Book Review: Sapiens (A Brief History of Humankind) by Yuval Noah Harari
Oh, the humanity… 12 000 years of civilization and we still cannot adapt to the solutions we ourselves invented to fix our biological problems. We produce more food than ever but we distribute it unevenly, we eat ourselves to death but not before we spend our life savings on diets. This probably seems like a stark definition of the human condition — well that’s the point. Actually, that’s the point throughout professor Harari’s book ‘Sapiens (A Brief History of Humankind)’.
Some say that Harari is a reductionist, that he oversimplifies things, but I think that if one is to truly find trends in the entire history of humanity, one needs to reduce and distill our history. If we want to study a certain war or an economic crisis we try to go in as much detail as possible, but on the scale of the entire human civilization, detail seems like noise.
Harari systematically goes through the history of homo sapiens and extracts the stable, underlying trends for each period of our existence, starting from the cognitive revolution, the agricultural one, the industrial and the digital. Each period is characterized with a specific set of problems and juxtapositions within society and the author articulates those brilliantly.
The Structure Of The Book
The book has 20 chapters that chronologically lay out the history and struggles of homo sapiens starting from the biological origins of the humans and ending in the present days. Chapter 1 describes homo sapiens’ simultaneous existence with other hominids. Chapter 2 explains the cognitive revolution that gave rise to our abilities to concoct myths. Such myths, it seems, support the structure of our civilization to this very day. Chapter 3 provides Harari’s perspective on how our hunter-gatherer life affects our modern behavior, such as our eating habits, our conflicts and our sexuality. Chapter 4 places us 850 000 years ago and shows how the flood of humans has methodically changed the flora and the fauna of the world to fit our needs. The most shocking fact here is that this has happened way before the agricultural revolution. Chapters 5 through to 8 tell us the controversial story of the agricultural revolution. Chapters 9 to 13 describe the mainstays of human civilization — the human institutions which constantly change externally but whose essence remains stable to the present. Chapters 14 through to 20 tell us the incredible story of the science revolution and explain the profound change it has rendered to our society. The afterword reminds us that even though we have aeroplanes, ships and nuclear weapons, deep inside, we are still the animal that lived in the savannah hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The Main Theme
We evolved as hunter-gatherers. Biologically-adapted to such lifestyle, our instincts, needs and desires are knowledge built inside our DNA. But beside this knowledge, we also possess the knowledge that our collective experience accumulates externally — stories, learned behaviors and recorded thought. This allows every individual to internalize (by re-configuring the pattern recognizer network inside our neocortex) a part of the accumulated collective knowledge. Often, the collective knowledge contradicts our built-in knowledge. These contradictions seem to be the main theme in professor Harari’s book.
An example of such a contradiction is our instinct to binge on sweet and greasy foods. After all, before the agricultural revolution, it was important to take in every single calorie we could get our hands on. Sweetness signaled that a food is rich in calories and thus, today we find ourselves in a predicament. We can sweeten everything and we have abundance of calories. How do we then tame our instinct to eat voraciously? The author explains the origins of many such controversies in an engaging way that teases one’s intellectual appetite.
Secondary Themes
On several occasions, throughout the book, professor Harari talks about the consequences that civilization has brought upon animals. The author reminds us that animals not unlike us have instincts and the global problems of animal welfare in fact come down to the situations where humans deprive animals of what they naturally need. Some examples of these are farming practices that the author opines are incompatible with the animals’ natural way of life.
Another leitmotif in the book are myths and their significant role within human society. It seems like our cooperation on a massive scale (that is many times the number of individuals in the extended family) depends on myths. And myths are nothing more than controversial stories that lead us to trust and help each other. From the start of the book, the author gives an example with the company Peugeot. The myth of Peugeot leads thousands of people all over the world, who speak different languages and basically have nothing in common to cooperate all for the sake of an entity that only exists on paper. An even more grotesque example is how millions of people were slaughtered because a great conquest (the crusades) was ordered in the name of a god that preaches love and compassion.
In conclusion, this book will definitely provoke you to think about yourself in terms of your origins and your current lifestyle. There may be many controversial ideas, but that’s a good thing, because those ideas will shake you into taking some time and meditating about our nature as species and our society.
