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

by Tamim Ansary

It’s not just that the Romans had the same array of gods and goddesses as the Greeks except with Latin names. They saw those deities within the same framework as the Greeks: a “natural” world that contained both humans and gods. Rome, in short, was Greece without the subtleties. Minus philosophers but plus engineers—and concrete.

Political states have borders demarcating one “interior” from another. Civilizations have frontier zones, where the coherence of one master narrative gradually dissolves and the power of another fades in. Borders are porous, however, and frontiers are nebulous. All through history, people have moved from one world civilization to another through the spaces in between. Merchants, tourists, adventurers, bandits, armies, migrants, criminals on the lam—all have carried with them trinkets, goods, games, jokes, recipes, riddles, songs, stories, judgments, rumors, opinions, and countless other sorts of artifacts, ideas, impulses, and habits. Human cultures may clot into constellations, but connections have threaded among them forever. People inhabiting the lands between distinct civilizations have always, therefore, played a vital role in the ever-increasing interconnectedness of humankind.

The towering luminaries associated with the origins of science were not scientists. They couldn’t be, since no such thing existed yet. The trailblazers of science were men of the church, one and all. Take Copernicus, for example, the fifteenth-century astronomer who solved the growing incoherence of the Ptolemaic star charts with a bold new theory: he proposed that the sun stood still and everything else, including Earth, revolved around it. The author of this seminal restructuring of the cosmos lived his whole life nestled in the warm embrace of Mother Church. Copernicus was a famous academic of his time, and he held a doctorate in, yes, canon law. When he wrote a book describing his heliocentric theory, his admiring readers included the pope. Copernicus had a pupil named Kepler, another giant of early science. Kepler was also a devout man of the church. He labored to complete the work Copernicus had begun because, in the spirit of the scholastics—men of the church, one and all—he thought God’s creation must reflect God’s perfection, and there were still a few discrepancies in his master’s heliocentric model.

Spain was like some happy-go-lucky fool who has found an ATM machine that is spitting out free money.

The values fueled by the apocalyptic encounter in the Americas extended to the slaves taken from Africa. Slavery was age-old, yes, but this was slavery based explicitly on a notion of race, the notion that people were of essentially different types and some were slaves by nature. 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. How could these be part of the same conceptual constellation? Racism provided the bridge. 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.

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.

The progress narrative nourished this attitude because, as everyone knows, the best machines are the ones that are new and improved, and machines can always be improved. Societies shaped by the progress narrative had an advantage over others not so much because of the seminal tools they invented but because of the improvements and variations they kept making on those tools. Guns didn’t tilt the balance in conflicts between Muslim and European armies. The Muslims had guns too. Guns didn’t make the difference in China: the Chinese invented guns, for heaven’s sake. What set the Europeans apart were the kinds of guns they brought to the field.

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 French revolutionaries raised ideology as an explicit banner. They weren’t out to replace one powerful family with another but to wipe out the very idea of family lineage as a basis of authority. They appealed to abstract principles that could be stated in words. Three words, to be exact: liberty, fraternity, and equality. In practice, these terms have come in for much deconstruction. Who is to be liberated from whom? What constitutes liberty? Where does fraternity leave women? Equality, you say? Ah, but people are not exactly similar, so equal in what regard? These questions do not, however, undercut the fundamentally ideological nature of the French Revolution and the doctrines it generated. Every ideology runs into contradictions in practice.

share makes us intelligible to one another, thereby empowering us to operate as a social constellation, but it makes us less intelligible to people outside our narrative. As the novelist Yann Martell once said, “We are all citizens of the languages we speak, and World is not a language.”

Everything we know is one node in a web of knowledge, which is why, when we think we’re coming to understand something, we say we’re connecting the dots. We mean we’re starting to see a constellation. Dots are all that the world gives us; connections are what we add. The big picture is in our minds, but if others see it too, it feels real. For most practical purposes, it is real. Once a big picture has formed, a dot can vanish here or there, and it doesn’t matter: the picture is still there. A few new dots can drift into the frame: it doesn’t matter. We incorporate the ones that fit and ignore the ones that don’t, and the picture is still there. But if too many dots disappear and too many more drift in, the picture gets blurry. At some point, the addition or subtraction of just a few dots can bring a whole new picture into view. And with that, the meaning of all the dots can change, for now they are nodes in a whole different web of meaning.

I’m proposing that every stable society is permeated by a social paradigm that organizes human interactions, gives purpose to people’s lives, and makes most events meaningful. As in science, however, there are always a few things that do not fit, a few social whorls that remain troublesome, a few groups of people that have not found a comfortable place within the paradigm, a few nonconformists who keep yelling that the emperor has no clothes, a few workers who refuse to do the work everyone else needs them to do, a few fringe loonies claiming that they were abducted by aliens, a few secretive rebel movements stockpiling weapons in the vain delusion that they will one day overthrow the government and thereby solve all problems. But those register as anomalies—problems to be studied, wrinkles to be ironed out. So long as most people subscribe to the paradigm, society can manage its outliers and their ideas. The constellation remains healthy; lives remain meaningful. The world, however, keeps hitting us with information unlike anything we’ve seen before. Our model of the universe has to keep up with the material facts, and if we have to deny or contain half of what we confront, we end up with a lot of ideas that do not fit the reality we’re living in. If, on the other hand, we have to reconfigure our big picture too much, the picture itself grows blurry and loses some of its power to hold ideas (and lives) together. Master narratives need coherence to exist at all. When nothi...

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. We’ve seen it happen many times in history. All the great religions represented paradigm shifts. A discrete set of events took place. They dropped into a pool of incoherence, and suddenly, for a great many people, everything made sense again. Stark social and political examples of social paradigm shifts abound in the last century alone. Consider the sudden metamorphosis of 1930s Germany into a Nazi world. Afterward, horrified Germans tried to represent the momentary triumph of Nazism as a coup: a small clique took power and forced everyone else to behave badly. At the time, however, it certainly looked like a great many Germans simply and rather suddenly bought into the Nazi paradigm—they became Nazis.

We may never have a world we all share peacefully, but we won’t ever have it if we don’t build it. The goal is not for all of us to become “just the same,” nor to educate “them” so they can join with us, nor to become just like them so we can join their world. The goal is for all of us to find our way around the world with the same map. Only then will all discussions make sense. Only then will all conversations become possible. Making connections across cultural borders requires that we take context seriously. It’s the only way to glimpse a universe of meaning that we might build with people very different from ourselves. And it isn’t enough to include “them” in one’s own picture as supporting cast. The challenge has always been to get at least an inkling of a perspective other than our own, to be inside another monad. It takes a lot of intellectual craning and neck stretching to picture the world from another center, but there’s no other way to build a world community in which everyone is “us” and nobody is “them.” In a crude way, it’s happened before, but it’s never been achieved perfectly. If it had been, we’d still be living that way. If one whole us ever comes into being, it won’t be living in a world like the one we’re living in now, nor in a world like the one they are living in now, whoever “they” might be. The all-encompassing “we the people” of the future will be living in a world that does not exist—yet. Before it can come into being, someone has to imagine it. ...