Yuval Noah Harari, 2011 (English translation, 2014)
I needed an audiobook for my drive back from Phoenix, and I chose this one because over the past few years, this is the book I have most often seen people reading out in public, on trains and in restaurants and whatnot. There hasn’t even really been a close second. It’s not quite what I expected. Even though the subtitle is “A Brief History of Humankind”—which is also the full title of the book in the original Hebrew—the English publishers’ title Sapiens made me think that this would be a book about evolutionary biology, something along the lines of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. But no—this is a history book, though not of the sort I have been reading (and complaining about) recently.
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Primary source: A historical document, such as a letter written by a local official during the sack of Rome in the year 410 Secondary source: A work of history based on primary sources, such as a journal article about the sack of Rome that draws upon that letter Tertiary source: A work of history based on secondary sources, such as a book about the fall of the Western Roman Empire that draws upon that article |
I’m not the only one to have been thrown off by the name the English publishers picked for the book; here’s a reviewer agreeing that the “biological title” led him to expect that Sapiens would be “a work of hard-nosed science in the Darwinian tradition”. Similarly, I imagine that readers (and viewers) of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos must have expected that, with a title like that, it would be about space—which it is, with chapters/episodes about the heliocentric solar system, Venus, Mars, the outer planets, stars, cosmic scales, and the likelihood of alien life. But Cosmos also moves from astronomy to general physics with chapters about relativity and dimensions, and ventures even further afield with chapters on evolution, the brain, the dawn of science, and human survival in the age of nuclear weapons. It’s sort of about everything! And so is Sapiens. I once read that Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, which covers the evolution of life from the first self-replicating molecules up to the primates, was originally intended as the first book in a trilogy, and I expected that Sapiens might cover volume two and possibly volume three. Sure enough, the book starts with the emergence of a number of species within the genus Homo, then zeroes in on developments that led to us (e.g., cooked food allowing energy to be diverted from guts to brains). From there I thought it might go on to talk about prehistory, life in hunter-gatherer bands, and the spread of Homo sapiens across the globe, and so it does. That would have been volume two of the Sagan/Druyan series. Volume three, as I recall, would have covered the advent of civilization, and Harari obligingly moves on to the birth of agriculture and the rise of cities. He discusses the invention of writing, money, and mathematics, and describes how mythology evolved into religion. But, like Civilization the video game, and unlike Civilization the board game, Sapiens doesn’t stop there. Harari goes on to cover imperialism, secular ideology, science, capitalism, industrialization, individualism, war and peace, the nature of happiness, and the potential of genetic engineering to transform humanity into something quite different. And I haven’t even mentioned some of the issues he covers just in passing, such as animal welfare and ecological collapse. That’s a lot of stuff!
How do you cover basically every aspect of human history in 464 pages (or, for me, 15 hours and 18 minutes as recited by a self-proclaimed “British Narrator with Impeccable Style”)? Like, I said that Sapiens is a very broad account of history, and it is—less of a bird’s-eye view than a moon’s-eye one—but what does that mean? Well, again, compare it to the other history books I’ve read lately. For the most part, they just rattle off one damn thing after another for hundreds of pages. There’s a whole lot of “what” and not a whole lot of “why”. To borrow from E.M. Forster, the academic historians I have been reading lately, even when they’re writing for a popular audience, lean toward “the queen died and then the king died” and away from “the queen died and then the king died of grief”. It would be speculation to put forward a theory as to why the king died, you know. Sapiens, by contrast, is virtually all “why”. Why did people, over generations, give up foraging for agriculture when it meant trading leisure for drudgery and a varied diet for a monotonous, less nutritious one? Why was it Europe that conquered the world? More specifically, why did a one-time colonial powerhouse, Spain, become one of Europe’s also-rans with centuries of troubled history, while the much smaller Netherlands ended up with a comparable empire and today sits significantly higher on the Human Development Index? These are very interesting questions, and Harari provides interesting answers. Where the book falls down a bit is on the “what” he uses to back those answers up. The evidence Harari presents generally takes the form of anecdote (e.g., a paragraph about the British excavation of Mohenjo-daro to illustrate that archaeology began as a uniquely Western pursuit) or scenario (e.g., “Imagine that you are the son of a solid family of German financiers…”)—when he offers evidence at all. These anecdotes and scenarios are for the most part very well-written and make the “why” behind a lot of history admirably clear. The problem is that, according to those who know better, Sapiens often gets the “what” flat-out wrong, throwing the “why” into question.
Harari is, by training, a military historian. When he gets into anthropology, the anthropologists whose reviews I have read have been distinctly unimpressed. For instance, Harari contends that the cognitive abilities of Homo sapiens benefited from evolutionary upgrades approximately 70,000 years ago that allowed it to outcompete other Homo species and indeed drive them all to extinction. We have learned much since then, but neurologically have become no smarter. Therefore, Harari asserts, if we could hop into a time machine and meet a group of hunter-gatherers from hundreds of centuries ago, we’d “be able to explain to them everything we know—from the adventures of Alice in Wonderland to the paradoxes of quantum physics”. This, say the anthropologists, is preposterous to anyone who has actually looked at the empirical data rather than sitting in a chair and drawing conclusions from first principles. Look at Daniel Everett’s work on the Pirahãs, for instance: not only can they not understand quantum physics, they can’t even count. Sure, these critics say, you could take a Pirahã baby, raise her in the world outside the Amazon, and teach her quantum physics—but though the developing brain is wildly plastic, it sets pretty quickly. If it sets without the concept of number, then that concept will forever be beyond that brain. So was Harari unfamiliar with Everett’s work? Or—as that work is pretty controversial—did he disagree with it and deem it unworthy of discussion? Another example: Harari contends that “[w]hen the [number] of people and [amount of] property in a particular society crossed a critical threshold, it became necessary to store and process large amounts of mathematical data. Since the human brain could not do it, the system collapsed. […] Between the years 3500 [BCE] and 3000 [BCE], some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing’.” The problem with this account, the critics contend, is that empires on the scale of those of ancient Mesopotamia operated quite well a few millennia later in Sub-Saharan Africa with no writing system at all. Again, was Harari unaware of this? Or did he deny it? (I don’t whether it’s true myself—I’m just reporting what the critics said.) Did he consider it an exception that might dent his argument, but not enough to call for a rewrite? I don’t know, but I can say that, as a layperson who had recently listened to audiobooks on ancient Mesopotamia and the Spanish conquistadors, Sapiens’s treatment of these topics did make me frown and think, “Wow, he’s really glossing over a lot of stuff.” So I can understand why an actual expert would be pretty vexed.
Still, even if there is a contingent out there who would call this book, in the immortal words of Brandon Van Every, “non-rigorous and therefore pointless”, I have found that it is the very rigorous books that make either no points or extremely tepid ones. They supply plenty of evidence, but few or no takeaways. Sapiens has plenty of takeaways, such as the notion that the thread connecting all the historical developments covered by the book is that every one of them led humans to grow more deeply interconnected—even individualism, as it led people to meet their needs through participation in sprawling networks of people such as the market and the state rather than relying on smaller units like families and villages. An even bigger theme in Sapiens is that what has allowed us to thrive as a species has been our ability to subscribe to the same fictions and thereby work together. One of the examples he gives is a company—he uses Peugeot, but any company would do. Companies don’t exist the way that “rivers, trees, and lions” do, Harari contends. Like, what do you point at? The building? The equipment? The logo? The people? The intellectual property? None of these work. Take the test prep tutoring company I have worked for off and on over the years. The local office moved to a new location across town in 2008. It went online in 2020, so the equipment is all gone. The logo changed in, I believe, 2015. Of the dozen or so administrators who constituted the local branch when I transferred over in 2005, not a single one was still there in 2009, let alone 2022. And all of what were once the company’s signature strategies have changed entirely, along with the tests. Ultimately, the company is just an agreement by a pool of people (and not even the same people from year to year) to work in concert under that name. They believe the company exists, and so while objectively it does not, intersubjectively—in the minds of that pool of people and the minds of the people who make up society at large—it does. “Harari seems unable to distinguish a belief from a convention,” critic C.R. Hallpike scoffs, arguing that, duh, everybody knows that companies don’t really exist, but we make a “collective decision, consciously taken” to behave as though they did because it is useful to do so. And, uh, yeah, I don’t agree! I suspect that most people have never once in their lives had the thought that the existence of companies is in any way different from that of rivers, trees, and lions, nor have they ever consciously decided to stipulate the existence of Walmart, Monsanto, and Raytheon. Plenty have, of course—I’d have no trouble believing that it’s a respectable minority. But to suggest it’s a majority strikes me as a significantly heavier lift, and a totality even more so. And of those who haven’t had that thought, some might say, “Hunh, I’d never thought about it that way before, cool”—but a lot would dismiss it as just so much stoner talk. I think Hallpike has fallen into the trap illustrated (with stick figures) by that Xkcd joke: “Silicate chemistry is second nature to us geochemists, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars.” If you’re an anthropology professor who’s spent sixty years intensively studying human institutions, you might think that the person on the bus reading Sapiens knows 10% as much about the topic as you do and therefore finds the book to be a stack of commonplaces. But if the real figure is 0.1%, some of those supposed commonplaces might be pretty mind-blowing!
In any case, one of the things I liked most about Sapiens was how uncompromising Harari is in following a true observation—that an overwhelming proportion of what makes up our lives exists only in our minds—to its logical conclusions, however uncomfortable they may be. Like, it’s one thing to say that a company is an illusion, that a nation has no objective existence, or that money has no intrinsic value—a point that has come up a few times in these articles over the years. It takes another level of bravery to say that the same applies to human rights. Harari directly takes on the Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal”? Objectively, everyone is genetically different—a species is more likely to survive if its members shuffle their genes around through sexual reproduction rather than all just being clones of one another, equally vulnerable to pathogens and other threats—so the notion of “equal worth” is purely ideological. “They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”? Nope: mythological figures such as a “Creator” have no existence outside the minds of those who buy into the mythology; “rights” only exist within a social framework, and are “alienated” from us as soon as people stop believing in that framework. Sapiens was published right as a debate was launched, in the U.S. at least, over whose lives “matter”, but that question is meaningless unless you specify to whom those lives matter. There is no cosmic ledger of value. This is an unpleasant enough landing spot for some of the critics I’ve read that they are left jeering it as “crudely materialistic” (in a journal expressly dedicated to getting “beyond [what] ‘science says’”) or sneering that Harari “loves science” in a tone all too reminiscent of George W. Bush mocking Al Gore because “he talks about numbers”. What most unites the more scathing reviews I have read is their fury at Harari’s use of the word “fiction” to describe the intersubjective world of companies, nations, gods, and rights. They take it as a grievous insult, even though Harari is putting it forward as the foremost human accomplishment, as the thing that allowed us to leap beyond the capabilities of other animals. For people so invested in the notion that there’s more to truth than science, they sure seem dismissive of the value of the arts.
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