Bøker av Marvin Bram

A History of Humanity is the definitive symbolic history of the world. The methods of symbolic history revolve around (1) an account of the human endowment taking up thought, feeling, and behaviour from fruitful new perspectives, and (2) a correspondingly new account of global history from the point of view of the degrees of retention, surrender, and deformation of fundamental elements of the human endowment over time. Among the new perspectives informing the account of the human endowment are semiotics, neuroscience, and palaeoethnobotany. They combine the classical modes of analysis: social anthropology and social history, political anthropology and political history, economic anthropology and economic history, and cultural anthropology and cultural history, that are gathered and unfolded under the aegis of symbolic history, bringing to the narrative a unique clarity. Original source materials from the Neolithic world and from South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Western civilizations illustrate and challenge the narrative, which is unbroken but not dogmatic. Both the narrative and original sources are accompanied by a two-level marginal commentary: the first keeps the reader located in time and space, while the second brings insights from other observers of the world to the reader's attention. The aim of the commentary is to help the reader think about the human world, without, however, closing the question of the nature of the human world.

""If you study the past, you won't repeat its mistakes."" That's a hopeful sentiment, but as a formula for moving forward humanely, it's largely useless. A useful appeal to history would adopt the old saying, ""The farther you back up, the better you jump forward."" But the past to which most historians appeal doesn't go back far enough. The long time coming will be the time of living full lives as individuals while living in harmony with others as communities. Everything we need to do to bring that world about we've already done. We must only add humanity's prehistory to its history. It may come as a surprise that all the elements of a humane future can be found in this expanded timeframe, but it's the case. When we synthesize the life-serving aspects of the deep past with those of the recent past, we'll much shorten the time before the world we deserve comes into being. THE LONG TIME COMING attempts such a synthesis.