I had the chance to browse through an airport bookstore while waiting for a 11 hour connecting flight back to London when I came across Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. The book was familiar from countless social media posts by friends prophesying its brilliance — something which made me ignore it completely. However with time to spare while at the airport, I picked it up numbly to skim through the synopsis, presenting myself a minute to asses its worthiness for a long haul flight. Few pages down, I was captivated by the narration; the writing felt as comforting as a Wikipedia page — detailed, connected and well referenced.
Harari attempts to pack the history of humankind from the early stages of forgathering to evolving into cognitive beings pushing the boundaries of our existence as we know it — in simple terms, circumventing the ‘act of god’ reasoning that has defined much of our actions and reactions. He credits the course of human history to four distinctive revolutions:
- Cognitive
- Agricultural
- Unification of Humankind and
- Scientific
Harari argues that the said revolutions were possible only for the common ground that the human species have perfected — the ability to cooperate on common imaginative thoughts and beliefs in extensively large numbers — sometimes by the billions as the existence of nation states or religions suggest.
As per this argument, one feels belonged and invested in ideals and values entirely co-created by collective human imagination and is existent only because of them being accepted by us all for generations as a‘fact’. For example, there is a reason why we believe in one piece of paper and not an other — one is issued by the Federal Reserve and marked the US Dollar, while the other holds no such promissory bearing. Despite both of them in physical essence similar, in our cognitive thoughts only one holds value. That is because 7 billion others believe in it too while no one holds value to the other piece of paper.
For an alien introduced to life on this planet, observing the functioning of our society would be perplexing. The existence of states, countries, money, and religion are entirely our collective fiction that holds no physical existence. As an outsider all these are absolutely imaginative and unreal.
Harari credits this ability to co-create ‘collective imagination’ to be the definitive aspect that as enabled the human species to conquer the global ecosystem, despite being at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to sheer primitive power on the food chain. The ensuing chapters further develop on the progress made on trade, currency, religion, human rights, politics, scientific exploration, nation states, medicine and ultimately the power being wielded by the human race in defining the current world as we know it.
While reading the book, one can often relate it to a Wikpediaic flow, but Harari mostly confines it within the framework of natural sciences — evolutionary biology and anthropology. In simple analogy, Harari doesn’t just share the definitive points in history such as the discovery of fire, he constructs a convincing argument behind the reason for us to have made the discovery and how we coursed our collective journey with it. Often, the argument feels one sided, but it is logical and convincing enough and therefore cannot be discredited. His particular take on how humans were colonized by Wheat instead of the other way around is one such argument.
I had been convinced to be sold Homo Deus, the second book by Harari which picks up from where Sapiens left off, and further elaborates on the scientific revolution that is increasingly making mankind play god.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, a book from 2015, is still ranked under Top 50 of the Amazon Best Sellers list.
By A Uppuluri
