The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self

When we knew every face intimately, there was no need to generalize into “people.” Our ancestors experienced a richness of intimacy that we can hardly imagine today, living as we do among strangers. It is not only social richness that is muffled underneath our words, it is the entirety of sensual experience. Margaret Mead once observed, “For those

There is no self except in relationship to the other. The economic man, the rational actor, the Cartesian “I am” is a delusion that cuts us off from most of what we are, leaving us lonely and small.

Under the delusion of the discrete and separate self, we see our relationships as extrinsic to who we are on the deepest level; we see relationships as associations of discrete individuals. But in fact, our relationships—with other people and all life—define who we are, and by impoverishing these relationships we diminish ourselves. We are our rela

Boredom, that yearning for stimulation and distraction, for something to pass the time, is simply how we experience any pause in the program of control that seeks to deny pain.

Post-technology technology, if I may use such a phrase, will take as its model the cycles of nature and in particular, the “magical” practices of ancient people. It will seek attunement and not conquest, and it will be occupied not with control but with beauty. This mode of technology, which I will describe later in the book, will not be a separati

The same goes, of course, for human beings. The distancing effect of language facilitates exploitation, cruelty, murder, and genocide. When the other party to a relationship is a mere member of a generic category, be it “customer,” “terrorist,” or “employee,” exploitation or murder comes much more easily. Racial epithets serve the same purpose: we

This, in a nutshell, is the ascent of humanity that Jacob Bronowski was referring to in his classic The Ascent of Man, after which the present volume is ironically named.

We have achieved mastery of the linear domain, and attempted to expand that domain to cover the universe. Most real-world systems, however, including living organisms, are hopelessly nonlinear. From this realization will arise a new approach to engineering and to problem-solving in general that does not start by breaking the problem into pieces. Ou

In everyday human life, happiness and security come from strong connections—to family, community, nature, place, spirit, and self—and not from “independence” whether psychological or financial.

greater effort from our present state of being only serves to reinforce that state of being.