The Dawn of Everything, Part 2

So, I had promised a Part 2, and here it is. As I anticipated in Part 1, Graeber and Wengrow suggest that we should look at early Modern and Modern exchanges between, especially, Europeans and native North-Americans in a different way. If we take seriously what European intellectuals, missionaries and explorers of the time report, the story they tell us is one of encounters characterised by muscular, vibrant debates about the merits of different social arrangements and life-styles. Crucially, in these debates, both parties were active, passionate participants, and indigenous intellectuals had very sharp criticisms to make to western political structures, as they were getting to know them. This is not the central thesis of the book (which is about early humans, recall), but it is put forward as a clue to the fact that we might have a tendency to stubbornly deny certain pieces of evidence – even when they lie in front of us, in plain sight.

The point is one to which the two Davids return at various junctures in the book, but it is tackled head-first in an early chapter, entitled “The Indigenous Critique.” To a reader like me, the thesis put forward there is as bold and thought-provoking as they come – I have no competence to judge whether it is accurate, but it really got me thinking. The idea, in a nutshell, is the following. Remember when Enlightenment writers, and social and political thinkers of the time in particular, revived the literary-philosophical tradition of the Socratic dialogue, but often with indigenous chiefs, warriors, or other eminent figures as interlocutors? And remember how, far from being brutal barbarians or noble savages, these interlocutors had very eloquent, insightful things to say about equality, freedom, and democracy – so much so that they often ended up being the voice of the author’s own thesis, as it were? Well, guess what, those most likely were not complex allegories and literary artifices. Indeed,in all likelihood many of these dialogues actually report (albeit, of course, in a reimagined way) exchanges that had actually taken place, and during which some western thinkers had a proper aha moment. Jennifer Schuessler (loosely paraphrasing James C. Scott’s appraisal of the book) puts it very well in her review for the New York Times (paywall):

The European Enlightenment […], rather than being a gift of wisdom bestowed on the rest of the world, grew out of a dialogue with Indigenous people of the New World, whose trenchant assessments of the shortcomings of European society influenced emerging ideas of freedom.

In the book, this is illustrated primarily through the figure of Kondiaronk – a statesman, intellectual and debater from the Wendat (“Huron”) confederation who features prominently (with the fictional name of Adario) in the memoirs of the Baron de Lahontan, one of the deputies of the French governor-general in the area at the time. In Lahontan’s work (a dialogue, of course) Kondiaronk/Adario embarks in a merciless critique of French mores, values, and socio-political arrangements. In so doing, he firmly rejects the prospect of him and his people being assimilated into the European life-style, as he believes the latter is one characterised by an excessive lack of freedom. What is more, these are not just forceful but unsupported proclamations: they are fastidiously, eloquently and richly argued points. Many commentators, Graeber and Wengrow notice, have pointed out how this cannot but be evidence of the fact that Adario was an entirely fictional figure – I mean, he just “sounds” too much like an Enlightenment intellectual in a salon, doesn’t he? Lahontan, however, interacted with Kondiaronk intensely and repeatedly; the latter was famously known for being an impressively witty debater, has many third party sources attest; finally, Lahontans dialogue is called Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Traveled, and travelling through Europe is exactly what Kondiaronk did. The simplest explanation, in this case and many others from the time, is that western writers were inspired by real indigenous figures – even if, of course, they probably did not report their arguments literally. Yet commentators are, more often than not, busy trying to explain this away, as an obviously absurd possibility. The analogy with the handling of uncomfortable archaeological evidence discussed in later chapters is as clear as ever: newly researched Ukrainian mega-sites, for instance, just cannot be cities, because they ostensibly lack public quarters for the dominant cast, which cities must have – hence another explanation must be conjured up for them.

For discussions providing more detail than what I have done here, yet more manageable than the book itself, you might want to check out this and this essay by Graeber and Wengrow – both predating the book. I cannot really go into any detail about what exactly indigenous intellectuals criticised, and why exactly it is plausible to speculate that they were a source of inspiration for some crucial aspects of the social and political thought of the Enlightenment. I just would like to share what really stayed with me. Of course – but there really is nothing new here – both the image of the good savage and that of a pre-modern, barbaric life-style are out of the question on this reading. More interestingly, though, so are some post-colonial accounts, according to which any attempt to use seemingly “western” categories to understand such encounters is deeply misled. In opposition to those, the idea here is that western missionaries, explorers and conquerors, and later western intellectuals, encountered a rich intellectual and cultural life that – in kind if not in substance – looked very much like the ones they themselves knew from Universities, salons, and (when there were any) Parliaments back home. What they encountered, in other words, were humans in the business of defining and inventing themselves; shaping their own fate; providing an account of what they stood for; defending their visions against criticisms; and trying to implement it faithfully. So – as we saw in Part 1 of this review – the underlying idea seems to be that (if you excuse the bold, unqualified language here) maybe there is such a thing as a common “human nature” after all. Thing is, though, such common nature does not consist in sharing a common trajectory or certain immutable objective features, but precisely in being predisposed to self-reflection and self-creation, and thus in finding ever new ways of consciously experimenting with something different.