Brave New Ways #4 / History's Myths, Tech Progress, Open Futures and Mental Freedom
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Welcome to your two-part holiday Edition of Brave New Ways. Part 1 (today) offers you three big questions to spark your year-end reflections on history, progress and possible futures. Part 2 (on January 4) helps you translate these questions into big Opportunities for Action in 2022.
History's Myths
Myths can bind us, and they can blind us.
They can give meaning and structure to our experiences, and they can elevate certain false beliefs so far above our conscious awareness that we don’t even realise we hold them.
One of our biggest myths — maybe the biggest — is the story of progress. It’s difficult for us to see the full sweep of human history as anything but. “Almost anyone who wishes to tell the human story on a broad scale feels secure in their knowledge of how it should properly start and where it is leading,” remarked David Graeber, a brilliant anthropologist who died in 2020.
Recasting the story of human progress as myth is a radical act of mental freedom. It forces three big and valuable questions onto the table immediately – any one of which might help you widen the window of possible futures in important ways:
- How open is the future?
- How optional is new technology?
- How likely are new forms of organization and society?
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How open is the future?
History has only recently become a story of forward progress. In Renaissance Europe of the 15th and 16th centuries, history was mainly understood as a series of disasters on the road to return to the lost wisdom and glory of the past (ancient Greece and Rome). The story of progress emerged later, possibly in the 1750s with the French economist A.R.J. Turgot, who put forth the idea that commercial societies (like those in Europe) are more advanced than “primitive” hunter-foraging societies (like those in the Americas). It was a colonial mindset that served European purposes.
Today, we’re better at recognizing such blind spots in our thinking. “Primitive” is a word loaded with colonial biases, and we know that. But we still often talk about present-day civilization as “advanced” — which implies a sense of direction about the past and the future. Some paths in the past were inevitable, and some paths in the future are, too.
Is that right? Or is it time to do a more radical re-evaluation? When it comes to the sweep of history, are we line-takers or line-makers?
How optional is new technology?
Many of today’s technology-driven visions of progress are rooted, explicitly or implicitly, in the belief that technology has been driving change since the time of the Agricultural Revolution. We may call out its evils where we find them (Big Tech), but we still greet new technologies as one-way tickets to move us permanently past the problems we’re stuck in now (climate change; pandemics) and into a futu
re with different challenges – the same way agriculture once transformed foragers into farmers forever. Once Adam bit the apple, there was no going back to the Garden of Eden.
Only it didn’t happen that way. For millennia, human societies farmed without becoming farmers. They raised crops and animals without surrendering too much of their existence to the demands of agriculture. They experimented with how to integrate play-farming into their settlements, which they had already settled for other reasons: hunting, foraging, fishing, trading and more. Some societies defined their identity in part by their decision to reject an agricultural way of life.
Are things different now? In a massive, globe-spanning, tech-enabled economy and society like ours, is every new technology-apple a bite that we must take? Is every bite now genuinely a point of no return?
How likely are new forms of organization and society?
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Harari concluded: “There is no way out of the imagined order…When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.” Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel concluded that “large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws.” If you want to live in a society without such things, “you’ll have to find some tiny band or tribe willing to accept you…”
Are they right? Holidays are a chance to challenge such sweeping conclusions and widen the window of possibilities you see.
The historical record is full of large-scale, multi-century endeavours to create societies that do not fit into the story of progress we know today. Were these experiments random bumps in the inexorable road to modern-day states and empires, or were they roads not taken?
What's your perspective? Share your stories with us:
Rare Perspectives
Connect with people and ideas that can help you understand your own filters better:
- Watch the late anthropologist David Graeber argue why the future is more open than most people think (2 minutes)
- Watch economist Stephanie Kelton challenge a core myth of economics and offer a different story about the origin of money (7 minutes)
- Watch David Wengrow, co-author of Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, question the conventional wisdom of human history (3 minutes)
Premium Content
Watch the 10-minute summary of Chris' most valuable questions of 2021.
Join the conversation at the NeueGeo Discord Channel.
The Journey Continues...
Social experiments are flourishing. Cryptocurrency, web3, DAOs —these are tech-enabled ways to reorganize society. They will generate plenty of hype in 2022. What genuine opportunities do they present to you and to society?
🙏 Thanks for bringing your energy here. - Chris and your Neue Geo team
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