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The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
This fresh perspective on crucial questions of history identifies the root metaphors that cultures have used to construct meaning in their world. It offers a glimpse into the minds of a vast range of different peoples: early hunter-gatherers and farmers, ancient Egyptians, traditional Chinese sages, the founders of Christianity, trail-blazers of the Scientific Revolution, and those who constructed our modern consumer society.
Taking the reader on an archaeological exploration of the mind, the author, an entrepreneur and sustainability leader, uses recent findings in cognitive science and systems theory to reveal the hidden layers of values that form today's cultural norms.
Uprooting the tired clichés of the science-religion debate, he shows how medieval Christian rationalism acted as an incubator for scientific thought, which in turn shaped our modern vision of the conquest of nature. The author probes our current crisis of unsustainability and argues that it is not an inevitable result of human nature, but is culturally driven: a product of particular mental patterns that could conceivably be reshaped.
By shining a light on our possible futures, the book foresees a coming struggle between two contrasting views of humanity: one driving to a technological endgame of artificially enhanced humans, the other enabling a sustainable future arising from our intrinsic connectedness with each other and the natural world. This struggle, it concludes, is one in which each of us will play a role through the meaning we choose to forge from the lives we lead.
Taking the reader on an archaeological exploration of the mind, the author, an entrepreneur and sustainability leader, uses recent findings in cognitive science and systems theory to reveal the hidden layers of values that form today's cultural norms.
Uprooting the tired clichés of the science-religion debate, he shows how medieval Christian rationalism acted as an incubator for scientific thought, which in turn shaped our modern vision of the conquest of nature. The author probes our current crisis of unsustainability and argues that it is not an inevitable result of human nature, but is culturally driven: a product of particular mental patterns that could conceivably be reshaped.
By shining a light on our possible futures, the book foresees a coming struggle between two contrasting views of humanity: one driving to a technological endgame of artificially enhanced humans, the other enabling a sustainable future arising from our intrinsic connectedness with each other and the natural world. This struggle, it concludes, is one in which each of us will play a role through the meaning we choose to forge from the lives we lead.
576 pages, Hardcover
First published May 23, 2017
283 people are currently reading
4671 people want to read
About the author
Jeremy Lent
5 books177 followersI’m author of The Patterning Instinct, (Prometheus Books, May 2017), and founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute. I’m passionate about doing my part to make a difference in humanity’s future trajectory. I’ve come to believe that our global society needs a transformational shift in our underlying values if we want a sustainable and flourishing future for the human race.
The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Future, is based on a simple but compelling theme – culture shapes values, and those values shape history. The book identifies the root metaphors that cultures have used to construct meaning into their universe – from hunter-gatherer times to our current precarious civilization – and traces how these have affected the course of history. Taking the reader on an archaeology of the mind, it reveals the hidden layers of values that form today’s cultural norms and asks: how can we shape humanity’s destiny by consciously forging our own structures of meaning into our lives?
The Liology Institute, of which I’m president, is dedicated to fostering a worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth. Liology offers the experience of living life in an integrated, embodied and connected manner. Instead of the conventional search for a transcendent source of meaning, liology finds the most profound meaning in life arising from our intrinsic connectedness with every cell and integrated system within our own bodies and with every living entity in the natural world in which we are embedded. Liology sees humanity as a fractal entity within the natural system of the earth.
Years ago, in what seems like another life, I was founder and CEO of an internet company. Now, I’m living happily in the San Francisco Bay Area with my amazing wife, Lisa Ferguson. Together, we’re trying to do our bit to make the world a better place.
The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Future, is based on a simple but compelling theme – culture shapes values, and those values shape history. The book identifies the root metaphors that cultures have used to construct meaning into their universe – from hunter-gatherer times to our current precarious civilization – and traces how these have affected the course of history. Taking the reader on an archaeology of the mind, it reveals the hidden layers of values that form today’s cultural norms and asks: how can we shape humanity’s destiny by consciously forging our own structures of meaning into our lives?
The Liology Institute, of which I’m president, is dedicated to fostering a worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth. Liology offers the experience of living life in an integrated, embodied and connected manner. Instead of the conventional search for a transcendent source of meaning, liology finds the most profound meaning in life arising from our intrinsic connectedness with every cell and integrated system within our own bodies and with every living entity in the natural world in which we are embedded. Liology sees humanity as a fractal entity within the natural system of the earth.
Years ago, in what seems like another life, I was founder and CEO of an internet company. Now, I’m living happily in the San Francisco Bay Area with my amazing wife, Lisa Ferguson. Together, we’re trying to do our bit to make the world a better place.
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March 16, 2018
It is funny how books seem to find me sometimes. I reviewed Small Change last week and then Aaron recommended I read Doughnut Economics. I can’t say the idea filled me with much joy – I had a horrible feeling it would be something like ‘economics meets Homer Simpson in this fun-packed…’ oh god, no, kill me now. But it proved to be one of the best books I’ve read in a while – she’s both super smart and intensely interesting.
Then during the week a friend of mine sent me an article by George Monbiot about Pinker’s new book on the Enlightenment and that then said that both Doughnut Economics and this book were well worth reading – actually, what he said was even better than that: “While Pinker is lauded, far more interesting and original books, such as Jeremy Lent’s ‘The Patterning Instinct’ and Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’, are scarcely reviewed.” And since I was really enjoying my doughnut book, I figured it was pretty likely I would enjoy a good pattern book too… Ironically enough, this one gets it title in part as a polemic with Pinker and his language instinct. Wheels within wheel, guys, it turns out it’s all just wheels within wheels.
I kept thinking of Hegel’s Philosophy of History while reading this. Not that this is really trying to stamp the final and ultimate true interpretation of the history of the world, but he is trying to show the kinds of patterns that underlie peoples’ understanding of the world and how these make for particular interactions between people and between people and nature. I can’t remember which of Foucault’s books says that we don’t do history so as to understand the past, but rather to understand the present – but that’s pretty much the point of this book too.
There’s a kind of subplot to this book, that you only really get at the end – and that is summed up by Gramsci’s most famous quote about being a pessimist because of intellect, but an optimist because of will. To misquote someone else mentioned in this book – only a fool or an economist could look at the world at the moment and not be terrified for our future. As Doughnut Economics points out, our current paradigm thinks it is perfectly fine that we need to have endless economic growth on a finite planet and since that necessarily means destroying the basis of human existence, our current paradigm is one that will ultimately lead to the catastrophic failure of our societies and civilisation – unless, of course, we make fundamental changes to how we live. But to do that we must make fundamental changes to how we think about and understand the world – probably the hardest part to the change. This book says that we have made changes as great as this as a species before – the problem this time is that we need to do it consciously and outside of our immediate self-interest – not something we selfish and greedy humans have ever proven particularly good at. (Did I mention pessimism of the intellect???)
Except that if there is one thing that looking at our history and archaeology as a species shows us is that humans have come up with a remarkable variety of ways of understanding the world, and that small groups of people determined to effect change can be devastatingly effective. I need to quote this bit, which he says just before he uses that famous Mead quote:
“Political scientists have studied the history of all campaigns since 1900 that led to government overthrow or territorial liberation, and they discovered that no campaign failed once it achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population.”
If that doesn’t give you optimism of the will, I’m not sure what will.
But this is just the last chapter or so – the rest of the book is a fascinating run through the history of humanity’s various understandings of the relationship between themselves and their universe. What is particularly interesting is the deep variety, but also the cross-fertilisation that has existed between these traditions.
This book is quite strongly influenced by Jared Diamond’s Germs, Guns and Steel – but he argues with that book as much as he promotes it as being essential reading (something I would do too – and by the way, this book ends with an annotated bibliography, what a bloody useful thing that is). In some ways this book is similar to Diamond’s, but less about how civilisations rise and fall and prosper or struggle due to their environmental circumstances, but about how their fundamental philosophical patterns of thinking impacts how they engage with the world and therefore how they will interact with other civilisations and so on. So that the philosophical and spiritual traditions that started in India, China, Greece or Palestine all expressed different relationships to knowledge and different expectations based on either harmony with or stewardship over the world. So that Eastern ways of understanding the world stressed relationships and interconnections, while Western notions stressed a kind of hidden eternal truth that needed to be uncovered and that then granted access to ultimate control. So, one tradition sees humanity within the world, and the other as humanity outside the world – this is, of course, a gross over-simplification, and one the book adds much more nuance to.
As is stressed repeatedly here – the metaphors we used as a civilisation reflect how we frame the world and therefore also how we interact with it. In the Western framing those metaphors too often involve constraining nature, subduing it, and ultimately replacing it with the power of reason. This is reflected in our religion which stresses that in the beginning was the word and that the word was God – it is reflected in some of us desiring a time in the not too distant future when we become ‘post-human’, when our brains will be uploaded to a computer and we become immortal.
But not all human philosophical traditions have the same desires as the current and dominant Western one. Rather, many other traditions stress the interconnectedness of the universe and also the communal nature of human societies. One of the more interesting observations in this book – and I don’t know how true it is, as my understanding of non-Western traditions is far too limited – but he says that while other traditions have sectarian wars and so on, generally these did not end up in acts of genocide – in the way the Old Testament demands from the Jews as they conquer those tribes already in the ‘holy lands’. Such single-minded certainty of the need to eradicate all other voices is a particularly Western affliction and one that is at odds with humanity’s ongoing survival and that of our civilisation.
This is an interesting book for many reasons – it gives a nice series of thumbnail sketches of some of the most important philosophical and spiritual traditions. It explains how these helped develop the social psychology of the peoples of the nations that have been held under the sway of these traditions – and it therefore gives some hope that maybe, just maybe, understanding that since such a variety philosophical traditions have existed and that they are human inventions we have developed to help us understand the world, and since it is becoming increasingly clear these aren’t working particularly well at the moment at helping us understand and be in the weld, that maybe, just maybe, we will find the courage to change how we understand the world and change how our societies interact with the world before it is ultimately too late.
Intellectually, I don’t see all that much hope of this happening, of course, but then, if only 3.5% of us can find the will, change is inevitable.
Then during the week a friend of mine sent me an article by George Monbiot about Pinker’s new book on the Enlightenment and that then said that both Doughnut Economics and this book were well worth reading – actually, what he said was even better than that: “While Pinker is lauded, far more interesting and original books, such as Jeremy Lent’s ‘The Patterning Instinct’ and Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’, are scarcely reviewed.” And since I was really enjoying my doughnut book, I figured it was pretty likely I would enjoy a good pattern book too… Ironically enough, this one gets it title in part as a polemic with Pinker and his language instinct. Wheels within wheel, guys, it turns out it’s all just wheels within wheels.
I kept thinking of Hegel’s Philosophy of History while reading this. Not that this is really trying to stamp the final and ultimate true interpretation of the history of the world, but he is trying to show the kinds of patterns that underlie peoples’ understanding of the world and how these make for particular interactions between people and between people and nature. I can’t remember which of Foucault’s books says that we don’t do history so as to understand the past, but rather to understand the present – but that’s pretty much the point of this book too.
There’s a kind of subplot to this book, that you only really get at the end – and that is summed up by Gramsci’s most famous quote about being a pessimist because of intellect, but an optimist because of will. To misquote someone else mentioned in this book – only a fool or an economist could look at the world at the moment and not be terrified for our future. As Doughnut Economics points out, our current paradigm thinks it is perfectly fine that we need to have endless economic growth on a finite planet and since that necessarily means destroying the basis of human existence, our current paradigm is one that will ultimately lead to the catastrophic failure of our societies and civilisation – unless, of course, we make fundamental changes to how we live. But to do that we must make fundamental changes to how we think about and understand the world – probably the hardest part to the change. This book says that we have made changes as great as this as a species before – the problem this time is that we need to do it consciously and outside of our immediate self-interest – not something we selfish and greedy humans have ever proven particularly good at. (Did I mention pessimism of the intellect???)
Except that if there is one thing that looking at our history and archaeology as a species shows us is that humans have come up with a remarkable variety of ways of understanding the world, and that small groups of people determined to effect change can be devastatingly effective. I need to quote this bit, which he says just before he uses that famous Mead quote:
“Political scientists have studied the history of all campaigns since 1900 that led to government overthrow or territorial liberation, and they discovered that no campaign failed once it achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population.”
If that doesn’t give you optimism of the will, I’m not sure what will.
But this is just the last chapter or so – the rest of the book is a fascinating run through the history of humanity’s various understandings of the relationship between themselves and their universe. What is particularly interesting is the deep variety, but also the cross-fertilisation that has existed between these traditions.
This book is quite strongly influenced by Jared Diamond’s Germs, Guns and Steel – but he argues with that book as much as he promotes it as being essential reading (something I would do too – and by the way, this book ends with an annotated bibliography, what a bloody useful thing that is). In some ways this book is similar to Diamond’s, but less about how civilisations rise and fall and prosper or struggle due to their environmental circumstances, but about how their fundamental philosophical patterns of thinking impacts how they engage with the world and therefore how they will interact with other civilisations and so on. So that the philosophical and spiritual traditions that started in India, China, Greece or Palestine all expressed different relationships to knowledge and different expectations based on either harmony with or stewardship over the world. So that Eastern ways of understanding the world stressed relationships and interconnections, while Western notions stressed a kind of hidden eternal truth that needed to be uncovered and that then granted access to ultimate control. So, one tradition sees humanity within the world, and the other as humanity outside the world – this is, of course, a gross over-simplification, and one the book adds much more nuance to.
As is stressed repeatedly here – the metaphors we used as a civilisation reflect how we frame the world and therefore also how we interact with it. In the Western framing those metaphors too often involve constraining nature, subduing it, and ultimately replacing it with the power of reason. This is reflected in our religion which stresses that in the beginning was the word and that the word was God – it is reflected in some of us desiring a time in the not too distant future when we become ‘post-human’, when our brains will be uploaded to a computer and we become immortal.
But not all human philosophical traditions have the same desires as the current and dominant Western one. Rather, many other traditions stress the interconnectedness of the universe and also the communal nature of human societies. One of the more interesting observations in this book – and I don’t know how true it is, as my understanding of non-Western traditions is far too limited – but he says that while other traditions have sectarian wars and so on, generally these did not end up in acts of genocide – in the way the Old Testament demands from the Jews as they conquer those tribes already in the ‘holy lands’. Such single-minded certainty of the need to eradicate all other voices is a particularly Western affliction and one that is at odds with humanity’s ongoing survival and that of our civilisation.
This is an interesting book for many reasons – it gives a nice series of thumbnail sketches of some of the most important philosophical and spiritual traditions. It explains how these helped develop the social psychology of the peoples of the nations that have been held under the sway of these traditions – and it therefore gives some hope that maybe, just maybe, understanding that since such a variety philosophical traditions have existed and that they are human inventions we have developed to help us understand the world, and since it is becoming increasingly clear these aren’t working particularly well at the moment at helping us understand and be in the weld, that maybe, just maybe, we will find the courage to change how we understand the world and change how our societies interact with the world before it is ultimately too late.
Intellectually, I don’t see all that much hope of this happening, of course, but then, if only 3.5% of us can find the will, change is inevitable.
November 6, 2017
Excellent book, for all it was a little heavy on the generalizing in places. Lent also doesn't address the fact that Neo-Confusionist stability relies on humans accepting their place and fitting in i.e. it sucks to be a woman, a minority, a human with an intellectual or physical difference, a member of the non-elite. Feminism grew within the Western individualistic framework. Can you have personal freedom within an interconnected web that emphasizes the overarching importance of society vs the individual? Still, I definitely rec this for everyone interested in the possible directions for our culture over the next 80 years.
Kindle book finishes at 62%, the rest is references.
Kindle book finishes at 62%, the rest is references.
June 20, 2018
This book is a brilliant but bulky first draft that badly needs to be edited. This ambitious doorstop of a book is much too long (569 pages) and needs to be cut by about half, with many sections cut out entirely or brought into better focus. It doesn't quite deliver on its premise and promise, but it does say enough to make it quite worth looking at. Therefore, I'd really say that this book rates 5 stars for "you should look at it" but only 3 stars for "you should read the whole thing." Let me explain.
The idea of a cultural history explaining how our environmental crisis arose out of cultural factors is a key reason I picked up and read the book. I am grateful for his numerous references to rapid cultural and social transformation, e. g. China in the 20th century, so clearly rapid cultural and social transformation is possible, and given the environmental crisis, something that needs to happen in a hurry.
Culture? Environmental crisis? Lead me on! It starts out with a bang, but gets bogged down in the middle. He could have cut the book by at least 50% --- get rid of much or most of parts 2, 3, and 4. He should lose the part where he tries to explain the cultural history of the west, and then China, India, and everything else for the past 10,000 years. Please just focus on cultural attitudes and our present-day environmental crisis with some illustrations from our past.
Early on, when he discusses the ancient Greeks and Plato, my mind started raising red flags. He says that Plato is responsible for our dualistic world view. All right, fine. I was a philosophy major (and even did some graduate work), and I think I know something about Plato. So what does he say about Plato? He starts talking about Plato's theory of the forms. He doesn't cite anything in Plato, but quotes from secondary sources, such as Francis Cornford's book on Plato.
Francis Cornford is a respected commentator on Plato who I am sure has followers, but he is hardly the last word on Plato, and I think he is dead wrong about Plato's Theory of Forms. Plato doesn't have a theory of forms. That Plato has a "theory of the forms" in the first place is a misconception which Cornford unfortunately seems to be somewhat responsible for. The only place in Plato where there is extensive discussion of the so-called "forms" is in the "Parmenides," in which the Young Socrates talks with Parmenides and the conclusion is that the theory of the forms is to be rejected.
Most of Plato's writings are agnostic and negative in their outcome. A plausible theory is put forward, and then shot down. In the "Theaetetus," one of Plato's key "mature" dialogues, for example, Socrates discusses three theories of knowledge: knowledge is perception, knowledge is true opinion, and knowledge is true opinion plus reasons. We wind up rejecting all three. In the Seventh Letter, he explicitly says that his doctrine cannot be taught like other disciplines, but that it catches fire in the mind of the student after much preparation and study. Plato's dialogues often have memorable mystical myths, such as the myth of Er in the Republic and the theory of recollection in the Meno. Plato is a mystic; he doesn't teach "explicit" objective knowledge or science in the sense that we think of today. For science, you need to go to Aristotle.
So, to get back to Lent, the author presents Plato all wrong. I see that this doesn't fatally damage his thesis, because this kind of dualism is clearly present in many Western thinkers, such as the early orthodox Christian theologians like Augustine as well as Descartes, Kant, and so on. However, at this point I am having to supply my own rationalizations to help the author out, and I start to lose interest in everything else he has to say. He is going to rely on secondary sources, albeit plausible secondary sources, and so we are going to get a long-winded, but fuzzy, intellectual history of the West, and later the East, too.
I haven't gone through all his sources, but I see that he even relies on secondary sources for writers for which there could easily have been explicit references. For example, at one point (p. 378) he quotes Nietzsche as saying "God is dead." Oh yeah, I say to myself, I remember a big discussion of that in the 1960's! I wonder where Nietzsche says that? I turn to the footnote, and I get a secondary source, a reference to Peter Watson's "The Age of Atheists." Jeez, Louise! I did a Google search and quickly found the Wikipedia article identifying the phrase "God is dead" as coming from "The Gay Science" and "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Why can't Lent do an extra 45 seconds of research and give us the exact reference? And is this how he is going to do all of his research, and if so, why should I read this?
So in conclusion, this is a fascinating but unfinished book. Send it back to the author with a request for extensive revisions. A cultural resolution to the environmental crisis is possible, in fact, we may be undergoing such a transformation right now. But it might also turn out badly. What kind of cultural transformations do we need for human survival, and how do we get there? I wish someone would write about that.
The idea of a cultural history explaining how our environmental crisis arose out of cultural factors is a key reason I picked up and read the book. I am grateful for his numerous references to rapid cultural and social transformation, e. g. China in the 20th century, so clearly rapid cultural and social transformation is possible, and given the environmental crisis, something that needs to happen in a hurry.
Culture? Environmental crisis? Lead me on! It starts out with a bang, but gets bogged down in the middle. He could have cut the book by at least 50% --- get rid of much or most of parts 2, 3, and 4. He should lose the part where he tries to explain the cultural history of the west, and then China, India, and everything else for the past 10,000 years. Please just focus on cultural attitudes and our present-day environmental crisis with some illustrations from our past.
Early on, when he discusses the ancient Greeks and Plato, my mind started raising red flags. He says that Plato is responsible for our dualistic world view. All right, fine. I was a philosophy major (and even did some graduate work), and I think I know something about Plato. So what does he say about Plato? He starts talking about Plato's theory of the forms. He doesn't cite anything in Plato, but quotes from secondary sources, such as Francis Cornford's book on Plato.
Francis Cornford is a respected commentator on Plato who I am sure has followers, but he is hardly the last word on Plato, and I think he is dead wrong about Plato's Theory of Forms. Plato doesn't have a theory of forms. That Plato has a "theory of the forms" in the first place is a misconception which Cornford unfortunately seems to be somewhat responsible for. The only place in Plato where there is extensive discussion of the so-called "forms" is in the "Parmenides," in which the Young Socrates talks with Parmenides and the conclusion is that the theory of the forms is to be rejected.
Most of Plato's writings are agnostic and negative in their outcome. A plausible theory is put forward, and then shot down. In the "Theaetetus," one of Plato's key "mature" dialogues, for example, Socrates discusses three theories of knowledge: knowledge is perception, knowledge is true opinion, and knowledge is true opinion plus reasons. We wind up rejecting all three. In the Seventh Letter, he explicitly says that his doctrine cannot be taught like other disciplines, but that it catches fire in the mind of the student after much preparation and study. Plato's dialogues often have memorable mystical myths, such as the myth of Er in the Republic and the theory of recollection in the Meno. Plato is a mystic; he doesn't teach "explicit" objective knowledge or science in the sense that we think of today. For science, you need to go to Aristotle.
So, to get back to Lent, the author presents Plato all wrong. I see that this doesn't fatally damage his thesis, because this kind of dualism is clearly present in many Western thinkers, such as the early orthodox Christian theologians like Augustine as well as Descartes, Kant, and so on. However, at this point I am having to supply my own rationalizations to help the author out, and I start to lose interest in everything else he has to say. He is going to rely on secondary sources, albeit plausible secondary sources, and so we are going to get a long-winded, but fuzzy, intellectual history of the West, and later the East, too.
I haven't gone through all his sources, but I see that he even relies on secondary sources for writers for which there could easily have been explicit references. For example, at one point (p. 378) he quotes Nietzsche as saying "God is dead." Oh yeah, I say to myself, I remember a big discussion of that in the 1960's! I wonder where Nietzsche says that? I turn to the footnote, and I get a secondary source, a reference to Peter Watson's "The Age of Atheists." Jeez, Louise! I did a Google search and quickly found the Wikipedia article identifying the phrase "God is dead" as coming from "The Gay Science" and "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Why can't Lent do an extra 45 seconds of research and give us the exact reference? And is this how he is going to do all of his research, and if so, why should I read this?
So in conclusion, this is a fascinating but unfinished book. Send it back to the author with a request for extensive revisions. A cultural resolution to the environmental crisis is possible, in fact, we may be undergoing such a transformation right now. But it might also turn out badly. What kind of cultural transformations do we need for human survival, and how do we get there? I wish someone would write about that.
August 23, 2022
Hey everyone.
If you’re in the mood for a 500 page (plus) cinderblock of a tome, offering a retelling of human history in sweeping broad strokes, with cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary biology, systems theory, and classical eastern and western philosophy artfully woven into an impending doom message of humanities current imperative to evolve spiritually or die via catastrophic climate destabilization and subsequent mass extinction, than…
I think we have your next read.
The Patterning Instinct is author Jeramy Lent’s self proclaimed cognitive history of humanity.
He had me at about here.
The rest was gravy.
Lent deconstructs how different cultures philosophical assumptions, spiritual outlook, core metaphors, values and deep linguistic structures shape history, and inform our current unsustainable way of living.
Lent’s approach offers an alternative to the geographic determinism exemplified by histories such as Jared Diamond’s fantastic Guns Germs and Steel and Peter Ziehan’s outrageous The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning (read my review of it here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
As previously mentioned, The Patterning Instinct uses findings from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and shit like taoism and systems theory to reveal the layers of implicit meaning that underlie our contemporary cultural norms, and that ultimately manifest in our current crisis of environmental degradation.
Lent compellingly argues that our contemporary neo-liberal late capitalistic, globalized civilization is on an unsustainable trajectory and needs to be transformed at a fundamental level (like soon or better NOW, or were fucked).
Lent asserts that our current human driven ecological apocalypse is ultimately the product of reductionistic and materialistic western European cognitive patterns, and that these deep, implicit assumptions, however compelling, and however effective in the short term, desperately need to be upgraded if we want to survive in the mid-to-long-term.
Ultimately, Lent argues for a transformation to a more holistically integrated, systemically informed, and life-affirming rather than wealth-affirming ecological civilization.
It’s hard (for me anyway) to disagree with any of that.
And, the book is utterly mind-blowing in many ways.
So…
5 BIG STARS!
If you’re in the mood for a 500 page (plus) cinderblock of a tome, offering a retelling of human history in sweeping broad strokes, with cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary biology, systems theory, and classical eastern and western philosophy artfully woven into an impending doom message of humanities current imperative to evolve spiritually or die via catastrophic climate destabilization and subsequent mass extinction, than…
I think we have your next read.
The Patterning Instinct is author Jeramy Lent’s self proclaimed cognitive history of humanity.
He had me at about here.
The rest was gravy.
Lent deconstructs how different cultures philosophical assumptions, spiritual outlook, core metaphors, values and deep linguistic structures shape history, and inform our current unsustainable way of living.
Lent’s approach offers an alternative to the geographic determinism exemplified by histories such as Jared Diamond’s fantastic Guns Germs and Steel and Peter Ziehan’s outrageous The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning (read my review of it here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
As previously mentioned, The Patterning Instinct uses findings from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and shit like taoism and systems theory to reveal the layers of implicit meaning that underlie our contemporary cultural norms, and that ultimately manifest in our current crisis of environmental degradation.
Lent compellingly argues that our contemporary neo-liberal late capitalistic, globalized civilization is on an unsustainable trajectory and needs to be transformed at a fundamental level (like soon or better NOW, or were fucked).
Lent asserts that our current human driven ecological apocalypse is ultimately the product of reductionistic and materialistic western European cognitive patterns, and that these deep, implicit assumptions, however compelling, and however effective in the short term, desperately need to be upgraded if we want to survive in the mid-to-long-term.
Ultimately, Lent argues for a transformation to a more holistically integrated, systemically informed, and life-affirming rather than wealth-affirming ecological civilization.
It’s hard (for me anyway) to disagree with any of that.
And, the book is utterly mind-blowing in many ways.
So…
5 BIG STARS!
August 4, 2023
كيف نشأة الحضارات؟ وما أسباب انهيارها؟ وماهو أثر نظرية التطور في التاريخ الثقافي للبشرية وخلق المعنى؟ ما أثر المحاكاة في تطور الدماغ البشري وسلوكه" تشكيل الأنماط الخاصة التي ندركها من حولنا" وأثرها على مساراتنا نحو المستقبل؟ مادور الطبيعة والبيئة في نشأة وتكوين الحضارات؟ وكيف أثرت ثقافة المستهلك في بنية المجتمع وكيف كان الناس يفهمون عالمهم ؟ التطور البشري من العصر الحجري إلى الزراعة، ثم الصناعة وطفراتها إلى أن بلغت حقل الذكاء الإنساني والجينات ومنها إلى ثورة الذكاء الاصطناعي، ودور ثورة القيم في كل ذلك، وإلى إمكان إيجاد معنى؛ " في نهاية المطاف، من خلال الترابط داخل أنفسنا، ومع بعضنا بعضاً، ومع عالم الطبيعة. إن طريقة التفكير هذه، التي ترى الكون كشبكة من المعنى، لديها القدرة على تقديم إطار قوي لقيم التحول الكبير التي تؤكد على نوعية الحياة، وإنسانيتنا المشتركة، وازدهار الطبيعة."
كتاب يقدم رؤية عن بيولوغرافيا الإنسان ونموه التاريخي عبر الزمن في سياق مجابهاته المختلفه للتحديات المنضوية في محاكاة صور و أشكال مختلفة لسبل النمو والقتال ليعيش؛ تطورية، بيئية، اقتصادية، ثقافية، أيدولوجية، فكرية، وأخرى. وطرقه للبحث عن معانيه وإيجاد فسحه له في هذا الكون الفسيح.
كتاب يقدم رؤية عن بيولوغرافيا الإنسان ونموه التاريخي عبر الزمن في سياق مجابهاته المختلفه للتحديات المنضوية في محاكاة صور و أشكال مختلفة لسبل النمو والقتال ليعيش؛ تطورية، بيئية، اقتصادية، ثقافية، أيدولوجية، فكرية، وأخرى. وطرقه للبحث عن معانيه وإيجاد فسحه له في هذا الكون الفسيح.
October 17, 2021
Nahhh.... I didn't need another five hundred page broad view history of human civilization with some fifth grade level history of religion and philosophy thrown in for good measure. Yuval Harari and Jared Diamond do this kind of thing much better, and I don't even like them so much. There was nothing new here, and it took Mr. Lent too many pages to tell me a lot of stuff that I already knew.
June 11, 2022
I read this book because another Goodreads reviewer recommended it as a counterpoint to Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, which I had just finished. The reviewer felt that Enlightenment Now, which argues that the cultural values listed in its title have been a force for the betterment of humanity over the past few centuries and should continue to be pursued, was too biased to a Western perspective and too optimistic in its assessment of those values. The Patterning Instinct definitely presents an alternative argument, but it was not, in my view, a winning argument.
Author Jeremy Lent attempts to show that a society's cultural values drive that society's evolution. He believes today's dominant cultural values, such as treating nature as a resource to be exploited and endlessly pursuing economic growth, are leading us towards disaster. Either we will all be destroyed by climate change and other ecological catastrophes, or we will bifurcate into the extremely rich, who will benefit from comfortable, technologically enhanced lives of ease, and the extremely poor, whose lives will be nasty, brutish, and short.
To get there, Lent takes hundreds of pages to discuss the evolutionary development of humans, the origins of religion, the development of agrarian societies from earlier hunter-gatherer cultures, and the progress of philosophical and scientific thinking in various regions of the world. I have been reading this sort of material for forty years, and Lent's work reminds me of better books such as Cosmos, The Discoverers, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and the works of Karen Armstrong and Thomas Homer-Dixon, to name just a few.
My impression is that Lent feels that Western cultural values dating back to ancient Greece have led us to a place where humans have fouled our own nest and are in danger of self-extinction. He contrasts Western values with those of India and particularly China. Lent argues that pre-modern China (a footnote early in the book avers that modern, Communist China is not pursuing the country's traditional values) praised and promoted harmony with nature rather than technological innovation and economic growth.
Lent asks some key questions in this book, such as: Are humans naturally competitive or cooperative? and: Why did European values and European explorers succeed at spreading throughout the world, instead of values and explorers from some other culture (such as China)? To the former question, Lent basically says we're both. He never really gives an answer to the latter question, at least not that I noticed. He observes that European culture gave us many innovations that made life easier, safer, healthier, and longer (which is basically the point of Enlightenment Now), but doesn't explicitly say that's why those innovations have colonized the globe, and implies that, in the long run, colonization has been bad for most of the world's population. Certainly, Europeans (and, more generally, Westerners) have committed atrocities, some intentional and some unintentional, but Lent doesn't seem to require a reckoning for them. He focuses on trying to convince readers that we must undertake a cultural shift to ensure our continued survival, and that the required shift is to a more traditional Chinese way of thinking, where harmony is to be valued more highly than conquest and competition.
If I've learned nothing else over the past twenty years of so reading books that forecast all sorts of horrible futures for humankind, from peak oil to population explosions to climate change, I've learned that predicting the future is really hard and takes a lot more careful analysis and thought than I believe Lent has put into this book (see in particular the works of Dan Gardner and Philip E. Tetlock). I don't question Lent's passion or his research, but I don't trust his conclusions.
Lent's writing style is clear and understandable, but I also found him tedious and repetitive. I think he could have made his points much more succinctly. I looked him up online, and found that his background is in business. He founded an online credit card company in the '90s that eventually went bankrupt under a heavy load of bad debts. Lent now runs a non-profit organization that is attempting to integrate Western and Eastern philosophies to ensure humanity's survival. I wish him well, but I suspect his influence will be minimal.
Author Jeremy Lent attempts to show that a society's cultural values drive that society's evolution. He believes today's dominant cultural values, such as treating nature as a resource to be exploited and endlessly pursuing economic growth, are leading us towards disaster. Either we will all be destroyed by climate change and other ecological catastrophes, or we will bifurcate into the extremely rich, who will benefit from comfortable, technologically enhanced lives of ease, and the extremely poor, whose lives will be nasty, brutish, and short.
To get there, Lent takes hundreds of pages to discuss the evolutionary development of humans, the origins of religion, the development of agrarian societies from earlier hunter-gatherer cultures, and the progress of philosophical and scientific thinking in various regions of the world. I have been reading this sort of material for forty years, and Lent's work reminds me of better books such as Cosmos, The Discoverers, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and the works of Karen Armstrong and Thomas Homer-Dixon, to name just a few.
My impression is that Lent feels that Western cultural values dating back to ancient Greece have led us to a place where humans have fouled our own nest and are in danger of self-extinction. He contrasts Western values with those of India and particularly China. Lent argues that pre-modern China (a footnote early in the book avers that modern, Communist China is not pursuing the country's traditional values) praised and promoted harmony with nature rather than technological innovation and economic growth.
Lent asks some key questions in this book, such as: Are humans naturally competitive or cooperative? and: Why did European values and European explorers succeed at spreading throughout the world, instead of values and explorers from some other culture (such as China)? To the former question, Lent basically says we're both. He never really gives an answer to the latter question, at least not that I noticed. He observes that European culture gave us many innovations that made life easier, safer, healthier, and longer (which is basically the point of Enlightenment Now), but doesn't explicitly say that's why those innovations have colonized the globe, and implies that, in the long run, colonization has been bad for most of the world's population. Certainly, Europeans (and, more generally, Westerners) have committed atrocities, some intentional and some unintentional, but Lent doesn't seem to require a reckoning for them. He focuses on trying to convince readers that we must undertake a cultural shift to ensure our continued survival, and that the required shift is to a more traditional Chinese way of thinking, where harmony is to be valued more highly than conquest and competition.
If I've learned nothing else over the past twenty years of so reading books that forecast all sorts of horrible futures for humankind, from peak oil to population explosions to climate change, I've learned that predicting the future is really hard and takes a lot more careful analysis and thought than I believe Lent has put into this book (see in particular the works of Dan Gardner and Philip E. Tetlock). I don't question Lent's passion or his research, but I don't trust his conclusions.
Lent's writing style is clear and understandable, but I also found him tedious and repetitive. I think he could have made his points much more succinctly. I looked him up online, and found that his background is in business. He founded an online credit card company in the '90s that eventually went bankrupt under a heavy load of bad debts. Lent now runs a non-profit organization that is attempting to integrate Western and Eastern philosophies to ensure humanity's survival. I wish him well, but I suspect his influence will be minimal.
April 8, 2019
In any complex system present equilibrium state and future transition cannot be understood and determined by analysing characteristics and interaction of few elements. Because there would be feedback loops where entire state of the system would influence individual elements and in return they would chaotically change the equilibrium state. Transitions in a complex systems are usually irreversible.
The story of human evolution from bipedal apes to modern conscious beings is an irreversible chaotic process.It cannot be understood using any reductionist approach. The holistic approach incorporating established findings of natural and social sciences can help fully understand it.
After the invention of tools and language all of human history from hunter gatherer to modern man is a struggle to discover meaning of his existence. This quest resulted in the establishment of few great civilisations with completely unique world views. Greeks developed the abstract thought system with dualistic conception of existence, where mam was superior because of his intellect. Knowing and controlling the external world to create a utopian society with a philosopher king was the goal.
Chinese created the system of thought where Individual was linked with other beings. So focus was not on knowing but on living in harmony with other beings. In hindu System of thought, All the material world was a sensory illusion, the truth or meaning can only be found by abandoning the world of maya and connect with barhama through meditation.
The scientific revolution can only be possible in the west because of several geographical and historical factors. It opened the gates of modernity but at an enormous cost. Countless precious lives, unique cultures and natural resources perished. Most importantly status of humans reduced from supreme beings to mere biological machines.
The dilemma of information age person is the feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness . Things are happening at an enormous pace, an individual can't understand or influence them. So he always remains at the surface of things. He tries to forget his shallowness by immersing himself in consumer culture.
The story of human evolution from bipedal apes to modern conscious beings is an irreversible chaotic process.It cannot be understood using any reductionist approach. The holistic approach incorporating established findings of natural and social sciences can help fully understand it.
After the invention of tools and language all of human history from hunter gatherer to modern man is a struggle to discover meaning of his existence. This quest resulted in the establishment of few great civilisations with completely unique world views. Greeks developed the abstract thought system with dualistic conception of existence, where mam was superior because of his intellect. Knowing and controlling the external world to create a utopian society with a philosopher king was the goal.
Chinese created the system of thought where Individual was linked with other beings. So focus was not on knowing but on living in harmony with other beings. In hindu System of thought, All the material world was a sensory illusion, the truth or meaning can only be found by abandoning the world of maya and connect with barhama through meditation.
The scientific revolution can only be possible in the west because of several geographical and historical factors. It opened the gates of modernity but at an enormous cost. Countless precious lives, unique cultures and natural resources perished. Most importantly status of humans reduced from supreme beings to mere biological machines.
The dilemma of information age person is the feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness . Things are happening at an enormous pace, an individual can't understand or influence them. So he always remains at the surface of things. He tries to forget his shallowness by immersing himself in consumer culture.
February 4, 2020
It is a good book, but a little depressing. Everything in this books tells me that humanity goes to shits. People will eat the planet and themselves too and there is no answer to this. If you have some kind of depression, don’t read it. This book was written in a such good style that I couldn’t stop reading it. But I am afraid that it ruined my mood for last 3 weeks too. Is all philosophy like that?
May 13, 2018
Listened to audiobook, but I couldn’t get further than 50%. I found it too repetitive, bland, and not really bringing anything of substance. Like another reviewer said, the author has a strong bias for cultural determinism, and he’s writing with an agenda. What you get is a lot of anthropological and sociological topics with a vague “the ancient past was golden, today all is shit” overarching narrative. No, thanks.
April 12, 2021
The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning is another macrohistory book I've read in recent years, along with Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, and Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
In the introduction, the author writes: "This book takes an entirely different approach from historical reductionism. Instead, it offers a cognitive approach to history, arguing that cognitive frames, through which different cultures perceive reality, had a profound affect on their historical direction. The world view of a given civilization, implicit believes and values that created patterns in people's lives, has-in my opinion-being a significant driver of the historical path each civilization had taken, but at the same time I disavow of any affinity with the old triumphalist view in history, which pauses some characteristics of the western mindsets that somehow made it "superior" to other cultures and therefore led the west "success" over the rest of the world. Instead, as the book unfolds, it reveals an underline pattern to western cognition that is responsible for its scientific and industrial revolutions, as well as its devastating destruction of indigenous cultures around the world and our current global rush towards possible catastrophe. "
Jeremy Lent argues for the strong and weak Whorf hypothesis (language impacts one's cognition), as well as the interdependency between a culture (a.k.a a set of common believes and root metaphors) and the society where the culture is formed. He examines various cultures in the world--Egypt, India, Greek and China, then, by using the cognitive patterns that seeded in Greek philosophy and spread through Europe alone with Christianity as tools, he explains why scientific and industrial revolutions were originated from Europe instead of from China or Islamic countries.
In short, the basic idea in this book is that culture shapes values and those values shape history. Western culture favors conquer and dominance, puts humanity above nature, therefore nature becomes something to be conquered. It's the exploitation of nature by men leads to a civilization's downfall, not just geography.
Human society is a complex system inside another complex system (earth's ecosystem). A complex system can't be understood just by examining its parts separately (the reductionist view). The popular metaphor "nature as machine" is a reductionist view, powerful as it has been but equally destructive. The prescription given by the author is to take a holistic view of the world, to see all human beings as participants in the interconnected system, to view we are a part of the nature, not above it. More importantly, in order to save our planet and ourselves, this holistic view needs to become a culture, a global culture. Growth-based economy is not sustainable; consumerism needs to be replaced.
I am all for this holistic view of nature and humanity, which is already a part of my world views to a certain degree. The author is obviously an optimist. The world needs optimists!
One thing strikes me is the author's analysis of Chinese philosophies--Confucianism and Taoism, especially the Neo-Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasty (宋明理学), in which the world is an interconnected system, each individual an integral part of the system and a part of the nature. As an individual, your best interest of life is to achieve the equilibrium with the world around you. However, Neo-Confucianism and its application in Chinese cultural history is complicated. The first thing comes to my mind when I think of Neo-Confucianism is its subjugation of women.
In the introduction, the author writes: "This book takes an entirely different approach from historical reductionism. Instead, it offers a cognitive approach to history, arguing that cognitive frames, through which different cultures perceive reality, had a profound affect on their historical direction. The world view of a given civilization, implicit believes and values that created patterns in people's lives, has-in my opinion-being a significant driver of the historical path each civilization had taken, but at the same time I disavow of any affinity with the old triumphalist view in history, which pauses some characteristics of the western mindsets that somehow made it "superior" to other cultures and therefore led the west "success" over the rest of the world. Instead, as the book unfolds, it reveals an underline pattern to western cognition that is responsible for its scientific and industrial revolutions, as well as its devastating destruction of indigenous cultures around the world and our current global rush towards possible catastrophe. "
Jeremy Lent argues for the strong and weak Whorf hypothesis (language impacts one's cognition), as well as the interdependency between a culture (a.k.a a set of common believes and root metaphors) and the society where the culture is formed. He examines various cultures in the world--Egypt, India, Greek and China, then, by using the cognitive patterns that seeded in Greek philosophy and spread through Europe alone with Christianity as tools, he explains why scientific and industrial revolutions were originated from Europe instead of from China or Islamic countries.
In short, the basic idea in this book is that culture shapes values and those values shape history. Western culture favors conquer and dominance, puts humanity above nature, therefore nature becomes something to be conquered. It's the exploitation of nature by men leads to a civilization's downfall, not just geography.
Human society is a complex system inside another complex system (earth's ecosystem). A complex system can't be understood just by examining its parts separately (the reductionist view). The popular metaphor "nature as machine" is a reductionist view, powerful as it has been but equally destructive. The prescription given by the author is to take a holistic view of the world, to see all human beings as participants in the interconnected system, to view we are a part of the nature, not above it. More importantly, in order to save our planet and ourselves, this holistic view needs to become a culture, a global culture. Growth-based economy is not sustainable; consumerism needs to be replaced.
I am all for this holistic view of nature and humanity, which is already a part of my world views to a certain degree. The author is obviously an optimist. The world needs optimists!
One thing strikes me is the author's analysis of Chinese philosophies--Confucianism and Taoism, especially the Neo-Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasty (宋明理学), in which the world is an interconnected system, each individual an integral part of the system and a part of the nature. As an individual, your best interest of life is to achieve the equilibrium with the world around you. However, Neo-Confucianism and its application in Chinese cultural history is complicated. The first thing comes to my mind when I think of Neo-Confucianism is its subjugation of women.
September 1, 2017
Although Lent attempts to connect the scope of this book with that of Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel it ends up being nothing more than a contemporary Leftist attempt at Cultural Determinism. Not to say this is entirely incorrect but this approach has a tendency to unmoor events from an external reality and objective facts. The reason this is a bad approach is that subsequent academics and political demagogues can further remove humanity from a shared experience in the name of Utopian idealism and could visit the suffering of Soviet Russia and communist China (not to mention the French Revolution) upon the world yet again.
Though Lent is serious minded, this book is little more than jumped up cultural determinism and may be safely avoided by all serious students of the human condition: in the same way as the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and Cultural Marxism may be.
Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
Though Lent is serious minded, this book is little more than jumped up cultural determinism and may be safely avoided by all serious students of the human condition: in the same way as the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and Cultural Marxism may be.
Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
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December 28, 2020I can’t believe I finished this book. There is no original research, there are no original ideas, and it generalizes in the extreme.
I think there was one woman mentioned in the entire book.
About 3/4’s the way through the book I bothered to look up the author’s personal history and discovered:
- a BA in English Lit
- an MBA
- a career as a fintech entrepreneur ended by bankruptcy and a SEC investigation into stock manipulation.
The publisher probably took the name “The Patterning Instinct” to lure readers into a debate with Pinker’s “The Language Instinct.”
But Steven Pinker is a scientist. Jeremy Lent is not.
There is no real analysis of any human instinct. It’s more of a Bertrand Russell style survey of world philosophy, with Chinese philosophy getting the thumbs up.
I think there was one woman mentioned in the entire book.
About 3/4’s the way through the book I bothered to look up the author’s personal history and discovered:
- a BA in English Lit
- an MBA
- a career as a fintech entrepreneur ended by bankruptcy and a SEC investigation into stock manipulation.
The publisher probably took the name “The Patterning Instinct” to lure readers into a debate with Pinker’s “The Language Instinct.”
But Steven Pinker is a scientist. Jeremy Lent is not.
There is no real analysis of any human instinct. It’s more of a Bertrand Russell style survey of world philosophy, with Chinese philosophy getting the thumbs up.
September 30, 2020
It's a slow read and took me almost 10 days to finish but in the end every bit of time spent was well worth. I learnt quite a lot from this wonderful book, right from evolution of language due to growing social complexities to domestication of animals as well as humans with the advent of agriculture. The various stages of language development, from mimetic language to protolanguage and finally the modern language which coevolved alongside PFC( prefrontal cortex) part of our brain responsible for connecting emotions, feelings, sensations, memories etc. As the lives of ancient humans started becoming complex our PFC grew in size which further enabled humans to manage complexity forming kind of a positive feedback loop. There's a very interesting point raised in the beginning whether the humans are selfish as we currently believe to be the case or was there a sense of cooperation and fairness which led us to make such great advances ,which were impossible for any other species. With the emergence of modern language complete with syntax, we humans got an undefinable power to express our emotions and other abstract concepts such as values, Universe etc. We got the symbolic power, power of metaphors we use in our daily language without even realizing(eg. i gave you an idea is a metaphor with idea being an abstract concept which can be given like it's something tangible) and we harnessed it to form unique cosmologies. With the development of external symbol like the art of expressing our values and beliefs, culture through art and painitings we found a way to transcend our mortality, our culture lived long after the members have passed away.
There's a concept of theory of mind through which we can empathize with other beings recognizing their individuality, seeing them as separate beings. With this understanding arose the need for finding meaning in life which led to the hierarchies of Gods. It was fascinating to read how a hunter gatherer society differed vastly in their values and beliefs from the agrarian society. Hunter gatherers believed in the oneness with nature, believing everything has a spirit, trees, fish etc and all were treated as members of family with respect. There was a view of 'Nature a giving parent' which resulted in respecting the interconnectedness and harmony of all aspects of nature. Humans were believed to be the part of nature and the concept of nature's only purpose being the evolution of humans( a view widely held in present) was absolutely unkown.
With the onset of agriculture the culture and values changed profoundly. With the concept of private land, property, inequality in society emerged which was previously unknown. With hard work came more power and with more power came hierarchies which were then passed on in families. Values changed, with progress came the sense of superiority over other beings and nature. Nature could now be exploited for power, for control. Civilizations formed their own unique cosmologies but there still was religious tolerance with everybody free to worship gods of their own choice. With increase in trade and commerce, came wars and intermixing of values. Like In ancient Greek civilization there were ideas taken from Egyptians as well as Babylonians. But it was Plato whose ideas were to have the most profound global impact. With his dualistic cosmology, where abstract world of ideas was ideal while the real human world was just a shadow. There was increased emphasis on the reason as being the only way to reach divinity while the human body was something to be despised, seen as a cage locking in the soul, the seat of pure reason. Senses were not to be trusted and it was only through reason that the universe could be known. Hence came our disconnect with the natural world where everything was perishable and idealization of the abstract world (an unknown and eternal world). Root metaphor changed to ' Conquering Nature' and further mechanization of human body and Nature by western philosophers, especially Descartes (who further widened the chasm between mind and body) came the new metaphor, ' Nature as a Machine'. Economic progress, industrial revolution,technological advancements led to more and more exploitation of nature leading us to the brink of collapse.
Entire book is filled with how the western values led to the exploitation of nature as well as of humans. Indigenous populations were killed and their lands captured. With the monotheistic thoughts in Jewish religion came religious intolerance from which Christianity massively borrowed its ideas. Merciless killings in the name of religion and God were justified, not even infants were spared.
I can keep writing pages on the stuff that can be learnt from this book. I highly recommend this book to anyone who's interested in seeing a wider picture. As for Jeremy Lent's writing style, I think he has mostly done a good job with the middle of the book being little dragging but the ending made up for it. Again there are places where I felt Lent has exaggerated the niceness of Chinese civilization constructing it as almost perfect, though he got me surely interested in it. I have to find more about Taoism, Neo Confucianism.
Also the concept of anthropomorphism is so so fascinating that once realized its like a mist lifting making everything clear. There's a passage by Xenophanes which has amused me during my earlier readings also:
"The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own."
Apparently after Plato, it was human mind that was anthropomorphized in to God and deified.
Lastly, this book is a big advocate of systems approach towards life and other things. I recently read an article on the same on the evolution of life on earth, how its a complex system and can never be predicted with certainty. Possibly our entire approach of imposing Universal laws is wrong as has been proved by the failure of Newton's laws in certain circumstances. Also with quantum mechanics we are just beginning to realize that we understand close to nothing. This book is an eye opener on the devastating effects of our current habits of overconsumption and consumerism on our planet. Will our current habits lead to global collapse or will there be a singularity where humans will transform in to transhumans?? A good question to ponder about and assess our role in it unless we don't at all care for future generations.
There's a concept of theory of mind through which we can empathize with other beings recognizing their individuality, seeing them as separate beings. With this understanding arose the need for finding meaning in life which led to the hierarchies of Gods. It was fascinating to read how a hunter gatherer society differed vastly in their values and beliefs from the agrarian society. Hunter gatherers believed in the oneness with nature, believing everything has a spirit, trees, fish etc and all were treated as members of family with respect. There was a view of 'Nature a giving parent' which resulted in respecting the interconnectedness and harmony of all aspects of nature. Humans were believed to be the part of nature and the concept of nature's only purpose being the evolution of humans( a view widely held in present) was absolutely unkown.
With the onset of agriculture the culture and values changed profoundly. With the concept of private land, property, inequality in society emerged which was previously unknown. With hard work came more power and with more power came hierarchies which were then passed on in families. Values changed, with progress came the sense of superiority over other beings and nature. Nature could now be exploited for power, for control. Civilizations formed their own unique cosmologies but there still was religious tolerance with everybody free to worship gods of their own choice. With increase in trade and commerce, came wars and intermixing of values. Like In ancient Greek civilization there were ideas taken from Egyptians as well as Babylonians. But it was Plato whose ideas were to have the most profound global impact. With his dualistic cosmology, where abstract world of ideas was ideal while the real human world was just a shadow. There was increased emphasis on the reason as being the only way to reach divinity while the human body was something to be despised, seen as a cage locking in the soul, the seat of pure reason. Senses were not to be trusted and it was only through reason that the universe could be known. Hence came our disconnect with the natural world where everything was perishable and idealization of the abstract world (an unknown and eternal world). Root metaphor changed to ' Conquering Nature' and further mechanization of human body and Nature by western philosophers, especially Descartes (who further widened the chasm between mind and body) came the new metaphor, ' Nature as a Machine'. Economic progress, industrial revolution,technological advancements led to more and more exploitation of nature leading us to the brink of collapse.
Entire book is filled with how the western values led to the exploitation of nature as well as of humans. Indigenous populations were killed and their lands captured. With the monotheistic thoughts in Jewish religion came religious intolerance from which Christianity massively borrowed its ideas. Merciless killings in the name of religion and God were justified, not even infants were spared.
I can keep writing pages on the stuff that can be learnt from this book. I highly recommend this book to anyone who's interested in seeing a wider picture. As for Jeremy Lent's writing style, I think he has mostly done a good job with the middle of the book being little dragging but the ending made up for it. Again there are places where I felt Lent has exaggerated the niceness of Chinese civilization constructing it as almost perfect, though he got me surely interested in it. I have to find more about Taoism, Neo Confucianism.
Also the concept of anthropomorphism is so so fascinating that once realized its like a mist lifting making everything clear. There's a passage by Xenophanes which has amused me during my earlier readings also:
"The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own."
Apparently after Plato, it was human mind that was anthropomorphized in to God and deified.
Lastly, this book is a big advocate of systems approach towards life and other things. I recently read an article on the same on the evolution of life on earth, how its a complex system and can never be predicted with certainty. Possibly our entire approach of imposing Universal laws is wrong as has been proved by the failure of Newton's laws in certain circumstances. Also with quantum mechanics we are just beginning to realize that we understand close to nothing. This book is an eye opener on the devastating effects of our current habits of overconsumption and consumerism on our planet. Will our current habits lead to global collapse or will there be a singularity where humans will transform in to transhumans?? A good question to ponder about and assess our role in it unless we don't at all care for future generations.
February 20, 2022
I quite enjoyed this book. A lot of really interesting new science that is causing us to rethink what is happened through human development.
December 19, 2017
This is a really tremendous book for understanding some of the key events and strands of human intellectual history. Jeremy Lent has a great way of pulling out important threads, especially in the development of religions, and the broad reading and independent-mindedness to do so. His search begins with the separation of homo species from other primates and goes right up to the present day. Some of the events that Jeremy Lent describes I was already familiar with but I always found his interpretations fresh, concise, often helpful ,and only incorrect on very minor issues. Some of the developments and intellectual currents he describes, such as the transition from animist to human deities and the development of Chinese philosophy since Confucius, were almost entirely novel to me. His ultimate point is that we live in a world of unexpected choices, we dont have to see the world in the narrow way we now typically do, and that is an extremely important message of hope. He used his research to extricate himself from an existential crisis and we can too.
I do have some quibbles though. He organises the book loosely around an ill-defined "patterning instinct" whose uniqueness and validity is unclear and it makes no real contribution to the book. Plus, an instinct is one of those concepts often invoked to narrow human potential, exactly the kind of genetic determinist thinking the book is intended to refute. So its use in the title and the hook seems unfortunate.
Ultimately too, the book ends weakly, with no real recommendations and pointers, which to me implies that his enquiries, though profound, are nevertheless slightly off-track. Somehow he lost the scent. The real book that will blow apart the Western cultural mindset has yet to be written. The Patterning Instinct though, is still easily 5stars since for most people it will substitute and far exceed a conventional liberal arts education, and for anyone who wants to change the world or understand themselves it will be both an inspiration and a primer.
I do have some quibbles though. He organises the book loosely around an ill-defined "patterning instinct" whose uniqueness and validity is unclear and it makes no real contribution to the book. Plus, an instinct is one of those concepts often invoked to narrow human potential, exactly the kind of genetic determinist thinking the book is intended to refute. So its use in the title and the hook seems unfortunate.
Ultimately too, the book ends weakly, with no real recommendations and pointers, which to me implies that his enquiries, though profound, are nevertheless slightly off-track. Somehow he lost the scent. The real book that will blow apart the Western cultural mindset has yet to be written. The Patterning Instinct though, is still easily 5stars since for most people it will substitute and far exceed a conventional liberal arts education, and for anyone who wants to change the world or understand themselves it will be both an inspiration and a primer.
Read
July 2, 2023DNF
Queria muito ler este livro pelo título, mas ele é profundamente enganador. O instinto de padronização é algo que nos define enquanto humanos, define o modo como olhamos a realidade, a reduzimos a padrões e registamos como novos factos, memórias e conhecimento. Mas daí a usar esse conceito para discutir a evolução histórica ao longo dos séculos, parece-me bastante desinteressante. O processo cognitivo é poderoso e dá conta do modo como os humanos funcionam, mas é um processo. Os processos contaminam o modo como se constroem conteúdos, ideias, mas daí a tentar distinguir toda a história humana em função de um processo vai um salto grande. Nomeadamente porque não existem outras espécies para podermos comparar diferentes formas de processar a informação. També, porque não mudámos este processo ao longo do tempo, somos assim há alguns milhares de milénios. Por isso, não havendo como distinguir o processo de qualquer outro, sendo ele o único meio de aceder, torna-se inconsequente a tentativa de traçar uma história por meio deste processo.
Mas o maior problema acaba por sugir na superficialidade do que se discute e na fraca estrutura de todo o livro. Os tópicos vão surgindo uns atrás dos outros, com hierarquia conceptual pouco definida, sentindo-se saltos informativos por vezes difíceis de justificar.
Falta rigor, falta método, falta profundidade. Percebe-se porquê quando vemos que a formação de base do autor está distante dos assuntos que tenta aqui abordar. Por outro lado, Lent apresenta-se como um filantropo interessado na melhoria da humanidade, agora que vive de rendimentos feitos com a venda de empresas nos tempos áureos da internet.
Queria muito ler este livro pelo título, mas ele é profundamente enganador. O instinto de padronização é algo que nos define enquanto humanos, define o modo como olhamos a realidade, a reduzimos a padrões e registamos como novos factos, memórias e conhecimento. Mas daí a usar esse conceito para discutir a evolução histórica ao longo dos séculos, parece-me bastante desinteressante. O processo cognitivo é poderoso e dá conta do modo como os humanos funcionam, mas é um processo. Os processos contaminam o modo como se constroem conteúdos, ideias, mas daí a tentar distinguir toda a história humana em função de um processo vai um salto grande. Nomeadamente porque não existem outras espécies para podermos comparar diferentes formas de processar a informação. També, porque não mudámos este processo ao longo do tempo, somos assim há alguns milhares de milénios. Por isso, não havendo como distinguir o processo de qualquer outro, sendo ele o único meio de aceder, torna-se inconsequente a tentativa de traçar uma história por meio deste processo.
Mas o maior problema acaba por sugir na superficialidade do que se discute e na fraca estrutura de todo o livro. Os tópicos vão surgindo uns atrás dos outros, com hierarquia conceptual pouco definida, sentindo-se saltos informativos por vezes difíceis de justificar.
Falta rigor, falta método, falta profundidade. Percebe-se porquê quando vemos que a formação de base do autor está distante dos assuntos que tenta aqui abordar. Por outro lado, Lent apresenta-se como um filantropo interessado na melhoria da humanidade, agora que vive de rendimentos feitos com a venda de empresas nos tempos áureos da internet.
April 6, 2021
What an amaizing book. A page turner for sure. If you liked Yuval Noah Harari's books, you will definitely enjoy this one a great deal as well.
In my humble opinnion, this book is even better written and contains more deep insights than Harari's works (and I did enjoy Harari's books as well, but I would recommed this over all of them).
The book's argument is solid and entertaining to say the least. I don't necessarily agree with everything, but this book succeeds in building a memorable and coherent picture of the reasons why we have ended up to this situation right now as a species.
Lent goes throught all of the great civilizations and their complex mythologies and philosophies with a such clarity that this book to me was reading like a novel.
Rare treat!
6/5
In my humble opinnion, this book is even better written and contains more deep insights than Harari's works (and I did enjoy Harari's books as well, but I would recommed this over all of them).
The book's argument is solid and entertaining to say the least. I don't necessarily agree with everything, but this book succeeds in building a memorable and coherent picture of the reasons why we have ended up to this situation right now as a species.
Lent goes throught all of the great civilizations and their complex mythologies and philosophies with a such clarity that this book to me was reading like a novel.
Rare treat!
6/5
February 2, 2022
I read this book for the neuroscience book club I co-run. We occasionally read broad multi-disciplinary books like this or Sapiens, and it often instigates the most interesting and longest conversations.
"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."
There's many different ways culture can shape history, one is language (Lent promotes a soft version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Another is through cultural root metaphors, which are structures we use to make sense of the world and derive meaning from it. The book is structured as a roadmap through the most enduring structures of meaning in human history.
Lent begins with hunter gatherers: nature as giving parent, nature is sacred, relations are fluid. 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.
Then there's agriculture when "there arose a new form of energy to exploit: the energy of other human beings, now locked into static communities."
With the ancient Greeks, we get the popularization of dualism. 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. The ancient Egyptians for the first time introduce the idea of a “morally contingent afterlife,” ordaining that your actions in this life have a direct effect on your experience of the next. Meanwhile, China is forming into a highly stable society that prioritizes harmonization.
The premise of this book is so simple, that the way we think and what we value shapes the actions we take. But it's a point that apparently really needs to be made because most people just don't think this way intuitively. I remember visiting Cahokia Mounds near St. Louis several years ago and wondering why the pre-Columbian societies in what is now the USA left behind so few lasting structures. Cahokia is the largest and most complex archaeological site north of the great pre-Columbian cities in Mexico, and it's just a bunch of dirt mounds. I wondered what challenges these cultures faced that prevented them from achieving the architectural feats of many contemporaneous societies. It never occurred to me that they might have had different goals altogether and that our definition of a successful society has historically been one that is almost invariably exploitative of human labor and the environment.
There are many issues with Lent's book, most can be grouped into his bias towards Taoism and Eastern culture in general, or gross generalizations of cultural attitudes. However, this is a really thought provoking, bold, and exciting book. The writing is clear and very accessible. I enjoyed it, and would read another Lent book if he wrote another.
"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."
There's many different ways culture can shape history, one is language (Lent promotes a soft version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Another is through cultural root metaphors, which are structures we use to make sense of the world and derive meaning from it. The book is structured as a roadmap through the most enduring structures of meaning in human history.
Lent begins with hunter gatherers: nature as giving parent, nature is sacred, relations are fluid. 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.
Then there's agriculture when "there arose a new form of energy to exploit: the energy of other human beings, now locked into static communities."
With the ancient Greeks, we get the popularization of dualism. 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. The ancient Egyptians for the first time introduce the idea of a “morally contingent afterlife,” ordaining that your actions in this life have a direct effect on your experience of the next. Meanwhile, China is forming into a highly stable society that prioritizes harmonization.
The premise of this book is so simple, that the way we think and what we value shapes the actions we take. But it's a point that apparently really needs to be made because most people just don't think this way intuitively. I remember visiting Cahokia Mounds near St. Louis several years ago and wondering why the pre-Columbian societies in what is now the USA left behind so few lasting structures. Cahokia is the largest and most complex archaeological site north of the great pre-Columbian cities in Mexico, and it's just a bunch of dirt mounds. I wondered what challenges these cultures faced that prevented them from achieving the architectural feats of many contemporaneous societies. It never occurred to me that they might have had different goals altogether and that our definition of a successful society has historically been one that is almost invariably exploitative of human labor and the environment.
There are many issues with Lent's book, most can be grouped into his bias towards Taoism and Eastern culture in general, or gross generalizations of cultural attitudes. However, this is a really thought provoking, bold, and exciting book. The writing is clear and very accessible. I enjoyed it, and would read another Lent book if he wrote another.
October 27, 2018
There's a lot to love about this book. At least for someone like me with a wide range of interests and a passion for understanding things. Jeremy Lent weaves a compelling series of threads together to show how our innate drive to seek out patterns and apply them to our worldview has led to different key themes over the millenia of our history. And he extracts from that some ideas about where we might be heading and attempts to show which of these patterns are most well-tuned to lead us where we need to go. In his eyes, Neo-Confucianism appears to be the ideal worldview for the ongoing prosperity of our civilization when the health of our ecosystem is considered. I'm not sure yet if I can go so far as saying I fully agree, but Lent paints a compelling picture, even if it does feel a bit scattered and hard to follow at times.
This book may eventually creep into range of a five star rating. The elements are all there, but a bit more organization to the story would go a long way. Nonetheless, I'll definitely be revisiting this one.
This book may eventually creep into range of a five star rating. The elements are all there, but a bit more organization to the story would go a long way. Nonetheless, I'll definitely be revisiting this one.
Read
May 18, 2018The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
Jeremy Lent (Goodreads Author), Fritjof Capra (Foreword)
In spite of a foreword, preface, and introduction that take 32 pages, I had a mistaken impression of what this book was about.
Part 1, "Everything Is Connected", was a fascinating discussion of how the prefrontal cortex grew in early man to meet changing needs. This growth included an increase in size, and, more importantly, an ability to handle abstract ideas. The author continues with the shift from hunter-gatherers to an agriculture basis, discussing the rise of a hierarchical model and an increase in anxiety due to a sometimes uncertain future.
Thousands of years pass. Now the focus in on the notion of dualism, a contrast between the western concept of opposition and the eastern idea of harmony. 130+ pages later, I was numb, and thinking of DNF.
In the third major part, the author applies dualism to the conquest of nature. In a methodical and un-hyped discussion, he addresses many of the environmental issues that we currently face. One can now see how the concepts of dualism have given us a frame of reference that may not be sufficiently helpful in reaching a solution to our problems.
The last small part is focused on whether a solution is possible and how it might happen. One is hopeful, but a lot of change is needed in a short amount of time.
Jeremy Lent (Goodreads Author), Fritjof Capra (Foreword)
In spite of a foreword, preface, and introduction that take 32 pages, I had a mistaken impression of what this book was about.
Part 1, "Everything Is Connected", was a fascinating discussion of how the prefrontal cortex grew in early man to meet changing needs. This growth included an increase in size, and, more importantly, an ability to handle abstract ideas. The author continues with the shift from hunter-gatherers to an agriculture basis, discussing the rise of a hierarchical model and an increase in anxiety due to a sometimes uncertain future.
Thousands of years pass. Now the focus in on the notion of dualism, a contrast between the western concept of opposition and the eastern idea of harmony. 130+ pages later, I was numb, and thinking of DNF.
In the third major part, the author applies dualism to the conquest of nature. In a methodical and un-hyped discussion, he addresses many of the environmental issues that we currently face. One can now see how the concepts of dualism have given us a frame of reference that may not be sufficiently helpful in reaching a solution to our problems.
The last small part is focused on whether a solution is possible and how it might happen. One is hopeful, but a lot of change is needed in a short amount of time.
June 6, 2019
A little tedious at first but it gets more and more fascinating as it gets going. It seems so logical that meanings change over time and explanations for events become clearer with more information and yet so much of the world is behaving as though their meaning aka religion, was the only true meaning.
December 16, 2020
Without a shadow of a doubt the most compelling book I've read all year! Will have to return later to write a proper review, but just too astounded for now.
December 7, 2019
The Western dualistic tradition has inexorably separated humanity from a sense of connection with the rest of the world, leaving an underlying sense of meaninglessness.
Some things can best be understood through a reductionist approach—by breaking them down to their discrete elements and investigating each in turn. Other things—especially what is alive or composed of living entities, such as organisms, ecosystems, and human communities—can only be understood through a process of integration, through recognizing how each part relates to each other and the whole.
In our mainstream modern value system, the separation from the desacralized natural world—created by the Greeks, systematized by Christianity, and endorsed by reductionist science—is complete.
Our global civilization is on an unsustainable course because the meaning we've derived from the world has historically been based on disconnection. Beginning with the dualistic conception of human being and cosmos in ancient Greece, Western civilization (more recently becoming global civilization) has followed a path of cognitive separation. By prizing reason over emotion, splitting human existence into mind and body, and then defining humanity only by its mind, we set the cognitive foundation for the scientific and industrial revolutions that transformed the world.
In our relationship to the external world, we pursued a similar path of disconnection, finding meaning in transcendence while desacralizing the earth, creating root metaphors of nature as an ENEMY TO BE CONQUERED and a MACHINE TO BE ENGINEERED.
STEPS
Societal
Based on the group sizes early humans probably lived in, they would have had to spend 30–45 percent of their day grooming to maintain social cohesion—probably an unsustainable amount of time. Gradually, mimetic forms of communication—gestures, grunts, and other vocalizations—would have become more significant, offering a more efficient form of social interaction than grooming, until finally developing into language. (socialising, grooming, mimicking, then language)
These tools give archaeologists a good idea of how our ancestors might have procured their food. They would now have been able to dig up termite colonies or scavenge big game carcasses in the savannah, cutting through bones into the nutritious marrow. The extra calories available to them would have fueled the development of their larger brains, which demanded more metabolic energy. Their larger brains, in turn, gave them the social intelligence to thrive in their newly complex societies, creating a positive feedback cycle, leading to the evolution of even more powerful brains capable of developing more complex tools. (Tools, better nutrition, bigger brains, better tools, better nutrition)
Those infants whose PFCs were able to make the best connections would be more successful at realizing how the complex mélange of grunts, rhythms, gestures, and expressions around them patterned themselves into social meaning. As they grew up, they would be better integrated within their community and, as such, more likely to pass on their genes for enhanced PFC connectivity to the next generation.
(Prefrontal Cortex further developed, and the ability of patterning, better communication, language, better chance of offspring)
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.
(Attitude towards time and work. Sedentism. Shortage of resources. Agriculture. Ownership)
A similar dynamic occurred with the wild dogs, goats, sheep, and cattle that became domesticated. In each case, humans would select the smaller and gentler animals, and, over generations, these genetic traits would predominate until the species became too weak to survive by itself in the wild. Now, humans were responsible for protecting these domesticated animals from predators, something their wild predecessors had been able to do for themselves. (Agriculture. Lost of freedom)
He points to the transition in Southwest Asia, after the emergence of agriculture, from circular dwellings to square and rectangular houses. The natural world is filled with circular or curved shapes, but squares and rectangles are almost entirely human constructions. Once villages became permanent, those born into these settlements would have developed a new view of human patterns and structures as different from the unruly patterns of the wild. (Agriculture. Ownership. Shapes and mentality)
The land itself—previously free—becomes a valuable asset, permitting those who own it to become even wealthier by growing more crops. Wealth becomes an intrinsic value, and those who don't have any are seen as worthless. Significant hierarchical inequalities emerged over the first few thousand years of agriculture. (Ownership. Concept of wealth and hierarchical. Agriculture)
In an agrarian society, however, someone who has spent his life building up wealth and prestige doesn't want to see it all evaporate on his death. The issue of inheritance emerges, requiring rules for how possessions get passed from one generation to the next. The authority of the patriarch becomes paramount. Women are perceived as commodities, like land and food sources, that males can utilize to further enhance their wealth into the distant future, even beyond their own life span. New values emphasizing hitherto unknown concepts of honor, virginity, and sexual fidelity now become major issues dominating people's lives. (Concept of wealth. Ownership. Agriculture. Productisation and capitalisation.)
The hierarchical structure of agrarian societies helped shape a new conception of the universe. In agrarian civilizations around the world, a HIERARCHY OF THE GODS emerged, stratified and distant from ordinary people, mediated by priests. (Agriculture. Social hierarchy breeds hierarchy of gods. Change of worldview)
This led, in the words of archaeologist Graeme Barker, to “a very different kind of spirituality characterized by a separation from and distrust of nature,” which generated “the anxiety over cosmic disorder that seems to lie at the core of all the agrarian religions.” No longer was nature a generous, giving parent; instead, it was increasingly something to “control and appropriate rather than be part of.
( Change of worldview. Anxiety and distrust of nature. Control became central.)
The theme of control becomes central. On the one hand, the very idea of agriculture opens the possibility of humans controlling their destiny through their actions. On the other hand, the parameters under human control remain painfully limited. A sure recipe for distress. Agrarian views of the universe arise directly from the habitual patterns of agricultural life—and, as a result, the twin themes of control and anxiety are never far away. (Control and Anxiety)
As humans exerted increasing control over other animals, their gods took on a more human form.. As early as the Natufians, images of animals began to be superseded by human forms, primarily female “mother goddess” figurines. (Gods change from animal form to humans)
These new gods take on a position of authority, a concept unknown to nomadic foragers. Image of deities begin to show humans around them with their arms raised in the position of supplication.
“The theme of the ‘supplicant’ introduces an entirely new relationship between god and man…a new distinction at the heart of the human imagination between an ‘above’ and ‘below’, between an order of a divine force, personified and dominant, and that of an everyday humanity.”
Gone are the days of nature as mother and father providing food unconditionally to their children. Instead, nature now provides food only in return for the right conduct. If the ancestral spirits receive the correct sacrifices given with the appropriate rituals, they will reward their descendants with a good harvest. If not, they might cause the crops to fail in retribution.
(Supplicant. Demanding, conditional deities. Distrust even to humans?)
It became increasingly difficult to conceive of deities existing only in the natural world. How could people now communicate with them? The emergence of idols solved this problem. Now, just as a natural object such as a tree could hold a divine essence, an idol could too. Everyone, from peasant to king, had a part to play in this elaborate network of cosmos, society, and individual. No role was more crucial than that of the king, who, by performing the required rituals, could maintain the order of the cosmos—which, in turn, transferred to political and social stability.
Worldview envisaged an orderly cosmos, a rational universe that responded to the appropriate human actions. (Idols. Delegate of communication. Orderly universe, everyone plays a part.)
The very foundation of beliefs about the cosmos was shaken during this time, resulting in a crisis of faith regarding whether ma'at could be maintained. During this epoch, people began to wonder whether their destiny was, in fact, driven by what Assmann calls “the inscrutable will of a hidden god.”
(Natural disaster caused the old belief system to fall. New monotheism was born, however monotheism is not systematic, not natural enough for understanding or acceptance.)
Perhaps it's because of this grinding insecurity felt by Mesopotamians, this sense that no amount of piety could secure your position in this world, and the next world didn't even bear thinking about, that their civilization went on to create some of the greatest innovations the world has ever seen. If you can't rely on the gods to do it for you, they seemed to believe, you may as well accomplish what you can on your own. (Revolution. The lack of confidence in God.)
The most they could claim was to act as stewards of the gods, and everyone recognized they would be punished by military defeat if they failed to do their job well. This separation of the king from divinity led to a process of secularization, during which the political domain was gradually recognized as separate from the cosmological.(Political domain’s separation from divinity)
Separated from the wilderness, agriculturalists saw the natural world as a mysterious place filled with cosmic power. (Spirits everywhere)
Sedentism is the name given to the lifestyle of living in permanent dwellings, and it's considered by many to have been the most important step in prehistory.
(The ability to storage. Farm.Plan ahead."Delayed return".Change of ideology. Ownership. Selfishness)
In the view of an influential thinker, Richard Alexander, as hominids became more dominant in their ecology, they no longer needed to evolve better capabilities to deal with the natural environment. Instead, they developed new cognitive skills to outcompete each other. (Competition)
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. (Nature desacralisation. Monotheism. Artifice of external creator)
Mental
Old Testament, giving mankind dominion over the animals, was perceived in Europe as a clarion call for the scientific CONQUEST OF NATURE, framing the pattern of meaning that has encompassed the world through the present day. (Old testament. Conquest of nature)
The cognitive processes of toolmaking, for example, by which things were designed and constructed for a particular purpose, may have inspired the belief that natural objects were also created for a purpose.
(Tool making. Purpose of the natural objects.)
Similarly, the intuitive sense of fairness that was crucial to the stability of hunter-gatherer societies would have implied the need to maintain equally harmonious relationships with the spirits of the natural world.
(Harmonious relationships with all things)
As the infant gets used to certain behaviors, such as grasping, nursing, or cooing, the synaptic junctions that enable a successful behavior get strengthened by increased usage. The connections that are never used gradually wither away. As the infant grows, this synaptic reinforcement continues until some pathways are massively strengthened, while countless others that turned out to be useless have died out.
(Patterning in lingual scenarios)
The solution to this capacity constraint came in the form of a cognitive breakthrough that has allowed humans to think in a way that, most likely, no other creature on earth has ever achieved: symbolic thought. A symbol is something that has a purely arbitrary relationship to what it signifies, which can only be understood by someone who shares the same code.
(Symbolic thoughts. Higher efficiency of communication)
Just as language shapes the perception of an infant as she listens to the patterns of sounds around her, so the mythic patterns of thought informing the culture a child is born into will literally shape how that child constructs meaning in his world. Every culture holds its own worldview: a complex and comprehensive model of how the universe works and how to act within it. This network of beliefs and values determines the way in which each child in that culture makes sense of his universe.
(Language. Pattern. Culture. Worldview)
Once you understand that those around you are thinking and feeling people like you, a disturbing crescendo of implications is likely to occur in your mind when somebody dies. It's clear that the life force previously animating that person has vanished. As that happens to those around you, you soon realize this will eventually be your own fate, leading to profound dread at the inevitable future reality of your own death.
(“You”, people like “you”, fear of death)
Bronislaw Malinowski theorized that religion is the “affirmation that death is not real, that man has a soul and that this is immortal,” which has since inspired a school of thought called “terror management theory.” In this view, just as an infant gains comfort and security from the authority of her parents, so as she grows up and becomes aware of death, she is comforted by the notion of deities, who are frequently patriarchal or matriarchal figures.
(The birth of religions and beliefs for fear of death. Normally the father/mother figure)
As infants, we quickly learn that people can disappear and then reappear, sometimes minutes, hours, or even days later. From this, we realize that people continue to exist even while they have disappeared. (Continuity to exist even after disappearance, alive or dead)
In the diverse cultures of the world, gods come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they always share is a mind with the ability to think symbolically, just like a human. This makes sense in light of the critical importance of theory of mind in the development of our social intelligence: if other people have minds like ours, wouldn't that be true of other agents we perceive to act intentionally in the natural world?
(People have minds, gods must be like people as well, even other agents/living organisms. Pantheism)
The body intrudes…into our investigations, interrupting, disturbing, distracting, and preventing us from getting a glimpse of the truth. We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself.
(Dualism. Truth and immortality. Western root. Hatred for bodily existence.)
Socrates explains that when the soul is freed to look by itself, it perceives true reality composed of “the pure, eternal, immortal, unchanging.” The soul can then “cease its wanderings,” and, through its contact with eternal truth, it too becomes eternal. This, he avers, is the soul's true nature, a condition called wisdom.
(“Purity” of soul)
The core of Plato's worldview, known as the theory of Forms, is that for everything existing in the material world, there exists an ideal form of that thing in another dimension, the immutable world of Ideas.
(Theory of forms. Idea of purity)
Some things can best be understood through a reductionist approach—by breaking them down to their discrete elements and investigating each in turn. Other things—especially what is alive or composed of living entities, such as organisms, ecosystems, and human communities—can only be understood through a process of integration, through recognizing how each part relates to each other and the whole.
In our mainstream modern value system, the separation from the desacralized natural world—created by the Greeks, systematized by Christianity, and endorsed by reductionist science—is complete.
Our global civilization is on an unsustainable course because the meaning we've derived from the world has historically been based on disconnection. Beginning with the dualistic conception of human being and cosmos in ancient Greece, Western civilization (more recently becoming global civilization) has followed a path of cognitive separation. By prizing reason over emotion, splitting human existence into mind and body, and then defining humanity only by its mind, we set the cognitive foundation for the scientific and industrial revolutions that transformed the world.
In our relationship to the external world, we pursued a similar path of disconnection, finding meaning in transcendence while desacralizing the earth, creating root metaphors of nature as an ENEMY TO BE CONQUERED and a MACHINE TO BE ENGINEERED.
STEPS
Societal
Based on the group sizes early humans probably lived in, they would have had to spend 30–45 percent of their day grooming to maintain social cohesion—probably an unsustainable amount of time. Gradually, mimetic forms of communication—gestures, grunts, and other vocalizations—would have become more significant, offering a more efficient form of social interaction than grooming, until finally developing into language. (socialising, grooming, mimicking, then language)
These tools give archaeologists a good idea of how our ancestors might have procured their food. They would now have been able to dig up termite colonies or scavenge big game carcasses in the savannah, cutting through bones into the nutritious marrow. The extra calories available to them would have fueled the development of their larger brains, which demanded more metabolic energy. Their larger brains, in turn, gave them the social intelligence to thrive in their newly complex societies, creating a positive feedback cycle, leading to the evolution of even more powerful brains capable of developing more complex tools. (Tools, better nutrition, bigger brains, better tools, better nutrition)
Those infants whose PFCs were able to make the best connections would be more successful at realizing how the complex mélange of grunts, rhythms, gestures, and expressions around them patterned themselves into social meaning. As they grew up, they would be better integrated within their community and, as such, more likely to pass on their genes for enhanced PFC connectivity to the next generation.
(Prefrontal Cortex further developed, and the ability of patterning, better communication, language, better chance of offspring)
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.
(Attitude towards time and work. Sedentism. Shortage of resources. Agriculture. Ownership)
A similar dynamic occurred with the wild dogs, goats, sheep, and cattle that became domesticated. In each case, humans would select the smaller and gentler animals, and, over generations, these genetic traits would predominate until the species became too weak to survive by itself in the wild. Now, humans were responsible for protecting these domesticated animals from predators, something their wild predecessors had been able to do for themselves. (Agriculture. Lost of freedom)
He points to the transition in Southwest Asia, after the emergence of agriculture, from circular dwellings to square and rectangular houses. The natural world is filled with circular or curved shapes, but squares and rectangles are almost entirely human constructions. Once villages became permanent, those born into these settlements would have developed a new view of human patterns and structures as different from the unruly patterns of the wild. (Agriculture. Ownership. Shapes and mentality)
The land itself—previously free—becomes a valuable asset, permitting those who own it to become even wealthier by growing more crops. Wealth becomes an intrinsic value, and those who don't have any are seen as worthless. Significant hierarchical inequalities emerged over the first few thousand years of agriculture. (Ownership. Concept of wealth and hierarchical. Agriculture)
In an agrarian society, however, someone who has spent his life building up wealth and prestige doesn't want to see it all evaporate on his death. The issue of inheritance emerges, requiring rules for how possessions get passed from one generation to the next. The authority of the patriarch becomes paramount. Women are perceived as commodities, like land and food sources, that males can utilize to further enhance their wealth into the distant future, even beyond their own life span. New values emphasizing hitherto unknown concepts of honor, virginity, and sexual fidelity now become major issues dominating people's lives. (Concept of wealth. Ownership. Agriculture. Productisation and capitalisation.)
The hierarchical structure of agrarian societies helped shape a new conception of the universe. In agrarian civilizations around the world, a HIERARCHY OF THE GODS emerged, stratified and distant from ordinary people, mediated by priests. (Agriculture. Social hierarchy breeds hierarchy of gods. Change of worldview)
This led, in the words of archaeologist Graeme Barker, to “a very different kind of spirituality characterized by a separation from and distrust of nature,” which generated “the anxiety over cosmic disorder that seems to lie at the core of all the agrarian religions.” No longer was nature a generous, giving parent; instead, it was increasingly something to “control and appropriate rather than be part of.
( Change of worldview. Anxiety and distrust of nature. Control became central.)
The theme of control becomes central. On the one hand, the very idea of agriculture opens the possibility of humans controlling their destiny through their actions. On the other hand, the parameters under human control remain painfully limited. A sure recipe for distress. Agrarian views of the universe arise directly from the habitual patterns of agricultural life—and, as a result, the twin themes of control and anxiety are never far away. (Control and Anxiety)
As humans exerted increasing control over other animals, their gods took on a more human form.. As early as the Natufians, images of animals began to be superseded by human forms, primarily female “mother goddess” figurines. (Gods change from animal form to humans)
These new gods take on a position of authority, a concept unknown to nomadic foragers. Image of deities begin to show humans around them with their arms raised in the position of supplication.
“The theme of the ‘supplicant’ introduces an entirely new relationship between god and man…a new distinction at the heart of the human imagination between an ‘above’ and ‘below’, between an order of a divine force, personified and dominant, and that of an everyday humanity.”
Gone are the days of nature as mother and father providing food unconditionally to their children. Instead, nature now provides food only in return for the right conduct. If the ancestral spirits receive the correct sacrifices given with the appropriate rituals, they will reward their descendants with a good harvest. If not, they might cause the crops to fail in retribution.
(Supplicant. Demanding, conditional deities. Distrust even to humans?)
It became increasingly difficult to conceive of deities existing only in the natural world. How could people now communicate with them? The emergence of idols solved this problem. Now, just as a natural object such as a tree could hold a divine essence, an idol could too. Everyone, from peasant to king, had a part to play in this elaborate network of cosmos, society, and individual. No role was more crucial than that of the king, who, by performing the required rituals, could maintain the order of the cosmos—which, in turn, transferred to political and social stability.
Worldview envisaged an orderly cosmos, a rational universe that responded to the appropriate human actions. (Idols. Delegate of communication. Orderly universe, everyone plays a part.)
The very foundation of beliefs about the cosmos was shaken during this time, resulting in a crisis of faith regarding whether ma'at could be maintained. During this epoch, people began to wonder whether their destiny was, in fact, driven by what Assmann calls “the inscrutable will of a hidden god.”
(Natural disaster caused the old belief system to fall. New monotheism was born, however monotheism is not systematic, not natural enough for understanding or acceptance.)
Perhaps it's because of this grinding insecurity felt by Mesopotamians, this sense that no amount of piety could secure your position in this world, and the next world didn't even bear thinking about, that their civilization went on to create some of the greatest innovations the world has ever seen. If you can't rely on the gods to do it for you, they seemed to believe, you may as well accomplish what you can on your own. (Revolution. The lack of confidence in God.)
The most they could claim was to act as stewards of the gods, and everyone recognized they would be punished by military defeat if they failed to do their job well. This separation of the king from divinity led to a process of secularization, during which the political domain was gradually recognized as separate from the cosmological.(Political domain’s separation from divinity)
Separated from the wilderness, agriculturalists saw the natural world as a mysterious place filled with cosmic power. (Spirits everywhere)
Sedentism is the name given to the lifestyle of living in permanent dwellings, and it's considered by many to have been the most important step in prehistory.
(The ability to storage. Farm.Plan ahead."Delayed return".Change of ideology. Ownership. Selfishness)
In the view of an influential thinker, Richard Alexander, as hominids became more dominant in their ecology, they no longer needed to evolve better capabilities to deal with the natural environment. Instead, they developed new cognitive skills to outcompete each other. (Competition)
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. (Nature desacralisation. Monotheism. Artifice of external creator)
Mental
Old Testament, giving mankind dominion over the animals, was perceived in Europe as a clarion call for the scientific CONQUEST OF NATURE, framing the pattern of meaning that has encompassed the world through the present day. (Old testament. Conquest of nature)
The cognitive processes of toolmaking, for example, by which things were designed and constructed for a particular purpose, may have inspired the belief that natural objects were also created for a purpose.
(Tool making. Purpose of the natural objects.)
Similarly, the intuitive sense of fairness that was crucial to the stability of hunter-gatherer societies would have implied the need to maintain equally harmonious relationships with the spirits of the natural world.
(Harmonious relationships with all things)
As the infant gets used to certain behaviors, such as grasping, nursing, or cooing, the synaptic junctions that enable a successful behavior get strengthened by increased usage. The connections that are never used gradually wither away. As the infant grows, this synaptic reinforcement continues until some pathways are massively strengthened, while countless others that turned out to be useless have died out.
(Patterning in lingual scenarios)
The solution to this capacity constraint came in the form of a cognitive breakthrough that has allowed humans to think in a way that, most likely, no other creature on earth has ever achieved: symbolic thought. A symbol is something that has a purely arbitrary relationship to what it signifies, which can only be understood by someone who shares the same code.
(Symbolic thoughts. Higher efficiency of communication)
Just as language shapes the perception of an infant as she listens to the patterns of sounds around her, so the mythic patterns of thought informing the culture a child is born into will literally shape how that child constructs meaning in his world. Every culture holds its own worldview: a complex and comprehensive model of how the universe works and how to act within it. This network of beliefs and values determines the way in which each child in that culture makes sense of his universe.
(Language. Pattern. Culture. Worldview)
Once you understand that those around you are thinking and feeling people like you, a disturbing crescendo of implications is likely to occur in your mind when somebody dies. It's clear that the life force previously animating that person has vanished. As that happens to those around you, you soon realize this will eventually be your own fate, leading to profound dread at the inevitable future reality of your own death.
(“You”, people like “you”, fear of death)
Bronislaw Malinowski theorized that religion is the “affirmation that death is not real, that man has a soul and that this is immortal,” which has since inspired a school of thought called “terror management theory.” In this view, just as an infant gains comfort and security from the authority of her parents, so as she grows up and becomes aware of death, she is comforted by the notion of deities, who are frequently patriarchal or matriarchal figures.
(The birth of religions and beliefs for fear of death. Normally the father/mother figure)
As infants, we quickly learn that people can disappear and then reappear, sometimes minutes, hours, or even days later. From this, we realize that people continue to exist even while they have disappeared. (Continuity to exist even after disappearance, alive or dead)
In the diverse cultures of the world, gods come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they always share is a mind with the ability to think symbolically, just like a human. This makes sense in light of the critical importance of theory of mind in the development of our social intelligence: if other people have minds like ours, wouldn't that be true of other agents we perceive to act intentionally in the natural world?
(People have minds, gods must be like people as well, even other agents/living organisms. Pantheism)
The body intrudes…into our investigations, interrupting, disturbing, distracting, and preventing us from getting a glimpse of the truth. We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself.
(Dualism. Truth and immortality. Western root. Hatred for bodily existence.)
Socrates explains that when the soul is freed to look by itself, it perceives true reality composed of “the pure, eternal, immortal, unchanging.” The soul can then “cease its wanderings,” and, through its contact with eternal truth, it too becomes eternal. This, he avers, is the soul's true nature, a condition called wisdom.
(“Purity” of soul)
The core of Plato's worldview, known as the theory of Forms, is that for everything existing in the material world, there exists an ideal form of that thing in another dimension, the immutable world of Ideas.
(Theory of forms. Idea of purity)
July 16, 2022
The book argues that how we organize our thoughts and view the exterior world influences what actions we take as nations and what follows. Jeremy Lent goes over different cultures and their thinking patterns, and how those patterns might have influenced their position in the world and their policy-making. I think he is right, that the way we organize our cultures, what we view as essential, and what we value influence our actions. It is not only about guns, germs, and steel, especially why Western thoughts dominated our world and the industrial revolution started from here. The book reasons that those three things play their part, but Jeremy Lent wants to look past that.
The book's central thesis is that the way we see personhood, humans and their interactions with the world, and how we view information and how it should be obtained have been formed through our cultural history. And those things influence how we are living now and what choices we make, especially towards our environment. Jeremy Lent argues that the pattern of thoughts and values we have created highly influenced the environmental destruction and why the Western way of thinking accepts it on such a massive scale and doesn't take action. He praises the Chinese philosophies and their view on how an individual is an integral part of not only the community they live in but also the environment they occupy. He disputes reductionism and the views of nature and human minds as machines. Two thought patterns that in his view cause harm to our appreciation of nature, selfhood, and how everything is interconnected.
I can't say I disagree with Jeremy Lent, but what gets to me is the attacking, idealistic, one-sided judging ethos. Somehow it takes away the reading experience. Somehow it lessens the argumentation power. Somehow it makes the book more simplistic than it is. Yet, I would say that book has a lot to offer, despite its many flaws: introducing just the basic history, not going too deep into the ideologies he discusses about, and the biased and judgmental tone. But can you really argue against what he proposes? That how our brains are organized and how we pattern those thoughts in our cultures matters to our values and actions we take.
Thank you for reading <3 Have a beautiful day!
The book's central thesis is that the way we see personhood, humans and their interactions with the world, and how we view information and how it should be obtained have been formed through our cultural history. And those things influence how we are living now and what choices we make, especially towards our environment. Jeremy Lent argues that the pattern of thoughts and values we have created highly influenced the environmental destruction and why the Western way of thinking accepts it on such a massive scale and doesn't take action. He praises the Chinese philosophies and their view on how an individual is an integral part of not only the community they live in but also the environment they occupy. He disputes reductionism and the views of nature and human minds as machines. Two thought patterns that in his view cause harm to our appreciation of nature, selfhood, and how everything is interconnected.
I can't say I disagree with Jeremy Lent, but what gets to me is the attacking, idealistic, one-sided judging ethos. Somehow it takes away the reading experience. Somehow it lessens the argumentation power. Somehow it makes the book more simplistic than it is. Yet, I would say that book has a lot to offer, despite its many flaws: introducing just the basic history, not going too deep into the ideologies he discusses about, and the biased and judgmental tone. But can you really argue against what he proposes? That how our brains are organized and how we pattern those thoughts in our cultures matters to our values and actions we take.
Thank you for reading <3 Have a beautiful day!
December 2, 2020
Quite disappointing to be honest. This was recommended to me in the same breath as Sapiens and it's got a very similar aim and scope, but falls a looong way short of the expectations that comparison creates. Maybe if I hadn't already read Sapiens, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. I really like the idea of this 'patterning instinct' as an overarching cognitive theme in human cultural history, but it wasn't strong enough to provide a proper shape or direction to the book. It just ended up feeling like a bunch of disparate chunks of history that Lent happened to be interested in, with very little actually stringing them together. It seemed like maybe he was aware of this issue because the intro was so ridiculously long - if you need that much prefacing to explain how the sections of your book fit together, they probably don't actually fit together that well....
Despite my qualms about the structuring, I probably still could have quite enjoyed it if the sections themselves were interesting, but I found a lot of them pretty boring and could feel myself switching off. There were a few bits that grabbed my interest: the hunter-gatherer societal structures, emergence of language, the bit tying religious violence specifically to monotheism and the section about possible futures (although I suspect Homo Deus will do a better job of that too when I get around to reading it), but a lot of the middle section just felt like an encyclopaedic recounting of global philosophical history. [Also the section about mathematical truth really rubbed me up the wrong way, but that *might* just be because I'm the snobbiest mathematical purist alive]
Despite my qualms about the structuring, I probably still could have quite enjoyed it if the sections themselves were interesting, but I found a lot of them pretty boring and could feel myself switching off. There were a few bits that grabbed my interest: the hunter-gatherer societal structures, emergence of language, the bit tying religious violence specifically to monotheism and the section about possible futures (although I suspect Homo Deus will do a better job of that too when I get around to reading it), but a lot of the middle section just felt like an encyclopaedic recounting of global philosophical history. [Also the section about mathematical truth really rubbed me up the wrong way, but that *might* just be because I'm the snobbiest mathematical purist alive]
January 10, 2022
A remarkably ambitious effort--a cognitive history of the world--profoundly achieved.
Everything looks different through a different narrative lens and this is a novel one. The thesis of this book is that different cultures construct core metaphors to make meaning out of their world and these metaphors forge the values that ultimately drive people's action. Culture shapes values and values shape history.
It follows the approach to science writing of the giants of the genre like Jared Diamond and James Gleick. It is a broad interdisciplinary historical narrative written in non-technical language, is imminently readable, entertaining, yet sophisticated and intellectually fascinating.
The book arcs over the histories of Western and Eastern thought and weaves the patterns of those worldviews into modern day and what might lay ahead in the 21st century. His association of Eastern thought with modern-day systems and complexity science concepts was particularly poignant.
Everything looks different through a different narrative lens and this is a novel one. The thesis of this book is that different cultures construct core metaphors to make meaning out of their world and these metaphors forge the values that ultimately drive people's action. Culture shapes values and values shape history.
It follows the approach to science writing of the giants of the genre like Jared Diamond and James Gleick. It is a broad interdisciplinary historical narrative written in non-technical language, is imminently readable, entertaining, yet sophisticated and intellectually fascinating.
The book arcs over the histories of Western and Eastern thought and weaves the patterns of those worldviews into modern day and what might lay ahead in the 21st century. His association of Eastern thought with modern-day systems and complexity science concepts was particularly poignant.
April 23, 2021
Tessa recommended this book so I bought it. After a few chapters I told her it was incomprehensible and I wanted her to explain what it was about. Apparently she had not read it - a friend of hers has suggested she try it but she never got around to getting it. I have no idea what its about. If anyone managed to wade through it, please let me know what you got out of it.
July 7, 2021
A very eye-opening history of humanity from a cognitive point of view. I learned a lot from it. It shows that our current world view is not inevitable or necessarily the only possible way to view the world but that it has its roots very far back in cultural history. I especially enjoyed the chapter on Neo-Confucianism, a subject with which I was not familiar. I highly recommend this book.
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October 22, 2022Having enjoyed a Web of Meaning I thought I'd read the earlier book. Enjoyed it, but reading them the other way round would probably have enhanced my pleasure in this one. The importance of language in shaping our thoughts and minds cannot be overstated
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