Talking about "A Brief History of Humanity": When the labels are stripped off, and pure life is left, who are we?
On "A Brief History of Humanity"
The first few chapters of the book "A Brief History of Humanity" are somewhat unexpected. In my impression, our ancestors, Homo sapiens, were struggling and hungry in nature, just like in "Crazy Primitives" In the same way, everyone fought against large carnivores with stones in order to protect themselves, and it was miserable. But the authors point out a key point. Whenever Homo sapiens moved to a new continent, the local large mammals and birds began to die off a cliff.
Before the beginning of agricultural society, Homo sapiens did not rely on smashing stones day and night to chase after the eater to get food, but to gather it. The author cites hunter-gatherers as surprisingly few hours per week, and at first I couldn't believe my eyes - 35-45 hours per week. Compared with the 996 of modern wage earners, who work 70-90 hours a week, perhaps Homo sapiens have a happier life. Now we have high-speed rail, which can travel thousands of miles in just 3 hours; with mobile phones, people on the other side of the ocean can receive our information without sending letters. We have so much higher technology than Homo sapiens, why are humans still unhappy?
As said in the book, we seem to be living our lives at 10 times the speed. We watch a 5-minute commentary and finish a 120-minute movie, and watch a TV series at 2 times the speed. We are anxious that 27-year-old recruitment will not prevail, and 35-year-olds will be eliminated. Complaining that the fast pace of short videos makes it impossible to concentrate the fragmented time, our own life is rolling at a non-stop speed. I always thought that an agricultural society was a remarkable progress for mankind. But the author points out that in an agricultural society, human beings are actually enslaved by plants.
Wheat, a species that was unremarkable thousands of years ago, has spread to every corner of the world overnight. In order for wheat to thrive, human beings have to pick large manures to fertilize and dig ditches to water them. People live in a fixed place because wheat cannot move with human beings. When people are stationed in one place, human beings become too dependent on the quality of the environment, and the food becomes single. During the collection period, Homo sapiens ingested a variety of foods and it was not easy to be malnourished. There is no evidence that humans are getting smarter, because in the era of gathering, humans had to be careful to identify various plants and animals.
The establishment of writing is not only about pure advantages and disadvantages, but it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. The free connection and holistic thinking of the past have been transformed into fragmented thinking, bureaucracy, and words have changed the way we think. My friend shared with me that when she first arrived at the company, there was a way of speaking within the company. As a screw, she has limited problems to solve. When she needs to connect with other departments, she will tell the other party "I want to solve 1234, you need to help me do 1234", which may also represent a kind of computer-like command-like language. This imperative language completely compresses the part of us as "humans", simply as parts of a huge factory machine, helping the machine to complete the characters more efficiently.
Money may also become our language, and everyone is labelled, defined, and lost in this wave. "With class, strangers don't have to waste time and energy to really understand each other, but also know how to know each other." In accelerated life, we meet every stranger and judge him from his brand, address, etc. The class determines whether they can communicate with each other and whether they have a common language. Are we not now? Everything is built on the basis of "believing that the future will be better". But when we put our thoughts on the idea of "the future will be better", we also give the fulcrum of our lives to the society and the outside world.
“The place racism used to occupy in imperial thought is now replaced by culturalism.” The ever-changing tourist attractions, every city has an ancient street that sells old Shanghai hand creams, silver jewelry and more. hand-made soap. All cities have McDonald's, KFC, old Beijing yogurt, and Chengdu old yogurt seems to have no essential difference. "Who am I?" has become extremely important in this era. But what exactly is culture?
Is culture really just a part of the human imaginary community, a tradition invented by humans to distinguish between "you" and "us"? is that so? I don't feel like that. The question asked at the end of the article is important, what are we going to evolve into? Evolution seems to be just to survive, but somehow I feel as if it should not be the case. Perhaps there are other things more important than living.
Many of the author's views are more metaphysical, and for China, where atheists are the majority, such views may be more appealing. Most life studies only acknowledge the existence of 'hedonic' deficits, and there are relatively easy ways to define and measure them. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are really just life and the pursuit of pleasure. But man can reach the heights of God. Just as Hongmeng has not yet been established, the universe is full of famine, and the atoms in our bodies already exist in the world. We are connected to each other. Just as we cannot now explain what gravity is, simply interpreting happiness as the pleasure of life is to lower the height of human beings. When we strip off the labels one by one, and we are left with a pure life, who are we?
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daron mychal
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