Winter Book Club: The Story of Us?

Summary

Throughline Podcast: Winter Book Club – “The Story of Us?”
NPR – December 18, 2025
Hosts: Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei
Featured Guest: Tamim Ansari, author of The Invention of Yesterday

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Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking Winter Book Club episode, Throughline hosts Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei are joined by historian and writer Tamim Ansari. The conversation revolves around Ansari’s sweeping book The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection, using it as a lens to explore humanity’s ongoing struggle—and need—for a shared narrative. In a world fractured by competing stories, the episode investigates why history is more about the stories we choose to tell than the facts themselves, how “the story of us” is constructed and reconstructed, and whether a global “we” is possible or even desirable, especially in times of technological and social upheaval.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Nature of History as Story

• History vs. Facts:
  • Ansari argues that history is less a collection of facts and more the narrative constructed from those facts. “History is composed of facts, the way that a cathedral is composed of bricks, let's say. But the bricks are not the cathedral. The cathedral is something about the way the bricks are put together.” (Tamim Ansari, 06:56)
  • The hosts and Ansari agree that a shared story gives meaning and cohesion to groups—whether small bands or entire civilizations.
• Origins of Storytelling:
  • The episode opens with reflection on how early humans drew constellations in the stars and agreed on shared interpretations, forming narratives that defined their worlds.
    • “When ancient folks looked up at the night sky, they didn't just see stars, they saw constellations. They said, there's a bear. And they said, hey, look, a mighty hunter... And as long as everybody in the group saw the bear and the mighty hunter, there they were.” (Narrator quoting Tamim Ansari, 02:19)

2. The Crisis of the Shared Narrative

• Society’s Fragmentation:
  • The episode addresses America's current “history problem”—the lack of agreement on a unifying story.
    • “It's very clear that America has a history problem. There's no agreeing on how to tell the story of how we got to where we are today. No common narrative that unites us.” (Ramtin Arablouei, 03:48)
• Who Gets to Decide?
  • They question who is included in the “we” that history is supposed to represent.
    • “One of the things Tamim Mansari argues is that human beings need to agree on a common sense story, a feeling of being part of a we, or in his words, an ‘intertangled spaghetti of human lives’ in order to function. But who decides who the we is and what we can all agree on?” (Rand AbdelFattah, 12:42)
• The Power of the Powerful:
  • “The narrative keeps the powerful in place and keeps everybody else in place. The function of the narrative is not just to do that, but it's to enable us to efficiently and correctly handle the data that's coming at us from out there.” (Tamim Ansari, 13:05)
  • When dominant narratives break down, marginalized voices question and revise the story, leading to transformation—and sometimes conflict.

3. Ansari’s Framework for the Human Story

• Meta-History and Connection:
  • Ansari’s book isn’t just a catalog of facts; it's about finding the “patterns” and “threads” that pull seemingly disparate events and peoples into a single shared tapestry.
    • “I'm trying to tell a single story—that's the human story.” (Tamim Ansari, 08:31)
• The Three Drivers of Human History:
  • Environment: Every life form interacts with its surroundings; group identities often form around environmental challenges or landscapes.
    • “Wherever there's life, there's also an environment... And the story occurs on the border between in here and out there. Always building the wall, reaching out, building the wall.” (Tamim Ansari, 27:17)
  • Language/Intercommunication: Our ability to form “social selves” grows from communication. As language developed, it enabled myths and group identities, which expanded from kin groups to tribes, nations, and beyond.
    • “These social selves exist, but they're not like biological selves because they can grow, they can merge with other social selves.” (Tamim Ansari, 28:18)
  • Tools: Beyond physical objects, tools are seen as extensions of ourselves, shaping not only the environment but our social fabric.
    • “Tools is a feature of us as a biological species. It's how we interact with the environment. It is our interface...” (Tamim Ansari, 29:45)
  • The interplay among these three creates the ever-evolving “story of us.”

4. The Battle of Many Narratives

• Technology & Fragmentation:
  • Digital algorithms promise to cater to individual desires, fracturing consensus and fostering millions of personal narratives.
    • “The algorithm, to put it in a blunt fashion, when you walk into a bookstore called Amazon, you're entering a bookstore nobody else has ever seen or ever will. ... Technology has a built in tendency to narrow each of us down to living all alone.” (Tamim Ansari, 36:45)
  • Despite hopes that a shared crisis (like the COVID-19 pandemic) might unite us, Ansari reflects on how even “the aliens did come”—in microbial form—but did not produce unity. (Tamim Ansari, 35:15)

5. The Hazards and Hope of “Us”

• Does Creating “Us” Exclude “Them”?
  • Ramtin raises a critical point: does defining “us” always require creating a “them” to oppose? Ansari acknowledges the persistent danger:
    • “We have never been able to have an us without a them. We need the aliens. We need to kill them.” (Tamim Ansari, 42:50)
• Collective Action and Mythic Projects:
  • Ansari proposes that a unifying “us” often grows out of a monumental, common challenge—he points to Egypt’s agricultural civilization and the U.S. transcontinental railroad as examples where collective projects birth shared stories and identities. (Tamim Ansari, 43:33–44:27)
  • Yet with global threats like climate change, the challenge is to build a global-scale story and project—one inclusive enough for all.

6. The Future: Hope, Doubt, and Change

• Personal Evolution as a Mirror:
  • Ansari notes that his own sense of self and story have evolved, just as collective narratives do.
    • “My sense of the story and my sense of my story has certainly changed continually over time. So that's all I can say.” (Tamim Ansari, 45:56)
• Hope in Uncertainty:
  • Despite past despair, Ansari leans toward hope—history shows we’ve endured and changed, though nothing about the future is certain.
    • “The one thing we can say for sure about the future, is nothing at all. We don't know nothing about it. It's up to...” (Tamim Ansari, 47:00)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On History as Story:
  • “History is composed of facts, the way that a cathedral is composed of bricks, let's say. But the bricks are not the cathedral.” (Tamim Ansari, 06:56)
• On Fragmentation and Technology:
  • “The algorithm... when you walk into a bookstore called Amazon, you're entering a bookstore nobody else has ever seen or ever will.” (Tamim Ansari, 36:45)
• On the Danger of “Us” and “Them”:
  • “We have never been able to have an us without a them. We need the aliens. We need to kill them.” (Tamim Ansari, 42:50)
• On Hope and Change:
  • “When I look back at who I was 50 years ago, I'm amazed at how dumb I was. ...But it's only that way... because I know how it came out... Nothing about the future is certain.” (Tamim Ansari, 45:56, paraphrased)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:19 – The importance of narrative in early human communities (constellations and shared meaning)
• 04:42 – Ansari’s background as textbook editor and his search for connections across history
• 08:31 – The ambition to tell a single human story
• 13:05 – The function of narratives and who gets included in “we”
• 27:14–29:45 – Ansari’s three drivers of history: environment, language, tools
• 32:54 – The destructive renewal of narratives & the fragmentation of society
• 35:15 – Attempts at unity in the face of global crises (COVID-19)
• 36:45 – The effect of technology and algorithms on personal and collective stories
• 42:38 – Can there be an “us” without a “them”?
• 43:32–44:27 – The role of mythic, communal projects in creating shared narrative
• 45:56 – The evolving nature of self-understanding and historical narrative
• 47:00 – Why hope perseveres despite uncertainty about the future

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Conclusion

Through a rich, philosophical exchange supported by Ansari’s global perspective, this episode pushes listeners to confront not only how history gets made, but why a “story of us” may be our most urgent invention—and our greatest challenge. The search for a unifying narrative, fraught with pitfalls and fueled by both fragmentation and hope, remains essential for the future of a truly global society. The episode closes with Ansari’s reminder that, just as our personal narratives shift over time, so too must our collective story—and that humility, curiosity, and participation in that storytelling process are the keys to creating the “us” we hope to see.

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Recommended for:
Anyone interested in history, identity, philosophy, or understanding how stories shape our societies—especially in times of deep division and rapid change.

Transcript

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[Rand AbdelFattah]

Hi Rund here. Somehow we're almost at the end of 2025. A lot happened this year and it's been a tough one for NPR and local stations. We lost federal funding for public media. We've seen relentless attacks on a free press, but we're not going anywhere. Here at Throughline, we will keep bringing you immersive, entertaining stories that answer our guiding how did we get here? If you're already a Throughline plus supporter, thank you so much. We see you and we're really grateful for you. If not, please consider joining the community of public radio supporters right now before the end of the year at plus.npr.org Signing up unlocks a bunch of perks like bonus episodes and more from across NPR's podcasts. Plus, you get to feel good about supporting public media while you listen. And while I'm here, I just want to say thank you so much to our loyal listeners. Thanks to you and your votes. Throughline is this year's winner of NPR People's Choice Awards. I gotta say, of all the awards the show has won over the past few years, this one really means the most because you, our listeners, picked us. Thank you. So it's cozy season, and that means short days, cold nights, warm drinks, and books. I mean, we read all year, but come on, it's the best in the winter. And for the next few weeks, we're going to bring you a series of episodes we've made, featuring books and authors we love and that have stuck with us through many rereads. They're from all over the world, written across hundreds of years. This is through line, after all, and we're excited to have you with us.

[Narrator/Host]

The shape of the narrative is what it all comes down to in the end. History deals in facts, of course, but in history, those facts fundamentally serve a narrative. When we construct our story, we are inventing ourselves. That's what we were doing in those caves long ago, gathered around the fire, passing on to our children what we remembered about our grandparents, reminiscing about life changing adventures we'd shared, arguing about which of us really killed the bear, and drawing conclusions about the meaning of life from the stars we saw above. For when ancient folks looked up at the night sky, they didn't just see stars, they saw constellations. They said, there's a bear. And they said, hey, look, a mighty hunter. And their companions nodded. And as long as everybody in the group saw the bear and the mighty hunter, there they were. Tamim Ansari, the Invention of yesterday.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

Right now in America, it feels impossible for people to agree on just about anything. You might find it comforting to think about how long ago modern humans looked up at the stars and agreed on what it was they saw. But today, it feels like we're so far removed from that shared story, it's.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Very clear that America has a history problem. There's no agreeing on how to tell the story of how we got to where we are today. No common narrative that unites us. Every American story, well, who gets to decide what's included, what's left out? And what ultimately shapes our American story, our global story, as human beings on this earth, some people look up at the night sky and see stars. Some see a bear and a mighty hunter. But who's to say and what interpretation is passed down to future generations? What do you see?

[Rand AbdelFattah]

It may seem like a lost cause trying to tell a single human story that we all agree on, but knowing who we are and being able to visualize where we're going is based on where we've been. So maybe a common history is a key to bringing us all together. At least that's what Tameem Ansari thinks.

[Tamim Ansari]

You know, many years ago, I was a textbook editor. Eventually my area was world history.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

Now Tamim's a writer, teacher, and author of big histories. But he comes from the world of editing textbooks, framing the narrative.

[Tamim Ansari]

One month I might have an assignment to write the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, and the next month I might have an assignment to write for some whole different textbook program, you know, the invention explosion of the 19th century in Europe and America.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

Doing this work, Tamim began to see unexpected connections across time and place and peoples.

[Tamim Ansari]

Because I was like, skipping across, you know, like now, the Civil War in America now, you know, the ancient Mesopotamian empires. I was seeing patterns that I might not have seen otherwise.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Years later, all those patterns started to coalesce for him. While reading three totally different history books at the same time.

[Tamim Ansari]

And one was about building the Great Wall of China, and one was about how nomads in Central Asia, you know, how their life went, what happened when they raided another nomadic camp? There was nothing to get that they didn't already have, so they would all join up and raid them. And then these, these rolling waves of marauding nomads would develop. You know, then I recognized from reading Roman history about. Yeah, and these people, the Huns, came out of the, out of the east and they sacked things that were part of the civilized Roman Empire. And I'm like, wait, all of those things. I read that and then there were these guys in the middle. This is all part of the same big picture.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

So what is that picture? Well, Tamim started to create meaning from seemingly unrelated events across the world. Connecting dots, building constellations. In other words, he started writing a story.

[Tamim Ansari]

The book that I think we're talking about today is called the invention of a 50,000 year history of Human Culture, Conflict and Connection.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

Tamim Ansari's book poses a fundamental question. What if the real story of human history is story itself?

[Tamim Ansari]

History is composed of facts, the way that a cathedral is composed of bricks, let's say. But the bricks are not the cathedral. The cathedral is something about the way the bricks are put together. So history in that sense is a narrative, is a story. And I am undertaking to tell that story. And it's not the only way to tell it, but it's maybe one way.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I like to think of Tamim as kind of a philosopher of history, someone who studies and writes history, but also writes about history, thinks about what it really is and what it's made up of. And on Throughline. That's the kind of thing we're always thinking about behind the scenes. We look for connections, try to discover the ways the stories we tell interact with one another across time and place. We're always asking what stories should be told, who, who should tell them, and why these moments from the past matter, why they're relevant to us today. And through that we also start to see that history always boils down to one, the suffix of the word itself, story.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

And that's what Tamim tries to capture in his book, the Invention of Yesterday. It's a global history focused on the stories different civilizations have invented about themselves across time. Stories that tell thousands of years of experiences and encounters, memories, memoirs that became history. Because to Tamim, history is really just a story we're telling one another, which obviously resonates with us.

[Tamim Ansari]

I'm trying to tell a single story that's the human story.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

And to do that, Tamim is searching for a history, a narrative that the whole world feels seen in, a past we can all agree on and claim.

[Tamim Ansari]

I think there's a global we that is trying to be born and that inevitably will be born, because we can't all just be in the same space without eventually speaking the same language. That's what humans do. But if you're trying to tell the story of this emerging global we, then you have to look past the details.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

Randall I'm Rand AbdelFattah.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And on this philosophical episode of Thuline from NPR, we're doing something a little different. We're getting inside the head of best selling author Tamim Ansari and looking past the details to learn what inspires someone to write 50,000 years of history, why our shared history is a story we have to invent, and how the future of our species might depend on our ability to to arrive at a story we can all see ourselves in.

[Tamim Ansari]

Hi, this is Brian Hoyle from Twinsburg, Ohio, and you're listening to throughline from NPR.

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[Rand AbdelFattah]

Part 1 the Power of the Powerful.

[Narrator/Host]

We do seem to be living through one of those periods of quite a growing Worldwide incoherence. Old narratives have lost their power. Atomized voices are trumpeting new ones or refurbished versions of old ones. And if someone doesn't come up with something good, the many moving towards something bad will sow catastrophe. The danger is particularly sharp now because the quote unquote society we're talking about is not this or that bunch of people, but the single intertangled spaghetti of human lives that constitutes all of humanity in this, our global age.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

One of the things Tamim Mansari argues is that human beings need to agree on a common sense story, a feeling of being part of a we, or in his words, an intertangled spaghetti of human lives in order to function. But who decides who the we is and what we can all agree on? If the old narratives have lost their power, who determines a new one?

[Tamim Ansari]

The narrative is our framework that allows us to actually just even operate. Now, when a society is in some more or less stable shape, the experiences or the data that challenges the narrative is shelved. It's considered irrelevant, and it's put on the back shelf where it'll be looked at later by someone who cares and nobody does. But when things stop working, you know, when there's more and more trouble arises, then some of those irrelevant facts, some people start to say, wait, maybe that's not so irrelevant. The narrative that keeps the powerful in place and keeps everybody else in place. The function of the narrative is not just to do that, but it's to enable us to efficiently and correctly handle the data that's coming at us from out there. And it's not just random. It has to fit more. It has to kind of fit what's really out there. If it doesn't actually fit what's really out there. We are an extinct species. So our ability to keep correcting our narrative is our ability to function effectively in the environment. And when a society starts to not be able to cope with what's coming at it and what's happening, then the narrative starts to break down. And you see what's happening in, let's say, the United States today. You know, it's like the narrative is breaking down. And as the narrative starts to break down, there are people who the long in place narrative that confirmed the power of the powerful. As those narrative threads weaken, people who have been victimized by the way things are over the course of history now begin to raise their voices and say, you know what? That story doesn't. It doesn't fit me and, or I don't recognize the character that is in that story. That's supposed to be me. That's not me, that guy. So they start to try to tell a different story.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Those stories depend on your point of view. Where do you come from? What do you see from where you are? Who's telling you about how the world works and what the world even is? Can you tell us a little bit about your story? You know, we all have a story, sort of, where do you come from, where did you grow up? And how did you become interested in writing history?

[Tamim Ansari]

My father was an Afghan, my mother was an American. We could go a little deeper into that. My father was an Afghan from an eminent cultural, literary, intellectual family in Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, you know, from. From some people's point of view. So he was at the top of the heap of a very. Of the bottom of the heap. My mother was an American who was from a family of Finnish immigrants and they were working class, poor. And my mother and father met at the end of the Depression. It's a very complex tapestry. And when I work out my own story that has unfolded through my journey through the cultural universe of the world today, the anomaly of my parents is always a generating factor of the plot. So I grew up in Afghanistan. I lived there until I was 16, and then I came to the States and I've lived here ever since. So, you know, what ends up being a mainspring of my little story is actually just one thread in a bigger fabric that is history. So that's. That's how come I write these things.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

That I write as a result, kind of like me and Ramtin Tamim grew up bicultural, straddling the fault line of the earth.

[Tamim Ansari]

I am both Afghan and American. I think I could also say I'm neither Afghan nor American. Somehow I'm standing outside both of these bubbles. And because, you know, I've been standing outside of these cultural bubbles, it gives me a perspective that gets me to look at what many of my people who are monocultural see as reality. I see it as a construct. I see it as one whole context that one could be outside of and be in another whole context.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

I have to say, I really love that. You know, honestly, partly the inspiration for Throughline came from exactly what you're talking about. Ramtin and I are both the children of refugees, and we ourselves were not born here. And that was partly what prompted the show, was that we were like trying to make sense of our individual stories. Not only our origin, country's history, and then our new adopted country's history, but then the history of this entire planet. That's like you're zooming out more and more and more.

[Tamim Ansari]

Yeah. When I find myself among Afghans, I am an Afghan. I am a certain somebody, you know, that I recognize. When I drift away from that and I'm in an American context with my American friends, then I'm an American, and I recognize that self. And there is almost a sense that it's not the same self. So I've been fascinated by that, you know, by. By that anomaly or that experience.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Which brings it back to this other fascination Tamim has. The concept of we. Who's being included in the narrative of human history, who feels included in that story and how we connect through a mutual understanding of what was and what is.

[Tamim Ansari]

When we say a history of the world, we're actually talking about the story of how we got to where we are today. And that there's an explanatory element to that. And what struck me was that embedded in that formulation, there's always some assumption about who is this we we're talking about that is here today? And because I came from another place and I've been in, you know, like, my scrambled cultural odyssey made me remember from my Afghan side, living in Afghanistan and growing up in the schools there and hearing a history of the world. I was hearing a history of the world, not just the history of Afghanistan or the history of Islam or the history of some corner, you know, the periphery. That was the history of the world. And it included some of the events from the history of the world that I, as a textbook editor, creating world histories for kids in America. Some of the same events were in both of these histories, but it made a difference where you stood and the perspective you had on this entire collection of facts. And it made a difference in which facts you would leave out or which ones you would put in. But after that, I got to thinking about how globalization is now such a leading feature of life for everyone on the planet. It is the case that now, any place you are in your experience of the world, you're going to be overlapping with people who look like they're in the Safeway with you buying carrots and you're doing the same thing. But actually, each of you have a constellation of memories and history and, you know, values and relationships. That means you're not necessarily in the same world. Each of you is standing in your own world, and there is misunderstandings and little sparks that trigger off of the fact that, you know, you think you're in the same place, but actually you're in Two different worlds. And all of the different worlds that have grown up on Earth over these many thousands of years are now all in the same space. They're in cyberspace. You know, that's a space that now exists, but also physically, people are migrating and, you know, everybody. You guys know what I'm talking about. So then I started to think, well, if you were to try to tell a story in which the we is this global we that isn't here yet but is trying to be here, then you have to look past the details. You know, you have to look past who's going to run for president next year or whether fascism is on the rise in Italy or, you know, these. These particular questions you have to look at. You have to look for the mainsprings of the human story and what's generating this constant flow of events.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I mean, obviously it makes sense why you would then become interested in doing this kind of larger meta history. But I just wanted to ask one thing. Sort of one of the things you talk about and you hinted at here is the kind of the role of. Of narrative in history, that ultimately all history can be boiled down to a story. We tell ourselves that the story is as important as quantifiable data or other information. With that said, what do you think of the old adage that the victors get to tell that story?

[Tamim Ansari]

You're right that in any given area, the story that's being told. Let's back up a little. It serves the preservation of whatever the social configuration is at that point, and it allows a social entity or world to exist that can continue to meet the challenges of the environment. Now, in the history of the world, there has never been a time in which that has occurred without somebody being in power and others having less power. So the narrative has a tendency to preserve the power of whoever's powerful. And you can say that the narrative that preserves the power of the powerful is very appealing to the powerful. It sounds true, right? Right, right. And, you know, much expertise is mustered to show how and why it's true. And that's not just in terms of, like, stockpiling the appropriate and relevant facts that will prove this narrative to be true, but also the intellectual endeavors of, well, people like me who, you know, put the facts together and they make it sound right.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

How Tameem ansari sifted through 50,000 years of human history to find the connective tissue. And what he found when we come back.

[Tamim Ansari]

Hello, this is Rachel Lytle from Omaha, Nebraska. You are listening to Throughline with npr.

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[Narrator/Host]

Part 2 A band of Relatives Human groups exist as social constellations which interact with their environment as if those whole collections of individuals were cells of single entities. Once we started forming such group selves, one and all of which were constellations, webs of meaning that existed only in the minds of their members and not in the physical world as such. That's when the story of humankind truly began.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

In Tamim Ansari's book the Invention of Yesterday, he says that the history of the world is the story that we're telling one another, that since the beginning of humankind, people have been inventing stories to find purpose, to explain mystery and wonder, to survive. And the interpretation of these stories over tens of thousands of years is the writing of history.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And because Tamim writes about the writing of history, talk about being meta, he searched for some of the common threads and links that have connected people throughout the centuries, threads that he was searching for as the braids that he wove together to form a collective human story.

[Tamim Ansari]

So, you know, I went through to thinking like, what are the. Well, there's money. Money and bureaucracy is one of the things. Bureaucracy, you know, then religion would be.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

One and religion, money, bureaucracy and religion.

[Tamim Ansari]

But it all seemed not quite deep enough yet. You know, I'm looking for a deeper structure. And when I kept trying to get deeper, I finally got down to a sense of the factors that were driving the human story. You could bring it down to three. Three actors, you know, three factors, actors that are Constantly affecting each other's journey, so to speak.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Factor number one, environment.

[Tamim Ansari]

So it struck me that every life form, you can say it's in some environment, and those two things are irreducible. There's, you know, wherever there's life, there's also an environment that's not the same as that life form. So there's always an in here and an out there. And the story occurs on the border between in here and out there. It's the interaction always building the wall, reaching out, building the wall. That's one of the fundamental processes. As humans, we exist as clumps of individuals. You know, we have agency as social groups. And those social groups, just as much as an individual has a self that they can experience and identify, and they pursue the interests of the self. Social groups also have a self. It's a social self. And how do they have that? Well, there you get to the second factor.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Factor number two, language.

[Tamim Ansari]

Maybe I should call it intercommunication. However it is that we do it from these internal selves that nobody knows about. You guys don't know what I'm thinking. You know, you can't get in here, but actually you can, because we're all in this conversation together, and we're all in some way thinking about this conversation that we're having. So the social event is something that we're all participating in. And to that extent that we're participating, there's a social self that exists even right here with the three of us. So these social selves exist, but they're not like biological selves because they can grow, they can merge with other social selves. So that's one of the driving factors of history, is that these social selves are in a constant state of flux sometimes. Originally, I think in the early in the human story, we were just bands of nomads, all of us related by blood ties. You know, we were a band of relatives roaming the world and doing all that stuff, interacting with the environment that I talked about. But tribes emerged and kingdoms, and now we're countries. And that's not the end of it. We're just in. In the middle of the story still.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

So, quick recap. Factor one, environment. Factor two, language. And that brings us to factor three, tools.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Tools.

[Tamim Ansari]

I think that the key to understanding the role of tools in history is to realize the tools are not something that we have, even though it feels that way, because I could walk away from my computer, you know, I could put my hammer back in my workshop and even lose it, and. And it's not like I've lost a part of myself. But actually, tools is a feature of us as a biological species. It's how we interact with the environment. It is our interface with the environment. You know, our tools are the extensions of our fingers, the extension of our eyes, the extension of our ears. And so there is a constant interaction between the evolution of our tools and what is coming at us from the environment. But since tools is the outermost layer of who we are, it's not just something we have. As our toolkit changes, we change. And you know, we change means the social landscape we live in keeps changing, even the physical landscape. And then we have to face the problem of syncing up with everybody else, because our way of staying together is by communicating with each other. We don't have a single telepathic brain, so that we cannot just all change at the same time. And therefore the process of changing to stay in sync with the changes that the environment is bringing that our tools are forcing upon us and that we are all of that. When you put all of that together, I think you have the human story, and that's the story I tried to tell on the invention of yesterday.

[Narrator/Host]

Alone among the creatures of Earth, we humans use tools and language to deal with our environment effectively. As groups, language makes stories possible, and mythic stories are what knit human groups together. In our earliest days, our mythic narratives were spawned by geography. We formed webs of meaning with people in our immediate environment. Where we lived was who we were. Through constant intercommunication, we built up shared assumptions about deep matters such as time and space, life and death, good and evil. We lived and died in symbolic landscapes woven of our ideas. And as far as we knew, those landscapes were the world itself.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

Right. Now, I think a lot of people would argue there is a war of narratives happening, right? And I think it's interesting because you said, just to paraphrase, I think you said something like it has the power, by questioning the narratives and our ability as a species to continually revise the narrative is our survival. But it feels like it's destroying us in some ways, like right now, living through it. You could argue it's a necessary pulling apart. Right. So is it like short term destruction for long term survival? I guess is my question. This process of challenging and revising the narrative.

[Tamim Ansari]

Excellent point you're making. I think there's no yes or no to that. It has happened all through history and it's led to upheavals, revolutionary upheavals, which when the smoke clears, there's A different world order. And those have not often been very clean and easy. And maybe we're in for a hard time with that. I don't know. But I do know, I think in the United States, the contradiction of the enslavement of Africans to build the economy of this country and the proposition that all men are created equal and have in a, of the rights to pursue, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, both of those things are true. You know, it's like there was enslavement. And I personally embrace the spirit of that proposition. But cognitive dissonance says, come on now, something has to be resolved with that. What ended up happening with the Civil War and all that didn't resolve it. The circumstances are still not neutral here. But it is also the case that we are in our search for inclusion based on acknowledgement of diversity, and acceptance of diversity also has had and is having a fragmenting effect. So that instead of a multicultural society, somebody used a phrase I thought was really good. Frank Viviano, another writer, he said, instead of multiculturalism, we're getting a shattered kaleidoscope of monoculturalisms. And what we want to try to do is build a new narrative structure, tell a new story that all of us can legitimately see ourselves as characters in. Then we can start to interact. The trouble is, of course, it's not the trouble, but the fact is that America is not alone anymore. We can't just fix our society. We can't. It's a world problem. We have to find the narrative that will enable a human story to develop. That's the story of all of us that we can say, yeah, I accept that. That's. I see myself in that story. And that sounds like it is my story. I'm in there. Validly. We don't have that yet.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

I guess in my mind, what could possibly unite the entire world? What story could possibly unite the entire world?

[Tamim Ansari]

The old idea was, oh, the aliens will come, and we'll all unite as humans against the aliens. Well, the aliens did come. It's in the form of a microscopic little thing that doesn't look like a human, has spikes. It's called Covid. It didn't unite us, which should have. I thought it was going to. It didn't do it. You know, the other aspect of what's happening right now in terms of world history is the evolution of technology. We're trying to get down inside of material reality and shape our own. Whatever we need. Artificial intelligence, robotics, you know, these are all ancient quests that are trying to do things that Traditionally have been the. We have considered them to be the domain of the gods or of God. You know, it's like we're trying to create life now. We're trying to be the masters of material reality.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Right. Just going on with the technology theme, isn't the nature of communication today a challenge also to developing some kind of widely acceptable narrative? Because now everyone has a narrative. It's not even a. Everyone's narrative is the world and they can express that easily. And there's literally millions and, you know, millions and millions of narratives whacking up against each other and the public sphere every single second. So isn't that a challenge?

[Tamim Ansari]

Absolutely. You really bring up. One of the core things that I've been puzzling over and worrying about because the way the technology operates is through the algorithm. And the algorithm, you know, the algorithmic process is one that was falsely appealing to us because it said to each of us, individuals, what do you want? Not to anybody else, just you particularly, what do you want? We can figure out, we can give you exactly that. So the algorithm, to put it in a blunt fashion, when you walk into a bookstore called Amazon, you're entering a bookstore nobody else has ever seen or ever will. It exists only for you. If I look for Google Egypt, I'll get a lot of stuff about Muslim Brotherhood and you know, and if somebody else Googles it, they will get a lot of stuff about the temples of Luxor and tours of the Nile and so on. And that's because the algorithm knows who we are. But I will say that in the old days, back before Spotify and Pandora and stuff, I used to drive around my car and I would, you know, listen to DJs. There were some I liked and some I didn't like. So I would gravitate towards the ones I liked. But the ones I like picked a bunch of songs, some of which I liked more, some I didn't like. But the thing is that was okay because I was in interaction with somebody else making their choices and I was, was interacting with another consciousness out there in reality. I think that technology has a built in tendency to narrow each of us down to living all alone. And then that narrative that you're talking about is the narrative that creates a self for that individual loner and the prison cell constructed by the algorithm for just them.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

When we come back, the quest for a narrative everyone can see themselves in and whether that's ultimately a good thing.

[Tamim Ansari]

Hi, this is Taylor Hein from Memphis, Tennessee, and you're listening to Throughline by npr.

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[Rand AbdelFattah]

Part 3 the Story of us.

[Narrator/Host]

Even in unstable times Today is what all of history seems to have been leading up to, which gives the present moment a visceral authority, authority that yesterday can never match. As Dwight D. Eisenhower once put it, things are more like they are right now than they have ever been. But the present doesn't deserve the authority it enjoys. Something that is always in the process of vanishing has some nerve claiming to be the permanent real. That's one good reason to ponder history and pay attention to the past. The present, after all, is nothing but the past that will exist in the future.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

Tamim Mansari has written two metahistories of the world, and he's currently contemplating a third. And I gotta be honest, the skeptic in me is kinda like, what are these attempts to define ourselves for? Why are we searching for some sort of overarching trend throughout all of human history? Is that actually possible? Like, does Tamim think he's actually figured it all out? Does he have doubts? I had to ask.

[Tamim Ansari]

Well, doubt is not quite the right word, I think, because the story that I'm telling and the invention of yesterday is not presenting itself as the true story of humans on Earth. It's a story, and I think back to when there was just 200 of us as a little band of relatives huddled around the fire in the darkness and we're telling the story to one another, about us and where we came from. And you know, Grandpa did this and Grandma did that and you know, you, kid are going to be a great hunter one day. Whatever that story was, we were telling it to one another. And by telling it we were creating an us. That's the process I'm involved in. I'm telling a story. And when we all start telling the story of us, there will become an us.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Is the us dangerous?

[Tamim Ansari]

Is the us dangerous?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Can the US be dangerous? This is the thing I've grappled with, is that isn't part of creating the us as human beings to then have a them that we must fight, that we must oppose?

[Tamim Ansari]

That's a question that, you know, I bash my head on the wall on that one because we have never been able to have an us without a them. We need the aliens. We need to kill them.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

We do have another alien, though, that you talk about, if you could maybe expand on this, which is climate change, which is this impending disaster that's coming. And we can't seem to come up with any narrative there about what that means. Right. Because that is something that will impact the vast majority of us.

[Tamim Ansari]

Right, right. So I have had a thought about that. I should mention that I'm actually prepping a course and the name of this course is the Invention of Tomorrow.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Okay.

[Tamim Ansari]

All right. So one of the things that ideas that has come to me is that the construction of an us, the narrative that creates an us, emerges out of a physical or material project that we are doing. So, you know, you have this whole superstructure of mythological reality that emerged in Egypt when the Egyptians had a huge river that they were trying to figure out how to operate with this river, you know, and they had to be an OSH to do that because, you know, there were thousands of them required to do little bits of different things that would somehow all fit together. But they were able to do it, and they did do it because they had one single monumental, epic, mythic sized project. And that ultimately what we need is an ultimate mythic in scope project.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

So like a giant alien squid. That's for my fellow Watchmen fans, Think.

[Tamim Ansari]

Back to another much smaller but still illuminating project, physical project, that was related to building on us. And that was a transcontinental railroad. In the middle of the Civil War, this country, and Lincoln was a driver of it, they decided to build a line, a real rail across uncharted wilderness that would connect the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. What a metaphor. What a method. Mythic, you know, metaphor.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

Yeah. I think it's sometimes hard to see kind of the forest from the trees and kind of come up with the story while you're sitting in it. But I think we all know we're living in historic times, like there are there. Think Pieces around all the time about how, you know, imagining how the future is going to look back at this time. Right.

[Tamim Ansari]

Yeah.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

To kind of relate it back for a second to what you were telling us about sort of your feeling like you didn't quite belong in one place or another when you first maybe got to the US just with the benefit of time. And now looking back and thinking about the story you had in your mind about yourself at that time versus the story you have now, I wonder whether it changed for you and whether you think that tells us anything about how on a bigger level, the story changes potentially with the time that passes.

[Tamim Ansari]

My sense of the story and my sense of my story has certainly changed continually over time. So that's all I can say. And when I look back at who I was 50 years ago, I'm amazed at how dumb I was. And at the same time, the interesting thing is that I can look back at some of my high school papers that I wrote when I first came here, and I find myself expressing ideas very well put that I thought I discovered a month ago. Ideas that I thought I had for the first time a month ago.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Wow.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Interesting. Kind of looking back, do you have more of a sense of hope or despair when you're looking at the future?

[Tamim Ansari]

I think I'm sort of leaning towards hope because my sense of the past is that when I look at my own past, I see so many times in my life that I would love to just go back, back and stay there forever. But when I look at my. Any scraps of writing or evidence I have, at the time I was really in despair and I didn't, you know, I felt terrible. So it's only that way. I can think of it that way only now because I know how it came out and we're here in the present and we don't know how it's going to come out. It's impossible not to emotionally imagine the worst. But it's also the case that evidence shows that we've been through a lot of tough stuff and come through. I think that one thing we can say about the future, the one thing we can say for sure about the future, is nothing at all. We don't know nothing about it. It's up to.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

That's it for this week's episode. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

I'm Rand Abdelfatah and you've been listening to Throughline from npr.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This episode was produced by me and.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

Me and Lawrence Wu, Laine Kaplan Levinson.

[Narrator/Host]

Julie Kane, Victor Iz, Skyler Swenson, Camila.

[Tamim Ansari]

Bayner, Monsieur Carano, Yolanda Sangueni.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

Thanks also to Tamar Charney and Anya Grundman.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This episode was mixed by Andy Huether.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Includes Naveed Marvi Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. Also, we want your voice on our show. Send us a voicemail at 872-588-8805 with your name, where you're from and the line you're listening to Throughline from NPR and we'll get you on the show. That's 872-588-8805.

[Rand AbdelFattah]

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write [e-mail] thanks for listening.

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