SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND
by Yuval Noah Harari
o-o-o-o
More often than not, I find myself reluctant to engage with overhyped books that make national bestseller lists, and in the rare occasions that I do engage with such books, more often than not, I tend to be very disappointed. Harari's SAPIENS is an exception: It really is a must read. That does not mean caveats are absent, there are quite a few, which I'll also address.
The book begins where it is thought the universe itself began: The big bang, around 14 billion years ago, and ends with where we are today as a species along with a question about where we might be headed: “We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?”
In that sense, the title does not lie, it really is a brief history of humankind. The keyword here however being brief, which means Harari will sometimes mention a major historical event or finding in passing, which may frustrate the curious mind who really wants to know more about said historical event or finding. This isn't a bad thing, this is a great way to note particular events or subjects one might like to find more in-depth writing on. The downside however is that there is a high chance many readers might assume they know everything that needs to be known about whatever is mentioned in the book, a foolish and likely popular assumption. But make no mistake, the book is very much a must-read.
It is divided into four parts, what Harari hypotheses to be the four revolutions that got us to where we are today: The Cognitive Revolution, The Agricultural Revolution, The Unification of Humankind, and the Scientific Revolution.
The first, second, and fourth are largely self-explanatory, so let's do something a little unorthodox and talk about the third. Here's how it begins: “After the agricultural revolution, human societies grew ever larger and more complex, while the imagined constructs sustaining the social order also became more elaborate. Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called 'culture'.”
Therefore, one can deduce that the third revolution in Yuval's hypothesis is a “cultural revolution”, one perhaps that entails the evolution of culture from a bonding agent for bands, tribes, or even nation states to a bonding agent for the entire human race.
“Over the millennia, small, simple cultures gradually coalesce into bigger and more complex civilisations, so that the world contains fewer and fewer mega-cultures.” According to Harari, we are on the path towards coalescing into one single global mega-culture.
“Homo sapiens evolved to think of people as divided into us and them. 'Us' was the group immediately around you, whoever you were, and 'them' was everyone else. In fact, no social animal is ever guided by the interests of the entire species to which it belongs. No chimpanzee cares about the interests of the chimpanzee species, no snail will lift a tentacle for the global snail community, no lion alpha male makes a bid for becoming the king of all lions, and at the entrance of no beehive can one find the slogan: 'Worker bees of the world — unite!'”
One look at today's news, however, makes it clear that we are far from global unity. The world is ablaze in conflict and some parts of world, once part of much larger empires, are now divided up into little more than city states. On the other hand though, the presence of great masses calling for the end of such conflicts can be taken as a clue to the evolution in our species towards a more unified existence. Did Europeans mass-mobilize against their rulers to keep them from embarking on the Crusades? Perhaps we really are witnessing something new and incredible when considered in the context of human history. Those who stand in opposition to borders and draconian anti-immigration measures might also be considered as evidence of the development of a new post-tribal, post-national consciousness. Perhaps even, this can be considered an extension of the very cognitive revolution that separated sapiens from all other living organisms, or even the one that separated homo-sapiens from other human species (Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc). Earlier in the book, in the Cognitive Revolution section, Harari recounts the instance of the first recorded encounter between Sapiens and Neanderthals:
“About 100,000 years ago, some Sapiens groups migrated north to the Levant, which was Neanderthal territory, but failed to secure a firm footing. It might have been due to nasty natives, an inclement climate, or unfamiliar local parasites. Whatever the reason, the Sapiens eventually retreated, leaving the Neanderthals as masters of the Middle East.
“But then, beginning about 70,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens started doing very special things. Around that date Sapiens bands left Africa for a second time. This time they drove the Neanderthals and all other human species not only from the Middle East, but from the face of the earth. Within a remarkably short period, Sapiens reached Europe and East Asia. About 45,000 years ago, they somehow crossed the open sea and landed in Australia — a continent hitherto untouched by humans. The period from about 70,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago witnessed the invention of boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows and needles (essential for sewing warm clothing). The first objects that can reliably be called art date from this era, as does the first clear evidence for religion, commerce and social stratification. Most researchers believe that these unprecedented accomplishments were the product of a revolution in Sapiens' cognitive abilities.”
A surface level examination of Neanderthal defeat at the hands of Sapiens some 30,000 years after such a feat not at all being possible may credit it to the development of “better tech” essentially, but at the root of that development was the appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating that constituted the cognitive revolution that allowed for far more expansive communities than Neanderthals were capable of. Ever-expanding collectivism seems to be at the heart of human evolution, and indeed a reading of the history of humankind would suggest that such is the uncontested trajectory of the arrow of history.
This theory of course stands in stark contrast to what is now being reported as “an epidemic of loneliness”, of community disintegration and increased individualism, but perhaps this can be considered a blip in our overall trajectory, a temporary contraction before the inevitable expansion; the result of feeble measures that stand in opposition to where we are inevitably headed. History is rife with contradictory forces that butt against each other (quite often one that points towards more collectivism while the other not) until ultimately, one of them wins, sometimes only for a time. We now have airplanes for example that allow for far more travel than the bare feet of our Sapien ancestors 70,000 years ago, but they didn't have borders or passport control to artificially limit the flow of people either. Whenever someone invents something that will allow for more human collectivism, like say, the internet, you can always bet that someone else will come up with a firewall or heck, paywall to rein things in. Perhaps what we are witnessing now are the last attempts of upholding national sovereignty and erected cultural divides before it all comes crumbling down.
Needless to say, these are my own conclusions and not Harari's, and it's entirely possible that such conclusions are part and parcel of what Harari calls “The Hindsight Fallacy”:
“Every point in history is a crossroads. A single travelled road leads from past to present, but myriad paths fork off into the future. Some of those paths are wider, smoother and better marked, and thus more likely to be taken, but sometimes history — or the people who make history — takes unexpected turns.”
So, even if sometimes one path and the series of developments it encourages may seem inevitable, a different far less likely path can be the one taken.
“At the beginning of the fourth century AD, the Roman Empire faced a wide horizon of religious possibilities. It could have stuck to its traditional and variegated polytheism. But its emperor, Constantine, looking back on a fractious century of civil war seems to have thought that a single religious with a clear doctrine could help unify his ethnically diverse realm. He could have chosen from any number of contemporary cults to be his national faith — Manichaeism, Mithraism, the cults of Isisi or Cybele, Zoroastrianism, Judaism and even Buddhism were all available options. Why did he opt for Jesus? Was there something in Christian theology that attracted him personally, or perhaps an aspect of the faith that made him think it would be easier to use for his purposes? Did he have a religious experience, or did some of his advisers suggest that Christians were quickly gaining adherents and that it would be best to jump on that wagon? Historians can speculate, but not provide any definitive answer. They can describe how Christianity took over the Roman Empire, but they cannot explain why this particular possibility was realised.
“Some scholars do indeed provide deterministic explanations of events such as the rise of Christianity. They attempt to reduce human history to the workings of biological, ecological or economic forces.”
Therefore, in reading Yuval's brief history of humankind, or anyone's take on history for that matter, it is important not to assume that everything that did happen had to happen, including European imperialism, the genocide inflicted upon the indigenous people of North America, dropping two nukes on Japan, or the holocaust. It wasn't all a necessary part of our evolution as a species. Same goes for certain technological developments; there's no need to assume that we would've been any less evolved as a species had we not relied so heavily on the exploitation of petroleum as an energy source, or air-conditioning units to regulate the temperatures of our built environments, or rely on poorly insulated steel and glass in the construction of some of those environments. Was it really ever necessary for Coca-Cola to exist? We mustn't conflate the how of history with the why.
“When Constantine assumed the throne in 306, Christianity was little more than an esoteric Eastern sect. If you were to suggest then that it was about to become the Roman state religion, you'd have been laughed out of the room just as you would today if you were to suggest that by the year 2050 Hare Krishna would be the state religion of the USA. In October 1913, the Bolsheviks were a small radical Russian faction. No reasonable person would have predicted that within a mere four years they would take over the country. In AD 600, the notion that a band of desert-dwelling Arabs would soon conquer an expanse stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to India was even more preposterous.”
Ever the historian and not so much the philosopher, Harari is far more concerned with exploring how than why. But to quote the man himself:
“Despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles — but nobody knows where we're going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one... Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?”
Maybe we should ask why. Maybe finding answers to the whys of the past—however difficult that may be—will help us come up with answers to some of the whys that mark our present and will inevitably plague our future.
Yuval Noah Harari's SAPIENS isn't here to offer answers, but by presenting a sweeping look at the entire history of our species, two things become impossible not to notice:
Communication and storytelling are at the heart of our evolution as a species. It is almost entirely through storytelling that bands of humans were able to work together and hunt down Wolly Mammoths, that ancestral knowledge was passed down, that religions came into being, that empires were founded, spread, and preserved, that nations manage to exist, and that money, however materially invaluable, came to be used to trade for materially valuable goods.
It is due to storytelling that our species has witnessed ever-expanding collectivism.
Therefore, one may arguably conclude that the why motivating our evolutionary gene all along might just be the desire to coalesce with all other members of the human species into one single mega-collective. I'm starting to wonder if that very gene is behind my why for starting this blog even. I have no real good reason for why I do this. Upon deriving enjoyment from reading a book, I could very easily jump right into the next book. What good does it serve me to take the time to publicly post about it? Very strange.
How an all species-encompassing mega-community may be achieved or what shape it may take on are multiple, but Harari does actually posit one possibility:
“Of all the projects currently under development, the most revolutionary is the attempt to devise a direct two-way brain-computer interface that will allow computers to read the electrical signals of a human brain, simultaneously transmitting signals that the brain can read in turn. What if such interfaces are used to directly link a brain to the Internet, or to directly link several brains to each other, thereby creating a sort of Inter-brain-net?”
Lots to think about, thanks to Yuval Noah Harari's SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND.