Sublime

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

Contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers—even today in the marginal refugia they inhabit—are nothing like the famished, one-day-away-from-starvation desperados of folklore. Hunters and gathers have, in fact, never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never look

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.

race, which wasn’t invented until the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.

In the Age of Imperialism, when the definition of human was "man" and the definition of man was "white," none of this was obvious.