Pod Insights Throughline Winter Book Club: The Story of Us? About this episode What if the real story of human history is a story itself? To kick off our winter book club, we talk with bestselling author Tamim Ansary about his book, "The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History Of Human Culture, Conflict And Connection," about why the future of our species might depend on our ability to arrive at a story we all share. This episode originally ran in 2022.
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Transcript 7,484 words · 13 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from Scholastic with Licorice, the highly anticipated, chilling, yet heartfelt story from award-winning author Carol LaRoe. Told in powerful prose and illuminating illustrations, this charming tale following Kitty's eerie journey to find the perfect home is catnip for fans of Catherine Applegate and Kate DiCamillo. Licorice from Carol LaRoe is available now wherever books are sold.
0:24 Rund Abdelfatah? Hi, Rand here. Somehow, we're almost at the end of 2025. A lot happened this year, and it's been a tough one for NPR and local stations. We lost federal funding for public media. We've seen relentless attacks on a free press. But we're not going anywhere. Here at Throughline, we will keep bringing you immersive, entertaining stories that answer our guiding question: How did we get here? If you're already a Throughline Plus supporter, thank you so much. We see you, and we're really grateful for you. If not, please consider joining the community of public radio supporters right now, before the end of the year, at plus.npr.org.
1:07 Rund Abdelfatah? Signing up unlocks a bunch of perks, like bonus episodes and more, from across NPR's podcasts. Plus, you get to feel good about supporting public media while you listen. And while I'm here, I just want to say thank you so much to our loyal listeners. Thanks to you and your votes, Throughline is this year's winner of NPR People's Choice Awards. I gotta say, of all the awards the show has won over the past few years, this one really means the most because you, our listeners, picked us. Thank you.
1:50 Rund Abdelfatah? So it's cozy season, and that means short days, cold nights, warm drinks, and books. I mean, we read all year, but come on, it's the best in the winter. And for the next few weeks, we're going to bring you a series of episodes we've made featuring books and authors we love and that have stuck with us through many re-reads. They're from all over the world, written across hundreds of years. This is Throughline after all, and we're excited to have you with us.
2:26 Speaker 02 The shape of the narrative is what it all comes down to in the end. History deals in facts, of course, but in history, those facts fundamentally serve a narrative. When we construct our story, we are inventing ourselves. That's what we were doing in those caves long ago, gathered around the fire, passing on to our children what we remembered about our grandparents, reminiscing about life-changing adventures we'd shared, arguing about which of us really killed the bear, and drawing conclusions about the meaning of life from the stars we saw above. For when ancient folks looked up at the night sky, they didn't just see stars, they saw constellations. They said, "There's a bear."
3:10 Speaker 02 And they said, "Hey, look, a mighty hunter." And their companions nodded. And as long as everybody in the group saw the bear and the mighty hunter, there they were. Tamim Ansari, The Invention of Yesterday.
3:34 Rund Abdelfatah? Right now, in America, it feels impossible for people to agree on just about anything. You might find it comforting to think about how, long ago, modern humans looked up at the stars and agreed on what it was they saw. But today, it feels like we're so far removed from that shared story.
3:54 Speaker 03 It's very clear that America has a history problem. There's no agreeing on how to tell the story of how we got to where we are today, no common narrative that unites us. Every American's story. Well, who gets to decide what's included, what's left out, and what ultimately shapes our American story, our global story as human beings on this earth? Some people look up at the night sky and see stars. Some see a bear and a mighty hunter. But who's to say? And what interpretation is passed down to future generations? What do you see?
4:30 Rund Abdelfatah? It may seem like a lost cause trying to tell a single human story that we all agree on. But knowing who we are and being able to visualize where we're going is based on where we've been. So maybe a common history is a key to bringing us all together. At least that's what Tamim Ansari thinks.
4:50 Speaker 04 You know, many years ago, I was a textbook editor. Eventually, my area was world history.
4:57 Rund Abdelfatah? Now Tamim's a writer, teacher, and author of big histories. But he comes from the world of editing textbooks, framing the narrative.
5:05 Speaker 04 One month I might have an assignment to write the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. And the next month I might have an assignment to write for some whole different textbook program. You know, the invention explosion of the 19th century in Europe and America.
5:22 Rund Abdelfatah? Doing this work, Tamim began to see unexpected connections across time and place and peoples.
5:28 Speaker 04 Because I was like skipping across, you know, like now the Civil War in America. Now, you know, the ancient Mesopotamian empires. I was seeing patterns that I might not have seen otherwise.
5:41 Speaker 03 Years later, all those patterns started to coalesce for him while reading three totally different history books at the same time.
5:49 Speaker 04 And one was about building the Great Wall of China. And one was about how nomads in Central Asia, you know, how their life went. What happened when they raided another nomadic camp? There was nothing to get that they didn't already have, so they would all join up and raid them. And then these these rolling waves of marauding nomads would develop. You know, then I I recognized from reading Roman history about, yeah, and these people, the Huns, came out of the out of the east. And they sacked things that were part of the civilized Roman Empire. And I'm like, wait, all of those things, I read that. And then there were these guys in the middle. This is all part of the same big picture.
6:32 Speaker 03 So what is that picture? Well, Tameem started to create meaning from seemingly unrelated events across the world, connecting dots, building constellations. In other words, he started writing a story.
6:47 Speaker 04 The book that I think we're talking about today is called "The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection."
6:55 Rund Abdelfatah? Tameem Ansari's book poses a fundamental question: What if the real story of human history is story itself?
7:04 Speaker 04 History is composed of facts the way that a cathedral is composed of bricks, let's say. But the bricks are not the cathedral. The cathedral is something about the way the bricks are put together. So history, in that sense, is a narrative, is a story. And I am undertaking to tell that story. And it's not the only way to tell it, but it's maybe one way.
7:28 Speaker 03 I like to think of Tameem as kind of a philosopher of history, someone who studies and writes history, but also writes about history, thinks about what it really is and what it's made up of. And on Throughline, that's the kind of thing we're always thinking about behind the scenes. We look for connections, try to discover the ways the stories we tell interact with one another across time and place. We're always asking what stories should be told, who should tell them, and why these moments from the past matter, why they're relevant to us today. And through that, we also start to see that history always boils down to one thing: the suffix of the word itself: story.
8:12 Rund Abdelfatah? And that's what Tameem tries to capture in his book, "The Invention of Yesterday." It's a global history focused on the stories different civilizations have invented about themselves across time. Stories that tell thousands of years of experiences and encounters, memories, memoirs, that became history. Because to Tameem, history is really just a story we're telling one another, which, obviously, resonates with us.
8:38 Speaker 04 I'm trying to tell a single story that's the human story.
8:43 Rund Abdelfatah? And to do that, Tameem is searching for a history, a narrative that the whole world feels seen in, a past we can all agree on and claim.
8:53 Speaker 04 And I think there's a global we that is trying to be born and that inevitably will be born because we can't all just be in the same space without eventually speaking the same language. That's what humans do. But if you're trying to tell the story of this emerging global we, then you have to look past the details.
9:15 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.
9:16 Speaker 03 I'm Ramtin Al-Abdulouin. And on this philosophical episode of Throughline from NPR, we're doing something a little different. We're getting inside the head of bestselling author Tameem Ansari and looking past the details to learn what inspires someone to write 50,000 years of history, why our shared history is a story we have to invent, and how the future of our species might depend on our ability to arrive at a story we can all see ourselves in.
9:51 Speaker 05 Hi, this is Brian Hoyle from Twinsburg, Ohio, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.
9:58 Speaker 06 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Live Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
10:27 Speaker 00 This message comes from Data IQ Agent Management. Most enterprises can count every device, every login, and every contractor. Almost none can count their AI agents. Take control of your agentic workforce with one view across every platform and tool, showing what's driving revenue, what's drifted, and who signed off on it. Visit dataiku.com. That's data I K U dot com.
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11:19 Speaker 07 Part one, The Power of the Powerful.
11:25 Speaker 02 We do seem to be living through one of those periods of growing worldwide incoherence. Old narratives have lost their power. Atomized voices are trumpeting new ones, or refurbished versions of old ones. And if someone doesn't come up with something good, the many moving towards something bad will sow catastrophe. The danger is particularly sharp now because the "society" we're talking about is not this or that bunch of people, but the single intertangled spaghetti of human lives that constitutes all of humanity in this, our global age.
12:15 Rund Abdelfatah? One of the things Tamim Mansari argues is that human beings need to agree on a common story, a feeling of being part of a "we", or, in his words, "an intertangled spaghetti of human lives" in order to function. But who decides who the "we" is and what we can all agree on? If the old narratives have lost their power, who determines a new one?
12:38 Speaker 04 The narrative is our framework that allows us to actually just even operate. Now, when a society is in some more or less stable shape, the experiences or the data that challenges the narrative is shelved. It's considered irrelevant. And it's put on the back shelf where it'll be looked at later by someone who cares, and nobody does. But when things stop working, you know, when there's more and more trouble arises, then some of those irrelevant facts, some people start to say, "Wait, maybe that's not so irrelevant." The narrative that keeps the powerful in place and keeps everybody else in place, the function of the narrative is not just to do that,
13:21 Speaker 04 but it's to enable us to efficiently and correctly handle the data that's coming at us from out there. And it's not just random. It has to fit more, it has to kind of fit what's really out there. If it doesn't actually fit what's really out there, we are an extinct species. So our ability to keep correcting our narrative is our ability to function effectively in the environment. And when a society starts to not be able to cope with what's coming at it and what's happening, then the narrative starts to break down.
14:05 Speaker 04 And you see what's happening in, let's say, the United States today. You know, it's like the narrative is breaking down. And as the narrative starts to break down, there are people who the long-in-place narrative that confirmed the power of the powerful, as those narrative threads weaken, people who have been victimized by the way things are over the course of history now begin to raise their voices and say, "You know what? That story doesn't, doesn't fit me. And/or, I don't recognize the character that is in that story that's supposed to be me. That's not me, that guy." So they start to try to tell a different story.
14:48 Speaker 03 Those stories depend on your point of view. Where do you come from? What do you see from where you are? Who's telling you about how the world works? And what the world even is?
15:01 Speaker 03 Can you tell us a little bit about your story? You know, we all have a story. Sort of, where do you come from? Where'd you grow up? And how did you become interested in writing history?
15:13 Speaker 04 My father was an Afghan, my mother was an American. We could go a little deeper into that. My father was an Afghan from an eminent cultural, literary, intellectual family in Afghanistan. The poorest country on earth, you know, from some people's point of view. So he was at the top of the heap of the very, of the bottom of the heap. My mother was an American who was from a family of Finnish immigrants, and they were working-class poor. And my mother and father met at the end of the Depression. It's a very complex tapestry. And when I work out my own story that has unfolded through my journey through the cultural universe of the world today,
15:58 Speaker 04 the anomaly of my parents is always a generating factor of a plot, so to speak. So I grew up in Afghanistan. I lived there until I was 16. And then I came to the States, and I've lived here ever since. So, you know, what ends up being a mainspring of my little story is actually just one thread in a bigger fabric that is history. So that's how come I write these things that I write.
16:29 Rund Abdelfatah? As a result, kind of like me and Ramtin, Tamim grew up bicultural, straddling the fault line of the earth.
16:36 Speaker 04 I am both Afghan and American. I think I could also say I'm neither Afghan nor American. Somehow, I'm standing outside both of these bubbles. And because, you know, I've been standing outside of these cultural bubbles, it gives me a perspective that gets me to look at what many of my people who are monocultural see as reality, I see it as a construct. I see it as one whole context that one could be outside of and be in another whole context.
17:10 Speaker 08 I have to say, I really love that. You know, honestly, partly the inspiration for Throughline came from exactly what you're talking about. Ramtin and I are both the children of refugees and we ourselves were not born here. And that was partly what prompted the show, is that we were like trying to make sense of our individual stories. Not only our origin country's history and then our new, you know, adopted country's history, but then the history of this entire like planet, right? That's like you're zooming out more and more and more.
17:43 Speaker 04 Yeah. When I find myself among Afghans, I am an Afghan. I am a certain somebody, you know, that I recognize. When I drift away from that and I'm in an American context with my American friends, then I'm an American and I recognize that self. And there is almost a sense that it's not the same self. So I've been fascinated by that, you know, by that anomaly or that experience.
18:13 Speaker 03 Which brings it back to this other fascination Tameem has, the concept of we. Who's being included in the narrative of human history? Who feels included in that story? And how we connect through a mutual understanding of what was and what is.
18:31 Speaker 04 When we say a history of the world, we're actually talking about the story of how we got to where we are today. And that there's an explanatory element to that. And what struck me was that embedded in that formulation, there's always some assumption about who is this we we're talking about that is here today? And because I came from another place and I've been in, you know, it's like my scrambled cultural odyssey made me remember.
19:00 Speaker 04 From my Afghan side, living in Afghanistan and growing up in the schools there and hearing the history of the world, I was hearing a history of the world, not just the history of Afghanistan or the history of Islam or the history of some corner, you know, the periphery. That was the history of the world. And it included some of the events from the history of the world that I, as a textbook editor, creating World Histories for Kids in America, some of the same events were in both of these histories. But it made a difference where you stood and the perspective you had on this entire collection of facts. And it made a difference in which facts you would leave out or which ones you would put in.
19:42 Speaker 04 But after that, I got to thinking about, you know, how globalization is now such a leading feature of life for everyone on the planet.
19:54 Speaker 04 It is the case that now any place you are in your experience of the world, you're gonna be overlapping with people who look like they're in the safe way with you buying carrots and you're doing the same thing. But actually, each of you have a constellation of memories and history and, you know, values and relationships that means you're not necessarily in the same world. Each of you is standing in your own world and there's misunderstandings and little sparks that trigger off of the fact that, you know, you think you're in the same place, but actually you're in two different worlds. And all of the different worlds that have grown up on Earth over these many thousands of years are now all in the same space.
20:38 Speaker 04 They're in cyberspace, you know, that's a space that now exists. But also physically, people are migrating and, you know, everybody, you guys, you know, know what I'm talking about. So then I started to think, well, if you were to try to tell a story in which the we is this global we that isn't here yet but is trying to be here, then you have to look past the details. You know, you have to look past who's gonna run for president next year or whether fascism is on the rise in Italy or, you know, these particular questions. You have to look at, you have to look for the mainsprings of the human story and what's generating this constant flow of events.
21:26 Speaker 03 I mean, obviously, it makes sense why you would then become interested in doing this kind of larger meta-history. But I just wanted to ask one thing. So one of the things you talk about, and you hinted at here, is the role of narrative in history, that ultimately, all history can be boiled down to a story we tell ourselves, that the story is as important as quantifiable data or other information. With that said, what do you think of the old adage that the victors get to tell that story?
21:59 Speaker 04 You're right that in any given area, the story that's being told, let's back up a little. It serves the preservation of whatever the social configuration is at that point. And it allows a social entity or world to exist that can continue to meet the challenges of the environment. Now, in the history of the world, there has never been a time in which that has occurred without somebody being in power and others having less power. So the narrative has a tendency to preserve the power of whoever's powerful.
22:41 Speaker 04 And you can say that the narrative that preserves the power of the powerful is very appealing to the powerful. It sounds true.
22:50 Speaker 03 Right, right, right.
22:53 Speaker 04 And, you know, much expertise is mustered to show how and why it's true. And that's not just in terms of like, stockpiling the appropriate and relevant facts that will prove this narrative to be true, but also the intellectual endeavors of, well, people like me who, you know, put the facts together and they make it sound right.
23:19 Rund Abdelfatah? How Tamiya Mansari sifted through 50,000 years of human history to find the connective tissue and what he found when we come back.
23:32 Speaker 09 Hello, this is Rachel Lidle from Omaha, Nebraska. You are listening to Throughline with NPR.
23:44 Speaker 06 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Live Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
24:13 Speaker 00 This message comes from Data IQ Agent Management. Most enterprises can count every device, every login, and every contractor. Almost none can count their AI agents. Take control of your agentic workforce with one view across every platform and tool, showing what's driving revenue, what's drifted, and who signed off on it. Visit dataiku.com. That's data I K U dot com.
24:37 Speaker 06 Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for a dirty air. No one voted for polluted water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on, just as they've done for 40 years. Because clean air, clean water, and a healthy climate aren't political, they're fundamental. Learn more at SELC.org.
25:03 Speaker 07 Part Two: A Band of Relatives.
25:08 Speaker 02 Human groups exist as social constellations, which interact with their environment as if those whole collections of individuals were cells of single entities. Once we started forming such group selves, one and all of which were constellations, webs of meaning that existed only in the minds of their members and not in the physical world as such, that's when the story of humankind truly began.
25:40 Rund Abdelfatah? In Tameem Ansari's book, The Invention of Yesterday, he says that the history of the world is the story that we're telling one another, that since the beginning of humankind, people have been inventing stories to find purpose, to explain mystery and wonder, to survive. And the interpretation of these stories over tens of thousands of years is the writing of history.
26:02 Speaker 03 And because Tameem writes about the writing of history, talk about being meta, he searched for some of the common threads and links that have connected people throughout the centuries. Threads that he was searching for as the braids that he wove together to form a collective human story.
26:18 Speaker 04 So, you know, I went through to think, what are the... Well, there's money.
26:21 Speaker 03 Money.
26:22 Speaker 04 And bureaucracy is one of the things.
26:24 Speaker 03 Bureaucracy.
26:25 Speaker 04 You know, then religion would be one.
26:27 Speaker 03 And religion. Money, bureaucracy, and religion.
26:31 Speaker 04 But it all seemed not quite deep enough yet, you know? I'm looking for a deeper structure. And when I kept trying to get deeper, I finally got down to a sense of the factors that were driving the human story. You could bring it down to three actors, you know, three factors, actors, that are constantly affecting each other's journey, so to speak.
26:59 Speaker 03 Factor number one: environment.
27:02 Speaker 04 So it struck me that every life form, you can say it's in some environment. And those two things are irreducible. There's, you know, wherever there's life, there's also an environment that's not the same as that life form. So there's always an in here and then out there. And the story occurs on the border between in here and out there. It's the interaction, always building the wall, reaching out, building the wall. That's one of the fundamental processes. As humans, we exist as clumps of individuals, you know? We have agency as social groups. And those social groups... Just as much as an individual has a self
27:47 Speaker 04 that they can experience and identify and they pursue the interests of the self, social groups also have a self. It's a social self. And how do they have that? Well, there you get to the second factor. Factor number two: language. Maybe I should call it intercommunication. However it is that we do it from these internal selves that nobody knows about. You guys don't know what I'm thinking. You know, you can't get in here. But actually, you can because we're all in this conversation together and we're all in some way thinking about this conversation that we're having. So the social event is something that we're all participating in.
28:30 Speaker 04 And to that extent that we're participating, there's a social self that exists even right here with the three of us. So these social selves exist, but they're not like biological selves because they can grow, they can merge with other social selves. So that's one of the driving factors of history is that these social selves are in a constant state of flux. Sometimes, originally, I think in the early in the human story, we were just bands of nomads, all of us related by blood ties. You know, we were a band of relatives roaming the world and doing all that stuff, interacting with the environment that I talked about.
29:13 Speaker 04 But tribes emerged and kingdoms, and now we're countries. And that's not the end of it. We're just in the middle of the story still.
29:22 Rund Abdelfatah? So quick recap. Factor one: environment. Factor two: language. And that brings us to factor three.
29:29 Speaker 04 Tools. Tools. I think that the key to understanding the role of tools in history is to realize the tools are not something that we have, even though it feels that way because I could walk away from my computer. You know, I could put my hammer back in my workshop and even lose it and it's not like I've lost a part of myself. But actually, tools is a feature of us as a biological species. It's how we interact with the environment. It is our interface with the environment, you know. Our tools are the extensions of our fingers, the extension of our eyes, the extension of our ears. And so, there is a constant interaction between the evolution of our tools
30:12 Speaker 04 and what is coming at us from the environment. But since tools is the outermost layer of who we are, it's not just something we have. As our toolkit changes, we change. And, you know, "we change" means the social landscape we live in keeps changing, even the physical landscape. And then we have to face the problem of syncing up with everybody else because our way of staying together is by communicating with each other. We don't have a single telepathic brain so that we cannot just all change at the same time. And therefore, the process of changing to stay in sync with the changes that the environment is bringing, that our tools are forcing upon us, and that we are... All of that, when you put all of that together,
30:56 Speaker 04 I think you have the human story.
31:00 Speaker 04 And that's the story I tried to tell on the invention of yesterday.
31:10 Speaker 02 Alone among the creatures of Earth, we humans use tools and language to deal with our environment effectively as groups. Language makes stories possible, and mythic stories are what knit human groups together. In our earliest days, our mythic narratives were spawned by geography. We formed webs of meaning with people in our immediate environment. Where we lived was who we were. Through constant intercommunication, we built up shared assumptions about deep matters such as time and space, life and death, good and evil. We lived and died in symbolic landscapes woven of our ideas. And as far as we knew,
31:54 Speaker 02 those landscapes were the world itself.
32:03 Speaker 08 Right now, I think a lot of people would argue there is a war of narratives
32:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:07 Speaker 08 happening, right? And I think it's interesting because you said, just to paraphrase, I think you said something like, it has the power by questioning the narratives and our ability as a species to continually revise the narrative is our survival.
32:22 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:22 Speaker 08 But it feels like it's destroying us in some ways. Like, right now, living through it, you could argue it's a necessary pulling apart, right? So is it like, short-term destruction for long-term survival? I guess is my question. This process of, you know, challenging and revising the narrative.
32:39 Speaker 04 Excellent point you're making. I think there's no yes or no to that. It's, it has happened all through history and it's led to upheavals, revolutionary upheavals, which, when the smoke clears, there's a different world order. And those have not often been very clean and, you know, easy. And maybe we're in for a hard time with that, I don't know. But I do know, I think in the United States, the contradiction of the enslavement of Africans to build the economy of this country and the proposition that all men are created equal and have inalienable rights to pursue blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Both of those things are true.
33:23 Speaker 04 You know, it's like, there was enslavement and this, I personally embrace the spirit of that proposition. But cognitive dissonance says, come on now, something has to be resolved with that. What ended up happening with the civil war and all that didn't resolve it. The circumstances are still not neutral here. But it is also the case that we are, in our search for inclusion, based on acknowledgement of diversity and acceptance of diversity, also has had and is having
33:59 Speaker 04 A fragmenting effect, so that instead of a multicultural society, somebody used a phrase I thought was really good. Frank Viviano, another writer. He said, instead of multiculturalism, we're getting a shattered kaleidoscope of monoculturalisms. And what we want to try to do is build a new narrative, structure, tell a new story that all of us can legitimately see ourselves as characters in. Then we can start to interact. The trouble is, of course, it's not the trouble, but the fact is that America's not alone anymore. We can't just fix our society. It's a world problem. We have to find a narrative that will enable a human story to develop.
34:43 Speaker 04 That's the story of all of us that we can say, yeah, I accept that. That's, I see myself in that story. And that sounds like it is my story. I'm in there validly. We don't have that yet.
34:53 Speaker 08 I guess in my mind, what could possibly unite the entire world? What story could possibly unite the entire world?
35:00 Speaker 04 The old idea was, oh, the aliens will come and we'll all unite as humans against the aliens. Well, the aliens did come. It's in the form of a microscopic little thing that doesn't look like a human has spikes. It's called COVID. It didn't unite us. It should have. I thought it was gonna. It didn't do it. You know, the other aspect of what's happening right now in terms of world history is the evolution of technology. We're trying to get down inside of material reality and shape our own, whatever we need. Artificial intelligence, robotics. You know, these are all ancient quests that are trying to do things that traditionally have been the,
35:45 Speaker 04 we have considered them to be the domain of the gods or of God. You know, it's like we're trying to create life now. We're trying to be the masters of material reality.
36:00 Speaker 03 Right. Just going on with the technology theme. Isn't the nature of communication today a challenge also to developing some kind of widely acceptable narrative? Because now everyone has a narrative. It's not even a, you know, everyone's narrative is the world. And they can express that easily. And there's literally millions and, you know, millions and millions of narratives whacking up against each other in the public sphere every single second. So isn't that a challenge?
36:29 Speaker 04 Absolutely. You really bring up one of the core things that I've been puzzling over and worrying about. Because the, you know, the way that technology operates is through the algorithm. And the algorithm, you know, the algorithmic process is one that was falsely appealing to us because it said to each of us individuals, what do you want? Not to anybody else, just you particularly. What do you want? We can figure out. We can give you exactly that. So the algorithm, to put it in a blunt fashion, when you walk into a bookstore called Amazon, you're entering a bookstore nobody else has ever seen or ever will.
37:12 Speaker 04 It exists only for you. If I look for Google Egypt, I'll get a lot of stuff about Muslim Brotherhood and, you know. And if somebody else Googles it, they will get a lot of stuff about the temples of Laxar and tours of the Nile and so on. And that's because the algorithm knows who we are. But I will say that in the old days, back in before Spotify and Pandora and stuff, I used to drive around my car and I would, you know, listen to DJs. There were some I liked and some I didn't like, so I would gravitate towards the ones I liked.
37:54 Speaker 04 But the ones I liked picked a bunch of songs, some of which I liked more, some I didn't like. But the thing is, that was okay because I was in interaction with somebody else making their choices and I was interacting with another consciousness out there in reality. I think that technology has a built-in tendency to narrow each of us down to living all alone.
38:21 Speaker 04 And then that narrative that you're talking about is the narrative that creates a self for that individual loner in the prison cell constructed by the algorithm for just them.
38:39 Rund Abdelfatah? When we come back, the quest for a narrative everyone can see themselves in, and whether that's ultimately a good thing.
38:53 Speaker 10 Hi, this is Kayla Hine from Memphis, Tennessee, and you're listening to Throughline by NPR.
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40:21 Rund Abdelfatah? Part Three, The Story of Us.
40:26 Speaker 02 Even in unstable times, today is what all of history seems to have been leading up to, which gives the present moment a visceral authority that yesterday can never match. As Dwight D. Eisenhower once put it, quote, "Things are more like they are right now than they have ever been." But the present doesn't deserve the authority it enjoys. Something that is always in the process of vanishing has some nerve claiming to be the permanent real. That's one good reason to ponder history and pay attention to the past. The present, after all, is nothing but the past that will exist in the future.
41:09 Rund Abdelfatah? Tameem Ansari has written two meta-histories of the world, and he's currently contemplating a third. And I gotta be honest, the skeptic in me is kinda like, what are these attempts to define ourselves for? Why are we searching for some sort of overarching trend throughout all of human history? Is that actually possible? Like, does Tameem think he's actually figured it all out? Does he have doubts? I had to ask.
41:34 Speaker 04 Well, doubt is not quite the right word, I think, because the story that I'm telling in The Invention of Yesterday is not presenting itself as the true story of humans on Earth. It's a story. And I think, I think back to when there was just 200 of us as a little band of relatives huddled around the fire in the darkness and were telling the story to one another about us and where we came from, and you know, grandpa did this and grandma did that, and, you know, "You kid are gonna be a great hunter one day."
42:19 Speaker 04 Whatever that story was, we were telling it to one another, and by telling it, we were creating an us. That's the process I'm involved in. I'm telling a story, and when we all start telling the story of us, there will become an us.
42:34 Speaker 03 Is the us dangerous?
42:37 Speaker 04 Is the us dangerous?
42:38 Speaker 03 Can the us be dangerous? And this is the thing I've, I've grappled with, is that, is it part of creating the us as human beings to then have a them that we must fight, that we must oppose?
42:50 Speaker 04 That, that's a question that... You know, I bashed my head on the wall on that one because we have never been able to have an us without a them. We need the aliens. We need to kill them.
43:03 Speaker 03 We do have another alien, though, that you talk about. If you could maybe expand on this, which is climate change, which is this impending disaster that's coming. And we can't seem to come up with any narratives there about what that means, right? Because that is something that will impact the vast majority of us.
43:20 Speaker 04 Right, right. So I have had a thought about that. I should mention that I'm actually prepping a course, and the name of this course is The Invention of Tomorrow. So.
43:33 Speaker 03 Okay, all right.
43:34 Speaker 04 So one of the things that ideas that has come to me is that the construction of an us, the narrative that creates an us emerges out of a physical and material project that we are doing. So, you know, you have this whole superstructure of mythological reality that emerged in Egypt when the Egyptians had a huge river that they were trying to figure out how to operate with this river, you know, and they had to be an us to do that because, you know, there were thousands of them required to do little bits of different things that would somehow all fit together. But they were able to do it, and they did
44:15 Speaker 04 do it because they had one single monumental epic mythic sized project. And that ultimately, what we need is an ultimate mythic in scope project.
44:28 Speaker 03 So like a giant alien squid. That's for my fellow Watchmen fans.
44:32 Speaker 04 Think back to another much smaller, but still illuminating project, physical project that that was related to building an us. And that was a transcontinental railroad, you know, in the middle of the Civil War. This country, and Lincoln was a driver of it, they decided to build a
44:53 Speaker 04 Line, you know, real rail across uncharted wilderness that would connect the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. What a metaphor, what a mythic, you know, metaphor.
45:04 Speaker 08 Yeah, I think it's sometimes hard to see kind of the forest from the trees and and kind of come up with the story while you're sitting in it. But I think we all know we're living in historic times. Like there there are think pieces around all the time about how, you know, imagining how the future is going to look back at this time, right?
45:23 Speaker 04 Yeah.
45:24 Speaker 08 To kind of relate it back for a second to what you were telling us about sort of your feeling like you didn't quite belong in one place or another when you first maybe got to the US. Just with the benefit of time and now looking back and thinking about the story you had in your mind about yourself at that time versus the story you have now, I wonder what, whether it changed for you and whether you think that tells us anything about how on on a bigger level, the story changes potentially with with the time that passes.
45:56 Speaker 04 Uh, my sense of the of the story and my sense of my story has certainly changed continually over time. So that's all I can say. And when I look back at who I was uh fifty years ago, I'm I'm amazed at how uh how dumb I was. And and at the same time, the interesting thing is that I can look back at some of my high school papers that I wrote when I first came here, and I find myself expressing ideas very well put that I thought I discovered a month ago.
46:34 Speaker 04 Ideas that I thought I had for the first time a month ago.
46:36 Speaker 03 Wow, interesting.
46:42 Speaker 03 Kind of looking back, do you have more of a sense of um hope or despair when you're looking at the future?
46:54 Speaker 04 I think I'm sort of leaning towards hope. Because my sense of the past is that when I look at my own past, I see so many times in my life that I would love to just go back and stay there forever. But when I look at my, any scraps of writing or evidence I have, at the time, I was really in despair and I didn't, you know, I felt terrible. So it's only that way, I can think of it that way only now because I know how it came out. And we're here in the present and we don't know how it's going to come out.
47:37 Speaker 04 It's impossible not to imagine the worst. But it's also the case that evidence shows that we've been through a lot of tough stuff and come through. I think that one thing we can say about the future, the one thing we can say for sure about the future is nothing at all. We don't know nothing about it. It's up to us.
48:07 Speaker 03 That's it for this week's episode. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.
48:10 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Randa Abdel Fattah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
48:14 Speaker 03 This episode was produced by me.
48:16 Rund Abdelfatah? And me, and?
48:17 Speaker 11 Lawrence Wu.
48:18 Speaker 12 Laine Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane.
48:20 Speaker 03 Victor Ibevez.
48:22 Speaker 12 Skylar Swenson. Camila Beno. Montse Karuna. Yolanda Sanghui.
48:28 Speaker 03 Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.
48:31 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks also to Tamar Charney and Anya Grunman.
48:34 Speaker 03 This episode was mixed by Andy Huthur.
48:37 Rund Abdelfatah? Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes?
48:41 Speaker 11 Navid Marvi. Cho Fujiwara.
48:44 Speaker 08 Anya Mizani.
48:46 Speaker 03 Also, we want your voice on our show. Send us a voicemail at 872-588-8805 with your name, where you're from, and the line, "You're listening to Throughline from NPR," and we'll get you on the show. That's 872-588-8805.
49:04 Rund Abdelfatah? And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected] .
49:10 Speaker 03 Thanks for listening.
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