How History Can Liberate Us

I read a most unusual book, Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian who is on the Cambridge faculty. It has been a widely-read book in the English speaking world. Many of the author’s assertions are not completely credible, but there was one insight that drew my attention right away. As an historian, the author naturally asked himself and his readers, of what value is history? Why study it, why write about it? Many of you have personal interests in history, perhaps because of where you live or your family history. This is why I write about Cherokee history. But why should anyone be interested in history in general, or other peoples’ histories?

Harari’s answer is simple and powerful. There are many problems of oppression and injustice in the world today. The only way to solve these problems is for us to re-imagine the future, a future in which we will have put these problems behind us. I live in France, and I can see Germany from my window. But not once have I had the slightest fear that a new crop of Nazis will coming marching or sailing over the Rhine. That was what happened eighty years ago, but Europe re-imagined its future, a future without aggression and war. It worked.

And the first step to re-imagining the future is to retell our history. Harari said on page 69, “Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future.”

And this is what I am doing in my book, now in press and due out in July 2025, Forgotten Landscapes. I will tell you a lot more about it as its publication draws closer.

One major problem in America, often overlooked, is the continued oppression of Native Americans. And one major reason for it is that American culture, in general, dismisses Native American tribes as dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the Rez in flyover country. This image makes Native American progress sound totally hopeless.

And this image emerges from an historical mythology. One of the dominant, foundational myths of American culture is that Europeans came across the Atlantic and found a continent that was sparsely inhabited by savage hunter-gatherers who hunted deer and gathered nuts and berries, running through the forest and leaving scarcely a footprint behind them. Europeans then took the land, pushing Natives out of the way, but in the end the land was better off for it, even for the Natives. God blessed the Europeans, and the Natives too, by the Manifest Destiny of the United States.

This version of American history is totally and verifiably wrong. Some books (for example, by Dee Brown and Angie Debo) have tried to correct this false image, mostly from the historical viewpoint. My book will also retell the story of Native American history, and tell it accurately, this time including scientific as well as historical information.

North America was not sparsely populated by Natives. It was densely populated. A civilization that was as highly developed as any in Europe or Asia had just collapsed when Columbus came, but the economy of that civilization lived on, in a network of large, healthy villages connected by strong trade networks. These large villages were healthier than the cities of Europe. European soldiers would not have been able to conquer America had it not been for their diseases, which wiped out ninety percent of the Native population. Europeans also conquered Africa and Asia. But today Asia is mostly Asian, and Africa mostly black, while America is mostly white. And the reason for this is epidemic diseases.

Nor were Natives hunter-gatherers who lived on in unaltered wilderness. Natives transformed the entire landscape by the controlled use of fire, burning whole forests and prairies. They controlled animal populations by hunting. They relied upon agriculture, including by means of irrigation and orchards.

I am not the first to write about this, but other books have been lost in the scholarly literature. They include Forgotten Fires by Omer C. Stewart and America’s Ancient Forests by Thomas M. Bonnicksen. My book will be, as far as I am aware, the first time this story about Native transformation of the American landscape has been told for a popular audience.

I provide documentation for all of these things. In this book, I have retold Native American history and got it correct this time. This will be my contribution to a popular rethinking of Native Americans and their ongoing oppression today.

It is equally incorrect to depict Native Americans as having lived in perfect harmony with their environments, something about which numerous books have been published. Natives changed their environments and sometimes degraded them. But the myth of the eco-friendly tribesmen is not a dangerous myth, unlike the primitive-savage myth that dominates American thinking and keeps Native tribes in ongoing repression, poverty, and obscurity.

I hope that my book will have an impact similar to that of Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, which revealed how, even in the twentieth century when most white Americans assumed the Indian Wars were over, members of the Osage tribe were murdered so that whites could get their oil rights. Although I cannot hope that Martin Scorsese will make a movie from my book.

Vanishing Utopias

We all know that utopias cannot ever exist. But, according to historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, we keep getting closer to it. In fact, our approach to it is accelerating.

It is a long book, almost 500 pages, but it covers the entirety of human prehistory and history, up until the present day, which for the author was 2014. You will not find lists of empires and dates. In this way, it is almost the exact opposite of what is still perhaps the most famous overview of world history, the Outline of History by H. G. Wells.

Instead, the author seeks general trends and explanations for everything that has happened. Here is an example. Why did human evolution seem to proceed so slowly before the arrival of modern humans? For example, Homo ergaster stone tools in Africa remained unchanged for a million years. Harari says that all other animal species, and all humans before Homo sapiens, have or had a biological constraint on their ability to think of new ways of living. Before the human lineage could make any progress, we needed an innovation, invisible in bones and DNA, which allowed us to imagine the future. Neanderthals, for example, he said, did not have “the ability to compose fiction.”

But the author suffers from the delusion of technological optimism, which is very common among writers of popular sociology. Here are two examples which considerably erode the credibility of the conclusion of the book.

First, he seems to assume we will never run out of energy. This is because we invest some of the profits from the old kinds of energy into developing new ones. This has, in fact, happened. One obvious example is that England was running out of wood, so they invested money and research into using coal, which required the invention of the steam engine. Before modern times, all energy was either from burning wood or from human and animal muscle power. Medieval people did not even imagine steam, hydroelectric, or atomic power.

But this will happen only if we deliberately invest in new technology. Right now we need to invest in green technologies such as wind and solar energy. We have done so, but powerful ideological and political forces oppose the adoption of green technology. Donald Trump has made it very clear that his solution to our future energy needs is to pump more oil. Technology will not save us, because Trump will lead us boldly into the twentieth century.

Harari also speculated that wars were becoming rare. It is true that there were fewer wars in 2014 than there had ever been in the past. This was easy to believe in the balmy days of the Obama administration. But almost as soon as Harari’s book was published, Putin decided to invade the Ukraine, for reasons that are not clear even to his supporters, who do not dare to have an independent opinion; and Harari’s own country, Israel, is waging what many observers claim to be a war of extermination against the Palestinians.

Harari even speculated about how to be happy. Happiness is, he said, the product of serotonin levels in the brain. No matter what your external circumstances happen to be, no matter if you are in pain or slavery, you will be happy if you have a lot of serotonin. I think this opinion is a product of the author’s scarcely-hidden admiration for Buddhism. And, he implies, serotonin levels are not only biologically determined—you are either a happy or a depressed person—but also remain unchanged during your life. But this is true only for people who are clinically depressed. They need more serotonin but I do not. Also, I am certain that I am happier now, having completed so many of my life goals, than I was back when I had no idea if my future would be successful.

We need to admit that lots of things are getting better—the same message as Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature—but that we still have a lot of work to do and our success is not assured.

We all live in imagined realities. Despite the absence of evidence for spiritual realities, we will be individually unhappy and collective failures if we live in the way the apostle Paul described in one of his epistles: Eat, drink, for tomorrow we die. We have to at least imagine that we can make the world better.