By the end of 2019 I couldn’t face my last unread book about the threat of climate change. The Silk Roads at the end of 2018 had given me interesting reading so I turned to a similar kind of book - Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Signal Books 2014).
Sapiens tells the history of the one remaining human species, homo sapiens, from the very beginning to a projected future. Originally written in Hebrew, now translated into many other languages, this has been a remarkably successful book that seems to resonate with the realisation in our time that we are, in some new sense, one people.
The book is a fairly easy read. It covers big waves of transition in Sapiens’ social organization over many thousands of years from the time when Sapiens existed among other human species. The book ends looking to the future after the last 500 years of what the book calls the scientific era. The story is folded into four parts each relating to a big shift in Sapiens’ social organization: The Cognitive Revolution; The Agricultural Revolution; Human Unification; and The Scientific Revolution.
Unfortunately, the last two parts of Sapiens, covering recorded history, have been covered more recently from a novel vantage point in the Silk Roads. Moreover, the manner in which information is provided in Sapiens often made me think of a high school class. It can seem superficial and facile. The concept of human rights in the US and the ancient Sumerian code are given as just one and another myth by which Sapiens lives. In places the book spends time on a topic that doesn’t quite belong or fit. For example, the question of why Sapiens follows the pattern of the patriarchal apes rather than the matriarchal apes moves off into a history of women’s rights and leadership.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. The other books I was reading at the time told me more on the role of women. Michele Obama in Becoming (Crown, New York, 2018) tells about a present-day egalitarian female life, moving from South Side Chicago to a leading role in a law firm and being first lady in the US White House. Sally Armstrong in Power Shift: The Longest Revolution (Anansi, 2019) proclaims a revolution has occurred: “Man the Hunter is bogus;” “Women’s history is flawed;” “... for millions of years men and women had equal status. Then they didn’t. … It has taken 10,000 years and a million voices to right these wrongs.” But I suppose Sapiens can’t be blamed for being general.
Summing up: the book provides a story of the remaining human species. And perhaps that is enough for the book to have value. The first two parts offer some insights into early history that were novel for me. And over the whole book the reader gets the sense of our human story for more than 100,000 years – from before the last ice-age ago. But the last two parts of the book, recorded Sapiens history, are more interestingly covered by The Silk Roads. My usual fuller summary follows.
Part 1 The Cognitive Revolution tells over four chapters how, starting as a human species like other mammals, the Sapiens human species developed enhanced toolmaking, communicative and cooperative skills which distinguished it from the others. This preceded the demise of the other human species and the survival of only Sapiens.
In Part I the chapter titles are a little irritating. They allude to Judeo-Christian myths without explanation. That seemed a distraction for someone like me who is in one of these faith communities, but it must be bewildering for people unfamiliar with the myth and its significance. For example, The Tree of Knowledge is one chapter and The Flood is another. The Flood is not shown to relate to the content, which is the emergence of Sapiens in all parts of the world and the disappearance of all other human species. Despite irritations, Part 1 is informative and readable.
Part 2 The Agricultural Revolution covers another revolution that led to agricultural settlements and related cultural revolutions within Sapiens communities. The chapters are: History’s biggest fraud; Building Pyramids; Memory Overload; and There is No Justice in History. These are somewhat unhelpful chapter titles. The fraud is that although agriculture led a community to more food production than a hunter gatherer society it created a kind of treadmill. More food supported a bigger population, but that bigger population then required even more food. Also, settlements and the need for stored food over winter meant a community’s survival depended on its defence. The foods may be more plentiful, but they are more vulnerable to disease and climate. Also the foods developed by Sapiens were more limited and offered less variety. The shift to agricultural society seems to have occurred independently for the Sapiens in Meso-America and in Eurasia. But the book is silent about that.
Building Pyramids develops thoughts around dominant shared myths that shape what a culture does – whether one dreams of cruises to foreign parts or building a memorial pyramid for the afterlife. Memory Overload tells of the arrival of written language. Initially this was a simple language for keeping accounts and records – a tool for bureaucracy. Later fuller language evolved for writing poetry or stories or decrees. Surprisingly, There is No Justice in History is the chapter about the role of women in Sapiens’ history and talks about how Sapiens seems to be a patriarchal type of ape. However, the book has noted that Sapiens found ways by means of myths, communication and tools to change behavioural patterns faster than the biological genetic process. The current global human construct of human rights with its equality for sexes seems to me to be moving Sapiens communities in a direction that is neither matriarchal nor patriarchal and one that is more generally inclusive and participatory.
Part 3, The Unification of Humankind begins with an introductory chapter The Arrow of Time. The chapter suggests in high school class mode that myths capable of holding a community together create a culture and that the myths of a culture are fluid over time. Viewed from a satellite the history of Sapiens had a direction. Many isolated hunter-gatherer cultures in 10,000 BCE became one inter-connected global set of communities by 2000 CE. In 1450 CE fewer larger Sapiens communities were spread over Asia, Europe and Africa connected by economic or political ties. But ten percent of the Sapiens population remained in other isolated worlds: Meso-America (Central and parts of Northern America); The Andean World (Western South America); Australia – the continent; and The Oceanic World – South West Pacific islands from Hawaii to New Zealand. After 1450 “the Afro-Asian giant swallowed up all the other worlds.” The Aztec empire in Meso-America and the Inca empire in the Andes were conquered by the Spanish by 1532. The Oceanic world was taken by the same time. By 1788 the British had found then colonized Australia and found Tasmania.
The remaining chapters in this part of the book examine myths that the book says brought these Sapiens communities together. The Scent of Money shows the mythology behind money as an exchange tool. Coins worked better than barter and were happily exchanged across divides like Empire and Religion. Then come myths in a chapter on Imperial Visions. Empires are defined. They are collections of diverse communities. They have flexible boundaries. They are non-dictatorial. Most countries of today came out of an empire. The Law of Religions is a quick history of major religions - adding modern “religions” like communism. The pros and cons of polytheism come along the way.
For me the coinage and the religion are just part of the recorded history. The period around the first century saw the arrival of major religions alongside the wider establishment of empires. The first Chinese Emperor was designated by heaven to rule for the benefit of the ruled (religion). He introduced a common currency that bore his image (money) for trade among his various peoples (empire). The mix of religion, money and empire plus the reality of military success plus the need to hold all these people together led to roads for trade, a bureaucracy to manage and a common written language. The chapter The Secret of Success, suggests there is nothing inevitable about the world that emerged and those who now dominate it. And be it game theory or memetics or post-modernism, nothing suggests that the most successful cultures in history are the best for the well-being of Sapiens! The book moves to Part 4, The Scientific Revolution.
Part 4, The Scientific Revolution has the book’s final chapters. The Discovery of Ignorance looks at the nature of science – observation and mathematics. Newton’s mathematical laws gave power, and an ability to shoot projectiles more accurately. Statistics allowed things like insurance to evolve. Lightening could be grounded. Poverty could be reduced. Is the real quest eternal life? The next chapter, The Marriage of Science and Empire, suggests that the voyages of exploration tended to be linked to the military. The Royal Society trip to Tahiti for astronomical measurements with a team of scientists went with Captain Cook. This led to science but paved the way for the British conquest of the South West Pacific including the occupation of Australia and New Zealand.
The Capitalist Creed, tells how the Dutch, having thrown off Spanish rule, developed their own sea trade routes. They invented shared liability financing and a stock exchange to fund the trading trips. The companies involved established stopping points. The Dutch East India company ended up running Indonesia. The British company ended up running a major part of India. These were subsequently formally adopted by the Empires of the Netherlands and Britain.
It was not just the invention of a steam engine that allowed Europe to take on world leadership. It was the cultural values and mindset. A quest for knowledge entwined with exploration and imperial conquest. Britain explored India, its history and its cultures. The Mexicans explored and conquered Meso-America.
The Capitalist Creed suggests economics has played a critical role. Modern economics is dominated by the notion of growth. A trust in future growth enabled credit. The book gives an outline of how banks work, what Adam Smith said about greed and the modern idea of re-investing profits. Flaws like political intervention in credit, monopolies and greed led to bubbles. This economic system led to colonial plantations and slaves. Economic matters are better dealt within in books by economists.
The Wheels of Industry begins with the story of the steam engine for mines, for transporting coal and then for travel. Besides fossil fuels the book notes the much greater flux of energy from the sun as well as energy from tides and wind to be harnessed. After steam came petroleum then electricity. And raw materials did not run out but just changed – plastics and silicon arrived, and fertilizer arrived from fixing atmospheric nitrogen. A second agricultural revolution came with tractors and the like. The book questions the treatment of farm animals in industrialized farming. With the quest for continual economic growth came consumerism - and came treating consumerism as something positive. Religious festivals are now shopping events.
A Permanent Revolution opens with the dominance of humans and domestic animals compared with other animals, the apparent “threat” of destroying natural habitat, and self-extinction. Modern industry, not the agricultural seasons, dominate the agenda and the human is a cog in a machine and lives by a timetable – so the book has a section on clock history!
Industry has broken the old community building blocks of family units and relatives. A crude sweep at historic changes from family-based communities to the present follows. There are imagined communities – like the nation – that follow from older imagined communities like Imperial China or the world Muslim community. But many nations are very recent. Other industrial revolutions like the arrival of cell phones or the internet seem continuous. Changes seem to be able to happen without the horror of WWI and WWII. The arrival of the state has reduced the violence of war – overall! But what of violence within the state? The book makes much of the peaceful end of British rule without reference to pressure from the new post-WWII mega-power, the US. The notion of Pax Atomica is raised. The book believes the cost of war is up and its benefits are way down. Also, the web of connections among states limits the power of most states to go it alone. Nothing is said about non-state actors! But then, this is not a book for current political science. The chapter ends suggesting the Sapiens experiment is simultaneously at the gates of heaven and hell.
And They All Lived Happily Ever After explores whether humans are better off now than they were. There are statistics and there are the fashionable tools for examining how humans “feel.” I can accept some statistics, but this chapter has wandered a bit far from Sapiens history to current social dilemmas, questioning whether the French revolution was worth it, and the biochemistry of serotonin – the hormone humans produce that makes them feel good.
The final chapter is: The End of Homo Sapiens. Sapiens has remained biological and subject to natural selection, but that constraint could end leading to a new being. There is now the possibility of intelligent design. Animals and crops are being engineered. There can be cyborg engineering – biological beings with non-organic parts like artificial arms and legs. There can be inorganic life. Humans with their cell phones, glasses, hearing aids and orthotics are already cyborgs. There is the Frankenstein prophesy and the quest for eternal life.
Could the brain get direct access to a memory bank? What would that mean? The book teases: what human identity awareness does a created being get – male, female, capitalist, communist, christian, muslim.
Perhaps all this “end” really just points back to when Sapiens emerged somehow with new awareness, new tool making and new communication skills. Sapiens went on to develop agriculture and shape the very face of the planet. Surely “the end of Sapiens” was up there in the beginning. Some knowledge made Sapiens god-like as the Genesis text of the Jewish bible about Adam and Eve recognized. It’s clever of the author to have noticed!
Afterword: The Animal that became God. I’ll not speak to this short written ending to the book directly. Although the book does register awareness of some continuing risk of atomic war and of the dangers of rising levels of global warming and climate change from the use of fossil fuels, Sapiens leaves an impression of human ingenuity’s overcoming obstacles, and of god-like humans striding into a golden future with a market economy, increasing life-expectancy, new life forms and artificial intelligence.
My own afterword requires a comment on the world reality of late 2019 – now in early 2020 compounded by a coronavirus pandemic challenging the world’s health systems and the global economy. This is also a moment in history when the full implications of the growing pollution of greenhouse gases from a century of burning fossil fuels are hitting Western consciousness. The global fossil fuel economy is causing dramatic destructive changes in climate around the globe such that scientific projections portend the end of many species and possibly the end of civilized society as many of us have known it. The atomic clock on human society’s annihilation from nuclear disaster again stands minutes from time up. This deserves a far stronger reference by the author than perhaps his concern for the feelings of the animals in modern agribusiness.
Sapiens’ dismissal of Marx and his predicted end of capitalism is too easy. Piketty’s great update of Marx in his book Capital in the 21st Century shows that Marx’s theory of the concentration of wealth and auto-collapse of capitalism remains true unless there is significant growth. Piketty showed that the concentration of wealth is advancing at a considerable pace with likely consequences of social unrest. Some of that social unrest has been seen.
Sapiens brings us to the present day without serious acknowledgement of these very real challenges that the history of the fossil-fuel-based scientific age has now set before humans.
In sum, Sapiens gives
information on the history of homo sapiens and
does so best in the first two parts of the
four-part book. The impression at the end of
Sapiens moving on god-like in a golden
scientific age defies some realities of the
moment as we face 2020.