Every so often you read a book that makes you smarter, that broadens your perspective. It doesn’t happen very often; with luck, maybe once every few years. I have to think back a long time to Paul Johnson’s Modern Times; even further, to The Catcher in the Rye.
Books like those make one believe there’s reason to keep going because they offer insight, perception. The world might only feel slightly different for having read them, but they make living more pleasurable. The luster returns.
Jeff Tweedy asked, “What would we be without wishful thinking?” Where would we be without good books to moderate our restlessness? I’d like to say a few things about a great book I finished a few weeks ago: Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari.
Harari describes the Agricultural Revolution as a great leap forward attended by degradation and death. Before we settled in communities and learned to cultivate wild grains and practice animal husbandry, our diet was better balanced—game, berries, nuts. Of course we couldn’t feed the numbers the Agricultural Revolution eventually enabled us to feed, but as humans we were weaker now that we’d been exposed to diseases borne by animals bred for ploughing and burden.
So humankind discovered the means for exponential self-propagation (food supply) and now had to learn how to live with its attendant horror—pestilential disease. A trade-off which is nearing its end point thanks to modern day epidemiology. It has taken the species nearly ten thousand years to cope with the complexities brought about by the Agricultural Revolution.