This book takes an approach to history that recognizes the power of the human mind to construct its own reality. It offers a simple thesis: culture shapes values, and those values shape history.
At the time of Columbus, the Chinese were far superior technologically to the Europeans, why was it that the Europeans conquered the world? The Chinese had all the preconditions for a scientific and industrial revolution hundreds of years before the Europeans, yet this did not occur in China. The traditional view, as seen through our Western lens is that this was a failing. Was it instead, simply a difference of goals, shaped by cultural values? Lent will argue that there is a deep structure in European cognition that identifies power as a value in itself, even if gaining such power causes massive disequilibrium. “In China, by contrast, the predominant approach to power was to maintain society's equilibrium in the context of heaven and earth, something the emperor was obligated to do through his “mandate of heaven.” Military might was seen as a force to use only when necessary to maintain stability.” Alternative explanations include: “Some have focused on demographics and economics, arguing that China's high population density kept the cost of labor cheap relative to capital, thereby reducing the value of labor-saving technology and discouraging innovation. Others point to the destructive impact of the Mongol conquests during those centuries, which engulfed not just China but also large parts of the Islamic empire.”
Culture can shape cognition in several ways. One is language. Lent promotes a soft version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that the language we speak from birth - although it doesn't prevent us thinking in different ways - establishes structures of cognition that influence us to perceive, understand, and think about the world according to certain patterns. Or, in its simplest terms: language has a patterning effect on cognition. “Languages can act as both building blocks and barriers of the mind at the same time. Once we've assigned a word to a particular set of ideas, it's easier for us to use that word than construct a new assemblage of thoughts unconnected to any word. The more complex and abstract the set of ideas attached to the word, the more difficult it is to come up with a competing set of ideas not associated with any word.” For example, Chinese lacks the definite article, which was invented by the Greeks and gave the linguistic framework for Plato to derive his theory of Forms. Instead of seeking an abstract idea such as “the Truth,” the Chinese language encouraged a more tangible search for “things that are true.”
Another way culture can affect how we think is through cultural root metaphors, which are structures we use to make sense of the world and derive meaning from it.
Lent argues that rather than possessing a language instinct, humans exhibit a patterning instinct mediated by the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The PFC allowed us to have symbolic thought, a major breakthrough. Later, symbols could be stored externally, in the form of writing. These major innovations mean that our cognitions is affected by our cultures more than any other animal. “Institutions we take for granted in today's society, such as marriage, money, and government, exist only because their reality is grounded in a common understanding that relies on external symbolic storage to maintain consistent meaning.”
The book is structured as a roadmap through the most enduring structures of meaning in human history.
First, there were the hunter gatherers: everything is connected. Nature is a giving parent. “A common principle that emerges from each aspect of the hunter-gatherer worldview is the blurring of boundaries between domains. Whether it's between the living and dead, the everyday and the spirit world, human and animal, owning and giving, or family and nonfamily, fluidity in relations is a universal feature of hunter-gatherer societies.”
When hunter gatherers first began to store things for later, Lent argues this represents a fundamental shift in thinking. Nature used to be a giving parent, with endless bounty that would take care of you. But now, storage betrays a distrust of that bounty. Storage also led inevitably to inequalities between people. “Someone who decides to work extra hard to gather surplus wheat will not be happy to give it away later to someone who was too lazy to do so. This leads to what anthropologist Alain Testart has called a “change in ideology.” The foraging principle of food sharing has to be transformed or given up. There is less reliance on kinship and friendship for protection when things go wrong, and more reliance on building up your own stores of wealth.”
“Attitudes toward time begin to change: the past (when you accumulated your goods) and the future (when you might need them) become more important, replacing a simple, consistent focus on the present. Attitudes toward work also shift: rather than doing just what you need to feed yourself that day, there's an incentive to work harder to invest in the future. This all leads to a changed view of nature, with people relying on their own planning and storage rather than an ever-providing natural world.”
Then there was the agricultural era: humanity lives under a hierarchy of the Gods. Inequality continues to increase. “With the rise of agriculture, there arose a new form of energy to exploit: the energy of other human beings, now locked into static communities.”
Then, starting with the ancient Greeks: The divergence. The soul is separate from the physical world. Also leads to the idea of “Nature as Machine.” Dualism emerges from Plato’s school. The rational soul is subject to the animalistic (impure) urges of the physical body. This pattern of meaning gained momentum under Christianity and the Enlightenment and continues to heavily influence our thought patterns today. Lent actually believes this manifests in the modern era in the belief that our consciousness can transcend our physical bodies and be uploaded into new synthetic mediums. He disagrees with this viewpoint: “Software and hardware, which can be easily separated in a computer, are completely interwoven in brains - a neuron's biophysical makeup is intrinsically linked to the computations it carries out.” Though he doesn’t present any evidence for this claim.
The Greek innovation in cognition: “In a period of just a few generations, the ancient Greeks nurtured this faculty for symbolic thinking and brought it to an entirely new level of sophistication. Abstracting a general rule from an assortment of details is the defining characteristic of Greek thought. The Greeks weren't content merely to record what happened around them. Instead, they created categories and generated rules for why things happened, with the ultimate objective of explaining them and perhaps even predicting what would happen next… The senses and emotions were no longer to be trusted. Reason and abstraction would henceforth be the source of what was good in the human experience.”
The world splits into two main groups: dualistic Indo-European cosmologies, and the holistic cosmologies of China. The resulting worldviews lead to vastly different ideas about our relationships to nature and each other. This results in disparate attitudes and intentions towards science, technology, political and intergroup relations.
In China, the Shang dynasty presided from 1600 to 1046 B.C. “The Shang worldview envisaged an orderly cosmos, a rational universe that responded to the appropriate human actions. Of course, things could go wrong, such as a particular ancestor feeling malevolent, but, even then, there was the belief that a specific action could be divined to propitiate him. Ultimately, there was a conservative optimism at the heart of the Shang world, a belief that the universe - just like the bureaucracy of the imperial court - could work for all people's benefit if everyone played their part correctly.”
“The Chinese made no distinction between physical health and mental or spiritual health. While the ancient Greeks (and the yogis of India) viewed transcendence from bodily experience as their ultimate goal, the Chinese perceived harmonization with the Tao as something to be achieved through both mental and physiological methods. The Chinese, like the Indians, developed sophisticated practices of concentration, breathing, and movement, but they never saw these practices in terms of the mind exercising discipline over the body. Rather, body and mind were inherently integrated.”
With the ancient Egyptians, we see for the first time a “morally contingent afterlife,” ordaining that your actions in this life have a direct effect on your experience of the next. “The Shang were interested in the world of the ancestor spirits only insofar as it affected their own; they rarely, if ever, speculated on their own individual paths upon entering the spirit world. By contrast, the Egyptians viewed the afterlife as the most important sphere, with their current life merely a kind of dream preparing them for the next.” With Akhenaten we see for the first time a monotheistic religion, very atypical for ancient Egyptian society actually. It is noteworthy that the first appearance of monotheism in history brought with it great brutality and persecution. This pattern appears again and again, Lent believes monotheism and religion intolerance to be deeply connected. One characteristic of monotheism, seen here for the first time, is a shift in the source of sacredness from the world up to the heavens.
“The view of nature as a property to be measured by a divine architect is consistent with the monotheistic presumption that the ultimate source of value in the universe lies not in the natural world but in God's eternal sphere. This conception leads inexorably to the desacralization of nature: it is no longer sacred in its own right, as in earlier hunter-gatherer and agrarian cultures, but merely the constructed artifice of an external creator. The NATURE AS MACHINE metaphor took on new momentum in the late Middle Ages, reflecting and bolstering the emerging belief in a mechanistic universe subject to human control. Increasingly, God was visualized as an engineer or architect.”
Why did Muslim society never have a scientific revolution? “Muslim breakthroughs in scientific thought, impressive as they were, tended to be sporadic and clustered in communities that protected scientific thinkers from the mainstream culture. The thrust of Islamic cognition was aimed toward following the divine words of the Quran.”
Lent seems to favor the Eastern mode of thought, specifically Neo-Confucianism, an underappreciated philosophy according to him. Its core concept is an understanding of the universe as the interrelation of qi and li. Qi is the raw material of the universe - but li is “the ever-moving, ever-present set of patterns that flow through everything in nature and in all our perceptions of the world, including our consciousness”. He wants to fuse this spiritual tradition with a systems way of viewing the universe, what he calls the “new sciences.” He thinks this would lead to our ultimate sources of value being assigned not to “a transcendent realm”, or to our “moral rationality”, but to “humanity’s intrinsic connection with the natural world”. If we follow this mode more, he believes we can ameliorate many of our greatest societal problems.
While the Europeans focused on maximizing what they could mine from the earth, the Chinese seem to have targeted a different objective: avoiding an imbalance that could disturb public peace. In this, they appear to have been extraordinarily successful. Back in the ninth century, the Tang dynasty constructed the framework of a society that would remain remarkably stable until the twentieth century, even in the face of invasions by the Mongols and Manchus and later incursions of European powers. This stability has been viewed by many Western observers as a form of stagnation.
Modern society faces several problems today: catastrophic climate change, massive disruption of nearly every ecosystem on earth, mass extinction, reduction in societal cohesion, escalating wealth inequality both within and between countries, erosion of democracies by fake news and powerful corporate interests. Lent also believes that an increasingly secular society, at least in the West, is leading to a pervasive nihilism. What can we do?
How did our current consumer culture emerge? “increasing numbers of people seeking salvation in this world rather than the next, and increasingly efficient industrial producers seeking consumers for their goods.”
The drive for growing GDP now shapes a lot of our decisions as societies. This is to the detriment of the environment and human well-being because the GDP only measures economic activity, not if that activity harms anyone or the environment. Additionally, growth has become integral to the functioning of our capitalist society: “The money supply, now wholly controlled by central banks, could be increased without regard to any underlying commodity. There was, however, one important catch to this newfound freedom of money. It was now created as a form of debt, requiring a promise to be paid back. As such, the money supply had to keep growing to service the interest on the debt, making perpetual economic growth a necessity to keep the entire system running…Corporations are valued as a multiple of their current earnings, so most of the financial wealth in our society really represents a claim on the future wealth still to be created. All these expectations for a return on capital are ultimately based on a presumption of continued economic growth in society at large. Failure to grow - or even just the threat of it - thus leads to banks failing, businesses going bankrupt, and people losing their jobs. Meanwhile, as the money supply grows, there needs to be a corresponding increase in the goods and services available to be purchased to avoid runaway inflation. Now, instead of needing more gold to grow, our economy needs a continual increase in the amount of stuff that money can buy, just to maintain its stability.”
Lent concludes that something has to give. We can avoid societal collapse by recasting the root metaphors we use to understand the world. Instead of viewing nature as a machine that we can shape, we should take lessons from other root metaphors like nature as giving parent and the harmonic web of interconnected life. The confluence of our core metaphors constrain the way we see the world and the paths we follow. To change the disastrous direction of our society we must change these core metaphors. To do this, we must identify their essence and understand how they have evolved.
“In place of root metaphors such as NATURE AS MACHINE and CONQUERING NATURE, the new worldview would be based on the emerging systems view of life - recognizing the intrinsic interconnectedness between all forms of life on earth and seeing humanity as embedded integrally within the natural world. What values would arise from this worldview? Three core values emerge.
- The first is an emphasis on quality of life rather than material possessions.
- Secondly, we would base political, social, and economic choices on a sense of our shared humanity, emphasizing fairness and dignity for all rather than maximizing for ourselves and our parochially defined social group.
- Finally, we would build our civilization's future on the basis of environmental sustainability, with the flourishing of the natural world as a foundational principle for humanity's major decisions.
Change might require a smaller critical threshold of different thinkers than we might expect. “Political scientists have studied the history of all campaigns across the world since 1900 that led to government overthrow or territorial liberation, and they've discovered that no campaign failed once it achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population.”
“Cultures shape values, and those values shape history. Our values will shape our future”
Thought questions:
Lent conspicuously refrains from commenting about modern China. If modern China arose from the beliefs Lent believes would lead to less exploitation of natural resources and more sustainable living in harmony with nature, what does he think of modern China’s heavy use of coal and high levels of environmental pollution?
Many members of book club thought the book was somewhat biased in the presentation of certain topics. Did you feel that way? Which topics should have been explored more deeply? Which were treated too one-dimensionally?