Mark Elvin Quotes & Sayings

One of the most momentous, yet all but invisible, psychological changes in human history has been the intensification of a sense of insecurity and alienation from the world around us that arose when we became no longer able easily to get food in a few hours just by gathering it, or hunting it, but had to organize ourselves in a purposeful fashion simply to survive. This change is undocumented, though occasional clues can be gained about it from the comments of the few still alive who have lived through a version of it, such as old Australian Aboriginals. Its essence is subjection to a pervasive but unacknowledged, indeed unnamed, fear. It is the foundation of civilization. — Mark Elvin

Perhaps the most overpowering contrast [with the West] is the virtual absence in premodern China of the idea of a transcendent creator God who is distinct from Nature in a fundamental qualitative sense. The Chinese had notions of a supreme god in various guises (that is, 'hypatotheism'), and also, as we have seen, of a somewhat demiurge-like 'transformer' constantly reshaping the cosmos. — Mark Elvin

It must be remembered: fields end freedom. Whatever the astonishing subsequent achievements of civilization, it had a little recognized price: humanity itself became one of its own domesticated species. We enslaved ourselves to conquer. — Mark Elvin

Human history has no unique pattern of intelligibility. — Mark Elvin

[There is a] gulf that can exist between different emotional and perceptual worlds - all 'Chinese' - in recent times [post-Deng Xiaoping]. — Mark Elvin