Tl;dr — A good, popular history book of the great civilizations and how openness and tolerance were the basic ingredients for success. Yet, it leans more on history than applicable lessons for the modern challenges we’re facing in our own society. I started a book club at my local library (if you’re in the Bay Area and want to attend, check out the details here) and one of the great things about bringing people together with an interest in understanding the challenges facing society is that you get new book recommendations. And for a recent meeting, we wanted to take a more historical approach to understand what made great societies, rather than only what makes great societies fall — which has been a hot topic of books during the Trump era.. That book we read was Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages by Johan Norberg. In his book he covers all the great civilizations, from Athens and Rome to the Dutch Republic and the Anglosphere. Across all the societies he spotlights, he makes the case for a clear connection among them: openness. This openness to new ideas brings along with it tolerance to diverse and innovative ideas. Without this key feature, societies can flourish and build in the way a closed society can’t. He showed through example after example that these societies that all came to be looked at as great let in new people, took a wide view of the world, and importantly, did not impose viewpoints. I feel as though Norberg missed an opportunity here to hit on another commonality that came with the downfall of each of these societies and should be an important lesson. As each of these societies went past their peak, they all became more closed. This we know from other historical books on the fall of great societies and especially those that morph into authoritarian regimes. But in these stories I see a specific form of closeness: the imposition of state religion.