More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It is an odd way to live, isn’t it, to ignore the people physically with you while contacting friends who might be hundreds of miles away? You’d think the new technology would bring us together. Instead it seems to be pushing us apart.”
“ ‘The allurements of degeneracy: assembly rooms, baths, and smart dinner parties. In their naÏveté the British called it civilization, when it was really all part of their servitude.’ “
In the pale rocket light the face of Michael Poole Bazalget was like an upturned coin, but his mouth was set with a kind of determination, his eyes shadowed. I felt unaccountably disturbed. I wondered what this child, and his own children after him, would do with the world.
It was said that at one time just two thousand individuals had owned almost all the cultivated land in the western Empire, from Italy to Britain.
Our minds evolved in the first place so we could figure out what is going on inside other people’s heads—so we could get to know them, help them, even manipulate them. Did you know that? We need other people to make us fully conscious. So if you’re alone, if nobody is looking at you or talking to you, it really is as if you don’t exist.”
And it was a place of madness, she thought suddenly, of a great plague of the mind: all these people drawn from across Europe to see shabby relics and to part with their wealth, all for the sake of an idea, the great rampaging mind-sickness of Christianity.
We humans think we’re in control. In fact we’re enmeshed in emergent structures—jams, cities, even economies—working on scales of space and time far beyond our ability to map.
natural selection works at the level of the gene, not the individual.
