The Penguin History of the World

If this is speculative, the second reflection need not be: his genetic inheritance not only enables Homo sapiens to make conscious change, to undertake an unprecedented kind of evolution, but also controls and limits him. The irrationalities of the twentieth century show the narrow limits of our capacity for conscious control of our destiny. To this extent, we are still determined, still unfree, still a part of a nature which produced our unique qualities in the first place only by evolutionary selection. It is not easy to separate this part of our inheritance, either, from the emotional shaping the human psyche has received from the processes through which it has evolved. That shaping still lies deep at the heart of all our aesthetic and affective life. Man must live with an in-built dualism. To deal with it has been the aim of most of the great philosophies and religions and the mythologies by which we still live, but they are themselves moulded by it. As we move from prehistory to history it is important not to forget that its determining effect still proves much more resistant to control than those blind prehistoric forces of geography and climate which were so quickly overcome. Nevertheless, at the edge of an opening history we already encounter a creature we know – Man the change-maker.

Book Two

  CIVILIZATIONS

Ten thousand years ago, the physical shape of the world was much what it is today. The outlines of the continents were broadly those we know and the major natural barriers and channels of communication have remained constant ever since. By comparison with the upheavals of the hundreds of millennia preceding the end of the last Ice Age, climate, too, was for this short time stable; from then on the historian need only regard its short-term fluctuations. Ahead there lay the age (in which we still live) in which most change was going to be man-made.

Civilization has been one of the great accelerators of such change. It began at least seven times according to one historian, meaning by that that he could distinguish at least seven occasions on which particular mixes of human skills and natural facts came together to make possible a new order of life based on the exploitation of nature. Though all these beginnings fell within a span of 3,000 years or so – barely a moment by comparison with the vast scale of prehistory – they were neither simultaneous, nor equally successful. They turned out very differently, some of them racing ahead to lasting achievements while others declined or disappeared, even if after spectacular flowerings. Yet all of them signified an increase in the rate and scale of change dramatic by comparison with anything achieved in earlier times.