Sapiens in the Age of Coronavirus

I recently finished reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Since I last flirted with global history courses in college, I haven’t had the chance to think deeply about the evolution of organization, culture, and technology into their present forms. Harari’s book is prima facie ambitious, attempting to tackle all three starting a mere 2.5 million years ago.

But with an unassuming tone and a well-reasoned thesis, the book delivers. Harari tells the tale of our human race as a story of stories itself. He claims that the success of our species is directly attributable to our capacity for creating, believing, and sharing fictions. These “imagined realities” — be they religious orders, nation states, or even human rights — are not elemental truths like rain or sunshine. Instead, they allow us to rally around communal value systems and cooperate at scale.

Karnak Temple in Egypt, a product of cultural and political imaginations (source).

There were three points that I found particularly interesting:

1. Ideology as a religion. Harari calls religion “a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order,” distinguishing between divine religions (including the Abrahamic faiths and polytheistic counterparts) and natural-law religions (think Buddhism or Jainism, which lack gods). He then extends our conceptions of religion to encompass political ideologies like capitalism or Communism. After all, both are godless like natural-law faiths, both can be universally applicable, and both have strong missionary legacies. Today, religions like capitalism are inextricable from global policy agendas.
2. The stability of patriarchy. Gender actually takes its spotlight in the book a few chapters before religion does, but I think there’s some value in retroactively connecting the two. Harari describes patriarchy as a norm that has “weathered political upheavals, social revolutions, and economic transformation.” While I struggle to accept patriarchy as a necessary precondition for complex societies (the Khasi people of India are a counterexample), it is interesting to think about patriarchal ideology as another example of a religion. This leads me to wonder if by actively dismantling the missionary capabilities of patriarchy we can discredit the ideology itself. But as with any religion, this requires multifaceted (social, political, economic) buy-in from a critical mass of people.
3. The military-industrial-scientific complex. This is one of the most fascinating takes that Harari shares. He says that scientific progress was tightly coupled with the imperial project, which influenced research priorities by selectively allocating capital and determined the appropriate application of results. Science and big money enable the state (in military conquests, for instance), and in turn, the state enables science and big money. Unsurprisingly, the average American citizen isn’t privy to this back-scratching, and so instead we expect moral leadership from the controlling class and exercise our right to dissent when reality fails us.

It’s hard to read a book like Sapiens while being blind to the very real dangers of death by global pandemic. Coronavirus is no longer beyond the event horizon. And while so much else around us has been turned on its head within a matter of weeks, Harari’s insights have survived. Let’s consider the same three points as above, framed in the context of our current health crisis in the United States.

1. Capitalism is creed. American corporations have historically been left to their own devices in a very Adam Smithian way, free to choose “the markets they serve, the technologies they use, the wages and benefits they pay, and so on” as Erik Wright puts it. In recent weeks, companies with strong leadership quickly chose to enforce remote work when possible, provide their services for free, or build out special support for impacted customers. However, when several firms take the low road, the free market no longer enables prosperity and security for its people. Bird has laid off nearly a third of its team. Instacart and Amazon are failing to provide safe working conditions. The federal government, intently focused on bailing out struggling companies instead of struggling citizens, recently allocated 25% of its $2 trillion stimulus package for big businesses, nearly three times what it gives to public and health services. $58 billion have been earmarked specifically for airlines (though this might not even be enough). Particularly egregious, certain members of Congress withheld details about the magnitude of the outbreak from the public while dumping millions of dollars of stock in retail and travel companies that ended up suffering heavy losses. In other words, elected officials of the state acted not in the best interests of their polity, but rather chose to pledge allegiance to the supreme doctrine of the land: capitalism. If we really do consider capitalism to be a religion, today’s America has royally failed to separate “church” and state.
2. The pandemic has gendered long-term impacts. This is true for several reasons. Most directly, an outsized number of frontline medical workers internationally are women selflessly putting themselves at elevated risk. There are other subtle patriarchal forces at play too, however. As the title of Helen Lewis’s article goes, coronavirus is a disaster for feminism because women are likely to sacrifice work to shoulder child-care responsibilities, and their incomes will take longer to bounce back post-pandemic than those of male colleagues. Reports of domestic violence against women have also surged. The coronavirus response does not include any substantial analysis on gendered impacts, and there aren’t enough people in positions of power who care.
3. The politicization of science and industry. Paul Krugman wrote an interesting piece in The New York Times about the role of denial in the coronavirus response. In it, he says that “Epidemiologists trying to get a handle on the coronavirus threat appear to have been caught off guard by the immediate politicization of their work.” Not only is science being weaponized as a medium for misinformation in America, but today’s titans of industry are also being waved around to lend credibility to the country’s leadership. Every company from Google to Procter & Gamble — and on a lucky day, MyPillow — is featured in the daily coronavirus briefing. The White House has invoked the Defense Production Act “to require General Motors Company to accept, perform, and prioritize contracts or orders for the number of ventilators that the Secretary determines to be appropriate.” In an effort to strong-arm even international industry, the administration offered German pharmaceutical firm CureVac a large sum of money for exclusive access to a coronavirus vaccine it was developing. Here, science was sought out — and nearly bought out — as a mechanism to project the strength of the United States. But of course, reading Harari reminds us that this is not without centuries-old historical precedent: science and industry are at the service of the state, and the state is at the service of science and industry.

Naturally, all this makes me wonder whether Harari’s 2014 predictions for the future are ringing true now. Towards the tail-end of Sapiens, he says that the world of today “is already a world in which culture is releasing itself from the shackles of biology.” I have to disagree. If anything, this virus demonstrates the fragility of the imagined realities we’ve engineered around us. We have seen the buckling of our healthcare system at its knees, the breach of privacy (as noted by Harari himself), the closure of educational institutions, retirement savings lost and yet to be found, the failure points of our global supply chains, and even the de-urbanization of America. Granted some nations and their ideologies have proven better at handling these stress tests than others, but otherwise coronavirus has been a universal affliction, touching people of all classes, races, and as of recently, even ages.

Another remarkable consequence of this crisis has been the immediate retreat back to family and community, both of which Harari claimed were actually lost during the Industrial Revolution. While some of our imagined realities might be more imagined than real, our real and imagined communities have persisted, succored by technology. Zoom happy hours, Netflix Parties, or if you have more European taste, balcony bingo have made their way into our lives. My friends and I are self-isolating with family, and my sister is even attending her music lessons via video calls!

It’s not difficult to find acts of solidarity and service across the globe. States and nations are sending medical personnel and equipment across borders. I have seen a number of volunteer clearinghouses, proposals for DIY equipment, and petitions to provide living wages to members of our community. So while Harari’s predictions might have fallen short in some areas, he was right in a critical way. Our world today is tending towards unity. In times of crisis, we fall together. But inevitably, we will rise together too.