Philosophy and Ideas
I have become fascinated by the long sweep of human history. I want to understand where humans came from, what makes us distinct, why progress accelerated, where we now stand, and our potential future. I have found eight absorbing books that together tell the story of humanity as a cultural species, powered by accumulating knowledge. This essay sets out the picture painted by these books.
My first book is Joseph Henrich’s ‘The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species and Making us Smarter’ (2001). According to Henrich, humanity’s niche, what makes us special, is that we are ‘a cultural species’ that accumulates knowledge and practices, and the secret of our success has been ‘cumulative cultural evolution.’ Human genetics have co-evolved with our cultural speciality: to be effective at learning and transmitting information we have become social creatures with big brains and long childhoods. Culture has also shaped our bodies, with cooking shortening guts and clothing reducing body hair.
A complimentary telling of human history is Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the last 13,000 Years’ (1997). Diamond explains the comparative economic abundance of the West as due to culture: the scale of Eurasia has allowed it to accumulate better knowledge and practices than more isolated societies. Eurasia also benefitted from having better domesticable plants and animals, and from its east-west orientation making cultural transfers easier than in the Americas and Africa.
My third book is about an important feature of long history, the general decline in violence. Steven Pinker’s ‘The Better Angels of our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity’ (2011) chronicles the substantial reduction in violence from hunter-gatherers, though primitive and modern states and over recent decades. Drawing on many specialities, he suggests that we escaped from a shockingly violent past by forming states, adopting civilized values and self-control, applying enlightenment ideas such as human rights, and using our capacities to consider others and apply reason.
My fourth book is also by Steven Pinker – ‘Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress’ (2018). This sets out, illustrated by data and graphs, how enlightenment ideas have transformed human well-being across life expectancy, health, material wealth, knowledge and lifestyle. Pinker argues that greater awareness of the enlightenment’s achievements and approach is needed to counter declinist and populist thinking.
My fifth book considers the nature and significance of knowledge. David Deutsch’s ‘The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World’ (2011) argues that knowledge proceeds by creating good explanations and improving these through conjectures and criticisms. Knowledge took off with the enlightenment, with the approach that all knowledge is fallible and capable of improvement, and the ‘Principle of Optimism’ that progress is possible and desirable. Knowledge is information with causal powers which has allowed humans to transform the world in a cosmically significant and potentially infinite process.
An underlying theme of the books mentioned so far is that humanity has been advancing at an increasing rate through generating and harnessing big ideas. Michael Bashier’s ‘Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking’ (2021) tempers this optimism by arguing that progress has more recently slowed. He argues that western life changed less in the fifty years from 1970 to 2020 than in either 1870-1920 or 1920-1970, and that we are now living through a Great Stagnation in which big ideas have become harder to find as the low-hanging fruit of easier ideas have been exploited and the knowledge frontier has become more complex. For example, lighting houses was a one-off revolution, and the discoveries of Louis Pasteur will not be repeated.
The main downside of progress is the risk that growing knowledge will wipe us out. Toby Ord’s ‘The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity’ (2020) is a comprehensive discussion of natural and man-made extinction risks. Ord sees humanity as currently on a precipice where there is an elevated risk of an existential disaster.
My final book extends the Long History frame to consider future people. Will MacAskill’s ‘What We Owe The Future: A Million Year View’ (2022) argues for Longtermism, the view that future people count and as there could be many of them, safeguarding their future is a key moral priority. He thinks we are at a time of plasticity where we can reduce existential risks and positively influence the moral trajectory.
These eight books use elements from anthropology, history, biology, geography, epistemology, economics, political science and ethics, to suggest a compelling story about humanity’s past and future. The accumulation of knowledge and practices has been behind both the long-term evolution of homo sapiens and the post-enlightenment acceleration of progress. Currently, we have ‘never had it so good’, and progress could continue into a long future, but there are large risks to be navigated.