This is a strange book and for a while I didn’t know what to make of it. The early chapters describe how one of many species of early man (genus: Homo) outcompeted and likely exterminated numerous other human species, including Homo neanderthalensis. But up until about 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was just another Homo species, climbing trees and hunting with spears. Then something Harari calls the Cognitive Revolution happened. Harari believes that the Cognitive Revolution was triggered by a genetic mutation that enabled humans to use language for new conceptual purposes. He uses a provocative word to describe this new capability:
Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, “Careful! A lion!” Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, “The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.” This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.
Harari throws many of the hallmarks of our species into the category of “fictions”: religion, the use of money, social hierarchies, “tribal spirits, nations, limited liability companies, human rights,” and just about all the concepts that we use to live our lives. It’s a bold and daring way to hold a mirror up to our world, and I liked the way it made me think. So human rights “don’t really exist”? I don't think Harari is seeking to undercut these concepts, he’s just asking us to recognize that they exist by convention: we have to agree on such concepts for them to have validity. They are abstractions held in common.
Harari then goes on to describe a second great revolution in human history: the Agricultural Revolution. This one I’d heard a bit about before, but maybe not in the context of the “broad sweep of human history.” With agriculture, humans could give up nomadic living and collect in larger groups than ever before—i.e., cities. This led to more complex and formal social hierarchies, occupational specialization, and ultimately, writing, which was first used to track inventories of products and to record exchanges and debts. In the end, though, was it really an improvement for humanity? Harari thinks not.
The third (and final) revolution that Harari addresses is the Scientific Revolution. Again, this is not unfamiliar ground, but a summary of the latest thinking on this revolution, along with some of the usual provocative speculation, promised to be interesting.
But along the way something began to unsettle me about the way Harari was describing our species. The same boldness that impressed me in his discussion of the Cognitive Revolution began to seem a bit unrestrained, a bit ex cathedra. At one point he writes enthusiastically about the possibility of human immortality (or something close to it):
A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely).
Those “serious scholars” show up a few more times in the book, usually called on to testify to some piece of astonishing speculation. (I guess Harari wants us to keep in mind that he’s not talking about facetious scholars, who tend to pull our collective legs from time to time.) I tend to think that death is of a piece with birth and sex—that if you want to get rid of the former, you might eventually have to get rid of the others. Death—a key part of the process that causes new individuals to replace old ones—is kind of a key to evolution. I remember reading the third (less famous) part of Gulliver’s Travels, where Gulliver encounters the struldbrugs, a race of people who live forever but are listless and inert. The implication (for me, at least) is that life would lose meaning if people became a-mortal.
But to get back to Sapiens, it’s one thing for Harari to offer packaged summations of the early phases of human life, it’s quite another for him to tie the world around him and the world to come into such tidy packages. He never pulls back on his tone of certainty.
I was a bit baffled by this passage:
In traditional agricultural economies long-distance trade and foreign investment were sideshows. Consequently, peace brought little profit, aside from avoiding the costs of war. If, say, in 1400 England and France were at peace, the French did not have to pay heavy war taxes and to suffer destructive English invasions, but otherwise it did not benefit their wallets.
It wasn’t clear to me that Harari knew that in the year 1400, France and England were about two-thirds of the way through something we call the Hundred Years War, which involved copious heavy war taxes and destructive English invasions. Probably he did know, in which case I assume we are to understand this as a counter-factual hypothetical. And his point—that modern wars interrupt trade patterns where long-ago historical wars didn’t—is clear enough. But it’s sloppily made, and is “lack of cost” really such a different thing than “benefit”? I recently read a book that dealt in part with the Hundred Years War, and I certainly got the impression that the people who lived in France and England in 1400 would very much have preferred that their respective countries not be at war. I can’t imagine their situation would have been that much worse had the war interrupted extensive trade between the two nations.
Many of Harari’s pronouncements are what you might call “debatable,” though I suppose the debates would almost always be interesting. I got through the later sections of Sapiens by imagining that the book was a high-level brief prepared for the government of an alien civilization that wanted to know something about the dominant species on Planet Earth. In such a light, Harari’s done a commendable job, and if he oversimplifies or speculates recklessly on certain points, that can be written off as a consequence of his extremely high-level perspective.
Ultimately, I found Sapiens to be a cold book. Harari wants to purge himself of prejudices and assumptions about humanity. In places this approach works brilliantly—yes, civil rights are fictions, in that they don’t exist unless we agree that they exist. The word “fiction” drives the point home, even if it does seem to place him (and us?) outside the worthiness, the necessity, of that concept. And yes, to take another example, perhaps Nazism was a religion, in the sense that it was an ideological framework that explained to its adherents who they were and where they were going. But for all their faults, it doesn’t seem quite right to lump more conventional religions with Nazism. The aliens might see it that way, but we have more at stake.
