Throughline - A Story Of Us?

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

We've been seeing a lot of debate recently about how history should be taught. For example, some believe that the Civil War was about state rights while some argue that slavery played a large role in it. But what if we could all agree on one shared history? The past, as we know it, is a collection of billions of smaller stories that coalesce into the stories of families, communities, nations, and entire cultures. According to Tamim Ansary, narrative is the way we invent the past and the key to understanding history is understanding the stories we tell ourselves about three key areas: technology, environment, and language. With a world seemingly more connected than ever and still volatile with a constant sense of fracturing identities, Tamim contends that our shared history is a story we must invent. And the future of our species depends on our ability to develop a story we can all see ourselves in.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. The shape of the narrative is what it all comes down to in the end. History deals in facts, of course. But in history, those facts fundamentally serve a narrative. When we construct our story, we are inventing ourselves. That's what we were doing in those caves long ago, gathered around the fire, passing on to our children what we remembered about our grandparents,

reminiscing about life-changing adventures we'd shared, arguing about which of us really killed the bear, and drawing conclusions about the meaning of life from the stars we saw above. For when ancient folks looked up at the night sky, they didn't just see stars. They saw constellations. They said, there's a bear. And they said, hey look, a mighty hunter.

And their companions nodded. And as long as everybody in the group saw the bear and the mighty hunter, there they were. Tamim Ansari, the invention of yesterday. Conservative lawmakers are asking the Biden administration to abandon curriculum they, fabricates American history in schools. A new controversy about Texas history and free speech, all centering around a new book about the history of the Battle of the Alamo. A Tennessee school board has banned the critically acclaimed graphic novel Mouse. It is a true story about the horrors of the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman. There's a bill passing its first House committee vote on Thursday. Opponents call it the Don't Say Gay Bill. Right now, in America, it feels impossible for people to agree on just about anything.

You might find it comforting to think about how, long ago, modern humans looked up at the stars and agreed on what it was they saw. But today, it feels like we're so far removed from that shared story. It will effectively erase LGBTQ students and LGBTQ history from classroom discussion. Cancel culture is going to backfire because it denies history. It's very clear that America has a history problem. There's no agreeing on how to tell the story of how we got to where we are today. No common narrative that unites us. And this fight is especially playing out in our country's classrooms.

In North Carolina, amid statewide demonstrations, social studies standards are now under review. Our books are the bricks that build our society. And of course, there's the issue of slavery and how to teach that foundational part of our country's past. Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda. That's absurd. The highest form of patriotism is critical analysis. We cannot eliminate our history. Some of our history is bad, but the majority of it is great. Both sides need to be taught.

How do we fix this? We fix this by having new textbooks from different perspectives. Writing history by teaching every American story. Every American story. But who gets to decide what's included, what's left out, and what ultimately shapes our American story, our global story as human beings on this earth? Some people look up at the night sky and see stars. Some see a bear and a mighty hunter. But who's to say? And what interpretation is passed down to future generations? What do you see?

It may seem like a lost cause trying to tell a single human story that we all agree on. But knowing who we are and being able to visualize where we're going is based on where we've been. So maybe a common history is a key to bringing us all together. At least that's what Tamim Ansari thinks. You know, many years ago, I was a textbook editor. Eventually, my area was world history. Now, Tamim's a writer, teacher, and author of big histories. But he comes from the world of editing textbooks, framing the narrative. One month, I might have an assignment to write the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. And the next month, I might have an assignment to

write for some whole different textbook program, you know, the invention explosion of the 19th century in Europe and America. Doing this work, Tamim began to see unexpected connections across time and place and peoples. Because I was like skipping across, you know, like now the Civil War in America and now, you know, the ancient Mesopotamian empires. I was seeing patterns that I might not have seen otherwise. Years later, all those patterns started to coalesce for him while reading three totally different history books at the same time. And one was about building the Great Wall of China. And one was about how nomads in Central Asia, you know, how their life went, what happened

when they raided another nomadic camp. There was nothing to get that they didn't already have, so they would all join up and raid them. And then these rolling waves of marauding nomads would develop. Then I recognized from reading Roman history about, yeah, and these people, the Huns came out of the East and they sacked things that were part of the civilized Roman Empire. And I'm like, wait, all of those things, I read that. And then there were these guys in the middle.

This is all part of the same big picture. So what is that picture? Well, Tamim started to create meaning from seemingly unrelated events across the world, connecting dots, building constellations. In other words, he started writing a story. The book that I think we're talking about today is called The Invention of Yesterday, a 50,000-year history of human culture, conflict, and connection. Tamim Ansari's book poses a new fundamental question. What if the real story of human history is story itself?

History is composed of facts the way that a cathedral is composed of bricks, let's say. But the bricks are not the cathedral. The cathedral is something about the way the bricks are put together. So history, in that sense, is a, it's a story, and I am undertaking to tell that story. And it's not the only way to tell it, but it's maybe one way. I like to think of Tamim as kind of a philosopher of history. Someone who studies and writes history, but also writes about history. Thinks about what it really is and what it's made up of. And on ThruLine, that's the kind

of thing we're always thinking about behind the scenes. We look for connections, try to discover the ways the stories we tell interact with one another across time and place. We're always asking what stories should be told, who should tell them, and why these moments from the past matter, why they're relevant to us today. And through that, we also start to see that history always boils down to one thing, the suffix of the word itself, story. And that's what Tamim tries to capture in his book, The Invention of Yesterday. It's a global history focused on the stories different civilizations have invented about themselves across time.

Stories that tell thousands of years of experiences and encounters. Memories, memoirs, that became history. Because to Tamim, history is really just a story we're telling one another. Which, obviously, resonates with us. I'm trying to tell a single story that's the human story. And to do that, Tamim is searching for a history, a narrative that the whole world feels seen in, a past we can all agree on and claim.

I think there's a global we that is trying to be born and that inevitably will be born because we can't all just be in the same space without eventually speaking the same language. That's what humans do. But if you're trying to tell the story of this emerging global we, then you have to look past the details. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui. And on this philosophical episode of ThruLine from NPR, we're doing something a little different. We're getting inside the head of bestselling author Tamim Ansari and looking past the details to learn what inspires someone to write 50,000 years of history. Why our shared history is a story we have to invent and how the future of our species might depend on our ability to arrive at a story we can all see ourselves in. Hi, this is Brian Hoyle from Twinsburg, Ohio,

and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. C's apply. Part one, the power of the powerful. We do seem to be living through one of those periods of growing worldwide incoherence. Old narratives have lost their power. Atomized voices are trumpeting new ones, or refurbished versions of old ones. And if someone doesn't come up with something good, the many, moving towards something bad, will sow catastrophe. The danger is particularly sharp now because the quote-unquote society we're talking about is not this or that bunch of people, but the single intertangled spaghetti of human lives that constitutes all of humanity in this, our global age.

One of the things Tamim Ansari argues is that human beings need to agree on a common story, a feeling of being part of a we, or in his words, an intertangled spaghetti of human lives in order to function. But who decides who the we is and what we can all agree on? If the old narratives have lost their power, who determines a new one? The narrative is our framework that allows us to actually just even operate. Now, when a society is in some more or less stable shape, the experiences or the data that challenges the narrative

is shelved. It's considered irrelevant. And it's put on the back shelf where it'll be looked at later by someone who cares and nobody does. But when things stop working, you know, when there's more and more trouble arises, then some of those irrelevant facts, some people start to say, wait, maybe that's not so irrelevant. The narrative that keeps the powerful in place and keeps everybody else in place, the function of the narrative is not just to do that, but it's to enable us to efficiently and

correctly handle the data that's coming at us from out there. And it's not just random. It has to fit more. It has to kind of fit what's really out there. If it doesn't actually fit what's really out there, we are an extinct species. So our ability to keep correcting our narrative is our ability to function effectively in the environment. And when a society starts to not be able to cope with what's coming at it and what's happening,

then the narrative starts to break down. And you see what's happening in, let's say, the United States today. It's like the narrative is breaking down. And as the narrative starts to break down, there are people who the long-in- place narrative that confirmed the power of the powerful, as those narrative threads weaken, people who have been victimized by the way things are over the course of history now begin to raise their voices and say, you know what, that story doesn't fit me. And or, I don't recognize the character that is in that story that's supposed to be me. That's not me, that guy. So they start to try to tell a different story.

Those stories depend on your point of view. Where do you come from? What do you see from where you are? Who's telling you about how the world works and what the world even is? Can you tell us a little bit about your story? You know, we all have a story. Sort of where do you come from? Where'd you grow up? And how did you become interested in writing history? My father was an Afghan. My mother was an American. We could go a little deeper into that.

My father was an Afghan from an eminent cultural, literary, intellectual family in Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, you know, from some people's point of view. So he was at the top of the heap of the bottom of the heap. My mother was an American who was from a family of Finnish immigrants. You know, they were working class poor. And my mother and father met at the end of the Depression.

It's a very complex tapestry. And when I work out my own story that has unfolded through my journey through the cultural universe of the world today, the anomaly of my parents is always a generating factor of the plot, so to speak. So I grew up in Afghanistan. I lived there until I was 16. And then I came to the States and I've lived here ever since. So what ends up being a mainspring of my little story is actually just one thread in a bigger fabric that is history. So that's how come I write these things that I write. As a result, kind of like me and Ramtin,

Tamim grew up bicultural, straddling the fault line of the earth. I am both Afghan and American. I think I could also say I'm neither Afghan nor American. Somehow I'm standing outside both of these bubbles. And because, you know, I've been standing outside of these cultural bubbles, it gives me a perspective that gets me to look at what many of my people who are monocultural see as reality,

I see it as a construct. I see it as one whole context that one could be outside of and be in another whole context. I have to say, I really love that. You know, honestly, partly the inspiration for ThruLine came from exactly what you're talking about Ramtin and I are both the children of of refugees and and and we ourselves were not born here um and that was partly what prompted the show was that we were like trying to make sense of our individual stories not only our origin country's history and then our new, you know, adopted country's history, but then the history of this entire, like, planet, right? That's like you're zooming out more and more and more.

Yeah. When I find myself among Afghans, I am an Afghan. I am a certain somebody, you know, that I recognize. When I drift away from that and I'm in an American context with my American friends, then I'm an American and I recognize that self. And there is almost a sense that it's not the same self. So I've been fascinated by that, you know, by that anomaly or that experience. Which brings it back to this other fascination Tamim has, the concept of we. Who's being included in the narrative of human history? Who feels included in that story? And how we connect through a mutual understanding of what was and what is. When we say a history of the world,

we're actually talking about the story of how we got to where we are today, and that there's an explanatory element to that. And what struck me was that embedded in that formulation, there's always some assumption about who is this we were talking about that is here today. And because I came from another place and I've been in, you know, it's like my scrambled cultural odyssey made me remember from my Afghan side, living in Afghanistan and growing up in the schools there and hearing a history of the world. I was hearing a history of the world, not just the history of Afghanistan or the history of Islam or the history of some corner, you know, the periphery. That was the history of the world. And it included some of the events from the history of Islam or the history of some corner, you know, the periphery. That was the history of the world.

And it included some of the events from the history of the world that I, as a textbook editor, creating world histories for kids in America, some of the same events were in both of these histories. But it made a difference where you stood and the perspective you had on this entire collection of facts. And it made a difference in which facts you would leave out or which ones you would put in. But after that, I got to thinking about how globalization is now such a leading feature of life for everyone on the planet. It is the case that now any place you are in your experience of the world,

you're going to be overlapping with people who look like they're in the safe way with you buying carrots and you're doing the same thing. But actually each of you have a constellation of memories and history and, you know, values and relationships that means you're not necessarily in the same world. Each of you is standing in your own world. And there is misunderstandings and little sparks that trigger off of the fact that, you know, you think you're in the same place, but actually you're in two different worlds.

And all of the different worlds that have grown up on Earth over these many thousands of years are now all in the same space. They're in cyberspace. You know, that's a space that now exists. But also physically, people are migrating and, you know, everybody, you guys, you were to try to tell a story in which the we is this global we that isn't here yet, but is trying to be here, then you have to look past the details. You know, you have to look past who's going to run for president next year or whether fascism is on the rise in Italy or, you know, these particular questions, you have to look at, you have to look for the mainsprings of the human story and what's generating this constant flow of events. I mean, obviously, it makes sense why you would then become interested in doing this kind of larger meta history. But I just wanted to ask one thing. One of the things you talk about, and you hinted at here, is the role of narrative in history. That ultimately,

all history can be boiled down to a story we tell ourselves. That the story is as important as quantifiable data or other information. With that said, what do you think of the old adage that the victors get to tell that story? You're right that in any given area, the story that's being told, let's back up a little. It serves the preservation of whatever the social configuration is at that point. And it allows a social entity or world to exist that can continue to meet the challenges of the environment. Now, in the history of the world, there has never been a time in which

that has occurred without somebody being in power and others having less power. So the narrative has a tendency to preserve the power of whoever's powerful. And you can say that the narrative that preserves the power of the powerful is very appealing to the powerful. It sounds true. Right, right, right. And, you know, much expertise is mustered to show how and why it's true. And that's not just in terms of like stockpiling the appropriate and relevant facts that will prove this narrative to be true, but also the intellectual endeavors of, well, people like me who, you know, put the facts together and they make it sound right. How Tamim Ansari sifted through 50,000 years of human history to find the connective

tissue and what he found when we come back. Hello, this is Rachel Lytle from Omaha, Nebraska. You are listening to ThruLine with NPR. hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Part 2. A Band of Relatives Human groups exist as social constellations, which interact with their environment as if those whole collections of individuals were cells of single entities.

Once we started forming such group cells, one and all of which were constellations, webs of meaning that existed only in the minds of their members and not in the physical world as such. That's when the story of humankind truly began. In Tamim Ansari's book, The Invention of Yesterday, he says that the history of the world is the story that we're telling one another, that since the beginning of humankind, people have been inventing stories to find purpose, to explain mystery and wonder, to survive.

And the interpretation of these stories over tens of thousands of years is the writing of history. And because Tamim writes about the writing of history, talk about being meta, he searched for some of the common threads and links that have connected people throughout the centuries. Threads that he was searching for as the braids that he wove together to form a collective human story. So, you know, I went through to thinking, what are the, well, there's money. Money. And bureaucracy is one of the things. Bureaucracy.

You know, then religion would be one. And religion. Money, bureaucracy, and religion. But it all seemed not quite deep enough yet, you know. I'm looking for a deeper structure. And when I kept trying to get deeper, I finally got down to a sense of the factors that were driving the human story, you could bring it down to three actors, you know, three factors, actors that are constantly affecting each other's journey, so to speak. Factor number one, environment.

So it struck me that every life form, you can say it's in some environment. And those two things are irreducible. There's, you know, wherever there's life, there's also an environment that's not the same as that life form. So there's always an in here and an out there. And the story occurs on the border between in here and out there. It's the interaction, always building the wall, reaching out, building the wall. That's one of the fundamental processes. As humans, we exist as clumps of individuals. We have agency as social groups. And those social groups, just as much as an

individual has a self that they can experience and identify and they pursue the interests of the self, social groups also have a self. It's a social self. And how do they have that? Well, there you get to the second factor. Factor number two, language. Maybe I should call it intercommunication. However it is that we do it from these internal selves that nobody knows about. You guys don't know what I'm thinking. You know, you can't get in here. But actually you can because we're all in this conversation together and we're all in some way thinking about this conversation that we're having. So the social event is something that we're all participating in. And to that extent that we're participating, there's a social self that exists even right here with the three of us. So these social selves exist, but they're not like biological selves because they can grow, they can merge with other social selves. So that's one of the driving factors of history is that these social selves are in a constant state of flux. Sometimes originally,

I think in the early in the human story, we were just bands of nomads, all of us related by blood ties. We were a band of relatives roaming the world and doing all that stuff, interacting with the environment that I talked about. But tribes emerged and kingdoms, and now we're countries, and that's not the end of it. We're just in the middle of the story still. So quick recap. Factor one, environment. Factor two, language. And that brings us to factor three. Tools. Tools. I think that the key to understanding the role of tools in history is to realize the tools are not something that we have, even though it feels that way, because I could walk away from my computer, you know, I could put my hammer back in my workshop and even lose it. And it's not like I've lost a part of myself. But actually, tools is a feature of us as a biological species. It's how we interact with the environment.

It is our interface with the environment. You know, our tools are the extensions of our fingers, the extension of our eyes, the extension of our ears. And so there is a constant interaction between the evolution of our tools and what is coming at us from the environment. But since tools is the outermost layer of who we are, it's not just something we have. As our toolkit changes, we change. And we change means the social landscape we live in keeps changing, even the physical landscape. And then we have to face the problem of syncing up with everybody else because our way of staying together is by communicating with each other. We don't have a single telepathic brain so that we cannot just all change at the same time. And therefore, the process of changing to stay in sync with the

changes that the environment is bringing, that our tools are forcing upon us and that we are, all of that, when you put all of that together, I think you have the human story. And that's the story I tried to tell on the creatures of Earth, we humans use tools and language to deal with our environment effectively as groups. Language makes stories possible, and mythic stories are what knit human groups together. In our earliest days,

our mythic narratives were spawned by geography. We formed webs of meaning with people in our immediate environment. Where we lived was who we were. Through constant intercommunication, we built up shared assumptions about deep matters such as time and space, life and death, good and evil. We lived and died in symbolic landscapes woven of our ideas. And as far as we knew, those landscapes were the world itself. Right now, I think a lot of people would argue there is a war of narratives happening. Right. And I think it's interesting because you said just to paraphrase, I think you said something like it has the power by by questioning like it right now living through it it feels sometimes like the battle over you know 1619 versus 1776 is in some it's just leading to more and more

polarization and it's kind of like pulling apart the country as at it seems you could argue it's a necessary pulling apart right so is it like short-term destruction for long-term survival, I guess is my question, this process of challenging and revising the narrative? Excellent point you're making. I think there's no yes or no to that. It has happened all through history, and it's led to upheavals, revolutionary upheavals, which when the smoke clears, there's a different world order. And those have not often been very clean and easy. And maybe we're in for a hard time with that. I don't know. But I do know, I think in the United States, the contradiction that's being raised by the 1619 issue, you know, which is the contradiction of the enslavement of Africans to build the economy of this country and the proposition that all men are created equal and have inalienable rights to pursue blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Both of those things are true. You know, it's like there was enslavement and I personally embrace the spirit of that proposition. But cognitive dissonance says, come on now, something has to be resolved with that. What ended up happening with the Civil War and all that didn't resolve it. The circumstances are still not neutral here. But it is also the case that we are in our search for inclusion based on acknowledgement of diversity and acceptance of diversity

also has had and is having a fragmenting effect so that instead of a multicultural society, somebody used the phrase I thought was really good, Frank Viviano, another writer. He said, instead of multiculturalism, we're getting a shattered kaleidoscope of monoculturalisms. And what we want to try to do is build a new narrative structure and tell a new story that all of us can legitimately see ourselves as characters in, then we can start to interact. The trouble is, of course, it's not the trouble, but the fact is that America is not alone anymore. We can't just fix our society. It's a world problem. We have to find the narrative that will enable a human story to develop. That's the story of all

of us that we can say, yeah, I accept that. That's, I see myself in that story. And that sounds like it is my story. I'm in there validly. We don't have that yet. I guess in my mind, I'm like, what could possibly unite the entire world?

What story could possibly unite the entire world? The old idea was, oh, the aliens will come and we'll all unite as humans against the aliens. Well, the aliens did come. It's in the form of a microscopic little thing that doesn't look like a human. It has spikes. It's called COVID. It didn't unite us.

It should have. I thought it was going to. It didn't do it. You know, the other aspect of what's happening right now in terms of world history is the evolution of technology. We're trying to get down inside of material reality and shape our own whatever we need. Artificial intelligence, robotics, you know, these are all ancient quests that are trying to do things that traditionally have been the, we have considered them to be the domain of the gods or of God. You know, it's like we're trying to create life now. We're trying to be the masters of material reality. Right. Just going on with the technology theme, isn't the nature of communication today a challenge also to developing some kind of widely acceptable narrative?

Because now everyone has a narrative. Everyone's narrative is the world, and they can express that easily. And there's literally millions and millions and millions of narratives whacking up against each other in the public sphere every single second. So isn't that a challenge? Absolutely. You really bring up one of the core things that I've been puzzling over and worrying about because the way that technology operates is through the algorithm. And the algorithm, the algorithm. And the algorithm, you know, the algorithmic process is one that was

falsely appealing to us because it said to each of us individuals, what do you want? Not anybody else, just you particularly. What do you want? We can figure out. We can give you exactly that. So the algorithm, to put it in a blunt fashion, when you walk into a bookstore called Amazon, you're entering a bookstore nobody else has ever seen or ever will. It exists only for you. If I look for Google Egypt, I'll get a lot of stuff about Muslim Brotherhood.

And if somebody else Googles it, they will get a lot of stuff about the temples of Luxor and the tours of the Nile and so on. And that's because the algorithm knows who we are. But I will say that in the old days, back before Spotify and Pandora and stuff, I used to drive around my car and I would, you know, listen to DJs. There were some I liked and some I didn't like. So I would gravitate towards the ones I like. But the ones I like picked a bunch of songs, some of which I liked more, some I didn't like. But the thing is, that was OK, because I was in interaction with somebody else making their choices and I was interacting with another consciousness out there in reality.

I think that technology has a built-in tendency to narrow each of us down to living all alone and then that narrative that you're talking about is the narrative that creates a self for that individual loner and the prison cell constructed by the algorithm for just them. When we come back, the quest for a narrative everyone can see themselves in, and whether that's ultimately a good thing. Hi, this is Taylor Hines from Memphis, Tennessee, and you're listening to ThruLine by NPR. Part 3. The Story of Us. Even in unstable times, today is what all of history seems to have been leading up to, which gives the present moment a visceral authority that yesterday can never match. As Dwight D. Eisenhower once put it, quote,

things are more like they are right now than they have ever been. But the present doesn't deserve the authority it enjoys. Something that is always in the process of vanishing has some nerve claiming to be the permanent real. That's one good reason to ponder history and pay attention to the past. The present, after all, is nothing but the past that will exist in the future. Tamim Ansari has written two meta-histories of the world, and he's currently contemplating a third. And I gotta be honest, the skeptic in me is kind of like,

what are these attempts to define ourselves for? Why are we searching for some sort of overarching trend throughout all of human history? Is that actually possible? Like, does Tamim think he's actually figured it all out? Does he have doubts? I had to ask. Well, doubt is not quite the right word, I think,

because the story that I'm telling in The Invention of Yesterday is not presenting itself as the true story of humans on Earth. It's a story. And I think back to when there was just 200 of us as a little band of relatives huddled around the fire in the darkness. And we're telling the story to one another about us and where we came from. And, you know, grandpa did this and grandma did that.

And, you know, you kid are going to be a great hunter one day. Whatever that story was, we were telling it to one another. And by telling it, we were creating an us. That's the process I'm involved in. I'm telling a story. And when we all start telling the story of us, there will become an us. Is the us dangerous? Is the us dangerous? Can the us be dangerous?

And this is the thing I've grappled with, is that isn't part of creating the us as human beings to then have a them that we must fight, that we must oppose? That's a question that, you know, I bash my head on the wall on on that one because we have never been able to have an us without a them. We need the aliens. We need to kill them. We do have another alien though, that you talk about, if you could maybe expand on this, which is climate change, which is this impending disaster that's coming. And we can't seem to come up with any narratives there about what that means, right? Because that is something that will impact the vast majority of us. Right, right.

So I have had a thought about that. I should mention that I'm actually prepping a course and the name of this course is The Invention of Tomorrow. Okay, all right. So one of the things that ideas that has come to me is that the construction of an us, the narrative that creates an us emerges out of a physical and material project that we are doing. mythological reality that emerged in Egypt when the Egyptians had a huge river that they were trying to figure out how to operate with this river, you know, and they had to be an us to do that because, you know, there were thousands of them required to do little bits of different things that would somehow all fit together. But they were able to do it, and they did do it because they had one single

monumental, epic, mythic-sized project. And that ultimately, what we need is an ultimate mythic in scope project. So like a giant alien squid. That's for my fellow Watchmen fans. Think back to another much smaller but still illuminating project, physical project that was related to building on us. And that was a transcontinental railroad. You know, in the middle of the Civil War, this country and Lincoln was a driver of it. They decided to build a line, you know, a real rail across uncharted wilderness that would connect the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. What a metaphor.

What a mythic, you know, metaphor. Yeah. I think it's sometimes hard to see kind of the forest from the trees and kind of come up with the story while you're sitting in it. But I think we all know we're living in historic times. Like there are think pieces around all the time about how, you know, imagining how the future is going to look back at this time. Right. To kind of relate it back for a second to what you were telling us about sort of your feeling like you didn't quite belong in one place or another when

you first maybe got to the U S just with the benefit of time and now looking back and thinking about the story you had in your mind about yourself at that time versus the story you have now, I wonder whether it changed for you and whether you think that tells us anything about how on a bigger level, the story changes potentially with the time that passes? My sense of the story and my sense of my story has certainly changed continually over time. So that's all I can say. And when I look back at who I was 50 years ago, I'm amazed at how dumb I was. And at the same time, the interesting thing is that I can look back

at some of my high school papers that I wrote when I first came here and I find myself expressing ideas very well put that I thought I discovered a month ago. Ideas that I thought I had for the first time a month ago. Wow, Interesting.

Looking back, do you have more of a sense of hope or despair when you're looking at the future? I think I'm sort of leaning towards hope. Because my sense of the past is that when I look at my own past, I see so many times in my life that I would love to just go back and stay there forever. But when I look at any scraps of writing or evidence I have, at the time, I was really in despair, and I felt terrible.

So it's only that way. I can think of it that way only now because I know how it came out. And we're here in the present, and we don't know how it's going to come out. It's impossible not to imagine the worst, but it's also the case that evidence shows that we've been through a lot of tough stuff and come through. I think that one thing we can say about the future, the one thing we can say for sure about the future, is nothing at all. We don't know nothing about it.

It's up to us. Well, Tamim, I mean, it's been so nice talking to you, really. Thank you so much, Tamim. It's really a pleasure to meet you and talk to you and hopefully next time in person. It's been great talking to you guys. It's been a lot of fun That's it for this week's episode I'm Ramteen Arablui I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah

And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR This episode was produced by me And me and Lawrence Wu Lane Kaplan-Levinson Julie Kane Victor Ibeyez Skylar Swenson

Camila Deino Monsi Corona Yolanda Sanguini Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Thanks also to Tamar Charney and Anya Grunman. This episode was mixed by Andy Huther. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Navid Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani. Also, we want your voice on our show.

Send us a voicemail at 872-588-8805 with your name, where you're from, and the line, you're listening to ThruLine from NPR, and we'll get you on the show. That's 872-588-8805. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLine NPR. Thanks for listening. Thank you. rise and everyone would be more productive. That's what happens when you give Grammarly to your entire team. Grammarly is a secure AI writing partner that understands your business

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