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

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

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.

All the causes of boredom are permutations of the interior wound of separation.

The performance of any part of an organic nonlinear system cannot be understood or predicted in isolation from the rest, but only in relationship to the rest. Such parts are no longer freely interchangeable, and the methodologies of reductionism are impotent.

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

Primitive survival is a matter of intimacy and not control.

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.

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

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

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.