In this ambitious book, Ansary tackles 50,000 years (literally) of history with the thesis that pervasive narrative is the key driver of both cohesion and conflict. Narratives are the glue holding together the social constellations that give rise to culture. From stone age to digital age and beyond the singularity, he traces these narratives through giant hinge points such as the evolution of language, worldviews stemming from religion or ideologies, and methods of conquest and absorption. Why can’t we all get along? Because we are living in different worlds of meaning.
What I gained from reading this book is a much better understanding of the Islamic World, as that, of all the histories, is the one I know least about. Looking through his other books, I now wish I had read “Destiny Disrupted: A history of the world through Islamic Eyes” or “Games Without Rules,” a history of Afghanistan. His primary concept is (to me) not new, and does not really help think of solutions — I think we’ve known for a long time that we need to really understand the other in order to try to find some kind of compromise — and sometimes that is simply impossible. The way he tied global peoples and events across time was pretty interesting, though I found it often very high level.
There were a lot of small surprises (to me). Here are some of them (I have fact-checked some, but not all):
• North Americans didn’t develop the wheel because they had no tamable beasts (I don’t completely understand this since 1) a wheeled cart would be helpful to a person and 2) has anyone tried to tame a buffalo? I really don’t know.)
• Unlike the Western world, the Chinese had no tradition of jealous gods, demanding exclusive worship, so it was easier to absorb multiple narratives.
• Arabs were the (big) slave traders in East Africa, while Europeans became the traders in West Africa. Since Islam forbids enslaving Muslims, many conquered peoples decided to convert.
• Rome never fell, but did kind of get taken over by the conquered who had been given a path to citizenship through battle. More of the German tribes (German meant “barbarians who keep bugging us” — his words) ended up in leadership positions shifting things.
• Persians were OK with Islam but not with Arab superiority and so found an acceptable path by finding a Persian descendant of the Prophet leading to the Shia split.
• History of the development of the Caste system in India and description of why political fragmentation did not lead to cultural fragmentation there.
• The main Arab contribution around 800 CE was to catalog everything done elsewhere, e.g. medical knowledge. Their central project was the documentation of Sharia — the complete manual of how to be a Muslim. Meanwhile, the central project of the Western world was Science.
• Mongols brought bubonic plague to Europe from the Himalayan foot hills via fleas. In 1345 they lay siege to cities by catapulting diseased warrior corpses into the city.
• Movable type could handle the Roman alphabet better than Chinese pictographs. Arab writing also had something about it (he was vague) that made it more difficult.
• When Mongols took over China they tried to be Chinese, but their policies came from a different environment (e.g. water shortage in their home on the Steppes led to policies that discourage bathing in China)
• Systems based on patronage and relationships (Islamic world) vs commerce (western) and what that led to.
• Columbus “discovering” America led to one of the biggest hinges: — some estimates are that 90% (55 million) of people in all the Americas died — mostly of disease — after that “visit.” A catastrophe that dwarfs the Mongol hordes, the Holocaust, the Black Death, and both world wars.
• Tools and machines were as seminal as the acquisitions of language. Western social constellations could incorporate machines into their networks of meaning much more easily than the other large empires of the time.
• The Muslim narrative with its patronage networks and Sharia law did not have a way of turning inventions into products. The Chinese world with its dream of a socially cohesive centralized state operated by an all pervasive bureaucracy didn’t either. New technology had the potential for disrupting existing social arrangements, and in much of the world preserving existing social arrangements took precedence over building better stuff.
• Societies shaped by the progress narrative (ie the West) had an advantage not because of the tools, but because of the improvements and variations they kept building on the first.
• The invention explosion was the busy energy of all the entrepreneurial companies and corporations that got excited about making things happen
In summary — it was a long book and the ratio (for my personal background) of new ideas or information to number of pages was lower than I would like. However, the writing was accessible — it didn’t tend to get dragged into too much tedium — and I did learn a lot about the Muslim World. However, at this point I’m more interested in going back and reading the two books I mentioned at this beginning of this review. I did read (in 2007 so I unfortunately do not recall the details) his memoir of growing up in Afghanistan and then coming to the U.S. in high school. That was excellent!
Books to look forward to ... 