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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeremy Lent
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August 3 - November 10, 2018
In contrast to the modernist view of the world, which had emerged with the Scientific Revolution, the postmodernists proposed that reality is constructed by the mind and can never therefore be described objectively.
the broad east-west axis of Eurasia meant that newly domesticated crops could easily spread across zones with similar climates, whereas the north-south axis of the Americas prevented it.
Historian Kenneth Pomeranz argues in his acclaimed book The Great Divergence that it was England's easily accessible coal deposits and the proximity of Europe to the New World that gave it the impetus to achieve an industrial revolution and thereby dominate the rest of the globe.7
2010 by Ian Morris entitled Why the West Rules—For Now, in which the author offers his own Morris Theorem to summarize the universal cause of social change in history: “Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things.” To Morris, “culture, values, and beliefs were unimportant” in explaining the great currents of history, and instead we need to look for “brute, material forces,” specifically those arising from geography.9
plethora of new evidence has convincingly demonstrated a more refined version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that the language we speak from birth—although it doesn't prevent us thinking in different ways—establishes structures of cognition that influence us to perceive, understand, and think about the world according to certain patterns. Or, in its simplest terms: language has a patterning effect on cognition.16
It seems we humans have evolved a powerful sense of fairness. So powerful, in fact, that we would rather walk away with nothing than permit someone else to take unfair advantage of us. Researchers call this “altruistic punishment.” These results, and others like them, suggest that, over thousands of generations, our social intelligence was molded by cooperative group dynamics to evolve an innate sense of fairness and a drive to punish those who flagrantly break the rules, even at our own expense. This intrinsic sense of fairness is, in the view of some researchers, the extra ingredient that
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As humans diverged from other primates, their PFCs evolved far greater connectivity, with a 70 percent increase in the number of possible neuronal connections compared to that of a chimpanzee. This connectivity forms the basis of the human patterning instinct.30
A widely known fact about our working memory capacity is that it can only hold about seven pieces of information at one time.
This ability of language to create hypothetical situations out of thin air is known as a counterfactual.
It begins with the well-recognized fact that chimpanzees and other primates use the time spent grooming each other as an important mode of social interaction through which they form and maintain cliques and social hierarchies. Aiello and Dunbar ingeniously calculated how much time different species needed to spend grooming for their social group to remain cohesive. Larger groups required significantly more time, with some populations spending as much as 20 percent of their day grooming. Based on the group sizes early humans probably lived in, they would have had to spend 30–45 percent of their
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the Natufians began to do something no humans had done before: they settled down.
Attitudes toward time begin to change: the past (when you accumulated your goods) and the future (when you might need them) become more important, replacing a simple, consistent focus on the present.
There's more at stake here than just an academic debate. This is a question about the founding dynamics of our ancestry. Are we virtually all descendants of violent, colonizing aggressors, or do we come from an ancient tradition of cultural tolerance and diffusion?
Analysis of modern European populations has found that most male chromosomes descend from Near Eastern farmers, whereas maternal lineages are mostly from hunter-gatherers, indicating that farming males had a reproductive advantage over their foraging rivals.
For the first time, humans saw themselves as different from the rest of the world and imposed their own symbolic forms on nature. Archaeologist Jacques Cauvin sees this cognitive shift as the most important aspect of the rise of agriculture, calling it the Symbolic Revolution.
In forager cultures, familial relationships were as fluid and unstructured as everything else. The Hadza, for example, have no household heads, and the children tend to do what they want rather than obey their parents.
different kind of spirituality characterized by a separation from and distrust of nature,” which generated “the anxiety over cosmic disorder that seems to lie at the core of all the agrarian religions.”
Akhenaten was the first person to introduce true monotheism
Mesopotamians came up with many of the original formulations we still use to structure human activities. They invented dictionaries, legal documents such as sales and deeds, and codes of law. They were the first culture to create a separation between what we nowadays think of as religious and secular domains and to create concepts, such as equity and freedom, that have resounded through the millennia to become integral parts of the modern conception of society.37
The invasion of India by the Aryans is considered the earliest documented mass migration in history.
While one group of Aryans established themselves in the Indian subcontinent, other groups settled down farther west, naming their land “Realm of the Aryans,” or Iran.
Meanwhile, still more nomads from the PIE homeland journeyed southwest of the Black Sea. These people, called the Achaeans,
Zoroaster was born, the man who would found the world's first dualistic religion based on the cosmic struggle between good and evil.69 Growing up in a world that seemed to him utterly divided between the peaceful ways of the cattle breeders and the violent incursions of nomadic raiders, Zoroaster generalized this split between good and bad into a chasm dividing the entire cosmos.
In a chilling precursor to the intolerance that later versions of monotheism would bring, the word for free choice came to mean heresy—exactly paralleling the evolution of the Greek word hairesis in Christianity.73
The influence of Plato's thought is so pervasive that it led philosopher Alfred North Whitehead to comment famously that the European philosophical tradition “consists in a series of footnotes to Plato.” Nevertheless, while Plato's impact on Western thought is monumental, he was just part of a dramatic transformation in cognition that occurred in ancient
In the few centuries from roughly 750 to 350 BCE, the other great cultural edifices that structure our world were also being formed. In China, Confucius and Lao-Tzu left their legacy. In India, ancient Vedic traditions were crystallizing, while the Buddha offered revolutionary new ways of thinking about one's life. In Israel, Hebrew prophets were compiling the Old Testament. Philosopher Karl Jaspers was so struck by these contemporaneous breakthroughs that he called this period the Axial Age:
1992, Walter Burkert published an important work, The Orientalizing Revolution,
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Parmenides, showed how easy it is to become intoxicated by its power. He argued that nothing new could ever come into existence, since “it must either come from something, in which case it already existed, or from nothing, which is impossible, since nothing does not exist.”
For the Stoics, explains scholar E. R. Dodds, the exercise of reason was necessary for moral perfection, and any “passions” felt by a man were merely “errors of judgment.” For the founder of the Stoic movement, Zeno, “man's intellect was not merely akin to God, it was God, a portion of the divine substance in its pure or active state.”56 In just a few generations, the
Dandamos refused, asking Alexander why he had bothered to travel so far in his drive for fame and power. He told Alexander: I have just as much of the earth as you and every other person; even if you gain all rivers, you cannot drink more than I. Therefore, I have no fears, acquire no wounds and destroy no cities. I have just as much earth and water as you; altogether I possess everything. Learn this wisdom from me: wish for nothing and everything is yours.1
Five Great Sacrifices: offerings to the gods, to the ancestors, to animals, and to other people, and the offering of one's own study of sacred truths.
In Europe, the Romantic movement, which began in reaction to the Enlightenment values of the new scientific age, shared much with Taoism, rejecting the artifice of civilization with the iconic notion of the “noble savage” and the elevation of imagination over reason.
Guugu Yimithirr speakers maintain their orientation to the points of the compass no matter whether they are standing still or moving around, indoors or outdoors, in the deepest forest or the thickest fog.
Whorf took this idea, which became known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, to new heights of rhetoric. The grammar of our language, he claimed, affects how we pattern meaning into the natural world. “We cut up and organize the spread and flow of events as we do,” he wrote, “largely because, through our mother tongue, we are parties to an agreement to do so, not because nature itself is segmented in exactly that way for all to see.”6
As sinologist Donald Munro observes, while the early Greeks were ultimately “more concerned with knowing in order to understand,” their counterparts in China were “more concerned with knowing in order to
state. Weakened rulers in Jerusalem now allowed other gods to be worshipped, leading
The centralized priesthood, however, was down
Two hundred years ago, a German scholar named W. M. L. De Wette concluded that, in fact, Josiah and his high priest had perpetrated a “pious fraud,” as he called it. Scholars since then have corroborated his conclusions. The book of Deuteronomy was actually written shortly before it was found, and its “discovery” was just a charade: the book was written to provide justification for the power grab of the Yahweh-alone movement.13
Early Christians readily adopted this viewpoint, seeing the body—in the words of one—as “a filthy bag of excrement and urine.” Monks were prohibited from watching each other eating. Girls were forbidden to bathe so they wouldn't see their own naked bodies.5
Although Paul lived contemporaneously with Jesus, he never knew him personally, and his interpretation of Jesus's life and death was strongly at odds with that of the apostles who had actually witnessed Jesus's ministry.
Historian Jean Bottéro explains how, for example, the Mesopotamians believed a foreign pantheon had the same set of roles as their own gods. “It was as if, on the supernatural level, they had recognized the existence of a certain number of divine functions…a bit like political offices, which were pretty much the same everywhere.”
“Do not leave alive anything that breathes,” commands Yahweh. “Completely destroy them.” Why should the Israelites carry out this terrible genocide? Because “otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and
the story of the siege of Jericho, immortalized in popular culture as a miracle of God in which the city walls come tumbling down from the trumpeting sounds of the Israelite army. What is not generally discussed is the cheerfully narrated genocidal atrocity after the collapse of the walls. “Everyone charged straight in,” we are told, “and they took the city. They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep, and donkeys…. Then they burned the whole city and everything in it.” This event was considered an
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It is a grim irony of history that the first exemplar of genocide carried out in the name of ideology came from the holy book of the Jewish faith, the very people that the Nazis tried to wipe out with their racist ideology.12
Hajime Nakamura, a leading crosscultural authority on Asian spiritual traditions, observes that “in India there were no religious wars. Neither Buddhists nor Jains ever executed heretics. What they did to heretics was only to exclude them from the orders. Religious leaders in India died peacefully attended by their disciples and followers. Toleration is the most conspicuous characteristic of Indian culture.”28
William Wilberforce, remembered for his efforts to abolish slavery, considered Christian missionary activity in India to be “the greatest of all causes,” denounced Hindu deities as “absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty,” and concluded that “our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent [while] theirs is mean, licentious and cruel.”33*
When the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci founded the first Christian ministry in China in the late sixteenth century, he looked for areas of overlap between Christianity and traditional Confucian beliefs. When the Chinese referred vaguely to the heavens as a spiritual force, he deduced that they were referring to the Christian God; when they discussed the spirits that survived after death, he interpreted this as the Christian soul. This inclusive approach did not last long. Eventually, the Pope expressly forbade missionaries to show any tolerance for traditional Chinese practices such as paying
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Peter Drucker, a management consultant whose writings helped shape the philosophical foundations of the modern business corporation, observed that, in the natural world, “every plant is a weed and every mineral is just another rock…. Human possession and use is what activates the true nobility of any natural object.”29
today, just twenty species of plant provide 90 percent of the vegetable food people eat.
