// Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind // 09.08.15
Animals are said to belong the the same species if they tend to mate with each other, giving birth to fertile offspring.
Genus Homo
Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called The Great Apes. Out closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago a single female ape had two daughters; one become the ancestor of all chimps, the other is our own grandmother.
We are used to thinking about ourselves as the only humans, because for the last 10,000 years our species has indeed been the only human species around. Yet the real meaning of the word ‘human’ is an animal belonging to the genus Homo, and there used to be many other species of this genus besides homo sapiens. And why not? Today there are many species of foxes bears and pigs.
Humans first evolved in East Africa about 2.5 million years ago, from an earlier genus of apes called Australopithecus - which means Southern Ape. About 2 million years ago some of these archaic men and woman left their homeland to journey through and settle vast areas of North Africa, Europe and Asia. Since survival in the snowy forests of northern Europe required different traits than those needed to stay alive in Indonesia’s steaming jungles, human populations evolved in different directions.
Around 70,000 years ago sapiens left Africa for a second time. This time they drove Neanderthals and all other human species not only from the Middle East, but from the face of the earth.
Replacement vs. Interbreeding Theory
If the Replacement Theory is correct, all living humans have roughly the same genetic baggage, and racial distinctions among them are negligible. But if the Interbreeding Theory is right, there might well be genetic differences between Africans, Europeans and Asians that go back hundreds of thousands of years.
In homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2-3% of total body weight, but it consumes 25 % of the the body's energy when the body is at rest. By comparison, the brain of other apes require only 8% of rest-time energy.
It takes a tribe to raise a human
An upright gait required narrower hips, constricting the birth canal - and this just when babies’ heads were getting bigger and bigger. Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females. Women who gave birth earlier, when the infants’ brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children. Natural selection consequently favoured earlier births. And indeed, compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely, when many of their vital systems are still underdeveloped. A colt can trot shortly after birth for example. Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders.
Fire
Foods that humans cannot digest in their natural forms - such as wheat, rice, and potatoes - became staples of our diet thanks to cooking. Fire not only changed food’s chemistry, it changed its biology, as cooking killed germs and parasites that infested it.
The advent of cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food, to devote less time to eating, and to make do with smaller teeth and shorter intestines. Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal track, and the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way for the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and homo sapiens.
Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. The spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, etc. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contract is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.
The Cognitive Revolution: Myth, Fiction and Imagination
The Cognitive Revolution constitutes of the appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years. What caused it? We're not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner-wiring of the brains of sapiens, enabling to them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language.
Myths and fictions accustom people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture’.
Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, or gossip effectively about more than 150 people. But once the 150 threshold is crossed, things can no longer work that way. How did homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising of millions of people? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large scale human co-operation is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. When it is used it gives sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.
One on one, or even ten on ten, we are embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees. Significant differences begin to appear only when we cross the 150 threshold. When we reach 2000 the differences are astounding. If you tired to bunch thousands of chimpanzees into Tiananmen Square, Wall Square or the Vatican, the result would be pandemonium. By contrast, Sapiens regularly gather by the thousands in such places. Together they create orderly patterns - such as trade networks, mass celebrations and political initiations - that they could never have created in isolation. The real difference between us and the chimps is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue made us the masters of creation.
Ever since the cognitive revolution, sapiens have been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions, and one the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the U.S and Google.
An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example, is not a myth. Radioactive emissions occurred long before people discovered them, and they are dangerous even when people do not believe in them. The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and belief of a single individual. It disappears or changes if that particular individual changes his or her beliefs. The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective conscious of many individuals. Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.
Because the sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny. A conscious effort has to be made to sustain laws, customs, procedures and manners, otherwise the social order would quickly collapse.
Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively. Imagined orders can be maintained only if large segments of the population - and in particular large segments of the elite and security forces - truly believe in it.
Time is a modern day myth
If a lost time traveller popped-up in a medieval village and asked a passer-by, ‘What year is this?’ the villager would be as bewildered by the question as by the strangers ridiculous clothing. Today a single affluent family generally has more timepieces at home than an entire medieval country.
Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systemically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services. Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. Money is the apogee (the highest point in the development of something) of human tolerance. Money is more open minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that dose not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation.
An ivory figure of lion man (or woman) from the Stadel Cave in Germany 32,000 years ago is one of the first indisputable examples of art, and probably of religion, and of the ability of the human mind to imagine things that do not really exist.
We hardly notice how ubiquitous our stuff is until we have to move it to a new house. Foregoers moved house every month, every week and sometimes even every day, toting whatever they had on their backs. It’s reasonable to presume then that the greater part of their mental, religious and emotional lives were conducted without the help of artefacts.
Before the Agricultural Revolution, the human population of the entire planet was smaller that that of today's Cairo. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands, but at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or on an assembly line.
We should beware of demonising or idealising anything on the basis of a superficial acquaintance.
During the 20th century only 5% of human deaths resulted from human violence - and this in a century that saw the bloodiest wars and most massive genocide in history.
Biology enables, culture forbids
Biology is wiling to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It's culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others. Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesis, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.
Full Script
Consistency is the playground of dull minds.
Dharma
Suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving, and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is. If the mind of a person is free from craving, no god can make him miserable. Conversely, once craving arises in a person’s mind, all the gods in the universe cannot save him from suffering. This law, know as dharma, is seen by Buddhists as a universal law of nature.
It is like a man standing for decades on the shoreline, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them for disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach driving himself crazy with his fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!
Either you believe in a single omnipotent God or you believe in two opposing powers, neither of which is omnipotent. Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions, so it should not come as a surprise that millions of pious Christians, Muslims and Jews manage to believe at one and the same time in an omnipotent God and an independent Devil.
Britain
On September 15th 1830 the first commercial railway line was opened connecting Liverpool with Manchester. A mere 20 years later Britain had tens of thousands of kilometres of railway tracks.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, fewer than 500 British officials, about 70,000 British soldiers and perhaps 100,000 British business people were sufficient to conquer and rule up to 300 million Indians.
Napoleon made fun of the British calling them a nation of shopkeepers, yet those shop keepers defeated Napoleon, and their empire was the largest the world has ever seen.
Smith claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth. But when growth becomes a supreme good, unrestricted by any other ethical considerations, it can easily led to catastrophe.
Economic growth requires energy and raw materials, and these are finite. When and if they run out, the entire system will collapse. But the evidence provided by the past is that they are finite only in theory. Counter-intuitively, while humankind’s use of energy and raw materials has mushroomed in the last few centuries, the amounts available for our exploitation have actually increased. Whenever a shortage of either has threatened to slow economic growth, investments have flowed into scientific and technological research. These have invariably produced not only more efficient ways of exploiting existing resources, but also completely new types of energy and materials.
Prior to the industrial revolution the only machine that converted energy was the body. At heart, the industrial revolution has been a revolution in energy conversion. Every few decades we discover a new energy source, so that the sum total of energy at our disposal just keeps growing. Clearly the world does not lack energy. All we lack is the knowledge necessary to harness and convert it to our needs.
Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.
It is not coincidental that the few full-scale international wars that still take place, such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, occur in places where the wealth is old-fashioned material wealth. Armies could flee, but the old fields would stay put.
Unless you're not human
We can only congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern sapiens if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals. Much of the vaunted material wealth that shields us for disease and famine was accumulated at the expense of laboratory monkeys, diary cows and conveyor-belt chickens. Over the last two centuries, tens of billions of them have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth.
Our children’s book, our iconography, and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees in contrast to billions of humans.
As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful live can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is. Assessing life minute by minute, mediaeval people certainly had it rough. However if they believed in the promise of everlasting bliss in the afterlife, they may we have viewed their lives as far more meaningful and worthwhile than modern secular people, who in the long-term, can expect nothing but complete and meaningless oblivion. The other-worldly meanings mediaeval people found in their lives were no more deluded than the modern humanist, nationalist and capitalist meanings modern people find.
Perhaps happiness is synchronising one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As along as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.
“What I feel to be good is good. What I feel to be bad is bad.” - Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Animals are said to belong the the same species if they tend to mate with each other, giving birth to fertile offspring.
Genus Homo
Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called The Great Apes. Out closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago a single female ape had two daughters; one become the ancestor of all chimps, the other is our own grandmother.
We are used to thinking about ourselves as the only humans, because for the last 10,000 years our species has indeed been the only human species around. Yet the real meaning of the word ‘human’ is an animal belonging to the genus Homo, and there used to be many other species of this genus besides homo sapiens. And why not? Today there are many species of foxes bears and pigs.
Humans first evolved in East Africa about 2.5 million years ago, from an earlier genus of apes called Australopithecus - which means Southern Ape. About 2 million years ago some of these archaic men and woman left their homeland to journey through and settle vast areas of North Africa, Europe and Asia. Since survival in the snowy forests of northern Europe required different traits than those needed to stay alive in Indonesia’s steaming jungles, human populations evolved in different directions.
Around 70,000 years ago sapiens left Africa for a second time. This time they drove Neanderthals and all other human species not only from the Middle East, but from the face of the earth.
Replacement vs. Interbreeding Theory
If the Replacement Theory is correct, all living humans have roughly the same genetic baggage, and racial distinctions among them are negligible. But if the Interbreeding Theory is right, there might well be genetic differences between Africans, Europeans and Asians that go back hundreds of thousands of years.
In homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2-3% of total body weight, but it consumes 25 % of the the body's energy when the body is at rest. By comparison, the brain of other apes require only 8% of rest-time energy.
It takes a tribe to raise a human
An upright gait required narrower hips, constricting the birth canal - and this just when babies’ heads were getting bigger and bigger. Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females. Women who gave birth earlier, when the infants’ brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children. Natural selection consequently favoured earlier births. And indeed, compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely, when many of their vital systems are still underdeveloped. A colt can trot shortly after birth for example. Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders.
Fire
Foods that humans cannot digest in their natural forms - such as wheat, rice, and potatoes - became staples of our diet thanks to cooking. Fire not only changed food’s chemistry, it changed its biology, as cooking killed germs and parasites that infested it.
The advent of cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food, to devote less time to eating, and to make do with smaller teeth and shorter intestines. Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal track, and the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way for the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and homo sapiens.
Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. The spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, etc. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contract is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.
The Cognitive Revolution: Myth, Fiction and Imagination
The Cognitive Revolution constitutes of the appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years. What caused it? We're not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner-wiring of the brains of sapiens, enabling to them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language.
Myths and fictions accustom people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture’.
Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, or gossip effectively about more than 150 people. But once the 150 threshold is crossed, things can no longer work that way. How did homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising of millions of people? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large scale human co-operation is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. When it is used it gives sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.
One on one, or even ten on ten, we are embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees. Significant differences begin to appear only when we cross the 150 threshold. When we reach 2000 the differences are astounding. If you tired to bunch thousands of chimpanzees into Tiananmen Square, Wall Square or the Vatican, the result would be pandemonium. By contrast, Sapiens regularly gather by the thousands in such places. Together they create orderly patterns - such as trade networks, mass celebrations and political initiations - that they could never have created in isolation. The real difference between us and the chimps is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue made us the masters of creation.
Ever since the cognitive revolution, sapiens have been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions, and one the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the U.S and Google.
An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example, is not a myth. Radioactive emissions occurred long before people discovered them, and they are dangerous even when people do not believe in them. The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and belief of a single individual. It disappears or changes if that particular individual changes his or her beliefs. The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective conscious of many individuals. Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.
Because the sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny. A conscious effort has to be made to sustain laws, customs, procedures and manners, otherwise the social order would quickly collapse.
Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively. Imagined orders can be maintained only if large segments of the population - and in particular large segments of the elite and security forces - truly believe in it.
Time is a modern day myth
If a lost time traveller popped-up in a medieval village and asked a passer-by, ‘What year is this?’ the villager would be as bewildered by the question as by the strangers ridiculous clothing. Today a single affluent family generally has more timepieces at home than an entire medieval country.
Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systemically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services. Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. Money is the apogee (the highest point in the development of something) of human tolerance. Money is more open minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that dose not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation.
An ivory figure of lion man (or woman) from the Stadel Cave in Germany 32,000 years ago is one of the first indisputable examples of art, and probably of religion, and of the ability of the human mind to imagine things that do not really exist.
We hardly notice how ubiquitous our stuff is until we have to move it to a new house. Foregoers moved house every month, every week and sometimes even every day, toting whatever they had on their backs. It’s reasonable to presume then that the greater part of their mental, religious and emotional lives were conducted without the help of artefacts.
Before the Agricultural Revolution, the human population of the entire planet was smaller that that of today's Cairo. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands, but at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or on an assembly line.
We should beware of demonising or idealising anything on the basis of a superficial acquaintance.
During the 20th century only 5% of human deaths resulted from human violence - and this in a century that saw the bloodiest wars and most massive genocide in history.
Biology enables, culture forbids
Biology is wiling to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It's culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others. Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesis, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.
Full Script
Consistency is the playground of dull minds.
Dharma
Suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving, and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is. If the mind of a person is free from craving, no god can make him miserable. Conversely, once craving arises in a person’s mind, all the gods in the universe cannot save him from suffering. This law, know as dharma, is seen by Buddhists as a universal law of nature.
It is like a man standing for decades on the shoreline, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them for disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach driving himself crazy with his fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!
Either you believe in a single omnipotent God or you believe in two opposing powers, neither of which is omnipotent. Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions, so it should not come as a surprise that millions of pious Christians, Muslims and Jews manage to believe at one and the same time in an omnipotent God and an independent Devil.
Britain
On September 15th 1830 the first commercial railway line was opened connecting Liverpool with Manchester. A mere 20 years later Britain had tens of thousands of kilometres of railway tracks.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, fewer than 500 British officials, about 70,000 British soldiers and perhaps 100,000 British business people were sufficient to conquer and rule up to 300 million Indians.
Napoleon made fun of the British calling them a nation of shopkeepers, yet those shop keepers defeated Napoleon, and their empire was the largest the world has ever seen.
Smith claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth. But when growth becomes a supreme good, unrestricted by any other ethical considerations, it can easily led to catastrophe.
Economic growth requires energy and raw materials, and these are finite. When and if they run out, the entire system will collapse. But the evidence provided by the past is that they are finite only in theory. Counter-intuitively, while humankind’s use of energy and raw materials has mushroomed in the last few centuries, the amounts available for our exploitation have actually increased. Whenever a shortage of either has threatened to slow economic growth, investments have flowed into scientific and technological research. These have invariably produced not only more efficient ways of exploiting existing resources, but also completely new types of energy and materials.
Prior to the industrial revolution the only machine that converted energy was the body. At heart, the industrial revolution has been a revolution in energy conversion. Every few decades we discover a new energy source, so that the sum total of energy at our disposal just keeps growing. Clearly the world does not lack energy. All we lack is the knowledge necessary to harness and convert it to our needs.
Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.
It is not coincidental that the few full-scale international wars that still take place, such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, occur in places where the wealth is old-fashioned material wealth. Armies could flee, but the old fields would stay put.
Unless you're not human
We can only congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern sapiens if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals. Much of the vaunted material wealth that shields us for disease and famine was accumulated at the expense of laboratory monkeys, diary cows and conveyor-belt chickens. Over the last two centuries, tens of billions of them have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth.
Our children’s book, our iconography, and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees in contrast to billions of humans.
As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful live can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is. Assessing life minute by minute, mediaeval people certainly had it rough. However if they believed in the promise of everlasting bliss in the afterlife, they may we have viewed their lives as far more meaningful and worthwhile than modern secular people, who in the long-term, can expect nothing but complete and meaningless oblivion. The other-worldly meanings mediaeval people found in their lives were no more deluded than the modern humanist, nationalist and capitalist meanings modern people find.
Perhaps happiness is synchronising one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As along as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.
“What I feel to be good is good. What I feel to be bad is bad.” - Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
