Daniel B.'s Reviews > The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

Time, said Heraclitus the Dark, is a river, an endless, ceaseless flow into which no one steps twice, and from its unfathomable waters Tamim Ansary has written a pond: broad, flat, and shallow. But no, “The Invention of Yesterday,” whatever its other innumerable faults, is too vast and imposing. It is more of a swamp.

Through its bogs and quicksands, Ansary proposes to stalk the most elusive of Big History’s big game, the causes and processes of cultural evolution. He thinks he's tracked them down to some nebulous quality he calls “narrative.” Later, this becomes “master narrative” and sometimes “world narratives” whose “interconnectedness” form a “through line” across “world historical monads” in “intercommunicative zones,” whatever those may be. In this thicket of arglebargle he imagines he has cornered his prey.

Right from the start, you know your guide is unreliable. With the confidence of the utterly lost, Ansary early on decrees that human history began some hundred thousand years ago when “true language came into being.” To his credit, Ansary has managed to commit two fallacies in just five words, no mean feat. Anything which may not fit his subsequent thesis will be dismissed like a counterfeit Scotsman as no true language, with the thesis itself one gigantic begged question.

Narrative, as Ansary has it, may well be an inherent function of human language, and language itself a primary attribute distinguishing our species from our predecessors, but so what? Apart from its artifacts, what is narrative itself? How did it so blithely come into being and what shapes it? Riddle me that, and then the bewildering skeins of human culture and random chains of historical causation might well untangle. At this point Ansary might have spoken usefully of evolutionary biology, of climate and geography, of resource distribution, of the human psychological gestalt, or of memetics and communication theory, say. Instead we get a Gee Whiz tour of history from a pop psyche perspective, as if "The Decline of the West" were a postapocalyptic YA novel about vampires.

For make no mistake, this is a very bad book. It is junk history, replete with errors you’d question in a high school term paper. Ansary cannot be bothered to get his facts right. In the most egregious example, the Ming Great Wall of China is “the only man-made artifact visible from space today.” No, it’s not. Its color blends in to the terrain; at best it is marginally visible under ideal conditions from low earth orbit if you know where to look, but so are any number of bridges. The natural reservoir of the Black Death was “people living in the Himalayan foothills.” No, it wasn’t. Plague is a very young pathogen that evolved as an enzootic disease among marmots, but opportunistically infects through the vector of fleas other rodents such as rats and mammals such as man. Gutenberg only “figured out” printing “with an adaptation of the wine press.” No, he didn’t. Presses had been used to print patterns onto textiles for centuries by then, while woodcuts and even playing cards were being printed when Gutenberg was born. His precise methods are still debated, but since he was a goldsmith he almost certainly made matrixes that let him cast moveable type from lead. Gutenberg deserves credit for the invention of publishing, for which Ansary has more reason to be grateful than his readers. Ansary repays his debt by reducing Gutenberg to some guy who found that a screw press can squish almost anything.

It’s junk logic, too, full of contradictions. Having beaten the Templars, for instance, the Mongol Empire “stood poised to sweep across Europe to the Atlantic Ocean.” Two paragraphs later, having lost to the Mamluks, “it had surely reached its absolute administrative limit.” The Persians had their “huge empire humming like a well-tuned engine.” A few pages later after Salamis, they “had to slink home in defeat.” Ansary, always one to print the legend, calls the Persians “overextended” against Greeks enjoying the “unified coherence of a people fighting at home.” That’s the same story Herodotus tells, of course, but he was an Athenian. The Persian Empire flowered for another full century until Alexander, and the so-called Greek victory was as much merely a Persian strategic withdrawal. Ansary is as credulous of such lore as Herodotus himself buying a tall tale about the pyramids from an Egyptian huckster.

Some of this might be forgivable if the book were well written, but alas. Its prose aims for breezy and finds windy instead. His style might be called conversational if you enjoy trivial personal asides about his handwriting and the camels in Kabul. He scatters italics and flings exclamation marks when he’s afraid you might be missing a point, but he should’ve tried stronger and more vivid language instead. The overall effect is as monotonous as an evening watching Uncle Harry’s slide show of his trip to Nova Scotia. The insipidness descends to functional illiteracy at one point on page 248. In the wake of the Black Plague, people question the Catholic narrative, “not it’s accuracy but its relevance.” I’d like to believe this butchery an erratum, but I have my doubts. Maybe the Hatchette Book Group can’t afford truth checkers to correct all Ansary’s errors of fact, evidence, and reasoning, there’s just so many of them. But haven’t they even any proofreaders?

The often sophomoric and always slipshod language is more part of the conceptual vacuum at the book’s core than you might think. Ansary papers over every exception to his vaporous theories with semantics. In discussing nation-states, for instance, he notes China’s resistance to his model, so, neither empire nor nation-state, it becomes “to coin a term, a civilization-state.” Ansary is forever coining terms, most of which, like “narrative” and the especially clunky “intercommunicative zone,” mean nothing in particular. Otherwise, like Humpty Dumpty on a meth bender, he renames concepts which have perfectly well understood names already. The Middle East, or Southwest Asia if you prefer, becomes the “Islamic Middle World.” The High Middle Ages, or Late Medieval Era if you prefer, become the “Long Crusades.” The Enlightenment becomes the “progress narrative,” the Columbian Exchange the “Columbus moment,” the Industrial Revolution “the invention explosion,” and so on, ads infinitum, absurdum, and nauseum. None of Ansary’s clumsy neologisms contribute a thing to the discussion. Perhaps the clumsiest, bleshing, when cultures both blend and mesh, he stole from eminent hack Theodore Sturgeon. A distinction which makes no difference is Ansary’s stock in trade, but it shouldn’t sound like Sylvester the Cat saying grace.

Most ethereal of all these phantoms, even more undefined than narrative itself, is the word constellation, so roundly abused here as to lose all meaning. Sometimes it's social groups, sometimes cultural associations, sometimes public institutions and agencies, sometimes a society or culture as a whole, and when Ansary needs it to, sometimes all of suffering humanity standing on its ear. It’s like a four-syllable relative pronoun he trots out whenever he can’t think of the name of something. He couldn’t be less specific if he were using a bowl of Alpha-Bits.

It’s a rule of thumb that when you have something important to say, use the simplest, clearest, and most direct language possible. By the obvious corollary, “The Invention of Yesterday” conceals its paucity of conception within dense, choking clouds of gaseous verbiage. The jungle of jargon closes in, the swamp of inanity swallows all. Gertrude Stein would’ve said there is no here, here, but then, Gertrude would’ve had the common sense not to gag this whole turkey down like I did. It lacks any explanatory power whatsoever, and any comparison to “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is empty flattery. Next to Jared Diamond, Tamim Ansary is cubic zirconium. It’s too late for me, but you can still save yourself.