![]() He's a good guide to take along because he has a sure touch and he's an acute observer not just of the past and the canon and the expectations forged in ivory towers, but also a scholar of the here and now, primed to poke at some of the questions we tend not to ask ourselves enough and to shed some unexpected light on issues we thought we knew our way around.Įssentially when we signed on for humanism and saw ourselves as important rather than as mere cogs in a machine that we ourselves had invented but wanted to pretend came from outside us, this new deal led easily and inexorably to individualism and selfishness and not just moral relativity but now also physical relativity. Yuval Noah Harari, the young Israeli historian who struck such a chord with Sapiens, his history of humankind, now looks at the present and future of our race and the bonkers little adventure we seem to have unleashed on this hitherto unsuspecting ecosystem on the third rock from the sun. Where the steam engine brought enormous societal and commercial change, it didn't actually change the human being, so there were still a number of cycles to go through.īut now there is a very real possibility that we human beings will embark upon the creation of our own version of evolution rather than waiting for any incremental change to come and meet us along the way. The old saw that "if you don't know your history you are doomed to repeat it" has become something of a truism, not because it has nothing to tell us, but because we have distorted all the parameters that we used to be able to use when looking at certain recognisable elements in the conditions that were coming back around again.
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