Fear of Nature

 Harari, Yuval Noah.  Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.  Harper Collins, NY NY, 2015.

- The major new insight (new to me, anyway) from this book is what Harari calls the Cognitive Revolution, which occurred about 70K years ago.  This is when humans began to use “fictive language,” that is, language that portrays imaginary things.  We might call it simply, storytelling.  From this development in human evolution, we eventually get myths, religions, ideologies, and all manner of isms such as democracy, capitalism, communism, etc, and even corporations and human rights.  Ideals invented by humans.  These isms are attempts at immortality, the obsession with the un/certainty of existence. 

- Myths and isms made it possible for larger groups of people to work together, thereby eventually making nation states, empires, etc.  They are not possible unless people are willing to fight and die for “freedom,” “liberty,” “democracy,” “capitalism,” etc.  See page 27 notes for how bureaucratic social structures are needed after human groups grow larger than the anthropologically significant numbers of 30 (extended family unit) and 150-200 (tribal unit).   

- In short, we are at risk of destroying the planet over the intense beliefs in and deadly fights over isms that did not even exist in human life for most of human existence.  We make up what we’re supposed to believe in, then we kill each other over it.  In short, “fictive language” is what enables we in the global world to remain fervently tribal.

            - 4.5 M yrs ago: upright walking

                        - Australopithecus (“Lucy”)

            - 2 M yrs ago: stone tools and more widespread meat eating

            - 2 M - .5M ago:  brain expansion

            - 1.5 M ago: fire

            - 150 K ago: language

            - 70 K: “fiction,” story telling

            - 10 K: agriculture

            - 7 K: war (Jericho)

- 3 K: writing, 1K gun powder, 100 yrs ago vehicles, 20 yrs ago internet (extreme global communication, information overload, global clash of belief systems)

Part I: The Cognitive Revolution

(6) The more eastern regions of Asia were populated by homo erectus, ‘upright man,’ who survived there for close to 2 million years, making it the most durable human species ever.  This record is unlikely to be broken even by our own species.  It is doubtful whether homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league.

-       homo sapiens begins around 300-500K ago. 

(9) In homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2-3 percent of total body weight, but it consumes 25 percent of the body’s energy when the body is at rest.  By comparison, the brains of other apes require only 8 percent of rest-time energy.  Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways.  Firstly, they spent more time in search of food.  Secondly, their muscles atrophied.  Like a government diverting money from defense to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons.  It’s hardly a forgone conclusion that this is a good strategy for survival on the savannah.  A chimpanzee can’t win an argument with a homo sapiens, but the ape can rip the man apart like a rag doll. 

(11) It was only 400k years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100k – with the rise of homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain.

(12) Whereas chimps spend five hours a day chewing raw food, a single hour suffices for people eating cooked food.

(13) Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both.  By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens. 

(21) The period from about 70k years ago to about 30k years ago witnessed the invention of boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows, and needles.  The first objects that can reliably be called art date from this era, as does the first clear evidence for religion, commerce, and social stratification.

(27) In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands.  But even gossip has its limits.  Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals.  Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings.

       Even today, a critical threshold in human organizations falls somewhere around this magic number.  Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks, and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumor mongering.  There is no need for formal ranks, titles, and law books to keep order.  A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred soldiers can function well on the basis of intimate relations, with a minimum of formal discipline.  A well respected sergeant can become ‘king of the company’ and exercise authority even over commissioned officers.  A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO, or an accounting department.

        But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way.  You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon.  Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel.  If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust.

         How did homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants, and empires ruling hundreds of millions?  The secret was probably the appearance of fiction.  Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. 

(28) Modern business people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers.  The principle difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales. 

(35) While we can’t get inside a Neanderthal mind to understand how they thought, we have indirect evidence of the limits to their cognition compared with their Sapiens rivals.  Archaeologists excavating 30,000 year old Sapeins sites in the European heartland occasionally find their seashells from the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts.  In all likelihood, these shells got to the continental interior through long distance trade between different Sapiens bands.  Neanderthal sites lack any evidence of such trade.

-       trade, story telling, territorial growth…go hand in hand

(37) The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology.

(37) Ability to transmit larger quantities of information = planning and carrying out complex actions such as avoiding lions and hunting bison

(37) Ability to transmit information about things that don’t really exist, such as tribal spirits, nations, limited liability companies, and human rights = cooperation between large numbers of strangers).

-       mythical language contains “larger truths,” (ie truths that don’t really exist), but we are fanatically attracted to them because we want to belong to things larger than ourselves, larger than our everyday awareness.  Power and domination (see Demonic Males).  The large and abstract dominates the small and concrete.   Perhaps because the large and abstract cannot be defeated (because it doesn’t actually exist).

-       Fiction creates community (emotional ties), and larger communities = the conquest of smaller communities. 

(43) It’s reasonable to presume that the greater part of their [nomadic foragers] mental, religious, and emotional lives was conducted without the help of artifacts.

-       “artifacts” replace the physical, emotional support that nature once provided.  All human-made artifacts are transitional objects – teddy bears and blankies – whether they be physical ones like shiny cars and the new techy phone gadget, or whether they be emotional/mental like religions and ideologies. 

(44) The most notable characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies is how different they are from one another…One good example is the huge variety the first Europeans settlers found among the Aborigine peoples of Australia.  Just before the British conquest, between 300k and 700k hunter gatherers lived on the continent in 200-600 tribes, each of which was further divided into several bands.  Each tribe had its own language, religion, norms, and customs. 

(47) Before the Agricultural Revolution, the human population of the entire planet was smaller than that of today’s Cairo [~9M].

(49) There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging.  Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone.   When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up.  You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly line worker. 

 (50) Evidence from fossilized skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to suffer from starvation or malnutrition, and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant descendants.  Average life expectancy was apparently just thirty to forty years, but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality.  Children who made it through the perilous years first years had a good chance of reaching age sixty, and some even made it to their eighties.  Among modern foragers, forty five year old women can expect to live another twenty years, and about 5-8 percent of the population is over sixty.

-       4 people who each lived to be 60, 50, 40, and 1 have a group life expectancy of 37 years old.

-       5 people who each lived to be 60, 50, 40, 1, and 1 have a group life expectancy of 30 years old.

-       Do these numbers accurately reflect “life expectancy”? 

(51) Ancient foragers suffered less from infectious diseases.  Most infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution. 

(65) Of the 24 Australian animal species weighing 100 lbs or more, 23 became extinct [since humans settled there 45k ago].

 (67) Were the Australian extinction an isolated event, we could grant humans the benefit of the doubt.  But the historical record makes homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.

(71) Within 2,000 years of Sapiens arrival…North America lost 34 out of its 47 genera of large animals.  South America lost 50 out of 60. 

Part II:  The Agricultural Revolution

(78) For 2.5 million years humans fed themselves by gathering plants and hunting animals that lived and bred without their intervention.  Homo erectus, homo ergaster, and Neanderthals…why do anything else when your lifestyle feeds you amply and supports a rich world of social structures, religious beliefs, and political dynamics?

          All this changed about 10,000 years ago, when sapiens began to devote all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species.

(79) The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.  Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites.  The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return.  The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud. 

 (83) Around 13,000 BC, when people fed themselves by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals, the area around the oasis of Jericho, in Palestine, could support at most 100 relatively healthy and well-nourished people.  Around 8500 BC, when wild plants gave way to wheat fields, the oasis supported a large but cramped village of 1,000 people, who suffered far more from disease and malnourishment.

(83) This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. 

 (84) Homo sapiens reached the Middle East around 70k ago.  For the next 50k years our ancestors flourished there without agriculture.

 (87) The Luxury Trap.  If the adoption of ploughing increased a village’s population from 100 to 110, which ten people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the good old times?  There was no going back.  The trap snapped shut. 

-       Once population increased with Ag experiment, the activities of Ag had to continue to feed the increasing population.  Snowballed. 

-       The desire for growth was like a drug.

(87) One of history’s iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. 

(88) [in pre-internet times] Most people wrote and received no more than a handful of letters a month and seldom felt compelled to reply immediately.  Today, I receive dozens of emails each day, all from people who expect a prompt reply.  We thought we were saving time: instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.

-       Ie, a technology trap.

(93) Following homo sapiens, domesticated cattle, pigs, and sheep are the second, third, and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world.  From a narrow evolutionary perspective, which measures success by the number of DNA copies, the Ag Revolution was a wonderful boon for chickens, cattle, pigs, and sheep.

-       And they all live in cages…including us.

(93)  It’s reasonable to assume that bulls prefer to spend their days wandering over open prairies in the company of other bulls and cows rather than pulling carts and ploughshares under the yoke of a whip wielding ape.

(96) In evolutionary terms, cattle represent one of the most successful animal species ever to exist.  At the same time, they are some of the most miserable animals on the planet.

-       And what does this say about humans?

(98) Around 10,000 BC, earth was home to about 5-8 million nomadic foragers.  By the first century AD, on 1-2 million foragers remained (mainly in Australia, America, and Africa), but their numbers were dwarfed by the world’s 250 million farmers.

(98) [Sedentism] was a far-reaching revolution, whose impact was psychological as much as architectural.  Henceforth, attachment to ‘my house’ and separation from the neighbors became the psychological hallmark of a much more self-centered creature.

-       Property and individualism.  The toiling of Ag creates ‘mine.’  That much toiling will make for a possessive attitude toward things.

(101)  The stress of farming had far-reaching consequences.  It was the foundation of large-scale political and social systems.

(102)  Humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals.  The handful of millennia separating the Ag Rev from the appearance of cities, kingdoms, and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve. 

-       See EO Wilson, On Human Nature, for how culture evolves faster than biology.

(103)  When the Ag Rev opened the opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands, and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links.  While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail’s pace, the human imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any other ever seen on earth.

-       myths = social links

 (104)  ‘Cooperation’ sounds very altruistic, but is not always voluntary and seldom egalitarian.  Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation. 

(107)  Hammurabi’s Code asserts that Babylonian social order is rooted in universal and eternal principles of justice, dictated by the gods.  The principle of hierarchy is of paramount importance.  According to the code, people are divided into two genders and three classes: superior people, commoners, and slaves.  Members of each gender and class have different values.  The life of a female commoner is worth 30 silver shekels and that of a slave woman 20 silver shekels, whereas the eye of a male commoner is worth 60 silver shekels.

-       How is this different than the US Constitution?  Or any other institutionalized code of conduct?  Arbitrary rules made up by rich elites.

-       Every “man” is created equal, except Africans, Indians, Women, etc..

 (108)  The only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another.  These principles have no objective validity.

(109)  According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created.’  They have evolved.  And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal.’  The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation.  The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before god…[But] evolution is based on difference, not equality…’created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently.’

(111)  Voltaire said ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night.’  Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights.  Homo Sapiens have no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas, and chimpanzees have no natural rights.  But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night. 

(115)  Consumerism tells us that in order to be hapy we must consume as many products and services as possible…Every TV commercial is another little legend [myth] about how consuming some product or service will make life better.

(117)  Inter-subjective reality: something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals…many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.

(121)  With the Agricultural Revolution, a completely new type of information became vital – numbers…in order to maintain a large kingdom, mathematical data was vital.

-       Keeping track of extra stores of food/supplies.  Who owns it?  Who gets to have some?  What might it cost them?

-       see The Alphabet vs The Goddess on how words and numbers developed in  connection to male hierarchy and political power.

 (123)  The first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, or a poet, or a great conqueror…If we look for the first words of wisdom from our ancestors, 5,000 years ago, we’re in for a big disappointment.  The earliest messages our ancestors have left us read, for example, ’29,086 measures barley 37 months Kushim.’  [in Uruk, Sumer, c. 3400 BCE].

(124)  Alas, the first texts of history contain no philosophical insights, no poetry, legends, laws, or even royal triumphs.  They are humdrum economic documents, recording the payment of taxes, the accumulation of debts and the ownership of property.

(126)  By 2500 BCE, [Mesopotamian] kings were using cuneiform to issue decrees, priests were using I to record oracles, citizens for personal letters.  At roughly the same time, Egyptians developed another full script known as hieroglyphics.  Other full scripts were developed in China around 1200 BCE and in Central American around 1000-500 BCE.

(130)  The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world.  Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalization and bureaucracy.

-       ‘connote vs denote’ of S Diamond (In Search of the Primitive); horizontal perception vs vertical of M Berman (Wandering Gods); diffuse associations of lived experience in unmarked time instead of sharp categories of abstraction in linear time.

Part III:  The Unification of Humankind

(163)  Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules.  They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate efficiently.  This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture.’

(164)  Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both social equality and individual freedom as fundamental values.  Yet the two values contradict each other.  Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off.  Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality.  The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction. 

(165)  Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality.  But this is no defect.  Such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture.  In fact, they are the engines of cultural development, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species.  Discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, reevaluate and criticize.  Consistency is the playground of dull minds.  Can you name a single great work of art which is not about conflict?

            If tensions, conflicts, and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values.  It’s such an essential feature of any culture that it even has a name: cognitive dissonance.  Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche.  In fact, it is a vital asset.  Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture.

-       Myths and stories embrace these contradictions.  Modern logic and math and the news and banks and creditors and laws do not. 

-       To the extent that we don’t have healthy ways of holding contradictory tension within culture (ie myths and stories and empathic dialogue), then culture is in a state of atrophy.  Therefore, fanaticism promotes atrophy, decline, and ‘devolution.’

-       “The whole crux of economic life - and indeed of life in general - is that it constantly requires the living reconciliation of opposites which, in strict logic, are irreconcilable,” Schumacher, E.F. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.

(172)  The first millennium BCE witnessed the appearance of three potentially universal orders, whose devotees could for the first time imagine the entire world and the entire human race as a single unit governed by a single set of laws.  Everyone was ‘us,’ at least potentially.  There was no longer ‘them.’  The first universal order to appear was economic: the monetary order.  The second was political: the imperial order.  The third was religious: the order of universal religions such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. 

(175)  [Vocational] specialization created a problem – how do you manage the exchange of goods between the specialists? [ie, bureaucracy].

(210)  Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is.  The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures.  Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and indisputable authority.  This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.

            Religion can thus be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order. 

(210)  Religions must possess two qualities.  First, it must espouse a universal superhuman order that is true always and everywhere.  Second, it must insist on spreading this belief to everyone.  In other words, it must be universal and missionary.

            The best known religions of history, such as Islam and Buddhism, are universal and missionary.  Consequently people tend to believe that all religions are like them.  In fact, the majority of ancient religions were local and exclusive.  Their followers believed in local deities and spirits, and had no interest in converting the entire human race.  As far as we know, universal and missionary religions began to appear only in the first millennium BCE.

(212)  The first religious effect of the Agricultural Revolution was to turn plants and animals from equal members of a spiritual round table into property.

(212)  As long as people lived their entire lives within limited territories of a few hundred square miles, most of their needs could be met by local spirits.  But once kingdoms and trade networks expanded, people needed to contact entities whose power and authority encompassed a whole kingdom or an entire trade basin.

-       Empire = the need for universal superpowers

-       Political hegemony/conquest = the need for universal monotheism

(215)  In the 300 years from the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians.  Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own.  Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.  In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion. 

(216)  St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Aug 23, 1572…between 5,000 and 10,000 French Protestants were slaughtered in less than 24 hours.  When the pope in Rome heard the news, he was so overcome by joy that he organized festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre.

(217)  The first monotheist religion known to us appeared in Egypt, ca 1350 BCE, when Pharoah Akhentan declared that one of the minor deities of the Egyptian pantheon, the god Aten, was, in fact, the supreme power ruling the universe.

(240)  History is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system.  Chaotic systems come in two shapes.  Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to prediction about it.  The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system…Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately.  Markets, for example, are level two chaos systems.

(241)  History’s choices are not made for the benefit of humans.  There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along. 

(242)  Organic evolution is based on the replication of organic units called ‘genes.  Cultural evolution is based on the replication of cultural information called ‘memes.’  Succesful cultures are those that excel in reproducing their memes, irrespective of the costs and benefits to their human hosts. 

Part IV:  The Scientific Revolution

 (247)  In the last 500 years human population has increased 14 fold, production 240 fold (total value of goods and services), and energy consumption 115 fold. 

(253)  The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic, supple, and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge.  This has hugely expanded our capacity to understand how the world works and our ability to invent new technologies. 

-       “not knowing” = dynamic progress, forward moving; “knowing all” = staleness, stationary (or backward moving).

-       open democracy = not knowing; fascism = knowing all

(255)  A fundamental principle of Manichaean religion asserted that the world is a battleground between good and evil.  An evil force created matter, while a good force created spirit.  Humans are caught between these two forces, and should choose good over evil. 

-       As influenced on Christianity, the hatred of the physical, the this-worldly, ie, fear of nature.

(265)  Until the Scientific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress.  They thought the golden age was in the past, and that the world was stagnant, if not deteriorating. 

 (277)  In the century following the James Cook expedition (1769-1771), the native population of Australia and New Zealand dropped by 90 percent and the survivors were subjected to a harsh regime of racial oppression…An even worse fate befell the natives of Tasmania.  Having survived for 10,000 years in splendid isolation, there were almost exterminated within a century of Cook’s arrival. 

(280)  In 1775, Asia accounted for 80 percent of the world economy…Europe was an economic dwarf.

(287)  Columbus believed he had reached a small island off the Asian coast for the rest of his life.  The idea that he had discovered a completely unknown continent was inconceivable for him and for many of his generation

(292)  Within 20 years [of Cortes arriving in Mexico in 1519], almost the entire native Caribbean population was wiped out. 

 -       see The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, Todorov

(297)  When the Muslims conquered India [12th-16th centuries], they did not bring along archaeologists to systematically study Indian history, anthropologists to study Indian cultures, geologists to study Indian soils, or zoologists to study Indian fauna.  When the British conquered India, they did all of these things [19th century]. 

-       The scientific revolution changed the look and goals of colonialism

(304)  There are very few scientific disciplines that did not begin their lives as servants to imperial growth.

 (306)  Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every $1 they actually possess, which means that 90 percent of all the money in our bank accounts is not covered by actual coins and notes.  If all the account holders at Barclays Bank suddenly demand their money, Barclays will promptly collapse (unless the government steps in to save it).  The same is true of Lloyds, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and all the rest.

            It sounds like a giant ponzi scheme, doesn’t it?  But if it’s a fraud, then the entire modern economy is a fraud.  The fact is, it’s not a deception, but rather a tribute to the amazing abilities of human imagination.  What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future.  This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world.

-       Therefore, progress, particularly, economic progress…must be true…has to be true. 

 (311)  Adam Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good.

(315)  Capitalism’s belief in personal economic growth flies in the face of almost everything we know about the universe.  A society of wolves would be extremely foolish to believe that the supply of sheep would keep on growing indefinitely.

(332)  According to the most moderate estimates, between 1885 and 1908 the pursuit of growth and profits costs the lives of 6 million individuals (at least 20 percent of the Congo’s population).  Some estimates reach up to 10 million deaths. [Belgian rubber and slave trade].

(343)  Just as the Atlantic slave trade did not stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not motivated by animosity.  It is fueled by indifference. 

(350)  Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens.  If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons.  If you then took all of our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons.  In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons.  Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves, and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left.  There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only about 250,000 chimpanzees – in contrast to billions of humans.  Humankind has really taken over the world. 

-       see Paul Shepard’s The Others, for historical animal iconography.

(351)  Nature cannot be destroyed.

(351)  In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans.  In 1800 there were 950 million of us.  By 1900 we almost doubled our number to 1.6 billion.  And by 2000 that quadruples to 6 billion.

(352)  Traditional agriculture depended on cycles of natural time and organic growth.  Most societies were unable to make precise time measurements, nor were they terribly interested in doing so.  The world went about its business without clocks and timetables, subject only to the movements of the sun and growth cycles of plants.  There was no uniform working day, and all routines changed drastically from season to season.  People knew where the sun was, and watched anxiously for portents of the rainy season and harvest time, but they did not know the hour and hardly cared about the year.  If a lost time traveler popped up in a medieval village and asked a passerby, ‘what year is this?’ the villager would be as bewildered by the question as by the stranger’s ridiculous clothing. 

-       see Edward T Hall’s The Silent Language, and Beyond Culture, for Polychronic cultures vs Monochronic cultures.

-       counting and measuring time as yet another attempt to control Nature and turn it into something mechanical, which it cannot ever be.

(354)  In 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich.  For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise to sunset cycles.

(355)  Today, a single affluent family generally has more timepieces at home than an entire medieval country.  You can tell the time by looking at your wristwatch, glancing at your smartphone, peering at the alarm clock by your bed, gazing at the clock on the kitchen wall, staring at the microwave, catching a glimpse of the TV, or taking in the taskbar on your computer out of the corner of your eye.  You need to make a conscious effort not to know what time it is. 

            A typical person consults these clocks several times a day, because almost everything we do has to be done on time.  An alarm clocks wakes us up at 7am, we heat our frozen bagel for exactly fifty seconds in the microwave, brush our teeth for three minutes until the electric toothbrush beeps, catch the 7:40 train to work, run on the treadmill at the gym until the beeper announces that half an hour is over, sit down in front of the TV at 7pm to watch our favorite show, get interrupted at preordained moments by commercials that cost $1,000 a second, and eventually unload all our angst on a therapist who restricts our prattle to the now standard fifty minute therapy hour.

(355)  The most momentous social revolution that ever befell humankind [is] the collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market. 

-       the disappearance of localism – local time, local friends, local nature – has made us aliens surrounded by nothing but otherness.

 (360)  It is amazing that this deal works at all – however imperfectly.  For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements.  Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members.  Within a mere two centuries [Industrial Revolution] we have become alienated individuals.

(361)  Until not long ago, the suggestion that the state ought to prevent parents from beating or humiliating their children would have been rejected out of hand as ludicrous and unworkable.  In most societies parental authority was sacred.  Respect and obedience to one’s parents were among the most hallowed values, and parents could do almost anything they wanted, including killing newborn babies, selling children into slavery and marrying off daughters to men more than twice their age.  Today, parental authority is in full retreat. 

-       See Lakoff The Political Mind, and Moral Politics, for the authoritarian male model of the family and the universe. 

(362)  The two most important examples of the rise of imagined communities are the nation and the consumer tribe.  The nation is the imagined community of the state.  The consumer tribe is the imagined community of the market.  Both are imagined communities because it is impossible for all customers of a market or members of a nation to know one another the way villagers knew one another in the past. 

(363)  The Middle East provides ample examples [of political borders as imagined].  The Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, and Iraqi nations are the product of haphazard borders drawn in the sand by French and British diplomats who ignored local history, geography, and economy.  These diplomats determined in 1918 that the people of Kurdistan, Baghdad, and Basra would henceforth be ‘Iraqis.’  It was primarily the French who decided who would be Syrian and who Lebanese.  Saddam Hussein and Hafez el-Asad tried their best to promote and reinforce their Anglo-French-manufactured national consciousness, but their bombastic speeches about the allegedly eternal Iraqi and Syrian nations had a hollow ring. 

(365)  When we speak of modern revolutions, we tend to think of 1789 (French Revolution), 1848 (Liberal Revolution), or 1917 (Russian Revolution).  But these days, every year is revolutionary…The internet, for example, came into wide usage only in the 1990s.  Today we cannot imagine a world without it.

-       Hypertrophy: the extreme growth of pre-existing structures; and Autocatalytic:  a process that increases in speed according to the amount of the products is has created. The longer the process runs, the greater its speed. (E.O. Wilson, “On Human Nature”).

(365)  In the last two centuries, the currency of politics is that it promises to destroy the old world and build a better one in its place.  Not even the most conservative of political parties vows merely to keep things as they are.  Everybody promises social reform, education reform, economic reform.

-       state of permanent crisis.  the Anxiety of Progress, the unconscious certainty that things have to change, that things must change. 

 (367)  In the year following the 9/11 attacks, despite all the talk of terrorism and war, the average person was more likely to kill himself than to be killed by a terrorist, a soldier, or a drug dealer.

            - see Tribe, S Junger.  Alienation is deadlier than war or ‘terrorism.’

(372)  Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to see world domination by force of arms. 

(379)  We can congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern Sapiens only if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals.  Much of the vaunted material wealth that shields us from disease and famine was accumulated at the expense of laboratory monkeys, dairy cows, and conveyer belt chickens.  Over the last two centuries tens of billions of them have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet earth.  If we accept a mere tenth of what animal rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.

-       non-understanding of ecology.  the place of humans in a place.

(392)  Perhaps happiness is synchronizing one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions.  As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction. 

-       globalism and hyper-information muddles all of this.  what can an individual belong to, when the possible narratives are endless?  fanaticism provides an easy answer to quell the tension. 

(415)  Seventy thousand years ago, homo sapiens were still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa.  In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem.

Q&A with Yuval Noah Harari

(3) Because I live in the Middle East, with all its nationalist and religious conflicts, I am very aware of the immense power of imaginary stories to control our lives.  All around me, people are killing each other for mythologies.

(3) For the average American, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s pose a far deadlier threat than al-Qaeda and the Islamic state.

(3) Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop.  The fly is so weak that it cannot move even a single teacup.  So how does a fly destroy a china shop?  If finds a bull, gets inside its ear, and starts buzzing.  The bull goes wild with fear and anger and destroys the china shop.  This is what happened after 9/11, as Islamic fundamentalists incited the American bull to destroy the Middle Eastern china shop.  Now they flourish in the wreckage.  And there are plenty of short-tempered bulls in the world.

     The success of failure of terrorism really depends on us.  If we allow our imagination to be captured by the terrorists, and then overreact to our own fears, terrorism will succeed.  If we free our imagination from the terrorists, and react in a balanced and cool way, terrorism will fail.