Correctness to silence conservatives and the new yorkers andrew moran reports on online extremism. Check your Program Guide or visit booktv. Org for more information on everything that is airing today and tomorrow and now we kick off the weekend with tamim ansary who discusses his new book, on the history of everything. So the invention of yesterday, the invention of yesterday a 50,000year history of human culture, confict, and connection you got me at the title, all right . Even if you are not a history buff, in the scary unprecedented times it is incumbent on all of us to look back to see where we have been and how we got here now and hopefully some perspective of where we are going. This 6year investment produced a global history of the human journey which takes us from the stone age to the virtual age. The history of the world is a story we are telling one another and since there is no single circle of storytellers there must be many world histories. This dramatic journey asks us all in intertwining narratives form and inform us on one single big story of our planet and it what it might be. This book explores links and Ripple Effect that stitch the fabric of history. There is a lot of pivotal moment. Did anybody actually finish reading it because it just came out. You dont count. You dont count. All right. Okay. It is like columbuss discovery of america spark the rise of corporations and banks in europe and through the entire world into one great global drama. As an afghan american san franciscobased author draws nicely on his experiences of life in the different worlds of islam and the secular west to help leaders understand the outcomes of overlapping narratives. He examined the role of interconnection and developers of everything from boardgames to belief systems, science and multinational corporations. A wellwritten and valuable take on a diverse narrative that helped shape Human History. Of course we know him from other things, right . People have read his other books. You are a good crowd here. Preseeing this publication there have been 5 other books, road trips, games without rules, a history of afghanistan, history of the world through islamic eyes and a work of fiction, historical fiction that takes place in 1840 in kabul, and west of kabul and east of new york his memoir published in the wake of the 9 11 crisis and chronicles bicultural life. He has also written im surprised about this 6 book series for children. In your free time i dont know what you do but being here tonight is a joy. Lets put our hands together for this amazing man. [applause] i have two mikes here. Is this the way it goes now . Cspan i am not going to know which is which. I will do the best i can. Anyway, i did write childrens books and although i have been working on this book for six years, i remember the origins go back a little further. I remember when my presently 36yearold daughter jasmine was about eight, you do the math how long ago that was. At that time i normally wrote childrens books but told her children stories, made them up on the spot and had the idea then to write a childrens history of the world. I told her im going to write a history of the world and she wrinkled her brow and said didnt they already write that one . Now i want to say not only did they write that one but even though i have written one here myself i myself actually wrote another one earlier so it is really true i have been thinking about this for a long time and the way i have been thinking about it i think i can trigger off from this that for the past six years i have been working on this and occasionally people run into me and say what are you working on and i say history of the world, what are you working on and i go now, really, it doesnt improve matters when i say it is history of the world from the big bang to right now and a common response then is it must be 40,000 pages long. But that is the whole point. That is why there was this childrens history of the world idea i started with. The point is this book is shorter than the history of afghanistan that i wrote and that doesnt only reflect the fact that afghanistan is more complicated than the entire world, but also it goes right to the point because if you undertake to write the history of the world from the big bang to write now clearly you are going to leave some stuff out. What do you leave out and what do you leave in and why do you take something out and why do you leave something insecure there has to be some principle of exclusion and inclusion. I am going to suggest that for me the principle is you are including everything that tells the story and you are going to leave out stuff that gets in the way of seeing the story so the question is where do you find the through line for a story of Human History . I believe the big bang alone because i am thinking of humanity. And so around the time i first started seriously thinking of writing this book i went back to afghanistan in 2011 and when i grew up afghanistan was a synonym for the word remote. You either said remotes or afghanistan, they had the same meaning but in the air coming towards kabul i understood i am not headed towards remote. That is not happening now. Landed in kabul, the rex of former soviet tanks, big indications of american presence, cars everywhere and it feels like paris or new york, different flavor, maybe grungy or but it is one of those rural cities so then i thought okay, maybe remote isnt in kabul, you have to leave the city to find what used to be here. With some people we got in a car and drove 8 or 10 hours and got to the Central Highlands of afghanistan where those buddhas used to be that the talent and bombed out of existence and there was nothing, what is there now are some buddha shaped holes in the mountain but there is a town, somewhat substantial town. My friend said we are not stopping here. Theres a place further down the valley called the valley of the dragons. We will go there. We drove along, drove along and somewhere along the way in this desert im looking up and i see a glistening of white lines on a village clinging to the hillside. We kind of run out of road, following the tracks of earlier vehicles and going up to this Little Village we dont see much, maybe some tracks but it feels like maybe this is remote. I am saying what is this little glistening white line . I asked for binoculars and what i see up there is a satellite dish. I am like what do they do with a satellite dish . They operate a television. How do they operate a television, theres no electrical lines. They have solar panels. How do they get solar panels . They have a motorcycle, how do they pay for this cute you a lot of times opium being grown here and opium is kind of as good a currency as gold in a sense. It is infinitely something visible you can pay for small things with a little bit of opium, it doesnt dk, you can store it for next year. What happens with the opium . It goes to pakistan, it is processed into more refined versions of the drug, then it goes across turkey and europe and some comes to san francisco. Im like okay. There is some kind of a network that connects, this Little Village of their in the valley theres lots of programming coming out of kabul. The most popular show right then was afghan star. Some of you probably know what afghan star is that how many dont . Afghan star signal all over afghanistan, they sent out to a playoff championship sort of thing and finally one person is by cell phone vote of the audience chosen the winner of the year and that is the afghan star. It is obviously cant off of American Idol which was cloned out of british pop idol. Wade, british pop idol, afghan star, American Idol, at that same time i am browsing, reading information and finding that time, that year i was told 80 of childrens toys sold to kids for that year were made in china and china, one of its products was inexpensive motorcycles made just for the market in that valley. At that point i thought back and said 50,000 years ago, i didnt put a date on it, before villages and cities and all that stuff, the human animal on the planet existed as small bands of relatives basically and they were probably not much bigger than 180, 200 people and they lived in no fixed spot, roamed around, forged and hundred and probably knew other bands of relatives in areas where they dramatically migrated but didnt have any idea of thousands of other bands of humans on the planet. If that is the beginning, lets just start there, and then this is where we ended up, the planet is one spaghetti of human lives where anything that happens to any human or that any human does anyplace might have Ripple Effects that goes out and has some effect on somebody else anywhere else on the planet and on that planet there is no place left that is unaltered by our presence so i thought okay, that is maybe the trajectory, we could take that as a trajectory or through line, that is when i started writing this book and in the course of thinking about it and thinking about how this ever increasing interconnectedness took place, what i gradually sort of donned on me, and it is obvious that i will say it anyhow, the interconnection the interconnectedness did not just evenly spread out. Wasnt like we are living in a still pool of water and little ripples, that is not how it is. The human world consists not of still waters but lots of whirlpools and each whirlpools some group of people that are talking to each other but not much to somebody else. In the end i thought there are three things at play here, everybody lives in some environment and everything they do has something to do with how they get what they need out of that environment whatever it may be and repel whatever it is out there that might hurt them and as humans, always from the time we were able to say okay, this is the human species we did it by making and improving tools. Those are two things, environment and tools but theres one other thing, the third part of the story. Let me just some of you have started reading this. I dont know if i should read the beginning here but i will go ahead and read a little passage from chapter 1. One day in the fall of 1940 four french teenagers were roaming the woods near their home in Southwestern France searching for a legendary buried treasure they had heard about when the dog, robot scurried into a depression formed by uprooted tree and began pining at something. The teenagers rushed over hoping, but no, it wasnt an old treasure chest, it was only a small, dark opening in the ground so they did what teenagers do, what i might certainly have done myself at that age, they squeeze through the opening to see where it led. They had flashlights with them which was a good thing because the whole went down a long way before opening at last into a cavernous room and there, flashing their lights on rounds, they saw on the walls and ceiling 15 or 20 feet above their wonder struck eyes because the life paintings of buffalos and deer and other animals rendered gracefully and realistically in black, red, ocher and yellow. They found one of the worlds most spectacular galleries of paleolithic art. Spectacular but not unique. Cave paintings like this have been found all over the world since 1868 and are still being found in hundreds of sites from spain to libya to indonesia. In many cases the paintings in a given cave were made over the course of thousands of years. People were coming there to paint generation after generation but the oldest of them were made about 40,000 years ago and the odds thing is those earliest paintings were already quite sophisticated. Then i go through some examples. The thing is it isnt like you turn up examples of crude beginnings of doodling and then thousands of years later people learned how to make a kind of vaguely animal no. We were not that much distinguishable from neanderthals and other be appeal primates we shared the planet with and then suddenly humans took an uptick and that raises the question, what happened, what caused that . Something mustve happened 4050,000 years ago, what was it . My proposal is we came into true language and true language is not the ability to make words but do something. You know, my cat, raul knows 10 or 15 words. There is one word he knows which means food and he says that he gets food. Cocoa the gorilla, using sign language actually knew it thousand words or somewhere in that range so cocoa could say things like ice cream and crows can make up new words for things that appear in their environment, they can make up a word that among the crows they now mean that particular basket that came heard one of us, farmer brown coming. But words like that are just the significant level they are not different from pointing. What im talking about when i say true language is vocabulary embedded in grammar and syntax. What i mean is words can start referring directly to things in the world and start having a relationship with other words and let me just say a little about that. The meaning of many words is not their relationship to something the physical world but their relationship to other worlds. Developing language meant using words as if they were the object named, words could then separate from things and have an existence of their own. Once that happened a whole world of words, parallel to the world of things, two language users could enter that world and interact within it as if it were the world itself. Picture two guys talking. One says lets meet for lunch tomorrow at that taco place in portland and the other says i am game, what time, around noon . Nothing in a physical setting corresponds to any of the words these guys have spoken, tomorrow, lunch, noon, what could they. 2 . Nothing. Those are not even the most distinctively linguistic of their utterances. Consider left and apps and about, those words dont point to anything anywhere. They exist only in the linguistic universe they share with tomorrow at lunch and noon. When we acquire true language we graduated beyond making sounds that triggered our buddies to run or fight or salivate. We elevated our game to making sounds that conjured up in our fellow humans imagination a simulacrum of the whole world, when two guys talk about getting tacos tomorrow at noon they are not only interacting in the world they are each imagining, they are imagining the same world. If they werent they wouldnt both show up at the same place and time tomorrow. That is the truly incredible thing, they are imagining the same world and i drank that on by sitting here we are, 40 or 50 people, we are not experiencing the material physical world directly, we are experiencing a model of the world we created together and we share and think is the same world. In the course of human cultures developing you can trace how, for example people who lived on the nile river, because of the way the nile is, this wonderful waterway protected from all other things, the Sahara Desert is that way, another desert that way, big cataracts of waterfalls that way so 600 miles of a river that feeds the soil all along it and that river is a current that steadily moves north and over that river is a breeze that constantly blows south so if anyplace along that river if you have a boat and put it in the water take the sale down you are going north and if you put the sale up you are going south. No wonder all along that river emerges a monolithic and sort of homogenous civilization. I will not go into it but go to mesopotamia it is a different kind of river and went again people are there because they can grow crops there but the culture is different. Because their idea of the world is tuned into the environment in which they are living, the indus river, read the book, youll see it is a different kind of river. In these various environments there are worldviews building up and when i speak of worldviews, to a large extent, what i am talking about is when people are talking more to one another than they are to others out there who ever maybe their stories recirculate and reinforce and weave together until they not only have a narrative but a metanarrative, the story of the world they all feel themselves to be living in and situate themselves within and the history of the world, one of the things you can see happening and therefore one way in which you can construct a story out of it is by looking at the way these imaginary worlds, i will call them that, these worlds that are collectively constructed and communally inhabited but experienced as individuals, these Little Things start someplace and as the groups expand the world expands. And at some point they run into an expanding worldview from some other place and those overlap and things happen. Not necessarily fighting. When you have people occupying different worldviews and become aware, someone else over there, another way of thinking about the world, one of the things that happened is curiosity. Wonder what is going on over there. I am going to keep the fire one, im going to cut to talk to those guys. A differently which, cant talk to them. There is that thing that happens. Sometimes two groups trade and form a relationship that way. Or sometimes one group wants with the other group has and then there might be some fighting. If you look at the history of the world you see this constant expansion i dont want to call them bubbles, more like clouds of ideas that are coherent internally and have structure and they grow and overlap and sometimes clash. Sometimes they interweave and become one bigger narrative and i would say these narratives even when they interweave the ghosts of them stay in the bigger narratives so what we have today is a planet on which it doesnt matter if someone is living on the nile river and someone is living on the mississippi, location doesnt matter, these narratives can be anywhere in the world and are all overlapping at the same time and we are negotiating how to figure out the big story. I will add one more thing before i okay. Maybe i wont add one more thing. I will say this. A narrative we share with other people and how we handle other people, a coordinated group that is able to cope with the environment that consists of the unknown aspect of it all. The narrative we share with other people is sort of a social self. A social self implies a social other. There is a self and there is always other. Self and other is not necessarily warfare. Self and other is just a condition of humanity. If there is a sense that there is not going to be enough, resources are thin, someone is going to have to be excluded from the dinner table. That is when it becomes more the case people start looking around and saying who am i not going to share with if it comes to that . I think these narratives or to put it another way, culture, is the significance of it is it is how people sort when the violence might be coming because of resources or the other possibility, the violence might be coming because the narrative we are living in is growing incoherent. It doesnt explain what is going on anymore and now people are at a loss as to how to construct an identity living in not a coherent constellation of ideas but in a chaotic cloud of ideas and at that point you might see people clustering into smaller constellations so it makes sense, it can be somebody they know inside that clouded that is another thing we are doing. When i have been presenting this book, i did an interview in portland at a Radio Station that called me and to my bafflement, they werent interested in the big bang or any of the stuff i just talked about. They kind of interrupted me and said so what does this have to do with the impeachment of trump . [laughter] but you know, it does, actually. That is a lens through which you can understand things. I will give you two examples. Narratives are constructed of independent or both of ideas that all connect and seemed to reinforce each other. The ideas themselves can be part of a different narrative. When two ideas, a way the connection seems to be unavailable that might have some meaning to people in terms of interpreting their experiences that is a narrative beginning to form and i will look at the idea of guncontrol. The idea that people shouldnt have guns for they should be regulated or whatever that question is and lets say the gun thing is one idea and that gun thing is tied to we have a constitution that says Second Amendment everybody can have guns. Then we can argue but it says wellregulated militia. It is all related to the constitution and whether this fits in or not. Quite separately from that i am aware, you are aware another idea has been forming in the last 10 or 20 years and that idea has to do with the federal government and eventually i will say government in general, when those guys took over the bird observatory, bird sanctuary, are you aware of that . They took it over and said this is our land, youre taking it back. The federal government is the other. Any of the other idea floating about the people should or should not have guns. There is an attractive force between these two ideas and one near two would be we live in a country that is governed by the rule of law so when we talk about whether guns should be controlled or not or prohibited or whatever, we can assume within the narrative that we have assured and vested interest in a society in which people are not shooting each other. So we want to think about, this is a guaranteed right, so how do we guarantee that right and preserve the thing we all want which is a Harmonious Society in which people are not getting massacred. If that is the way youre thinking about it, its pretty obvious that assault rifles, that does not fit the narrative. But what of guncontrol is an issue within the other narrative which says the government is somebody else and we will someday go to work in separate and now the idea that nobody should prohibit us from having guns has a different meaning in that narrative and that narrative when you think about guncontrol makes perfect sense to say you cannot control us from having assault rifles they can bump out 50 bullets a minu minute. We should be able to defend ourselves not against criminals but against the government. Im not saying thats a fullfledged narrative that exist but the makings of it are there and it could come into existence. The other thing that that guy in portland asked me about was immigration. An border wall. We talk about a lot but if you look at the question through the lens of narrative i think a lot of things get clarified. In my experience, the border wall proposes as a solution to the problem was a curious thing because there was not really a problem until the solution was proposed. Once that proposal was on the table were gonna build the big wall and a lot of the conversation, gradually excepted there is a problem into the people who are against the wall said its not a way to solve it. Theres gotta be a better way. But from that point of view if there were the real problem with immigrants coming into the country where drugs or something, the wall is like what they did in 2000 bc. Its an absurd idea. If you look into the lens of narratives. You can see more or less immediately that the la wall isa metaphor. In an embodiment of a story, part of a narrative and that narrative is the anxiety that youre feeling and that im feeling is because the other is out there incoming and theyre going to do these things as they come in, they will bring drugs, taker jobs, do this, that. I think there is a lot of freefloating anxiety and the society for a lot of reasons. Ill toss in some of the factors, the economy of the world is going through such a phone model change that i think nobody knows what theyre going to be doing 20 years from now or ten years from now. So that is something. The technology is changing the social relationship to people in such a way it is completely apocalyptic changes. In gender relations and traditions of how you build a family or any of that stuff. There is a number of these things that are happening right now and people are anxious that they dont recognize the world that theyre in and they recognize less the world 11 year two years from now. In those kinds of problems are ones that nobody can actually as a single human being, its easy to just be helpless in the face of that. Now here comes a guy that tax the anxiety idea to something you can build, that now not all people and i would bet not many people in this room but i could be wrong but not me anyhow, a lot of people for them its like now its been physical ice and thats an expression of how i feel and thats an expression that theres something you can do to stay safe. I would say once the story of the journal that exists in the story that were threatened by the mother and we need a wall to separate us. That is a basic narrative. Once the idea exist, i might read a little more, once an existing can easily attract other ideas to grow more robust that narrative. Among them some of the other hazard gun aside so we have to clear out the other in here. Now you have the potential to move. Let me get into this sort of thing you can see the pattern of this sort of thing happening in history in various places in various contexts, one would be what happened after the crusades. What happened during the crusades and after the crusades. Let me see if i can find it. When the crusades start, europe was a place where everybody lived in the local spartan had the ever. This is a project thatw people from all parts of europe and they found themselves bumping shoulders with others and will say experience was a marvelous thing and people dressed differently and were all on the same type. And were part of the big project. The crusades open european sensibility to a sense of common identity and as christians stream to the holy land they brushed up all of that. They were all on the same side, but same side required there be one other side. The more minorly the two sites, the stronger the identity shared among europeans. They did not have to do any actual crusading to do any pride of ownership in the heroic quest. Just as one doesnt have to play football when the home team wins. Only a minority went east to fight but everyone knew there was an east to go to an award to fight. The crusades thus help the birth of europe by knowing the single thing they werent in for the Diverse People came to a stronger sense of single social whole that they were. And new social consolation was gaining definition. An identity shift by the other gains coherence by eliminating all traces of the other from itself. It is no surprise that as muslims took back the leblanc the crusades did not and. They shifted to europe. And there turned inward. At 1231, they created a judicial organ to sniff out heresies within. They spotted two such impurities right away in france, they were the alba begins he is in the waldensians. Two movements of religions rivals that claim poverty and selfdenial were essential features of christian life. Any bishop lowly and luxury could see how that religious was. Encouraged by the imposition, the french king launch crusades against both of these heresies crippling one and wiping out the other entirely. Later the imposition identified witchcraft as a major contamination, tens of thousands of which is were found improved at the stake over several centuries. Most of them outwardly husband women. They accuse witchcraft to the mother which is thus ensuring that the campaign to wipe out which is whenever reduce the supply of which is. It was important that the supply not shrink further merging consolation needed which hunting to help construct itself. Then a more extreme version came into existence in spain, a spanish inquisition and that is the place where the crusades were european succeeded that failed in the west and they turned into a stumble. And in spain the christian armies of ferdinand and isabella, they drove the muslims out and they turn the peninsula into a christian kingdom and then they set up the spanish inquisition in the hunt pretty much run out of muslims because those guys flood and there is one trace of otherness left in spain and it was the jews into the spanish inquisition really focused on hunting down juice because you converted and forced the jews to calm you down juice. So then he was the other that you can have is the force that was solidifying yourself this. So thats where and when the theory developed or began to develop that jewishness is not a set of beliefs, it was blood quality and no matter what you said you believed, you cannot eliminate your jewishnes jewish. You cannot contribute by claiming to become short. Then it became a question of mathematically calculating what percentage of your blood if you are a product of a jewish marriage. In that idea getting into the narrative never died, it popped up again and again, in european history. Im going to stop there and ask, do you have any quick questions, were almost out of time. [applause] if you are going to ask you question these gentlemen from cspan will be coming to just let you know questions. Me what your vision of the future, just taint everything that you talked about. My vision of the future, two things i would say, we dont know what the future will be. That is not part, from what i can see now there are crews that are running and some are running in the direction of saving us from ourselves and some are running in the direction of destroying us and i think its a race between the two or maybe more than two of the directions that people are going into. Technology is one of the problems of the age, the social impact of technology but i cannot deny that technology is also solving problem after problem, so one of the Things Technology is doing is making alarming advances in the direction of replacing our parts with machinery and we could still going to that. And even apart from that, think about algorithms and how theyve invaded the way that we do things in their always encountering some curated version of herself and when we go to buy but the machine of the ages digital devices and we ourselves have become digitalized more and more. Theres a blending occurring between technology and humans. At the same time we are gobbling up the resources in the way of life is creating changes in the planet that looks like it might be an extinction event going on. Throughout there, if this happens it is not the will destroy life on earth, will destroy human life on earth. Life is really tough, life will still be there. But we will be gone if anyone cares about that. I kind of do. Id like us to stick around but theres a race going on. Bring the boom in. I have not read the book yet, i just got it. But it seems like were talking about tribalism and sometimes your tribe is 200 people and then it can be a clan in the nationstate and then the world and in times of stress people seem to pull back. So how do you see tribalism playing into this whole thing. I think tribalism is one word for it and when i speak of narrative im speaking the same thing in a way, why i shy away from nationstates tribalism is because tribes is the thing. If we borrow that word we dont have anything left for tribes that are not nations or states. In each of these forms of social entities that are capable of forming intention in carrying out plans and its their own plans and we individuals are doing our parts to make the whole thing work. Thats bigger than tribes. For example corporations are one of these things too. People can come to corporations and every person in the corporation can be replaced by other people and yet the corporation is still the corporation. So its not those individuals. Theres a structural element that keeps that inexistent as itself. And i think a narrative like that social consolation is one of them. But whatever word you use, narrative like that is similar in nature to a biological organism. And that has a propensity to operate in a way to continue to exist and to continue to prosper and grow if it can. And when you look at how people behave within a narrative you kinda see how that works but you have to read the book. First of all i want to comment that the beginning is a great book of forgotten dreams and what you mentioned today reminded me something to read ten years that country ceased to exist a long time ago because the corporation came to affect and people have to have something to hold onto so they kept telling us but its actually the corporations are now controlling for the last 20 years because markets crashed maca questions. I was wondering a group of people have to have in other that they persecuted in order to keep their identity. I want to say thats not what im saying. That can happen, the mere fact that a group as itself that it doesnt need to persecute some other. [inaudible] and we have little groups that are inside of bigger groups and i just want to toss out one final metaphor, human body let me just put it in the bunchs way. A human body of living cells that are organs so you would not want those organs to banish and be one big bag of human cells. When all want to be the same where parts of bigger things. We have to keep striving to see yourselves not only as just awesome, our social identity and appreciate and see how were interacting and into related to bigger social self. Thats what im saying. I was wondering you mentioned the idea of curiosity. That to me is a big thing because then it helps to counteract the fear of the unknown. If youre curious youre looking outward whereas when you talk about anxiety it is more of a withdrawing inward psychologically. Absolutely. And you know, all of Human History these two processes have been going on simultaneously than the other one processes were always decatur tentacles out and seeing whats out there. And we are also periodically closing ranks and saying theyre coming. And bring out the swords and they have to be ready. Both of those are going on and sometimes its more of one and more of the other. How does the narrativebased argument account for the phenomenon that great quantity of people will follow a single leader right off a cliff and is there a Tipping Point where the insanity stops . And waits to go off the cliff and start over or is it not the leader, a cohesion and some random charismatic or not creature takes the reins . Its a combination of the two. I think one ingredient is incoherence of the current narrative. In the other ingredient is someone who spots away to supply the missing pieces so all this incoherent in all these random bits of dust floating around form up into a constellation. So its still out there but they somehow added to a meeting. It can be good or it can be bad. I dont think we say a hitler causes nazism. Nazism is and grows out of the circumstance that is there and the ideas that people are putting out there is to what is my explanation of all of this and someone says this and someone says that and then it comes to a point where its close to a Tipping Point. I wont go into it too much with this is related to the concept of a paradigm. And in france the paradigm is a big theory that explains everything of what scientist you and theyre looking for ways to fill in the gaps and complete the paradigm. Theres ways to things that dont fit you set them aside and dont think about them. The things that dont fit keep increasing in that connection between the things youre saying get more tender less and eventually the paradigm is in trouble and then it can be that one idea can pull together a whole bunch of these things at which point some of the dust that was significant before are irrelevant now. In some pieces were anomalies can become a crucial part of the big picture. Its a question of apparent doesnt change gradually, it changes suddenly and until that moment when it changes, when the last little bit, nobody sees it, its not there until its turned into dust. Theres huge numbers of people . The huge numbers of people have found visas in the anxiety of their lives. The huge numbers of people who follow some horrible leader is not as amazing as you might think it to be when you think about the fact that huge numbers of people for some reason or another find out they go in the army in march off and most get killed. And usually most people dont think thats possible to explain, no happens all the time. This might be a ridiculous question but would you say that you might be implying that in order for us to have a Better Future and not extinguishing ourselves that we might be moving towards a more harmonious shared narrative global narrative or collection of more harmonious narratives and if so do you have any suggestions about how to facilitate that . [laughter] yes to part one and no to part two. [laughter] really i think no person can make that change happen. Its a process going on and partly we have to be patient with the fact that new narrative does not come into existence by agency or in sudden ways, lots of little ideas have to stroll together and so on. So i would only say this however, the political experience of the society and current time that the thing that can defeat a narrative is only another narrative. Its really important to be responding to the things that are supporting the narrative you dont like and drawing on the common expenses in crafting a new narrative that explain the all the goes in a different direction. I think what well do an answer people want to ask when they get the book signed. This always happens. What were going to do if its okay were going to stop the q a on a big public scene and thank you very much for coming and [applause] with tv has life we can coverage at the Miami Book Fair starting saturday november 23 and sunday november 24. Featuring author discussions and interaction viewer call in segments. On saturday november 23 at 11 0n senator tom cotton talks about Arlington National cemetery. Foosusan rice discusses her life and career and megan felt roper on the Westborough Baptist church. Patrick on the chair of constitutional studies at the university of notre dame on liberalism. In wired magazine Andy Greenberg discusses Russian Hackers and on sunday november 24 at 10 30 a. M. Eastern our live coverage continues with former secretary of state in the Obama Administration richard sprinkle on the disinformation and international politics. Some prizewinning journalist david on the 1950s red scare. Eleanor randolph discusses new york city mayor michael bloomberg. Deputy director of the cia Counterterrorism Center talks about the state of cia detention centers. In former professional Football PlayerDon Mcpherson on toxic masculinity. Watch live coverage of the Miami Book Fair november 23 and november 24. On cspan2 booktv. West virginia is located in the southern part of the state and we are the capital city. Its almost like a spotlight for people to come and visit. And as part of west virginia. West virginians are seen as unsophisticated and lowquality and it comes from west virginia. The cspan city tour is on the road exploring the american story and this week and we take you to charleston west virginia. Youve always done the heavy lifting . Whether it be the timbering after the civil war the built most of the east coast and it basically made this deal in both the guns and ships and factories that defended us and built this great economy. [crowd boos] join us today at noon eastern booktv and sunday at 2 00 p. M. On American History tv as a cspan city tour looks at the history and literary life of charleston west virginia. It is a pleasure to introduce david tonight who needs no introduction but we will do this anyway. The last time we introduced the speaker the economic club,