The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

by Tamim Ansary

The Great Wall of China going up had something to do with the Roman Empire coming down. A provocative thought.

We live on the same planet but in many different worlds. What any of us humans see as the whole world is just the world as we see it, whoever “we” might be. What we know as the history of the world is actually a socially constructed somebody-centric world historical narrative. There’s a Euro-centric one, an Islamo-centric one, a Sino-centric one, and many more.

Social constellations form intentions and set the agendas of history: countries, families, empires, nations, clans, corporations, tribes, clubs, political parties, societies, neighborhood groups, social movements, mobs, civilizations, high school cliques—they’re all constellations. They do not exist outside culture. The mighty hunter dissolves upon closer examination into random individual stars. The same is true of social constellations. Clan, country, movement, mob—get up close to any of these and all you see are individual human beings and their ideas.

The Catholics and Lutherans were both Christians, but when they met, they didn’t see fellow Christians or fellow Germans or fellow anything. When they looked at the same event, they didn’t see the same event.

Could groups involved in such savagery ever reconcile? Could their descendants ever look upon one another as anything but the other?

Small worlds sometimes do merge into larger worlds; or small worlds intermesh to become distinct parts of single larger wholes, and how this happens is a riddle that can be unraveled only in the cultural universe.

We’re all one humanity, but we never stop creating whirlpools of exclusion.

Creatures that fit their environment as perfectly as keys fit locks were in trouble. The changes were too rapid for biological evolution to come to their rescue. Erratic conditions such as these favored generalists over specialists. It was better to be adaptable than adapted.

In fact, the meaning of many words is not their relationship to something in the physical world; it’s their relationship to other words. Developing language meant we could start using words as if they were the objects named. Words could then separate from things and have an existence of their own.

What’s happening at that point is that the kid is entering the same symbolic world as the group—waking up, you might say, into a reality that his or her group has created and is maintaining.

The fact is, we humans don’t live directly in the physical universe. We live in a model of the world we have created collectively through language and which we maintain communally. That model was already in existence when we were born; we merely made our way into it as we matured. Becoming an adult meant gaining the ability to imagine the same world as everyone else.

But a whole society can’t change its mind the way a biological creature can. It might behave as if it were a social organism, but it doesn’t have a brain; it exists only as a web of symbolic interactions among its members. It’s those individuals who have to do the changing, and rarely can many minds change at once because telepathy doesn’t exist. We inhabit imaginary worlds we share with others, but we come to those worlds privately, each with our own unique constellation of information, ideas, and beliefs. And if some members of a society alter their perceptions and beliefs and others don’t, the model they all share starts to lose coherence. If the model gets muddy, our ability to deal with the environment as single wholes gets weaker.

A doubter would have threatened the security of everyone. Hardly anyone wants to be that guy—the guy who threatens the security of everybody. Doubt threatens the social constellation’s internal order. Societies tend to frown on doubt.

Mesopotamia’s many little city-states spawned an entrepreneurial individualism and a competitive pluralism that came to characterize both Islamic and European civilizations—and how could it not, given the geography of its twin rivers?

A master narrative isn’t merely a series of events. To have resonance, a story must unfold in a world that feels real, that feels credible.

To the Greeks, the world looked more like an anthology of countless stories, big and small.

One chief critic of the Sophists (seen by many as a Sophist himself) was an ugly little pest named Socrates, who hung about in the streets of Athens, asking uncomfortable questions and then arguing about the answers.

When money emerged, it didn’t replace barter; it replaced calculations of credit and debt.

In China, theoretically, everyone at every level was ruled by a scholar-bureaucrat.

But when Greece was peaking as a cultural and military power, Rome was like a rowdy teenager still looking for itself.

These so-called tribunes had only one power, but it was a mighty power. They could say no: they could veto anything the senate proposed.

Some were quite specific; for example, if a man sang a song slandering another, he must be clubbed to death.

Rome, in short, was Greece without the subtleties. Minus philosophers but plus engineers—and concrete.

Camels could carry heavier loads than horses or mules, and on top of all that, they were cuddly and nice.

Not so for all those slaves and beggars. For them, by the start of the Common Era, the pagan narrative described a world without meaning. Then Christianity came along and said: this world was a mere test for what would happen after death. The poorest, meekest, and most oppressed were passing the test; they would live on forever in the kingdom of bliss. The Roman elite were mostly failing. For them, getting into heaven would be harder than it was for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Framed by the Christian narrative, now everything made sense. Aha! Such is the power of narrative.

The Germans weren’t trying to destroy Rome. They were trying to become Romans.

The fact is, Rome never fell. It started out as a Latin world. It soaked up Greek themes as it expanded. The Greco-Latin blend then got Christianized. And eventually, the Christianized Greco-Roman world got Germanized.

The subtle similarities between Greek philosophy and Islamic theology made them yawn. These warlords leaned more toward Islam as a book of rules and a corps of experts to interpret those rules, and a cadre of armed officials to enforce them.

The humbling of the Song, the Turkification of the Islamic world, the Afghan expansion into northern India, the Crusades—these dramas loom large in the world historical narratives of China, India, the Islamic world, and Europe. From the panoramic point of view, however, they look like a single interwoven drama that began in northern Europe, rippled through the Asian steppes, created disruptions in the urban civilizations along the whole perimeter of that region,

The Templars’ work put them in a position to realize something that very few Europeans understood at the time: money was not actually a thing. Money was information. It all came down to accounting. Once in possession of this arcane secret, the Knights Templar began to morph into the world’s first international bankers.

Meanwhile, in the southwest, another grandson of Genghis burned down Baghdad, where the nominal head of the Islamic world was still holding court. The Muslim caliphate was no more.

The Mongol eruption played a key role in the Long Crusades, even if Europeans didn’t know it, because it hammered China, demolished Russia, and laid waste to Dar-ul-Islam but left Christendom virtually untouched.

What learned Muslims mostly did with clockworks, therefore, was to construct ingenious toys for their moneyed elite.

But who was to judge? Islam had no formal structure of authority—no bishops, no pope, no one to certify that any particular person had the authority to issue a ruling. This is where Muslim universities stepped in.

How could one determine that a given piece of information was true? Hmmm, good question! Never goes stale, that one. Conventional wisdom said: First, check scripture. If it conflicts with that, it’s false. If it passes the scripture test, run it at the Aristotle-bar: Does it make rational sense? If it doesn’t clear the Aristotle-bar, it’s not true.

He thus laid out a method for gaining true information about the world without any reference to God.

A couple of centuries earlier, the idea that the existence of God could use some proving would have struck any European Christian as both laughable and blasphemous.

Protoscientists such as Leonardo were a threat because when people fixated on observation they began to spot little things that didn’t quite add up.

The Crusades thus helped give birth to the concept of Europe.

to explain themselves, they dragged their feet. Battles ensued, but the Tatars of the fourteenth century were not the Mongols of the thirteenth. Russians broke their grip and took control

The Ming transformed China into a totalitarian society held in place with a grid of rules.

In this milieu, innovation did not enjoy prestige: the unheard of was best not heard of again. The ideal society was the stable society. Anything that sounded echoes of the past had luster; anything that smacked of disruption had an odor. The great goal of human endeavor was social harmony. If ever that were achieved, change could stop, and that would be the greatest success of all: who doesn’t want to get to healthy adulthood and then stay that way forever? The great project for people of the present day was to reach again the level of the past. China became not just inward looking but backward looking.

The universe was an apocalyptic drama that would end with the day of judgment, and the pivotal moment in the story was the prophetic career of Messenger Muhammad: his seventh-century Medina stamped the template for all humankind. After the Prophet’s death, the mission had been to keep the perfection going. Muslims had let it slip away, so now they had the civilization-sized task of restoring it.

If everyone behaved as they should—and there were ways to know how they should—the social world could take final form, and disruptive change could blessedly stop.

Europe had come out of the fourteenth century pandemic as a world in flux. In this milieu, it was possible to think the unthinkable. It’s hardly accidental that in the wake of the Black Death, movements swelled up to translate the Bible into languages people actually spoke. Many wanted to see for themselves what the scriptures said because it kind of looked like maybe, perhaps, just maybe—here’s the unthinkable part: maybe the church had gotten something wrong.

A narrative rendered unnecessary is a dead man walking. Its lifeblood starts to ebb from the moment its relevance—not it’s accuracy but its relevance—comes into question.

In this context, the church could burn a guy at the stake for trying to translate a book, and instead of losing respect for the church, devout observers were moved to applaud the savagery and breathe a sigh of relief—nothing to worry about, the church was on it, the “we” would survive.

Luther’s rebellion must be seen against the backdrop of his times. The ravages of the fourteenth century had left the Church of Rome scrambling to repair its credibility.

It wasn’t a case of this church versus that church. It was fundamentally about one monolithic church versus everybody building his or her own church.

What all these social streams and cultural currents shared was a tendency to view the world in terms of progress and regress. In this narrative, time was linear but had no endpoint. The momentum of history was forward flowing but could at times slip backward. When it did regress, humanity had to stem the slippage, reverse the direction, and get the forward motion going again. What was slippage and what was forward motion might be open to argument, but progress was the ultimate goal of human effort, and there was no final destination: tomorrow could always be better than today, always. Progress was at the core of the faith that began to knit together a new civilization here at the western edges of Europe. No doubt many people still believed sincerely in a day of judgment—when they thought about it. But how many people thought about it as a normal part of their everyday lives? Fewer and fewer, one suspects. Whereas progress? Pretty much everyone was focused on making progress, all day, every day—and on stemming regress when they felt slippage happening.