Words&Dirt

Lately I’ve been wondering who’s going to take up Edward O. Wilson’s mantle after he dies. For decades, Wilson has penned accessible, intelligent books that help nonspecialists understand what he calls the “Evolutionary Epic”––the grand narrative of terrestrial life. “People need a sacred narrative,” Wilson wrote in 1998. “Homo sapiens is far more than a congeries of tribes and races. We are a single gene pool from which individuals are drawn in each generation and into which they are dissolved the next generation, forever united as a species by heritage and a common future” (Consilience, 289-90).

Though sprung from the mind of an Israeli historian rather than an American biologist, Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind marks a wonderful contribution to the “sacred narrative” of the modern, secular world. Combining fastidious research and acerbic humor, Harari distills 2.5 million years of human evolution into just over 400 pages. Such a project has significant limitations, but Harari conjures an impressive summary of the most significant events and questions of human history.

At the center of Harari’s treatise is the concept of “imagined realities,” which he argues are responsible for humanity’s transition from an “animal of no significance” to our current state:

Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale 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. (27)

Harari is quick to point out that imagined realities are not the same as lies, because “as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world” (32). So even if an imagined reality is founded on a web of lies, it can still change the world if enough people believe in it. Over time, Harari posits, our imagined realities have become increasingly similar. The Scientific Revolution rendered our imagined realities sensitive to natural law, resulting in more uniformity and standardization across cultures. Today, human thinking and behavior are beginning to congregate under a global set of imagined realities for the first time.

Is the march toward global unity a good thing? Harari’s answer is honest but inconclusive: It’s really complicated, and it depends on your point of view. Human history is littered with contradictions, accidents and surprises––certainties about the future are in short supply.

Before going any further, I’d like to share my list of selected historical “rules of thumb” presented in Sapiens. It’s lengthy, but worth reproducing as a testament to the scope and ambition of Harari’s project:

• “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution [development of subtle language], there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.” (45)
• “Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.” (74)
• “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.” (97)
• “‘Cooperation’ sounds very altruistic, but is not always voluntary and seldom egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation.” (104)
• “In order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order…When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison. (118)
• “It is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.” (134)
• “Vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an imagined hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence. Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time…Those victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.” (143)
• “How can we distinguish between what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others.” (146-7)
• “People throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction.” (164-5)
• “Does history have a direction? The answer is yes. Over the millennia, small, simple cultures gradually coalesce into bigger and more complex civilisations, so that the world contains fewer and fewer mega-cultures, each of which is bigger and more complex…It becomes crystal clear that history is moving relentlessly toward unity.” (166)
• “Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.” (180, emphasis his)
• “There is no justice in history. Most past cultures have sooner or later fallen prey to the armies of some ruthless empire, which have consigned them to oblivion. Empires, too, ultimately fall, but they tend to leave behind rich and enduring legacies. Almost all people in the twenty-first century are the offspring of one empire or another.” (189)
• “It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time. Today is no different.” (239)
• “The dynamics of history are not directed towards enhancing human well-being. There is no basis for thinking that the most successful cultures in history are necessarily the best ones for Homo sapiens. Like evolution, history disregards the happiness of individual organisms. And individual humans, for their part, are usually far too ignorant and weak to influence the course of history to their own advantage.” (243-4)
• “Scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology. The ideology justifies the costs of the research. In exchange, the ideology influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries.” (274)
• “Capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail to defend private individuals and their property. Instead, it flows into states upholding the rule of law and private property.” (318-9)
• “Belief in the free market is as naïve as belief in Santa Claus. There simply is no such thing as a market free of all political bias. The most important economic resource is trust in the future, and this resource is constantly threatened by thieves and charlatans. Markets by themselves offer no protection against fraud, theft, and violence. It is the job of political systems to ensure trust by legislating sanctions against cheats and to establish and support police forces, courts and jails which will enforce the law.” (329)
• “Craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way. When growth becomes a supreme good, unrestricted by any other ethical considerations, it can easily lead to catastrophe.” (331)
• “Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them.” (359)
• “The decline in violence is due largely to the rise of the state.” (367)
• “Though the last few decades have been an unprecedented golden age for humanity, it is too early to know whether this represents a fundamental shift in the currents of history or an ephemeral eddy of good fortune…Even the brief golden age of the last half-century may turn out to have sown the seeds of future catastrophe.” (379)
• “Scholars began to study the history of happiness only a few years ago, and we are still formulating initial hypotheses and searching for appropriate research methods. It’s much too early to adopt rigid conclusions and end a debate that’s hardly yet begun.” (396)
• “History teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise due to unforeseen barriers, and that other unimagined scenarios will in fact come to pass…What we should take seriously is the idea that the next stage of history will include not only technological and organisational transformations, but also fundamental transformations in human consciousness and identity.” (413)
• “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…Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. 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?” (415-6)

Although some of these passages might give the opposite impression, Harari is just as concerned with what we don’t yet know or can’t know as he is with whatever reasonable conclusions can be drawn from examining our past, present and possible futures. He is comfortable making broad claims about historical trends, but generally employs enough restraint and skepticism to avoid gross oversimplification.

Of course, a book like this has to cull a lot of detail in order to be palatable. None of the above “rules of thumb” is incontestable or exhaustive. Even though Harari goes out of his way to complicate his presentation of history, much is left out, and many of his points require further explication, clarification, or even refutation. In my view, however, this is a gift to the reader more than anything else. Each of us has the opportunity to fill in the gaps and augment Harari’s perspectives using personal knowledge and experience.

Sapiens is a powerful tool for generating humility, and this is the book’s greatest strength. Over and over, Harari disabuses readers of the notion that any modern humans are living in an “ideal” or “natural” state. “We study history,” he asserts, “not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine” (241). Harari doesn’t deny the considerable influence of biology on human behavior, but definitely sees culture as the dominant factor in shaping modern life. After reading Sapiens, it’s difficult to disagree.

If we take seriously the suggestion that “our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable,” we must also take responsibility for whatever small parts we play in our own corners of the Evolutionary Epic. We cannot excuse our failings by invoking the forces of fate or physics, even if we believe ourselves completely subject to them. We do not experience ourselves as predetermined marionettes, but rather as open-ended animals with mutable identities in an unfinished world. The imagined realities we accept or reject play a huge role in shaping and justifying our decisions, and since some imagined realities are substantively better than others, we need books like Sapiens to help us choose our allegiances wisely.

Homo sapiens has proved itself a petty and dangerous species more often than not, but I don’t think a more enlightened path is off the table, not quite yet. Thinkers like Yuval Noah Harari and Edward O. Wilson are the best of us––teachers who provide invaluable opportunities to propel ourselves forward by looking back. Unlike Wilson, the majority of Harari’s life is likely still ahead of him. This is something for which we should all be thankful.

Rating: 10/10