Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari

I read a book, that was like no other. It was a book that makes
one rethink about almost everything about Man, that one has ever known - or thought one knew. ( To date this will be automatic choice if I am to be marooned in an island with just one book. )Not stopping there it makes you rethink about nature, the religions, the philosophies and what is identified as good and what is identified as bad. I repeat, I read a book that was like no other. And if I had read no other books in 2018, but this book, I would've settled for it. I learn now, that there is so much hype about this book - there's this notion that one needs to read this book just for the hype it has created. Well, I strongly disagree. I was not aware of the intensity of the hype, until I was told a few days back. But this is a book that needs to be read by a modern man or woman, with the capacity to read it in its entirety.

The book broadly looks at the three revolutions that we, Homo Sapiens have triggered: Cognitive ( 70000 years ago), agricultural revolution ( 12000 years back) ,and the much more recent 500 year old Scientific one. The author discusses many topics under these broad eras, but with more emphasis on the latter era.

He shows how an animal no special than any other, in fact inferior than the more confident animals - the ones who knew their place in the scheme of things - managed to outwit ( not always intentionally ), the other animals over their one gift - their language, their ability to make up things which aren't there, to create myths, which collectively led to what he terms as cognitive revolution. At the earlier stages he cannot stress the importance of gossip as a means of us getting us kick started with our language.

"...ever since the Cognitive Revolution Homo sapiens has been able to revise its behaviour rapidly in accordance with changing needs. This opened a fast lane of cultural evolution, bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution. Speeding down this fast lane, Homo sapiens soon far outstripped all other human and animal species in its ability to cooperate."

He explores and questions the consequences  on nature due to the homo sapiens and discloses our track record which is downright bad. If we believed that man over the last five hundred years destroyed most of earth, well, think again. He was always a destroyer of nature ( but then what is nature ?  That too is discussed in the scheme of things ).

The second part looks at the Agricultural Revolution, and it is interesting to read that man may actually have opted for a raw deal when he settled down and planted his food crops.

"The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.... The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud ... The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa."

It further discusses the "happiness is around the corner" delusion and the belief that hard work is way to that oasis. Harari, predicts that given the context the Neanderthals were happier than us.

Since the agricultural revolution, the gaps in our biological deficiencies have been fulfilled by imagined orders and devised scripts which  led to mass networks of cooperation. A Special chapter is reserved to elaborate on the unfairness and lack of neutrality of these networks, be it based on skin colour, caste, gender and sexuality. The most interesting discussion to me was the question on what is Natural vs. what is Unnatural.

"In truth, our concepts ‘natural’ and unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology. The theological meaning of ‘natural’ is ‘in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature’. Christian theologians argued that God created the human body, intending each limb and organ to serve a particular purpose. If we use our limbs and organs for the purpose envisioned by God, then it is a natural activity. To use them differently  than God intends is unnatural. But evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Organs evolve to perform a particular function, but once they exist, they can be adapted for other usages as well." 

In essence this applies to everything from ability of flying of winged beings to homo-sexuality.

While the first two parts, each comprising of four chapters, are on cognitive revolution and agricultural revolution respectively, the next part is on the unification of humankind. It starts with how sometime back there existed in this planet multiple worlds of human existence.

"Around 10.000 BC our planet contained many thousands of them. By 2000 BC, their numbers had dwindled to the hundreds, or at most a few thousand. By AD 1450, their numbers had declined even more drastically. At that time, just prior to the age of European exploration, earth still contained a significant number of dwarf worlds such as Tasmania. But close to 90 per cent of humans lived in a single mega-world: the world of Afro-Asia. Most of Asia, most of Europe, and most of Africa (including substantial chunks of sub-Saharan Africa) were already connected by significant cultural, political and economic ties."

The chapter starts with the account of when  this unification took place, to today, where there is only "one world" for all practical purposes. Towards this end the role played by merchants, conquerers and prophets is of paramount importance. There is a very revealing chapter on how money played a big part in ths unification, on how the Chrisitans and the Muslims who saw not eye to eye, still agreed upon the belief of money.

It explores the role played by various empires in unification of humans. In recent times no where else is this more apparent than in India.

"...the modern Indian state is a child of the British Empire. The British killed, injured and persecuted the inhabitants of the subcontinent, but they also united a bewildering mosaic of warring kingdoms, principalities and tribes, creating a shared national consciousness and a country that functioned more or less as a single political unit."

The chapter concludes  discussing how the New Global Empire is inevitable.

The next chapter discusses religion and how it contributed towards this unification. It recognizes that polytheists were inherently more tolerant than monotheists.

"Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’."

Even when polytheists conquered huge empires, they did not try to convert their subjects."
The discussion doesn't spare the cruelties carried out in the name of religion.

"...the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion."

I couldn't help but detect the subtle inference that Judaism ( possibly the author's belief by birth ) is but a local monotheism, and it never had a missionary past unlike all other monotheist religions - a case I found hard to argue against.

It discusses Buddhism under the category of the law of nature.The gist of Buddism that is presented here is so concise and contains its core, that it introduces the faith to those who are not familiar with it.

"Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify. People dream for years about finding love but are rarely satisfied when they find it. Some become anxious that their partner will leave; others feel that they have settled cheaply, and could have found someone better. And we all know people who manage to do both."

The chapter gives a prominent space to "worship of man" - new religions, based on the natural law, and he includes humanisms here. The author doesn't hesitate to call liberalism, communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism religions, despite their adherents' dislike to recognised as creeds.

"Like Buddhists, Communists believed in a superhuman order of natural and immutable laws that should guide human actions. Whereas Buddhists believe that the law of nature was discovered by Siddhartha Gautama, Communists believed that the law of nature was discovered by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin."

 Something that I found very interesting was the fundamental of monotheism in such humanist beliefs such as Communism and Liberalism.

The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls.

 The idea that all humans are equal is a revamped version of the monotheist conviction that all souls are equal before God.

And the irony is that the only humanism that has broken out from traditional monotheism is Nazism! And the aim of Nazism human progressive evolution. While the Nazi belief in a superior race has since been debunked, that was due to more recent science. As per the knowledge available in 1933, Nazism was even scientific !!


The fourth section begins with a comparison of the changes that took place over the last five hundred years. While the comparisons are many, the following should be good as an indication of the level of changes that this period has brought.

"In 1873, Jules Verne could imagine that Phileas Fogg, a wealthy British adventurer, might just be able to make it around the world in eighty days. Today anyone with a middle-class income can safely and easily circumnavigate the globe in just forty-eight hours."

It stresses on how modern science doesn't fear to admit ignorance, the method of attempting to formulate new knowledge using a mathematical model, and how not being content with theory alone, how it uses the knowledge so gleaned for furthering its ends - as a power.

"Pre-modern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known."

"Modern-day science is a unique tradition of knowledge, inasmuch as it openly admits collective ignorance regarding the most important questions."

It goes on to elaborate that it is the utility of knowledge that is of import, for no knowledge or theory 100% accurate.This knowledge has developed to such a level that a-mortality is being suggested by 2050, under the Gilgamesh project.

The ideas being suggested from hereon becomes that much more interesting as they reach relative more recent times. One of the questions he attempts to answer is why is it that it was in Europe and not in China that the Industrial revolution took place ? Harari suggests that the secret lies in that Europe had started behaving with a scientific and a capitalist bent even before they had any technological advances under their belt. And the bitter truth is that their mindset of conquest, was instrumental in financing these advances. It is usually the insights that Harari provides which make this book so valuable. He suggests that whereas the Europeans admitted to their ignorance an their thirst for expanding their vistas, the other civilizations were so complacent and minding their own business that they didn't realise that their days were numbered, "even when the wolf was at the door". He takes the case of Cortez and the Aztecs as an example. In essence the build up of the scientific discipline an imperial project.

The Capitalist Creed: The comparison of how the muslim world ran out of steam in the race for conquest against that of Europe  is due to the latters' belief in credit and investments - and the resulting fair sharing of the spoils, the author shows. I could even draw a parallel of this modern Sri Lankan politics - why a certain political party is favoured by certain segments of the business world  despite the proven incompetency its leadership has shown, against the other party which showed rapid development during its tenure, is that the former allows the spoils to be shared by a larger segment of the community. All the other cries ( democracy !! Thief - thief !! ) are largely eye wash I feel ).

"Capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail to defend private individuals and their property. Instead, it flows into states upholding the rule of law and private property."
Harari takes the case of the Dutch merchants to elaborate on this home truth. The beauty of this work is is provides these insights while giving us the succession of incidents that follows - the rise of the English, the Opium wars and the economic truth so important today - your credit rating. The British investors were willing to take risks, because they knew their majesty's army could be trusted to safe guard their interests if the foreign debtors refused to pay.

The last few chapters are on the wheels of industry and how once the science and the art of successful conversion of energy was learnt, it has opened up the world for a permanent revolution. These chapters are presented with sufficient facts, enough insight yet with enough human emotional elements to make the book readable, without the reader getting tired.  It is this skill - this fine balance, which works to make this book such an amazing work. For example, how the big nations learnt that "Imperial Retirement" was due, shows so much astute statesmanship in hindsight one could say. Harari uses the case of Britain and the U.S.S.R. as examples.

Another thing is the healthy mix of the optimism that the narration carries without disregarding the negative effects too. For example, note the following sentence:

"For real peace is not the mere absence of war. Real peace is the implausibility of war."

Harari then goes on to show that the world has always had wars and despite the power of the states to annihilate others and even itself, that we are currently experiences the most peaceful of times.

"The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms."

Chapter 19, discusses if we can live happily ever after, and how even the third world countries are better off than they ever were before. It also discusses what is happiness, where is happiness and how it can be found. Harari returns to Buddhist teachings at this point, although he concedes that the path as taught by the Buddha is seldom followed, and practical difficulties it offers. Yet, there is almoest a grudging admission, that the teaching per se has an essence of truth in it.

Yet for all the advancement mentioned, the book ends with an ominous note for homo sapiens as the new experiments in DNA and bionic life makes one wonder what homo sapiens want - the question being "What do we want to want?"

I spent a many sessions of half hour to one hour with this book, and the book which I took to my hands glistening in white, has changed colour to a dusty shade of white by the time I was done.
I finished towards the second week of December I think and took another two weeks writing this review - and I know I haven't justice to this book. And I will cherish my soiled book, hopefully for many years to come, and many returns to it. In 2019, I hope to read its sequel, Homo Deus.