On his book Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting and the Course of Human Cultures
Cover Interview of June 20, 2017
A close-up
Readers will see that from the outset of the book, I try to
convey the ways in which numbers are filtered into our lives in pervasive and
often undetected ways. Everything from our perception of time to our
self-esteem is impacted by the culturally specific means we use to quantify
things.
Consider the case of time, highlighted in the first chapter:
We have minutes and seconds not because of something that exists in the
physical universe, but because we hold on to the detritus of long-dead
languages in Mesopotamia, namely unusual base-60 number systems that were used
by speakers in that region millennia ago.
In the first chapter I highlight ways in which particular
number systems impact our lives, while presaging some of the major points of
the book. I note that languages vary dramatically in the kinds of numbers they
use, and some languages have few or no numbers. I also point out that number
systems are usually based around decimal, vigesimal, and quinary patterns
because most (but not all) numbers were developed after people recognized
correspondences between the quantities of their fingers and other items in
their surroundings.
However, humans arrived at such recognitions in haphazard
ways that were only concretized and disseminated through and across cultures
via number words. This dissemination ultimately reshaped the human story. These
and other points are hinted at in the first chapter, and explored more fully
later in the book.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
Readers will see that from the outset of the book, I try to convey the ways in which numbers are filtered into our lives in pervasive and often undetected ways. Everything from our perception of time to our self-esteem is impacted by the culturally specific means we use to quantify things.
Consider the case of time, highlighted in the first chapter: We have minutes and seconds not because of something that exists in the physical universe, but because we hold on to the detritus of long-dead languages in Mesopotamia, namely unusual base-60 number systems that were used by speakers in that region millennia ago.
In the first chapter I highlight ways in which particular number systems impact our lives, while presaging some of the major points of the book. I note that languages vary dramatically in the kinds of numbers they use, and some languages have few or no numbers. I also point out that number systems are usually based around decimal, vigesimal, and quinary patterns because most (but not all) numbers were developed after people recognized correspondences between the quantities of their fingers and other items in their surroundings.
However, humans arrived at such recognitions in haphazard ways that were only concretized and disseminated through and across cultures via number words. This dissemination ultimately reshaped the human story. These and other points are hinted at in the first chapter, and explored more fully later in the book.