The Dawn of Dignity

I have been reading and rereading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) by David Graeber and David Wengrow to see if archeology and anthropology can tell us anything about human dignity. While the authors don’t talk about dignity per se, they do talk a lot about the idea of equality and that can tell us a lot about the idea of dignity.  

In this brief essay, I won’t do justice to this book whose evidence and arguments cover the entire span of human history and stretch all over the globe. But it’s worth focusing on just one or two threads in their argument.

The book’s raison d’être is to challenge our inherited narratives that social organization at large scale necessarily entails social hierarchy, organized violence, and the exclusion from political decisionmaking of the many in favor of the very few.

Graeber’s and Wengrow’s evidence reveals not that egalitarian systems were universal or exclusive but that they are “surprisingly common” throughout history. In other words, we needn’t assume that it’s just human nature to assign different values to different humans or that caste is inevitable and or that violence and punishment are necessary to maintain social order. Humans have always dealt with each other peaceably.

While there is no doubt that some communities in some places at some times entrenched social stratification, compelling the idolization of some and the denigration of others as a matter of birth and immutable status, the point is simply that social relationships at other times and places were generally egalitarian, among classes and genders, and that thousands of years passed with communities all over the world living peaceably side by side. Some of these communities lasted for hundreds or thousands of years and were quite sophisticated, indicating that there is no necessary correlation between violence and progress. Human beings can live together and respect each other’s equal worth.

There is a further fascinating point that bears directly on the idea of dignity as a measure of social relationships. The evidence provided here challenges our notions not of the existence of inequality or its origins but of the quality of inequality. The argument is made most clearly in the chapter that recounts encounters between the Wendat of what is now Michigan and the Jesuits who came with the intention of Christianizing and “civilizing” them. Graeber and Wengrow explain that among the Wendat there existed inequalities in wealth but

“Neither in the case of land and agricultural products, nor that of wampum and similar valuables, was there any way to transform access to material resources into power – at least not the kind of power that might allow one to make others work for you, or compel them to do anything they did not wish to do. … [Even] holding political office did not give anyone the right to give anybody orders either. Or, to be completely accurate, an office holder could give all the orders he or she liked, but no one was under any particular obligation to follow them.”

In other words, wealth inequality did not produce social, much less legal, inequality: the accumulation of wealth gave a person more things but did not give them the power to subjugate or demean another human being. This form of equality, the authors note, is the very expression of freedom. They quote a French chronicler of the time:

“From the beginning of the world to the coming of the French, the Savages have never known what it was so solemnly to forbid anything to their people, under any penalty, however slight. They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only insofar as it pleases them.”

Among at least some of the so-called “savages” of the Americas, there was no subjugation of one person by another, no power to compel another person to do something, no obligation to submit to another’s will. Each person had equal power and right to choose their actions. In other words, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would say 300 years later, everyone was “born equal in dignity and rights.”