Month: September 2019

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What Endures?

Throughout history…

… empires have come and gone. Movements have swelled and subsided. Titanic figures have swash-buckled their way across the stage, and then vanished into oblivion. Life is change. History is upheaval. 

Does anything endure?

The easy answer would be: No. But let’s look deeper. Are there not certain underlying themes?

Take, for example, the border that exists between the two fundamental sides. Yes there are only two sides: the inside and the outside. Look anywhere in history, pick out any event, and you can discern this border in the mix. And it’s not just true of history. All of life, at every level, from amoebas to empires can be described as the story of the interaction between the inside and the outside. The fundamental unit of life, which is the cell, exists only by virtue of a membrane that separates inside from outside.

We humans are always on that border as groups. We’re always grappling with Whatever’s Out There, and we don’t really know what is Out There.  We do our best to know. We look, listen, feel our way, sniff the air. We ask each other what we’ve seen. We tell each other what someone’s told us. We pass on rumors. We share conclusions with our fellow humans. We pool our evidence and make collective decisions. We construct a model of the world that we all agree on.  We operate within that shared model as individuals, because only thus can we sync up with our fellow humans. None of us would make it alone.We’re social animals. We’re all in this together.

But this model we’ve built with our fellow humans is not the world itself.  It’s an imaginary world that we’ve built collectively, and inhabit communally. As long as it works, we have no reason to think of it as anything but the world. The trouble is, the model never completely works.  Undetected asteroids are always hurling toward us from the unknowable Out There. Even between crises, our model of reality is always in the process of becoming obsolete.

Five hundred centuries ago, we humans lived entirely as hunters and foragers.  What our greatest experts knew was where the animals could be found and what plants could be consumed. Some eighty centuries ago, we figured out that we could fence off little parts of Out There and alter it to suit our needs.  As farmers, we turned bits of Out There into parts of In Here. We gathered with others and built sturdy shelters and enlarged the extent of the World in Here. As bigger groups, we found that we could even tame rivers and alter the shapes of mountains and turn them into parts of What’s In Here.

But Out There was still out there. It was still the immense unknown, always presenting new faces that forced us to keep adapting our model. We couldn’t know, for example, that such a thing as contagious diseases existed until we had cities. We couldn’t recognize pollution as a danger until we learned to power machines by burning stuff. Hello, climate change. New threats. New opportunities. That’s what is constantly emerging on the border between In Here and Out There. And that’s where the whole drama of human history takes place. History is the story of our adventures on that ever-changing frontier.

Ultimately, we human beings are a single human creature, looking for the way to keep on keeping on. It’s a drama because we’re looking for it as sub-groups.  That’s just the way we humans roll. Sometimes, various subgroups of all humanity agree, sometimes they clash, sometimes they merge. From ground level, one sees many separate stories. From the birds-eye view, one might see the story of one whole distributed animal trying to interface with a real world of unknown size and complexity. One might see the Whole Human Animal, thinking, probing, working out a plan–but doing so in the way that our species does: as subgroups working on many different plans. That’s our evolutionary strategy. That’s the key to our success.

The enduring problem of human history is this: None of us really is the Whole Human Animal.  No combination of human groups is the Whole Human Animal. Our success depends on being, at any given time, many different groups trying out many different plans. We need our differences.

But the coin does have that all-important other side. All of us depend on the health of the Whole Human Animal. If it’s sick, we’re all sick. Which suggests, we’d better ponder who we are as a whole. Because like it or not, we’re all characters in one big story: we all have some effect on where that story goes, and we all have a crucial stake in its outcome.

My upcoming book The Invention of Yesterday, A 50,000 Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection explores the interaction between Self and Other as one of the engines of history. Look for it wherever books are sold on October 1, 2019.

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The 20 Most Important Events of World History

Let’s say the through-line of world history is interconnectedness. Some 50,000 years ago, we were tens of thousands of disparate, virtually autonomous bands. Over time, we kept former larger networks, larger groups.  Now we occupy every habitable inch of the planet earth and we’re verging on merging into a one civilization that dominates the planet. If that’s the trajectory, what are the twenty most important events? Here’s my tentative list:

1. Techtonic plate movements shaped the continents and the climate patterns of our earth. These movements ripped the original one-big-continent in two, created the Himalayas, opened the rift that would someday be the Mediterranean Sea, moved the Americas to the other side of the planet, and created the environmental conditions that favored the evolution homo sapiens sapiens—without whom we would have no “world history”,  just ”world”.)

2. The Creative Explosion circa 40,000 BP marked the origin of most of the main features of human arts and culture–probably the beginning of dance, painting, literature, mythology, and religion.Technology also saw a radical spurt in sophistication.

3. The land bridge between Eurasia and the Americas vanished. The end of the last ice age eliminated the bridge between these continents, leaving two worlds, disconnected from each other, evolving separately until a traumatic joining millenia later.

4. Two divergent ways of life–sedentary farming and pastoral nomadism— emerged in Eurasia-Africa. One strategy predominated in a temperate belt stretching from Spain to China, the other largely in the plains, steppes, and grasslands of the north.

5. The seeds of urban civilization appeared along a number of rivers, gradually spreading out to form a handful of distinct world historical monads centered in China, the Indian subcontinent, Mesopotamia, and  Egypt. (Over time, trade moving among these nexes gave birth to further nexes–Persian Civilization straddling the land routes of Eurasia, Greece as an entrepot of sea trade on the Mediterranean.

6. The Indo-European migrations brought pastoral nomads from the Caucasus region filtering down into a region stretching from Italy to India, laying the foundations for a host of significant later cultures (and languages).

7. The axial age saw the birth, within about 500 years, of all the major religious/cultural frameworks of history —Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Semitic Monotheism, and (Greek) Pagan Humanism.

8. Political super-empires coalesced: centered in various locales and expanding through conquest, vast political entities formed throughout Eurasia, including Rome, Persia, a series of Central Asian empires, India, and China. In the Americas the forerunners of similar empires began to emerge in Mesoamerica and on the east coast of South America.

9. The Han Dynasty planted the seeds of a civilization state. The first emperor of China consolidated a political state, but the Han Dynasty that followed him used that state power to establish patterns of Chinese history and culture that became the dominant themes of east Asia for the next 2,000 years.

10. Christendom was born. Christianity permeated the Greco-Roman world, then melded with the culture of pastoral-nomadic Germans from the north to form the pan-European entity known to itself as Christendom, the seed of what we now know as “Western Civilization”.

11. Islam erupted out of the Arabian desert, melding the Levantine, Arab, Persian, and Turkic worlds, along with the Mediterranean coast of Africa, into one new civilization/world-historical monad.

12. The (Long) Crusades pitted European Christendom against Islamic civilization along a front that spanned the entire Mediterranean Sea, a four-century conflict that gave Europe a hunger for the spices of the far east while at the same time blocking European access to those goods. (The long Crusades should be distinguished from the 12 European military forays into “the Holy Lands” that are usually termed “the Crusades.”)

13. The Mongol conquests created a zone of cultural transmission that briefly but consequentially linked China, India, the Islamic world, Russia, and Europe. Together with the Crusades, these conquests and the Pax Mongolica they spawned facilitated a massive flow of knowledge and technology from east to west.

14. The voyages of Columbus opened the door between the global east and the global west, resulting in the near-annihilation of the people of the Americas, the devastation of Africa, and the rise of western Europe as the world’s dominant power.

15. Secular humanism spawned science and democracy: Secular humanism emerged as a new social paradigm competing with religion to provide a coherent framework for understanding and operating in the universe. European thinkers who gave primacy to reason over faith laid the basis for modern science and eroded the idea of kinship as the legitimizing basis for political power, thus opening the door to democracy.

16. The machine entered history. Science fueled a sudden flood of inventions and technological breakthroughs in western Europe and its offshoots, making the machine a dominant player in human history. The ripple effects of these new technologies included revolution, democracy, industrialism and the nation-state

17. The women’s movement took off: The machine also played a part in the metamorphosis of gender roles: the position of women began to shift vis-a-vis men, a transformation so seminal it deserves to be considered as a separate event, one that is still underway.

18. A world war engulfed the planet. The wars of the twentieth century crumbled the major empires of the world and put paid to the very idea of the multi-ethnic empire as a fundamental unit of political organization.  In the rubble of the multi-ethnic empires, the nation-state emerged as the fundamental political unit of human life worldwide.

19. Human domination of nature became a threat to the planet. The relationship of our species to the forces of nature went through a reversal: instead of having to adapt to our environment, we gained the ability to alter our environment to suit ourselves; as a result, the environment to which we must now adapt consists mainly of ourselves and our works—a possible dilemma.

20. The digital revolution began eroding political borders, undermining institutions, connecting people regardless of their position in physical space, and promoting individuation to the point of threatening community. Also, digital technology intersecting with medical and biological research gave rise to the possibility that our species may be melding significantly with our machinery.