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Wednesday, July 04, 2018

The Peripatetic Philosopher reviews a SAPIENS, A Brief History of Mankind:


Sapiens

A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

A Review

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 4, 2018


This is an important book, not because it confirms our beliefs about ourselves, but because it denies their legitimacy.  We as a species are on our way to extinction and it is all traceable, the author claims, to our “gorging gene.” 

The cover of this remarkable book has an endorsement by entrepreneur Bill Gates with the caption,  this is “a fun, engaging look at early human history.”  I don’t think so. 

Rather it is an indictment of Homo Sapiens (Latin, for “wise men”) for destroying 90 percent of the species that existed some 2.5 million years ago, and at least six other homo species some 250,000 years ago, including Neanderthal Man.   

In this handsome edition, which I felt I was violating its pristine construction by excessive highlighting, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari manages to capture with uninhibited confidence, the essence of the “nature of man” from an historical, biological, and anthropological basis, as well as from the evidence of the works of paleontologists and economists.  

The Cognitive Revolution

The author writes:

About 70,000 years ago Homo sapiens started to form elaborate structures called culture.

Culture is a dominant theme here at the macro level whereas I have pruned culture at the micro level, and therefore was especially pleased to see author Harari probes it as enthusiastically as I have attempted to do so at a much more modest level. 

This by way of introduction is to tell the reader he is not likely to be reassured by the author’s narrative as our species has operated with reckless abandon nearly from the first in an attempt at self-preservation often against impossible odds.

The Cognitive Revolution kicked off 70,000 years ago, the Agricultural Revolution some 12,000 years ago, and the Scientific Revolution only 500 years ago.  Each revolution has changed the character of the planet earth and the status of our species with palpable signs of our own extinction.

He writes:

Animals much like modern human first appeared about 2.5 million years ago ... prehistoric humans were insignificant animals (no more) significant on the environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish … like it or not, we are living relatives (that) include chimpanzees and orangutans.  The chimpanzees are (our closest relative).  Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters.  One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our grandmother.

Given the cultural biases we all have which are fed by the popular mythologies of our histories and religions, it would be unfortunate if the reader read no further.  Humans evolved some 2.5 million years ago from irrefutable evidence of an earlier genus of ape out of East Africa.  Given the push of the Scientific Age, Harari writes, “It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will be around a thousand years from now” (Harari covers the rationale for this in Homo Deus, 1917).


Figurine of a “lion man” 32,000 years ago, Stradel Cave, Germany.


The Creative Ice Age Brain: Cave Art in the Light of Neuroscience

Sapiens separated themselves from other homo species 70,000 years ago as language first evolved as gossip.  It was the dawn of art, religion and of things that did not actually exist but lived in the imagination.  Schadenfreude was born with this Cognitive Revolution.  Today the emblem of the head of the “lion man” graces the hood of the Peugeot automobile as evidence of this connection.

The author shows no timidity in extrapolating scientific findings into creative narrative metaphors:

Any large scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an  ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.  Churches are rooted in common religious myths.

Consciousness has allowed humans since the Cognitive Revolution to live in a dual reality: objective reality and imagined reality. 

The ability to create an imagined reality out of words has come to bind strangers to a common cooperative effectiveness.  We all live in this reality more than the objective reality as a matter of survival. 

The author wonders how difficult it would have been to create states, churches or legal systems if confined to things that really existed.

That said the Homo sapiens population of the planet earth before the Agricultural Revolution was smaller than that of today’s Cairo, Egypt.    Homo sapiens arrived 2 million years ago, and for 2 million years their only tools were stone aged tools. 

These early humans, Harari surmises, were likely to have been nearly identical to us today emotionally if not cognitively.  He startles the reader:

When the first Americans marched south from Alaska to the plains of Canada and the western United States, they encountered mammoths and mastodons, rodents as big as bears, herds of horses and camels, oversized lions and dozens of large species the likes of which are completely unknown today, among them fearsome sabre-tooth cats and giant sloths that weighed up to eight tons and reached heights of twenty feet.   

Within 2,000 years most of these species were gone with 34 out of 47 genera of large animals. 

The First Wave of Extinction (Cognitive Revolution) was accompanied with the spread of the foragers, the hunter and gatherers; the Second Wave of Extinction (Agricultural Revolution) was accompanied by the spread of farmers and a spite in population; and the Third Wave of Extinction (Industrial Revolution) was caused by industrial activity.  Subsequent waves, separated by the by tens of thousands of years, were the Fourth Wave of Extinction (Scientific Revolution) which has morphed into the Fifth Wave of Extinction (Technology/Information Revolution) which is moving in our current age in creative destruction at Mach speed.  

History’s Biggest Fraud

The author gets personal while laying out his argument to show that over the last 10,000 years Homo sapiens have devoted their efforts to manipulate the lives of a few animals and plant species in flagrant disregard to their natures and freedoms.  It is a tale that includes fish farms, clowned animals, breeding cages for chickens, pigs, goats, cattle, horses, and birds while distorting the genera of many plants with hybrid flowers, wheat, barley, corn, and potatoes, to include genetically engineered organs of humans to produce bionic man. 

The luxury trap first sprung 50,000 years ago has been fostered with the idea that any excess, any departure from nature’s dictates, can be successfully bridged by ingenuity and corporate genius, failing to see with every “cut & control” advance, something is permanently lost, never to be recovered. 

As a scientific historian, Harari is attempting to remind the reader that we are in deep dodo and there is no escape.  He writes:

In the following chapters, we will see time and again how a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering … Sapiens cast off its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted towards greed and alienation. 

This has hardly dissipated in the 21st century, and if anything, has accelerated.

True Believers and the Prison Walls

Looking at our situation nakedly, as author Harari chooses to do, blind evolution sanctions no particular purpose or advantage to the birth of the individual man or woman.  Equally do, there are no such things as rights in biology. 

Yet, Egyptians built giant pyramids to the gods as if there were, while Europeans built massive cathedrals to a religion that was founded in myth.  Nor is there any certainty that those in a democracy are free and those in a dictatorship are less free. 

We do not want to hear that political ideologies are founded in the imagination or that the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are myths supported by our imagination and emotional desire to believe.  Yet, if human rights exist only in our imagination, what is the promise of a stable society?  If order is mainly imagined, is it not always in danger of collapse?

Harrari suggests that the imagined order of things depends upon myths, and when people no longer believe in these myths that order collapses.  Look at the American and European political climate of today, is it not essentially controlled by chameleons?  That said Christianity would not have lasted 2,000 years if the majority of bishops and priests failed to believe in the Christ as the Redeemer.

This brings us to the cage and the prison walls within in which we all live.  The author claims that our cage is a collection of suppositions based on an imagined order that has Americans espousing belief in Christianity, democracy and capitalism. 

Before you withdraw from Harari’s discussion, consider his three dictums:

     Imagined order is embedded in the material world; The imagined order shapes our desires; and The imagined order is inter-subjective.

The high priests of this imagined order are the media using the platform of money, the law, our gods, and our sense of a protective nation. 

Memory Overload

It is a truism that our brain’s capacity is limited.  The written word can be stored, but our brains die with us, but that said, our brains have been adapted to store only particular types of information, making us all “prisoners of our minds.”  Still, in the wake of the Agricultural Revolution, a completely new type of information became vital – numbers!  Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, this system of storing information was invented which was able to handle large amounts of mathematical data.  In the same region, between 3000 BC and 2500 BC, the alphabet was invented. 

People began to write poetry, history books, dramas, romances, prophecies and even cookbooks.  The Hebrew Bible, Greek Iliad, Hindu Mahabharata and Buddhist Tipitika followed.

Vicious Circle

Harari shows that with this new technology the imagined order took on greater significance developing rationale to support purity/impurity and pollution/purity using these distinctions to separate and “cage” people. 

India’s four caste systems were believed immune to change only to turn into 3,000 groupings called “jati.”  Today, closer to  home, we have the gender controversy with the gender of male and female no longer immune to challenge with now some 51 classifications of sex role identities and still counting. 

Marriage is no longer between a man and a woman, but two members of the same sex, male or female.  That said Mother Nature does not mind if men are attracted to men and women to women.  Our concepts of natural and unnatural are not taken from biology but from Christian theology.

The biological point, however, is that male Homo sapiens have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome, while female Homo sapiens have two X chromosomes.

The Ubiquitous Pull of Culture

The balance of this book is on culture and the successful unification of mankind. 

During the first half of the 20th century, scholars taught that every culture was complete and harmonious, possessing an unchanging essence that defined if for all times.  Today, most scholars of culture have concluded the opposite is true.  Every culture has its typical beliefs, norms and values which are in constant flux. 

As readers familiar with my works on the nature of organizational life in the complex organization, they know that I maintain there are multiple cultures and subcultures existing in a single organization, and if not integrated into the whole, chaos and dysfunction takes hold.. 

A culture may transform itself in response to changes in its environment, such as going from position power to knowledge power, and from management dependence of blue collar workers to interdependence of professionals with management.  That transition and transformation as the reader knows is loaded with potholes and sink holes, and is therefore constantly in jeopardy.

Cultures undergo this transitions and transformation with internal dynamics, especially in the current age, as these ecological systems determine whether the working environment will be stable or chaotic.  A curtain of silence often greets this dynamic as the focus is on other matters.  In that sense, the micro view of culture tracks closely with what Professor Harari tracks here in a macro sense.

Culture both dictates and determines behavior.  To grasp this, the professor relates in reader friendly terms the universal order established over many millenniums:

The first was economic, and the order of money;

The second was political, and the order of imperial power; and 

The third the religious, and the order of religion, which is still critical today.

Order and stability, against those who insist otherwise, is still the principle function of the church, the synagogue and the masque today.  

The professor sometimes uses humor to get at the inherent paradox of things:

It is even possible to convert sex into salvation, as 15th century prostitutes did when they slept with men for money, which they in turn used to buy indulgences from the Catholic Church. 

Equally caustic is his wit concerning the emotional timber associated with global warming, human rights, empires, elitism, good and evil, hierarchies, bureaucracies, religions and racial purity.  In doing so, he often forces the reader to confront his most sacred convictions:

Two thousand years of monotheistic brainwashing have caused most Westerners to see polytheism as ignorance and childish idolatry.  Then he adds, Greeks didn’t waste any sacrifice on Fate, and Hindus built no temples to Atman.

Moreover, he sees no difference between the many Greek gods and the Catholic Community of Saints, whom he sees are worshiped by Catholics in a similar manner to the tradition of Athens.  

Polytheism gave birth not only to monotheism, but also to dualistic ones.  Dualistic religions espouse the existence of two opposing powers: good and evil.  (And thus the dichotomy as)  monotheism can explain order, but is mystified by evil, whereas dualism can explain evil, but is mystified by order. 

When I was a boy spending my summers with my professor uncle at his retreat in central Michigan at Higgins Lake, he acquainted me with Zoroaster at lunchtime, tiring of my cousin Robert and me incessantly arguing about baseball.  Zoroaster was the author of this dualism of good and evil.  Those mini lectures have stuck with me all my life. 

Nature has no conscience

Once Homo sapiens realized consciousness, then developed language to communicate, their collective power still needed gods or a God to justify the conquest of nature.  Since nature can neither be created nor destroyed, Homo sapiens have been in despair when nature due to their excesses disrupts their contentment.

The professor writes:

People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces.  Those who live in poverty dream of riches.  Those who have a million, want two million.  Those who have two million, want ten million.  Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied.  They too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them.  Everything that one accumulates vanishes like smoke.  Life is a pointless rat race.  But how to escape it. 

The author, while coming to a similar conclusion, addresses this matter in Who Put You in the Cage (2018), suggesting suffering is not caused by ill fortune, social injustice, or divine intervention, but rather by the behavioral patterns of one’s own mind and life choices.

If the reader will allow, I will juxtapose some of my own insights (in parentheses) to that of the author:

When the mind experiences something pleasant or unpleasant, it simply understands things as they are, then there is no suffering (through self-acceptance we embrace rather than retreat from pain and in doing so, our pain vanishes).

What am I experiencing now? rather than on What would I rather be experiencing? (Self-awareness of “what is,” and self-acceptance in that awareness finds us comfortable in the “now”).

Suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is (craving is a manifestation of chronological time or acting on the craving one-step-at-a-time, whereas psychological time is acting “now,” which amounts to quitting the craving, “cold turkey.”  To do otherwise, is to play tricks on the mind with craving if abated only temporarily so).

Whereas I see culture as a behavioral catalyst, some scholars see it as a mental infection or parasite.  With this thinking, cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally and thereafter take advantage of the people infected by them.  My experience has been that the infected behavior is a consequence of an inadequate or inappropriate culture for the individual.

The Scientific Revolution & the discovery of Ignorance

The world of today is a product of the Scientific Revolution of 1500.  SAPIENS is a book directed at the consequences of that and other revolutions with Homo Deus (2017) the consequences tomorrow.   

As we plow into the future without conscience or restrain, biologist still admit they have no explanation of how the brain produces consciousness.  Science is no more infallible than religion while often being equally dogmatic.

The sociopolitical order of the times, Harari claims, uses science in an unscientific methodology with common scientific theories and practices viewed as final and absolute truth:  He writes:

(This) leaves science out of it in accordance with a nonscientific absolute truth.  This has been the strategy of liberal humanism, which is built on a dogmatic belief in the unique worth and rights of human beings—a doctrine which has embarrassingly little in common with the scientific study of Homo sapiens. 

He concedes with concern:

One of the things that has made it possible for modern social order to hold together is the spread of an almost religious belief in technology. 

This has been my experiences as well in the corporate trenches.

If you get the impression that he speaks to the choir of this reviewer, there is some truth to that as he addresses the problem of scientific dogma and the ideal of progress which are equally germane to my efforts. 

Along the way, there were surprises such as his sense of the marriage of science and empire:

When the Muslims conquered India, they did not bring along archeologists to systematically study Indian history, anthropologists to study Indian culture, geologists to study Indian soil, or zoologists to study Indian fauna.  When the British conquered India, they did all of these things. 

On a proprietary level, often as a consultant to mergers when all the focus was on the condition of the facilities and machines, accounts receivable, and productivity history of the companies in the merger, nary a thought was directed at discrete variables and cultural idiosyncrasies of the intellectual capital of the principles in the merger.  A clash of cultures was inevitable with human capital, and this is never trivial. 

The End of Homo sapiens

Implicit in this brief history of humankind is a sense of its end.  Professor Harari is not attempting to justify or apologize for man’s history, but to explain it in terms of the evidence available as interpreted by scholars:

As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct.  Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. 

He concludes:

Ask scientists why they study the genome, or try to connect a brain to a computer, or try to create a mind inside a computer.  Nine out of ten times you’ll get the same standard answer: we are doing it to cure diseases and to save human lives.  Even though the implications of creating a mind inside a computer are far more dramatic than cutting psychiatric illnesses, this is the standard justification given, because nobody can argue against it.  This is why the Gilgamesh Project is the flagship of science.  It serves to justify everything science does.  Dr. Frankenstein piggybacks on the shoulders of Gilgamesh.  Since it is impossible to stop Gilgamesh, it is also impossible to stop Dr. Frankenstein. 
The only thing we can do is influence the direction scientists are taking.  But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires, too, the real question facing us is not “What do we want to become?” but “What do we want to want?”  Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven’t given it enough thought.

 
One of the images of the Gilgamesh Project

Finally

If this whets your appetite to ponder this intriguing study, this review has not been in vein.  The culture of humankind is explored from multiple vantage points supported by unimpeachable data, and with clarity and unbridled candor.  If I may, Dr. Harari explores Homo sapiens history from a macro-cultural perspective focusing on “the what” of history rather than definitively providing the reader with “the why” of Homo sapiens.   


























































































































































































































































































































































































































































































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