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 const