There’s a growing genre of books, the long sweep of human history from a social science perspective. The ur-text must be Jacob Bronowski’s [amazon_link id=”1849901155″ target=”_blank” ]The Ascent of Man[/amazon_link] (the DVD of the series is still available and, I think, still fascinating despite being so old-fashioned.) I suppose the recent wave started with Jared Diamond’s [amazon_link id=”0099302780″ target=”_blank” ]Guns, Germs and Steel[/amazon_link] (1997), and more conventional economic histories such as David Landes in the [amazon_link id=”0349111669″ target=”_blank” ]Wealth and Poverty of Nations[/amazon_link] (1998). More recent contributions have come from Ian Morris, with [amazon_link id=”1846682088″ target=”_blank” ]Why the West Rules – For Now[/amazon_link] (2011) and [amazon_link id=”0691155682″ target=”_blank” ]The Measure of Civilization[/amazon_link] (2013), and Diamond again with [amazon_link id=”0241958687″ target=”_blank” ]Collapse[/amazon_link] (2005).
[amazon_image id=”0563104988″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Ascent of Man[/amazon_image]
The latest is Yuval Noah Harari’s [amazon_link id=”1846558239″ target=”_blank” ]Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind[/amazon_link], just published in the UK with a lot of publicity razzmatazz. I’ve not read it, just this extract in The Guardian. It touches on how we measure progress, and is happiness a better aim than GDP. It isn’t entirely clear to me what the conclusion is – that we were happier in the Stone Age? To which the answer is surely the economist’s sceptical revealed preference argument: see how many voters want to revert to a hunter-gatherer society. Or is Harari instead arguing for giving evolution a bit of a boost?
“Humans are not adapted by evolution to experience constant pleasure, so ice‑cream and smartphone games will not do. If that is what humankind nevertheless wants, it will be necessary to re-engineer our bodies and minds. We are working on it.”
[amazon_image id=”1846558239″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind[/amazon_image]
I really don’t get this rose-tinted nostalgia for a pre-industrial past. There’s obviously some cognitive biases going on – people focusing on the negatives of modernity while being unable to see its positives (which we’re all too used to).
Sometimes I’d like to plonk these people back in time with a time machine for a week to see how much they like living without ice cream and smart phone games.
Excuse the language, but I can’t resist the immortal words of Peep Show’s Mark Corrigan:
“And listen, while we’re at it, there are systems for a reason in this world, economic stability, interest rates, growth. It’s not all a conspiracy to keep you in little boxes, alright? It’s only the miracle of consumer capitalism that means you’re not lying in your own shit, dying at 43 with rotten teeth”