The Journey of Humanity by Oded Galor

Author:Oded Galor [Galor, Oded]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

A Culture of Growth

For most of human history, individuals who questioned the norms, beliefs and preferences they inherited from their ancestors would have struggled to devise alternatives that were more efficient. Cultural wisdom and tradition were venerated because they had aided survival, and since few individuals had a deep understanding of how they contributed to their well-being, it would have been evolutionarily risky to question their validity. As such, most human societies in history have resisted rapid cultural changes, such as those that accompany major technological, philosophical and scientific advancements. Instead, cultures tend to emphasise the prudence of their ancient ancestors, revering the distant past with a mix of nostalgia and idealism. For instance, a tenet of Orthodox Judaism is the ‘decline of generations’: the belief that past generations were wiser and closer to God, and that the profound and well-argued interpretations of the Bible by the Jewish sages millennia ago are hard to match.

However, there came a point when technological change reached such a pace that the advantages of conservatism began to wane, and from that point onward the reverence for ancient wisdom gradually declined. The Battle of the Books, a satirical work by the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift published in 1704, contains a particularly colourful description of the spirit of this age, in which new and old books come to life in a library and fight one another. This was a metaphor for a quarrel that had started with the emergence of humanism during the Renaissance, gathered force over the seventeenth century and was shaking the European continent at the time. On one side were the ‘Moderns’, who argued that time and values had changed and it was feasible to progress beyond the classical thinking of Greece and Rome. On the other side were the ‘Ancients’, who maintained that the wisdom of the classical thinkers was eternal and universal and that modern philosophers and writers ought to confine themselves primarily to its salvation, restoration and imitation.

This quarrel marked a unique moment in history: the first time that forward-looking philosophers started to gain the upper hand over their rivals. Thus wrote Immanuel Kant in his 1784 essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.[13]

The Enlightenment called on human beings to trust themselves and have the resolution to reject antiquated cultural traditions. It encouraged the development of a more sceptical, empirical and flexible approach towards the world, in the hope of creating a new culture founded not on a faith in the traditions of the past but on the belief that a better world could be built through scientific, technological and institutional progress. This outlook, suited as

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