Book Review | Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Every so often a non-fiction book captures the attention of the reading public to such an extent that it becomes impossible to ignore. It isn’t always obvious why. Suddenly you can’t turn around in your local bookshop without knocking over a full display of them and everyone you meet is quoting their favourite fact. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is definitely one of those books. It was published in English in 2014 and has barely been out of the bestseller lists since.
In this instance it isn’t actually that hard to understand why. Sapiens takes as it subject the thing we are most interested in — ourselves. And it looks to answer the most fundamental of questions — how did all this happen? It approaches that epic task in an engaging, digestible, and oftentimes provocative romp through our brief sojourn on Planet Earth.
At its core this is not a happy account of anything you could meaningfully call success. As Harari’s says:
“the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of… [t]ime and time again massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals”.
Not a great review for a species that “stands on the verge of becoming a god”.
Harari’s account of how this came to pass is split into four sections. He starts with the Cognitive Revolution, in which the final piece of the evolutionary puzzle fell into place. The Homo Sapiens that emerged from this are, biologically speaking, identical to us. I found it humbling to remember that. Despite the manifold differences in how we live those people felt all the same things we do. They loved, they dreamed, they feared, they fought, and they hoped just as we do. But they did so in a world we would struggle to even begin to recognise.
The most profound changes in that world were sparked by the subject of the second section: the Agricultural Revolution. For most this marks the start of our story. The point at which we mastered Eden and put it to productive use. Harari describes it as the biggest mistake we’ve ever made. Great for humanity’s collective domination but utterly miserable for almost all the individuals involved. This dichotomy is something Harari keeps coming back to. Proliferation of a species should not be deemed as synonymous with success. More is not better.
He comes back to this at the end of the book, exploring what it means to be happy. As he points out, there is almost no way of knowing whether our cushy 21st century lives make us objectively happier than our ancestors. He concludes that objectivity is actually entirely the wrong way to think about that problem: “[happiness] depends on the correlation between objective condition and subjective expectations.” More profoundly still “if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how.”
The rather chilling conclusion is that given our rising expectations we are probably not notably happier than those who came before us.
After exploring how we transitioned from a nomadic to settled species, the book then moves on to examining humanity’s inexorable coalescence into a single amorphous system. Harari lightly traces this through various historical examples but at all times focusing on the meta-narrative. He argues, persuasively, that our success in achieving this unity is ultimately our remarkable ability to create and buy into a variety of “intersubjective myths”. Things that exist only in the minds of those who believe in them, have no basis in the physical sciences, but enable cooperation on a mass scale. The three most enduring of these have been our economic system, imperial or national states, and religion.
The chapters on the development of these interconnected and interdependent systems are probably the section of the book I found most intriguing. To be reminded of the constructed nature of these systems does not to my mind diminish their power. It instead reinforces our remarkable reliance on narrative. To have created such intricate ways to describe the functioning of our world to each other, based on nothing more, and nothing less, than our collective imagination is really a remarkable feat. But this section also reminded me how astonishingly recently the world became a single entity. Trade, travel and the exchange of ideas have existed for thousands of years. But a genuinely global population has existed for no more than a couple of centuries. The integration of the last remnants of the isolated worlds into our global community was recent enough that we know the names of those who lived through it. I found it impossible to envisage how it must have felt to have another world arrive on your beach after numberless generations of your world being unquestionably the whole world. We will never know that feeling again.
Finally, Harari brings us up to date by examining the Scientific Revolution. This one has barely started. Forged in Europe in the middle of the last millenium, and then violently exported around the world, this revolution marked a profound break with how humans saw themselves. Harari attributes this shift to a disarmingly simple cause. We understood we are ignorant. As soon as those scales fell the thirst for new knowledge was unquenchable. So unquenchable in fact that it harnessed itself to the twin systems of capitalism and imperialism to envelop the globe. The reason that this revolution is unfinished is largely a function of time. The other shifts that Harari described play out over 1,000 years or perhaps 10,000s of years. Scientific advances that allow us to move beyond the biological constraints placed on us by evolution will, in Harari’s telling, be the thing that shape the next phase of the human experience. Shape us so profoundly in fact that it might be hard to even imagine the consequences.
By the time I’d finished the book it wasn’t entirely clear to me whether the “brief” in the title is meant in earnest. For most readers 443 pages of closely typed prose isn’t brief. For most people 100,000 years isn’t that brief either.
I ended up realising that the “brief” is best interpreted as an instruction on how Harari intends to guide his reader through time. The book began life as a series of lectures at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and you can still see the vestiges of that approach. The sections are short and pacey, the conclusions are firm and provocative, there is a slightly questionable smattering of pictures.
There is a lot to be said for this approach. It is certainly preferable to a turgid review of academic literature. It is perhaps the only guaranteed way to ensure the reader keeps going. But it does have drawbacks. I was left wanting to know more about almost everything. I wish Harari had given himself more time to explore some of the most interesting transitions in our collective history:
How is it that language became so integral to our success as a species?
Why did Homo Sapiens master exploration, adaption and exploitation, in a way that no other species was able to?
Why has everything changed so dramatically in the last 200 years after millenia of inertia?
Each of these questions is raised but I’m not sure that I’m left with a satisfying answer. Perhaps we don’t know. Perhaps I need to seek my answers elsewhere. I’d love to know. I would also have loved Harari to spend some more time on the price our planet has paid for this ascendency. There are glimpses of this. The fact that the collective weight of humans and domesticated animals in the world today is 10x the weight of all the large wild animals is astonishing. There are 1.5 billions cows and only 80,000 giraffes (that is 20,000 cows per giraffe!). But despite this I’m not sure there is a full recognition of the fact David Wallace-Wells has made so forcefully; everything that we have ever known, or ever called civilisation, has existed with a set of climatological parameters that no longer exist. It is sobering to say the least.
There is also a danger that Hariri’s brevity becomes glibness. As human development begins to accelerate after the agricultural revolution (c10,000 years ago) the reader is increasingly left with the sense we are skating across the surface. Much of the academic response to this book has been dismissive or derogatory. That might be wounded pride or unattractive envy, but a lot of it is probably also fair. There are points at which it feels like the book’s provocations are grounded more in a desire to be provocative, rather than a deep engagement with the historiography.
This sense of “glibness” was brought into sharper relief when I compared this book with the only other book I’ve read of comparable breadth: Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature. I should preface this by saying that Pinker’s book is probably the best piece of non-fiction I’ve ever read. The comparison does not do Sapiens any favours. By focusing on a specific theme, the inexorable decline of violence in human society, Pinker offers the reader a tour-de-force in intellectual argumentation. He ranges from complex statistical analysis, to deep historical research, to pithily explained psychology, and to the physical structures of the rage systems in the brain. At every point you feel like you are in the hands of an expert without needing to be an expert. He is assured and astonishingly informative at the same time. Pinker also has graphs not pictures. Lots of graphs. Graphs do not maketh a good book but they help give it weight. I felt in places Harari could have done with a nice chart or two.
None of this is to say Sapiens is not worth your time. It is. It taught me a lot I didn’t know and gave me a new way to think about things I thought I did. I would encourage anyone who hasn’t already to pick it up. I’m definitely looking forward to Harari’s other work.
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