• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1078 0

of what we are doing changes, I no longer need to know the details of the old obsession. The circumference of a Caucasian head, the number of changes in a blue-grass song—anthropology and popular music go on, to varying degrees, without needing or wanting this information. We think of our version of a happy life as more like physics than like pop songs; we expect the people of the next century, say, to agree with our basic tenets—for instance, that broccoli is good for a happy life and that opium is bad—but they will not. Our rules for living are more like the history of pop songs. They make their weird sense only to the people of each given time period. They aren’t true. This book shows you how past myths functioned, and likewise how our myths of today function, and thus lets you out of the trap of thinking you have to pay heed to any of them. This process of examining myths is also good for sharpening our ability to see truths other than our own. We get to lose some respect for our own dogma, and to gain some respect for the dogma of other historical periods. This is a necessary and sufficient characteristic for understanding other historical eras—that is, for doing good history.

If you are looking for advice on happiness, the usual thing to do would be to find a book written by a psychologist. Most psychologists believe that people get locked into certain behaviors and feelings because of the way the world treated them when they were young. Let’s say you are anxious and demanding. Typical psychological advice would be that a whole group of people feel and act the way you do and that many individuals of this group lived in the same kind of world as yours when they were young, maybe with unreliable parents. If the advice is very insightful, or if you just get lucky, you might have a big realization. We all believe that we have to act the way we do in order for things not to come crashing down around us, but how often do we check? A big realization can show us that our guesses about the world are skewed—in this example, skewed toward thinking that other people will let us down. The realization might allow us to stop monitoring the shopping list or the office politics and just see what happens if we let everyone else do things their way. Likely as not, people will come through—on their own terms, but substantially. We all know it is exceedingly difficult to talk people out of their personality traits. But when such efforts are successful, it is because a person becomes aware of a viable alternative to their way of seeing the world. Instead of looking at the world through a narrow tube, now they can look at the world through two narrow tubes! Later, with some imagination, they may notice that there must be about six billion narrow tubes, and that big-picture reality will be available to them not by calling all the other assessments of the universe crazy or stupid, but rather by trying to accept them all as informative, and to use them all to build a patchwork vision of the whole.

Marvelously, history can work the same way. A lot of people read history so that they can get a glance at another way of seeing the world, another way of being a human being. History, too, has its explanatory methods. On the matter of history’s corset bones versus today’s skin and bones, we may note that in eras of intense family hierarchy, authoritarian governments, and dogma as an intellectual ideal, it seemed right for clothing, also, to squeeze and support you from the outside. In an era of individual rights and responsibilities, clothing is soft and accommodating, but people are told to do a lot of intense internal squeezing and controlling. It is a modern myth that a person with a lithe, toned body is better than other people, happier and healthier. We think of beliefs such as this as modern, and therefore more scientific than the claims of the past. But today, too, the cultural code of how to live and how to feel about things is just an unscientific web of symbolic cultural fantasies.

There are many ways that the past seems controlled by