Sapiens

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine got me Sapiens for my birthday. Being the worldwide blockbuster that it is, I had vaguely heard about it from various sources, but I also have a habit of jumping pretty late on the hype wagon especially when it comes to books, and this was no exception.

Reading Sapiens was a game changer. It has reshaped my views of the world in ways that cannot really be compared with anything else I have read before or since. The power of this work, in my opinion, is that whoever you are and wherever you stand on any ideological spectrum, it will make you distance yourself from most of the core values, social constructs and historical truths that you hold for granted.

But first of all, what is Sapiens all about? Its aim is to recount in a few hundredth pages the History or our specie, Homo Sapiens over its 200,00 years of existence, and how Evolution and History shaped it into the singular animal that it is today. Quite a program.

The book is divided into four parts which I will briefly summarize.

Part one focuses on the era that covers most of Homo Sapiens existence, the age of foragers and hunter gatherers. This often overlooked part of our past is when Evolution ran most of its course, and the findings from evolutionary biology highlight how much our deepest instincts and fears originate from this era. In addition, learning about other human species who populated our planet before (or concurrently to) us is a humbling experience. So far Homo Sapiens has survived only one tenth the amount that our cousins Homo Erectus did, and it is pretty certain that we will not come close to matching their feat. Yet the most disturbing idea presented in part one is the idea of shared myths, the very concept that truly sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Harari stresses out that the ability of humans to believe in shared, collective fictions is what makes them able to cooperate on a large scale. The shared myths touch all aspects of human societies, from concepts like money, nations and companies to moral values such as freedom and human rights.

Part two is equally fascinating, taking an unusual and particularly bleak stance towards the agricultural revolution by presenting it as a source of enslavement for humanity. Harari argues that the adoption of agriculture and sedentary lifestyle is what turned us from strong, resilient and well rounded animals, into a society of mainly weak and overworked individuals who find their mere existence threatened by a few days of hail. The argument of agricultural enslavement might feel irrelevant in a post industrialised society, yet it is interesting to consider that people living in agricultural societies (which is still a lot of people in our current world and pretty much everyone if you go a few generations back in time), are in a many ways living unhappier lives than our hunter gatherers ancestors.

Part three takes us a bit closer to contemporary times, covering the various factors that unified the world and made it the global, interconnected place that we have come to know. The section covers a wide range of topics, including the spread of monotheist religions, the rise of money and trade, XIXth century imperialism, and XXth century totalitarian ideologies. The common idea that emerges from all these facets of human history is their incidental nature. Harari describes how the rise of Christianism happened from a slightly favourable turn of events concurring the decline of the Roman empire. Racial segregation and then racism in modern America was really just a giant snowball effect that originated from Africa being located at a strategic place for slave trade, plus some genetics traits making African people more resistant to certain types of diseases common in cotton fields. The underlying idea behind these examples is that minor events and circumstances in History lead to cultural shifts whose consequences can endure for centuries, sometimes millenia. Even when dealing with sensitive topics such as religion, ideologies and moral values, the narration is refreshingly impartial and devoid of Western centric morale. Whether talking about capitalism, islam, human rights, the industrial revolution or feudal societies, Harari is always able to take a giant step back and analyse how these various constructs can be beneficial or detrimental with regards to social stability, human hapiness, or equality, in a way that gives the reader the full ability to form their own opinion.

Part four, without a doubt the most controversial of the book, dives deeper into the industrial revolution and the staggering development of science and technology in recent times. This section serves almost as a philosophical exercise about the pursuit of knowledge, even challenging the notion of its validity as a purpose for Humanity. Harari takes the opportunity to reflect on human happiness, inspired by some compelling insights from philosophy and behavioural science. He states that while change is natural and inevitable, most of the societal, political and technical advancement merely adjust our standards and expectations, and do not make us happier. The chapter is not a criticism of modernity or change (and the author makes it very clear that conservatives and nostalgics defend a lifestyle and value system that would have seemed equally fantasist and morally corrupted to their own predecessors), but it is also a clear affirmation that social and material modernity is not the key to a better life. Upon reading this section, the utopian promises from technological advancement and political discourse seem naive at best.

Reading more into the fourth section though, some of the ideas brought up come out a bit out of tune with the rest of the book. In a series of very bold predictions about the future of humanity, Harari imagines Homo Sapiens as some form of god specie with superpowers over Nature and the universe. This shift in the narration is slightly disconcerting for a couple of reasons: firstly because it was made so obvious in the first chapters that Homo Sapiens is nothing but a minuscule side note in the larger history of our planet (and to an even greater extent our universe), and second because the author went to great lengths earlier to emphasise the impredictable character of History. The various predictions are interesting thought exercises in their own right, but the tone is definitely more opinionated and less scientific than the previous chapters.

Despite this contentious ending, Sapiens is a provocative, fascinating account of our History that gives extremely valuable clues to understand who we are. Its dispassionate approach and rationalisation of human behaviour is bound to make you feel uncomfortable, and that’s a good thing. In a society where most of us live trapped in their social and cultural bubble, we ought to read more work that uproots us from our usual confirmation biases. Sapiens does just that, and more.