The Ascent of Humanity
by Charles Eisenstein
Rating: 3.0 / 5 · Read
Tagline: Root-cause analysis of all the world’s problems.
3 stars, not because I think the book is average, but because there are parts I really like and other parts I really hate.
Main argument: The world is going through a bunch of crises (e.g. environmental collapse, bullshit jobs, antibiotic resistance, suburban sprawl, suppressive schooling), and it all comes from “Separation”: people becoming less connected with nature and each other.
He spends most of the book attacking major parts of society: agriculture, industry, money, interest, the scientific method, reductionism, and suppressive schooling. He identifies a lot of real problems, but goes too far by tying them all under a single root cause. He legitimately made me consider real downsides/counterarguments to some foundational things, like science, technology, objectivity, and reductionism, but there was a ton of loosy-goosy new age spirituality in there too.
At the end, he offers some solutions to the problems he identified. I was skimming a lot by this point, but some ideas that caught my interest were: “demurrage” (effectively a negative interest rate), self-directed learning in schools, and ideas for a zero-waste economy. I mostly skipped over the spiritual stuff.
It took a lot of work to get through this book. He is super verbose and repetitive. I also had to skip through a lot of parts that I couldn’t even entertain (new-age spirituality). Still, I think I’ll probably keep this book around for browsing. There’s a lot packed inside of it and I definitely didn’t pick up on everything the first time through.
I’ll finish with some of my favorite ideas from the book, cherry-picked and no in particular order:
- A lot of technology is about local improvement, when more systematic change would be better. e.g. instead of a new gadget to help you sit up straight, maybe let’s not sit at our computers so much.
- Objectivity in the scientific sense isn’t technically possible, since the observer is part of the initial conditions
- Objectivity in reporting is extremely difficult or impossible. Even what you choose to cover or not cover is a choice.
- There is no clear basis for choosing or evaluating systems of determining knowledge (e.g. the scientific method), since knowledge determines what criteria you will use!
- Learning from axioms and first principles is a boring and counter-intuitive way to learn. Better to learn from a historical context. What problems were we trying to solve and how did we get there?
- Relationships encode much much more than individual elements. To remember something, connect it to what else you know.
- Humans are meant to operate as part of a social network (not social media).
- Gifts strengthen social bonds. Transactions weaken social bonds.
- “Financial independence” is dependence on strangers. You pay strangers instead of receiving favors from friends.
- The easiest way to come up with a business idea is identify something people get for free in a well-balanced life, then charge for it. e.g. sell them stories (TV/movies) when they stop telling each other stories.
- “Opening” a market often involves replacing an informal/social/local economy with one that benefits the opener.
- There are other motives than the profit motive.
- More people on the streets lead to slower cars lead to safer roads. Faster cars lead to fewer people on streets lead to even faster cars.
- Pasteurization and fermentation are both ways of preserving food. One kills all microbes. The other introduces less harmful microbes to outcompete more harmful microbes.
- Coddling kids means they don’t become self-reliant.
- Leasing durable goods like refrigerators would encourage manufacturers to make them last.
- If people had to pay to store their waste indefinitely, there would be a lot less waste.
- Self-motivated learning is so much more effective than being forced to learn.