Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
First Posted May 2017
At least one house on my street regularly puts books out on the sidewalk in old computer-paper ream boxes labeled “free.” Sapiens was there last week—I wonder what event triggered its ejection from bookshelf or storage.
I quite liked Sapiens because it worked with the reader on how to think, rather than on what to think. That type of pedagogy never goes out of style, even if, 14 years after publication, some of the details in the pages may have become less relevant. If I owned it, I might consider keeping it—though apparently this want was not enough to pick it up from the street.
I saw a hot take on twitter. It linked to a good quote:
Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.
I texted the quote to a friend. I found out it came from Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. I requested the book from the library.
Three months later I have finished the book, and after re-reading the quote out of context, I no longer feel the epiphanic jolt that motivated me to spread it around. That’s not to say it isn’t still awe-inspiring. But after reading the book en totale, the gentle pressure Sapiens exerts on the mind—a soft whisper, over and over, that you are just an animal—seeps in and breaks apart the primogeniture over nature ingrained in humans from birth. The unnatural mantle of cosmic, spiritual, and sentient supremacy slips off just a bit, and confronted with that quote in context it feels familiar, correct. Contrary to popular fear—“There is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night”—it is possible to lowers one’s place from the summit of the universe without completely destroying our collective senses of self.
It isn’t easy or graceful to internalize that we are not destined to rule the planet because we’ve had a lifetime of culture telling us otherwise. We see it every day in the complete control of the animal population, thralls to the food industry; of Zoos and non-dog pets; of pavement and exurbs. That’s without even mentioning the divine word of the world’s monotheistic religions: “A terrible flood might wipe out billions of ants, grasshoppers, turtles, antelopes, giraffes and elephants, just because a few stupid Sapiens made the gods angry. Polytheism thereby exalted not only the status of the gods, but that of humankind. Less fortunate members of the old animist system lost their stature and became either extras or silent decor in the great drama of man’s relationship with the gods.” I like to think of myself as pretty open-minded, but there was at least one section where I vividly remember bristling, where I began planning the rough outline for my written refutation. Three or so pages later, my reaction was confronted head-on:
It’s likely that more than a few readers squirmed in their chairs while reading the preceding paragraphs. Most of us today are educated to react in such a way. It is easy to accept that Hammurabi’s Code was a myth, but we do not want to hear that human rights are also a myth. If people realise that human rights exist only in the imagination, isn’t there a danger that our society will collapse? Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.
Everything is disarmingly self-aware; its bluntness preempts attempts to poke holes with admissions that nothing is complete. That—more so than the hot-take-style quotable excerpts that serve to draw attention to the text in the first place—is what makes it remarkable. Sapiens isn’t afraid to make the best claim it can given the facts as they are known, isn’t afraid to say, “This might all be wrong but here it is anyway,” and isn’t afraid to give all the information it can without trying to steer the reader into a comfortable line of thinking:
So our medieval ancestors were happy because they found meaning to life in collective delusions about the afterlife? Yes. As long as nobody punctured their fantasies, why shouldn’t they? As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion. The other-worldly meanings medieval people found in their were no more deluded than the modern humanist, nationalist and capitalist meanings modern people find….this is quite a depression conclusion.
Sapiens doesn’t force you into the conclusion it wants. That will keep it worthwhile even if—or more likely when—the facts upon which it is based have been revised. There are, I am sure, dozens of tiny details that are right in theory but wrong in specifics. For example, “genetic Engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of Caenorhabditis elegans worms” is true enough, in a broad sense—their lifespan has been increased sixfold in laboratory settings—but genetic manipulation was not in isolation and required a reduction in caloric intake to starvation-levels to increase longevity. No human can be an expert in every field simultaneously, and only an expert—or someone living with a doctor of genomics specializing in C. elegans—would have discussed that study over dinner and would recognize its mildly misleading nature offhand.
The point of Sapiens isn’t expanded longevity in microworms, but that humanity has become capable of manipulating their entire existence through genetic tinkering. It is about getting that information—in a larger context of what it means to be part of and partial to reality—out there, in the broad view. If it turns out some of the details are wrong, well, what you learned from this book aren’t a slew of cocktail-party facts but a new way of looking at humanity. The facts as presented are tools to piece together a view of the world that is a little more clear than it was yesterday. And if those facts are wrong, we throw them out and incorporate the newly revised truths, and try again. Ad infinitum.