They generally agree that the crucial rupture divided some original state of nature from the grand accession of civilization. Perhaps what readers like Gates find valuable in these books has less to do with the purported shape and direction of history than with the broad assurance that history has a shape and a direction.īoth stories, after all, adhere to a model of history that’s at once teleological (driven by specific forces to arrive at the foreordained present) and discontinuous (such magical things as farming and rationality emerged from the woodwork, unlocking successive stages of developmental maturity). until about twelve thousand years ago, when we first beat our swords into plowshares this innocent decision, which must have seemed a good idea at the time, heralded an era of administrative hierarchy, state-sanctioned violence, and the unchecked proliferation of carbohydrates. The second concludes that everything was more or less O.K. Two of Bill Gates’s favorite soup-to-nuts books of the past decade, for example, are Steven Pinker’s “ The Better Angels of Our Nature” and Yuval Noah Harari’s “ Sapiens.” The first asserts that everything has been on the upswing since the Enlightenment, when we learned that rational argument was preferable to religious superstition and wanton cudgelling. The appetite for such stories seems indiscriminate-tales of deterioration and tales of improvement are frequently consumed by the same people.

These chronicles either indulge a sense of decline or applaud our advances. Moments of sociopolitical tumult have a way of generating all-encompassing explanatory histories.

Shadows of the empire evolution