James Suzman
James Suzman . He wrote Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots in 2021 and Affluence Without Abundance: The disappearing world of the Bushmen in 2017.
About Work: “This book is a tour de force.” —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take
About Affluence Without Abundance: “Insightful and well-written . . . [Suzman chronicles] how much humankind can still learn from the disappearing way of life of the most marginalized communities on earth.” —Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2017
An NPR Best Book of 2017
473: James Suzman: What We Can Learn From 300,000 Years of Human History
Longtime readers of my blog know how much James Suzman’s first book influenced my thinking and views of possessions, community, ownership, modernity, and a range of similar topics. A top question I’ve asked anyone who might know is how populations that didn’t grow despite sharing our biology that has grown exponentially for centuries.
If knowing history is wise and knowing history farther back wiser, James’s living with the San Bushmen of southern Africa gave him a few hundred thousand years to know. We can’t know exactly how their lives today resemble their ancestors, but the overlap is greater than zero and suggests a huge alternative to the knee-jerk dichotomy people can’t see past today of capitalism versus communism. Human beings lived for two hundred thousand years, maybe three, in ways that were neither.
You can imagine the changes in climate, other species, terrain, and more in that time. Their stability endured a thousand times longer than the time since the Industrial Revolution led us to put our whole species in the realm of extinction.
As the world looks to technology to help us out of the mess technology wrought, flagrantly disregarding Einstein’s admonition that acting by what got us into a mess won’t get us out of it, James’s work suggests values, behaviors, and cultures we can learn from.
We covered topics like these. I bet you’ll find our conversation fascinating.