Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
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Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian and author of multiple bestsellers including Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
It is an Iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.
Yuval Noah Harari
I. Fundamentals & The Agricultural Revolution
ABOUT 13.5 BILLION YEARS AGO, MATTER, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics.
About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry.Â
About 3.8 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology.Â
About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures.
The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history. Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got underway only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.Â
This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms. There were humans long before there was history. Animals much like modern humans first appeared about 2.5 million years ago. But for countless generations they did not stand out from the myriad other organisms with which they shared their habitats.
From Nomadic Hunter-Gatherers to Settled Farmers
Homo sapiens spread from East Africa to the Middle East, to Europe and Asia, and finally to Australia and America—but everywhere they went, Sapiens continued to live by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals…All this changed about 10,000 years ago, when Sapiens began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species. From sunrise to sunset humans sowed seeds, watered plants, plucked weeds from the ground and led sheep to prime pastures. This work, they thought, would provide them with more fruit, grain and meat. It was a revolution in the way humans lived – the Agricultural Revolution.
II. Religion & Empires
The Emergence of ‘Imagined Orders’
We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.
A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. In order to safeguard an imagined order, continuous and strenuous efforts are imperative. Some of these efforts take the shape of violence and coercion. Armies, police forces, courts and prisons are ceaselessly at work forcing people to act in accordance with the imagined order.Â
Religion x Writing x Mathematics x Money = Empires
An empire is a political order with two important characteristics. First, to qualify for that designation you have to rule over a significant number of distinct peoples, each possessing a different cultural identity and a separate territory. How many peoples exactly? Two or three is not sufficient. Twenty or thirty is plenty. The imperial threshold passes somewhere in between. Second, empires are characterized by flexible borders and a potentially unlimited appetite.
There are schools of thought and political movements that seek to purge human culture of imperialism, leaving behind what they claim is a pure, authentic civilization, untainted by sin. These ideologies are at best naïve…How many Indians today would want to call a vote to divest themselves of democracy, English, the railway network, the legal system, cricket, and tea, on the grounds that they are imperial legacies?
Simplistically dividing the past into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere. Â
The Rise of Universal Religions
Religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires.Â
Western Religions
Polytheism (belief in many gods) is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’.Â
The big breakthrough (of Monotheism—belief in only one, true, God) came with Christianity…Saint Paul reasoned that if the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases, and if He had bothered to incarnate Himself in the flesh and die on the cross for the salvation of humankind, then this is something everyone should hear about, not just Jews.
Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition.
Eastern Religions
All the religions we have discussed so far share one important characteristic: they all focus on a belief in gods and other supernatural entities…The central figure of Buddhism is not a god but a human being, Siddhartha Gautama.
Gautama (The Buddha) developed a set of meditation techniques that train the mind to experience reality as it is, without craving. These practices train the mind to focus all its attention on the question, ‘What am I experiencing now?’ rather than on ‘What would I rather be experiencing?’ It is difficult to achieve this state of mind, but not impossible.Â
Dharma is seen by Buddhists as a universal law of nature. That ‘suffering arises from craving’ is always and everywhere true, just as in modern physics E always equals mc2. Buddhists are people who believe in this law and make it the fulcrum of all their activities. Belief in gods, on the other hand, is of minor importance to them. The first principle of monotheist religions is ‘God exists. What does He want from me?’ The first principle of Buddhism is ‘Suffering exists. How do I escape it?’Â
The Unification of Mankind in a Nutshell
Commerce, Empires, and universal religions eventually brought virtually every Sapiens on every continent into the global world we live in today.
III. The Scientific Revolution & Capitalism
The last 500 years have witnessed a phenomenal and unprecedented growth in human power…human population has increased fourteen-fold, production 240- fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.)Â
Modern science is based on the Latin injunction ignoramus – ‘we do not know’. It assumes that we don’t know everything. Even more critically, it accepts that the things that we think we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge. No concept, idea or theory is sacred and beyond challenge…Examples: After centuries of extensive scientific research, biologists admit that they still don’t have any good explanation for how brains produce consciousness. Physicists admit that they don’t know what caused the Big Bang.
(Two pretty big mysteries!)
The Capitalist World
To understand modern economic history, you really need to understand just a single word. The word is growth. In 1500, global production of goods and services was equal to about $250 billion; today it hovers around $60 trillion. Â
Capitalism has created a world that nobody but a capitalist is capable of running. The only serious attempt to manage the world differently – Communism – was so much worse in almost every conceivable way that nobody has the stomach to try again.
The fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism…capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed…
Pax Atomica
With very few exceptions, since 1945 states no longer invade other states in order to conquer and swallow them up…
(Unless you’re Putin or Xi Jingping)…
The threat of nuclear holocaust fosters pacifism; when pacifism spreads, war recedes and trade flourishes; and trade increases both the profits of peace and the costs of war.Â
I hope so!
Looking Forward
History teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialize due to unforeseen barriers, and that other unimagined scenarios will in fact come to pass.
It is naïve to imagine that we might simply hit the brakes and stop the scientific projects that are upgrading Homo sapiens into a different kind of being.Â
We are already cyborg-like…and are only becoming more so.