Lightbulb Moments in Human History tracks humanity’s big ideas and the eccentricities of those who conceived them. Along the way you’ll find answers to questions such as:
- Why did the Sumerians have temple prostitutes?
- Just how psychotic was the God of the Old Testament?
- Why did parents in ancient Greece encourage their young sons to take older male lovers?
- And what on earth inspired the Mayans to have tobacco enemas?
Funny. Irreverent. Never boring. This is not the history you were taught in school. Scott Edwin Williams’ Lightbulb Moments in Human History engages, entertains, and provides hope that while times are tough, we’re not all going to hell in a handbasket.
When I was a six-year-old ginger-haired boy obsessed with dinosaurs and cavemen, the biggest idea in human history became reality.
Before dawn on Monday, 21 July 1969, I jumped out of bed and careened barefoot into the kitchen with one question on my mind.
Mum was already at the stove, her beloved AM radio playing in the background.
“Have they landed yet?” I asked.
“I haven’t really been listening.” Mum was paying more attention to the frying eggs.
Dad walked in, buttoning his shirt. “Have they landed yet?”
I shrugged.
We turned our attention to the radio. There was a lot of static, beeps, and men saying things I didn’t understand, and then:
Houston, Tranquility Base Here. The Eagle has Landed.
That I understood. Armstrong and Aldrin had landed on the Moon. What a relief. I’d been worried the astronauts would suffer the same fate as the lizard I’d tried to launch a month before during the Queen’s Birthday fireworks. Enclosed in a gumball capsule insulated with modelling clay and strapped to a skyrocket, I’d sent the reptilian Neil Armstrong soaring skywards, only for the inevitable explosion to ensure ‘Neil’ didn’t make it back to Earth alive.
In a few hours, the commentator informed us, Neil and Buzz would step outside the Eagle, the lunar module, and step onto the Moon’s surface.
“Come on, get your uniform on, Scotto!”
“But Mum, I want to watch the moonwalk on TV!” I could see Dad was sympathetic, but he knew better than to contradict Mum.
“If you don’t go to school, you’ll never get to the Moon yourself.”
Snap. If I was going to grow up to be an astronaut, I needed to do well at school. I trudged off to get dressed.
It was difficult to concentrate in class. The moonwalk was all some kids could talk about. Others not so much:
“Who cares?” said Stevie, who always looked grubby no matter how early in the day.
All I could think about were the astronauts in the Eagle, readying themselves for the EVA, which I knew stood for Extra-Vehicular Activity. Luckily, my teacher, Mrs Landy, decided that this historical event was must-see TV. I was jammed into a classroom, eyes glued to a flickering black and white television mounted on a tall, wheeled metal stand. It must have been a huge deal, because teachers only rolled out the TV set for special occasions.
“Quiet down, boys and girls! You’re about to watch something very special,” Mrs Landy said, struggling to adjust the rabbit ears to fine-tune the snowy picture. I sat with the other Grade One students in Cronulla Public School, waiting for Neil Armstrong to step off the foot of the Lunar Module.
“Boring!” Stevie was wriggling next to me and taking core samples from deep inside his nose.
“Shut up.” I dug him in the ribs. “Just watch.”
The TV commentator breathlessly informed us that Neil Armstrong was exiting the lunar module. I watched in awe as the blurry footage showed Armstrong climbing down the ladder before stopping and hesitating at the bottom rung. Then, at 12:56 p.m. Sydney time, he stepped into history.
And that was it. A human was on the Moon. Humanity had succeeded in its greatest technological achievement. At that moment, a small but significant part of my brain was frozen in time.
When it comes to space, I will forever be six years old. That’s why I’m not angry when billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson spend their billions on seemingly quixotic trips into the void. Because, if I had billions of dollars, that’s exactly what I’d do.
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As I grew older, I began to wonder how we went from caveman to spaceman in such a geologically short span of time. In particular, how did the sequence begun millions of years ago with primitive stone tools develop into a technology capable of landing humans on another celestial body? These two disparate achievements share one similarity at the core of their DNA.
Each was the brainchild of humanity.
Humans had accomplished this amazing achievement by building on the discoveries of their predecessors. The heritage of space travel was traceable: Before being headhunted by NASA, Wernher von Braun had developed rocket technology for the Nazis, but he owed a debt to the pioneering rocketry of Robert Goddard. Both Von Braun and Goddard built on the work of the medieval Chinese rocket makers, and also owed much to the work of Sir Isaac Newton.
Of course, Sir Isaac had his own debts.
Lightbulb Moments: On the Shoulders of Giants
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Sir Isaac Newton wrote these words in 1675, 294 years before the Moon landing. He was acknowledging the debt his lightbulb moments, the laws of motion and universal gravitation, owed to giants such as Galileo and Copernicus. Newton understood that only a handful of new ideas truly stand alone. Occasionally, very occasionally, someone gets a flash of inspiration that leads to a genuinely new breakthrough, but otherwise, we build on the work of others. When conceiving big ideas, we humans walk the fine line between inspiration and plagiarism towards immortality. This is one of humanity’s superpowers.
So, what do I regard as ‘lightbulb moments?’ They are big ideas which initiate world-changing paradigm shifts. Therefore, throughout this book I’ll use the terms ‘lightbulb moments’ and ‘big ideas’ interchangeably. Sometimes they are creative flashes of epiphany. Sometimes they arise in response to existential problems. Sometimes, they’ve been hiding in plain sight just waiting for someone to notice. They are neither good nor evil, but can make civilisations rise or fall. They can be crude, three-million-year-old stone tools, spiritual concepts, mind-bending thought experiments, or the International Space Station.
Most lightbulb moments are elaborations on existing ideas. One such example is writing, which started life in Mesopotamia around 3400 BC as a practical method of doing business, and evolved into a powerful method of storytelling. Others are created through the synthesis of two or more existing ideas. Collective learning is an excellent example of this process. Three big ideas: spoken language, the invention of writing, and the development of teaching combine to give us the even bigger idea from whence, arguably, all other big ideas are born. Through collective learning, human ingenuity spans the sciences, religion, philosophy, engineering, law, the humanities, and the social sciences.
Collective learning allows humans to preserve and share information. It allows them to pass it down to their descendants, providing a link from the past and a connection to the future. Collective learning means each generation doesn't have to literally reinvent the wheel.
Or the toaster.
Collective learning also means that ideas can be continually refined, which is a critical process in progress. For example, the concept that ‘All men are created equal’ has changed the way we look at the world. But it took a long time for people to consider that ‘all humans are created equal,’ and honestly, we haven’t done a very good job following through on that.
For 99.9999% of human history, women, poor people, and anyone who wasn’t white weren’t considered equal. While we might be closer than ever before to getting there, we’re not close enough. Once conceived, the concept of human equality grew and spawned other big ideas, such as communism, modern democracy, the human rights, women’s rights and anti-slavery movements.
However, not all big ideas are intrinsically positive. The invention of writing, for example. How can the idea that gave us the Hobbit, Harry Potter and Hamlet be anything but good? Well, Mein Kampf, anyone? Writing is only as virtuous as the person who puts pen to paper. The same goes for rockets. The only differences between a Moonshot and a ballistic missile launch are intent, trajectory and payload.
The Four Domains of Lightbulb Moments
Throughout this book, I will categorise lightbulb moments into four domains: STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), Religion, Educational, and Cultural. Like the examples below, all of history’s big ideas can be sorted into at least one of these domains (see Table 1). Many can be categorised under more than one domain, such as religious education (Religious and Educational), or building megaprojects like Stonehenge (Religious, Cultural and STEM).
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Table 1: The Four Domains of Lightbulb Moments (S.E.W.)
I’m not suggesting this is groundbreaking stuff. It’s just a convenient way for me to explain my thinking. I offer no judgements as to whether one domain’s ideas are of greater value than others, as that would be unconsciously biased towards concepts I find important.
From time to time, I’ll refer to these domains, but I’ll do so as little as possible. Years of wading through educational theories has given me a deep loathing of all domains, taxonomies, stages, cycles, and hierarchies, yadda, yadda, yadda. They are usually the realm of self-important, self-promoting egotists, and I don’t take myself that seriously. For that reason, I absolutely, positively refuse to personalise them as Williams’ Four Domains of Lightbulb Moments. In fact, if I start referring to them as such, I give permission for you, dear reader, to approach me at a book signing and punch me in the head.
When it comes to assessing the impact of these lightbulb moments, it is most easily done through the lens afforded by Big History.
Big History
When it comes to history, big is the new small.
Since history was first recorded, historians maintained a laser focus on minutiae, which has reliably bored the shit out of generations of schoolchildren. In the race for tenure and relevance, historians zoomed in closer and closer. Close enough to see the clogged pores in Henry VIII’s nose. Historical periods had the crap analysed out of them, spawning extreme specialities and obscure papers, such as Devourers of Men’s Flesh: The Uncanny Representations of Irish Cannibalism in the Elizabethan Era by Marzena Keating.
Against this backdrop, enter Big History, a term coined in the 1990s by historian David Christian. Big History is a way of looking at long periods of time from a satellite’s view to assemble a big picture view of the past.
Big History examines history from the Big Bang to the present day. Rather than sweating the small stuff, big historians use a multidisciplinary approach combining scientific, sociological, historical, and geographical concepts to investigate long-term trends and patterns. Big History is structured around eight fundamental thresholds, which are:
1: The Big Bang
2: The First Stars
3: New Chemical Elements
4: The Earth and Solar System
5: Life on Earth
6: Humans
7: Agriculture
8: The Modern Revolution.
The limited scope of Lightbulb Moments in Human History means we can safely ditch the first thirteen-or-so billion years and enter at Threshold 6: Humans. Depending on which version of the theory you see, sometimes Threshold 6 is called ‘Collective Learning.’ Those who’ve been paying attention will notice I’ve already used that term a number of times. That’s because, from a Big History perspective, collective learning is what separates humans from most life on Earth. However, as we will see in Chapter One, not all life...
My Lightbulb Moment
Lightbulb Moments in Human History is a big and often chequered history of some of humanity’s biggest ideas. It is not and cannot be a complete history of every consequential idea of all time. In keeping with the theme of accessibility, I’ve only chosen big ideas I found impactful and interesting. There have been enough dry histories full of dates, wars, and kings. Having said that, sometimes there will be dates, wars, and kings, but only when they are accompanied by compelling and/or amusing stories. When an historical story is contested, I make no apologies for choosing the more entertaining option.
At this point, I should offer full disclosure: I’m a Gen X white straight cisgender male who was born in the 1960s into a middle-class family in an affluent area of an affluent country. As such, this book comes with a huge dollop of implicit biases, which I’ve tried to minimise.
In this endeavour, I stand precariously on the shoulders of giants. Unlike Sir Isaac, my ‘giants’ aren’t all scientists: I drew influence from the works of writers such as Yuval Noah Harari, Jared Diamond, Marlene Zuk, David Christian, Susan Wise Bauer, Emma Southon, and Rutger Bregman. Equally, I’m influenced by those of a less serious bent, such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and writers like Greg Jenner, John O’Farrell, and Mark Forsyth. I did extensive research, but I wanted this to be an accessible history, so I haven’t burdened it with loads of footnotes. However, for those interested, I include an extensive bibliography.
I believe that lightbulb moments usually make the world a better place. While it may be naïve to think that human ingenuity will solve the ills of the world, to be fair, it wouldn’t be the first time human ideas came to the rescue. In 1798, English economist Thomas Malthus predicted that agricultural production would not be able to keep up with population growth, and this would inevitably lead to worldwide famine and death. Given the farming methods of Mathus’ day (and his overestimation of population growth) he had a point. Fast forward to today, however, and big ideas have enabled humans to implement agricultural and technological improvements that have increased the productivity of farms, thus avoiding the Malthusian Trap.
Progressivist views of the world were popular in the eighteenth and nineteen centuries, but fell into disrepute in the twentieth. It is fashionable to simply deny that the human condition is improving. Many reputable academics hold complex philosophical views. I could go down the rabbit hole here, but I’d be talking in ever decreasing circles about stuff the general reader might find tedious (and would give me a headache).
In the world of professional historians, the idea of viewing history as a perpetual series of improvements has long since fallen out of favour. The concept is often dismissed in universities as oversimplified, ‘weak’ history. Ouch. In my defence, I believe history is more like the stock market: ups and downs, but with a steady long-term uptick.
However, I understand where the historians are coming from: For 95% of our history, humans were hunter-gatherers. If human history is indeed an unbroken sequence of growth, how do we account for millennia of seemingly zero development? Collective learning started off at a crawl. From our perspective, for thousands of years humanity’s intellectual property seemed limited to knowledge of survival tactics and how to flake the perfect stone tool. However, as we’ll see, even though early humans weren’t splitting the atom, they did the heavy lifting of inventing language, teamwork, and many other things we take for granted. These were big ideas without precedent.
In time, humankind’s collective knowledge grew until it hit critical mass. This is when I believe human ingenuity stepped up a gear, and it had overwhelmingly positive consequences.
It seems my sunny outlook isn’t for everyone. In his book Bad Ideas? An Arresting History of Our Inventions, Robert Winston explained his gloomier perspective: “Ever since the hand-axe human progress has, in one sense, been downhill. The hand-axe led to the battle-axe, and the atlatl led to the catapult.” While Winston claims not to view the future of humanity pessimistically, his point is well-taken. There are consequences for any technological advances humans make. Not all of them are good. Even seemingly benign inventions can have a dark side: knives spread butter, but they can also kill.
It’s really no surprise some people feel this way. Viewed in isolation, humanity seems to be attracted to the lowest common denominator. We’ve recently witnessed the rise in Reality TV Presidents, anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers, climate change deniers, and people who believe that shape-shifting reptilian humanoids are taking over the world. So it’s tempting to believe we are living in a real-life version of Mike Judge’s 2006 film, Idiocracy, where so-called stupid people have taken the ascendancy due to the devolution of humankind. In fact, the White House of Idiocracy was frighteningly prescient of the shitshow of Trump’s West Wing.
My belief is that human ingenuity propels civilisation’s upward trajectory. When humanity stumbles into a pothole, it eventually climbs out and moves slowly but inexorably towards better ideas. Socially, scientifically, and even politically. Yes, these blips can be glaring. Sometimes, it seems like human achievement is in a permanent death spiral. However, when viewed through the lens of Big History, these are minor corrections.
I’m not for one moment saying that times aren’t tough right now. Our confidence has been shaken on a number of fronts. Climate change looms, causing us to rethink our way of life. The information revolution and globalisation have displaced many jobs. Social media has given a platform to people who really shouldn’t have one. The twenty-four-hour news cycle means that we are bombarded with almost constant negativity. People are worried and looking for easy answers, enabling populist politicians to position themselves to take advantage.
If it’s any comfort, humanity has risen above such stumbles before. The European Middle Ages following the Fall of Rome saw a noticeable decline in civilised values, but people clawed back knowledge over time and the Renaissance was a high-water mark. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, living standards for workers initially dipped; unemployment was rife until the developed world reorganised itself to suit the new paradigm. The early-to-mid twentieth century suffered through two world wars, a depression, and the Holocaust; yet it wasn’t long after that average living standards for most of the world hit the highest level ever.
We must remember that every time there’s been a reversal, humans have always recovered and rebuilt. New technology and ideas in public policy emerge to meet the challenges.
Yes, things seem bleak right now, but in time, a new and better equilibrium will be reached. While I’m confident that education and creativity will allow us to solve our multitude of problems, the solutions won’t just magically appear, and there will be pain along the way. We face real problems that will require some heavy-duty big ideas to find a solution. Recovery isn’t guaranteed but, given what we’ve seen over the arc of history, it’s likely.
Of course, life isn’t significantly better for everyone. Everyday life in the developing world remains a struggle, but even there, infant mortality has dropped and life expectancy has risen (in Somalia life expectancy has risen from 33 years of age in 1950, to almost 58 years today). While things are better than they were, I don’t claim 58 years to be acceptable.
Even the developed world has problems. Significantly, at the time of writing we are nearly two years into a global pandemic that has ravaged the world. Millions have died worldwide. Not only has the pandemic caused a severe health crisis, it’s also given every conspiracy theorist a soap box. We’ve heard that COVID-19 is a hoax; that the life-saving vaccines (an absolute triumph of fast-moving human ingenuity) were really the delivery system for Bill Gates’ mind-control chips; and we’ve seen people take horse-worming medicine at the behest of unqualified right-wing TV hosts, Russian troll farms, and misguided Facebook friends. Deliberate, damaging misinformation is perpetuated by powerful people who should (and sometimes do) know better.
I don’t have the answer to combatting the use of lies to manipulate the population, but I have confidence that things will change. There will be rocky years ahead, but eventually things will get better. Our better angels, which have been put to flight by our demons, will return. Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind, makes the case that when given a choice, most humans will be decent, cooperative, and kind. He may well be right.
If all that wasn’t enough, we must also address global warming. It’s an existential crisis; but with hard work, luck, and a combination of creativity, sustainable living practices and yet-to-be-discovered green technologies, we’ll beat that problem too. However, if the worst comes to worst, humans will be forced to develop new ways of living on our planet. The only people who have a hope of solving these problems are people with big ideas.
Even if we drag ourselves back from the brink of global warming, the human population will eventually exceed the Earth’s optimal carrying capacity, if it hasn’t already. Perhaps colonising the Moon and Mars will, in time, reduce pressure on the Earth’s population. Again, it will be our best and brightest who will make this a reality. So, no matter what happens, our long-term survival as a species depends on human ingenuity.
If all this sounds overly optimistic, remember the strides humanity has made in the last hundred years. The world of today with cars, cell phones, space travel, and miraculous medical treatments, would be unrecognisable to our recent ancestors.
Cancelling History?
Within living memory, humans led very different lives to ours, with different priorities and philosophies. Judging certain historical figures or events by today’s standards often leads to false conclusions. That’s why, although I’m a liberal, I challenge the recent rise of the extreme cancel-culture view of history.
A very personal example of how different our lives and values can be is my grandmother. She was born in 1895 and grew up during the height of the White Australia Policy. She lived through World War I, the Spanish Flu Epidemic, the Great Depression, and World War II. She was born before the invention of the automobile and lived to see humans on the Moon. Nanna was in her late sixties when I first remember her as a kindly, if opinionated, older lady. She could also be a terrible racist, often making me wince with her opinions. While I’m not trying to excuse her, I know that if she’d been born a generation later, she would have held different, less intolerant views. I still cherish her memory and keep a photo of her in my home. I’m not going to ‘cancel’ my nanna. She was a product of her place and time.
Today, however, some proponents of ‘cancel culture’ want to purge certain historical figures. Now, there’s nothing wrong with looking at history through an updated lens. It’s helpful in bringing new understanding and perspective. We don’t need public statues of Confederate generals, in the same way we don’t need statues of Pol Pot, Joe Stalin or Justin Bieber.
However, many historical figures, like say, Winston Churchill, have been mythologised. Yet they were often far from saints. No doubt, Churchill was the bulwark against Nazism who saved Britain in its ‘finest hour.’ But he was also the man who said: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” If that wasn’t bad enough, he routinely described various people of colour as ‘uncivilised,’ ‘barbarians,’ and ‘savages.’ However, looking at Churchill, or any other luminary from the past, with a critical eye differs greatly from attempting to delete them from history.
If Lightbulb Moments in Human History has a bias towards Great Men over Great Women, it is not because only men can be great. It is because for most of recorded history women have not been afforded the opportunity of being great. They have been marginalised second-class citizens whose words and deeds were rarely recorded. Lack of gender equality reduced the number of people who were educated. Big ideas without education are possible, but unlikely, because innovation correlates strongly with education.
Imagine a world where the women had always received the same education as men. For every Caesar, Shakespeare and Darwin there would be at least one female equivalent. It is a similar story with socio-economic and racial factors. Include hypothetically educated men and women from all races and classes and imagine where our society would be today.
Humanity missed out on those great minds for thousands of years, but they’re no longer lost to the future. In ancient Egypt, the literacy rate was around 3%, a figure mostly composed of upper class men. Ancient Rome’s literacy rate was between 5% and 30%, depending on where you lived in the empire. Compare that to 2015, when UNESCO estimated the global literacy rate for all people aged 15 and over was 86.3%. This improvement is a major reason for my optimism about the trajectory of the educated mind and the prospect of even bigger ideas.
Getting Better all the Time?
Life, in the words of Lennon and McCartney, is ‘getting better all the time.’ Over the millennia, the human condition has improved dramatically in almost every conceivable metric: literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality, famine, poverty, war, work health and safety, housing, technology and education.
Looking at the last two hundred and twenty-one years, the statistics speak for themselves. Life expectancy at birth in 1800 was around 40 years of age; today the worldwide average is 73 years of age. The global infant mortality rate in 1800 was 43%, while today it has dropped to 3.8%. The worldwide literacy rate in 1800 was 12.05%; today, it’s 86.25%. In 1800, 81% of people worldwide lived in extreme poverty; today the figure is 9.2%. These rates are by no means a mic drop, but they illustrate my point.
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker showed how violence—including war, deaths by terrorism, and rates of homicide—has steadily declined over the years, despite the public perception to the contrary. In most Western countries, same-sex couples can marry. Even discrimination due to sexism and racism has decreased, although we must continually strive for further improvement.
On average, people’s daily lives are at an historical high. When the current era is studied by future historians, on statistics alone, they’ll view it as an improvement on what came before. However, there are also anecdotal factors.
Let’s face it, in the developed world, our minimum expectations are so much greater than our ancestors’ wildest desires. We expect to live in a McMansion when they just hoped for a roof over their heads. We need a vacation around the world; they’d have been happy for a weekend off work. We expect Instagrammable food presentation, while they just hoped not to starve. There’s a reason many of today’s petty complaints are written-off as ‘First World problems.’
Humanity’s lightbulb moments have played no small part in these impressive advances.
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Lightbulb Moments in Human History is organised into familiar historical eras. It covers many significant ancient civilisations, in chronological order wherever possible. This is the first in a series of books and deals with the big ideas of prehistory and the ancient world, up to the fall of Rome. The next installment will carry the story from medieval times up to the late Victorian era. Another will deal with the twentieth century up to the present, and then speculate on the lightbulb moments we can expect in humanity’s future.
The story of civilisation is a story of advancement. The human need for self-improvement is deeply embedded in our collective psyche. Parents work to ensure their children’s lives are better than theirs. All major religions seek to move their adherents towards enlightenment. Corporations strive to maximise their stock values. Inventors are still trying to build a better mousetrap. There’s a reason self-help books are such a popular genre, because individuals always want to ‘level-up.’ So do civilisations.
Of course, there are exceptions: If you were born after the fall of Rome, you’d probably wish you’d been born earlier; but from a Big History perspective, life has improved from generation to generation. A Roman from the first century AD who lived with running water and bathhouses would’ve been overjoyed not to be an Egyptian in 2500 BC, dodging crocodiles while bathing in the Nile. Citizens of Renaissance Florence would’ve thanked their lucky stars that they lived in their beautiful city and hadn’t been born during the squalor of Medieval York. The intelligentsia of Victorian England, of course, felt superior to them all.
But who alive today would seriously want to live in Victorian England? Before you jump up screaming, “Me! Pick me!” remember it was a time before antibiotics and effective anesthesia. It was the time of unbearable pollution and London’s ‘Great Stink.’ Cholera, smallpox, typhoid and scarlet fever went largely unchecked, and even a simple scratch could cause fatal sepsis. Seventy-hour, six-day working weeks were commonplace. Child labour was rife, and industrial health and safety laws non-existent. The infant mortality rate was 15%. It’s no surprise that the average life expectancy in Victorian England was barely 42 years.
In 2021, there are many, particularly politicians, who would love to take us all back to the 1950s. But would that be a good idea? In the 1950s, over 30% of Western homes didn’t have indoor plumbing and 25% didn’t even have a flush toilet. In 1959, 20% of homes had no telephone, and only 60% had a television. It wasn’t unusual for kids to die of measles or whooping cough. Heart conditions that can be routinely treated today were often fatal. The road deaths were through the roof, because cars had no seat belts or airbags. Computers took up a whole room and cost millions of dollars. Women were expected to give up their jobs when they married. Gay men remained closeted, so they didn’t have to endure the same fate as Alan Turing in 1952: chemical castration. Segregation still existed in many American states, and in Australia, the indigenous people were not even counted as citizens of their own country.
The Elephant in the Room
Even though we’re not living in a post-racial world, things are improving. Although not fast enough, to be sure. However, in part because the Black Lives Matter movement highlighted critical problems that still need solving, there’s a greater level of awareness than ever before. This augurs well for the future, but right now, the world is clearly going through something significant.
A big idea is suffering its birth pangs.
As a result, when writing a book such as Lightbulb Moments in Human History, which takes a lighthearted view of cross-cultural historical events, I find myself negotiating a minefield. Sure, it’s safe for me to poke fun at Christianity and white, Western society, whatever the era, because I’m nominally Christian, white, and Western. It’s also safe to make jokes about Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, and ancient Rome because there’s no one alive from those eras to be offended. However, similar comments about events in ancient China or ancient India are more problematic. If I make light of something Confucius said, is that racist? Is a wry examination of the unusual genesis of the Hindu god Ganesha culturally insensitive? Inevitably, some people will answer a resounding ‘YES!’
But please bear with me.
I’m aware that ‘humour’ has been used throughout history to subjugate minorities. Everything from the blackface in minstrel shows to the yellowface in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and beyond. I do not intend to offend, so I want to avoid anything discriminatory. In a 2020 Guardian article, No joke: ironic racism in comedy is just not funny, Jason Osamede Okundaye rebukes writers and performers who use racist characters ironically to mock racism, as “(t)his allows comedians and actors to ‘safely’ perform absurd racist tropes through the malicious deception of an actually racist audience, therefore creating distance between artist and artwork.” Point taken.
However, the task I’ve undertaken is writing a lighthearted history of big human ideas. Not all big ideas are from white, Western people, so I am left with a conundrum. I can write fun, snarky chapters about white people and ‘straight’ chapters about other cultures. Or treat all subjects equally and damn the consequences. I believe one thing that unites all human beings is a sense of humour, and I also think it is paternalistic not to treat all cultures the same. So I am applying the same gently mocking tone to ALL cultures alike.
Nevertheless, it’s inevitable that despite my intentions, I’ll upset someone. Let me be clear, if you are a holier-than-thou white person being offended on behalf of somebody else, I simply don’t care. However, if in my ignorance I genuinely offend your culture, I sincerely apologise.
One small step…
Lightbulb Moments in Human History melds many of my lifelong obsessions: prehistory, ancient history, art history, printing, science, cartooning, education, space, and (with a bit of luck) comedy, together in one package. It’s taken two years to write but has been a lifetime in the making. All my explanations, caveats and justifications have been made. Giant’s shoulders have been stood upon.
Now it’s time to take one small step.
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