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.
