Viewing History As Her Story
With president Barack Obama selecting Janet Yellen as the first woman to head the Federal Reserve and Hillary Clinton being seen as the next presidential hopeful of the Democrats, the most powerful nation on the earth has finally decided to toe the line drawn by several less powerful ones: empower women to rule their nations!
This trend, according to a new book, will only accelerate globally, until women replace men from all positions of power in the coming decades and centuries. And men? Nature would increasingly eliminate them through stratagems like terrorism and war, diseases and impotency, to make women emerge.
This 821-page multi-disciplinary book, The Biology of History-Ascent of Women, published by Partridge, a Penguin Company, is about the emerging change. In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, mega-trend spotters like Alvin Toffler, John Naisbitt and Samuel P Huntington interpreted the process of big-picture change, vis-a-vis contemporary frontiers, in terms of evolution of technology, business and politics, respectively. Authored by Indian journalist Virendra Pandit, the book interprets these changes along Darwinian lines: the “Descent of Men” leads to the “Ascent of Women”, as it were!
The path-breaking book analyses the “anarchy” all over—the world has always been chaotic like this; it is only a tad more connected now!—and suggests this turmoil may actually be a prelude to technology slowly replacing religions as the most powerful connector. Each day. Religion, the old connector of Homo sapiens, is now in a fatal embrace of the Machine, the new connector, which absorbs shelf life.
Why has this connectivity been necessitated? For survival of life as we know it and its evolution. Our planet has suffered half-a-dozen mass extinctions before the Homo sapiens emerged as the most evolved creatures yet; mythologies, religions and sciences connected them, to derive a survival benefit and weather the next mass extinction. Men took the lead in this zillennia-long process and evolved the First, Second and the Third Waves, i.e. agriculture, industry and knowledge. With the evolution of machines by men, for women, their role is now up. They would slowly be replaced by women in all walks of life: it would be the Fourth Wave, the Ascent of Women.
The book also explores interesting issues, old and new. How does Nature assemble religions, as mass connectors? By segregating a deviant section of the society, as a critical mass for the next set of changes. In this respect, circumcision proved to be the biggest game-changer, that made evolution of the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—possible. The book explains how these great man-made religions emerged in West Asia, turned men theo-intoxicated, pollinated the exhausted civilisations with a new sperm, clashed with each other to poach and harvest the maximum number of souls, slowly decayed and imploded within to give way to the next set of game-changers.
It delves into how Nature “harvested” us in the first, river-valley civilisations using modems like myths and polytheistic religions. These early mass connectors were replaced by the second set of civilisations evolved by three monotheistic Abrahamic religions that networked better by marketing theologies as contemporary “technologies”, accelerating competition and elimination. In the third, our civilisations, we have new servers like democracy and science, providing us more comprehensive connectivity, with less permanence, aiming to replace religions.
The book, which declares that “war is the supreme court of Homo sapiens”, and “evolution is a ruthless business that recognizes no moral or ethical issues”, is bound to trigger some controversies. It seeks to rewrite world history along Darwinian lines: how the Homo sapiens come together and get interconnected for collective, incremental, psychological evolution through variation, mutation, adaptation and elimination.
This might enable our species to skip the fate of other uncompetitive life forms which disappeared in six major mass extinctions reported so far in the Earth’s 4.5 billion year existence. In this “new” history, nothing remains constant; even Paradise is a festival-eve offer.
Essentially, the book explores war as a game-changer in catalysing, mutating and rejuvenating societies to restore fecundity. Terrorism and the “Arab Spring” may herald a Muslim Renaissance. And the net gain of the last 10,000 years? The sperm banks, making man “irrelevant” for the Fourth Wave, probably led by women!