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

by Tamim Ansary

Columbus was something of a jerk, actually.

Yes, technically, the natives could abandon their own ways, accept baptism, and join the church. Many did. But this didn’t make them the fellow Christians of the conquistadors. The narrative they were joining assigned to them the role of scut worker. Native Americans faced quite a challenge, constructing a healthy sense of self within this framework.

The Spanish government mined silver in Peru and Mexico and shipped it home, along with any gold they’d gotten. Spain was like some happy-go-lucky fool who has found an ATM machine that is spitting out free money.

They didn’t put much money into building up Spanish productivity because why go to the bother of making stuff when you can just go out and buy it?

an odor of moral criticism was attached to the landless rich: accumulating money for its own sake was a sign of moral decay. The honorable thing to do with accumulated wealth was to buy some land, purchase a title if possible, and spend one’s days as a benevolent lord managing tenant farmers.

Simple folks assumed that if those guys were doing so much lending, they must have lots of gold stashed somewhere. One day in 1307, King Philip IV of France decided to cancel his debt by arresting all the Templars, executing their leaders, and seizing their gold.

This proved to be the template for a conceptual constellation that has endured to this day: conspiracy theory: the notion that unbeknownst to the masses, some small group secretly controls the world.

The trade was going to happen no matter what, for there was money to be made, but anyone making that money needed to feel that capturing humans and working them to death didn’t necessarily mean they were bad people.

The race-based slave trade was the minotaur chained in the basement of the European colonization of the Americas. The people feasting upstairs did their best to ignore its muffled roars and go on with their dinner.

It wasn’t a nation-state, but it wasn’t simply an empire either; it was, to coin a term, a civilization-state. And the master narrative that sewed this civilization-state together had begun to fray.

The Great Rites Controversy was a Confucian Chinese version of a constitutional crisis.

The Ministry of Rites, therefore, ranked right up there with the army and treasury in importance: it was, after all, holding the world together. If the solutions devised for problems like the Great Rites Controversy felt dubious, public confidence in government eroded. Convoluted solutions that were only “correct enough” chipped away at the coherence that defined the Middle Kingdom under the Ming.

Through this loophole, members of the least respected stratum could move directly to the most honored one. Peasants, on the other hand, were destined to remain peasants. It must have rankled.

In times of turmoil, however, secret societies had a propensity for morphing into millenarian cults impassioned by visions of supernatural apocalypse.

In earlier times, tea came from orchards owned by landowning gentry. It was one of many crops cultivated on a given estate. The work was done by peasants with long-standing connections to the landowners. The relationships were mediated by Confucian values: peasants and gentry were linked to one another in webs of mutual obligations and responsibilities softened by oceans of etiquette and reciprocal debt. Now, however, tea orchards morphed into plantations, vast farms given over to a single cash crop. Efficiency became a central goal of cultivation as a way of maximizing output. Wage laborers did the work, overseen by professional managers more concerned with the bottom line than with Confucian homilies. It was a new world. The Qing and their advisers didn’t particularly like this new world. They liked the cash the Europeans brought, but not their seemingly corrosive culture.

So yes, the policies of China’s Qing government did contribute to the birth of the United States. Thank you for asking.

Chasing wealth was actually a form of philanthropy,

Smith also proposed that wealth concentrated in private hands was the most efficient way of organizing human labor, so long as the government didn’t interfere.

But they jacked up land taxes by 500 percent or more because they didn’t know these people or feel connected to them, so they weren’t hemmed in by tribal shaming the way local tax farmers might have been.

The company’s indifference to the social impact of its policies ended up wreaking havoc.

Here too, however, from their own perspective, the Europeans were not forcing anyone to do anything; they were just conducting business.

When other Western powers saw the privileges Britain had gained, they sent emissaries to Beijing to request in no uncertain terms the same privileges for their merchants. Fair is fair. Over the course of several decades, similar terms were indeed secured by the United States, France, Russia, and others. None of these powers claimed to have overthrown the Qing government. Officially, China was still a mighty Asian empire ruled by its own longtime dynasty. It’s just that various Westerners could now exercise their right to trade freely in this territory—a right that was, within their own network of meaning, sacred.

Capitalism forced on other countries

The Chinese master narrative lost much of its coherence at this point, and a narrative that can’t render the world meaningful can’t retain its grip.

New technology had the potential for disrupting existing social arrangements, and in much of the world, preserving existing social arrangements took precedence over building better mousetraps. In the restoration narrative, preserving and developing those arrangements tended to be the point of life itself.

In short, laborers on a plantation were not just slaves, serfs, or peasants; they were parts.

A machine cannot work if its parts are not perfectly in sync, so people working for a mechanized industrial manufacturing operation had to subordinate their biological selves to the logic of the machine.

Few other constitutions were born in circumstances quite so unencumbered. The French adopted their first constitution in 1791, but theirs didn’t last long, and how could it? The French were still living in France. They were in the hot middle of a story already in progress: mud wrestling amid the inherited grievances of their history, the latest chapters of which involved guillotines and beheading. The social context did not exactly favor sober discussions of mechanisms and procedures. The first French constitution had to be more treaty than manual.

Ideologies are blueprints for social interaction colored by the logic of the machine. They reflect the premise that a systematic doctrine worked out intellectually and capable of being articulated in words can supply the basis for a well-functioning social gestalt. Kinship and religion had long provided just such connective tissue; ideologies now began to offer an alternative sort of glue.

In a world defined by religion and kinship, the first question raised by every rule was, How do we know this comes from the top? In a world defined by ideology, the first question was, How do we know this rule will work? A religion must convince people its vision of the supernatural is true, and its interpretation of the highest supernatural authority’s word is correct. An ideology must convince people its dicta would in fact improve human life on Earth.

The functional unit of machine-age societies shrank from tribe to clan to extended family to nuclear family, and within this framework finally down to the irreducible, sovereign unit: the individual.

From that point on politics, war, construction, destruction—men’s work—gained apparent importance. Women’s work—food preparation, weaving, sewing, keeping the house, taking care of children—lost prestige.

One thing that mechanized mass production of consumer goods did was to wipe out women’s employment.

In fact, with the rise of the machine, there was no biological reason to favor men over women in almost any human endeavor (nor vice versa, for that matter). Thereupon, narratives related to gender began to change, adjusting to the new material reality.

At the same time, mechanized production was pouring out such an abundance of cheap consumer goods that the need for women’s work, even in the home, was eroding. People didn’t have to make a lot of stuff anymore; they could simply go out and buy it. Many middle-class women, idled by industrialism, found home life empty, even soul deadening. They wanted to get out of the house, even if it wasn’t to go to some job.

The current revolution in gender roles is a story still in progress. It is only two centuries old but is already so advanced, it presages even more apocalyptic changes ahead, quite probably including the end of the patriarchal family and perhaps even of gender as a fundamental aspect of human identity.

This was what resulted from the machine and its culture bleshing with the Russian world.

nineteenth-century Muslims started waking up to the fact that their most valuable resources were owned by others, their rulers were actually puppets, and their governments were stage shows controlled from behind the scenes by various Western powers.

This was not a unique phenomenon in history, of course. During the Crusades, a European identity had emerged out of the confrontation with the Muslim-Jewish East. It, too, was shaped by the otherness of the other: Europeans built a sense of who they were by identifying who they were not. At that point, however, Europe was a civilization on the rise. Defining itself as the opposite of the other expressed an energetic triumphalism. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Islamic world, by contrast, was a civilization waking up to its weakness and desperate to halt its own decline. Here, an identity shaped by the otherness of the other could not help but include dark threads of resentment.

Radical Muslims caught up in the nineteenth-century brew of political resistance and spiritual renewal equated Islamic authenticity with shoring up tribal-scale family structures and restricting women to the private realm.

Every attempt to restore the gender roles of past centuries and to cap the rise of women is doomed to fail at least in part because moving backward on this issue would require reversing the direction of technological development throughout all of human history, and that is not going to happen.

The westward expansion of the United States went hand in hand with the reduction and sometimes elimination of the indigenous people. No sugarcoating it. This was not the sort of ideological hate-fueled genocide the Nazis tried to carry out against the Jews. For the Europeans, the natives were simply in the way. They feared and hated the natives until they had swept them away, and then mythologized them as noble savages and eventually named sports teams after them.

In Germany, Adolph Hitler, surely one of the creepiest characters in history, figured out how to exploit the miseries of the war and the humiliations of the peace to stoke a racist nationalism.

however, our history remains braided of three strands: the environment, whatever it be; the tools we craft, whatever those be; and the peculiarly human function enabled by language—the intercommunication wherewith we bring conceptual worlds into being, worlds we inhabit communally

One side envisioned our species dissolving into an atomized cloud of independent individuals, each pursuing his or her own self-interest and thereby, theoretically, ensuring the happiness and prosperity of the whole. The other saw one centralized social will, consciously directing coordinated human effort toward the prosperity and happiness of the whole, thereby theoretically making it possible for each individual to achieve his or her own fulfillment.

a communally imagined landscape created through human intercommunication. This was the contemporary machine-mediated version of the symbolic universe we humans started creating as soon as we had language and became fully human.

People could think of themselves as full participants in society and yet interact less and less with other humans physically.

In this age of information, we tend to intercommunicate with those who share our terms of discourse.

Every worldview is a model that defines how the whole world fits together. Every such gestalt has a built-in mechanism that helps it endure. Like any willful organism, it has a will to live. It keeps death at bay by absorbing and incorporating ideas that fit and rejecting ideas that don’t.

A paradigmatic social change is always going to seem sudden because a paradigm is invisible until it isn’t. When a whole society goes through a pervasive change, it may feel like everyone is changing their mind at once, but it’s actually a social version of the paradigm shift described by Kuhn.