Alternative Civilizations Existed and Succeeded

November 29, 2021

The assumption that large-scale human societies require hierarchy, bureaucracy, and centralized authority is contradicted by extensive archaeological and anthropological evidence of societies that thrived without them.

"It is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms."

Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything systematically demolishes the standard narrative: that humans lived in small egalitarian bands, then invented agriculture, then inevitably developed hierarchy, states, and bureaucracy. The evidence shows something far more interesting. Pre-agricultural societies were politically diverse and inventive. Some were egalitarian, some hierarchical, some deliberately oscillated between modes egalitarian in summer, hierarchical in winter. Many of the world's earliest cities, including sites in Ukraine and Mesoamerica, appear to have operated without kings, standing armies, or centralized administration.

This matters because the "inevitability" narrative serves as a powerful argument against political imagination. If complexity necessarily produces domination, then our current arrangements are the best we can do. But if large, complex societies have operated on radically different principles and they have then the constraints on political possibility are narrower than we assume. The indigenous critique of European society was not naive romanticism; it was a serious intellectual challenge from people who had experienced alternative social arrangements and found European customs the obsession with private property, the tolerance of poverty amid plenty, the submission to arbitrary authority genuinely puzzling.

The colonial-era evidence is striking: when people who had lived in both European and indigenous American societies were given a free choice, they almost invariably chose indigenous life. Benjamin Franklin himself noted this pattern. The common reasons were not material comfort but the quality of social bonds mutual care, genuine equality of opportunity, and a depth of community that European settlers found impossible to replicate in their own societies.

Takeaway: The range of workable human social arrangements is far wider than our conventional history admits, and the failure to see this is itself a form of the poverty of imagination that Graeber spent his career fighting.

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History Is Not Linear Progress