Notes from ‘Sapiens’

Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens’ is an uncomfortable book to read. It’s an unflinching look at what makes us who we are, and the answer is not very pretty. It is not at all flattering — but it feels in some ways essential to recognize.

Sapient takes a humanist and scientific look at humanity, positing that we have evolved to the position we are at today not by our own ingenuity, but by the machinations of the world and its ways. One of the most interesting points of the book as that our agrarian society was not some genius concept we invented, but in fact an effort by the earth (namely, wheat) to domesticate us for its benefit. Harari calls the agrarian revolution “the greatest lie in history” and says this:

This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

It’s moments like this which make ‘Sapiens’ well worth reading, and there’s plenty of them. This isn’t the only time we traded in our freedom in the name of technology, says Harari, and points to email as a more recent occasion of this same truth shackling us without our recognition:

Back in the snail-mail era, people usually only wrote letters when they had something important to relate. Rather than writing the first thing that came into their heads, they considered carefully what they wanted to say and how to phrase it. They expected to receive a similarly considered answer. Most people wrote and received no more than a handful of letters a month and seldom felt compelled to reply immediately. Today I receive dozens of emails each day, all from people who expect a prompt reply. We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.

Here and there a Luddite holdout refuses to open an email account, just as thousands of years ago some human bands refused to take up farming and so escaped the luxury trap. But the Agricultural Revolution didn’t need every band in a given region to join up. It only took one. Once one band settled down and started tilling, whether in the Middle East or Central America, agriculture was irre-sistible. Since farming created the conditions for swift demographic growth, farmers could usually overcome foragers by sheer weight of numbers. The for-agers could either run away, abandoning their hunting grounds to field and pas-ture, or take up the ploughshare themselves. Either way, the old life was doomed.

The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted.

Problems like the ‘luxury trap’ notwithstanding, humans have made progress in the years which we’ve been developing — and though religious leaders don’t always come out on top in ‘Sapiens’, there are particular occasions in which they do. One interesting example had to do with life-insurance for widows and orphans by Scottish clergy:

In 1744, two Presbyterian clergymen in Scotland, Alexander Webster and Robert Wallace, decided to set up a life-insurance fund that would provide pensions for the widows and orphans of dead clergymen. They proposed that each of their church’s ministers would pay a small portion of his income into the fund, which would invest the money. If a minister died, his widow would receive dividends on the fund’s profits. This would allow her to live comfortably for the rest of her life. But to determine how much the ministers had to pay in so that the fund would have enough money to live up to its obligations, Webster and Wallace had to be able to predict how many ministers would die each year, how many widows and orphans they would leave behind, and by how many years the widows would outlive their husbands.

Take note of what the two churchmen did not do. They did not pray to God to reveal the answer. Nor did they search for an answer in the Holy Scriptures or among the works of ancient theologians. Nor did they enter into an abstract philosophical disputation. Being Scots, they were practical types. So they contacted a professor of mathematics from the University of Edinburgh, Colin Maclaurin. The three of them collected data on the ages at which people died and used these to calculate how many ministers were likely to pass away in any given year.

It’s our ability to tie calculations with empathy that makes us remarkable, and though this is only a passing remark from Harari, I found it to be a profound reality. We do not always make our mark, but we can. That’s important. Will it mean we can ‘solve’ problems like poverty? Harari, and humanity, seems unsure:

Many cultures have viewed poverty as an inescapable part of this imperfect world. According to the New Testament, shortly before the crucifixion a woman anointed Christ with precious oil worth 300 denarii. Jesus’ disciples scolded the woman for wasting such a huge sum of money instead of giving it to the poor, but Jesus defended her, saying that ‘The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me’ (Mark 14:7). Today, fewer and fewer people, including fewer and fewer Christians, agree with Jesus on this matter. Poverty is increasingly seen as a technical problem amenable to intervention. It’s common wisdom that policies based on the latest findings in agronomy, economics, medicine and sociology can eliminate poverty.

Invention and ingenuity always come with a price, and the price is often in the form of human suffering. The author includes what is surely an apocryphal story of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, which is too good not to share:

“On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface of the moon. In the months leading up to their expedition, the Apollo 11 astronauts trained in a remote moon-like desert in the western United States. The area is home to several Native American communities and there is a story -or legend — describing an encounter between the astronauts and one of the locals.

One day as they were training, the astronauts came across an old Native American. The man asked them what they were doing there. They replied that they were part of a research expedition that would shortly travel to explore the moon. When the old man heard that, he fell silent for a few moments, and then asked the astronauts if they could do him a favour.

“What do you want?” they asked.

“Well,” said the old man, “the people of my tribe believe that holy spirits live on the moon. I was wondering if you could pass an important to them from my people.”

“What’s the message?” asked the astronauts.

The man uttered something in his tribal language, and then asked the astronauts to repeat it again and again until they had memorised it correctly.

“What does it mean?” asked the astronauts.

“Oh, that I cannot tell you. It’s a secret that only our tribe and the moon spirits are allowed to know.”

When they returned to their base, the astronauts searched and searched until they found someone who could speak the tribal language and asked him to translate the secret message. When they repeated what they had memorised, the translator started to laugh uproariously. When he calmed down, the astronauts asked him what it meant. The man explained that the sentence they had memorised so carefully meant, “Don’t believe a single word these people are telling you. They have come to steal your lands.”

Our quest to dominate means that we step on others, and this is seemingly a cruel aspect of humanity that we have little interest in changing. For all our progress, we’ve progressed little in this aspect. The way which we ‘farm’ food is one of the most horrid examples of this truth:

What happens if farmers now take a young calf, separate her from her mother, put her in a closed cage, give her food, water and inoculations against diseases, and then, when she is old enough, inseminate her with bull sperm? From an objective perspective, this calf no longer needs either maternal bonding or playmates in order to survive and reproduce. But from a subjective perspective, the calf still feels a very strong urge to bond with her mother and to play with other calves. If these urges are not fulfilled, the calf suffers greatly. This is the basic lesson of evolutionary psychology: a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction. The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of animals, while neglecting their subjective needs.

…and there is no stopping this behavior. In fact, it will only grow more reprehensible as we become more consumeristic. This is an entire aspect of our culture that, like the agrarian society, has been hoisted upon us without our cognizance, and makes us more miserable than we realize:

Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology (‘Just do it!’) to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression.

It has succeeded. We are all good consumers. We buy countless products that we don’t really need, and that until yesterday we didn’t know existed. Manufacturers deliberately design short-term goods and invent new and unnecessary models of perfectly satisfactory products that we must purchase in order to stay ‘in’. Shopping has become a favourite pastime, and consumer goods have become essential mediators in relationships between family members, spouses and friends. Religious holidays such as Christmas have become shopping festivals. In the United States, even Memorial Day — originally a solemn day for remembering fallen soldiers — is now an occasion for special sales. Most people mark this day by going shopping, perhaps to prove that the defenders of freedom did not die in vain.

Our technologies are wide-ranging, and we have little realization on how dependent we are on them. We take it to be the way things have always been, but that just isn’t true. Time itself is an area which we have only ‘recently’ begun to care about keeping watch:

In Assyrian, Sassanid or Inca cities there might have been at most a few sundials. In European medieval cities there was usually a single clock — a giant machine mounted on top of a high tower in the town square. These tower clocks were notoriously inaccurate, but since there were no other clocks in town to contradict them, it hardly made any difference. Today, a single affluent family generally has more timepieces at home than an entire medieval country. You can tell the time by looking at your wristwatch, glancing at your Android, peering at the alarm clock by your bed, gazing at the clock on the kitchen wall, staring at the microwave, catching a glimpse of the TV or DVD, or taking in the taskbar on your computer out of the corner of your eye. You need to make a conscious effort not to know what time it is.

The typical person consults these clocks several dozen times a day, because almost everything we do has to be done on time. An alarm clock wakes us up at 7 A.M., we heat our frozen bagel for exactly fifty seconds in the microwave, brush our teeth for three minutes until the electric toothbrush beeps, catch the 07:40 train to work, run on the treadmill at the gym until the beeper announces that half an hour is over, sit down in front of the TV at 7 P.M. to watch our favourite show, get interrupted at preordained moments by commercials that cost $1,000 per second, and eventually unload all our angst on a therapist who restricts our prattle to the now standard fifty-minute therapy hour.

…and time is only one example of this, of many.

So, if invention and evolution have only shackled us, what good is it all? Sh0uldn’t we just go back to a hunter-gatherer way of life which made us just as happy? Maybe not, says Harari:

In most parts of the world, people go to sleep without fearing that in the middle of the night a neighbouring tribe might surround their village and slaughter everyone. Well-off British subjects travel daily from Nottingham to London through Sherwood Forest without fear that a gang of merry green-clad brigands will ambush them and take their money to give to the poor (or, more likely, murder them and take the money for themselves). Students brook no canings from their teachers, children need not fear that they will be sold into slavery when their parents can’t pay their bills, and women know that the law forbids their husbands from beating them and forcing them to stay at home. Increasingly, around the world, these expectations are fulfilled.

This seems like a rather bleak outcome for all of our struggles. We have made it to this point in time, simply to not fear death in our sleep. That is ‘progress’ in Harari’s eyes, and perhaps all that one could expect from a humanist and atheist perspective. I am glad that I have more to believe in, but I appreciate this insight into how others view the world at its worst and best.