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vice versa.
used to
Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.
contesting
intruders.
Just as there
Each of these viewed the others’ beliefs and practices as weird and heretical.
straits)
animal species
But the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.
Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark.
The transition to agriculture began around 9500–8500 BC in the hill country of south-eastern Turkey, western Iran and the Levant.
No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.
The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company without money is bankrupt.
always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
burdensome. Children died in droves, and
One of history’s few iron laws is
that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.
The earth’s surface measures about 510 million square kilometres, of which 155 million is land.
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
If people realise that human rights exist only in the imagination, isn’t there a danger that our society will collapse? Voltaire said about God that ‘There
‘You can do many things with bayonets, but it is rather uncomfortable to sit on them.’ A single priest often does the work of a hundred soldiers – far more cheaply and effectively.
In order to dismantle Peugeot, for example, we need to imagine something more powerful, such as the French legal system. In order to dismantle the French legal system we need to imagine something even more powerful, such as the French state. And if we would like to dismantle that too, we will have to imagine something yet more powerful. There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards
freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.
people’s
Although this system of writing remains a partial script, it has become the world’s dominant language.
history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.
