Patterning the past
Patterning the past
It is just simple repeating patterns, or is it?
Recently I have started reading again. That meant I finally completed one of the books David Graeber’s Debt - the first 5,000 years. Books like these are interesting to me in an anthropological sense. You can pattern the evolution of human behavior across a large spectrum of time in one or more areas of culture and human living. In a single book, there are 100’s perhaps 1000’s of stories from the past on human behavior and interactions. And from these books, interesting new patterns emerge…
Back to reading books means back to acquiring more stories, narratives, and new patterns. In back to acquiring new patterns, the reductionist brain is working to reduce these into simple models of what I could “see” from all this.
I like books on cultural anthropology. They are like a thousand books in one. And interestingly when you start overlaying this with other similar books which look at history and time from different perspectives, interesting patterns and models emerge from that reductionist thinking. And if I have started creating new (perhaps useless) models again, then it means I am getting well.
While reading, I looked at the above book in the combination with similar historical and anthropological books that I have read. Here are few other lenses that helped combine these stories and perspectives in looking at things:
Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind By: Yuval Noah Harari
Guns, Germs and Steel - The Fate of Human Societies By: Jared Diamond
An Economic History of the World since 1400 By: Donald J. Harreld
The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community by Fritjof Capra
The Story of Human Language By: John McWhorter
Tribe - On Homecoming and Belonging By: Sebastian Junger
These are not the only material to combine. In fact, every book I read or story that I acquire or pattern that I envisage are all candidates to add to this collection. Over the next several days, I shall discuss some hypotheses that I came up with from these patterns and present some models that emerged.
Before I expand this further, I shall leave you with my first hypotheses derived from these anthropological journeys.
“Humans are built to take advantage (to survive) in two dimensions - the moral and the immoral.”