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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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