Such interesting comments and questions. Booktv continues on cspan2, television for serious readers. The invention of yesterday. The invention of yesterday a 50,000year history of human culture you got me at the title. 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 have got here 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. Tamim ansary poses the history of the world is a story we. Telling one another and since there is no single circle of storytellers there must be many world histories. This dramatic journey asks us in all the narratives form a single big story of our planet and it is what it might be. This explores links and Ripple Effect that stitched the fabric of history. There is a lot of pivotal moment. Is anybody finished reading it . Just came out. You dont count. All right. It is like columbuss discovery of america sparked the rise of corporations and banks andrew the entire world into one great global drama. Tamim ansary writes the story of an afghan american san franciscobased author draws nicely on his experiences of life in a different world of islam and the secular west to help readers understand the outcomes of overlapping narratives. He examines the role of interconnections and development of everything from boardgames to belief systems, science and multinational corporations. A wellwritten and valuable take on the diverse narrative that helped shape Human History. Of course we know him from other things, right . You have read his other books, you are a good crowd. Preceding this publication there have been five other books, road trips, games without rules, the history of afghanistan. A history of the world through islamic eyes and a work of fiction the widows husband, historical fiction that takes place in 1840 and kabul and west of kabul and east of new york his memoir published in the wake of the 9 11 crisis and chronicles a bicultural life. He has also written i was surprised about this 6 book series for children, so in your free time i dont know what you are doing but being here tonight is really a joy and lets put our hands together for this amazing man. [applause] i have two mikes here. Is this the way it goes now. Cspan, im not going to go which is which, i will do the best i can. So anyway i did write childrens books and although i have been working on this book i say for 6 years i remember maybe the origins go back a little further. When might presently 36yearold daughter was about 8, you do the math. I dont know how long ago that was. At that time i normally wrote childrens books but told a lot of childrens stories, made them up on the spot and i had the idea then that i am going to write a childrens history of the world. I told her i have this idea to write a history of the world and she wrinkled her brow and said didnt they already write that one . So 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, but the way i have been thinking about it i think i can trigger off from this, for the past 6 years i have been working on this, people run into me and say what are you working on . It is a history of the world, no, really, what are you working on . I go now, really, and it doesnt improve matters when i say it is a 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 that i started out with. The whole point, this book is shorter than the history of afghanistan that i wrote. That is not only, that doesnt only reflect the fact that afghanistan is more complicated than the entire world but also goes right to the point because if youre going to undertake the history of the world from the big bang to right now, clearly youre going to leave some stuff out. So what do you leave out and what do you leave in and why do you take something out and why do you leave something in. There has to be some principle of inclusion and exclusion. I am going to suggest for me the principle is that you are including everything that tells the story and youre 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 will leave the big bang alone for right now because i am thinking of humanity. And so around the time that 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 either said remotes or use that afghanistan. They had the same meaning but in the air coming towards couple i understood i am not heading towards remote, that is not happening now. I landed in kabul, the rex of former soviet tanks, big indications of american presence, buildings, cars everywhere and feels like paris or new york, different flavor, grungy year but one of those world cities so 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 eight or ten hours and got to the Central Highlands of afghanistan were those buddhas used to be that the taliban 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 there, somewhat substantial town so my friend said no, we are not stopping here. Theres a place further down the valley, the valley of the dragon. We will go there so we drove along, drove along and somewhere in this desert i look up and i see a white line on a little bit village clinging to the hillside. At that time kind of run out of red, following the tracks of earlier vehicles and going up to this Little Village we dont see much, maybe some tracks but that feels like maybe this is remote so i am saying what is this little glistening white light. I ask for binoculars and what i see up there is a satellite dish and im like how do they what do they do with the satellite dish, operate a television, how do they operate a television, theres no electrical lines. How do they get solar panels, they have a motorcycle, how do they pay for this . A lot of times it is opium being grown here and opium is kind of as good a currency as gold because infinitely something visible so you can pay for smart things, a little bit of opium and it doesnt dk, you can store it so it is there next year. What happens with the opium . That goes to is pakistan, turkmenistan, is processed into more refined versions of the drug, then it goes across turkey and albania into europe and some comes to san francisco. So im like okay. So there is a network that connects me to san francisco, this Little Village in the valley but i say what could they possibly be watching on that thing. 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 but how many dont . Afghan star, singers all over afghanistan compete and send 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, obviously cloned off of American Idol which was itself cloned off of british popeye. British pop idol afghan star, American Idol and at that same time i am just browsing, reading information and finding at that time, that year i was told 80 of the 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 that im looking at in that valley. At that point i thought back and said all right 50,000 years ago, didnt put a date on it that way back before the four villages and cities and all that stuff, the human animal on the planet existed as small bands of relatives basically, and were not much bigger than 180, 200 people. They lived in open spots, world around, forged and hunted and probably knew other bands of relatives in their areas where they nomadic we migrated but they didnt have any idea of the thousands of other bands of humans that were on the planet. If that is the beginning, lets start there. This is where we ended up, the planet is one tangled spaghetti of human lives were anything that happens to any human or that any human does anyplace might have Ripple Effects to go out and has an effect on somebody else anywhere else on the planet and on that planet there is no place left that is unaltered by our presence. That is maybe the trajectory. We could take that as a trajectory or a through line. That is when i started writing this book. In the course of thinking about it and exploring it and thinking about how this everincreasing interconnectedness took place what i gradually dawned on me, that it is obvious but i will say it anyhow, the interconnectedness did not just evenly spread out, not like we are living in a still pool of water with and little ripples, thats not how it is. The human world consists not of still waters but lots of whirlpools and each whirlpool is some group of people talking to each other but not that much to somebody else and in the end i thought okay, theres 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 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 a human species, we did it by making and improving tools so those of the two things, environment and tools but there is one other thing and it is the third part of the whole story. Let me just some of you started reading this so 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, french teenagers were roaming the woods near their home in Southwestern France searching for a legendary buried treasure they had heard about when their dog robot scurried into a depression formed by uprooted tree and began plying at something. The teenagers rushed over hoping, but no, it wasnt a mold treasure chest, it was only a small dark opening in the ground. They did what teenagers do, what i might have done myself at that age, they squeezed through the opening to see where it went. 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 around, they saw on the walls and even on the ceiling 15 or 20 feet above their wonder struck eyes, bigger than life paintings of buffalo and deer and other animals rendered gracefully and realistically in black and red and yellow. They had found one of the worlds most spectacular galleries of paleolithic art. The skullcap in. 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 40,000 years ago and the odd thing is those earliest paintings were already quite sophisticated and then i go through some examples but the thing is it isnt like you have crude beginnings of doodling and thousands of years later people have learned how to make a kind of vaguely animal shape, now. We were not that much distinguishable from neanderthal from other bipedal primates that we shared the planet with and suddenly humans took an uptick and that raises the question, what happened . What caused that . Something 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 that mean something. My cat raul knows 10 or 15 words. There is one word he knows which means food and he says it and gets food and cocoa the gorilla using sign language actually knew 1000 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 and heard one of us, farmer brown and words like that i just pointing. Not at a significant level are not different from pointing. What i am talking about when i say true language is vocabulary embedded in grammar and symbol. What i mean is words can stop referring directly to things in the world and start having relationship with other words and let me just say a little about that. So the meaning of many words is not their relationship to something in the physical world but their relationship to other words. Developing language meant we could start using words as if they were the object named, words could separate from things and have an existence of their own. Once that happened a whole world of words could form 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, the other says i am game, what time, about noon . Nothing in their physical setting corresponds to any of the words these guys have spoken. Tomorrow, lunch, noon, what do they. 2 . Nothing. Those are not even the most distinctively linguistic of their utterances. Consider left,s, that, on or 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 acquired true language we graduated beyond merely making sounds the triggered our buddies to run or fight or salivate. We elevated our game to make sounds but 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. Imagining the same world. And i will drive at home by saying here we are, 40 or 50 people, we are not experiencing the material physical world directly. We are experiencing of a model we created together and think is the same world. And 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 and waterfalls that way so 600 miles of a river that feeds the soil all along it and that river is a current that steadily moved north and over that river is a breeze that constantly blows south so anyplace along that river if you have a boat and put it in the water you are going north and if you put the sale up youre going south no wonder all along that river emerges a monolithic and sort of margin a civilization. I will not go into it but you go to mesopotamia it is a different kind of river and once again people are there because they can grow crops but their culture is different. There idea of the world is tuned into the environment in which they are living, read the book, you will see it is a different kind of river so in 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 they may be, their stories recirculate and reinforce and weep together until they not only have a narrative but a sort of metanarrative, but a story of the world they feel themselves to be living in and situate themselves within and thus the history of the world to me, one of the things you can see happening and therefore one way in which you can construct a single whole story out of it is by looking at the way these imaginary worlds, i will call them that, worlds that are collectively constructed communally inhabited but experienced as individual, these Little Things start someplace that is groups expand the world expanded at some point they run into and expanding worldview from some other place and those overlap and then things happen. Not necessarily fighting. When you have people occupying different worldviews and become aware there is somebody else over there and have another way of thinking about the world, one thing that happens is curiosity. I wonder what is going on over there. Keep the fire warm. Im going to talk to those guys. They speak a different language, i cant talk to them. There is that thing that happens. Or sometimes two groups trade and form a relationship that way or sometimes one group wants what 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 a structure is growing overlap and sometimes clash and sometimes interweave and become one bigger narrative. I would say these narratives even when they interweave the ghosts of them stay in the bigger narratives that form. It doesnt matter if someone is living on the nile river or the mississippi, location doesnt matter anymore. These narratives can be anywhere in the world and are all overlapping at the same time and what we are negotiating is how to figure out the big story. I will add one more thing before i maybe i wont add one more thing. I will say this. A narrative we share with other people is how we are a coordinated group that is able to cope with the environment which consists of the unknown bitterness of it all. The narrative is a social self. A social self implies a social other. There is a self and theres always other. Self and others not necessarily warfare, self and others a condition of humanity. If there is a sense that theres not going to be enough, resources are thin, someone has to be excluded from the dinner table. That is when it becomes more the case that people stop looking around and saying who am i not going to share with and i think these narratives are to put it another way, culture, the significance of 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 incoherence. It doesnt explain what is going on anymore and now people are at a loss 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 posturing into smaller constellations so it makes sense, so it can be somebody they know inside that cloud and that is another thing we are doing here. When i have been presenting this book i did an interview in portland when a Radio Station called me into 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 what does this have to do with the impeachment of trump . [laughter] but it does actually. That is the lens through which you can understand things. I will give you two examples. Narratives are constructed of independent modes of ideas that are all connected and seemed to reinforce each other and the ideas themselves can be part of a different narrative. When two ideas, when there is a way that a connections seems to be available that might have some meaning for people in terms of interpreting their experience, that is a narrative beginning to form and i will look at the idea of gun control, the idea that people shouldnt have guns or they should be regulated or whatever the question is and so 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 about yeah but it says well regulated message melissa. It is up to the constitution and whether this fits in or not. Quite separately from that i am aware you are probably aware that another idea has been forming over the last 10 or 20 years and that other idea has to do with the federal government and eventually i will say government in general but the federal government, the idea that the federal government is not us, it is the other. When those guys took over the bird sanctuary, are you aware of that, in oregon, they took it over and said this is our land, we are taking it back, it was a national, set aside for birds things so presumably it belongs to all of us that these guys were saying all of us is not a lot of people out there. All of us is us guys who are here so if you have this idea, federal government is the other and then this other idea that people shooter shouldnt have guns there is an attractive force between these two ideas and one narrative 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 that narrative that we have a shared and vested interest in a society in which people are not shooting each other. We want to think about okay, this is guaranteed right so how do we guarantee that right and preserve thing we all want which is a Harmonious Society in which people are not getting killed, massacred . If that is the way you are thinking about it it is pretty obvious that assault rifles is like that, obviously that doesnt fit the narrative. But what if gun control is an issue within this other narrative which says the government is somebody else and we will someday go to war against it . Now the idea that nobody should prohibit us from having guns has a different meaning in that narrative and in that narrative when you think about gun control it makes perfect sense to say you cant control us from having assault rifles that can pump out 50,000. A minute because the government has bigger stuff. We should deal to defend ourselves not against criminals, against the government. I am not saying that is a fullfledged narrative that exists right now but the makings of a are there, but it could come into existence. The other thing the guy in portland asked me about was immigration in the border wall and i am going well, we talk about it a lot but if you look at the question of the border wall through the lens of narrative i think a lot of things get clarified. In my experience the border wall proposes is a solution to the problem, a curious thing because there wasnt really a problem until the solution was proposed and then once that proposal was on the table, we are going to build this big wall all a lot of the conversation then suddenly, not subtly but gradually accepted that there is a problem and so the people who were against the wall saying it is not a way to solve this, theres other better ways, but from that point of view if they were really a problem with people, immigrants coming into the country with drugs or something the wall is like what they did in 2000 bc in mesopotamia. It is an absurd idea but if you look at it through the lens of narrative that you can see, i would say more or less immediately that the wall is a metaphor. As a metaphor it is the embodiment of the story, part of the narrative and that narrative is the anxiety that you are feeling, but im feeling and were all feeling is because the other is out there and coming and they are going to do these things as they come in like delivering drugs, crime and take our jobs and do this or that. I think there is a lot of freefloating anxiety in society for lots of reasons and i will toss in as some of the factors the economy of the world is going through such a seminal change that i think nobody knows what theyre going to be doing 20 years from now or 10 years from now so that is something. Technology is changing the social relationships between people in such a way that it is like completely apocalyptic changes. Gender relations, traditions of how you build a family, or any of that stuff, a number of these things are happening right now and people are anxious, they dont recognize the world they are in and they recognize even less the world they imagine they are going to be living in a year or 2 from now but those kinds of problems are ones that nobody can actually is a single human being, it is easy to just be helpless in the face of that. Here comes a guy that attacks the anxiety idea, something you can build, that is like not all people, i would bet not many people in this room but i could be wrong but not me anyhow. A lot of people for them is like now it has been physical lies and that is an expression of how i feel and that is an expression that there is something you can do to stay safe. I would say that once that story, the germ of it exists in the germ of that story is us here are threatened by them out there and we need a wall to separate us, that is the basic narrative. Once the germ of that idea exists i might read a little more here, once the german that idea existed can easily attract other ideas to itself to grow more robust, that narrative. Among them being some of the other historic gotten inside so we have to clear out the other from in here. Now you have potential of some real problems. Let me get into, this sort of thing, you can see the patterns of this sort of thing happening in history in various places, various contexts. One of them would be i would say what happened after the crusades. What happened during the crusades and after the crusades. Let me see if i can find it. So when the crusades started europe was a place where everybody lived in some local spot, hardly anyone ever want 100 miles from home in the course of a lifetime. There were a lot of little places they didnt know about anything. When the crusades started. This was a project that drew people from all parts of this very fragmented europe and found themselves bumping shoulders with others and what they experienced was this marvelous thing, people spoke different ways, use different coins but we are all on the same side and we are part of a great project. The crusades opened european christian sensibilities to a sense of common identity as part of a single social whole. Is christian stream to the holy land, i just said all that. They were all on the same side but same side required that there be at least one other side. The more binary the sides, the stronger the identity shared among europeans. They didnt have to do any actual crusading to feel pride of ownership in the heroic quest. Just as one doesnt have to play football to exalt when the home team wins. Only a minority actually went east to fight but everyone knew there was an east to go to and a war to fight. The crusades thus helped give birth to the concept of europe by knowing the single thing they werent these Diverse People came to a stronger sense of some single social whole they were. A new social constellation was gaining definition now. And identity shaped by the otherness of the other gains coherence by eliminating all traces of the other from it self. It is no surprise that as muslims took back the love aunt, the crusades didnt end, they shifted to europe and turned inward. In 1230 when the Catholic Church created the judicial organ, the inquisition, to sniff out heresies within christendom. The inquisition spotted two such impurities right away. The album again the ends and the waldensians, two religious revival to claimed poverty and selfdenial were essential features of christian life. Any bishop lulling and luxury could see how sacrilegious that was. Encouraged by the inquisition the french king launched crusades against both of these heresies crippling one and wiping out the other entirely. Later the inquisition identified witchcraft as a major contamination. Tens of thousands of witches were found and burned at the stake over several centuries most of them elderly husband list women. The inquisition pressured people accused of witchcraft to name other which is thus ensuring the campaign to wipe out witches would never reduce the supply of witches. It was important that the supply not shrink for the emerging constellation needed which hunting to help construct itself and a more extreme version of the inquisition came into existence in spain, the spanish inquisition and that is the place where the crusades for europeans actually succeeded. It failed in the west, but in spain the christian armies of ferdinand and isabella drove the muslims out and turned the peninsula into a christian kingdom and then they set up the spanish inquisition and they had pretty much run out of muslims because those guys fled but there was one trace of otherness that was left in spain and it was the jews and so the spanish inquisition focused on hunting down jews and then what . If you forced all the jews to convert you would be out of jews. So who was the other that you could have as the force that was solidifying your self . That is where and when the theory developed and began to develop that jewishness was not a set of beliefs, it was blood, some blood quality and no matter what you said you believed, you couldnt eliminate your jewishness, you couldnt become, you couldnt become short by claiming to be short. Short is what you are. Then it became a question of mathematically calculating what percentage of your blood made you a jew if you were the product of a jewish christian marriage. And that idea of getting into the narrative it never died. It has popped up again and again in european history. Im going to stop there and ask do you have any quick questions . We are almost out of time. [applause] if you are going to ask a question these gentlemen just to let you know. Questions . Is it working . You an old friend, what is your vision of the future given everything you talked about . My vision of the future, two things i would say about it, we dont know what the future will be. From what i can see, there are currents 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. I think it is a race between the two, maybe more than two, directions people are going. Technology is one of the problems of the age to me, the social impact of technology but cant deny that technology is also solving problem after problem. One of the Things Technology is doing is making sometimes alarming advances in the direction of replacing our parts with machinery and we could go into a long thing on that. Even apart from that if you think about algorithms and how they have invaded our way we do things, we are always encountering some curated version of our self, we buy things we bought before etc. The machine of the age is digital devices and we ourselves are becoming digitized more and more so theres a blending occurring between technology and humans. At the same time, we are running out of gobbling up the resources and a way of life, creating changes in the planet that looks like just might be an extinction event going on. I want to throw out there that if this happens it isnt that we are going to destroy life on earth. We will destroy human life on earth. Life is really tough. Life is still going to be there. It will change into something else. What will be gone if anyone cares about that, i kind of do, i would like us to stick around. Theres a race going on. Bring the boom in. Havent read the book yet, just got it. It seems like we are talking about tribalism and sometimes your tribe is 200 people and it could be a clan and it could be a nationstate, could be the world and at times of stress people seem to pull it back. 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 of the same thing in a way. Why i guess i shy away from calling nationstates tribalism is tribes is a thing. There are tribes. If we bio that were we dont have anything left for tribes that arent nations or states. Each of these forms of social entities that are capable of forming intention and carrying out plans, it is their own plans and we individuals are just doing our part to make the whole thing work, that is bigger than tribes because corporations are one of these things too. People can come to a corporation, leave a corporation. Every person in the corporation can be replaced by other people and get the corporation is the same corporation. It is not as individuals, there is a structural element that keeps this thing in existence as itself. I think a narrative like that, i have lots of different words for this thing in the book, social constellation is one, narrative but whatever word you use, a narrative like that is similar in nature to a biological organism in that it has a propensity to operate in such a way as 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 see how that works but you have to read the book to see what i say about that. You mentioned at the beginning, there is a great documentary called forgotten dreams. What you mentioned today reminded me of something i read 10 years ago, countries seek to exist a long time ago because once the corporation came people have to have something to hold onto so they kind of blogging here or there but it is the corporations controlling for the last 20 years, if markets crash, in the east it will affect around the world so right now were playing this china and us game but it is just like, the simplest form to people to understand what is going on. You made it more together. Other questions . I was wondering, a group of people have to have an other that they persecute in order to keep their identity . That is not what i am saying. That can happen. The mere fact the group has a self doesnt mean it needs to persecute some other. We can move beyond that. Part of it is we have little groups and those are inside bigger groups. I want to toss out a final metaphor here. The human body let me put it in the blandest way. The human body is a bag of skins filled with living cells that are organized as organs and so you wouldnt want those organs to vanish and be one big bag of human cells. It wouldnt work that way. We dont want all of us to be the same. We are parts of smaller things that are parts of bigger things which are part of bigger things. And we have to keep striving to see ourselves not only as just our social identity, but appreciate and see how we are interacting with and interrelated to bigger social selves. When you mentioned the idea of curiosity, that to me is a big thing because it helps counteract the fear of the unknown. If youre curious you are looking outward whereas when you talk about anxiety and is more of a withdrawing in words. Absolutely. All of Human History these two processes have been going on simultaneously, sometimes more sometimes less. What is out there . And also periodically closing ranks and saying they are coming, look out, lets get together, bring out the swords, be ready. Both of those things are always going on and sometimes it is more of one and sometimes more of the other. How does the narrative based argument account for this phenomena and that people, huge great quantities of people will follow a single leader right off the class . Is there a Tipping Point where the insanity stops or is it not the leader but this cohesion and some random charismatic are not creature takes the reins . It is a combination of the two. I think one ingredient is the incoherence of the current narrative and the other ingredient is someone who starts a way to supply the missing pieces so all the incoherence, random bits of dust floating around form up into a constellation. They are still all out there but they can add up to meaning, that can be good, it can be bad. I dont think, lets say, a hitler cause is not to use them. The nazi is him grows out of circumstances that are there and ideas people are putting out as to what is my explanation of all this, someone says this insolence is that and it comes to a point where it is close to a Tipping Point. I wont going to too much but this is related to the concept of a paradigm. And science the paradigm is a theory that explains everything and what scientists do is they are looking for ways to fill in the gaps and complete the paradigm. There is always two things that dont fit and you set them aside and dont think about them. Of things that dont fit keep increasing and the connections between the things you are saying get more tenuous eventually the paradigm is in trouble and then it can be the one crucial idea can pull together a whole bunch of these things at which point some of the dots that were significant before are irrelevant. Some of the pieces that were just erratic and anomalies become a crucial part of the new picture and a paradigm doesnt change gradually. It changes suddenly and until that moment when it changes, when that last little bit comes in nobody sees it. It is not there until it is there. Huge numbers of people . Huge numbers of people have some basis in the anxiety of their lives. For 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 other sign up to go in the army and march off someplace and most of them get killed and usually most people dont they mustve all been insane. It happens all the time. This might be a ridiculous question, 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 and if so or collection of more harmonious narratives and if so do you have any suggestions how to facilitate that . Used to part one and now to part 2. I think no person can make the change happen. It is a process that is going on and i think partly we have to be patient with the fact the new narrative dont come into existence by agency or in certain ways. Lots of little ideas have to flow together. I will only say this, when one looks at the experience, political experience of the society at the current time, the thing that can defeat a narrative is only another narrative. It is really important to be responding to the things that are supporting emotionally the narrative you dont like and drawing on the common experiences and crafting a new narrative that explains it all too but goes in a different direction. What we will do is, people probably have little questions they want to ask as they get their book signed, this always happens. If that is okay, were going to stop the q and day on the big public seen here, thank you very much for coming. [inaudible conversations] the new cspan online store now has booktv products, go to cspanstore. Org to check them out, see what is new for booktv and all the cspan products. Tonight at 11 00 pm eastern on booktv, in his new book, sam houston and the alamo adventures, Brian Kilmeade offers a history of americas war for texas. Sam houston felt he was impervious. He got shot 3 times and should have died. He learned courage is got to be calculated. When it was time to get a commission he goes to washington pretty close to hear according to the map. Im able to see just about everything. Burns to the ground. What does he learn, this country is fragile, courage is got to because related. Sunday at noon eastern in depth is live with senior fellow and wall street journal columnist jason riley. The number of black elected officials in this country has grown from fewer than 1500 in 1970 to more than 10,000 today. Including a twice elected black president. That is the Voting Rights act. At 9 eastern on afterwords, university of virginia history professor sarah myla explores the political history of tobacco in america in her book the cigarette. Shes interviewed by former fda commissioner david kessler. Smoking in the 1900s was considered something almost unamerican. It was a vice of the foreignborn. The antismoking movement of the first two decades of the 20th century kind of road that wave of nativism and thinking about what type of behavior is appropriate for nativeborn healthy americans. Watch booktv every weekend on cspan2. Good evening. I i am the literary director for the library, and its a joy to welcome you here this evening. How many of you are at the library for the first time tonight . Ah, well, double welcome to you. And how many of you attended the library of Congress Flagship event, the National Book festival . Ah, nice. Like to see that