A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century Read Online Free PDF

religious and military orders and entrust it to merchants. Slaves, so essential to the former orders, long remain necessary to the smooth functioning of this new order.
    The Judeo-Greek ideal grows more precise: freedom is a final objective; respect for a moral code is a condition of survival; wealth is a gift from heaven; poverty is a threat. Individual freedom and the mercantile order will from now on be inseparable, marching in lockstep all the way to the present day.
    Around 850 BCE, the Phoenicians refine their alphabet: it is still in use today. Aramaeans settle in Syria, while in Israel next door Amos, Isaiah, and Hosea deliver their prophecies.
    A little later (753 BCE), tiny Athens is becoming one of the world’s most influential powers, thanks less to its armed forces than to its ideas and artistic achievements. Meanwhile in China, far and away the greatest demographic power of the day, the Zhou tear one other apart during the Warring Kingdoms phase. At the same time, in the central Mediterranean, another village is founded amid universal indifference — Rome.
    At the meeting point between Asia and the West, Mesopotamia is now the setting for all invasions and great population movements. In 722, Sargon’s Assyrians take Samaria and exile the Jewish people to Assyria, only to be driven from their land in 630 BCE by the Medes, who return the Jews to their homeland.
    The course of the next two centuries is dizzying: the ground rules of individualism become clearer still as events with lasting repercussions gather speed. In 594, Solon imposes on the Athenians history’s first democratic constitution. In 586, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar destroys Jerusalem and deports the Jewish people yet again — this time to Babylon. In 538, the Persians, newcomers from the mountains, led by their king Cyrus, also head for Mesopotamia’s fertile plains. They seize Babylon and send the Jews back to Israel a second time. They then invade the whole region from Mesopotamia to Egypt, putting a permanent end (in 525 BCE) to the two-thousand-year-old Egyptian empire. In the same period, a Chinese man of letters, LaoTsu, declares that happiness lies in inaction and that the only true freedom is that which relieves you of dependence on your own desires. A wealthy prince in India, Gautama, refuses to succeed his father on the throne and becomes “the Enlightened One,” the Buddha, injecting new life into the ancient Indian doctrine of Hinduism. Shortly afterward in China, another man of letters, Confucius, says that happiness demands respect for good manners, the family, and the traditions of the sociopolitical hierarchy and the Ancients.
    Here we face the great turning point of which we are still the heirs and of which the future will long bear the traces — Asia sets out to free man from his desires, while the West seeks to make him free to realize them. The first chooses to view the world as an illusion, the second to make it the only arena for action and happiness. One speaks of the transmigration of souls, the other of their salvation.
    In the Mediterranean (where in 510 Rome becomes a republic for a few free citizens), tiny Athens stands up (to universal astonishment) against the assault of the Persian empire’s formidable troops — who nevertheless conquer one by one all the Greek cities of Asia Minor. More surprising still: Athens, with Sparta’s help, sends the Persian armies flying — and Darius, an admirer of Heraclitus, the greatest Greek philosopher of the day, is defeated at Marathon in 490 BCE. His successor, Xerxes, is crushed ten years later by seaborne Greek guile at Salamis. For the first time, a tiny city resists an empire. It will not be the last.
    The small mercantile world, not yet taken seriously, thus proves that it is already inhabited by an innerrage — by a ferocious desire to live free — and that it can defy bigger enemies. And, also for the first time, the West repels invaders from the East.