Dominion Vs Dawn Of Everything

I’ve read two books this year that present delightfully clashing worldviews, told through the lens of history.  Dominion reinforces everything I was taught growing up. Some from direct lessons, but mostly absorbed through my culture.  The message of Dominion in a nutshell: Christianity is what propelled human rights, bending the moral arc of history upward, leading to our present time of unparalleled freedoms, rights and dignity. (One which is quickly backsliding due to the rejection of Christianity). 

Personally, my study of history, science, religion and philosophy over the years has changed my thinking on the worldview I inherited. But much like my opinions on the specific faith I was raised with, this evolution of thinking is not an overt rejection. Instead it’s a deeply critical interrogation of my own ability to adjudicate the veracity of the claims therein. I can’t tell you if a creator god incarnated as a man to sacrifice himself for the sins of mankind. I simply lack the credentials to do so. (I believe every human is in the same boat) My faith is gone, replaced with hopes that dive deeper than specific dogma. I derive Christian flavored teleology, but can no longer form those hopes into a Christian ontology. I hope there’s a loving creator entity that gives meaning to our suffering and creates some form of ultimate justice. But I can’t claim that’s true. I simply hope so, and act as if that’s the case.

So when it comes to the Dominion-contrasting worldview that is elucidated in The Dawn of Everything, I’m in no epistemological state to declare it True, while claiming that in Dominion is False. The process I see happening in both these books is that of authors starting with premises that compose a neatly simplified model of the world, and then setting to work finding data in the historical record to back that model up. And due to the fact that every field of inquiry runs so deep, I can never hope to learn enough about the fields involved to adjudicate which of these authors is using best practices.  Nor can I declare that current best practices in these fields actually lead to Truth. (See: the Replication Crisis in psychology as a great example where “best practices” just weren’t good enough.)

I can only say that one book FELT more rigorous and avoided Just-So stories better than the other.  Though I’m very biased by the fact that  I’ve heard all the arguments in Dominion before. Many times.  I learned them well and repeated them often during my Christian apologist years. And a big part of my epistemic deconstruction occurred precisely because my personal study led me to better arguments that -to me at least- fundamentally cripple the arguments in Dominion. So as I read it, I had the continual frustrating feeling that the author was not engaging with the best arguments against his model. To put it plainly; I’ve got a lot of history -and thus emotional baggage- tied up with this work. If this were a court case, I’d have to recuse myself. 

Conversely, the arguments made in The Dawn of Everything build to a worldview I am not nearly as familiar with. And due to my personality profile, wherein I derive great satisfaction from hearing new and challenging ideas, my emotional journey through this book was night and day different from that of Dominion. Moreover, while the authors are engaged in a similar process of (probably) cherry-picking history to compose a simplified model of the world, the individual bits of history are super exciting and based on recent archeology. (though still heavily translated through the dubious -in my mind- field of cultural anthropology)  These individual bits of illustrative history are so counterintuitive that they force me to consider that they are either completely wrong or that the authors are correct in their initial claim that the modern western worldview that frames our assumptions is so powerful that evidence falling outside of it is systematically downplayed or dismissed. Consciously or not.  

 

This rhetorical move in DoE, by the way, is one I was raised with. Anyone who has been in the world of conspiracy will be familiar with it.  First, a ‘dominant narrative’ is posited, usually as a monolithic force of culture. Then the countervailing narrative is woven, of the Truth that the rest of the world is blind to. And there you have a foolproof method for downplaying or dismissing data, ideas, and interpretations that fall outside of your unorthodox views.  For me, I was raised with two related conspiracy theories. The first being supernatural. We evangelical Christians were a persecuted minority, hated for having the Truth, and vilified in all mainstream media, misrepresented by the culture-makers of the age and actively hounded out of the fields of education, media, and the arts. 

The other conspiracy theory is more closely related to the kind that the the authors of The Dawn Of Everything put forth.  Not in content, but in structure.  I was raised to believe that evolution was an absolute disaster of a theory. Poorly constructed, fraught with gaps and holes that could only be ignored due to gross negligence, or most likely by very-highly-motivated-reasoning. Basically, everyone in the science community who believed in evolution (so like… 99% of them) did so because they really really hated God, or at least didn’t want to face the Truth of His existence. Evolution was always tied directly to atheism, as if evolution was a tool designed specifically to lead people to atheism and their eternal damnation.

Imagine my surprise when I discover that actually most Christians have no problem with evolution. When this fact is presented to those in the anti-evolution conspiracy theory, they would then No-True-Scottsman the evolution-believers out of Christianity. 

But that’s not what this blog is about. I just wanted to put my cards on the table as follows:

First, I recognize my bias in how I’m interpreting these two books, and acknowledging that my emotional journey through them colors my opinion. A lot. 

Secondly, I’m hoping to compensate for that bais by demonstrating that I’ve worked my way out of similarly structured conspiracy theories before.

What I’m ultimately arguing here is not that I’m comparing these two books and then declaring one to be more Right and Truthful.  But just that Dominion fails to grapple with its best detractors in the way that Dawn Of Everything seems to succeed.  DoE, in fact, cannot stand up structurally without engaging directly with the orthodoxy it’s attempting to upend. “You have heard X, but here is evidence for Y.” 

Now let me talk about the X and the Y.

The authors of DoE say that Locke and Rousseau, while presented as two opposing ideologies, share a big commonality.  Both fundamentally misunderstand and disrespect pre-history people. Whether presented as savages, barbarians, or infantile naive children of nature, both  Locke and Rousseau see the formation of hierarchical state building as the inevitable course of history. Once humans discovered farming, the rest was inevitable. Private property, permanent hierarchy, and inequality are conceptualized by western thinkers as necessary components of the stages that societies must evolve into as they grow.

DoE says ‘not necessarily’.  They say we should remember that humans in prehistory were just as clever and political as us. And because all cultures evolve, subject to innumerable forces, we need to take the force of self-determination seriously.(Rather than run over it rough shod with purely material theories, Jarred Diamond style.)  They make the case that emerging archeology is presenting us with more and more evidence that farming popped up many times in many places -and in many such places and times- abandoned. In others, long lasting peaceful civilizations thrived with no signs of warfare or permanent hierarchy. If farming inexorably leads to property, which leads to hierarchy, which leads to kings and priests, which leads to war… and there’s no going back… how would one explain this evidence?  (They also spend a lot of time on the claim that strict and permanent hierarchy is necessary above Dunbar’s Number.) 

A couple things that stuck out to me in DoE… Many indigenous cultures switch ‘government’ modalities seasonally. Individuals may be hierarchical leaders one day, and regular joes the next, subject to the needs of the people. 

There are so many societies where the leaders don’t have significant power. They, in fact, need to continually appease, impress, or convince the people of their policies.  

Schismogenesis is the urge to define one’s culture in contrast to surrounding cultures. This can be a major driver of cultural definition.  As opposed to material conditions, which are generally the default theory that archeological anthropologists use.  (See Guns, Germs and Steel for the most popular version of that.)

“Violent clown police” and the carnival. Turning the social structures upside down is a very common ritual that seems to be a social reset mechanism. Reminding all that status is largely arbitrary and subject to upheaval. 

If you want the cliff notes of DoE in a couple hours, I recommend this comedy podcast on the topic of the book with an interview with the surviving author. 

https://srslywrong.com/podcast/242-the-dawn-of-the-dawn-of-everything-w-david-wengrow/

In summary, I really loved DoE.  I’m skeptical of the claims it makes. But I’m also open to them. It seems that emerging data from archeology will continue to help to fill in the gaps that are currently filled with theory. But even if the authors got everything wrong, I think the radical ideas about how societies might have been, or could one day be, is important.  The idea that the global political system we have now is the pinnacle of as-good-as-it-can-be is, I think, terrible. Hope that we can do better, and ideas about how we can try to be better are important. One of the truly shameful things I think much of Christianity is doing today is its absolute adherence to the status-quo. To hear the cries of the downtrodden and those devastated by our current global order, and yet to reinforce the systems that cause that devastation. To offer individual salvation for the chance at a better life in the next life, while repressing ideas that might address the suffering in this one. I know this marriage between Christianity and global capitalism exists for many Christians because of fear.  They sincerely believe that any deviation from that system can ONLY lead to gulags and death camps for Christians. I used to feel the same way. Because I was under the sway of the Dominion. The framing of all that is good and just and comfortable as possible only under this system. Well I feel called to look outside of that system for alternatives. Alternatives that don’t require death camps, but that do respect the voices of ‘the-least-of-these’ who are crying out for justice that the current system is incapable of providing.

The Dawn of Everything is not a blueprint for this. It’s just a hypothetical. A potential. An inspiration for approaching that project with different lenses. Those who see our current global order as “the end of history” see it that way precisely because they are stuck with the lens of the Dominion. I’m happy to be discovering new potentialities through the creative activity of fusing old and new ideas in combinations humanity hasn’t seen yet.