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

by Tamim Ansary

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...