Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Part Three: The Unification of Humankind
Part Three: The Unification of Humankind
Please use this thread to discuss the above mentioned section of Sapiens.
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This apparent contradiction (growing homogeneity vs. clashing civilizations) can probably be resolved in terms of the difference between growing ambitions of exclusivity for worldviews, on the one hand, and the limit on ability to actually exclude due to competing worldviews on the other. The ambitions came first, and the monotheistic religions were pretty successful. But they clashed with each other (by force of arms! empire was arguably more involved than religion), and neither one triumphed.DWill wrote: He says that history has a direction, that the "arrow of history" describes an arc starting from many, many worlds and ending at a single world. This isn't the moral arc spoken of by some theologians and leaders like Lincoln and Obama. It just means that by now just about everyone in the world shares the same basic assumptions, a statement that cuts against the grain of the common narrative of clashing values and even clashing civilizations. Harari says no, what we see if we pan out from the particulars is a clear pattern of growing homogeneity.
This is actually the part I want to launch a little thought about. The first issue on which people had to think of themselves as a species was nuclear war. We did a poor job of it, but at least it got started. As time has gone on, we have had more and more of them. Population, climate change, water stress, energy markets, ozone depletion, plastics in the ocean, mass extinction, the list is getting longer and longer.DWill wrote:Other animals have no concept of themselves as members of a species, but Sapiens uniquely is able to at least imagine (that word again) that humanity is all one. Over the ages, three forces have brought humanity to this brink of unity: money, empire, and religion.
They are the same. Creationism and other such foolishness has distracted people from the obvious fact that religions and ideologies have always worked the same way. Ideologies don't usually create rituals of common practice, though elections and Fourth of July celebrations and National Anthem playing and Memorial Day are not nothing. Nor do they speak the language of the supernatural. But those are fairly superficial (except elections) compared to the way they both guide people to coordinate with strangers in supporting a particular set of ideas about how society ought to manage itself.DWill wrote:Liberal humanism, based on the sanctity of the individual, is the unacknowledged religion or ideology (to Harari they are about the same).
Umm, there is some truth to that but it is leaving out a lot that motivated and shaped Naziism.DWill wrote:Nazism, too, was a humanistic, natural law religion devoted to the perfection of the human race through eugenics.
While there is some truth to this, it overlooks major points. First, the notion of what is good in the New Testament is very similar to a universalist humanism. The major exception is that it promoted the view that God takes a special interest in the poor, but this has been labelled as a "social insurance scheme" by some who try to use modern concepts to explain it. Needless to say, that's kind of universalistic humanism, except that today we have different concepts of how much prosperity may be available to all so we think in terms of empowering rather than sharing.DWill wrote: It seems to me as though the most liberal Christians have moved the center of their belief from what God requires of them to the liberal humanist notion of what is good, which locates God within the individual as well.
Thanks for your entire response. This claim struck me in particular because in my reading I haven't seen the "China question" framed in quite this way. Perhaps I've just missed the larger point of the debate over whether China or the U.S. will win. Win economically, is how I've read the argument. Who will have the larger GDP in 15 years? But if we widen the scope to cover the challenge of getting the world population to middle class while not completely trashing the planet, the political implications bearing very closely on dearly held freedoms in the West come into the picture. We still don't know if the Chinese model combining communism and market economy will be successful, for example in managing the environment, but as you say our own efforts are beginning to look faltering.Harry Marks wrote: The social choice to be made in the 21st century is between the Chinese Model, which gives power to a single Party which can take the overall view of system effects, vs. the Western Model, which trusts a democratic system to make the necessary choices in its own self-interest. Frankly, it looks to me like the latest elections show the Western Model failing. We are putting power not in the hands of Putin and his cronyist authoritarian divide-and-rule model, but in the hands of the Party Elite model of China which seems more capable of coming to grips with systemic problems. They have managed to combine competence at the enterprise level with competence at the system level. It remains to be seen if the West can manage that feat.
I start off completely by-the-way. The house where Marshall lived, his "retirement house," is in Leesburg, Virginia where I used to work. It took him a while after moving there in 1941 to achieve retirement, obviously. I like the house because, while beautiful and stately, it's also far from ostentatious, not something to ooh and aah over like many houses today. The home seems to fit what is known of the character of the man, who didn't even want his name attached to the plan to rebuild Europe (at least according to the docent).Harry Marks wrote:Happy to poke into this set of issues again. I think Harari is very good at putting the big issues into perspective. I have lots of complaints about his treatment of this or that minor issue, but his Bigthink is first-rate.
He lays out a real arrow of history, that holds up: unification. As we have learned more and gotten more effective, we have overcome the distance that made humanity into a set of small tribes, speaking different languages and mutually distrustful. With the shrinking of the world we have both sought to increase our ability to dominate others and increased our urge toward universalized morality and justice. I give credit for the latter to the deep urge to harmonize reason's insistence on a universalized sense of meaning with the gradual evolution of a mode of production (as Marx would say) which in principle is infinite due to capital's producibility rather than finite due to land's dominant role.
Gradually the urge to dominate is passing. America, and to some extent Europe before her, showed that prosperity is more effectively cultivated by cooperation and by empowering others than by dominating and ruling them. The Marshall Plan was not just the most unsordid act in history (I am told Churchill was actually referring to Lend-Lease, but the apocryphal version is more enduringly true.) It was the landmark of unsordidness in history, falling at the same time as Dresden and Hiroshima marked the high water mark of mindless destruction.
No "Trump's U.S."? I take it the omission was deliberate, to show that we have a wannabe at this point, with still a chance to erase most of his attempts at authoritarianism. Like you, I see no reason why Harari would not see the current Western backwardness as a dip in the rising trend line.The major counterexamples today, especially Putin, the African National Congress, Hungary's Orban, and Syria's Assad, are the exceptions that prove the rule. They are backwater representatives of resource-based power grabbing, exploiting weaknesses in the liberal system to perpetuate domination systems which in turn suppress the natural dynamism and social flourishing of their citizens. Such separated, competing domination systems will gradually fade, and the resilience of the liberal order to confront them will capture the insight of the Long Telegram that such power dynamics are best controlled by containment.
Harari dismisses "clash of civilization" scenarios. Yet you've got me thinking that whatever level of clash we might call the West vs. China, co-existence of the worldviews might not be possible in the long run.A more difficult case to analyze is China. As an ancient society with a somewhat different social psychology, radically dragged into the 20th Century by the leadership of the Communist Party, it represents not a domination system but an elitist model with a heavy dose of social control. The Party has represented those with education and a sense of civic duty for a long time, even though it also incorporated Stalinist thuggery at the same time.
I think the contest between Chinese-style adaptive centralization, with a large dose of social control, and Western-style bureaucratic decentralization, will come down to whether there is more need for system-wide policies (such as carbon taxes) or more need for the natural impulses of human flourishing. I think I bet on the second, but not with heavy odds.
DWill wrote:Thanks for your entire response. This claim struck me in particular because in my reading I haven't seen the "China question" framed in quite this way. Perhaps I've just missed the larger point of the debate over whether China or the U.S. will win.Harry Marks wrote: The social choice to be made in the 21st century is between the Chinese Model, which gives power to a single Party which can take the overall view of system effects, vs. the Western Model, which trusts a democratic system to make the necessary choices in its own self-interest.
They have managed to combine competence at the enterprise level with competence at the system level. It remains to be seen if the West can manage that feat.
There is no question China will have the larger economy. And it is likely that Europe and the U.S. together will be larger than China. Nobody needs to worry about being dominated.DWill wrote:Win economically, is how I've read the argument. Who will have the larger GDP in 15 years? But if we widen the scope to cover the challenge of getting the world population to middle class while not completely trashing the planet, the political implications bearing very closely on dearly held freedoms in the West come into the picture.
Well, the question of whether they do a good job environmentally is a very good one. The Party has allowed the environment to deteriorate dreadfully, and only in the last five years seems to have gotten serious about things like Beijing air quality that are major issues. On the other hand this is a well-known pattern, that a country has to reach a certain standard of living before it seems worthwhile to alienate some capitalists with serious constraints on what they can do to the environment.DWill wrote: We still don't know if the Chinese model combining communism and market economy will be successful, for example in managing the environment, but as you say our own efforts are beginning to look faltering.
I am tempted to say that Marshall's character, like that of Omar Bradley and even Eisenhower, is a characteristic of American culture that represents its contribution to the world. Because Americans can generally feel secure in their home and community, they tend to promote those who focus on getting the job done, rather than those who ride or control the political currents with some kind of manipulative persona (e.g. MacArthur or Patton).DWill wrote:The home seems to fit what is known of the character of the man, who didn't even want his name attached to the plan to rebuild Europe (at least according to the docent).
Well I think it is clear in his writing that material progress has enabled unification. I have been reading with an eye to my issues, especially the issue of domination systems elevated for me by Zinn (but also by Crossan and Borg in a Christianity context).DWill wrote:Harari seems to indicate at times that unification means progress, but at other times he wants to hedge. Is that your impression as well? We have difficulty seeing "unification" as anything but positive, but that could have its dark side, and has, I suppose, throughout history.
It might pay globalists to think about how to cultivate local richness and the diversity that comes with it. I am loving "Our Towns" by James and Deborah Fallows about various ways small cities and even towns are entering the modern world with local economic vibrancy. The French, ever the ones to design a central solution, have an elaborate system of fostering and enriching "terroir", the local foods and drinks that make each part of France a culinary adventure. The French can enjoy going on holiday within France in part because the government now consciously leverages diversity rather than trying to unify.DWill wrote: Not everyone will be happy with unification, that much we already know by such movements as Brexit and conservative hatred of the UN. I've also worried about the loss of diversity that comes with globalization, fewer languages and distinct cultures surviving, species disappearing at far more than the background rate of extinction.
That's an insightful way to go analytical on the issue, which I appreciate. At the same time, we should recognize the particulars of the process and the ways they matter. Radio and then television have led to blending and standardization in the world. Terroir, or bluegrass music, or tulip festivals, tend to be regarded as quaint relics that either can be commercialized or can't be. It's difficult to find people in the South who can't "talk Yankee" or black people who can't "talk white" any more.DWill wrote: All of that seems to contradict the notion that the world is growing ever more complex. I suppose it really doesn't mean that, at least culturally, since it's the connections between things that determine complexity. A thousand disconnected items might be less complex than a hundred very connected ones.
What we have is a narcissist. He has trouble recruiting additional narcissists because, despite the occasional success of a Devin Nunes play or a Lindsey Graham tantrum, people don't easily shift into narcissist mode. It's one thing for people to pat themselves on the back for finessing a fight (Orrin Hatch and the Bush clan have been demonstrating that for a while), but it's another to full-on deny your gut instincts about integrity for a real abandonment of democratic principles.DWill wrote:No "Trump's U.S."? I take it the omission was deliberate, to show that we have a wannabe at this point, with still a chance to erase most of his attempts at authoritarianism.The major counterexamples today, especially Putin, the African National Congress, Hungary's Orban, and Syria's Assad, are the exceptions that prove the rule. They are backwater representatives of resource-based power grabbing,
Well, if Harari's instincts about syncretism are correct, and I think they are, we will gradually come to blend the systems. We already have a bureaucracy that thinks of itself a lot like the Party thinks of itself in China. Professional agents of efficient progress, recruited for skills, not politics, and expected to put in place the policies of whoever has most recently persuaded a majority of the electorate.DWill wrote:Yet you've got me thinking that whatever level of clash we might call the West vs. China, co-existence of the worldviews might not be possible in the long run.