A New Paradigm for Human History: Part 1 - Why Animals Don't Have History
We know that other animals don’t have history, only humans
do. What exactly is history? Clearly it is not the study of individual human
beings. Unlike other animals humans collectively create and maintain knowledge
which includes technology, laws and culture.

The knowledge of how
to grow food, of how to produce tools, of how to heal ourselves, in fact the
knowledge of how to even speak and then write are all maintained collectively.
Almost none of the items we use are produced individually. The skill and work
of several millions of people is involved in the production of every article,
and what enables this production and distribution is the collectively held and
maintained knowledge.
This collective knowledge has been increasing and developing
continuously for the past several million years and is leading to unification
and systemisation of more and more people leading to even higher knowledge.
Thus several thousands of years ago people lived in small band societies of
only a few dozen people. Now we are part of a single global society. Several
thousand years ago the knowledge – technology and wealth produced - was very
low. Now we can travel to other planets and control sub-atomic processes.
In other words history
is the study of human unification and systemization, thus the evolution and development of human society. We study the changes to
and the development in the collective knowledge of humans and the resulting
wealth that is produced by them. This wealth and knowledge are what bind us
together as society. Not only this but the knowledge level is increasing as
more and more groups coalesce into larger societies.
In this context the focus of history has to
move away from studying the actions of individual persons and events. The
methods of study used in ecology, weather and other systems have to be employed
here too. The first step in this direction would be to create a proper
framework to organise various stages in the development of the collective
knowledge and wealth. This would help us to delineate the various stages in the
systemisation, thus each stage indicating a more systemised and integrated
human society.
We will discuss these details in later articles.
Comments
Post a Comment