5,000 years of human history in seven hours
Haruaki Deguchi and why it's essential to look at the big picture
Human history – all 5,000 years of it – is one long story, all linked together. Read through it with that understanding, and you’ll be able to see the big picture.
These are the bold yet simple claims made on the cover of Ikki Yomi Sekaishi, the new book by Haruaki Deguchi, and I’d like to explain to you why I think they contain a shocking amount of eye-opening wisdom.
First, a bit of background.
If I were to translate the title of the book, it would be something like World History to Read in One Sitting, and it’s that title that attracted me to this book. I’ve never been much of a history buff, and that’s partly because history buffs – the people to whom I look in an attempt to learn history – tend to compartmentalize world history into pockets of discrete knowledge that I’ve always found intolerable to memorize and then try and piece together. But I’ve long wanted to remedy my relative lack of historical understanding. I know the importance of history, and several of the “big moments,” but I’m hazy on when various things happened, who did what, and how it all fits together. Here, it appears, is a book that is aimed precisely at someone like me.
Who is Haruaki Deguchi? He’s a well-known businessman and public intellectual in Japan. He’s the president of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, and he founded the Lifenet Insurance company when he was 60 years old. He’s got more than 132K followers on Twitter. He’s affable and likeable and doesn’t take himself – or anything else, really – too seriously. My kind of guy.
Here he is, talking about why people should never stop learning, no matter how old they get:
With Ikki Yomi, Deguchi starts way back at the dawn of human history in Africa, tracing the landmark achievements that have contributed to humanity’s progress through the ages, right up to Putin’s war in Ukraine. His writing is funny and charming, and reminds me of conversing with a knowledgeable uncle over beers. Why did the earliest humans migrate out of Africa, to the Arabian Peninsula and toward Eurasia? Because they wanted to eat the tastiest meat. The meat over there, they found out, was tastier than the meat they were used to eating, and so off they went. It sounds comical, almost dismissive, but Deguchi backs it up with facts. In this book, key concepts and moments in history are broken up and each given about a page, sometimes less. They’re delivered in this same style: set-up, punchline, so-what/what-next. It’s effective, and it’s fun to read. Full disclosure: I only started reading this book on Tuesday, and haven’t finished it yet. The cover promises that it can be read in seven hours, but Japanese is not my native language, so who knows how many hours it will take me to finish.
But I’m not here to talk about the content of this book or how accurately it depicts the entire history of humanity—those, clearly, are up for debate. What’s got me excited about Ikki Yomi are the thought technologies I think it represents—the key lessons about how to think about information, and how to tell our stories to one another, in an increasingly fragmented and compartmentalized world. Below are my three key takeaways from the time I’ve spent with this book so far.
Show your audience how it all fits together
In my job, and in my personal life, I sometimes have to explain concepts or areas of interest to people who know comparatively less – and sometimes nothing at all – about those concepts. So I know how challenging it can be to know where to start, to show how one idea impacts another, and to clearly convey the important bits. I suspect we’ve all struggled with this at one time or another. It’s one thing to be well-versed in a particular field of study or niche interest, but quite another to be able to quickly and effectively bring someone else up to speed on that topic.
So I greatly admire Deguchi’s confidence to say, give me seven hours of your time, and I will help you to see the big picture of everything humanity has ever accomplished. Even more, I admire his ability to follow through on that claim, in a way that’s conversational and humorous. This is good writing. This is good storytelling.
You don’t have to tell me about everything that humanity has ever accomplished, but I do want to learn from you about the things I don’t know (of which there are many). I firmly believe that everyone is my teacher. But, if you can teach me in a way that’s concise, by delineating the key points, and showing how they link together in a cause-and-effect way? You’re not just my teacher, you’re my idol.
Find peace of mind by placing events in historical context
I started this newsletter to try and help bring a little more calmness into my life, and, by extension, the world. The more omnivorous you are in your information gathering, the easier it is to freak out about… pretty much everything that’s currently happening.
The key to not freaking out, I’ve found, is situating the troubling information in a larger context, whether it be societal, historical or cultural. I’ve learned, from mindfulness training and meditation, to think about whether what’s happening in the current moment will matter to me (or anyone else) five minutes from now, five days from now, five years from now… The answer, almost always, is no.
The extreme example of this contextualization is reducing an entire century of human civilization to a few sentences and saying, this is really all you need to know about that period of time. This is the big stuff. Of course, if you’re interested, there’s always more to read on any given topic, and you’re free to do that. But remember, if humanity still exists in the year 3023, they sure as hell won’t care about the PowerPoint presentation you screwed up at work last week.
And it’s not simply about dismissing the aspects of experience you find to be unpalatable, or about being nihilist. The inverse is also true. By having a solid grasp on the big picture, you’re better equipped to appreciate all of the small moments life delivers, in all of their intricacy, precisely because you understand how they all fit together. I love this passage, from page 6 of the book:
僕らは毎日、たくさんの小さな物語を目にします。ネットで流れてくるニュースもそうですし、歴史でいえば、好きな偉人がいたり、興味のある時代やジャンルがあったりして、小説やノンフィクション、歴史書を手にとることもあるでしょう。そのとき背景となる人類5000年の歴史の流れが頭にあれば、小さな物語の意味をより深く理解できます。
My translation: Every day, we encounter lots of little stories. Whether it’s news circulating online, or if we’re talking about history, great figures you admire, or particular eras or genres you’re interested in. Maybe in a novel, or a nonfiction book, or a historical text. Whenever you encounter these little stories, if you have the context (background) of 5,000 years of human history in your head, you’re able to understand more deeply the meaning (significance) of these little stories.
Beautiful! I love it.
Future-proof yourself with big-picture awareness
ChatGPT has already proven itself to be kind of a jerk. It makes up facts. It lies all the time, then doubles down on its lies, insisting that it isn’t lying.
The thing is, AI isn’t going anywhere. And it will only get better at lying. It’s already a multi-billion-dollar business. ChatGPT had 100 million users two months after it launched. It’s a matter of when – not if – nefarious actors will exploit AI and machine learning to intentionally deceive (portions of) the general public. Heck, it’s probably already happening.
In the near future, for us humans, bullshit detection will be an even more valuable skill than ever, because it’s not just human actors that will be lying to us, it’ll be AI-assisted humans.
Now this is a bit of a leap I’m going to make, but here’s how I see it: It’s not just that human history is one long interconnected narrative, it’s that everything ever is one long interconnected narrative. If we agree that every part of human history is part of one long story, then we inherently agree that everything we humans have ever experienced is somehow connected to everything else. That can sound far-out, but it’s also not incorrect.
Once you’ve embraced that high-level awareness, you can start to drill down, to greater and greater levels of specificity, with the context required to make sense of events and turning points. When you’ve onboarded the interconnected narratives that have gotten us to the point we’re currently at, you’re better equipped to start prognosticating about what logically could follow. You begin to recognize patterns and trends, and when something aberrational happens – a black swan moment – you’re better equipped to understand how and why it’s surprising.
That’s all a fancy way of saying, you’ll know when to say, wow, that seems fake, let me investigate a little more instead of accepting what I’m seeing at face value.
Our world is growing increasingly stratified. It’s never been more possible to delve into your rabbit hole of choice and never come out.
I work in corporate communications, and everyone, everywhere is worried about information being siloed. Everyone is communicating all the time, but not enough meaningful communication is happening across disciplines, across departments, across organizations.
Haruaki Deguchi, by championing big-picture thinking, is encouraging curiosity, high-level awareness, and historical literacy. These are skills that all of us should be striving for, regardless of what we’re trying to achieve.
I remember Michael Sugrue saying something to the effect that understanding history is a sort of cheat code for understanding everything. He was talking about literature and philosophy, but it applies almost everywhere, and particularly to current events. Having the context and seeing the bigger picture turns an event from some crazy panicky confusing surprise to just one more step in a longer story. The world just makes a lot more sense, and you're right that your ability to detect complete bullshit increases as well.
Gotta commend this guy for trying to raise that awareness, even though obviously the abridged nature will likely lead to a large amount of distortions. But having that overall framework makes it a lot easier to delve into the specifics later and be able to piece them together. I have always learned history in a total hodge-podge fashion, and while I have a lot of fun trying to put it together myself, whenever I read a more zoomed-out book that ties different eras or locations together, it totally lights my brain on fire (in a good way.)
Having at least a rudimentary knowledge of history is pretty important for obvious reasons. I mean, even an awareness that it exists should be mandatory, really. How much of our very recent history is just a slightly different variation of some other silly thing that we have declared loudly (to nobody in particular) "Wow! Let's never do THAT again!".
Thanks for raising awareness of this book that raises awareness! :)