until about twelve thousand years ago, when we first beat our swords into plowshares this innocent decision, which must have seemed a good idea at the time, heralded an era of administrative hierarchy, state-sanctioned violence, and the unchecked proliferation of carbohydrates. The second concludes that everything was more or less O.K. Two of Bill Gates’s favorite soup-to-nuts books of the past decade, for example, are Steven Pinker’s “ The Better Angels of Our Nature” and Yuval Noah Harari’s “ Sapiens.” The first asserts that everything has been on the upswing since the Enlightenment, when we learned that rational argument was preferable to religious superstition and wanton cudgelling. The appetite for such stories seems indiscriminate-tales of deterioration and tales of improvement are frequently consumed by the same people. These chronicles either indulge a sense of decline or applaud our advances.
Moments of sociopolitical tumult have a way of generating all-encompassing explanatory histories.
