Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on Earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.My opening quote – coming as it does from the end of Sapiens – pretty much serves as a summary for the whole: Homo sapiens (shortened to “Sapiens” by author Yuval Noah Harari) are not inherently remarkable animals, but through a series of sudden leaps forward, or “Revolutions”, we have somehow come to dominate the Earth and its other inhabitants; to the detriment of all; even to the detriment of ourselves. I picked this book up because I thought it would be an interesting slant on the history of human civilisation (along the lines of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel), but this book is too agenda-driven to read as fun pop-history: Harari never misses an opportunity to take swipes at religion, capitalism, and animal husbandry and I was left repeatedly wondering, “Which came first? His conclusions or his 'proofs'?” This book wasn't a waste of time, but it routinely stretched my patience.
The brief history of humankind: 150 000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged as a separate species (and I found it interesting to be reminded that at the time we were just one of at least five or six humanoid animals – including Neanderthals – to be roaming the Earth); a Cognitive Revolution occurred 70 000 years ago (with emerging advanced language and organisational skills); the Agricultural Revolution happened 11 000 years ago; 500 years ago saw the Scientific Revolution; which lead to the Industrial Revolution of 200 years ago; the Information Revolution emerged 50 years ago; which paved the way for today's Biotechnical Revolution (which will no doubt see us Sapiens playing god and creating the amortal posthumans who will replace us). No one knows what prompted the Cognitive Revolution that set us Sapiens on the path to world domination, but Harari shares an interesting theory that it was the need to gossip (in order to create and maintain social groups) that sparked our language growth.
When Harari first started talking about the Agricultural Revolution, he made what I thought was a fascinating observation: If the goal of all life is to spread its genes far and wide, if you were to think of the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat, rice and potatoes, “These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.” Isn't that a challenging viewpoint? Unfortunately, this observation was just the groundwork for the first of Harari's anti-civilisation positions:
Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud.Throughout Sapiens, Harari stresses that the switch from hunter-gathering societies to settled farming communities was the beginning of the end for us as a species (he even goes so far as to lament the time we spend cleaning our homes as hours that could be spent frolicking on the Savannah), and if you can't follow along with his Anarcho-primitive line of thinking here, you're pretty much out of luck with finding common ground with the rest of the book. It is also at this point that Harari sets the framework for his second big theme: the widespread dissemination of DNA is not the main purpose of life on Earth (which, unfortunately, sets that business about wheat domesticating humankind on its head), and that happiness is more important than ubiquity; the last rhino roaming free in Africa is more successful as a species than the billion plus cattle confined to factory farms:
It's reasonable to assume, for example, that bulls prefer to spend their days wandering over open prairies in the company of other bulls and cows rather than pulling carts and ploughshares under the yoke of a whip-yielding ape.Ultimately, Harari spends a lot of time talking about happiness and concludes that we as a species are basically unhappy, and primarily because we are under the thumb of those systems that we've forgotten are imaginary constructs that we ourselves developed: money, credit, and capitalism; religion, and especially “toxic” monotheism; empire, nationalism and xenophobia. Not only have we spread misery to all the other animals on the planet (including probably killing off all the other humanoids), but with the Agricultural Revolution, we have made Sapiens the primary product of factory farming; with our social constructs, we built the cages for the human zoo. And it's all for nothing:
As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning...the scientist who says her life is meaningful because she increases the store of human knowledge, the soldier who declares that his life is meaningful because he fights to defend his homeland, and the entrepreneur who finds meaning on building a new company are no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning in reading scriptures, going on a crusade or building cathedrals.You either find Harari's conclusions self-evident, in which case you don't need to read Sapiens, or like me, maybe you think there's just a little bit more meaning to human life than that. One more complaint on Harari's writing style: he likes to make exaggerated and definitive statements (along the lines of “There is no God”), and at least three times while writing about the history of human civilisation, he'd make a sweeping generality (there have never been female leaders), and then list a few exceptions (Cleopatra, Elizabeth I) which he then says, “proves the rule”: that's not how that expression works; you can only say your “exceptions prove the rule” when they are not actually exceptions to what you're stating. In the end, I can't buy into the idea that we Sapiens would have been happier if we never made the leap to farming and cities and technology; I don't accept either this book's premise or its conclusions. On the other hand, based on this reading experience, I am still looking forward to receiving my copy of Harari's next book, Homo Deus; I never find it a waste of time to read a paradigm-challenging book like this, even when I'm not persuaded by its point of view.
