March 12, 2018 Monday
Bedtime Story
Present Human Apes are as Clueless About Future Historical Direction as were Past Apes
Tonight I am continuing to quote from
Harari’s book ‘Sapiens’ and the chapter ‘The Hindsight Fallacy’ where he is making
a case for uncertainty of the future that always exists for the human apes at any
time of time, including present.
We are historically no more important than
the human apes of the past.
Historians on hindsight, just like
economists seem to have explanations every morning for the behavior of share
markets, can conveniently find very “sensible” explanations to account for the
reasons the past took those specific directions.
The quotation will end today.
“Are we out of the global economic crisis,
or is the worse still to come?
Will China continue growing until it
becomes the leading superpower?
Will the United States lose its hegemony?
Is the upsurge of monotheistic
fundamentalism the wave of the future or a local whirlpool of little long-term
significance?
Are we heading towards ecological disaster
or technological paradise?
There are good arguments to be made for all
of these outcomes, but no way of knowing for sure.
In a few decades, people will look back and
think that answers to all of these questions were obvious.
It is particularly important to stress that
possibilities which seem very unlikely to contemporaries often get realized.
When Constantine assumed the throne in 306,
Christianity was a little more than as esoteric Eastern sect.
If you were to suggest then that it was
about to become Roman state religion, you’d have been laughed out of the room
just as you would be today if you were to suggest that by the year 2050 Hare
Krishna would be the state religion of the USA.
In October 1913, the Bolsheviks were a
small radical faction.
No reasonable person would have predicted
that within a mere four years they would take over the country.
In AD 600, the notion that a band of
dessert-dwelling Arabs would soon conquer an expanse stretching from Atlantic
Ocean to India was even more preposterous.
Indeed, had the Byzantine army been able to
repel the initial onslaught, Islam would probably have remained an obscure cult
of which only a handful of cognoscenti were aware.
Scholars would then a have a very easy job
explaining why a faith based on a revelation to a middle-aged Meccan merchant
could never have caught on.
Not that everything is possible.
Geographical, biological and economic
forces create constraints.
Yet these constraints leave ample room for
surprising developments, which do not seem bound by any deterministic laws.”
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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