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

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.

Primitive survival is a matter of intimacy and not control.

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

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.

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.

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.

his book Elements of Refusal establishes that the Revolution must go much deeper than that,

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