Why we are special (and dangerous)

Book Review:

Yuval Noah Harari, "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind", Vintage, 2015.

This is the first of two posts wherein I take a look at the bestselling books of the Israeli historian Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, who has become somewhat of an international phenomenon over the past couple of years. Besides the fact that Sapiens and Homo Deus are popular, my motivation for reading them has also been stimulated by the fact that they are on the "bookshelf" of the website Conceptually.org, which claims that they can improve one's "cognitive toolkit". So what is this all about?

Well, the first book is structured into four parts, with a total of twenty chapters. These are summarized below.

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"Fire gave us power..."

Part One of Sapiens deals with the "cognitive revolution", which jump-started the development of human culture about 70,000 years ago.

• We like to think of our species (Homo sapiens) as special, but between 2 million and 10,000 years ago, the world was shared by multiple human species including Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo soloensis, Homo floresiensis, Homo denisova, Homo rudolfensis, and Homo ergaster. What all these humans had in common was a large brain, the use of tools, the ability to learn, and complex social structures. (Interestingly, the different species sometimes had offspring together.) Yet during these two million years humans were not at the top of the food chain, and only with the rise of Homo sapiens about 100,000 years ago did humans ascend to the top. Why? Well, according to Harari the key development was our control of fire to cook food, scare away predators and warm ourselves -- but this alone doesn't explain why Homo sapiens outcompeted and/or outlasted Neanderthals and Denisovans.
• About 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens underwent a revolution in cognitive abilities, caused primarily by random genetic mutations. The upshot was new ways of thinking and communicating, which enabled us to share more information about the world, including gossip. As the author writes: "It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It's much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat" (p. 26). Even more importantly, our language allowed us to communicate about things that do not really exist -- things like legends, myths, gods, religions, nation states, corporations, laws, human rights, and money, which exist only as stories we believe in. Thanks to this, Homo sapiens was able to cooperate effectively with large numbers of strangers and thereby defeat Neanderthals.
• It was only for the past 10,000 years that most humans worked as farmers, herders, laborers or office workers; for most of our history we were hunter-gatherers and foragers. According to evolutionary psychology, our minds are still adapted to life in the pre-agricultural era. So what was life like back then? Well, it is hard to be precise because as Harari notes, there are no written records and the archaeological evidence is scant because foragers had few artefacts, and those they did have were often made from perishable materials (e.g. wood and leather). Nevertheless, there was no single "natural way of life" for Homo sapiens. In general, most people lived in small bands of a couple dozen members, and sometimes had domesticated dogs. They knew each other intimately and roamed from place to place. They had a deep knowledge of their surroundings, and ate a varied diet. They had enough free time to live a comfortable, rewarding and interesting lifestyle. Epidemics of disease were rare. On the flip side, child mortality was high and there was occasional violence and war. And foragers reshaped our planet's ecology.
• The cognitive revolution gave Homo sapiens the weapons, clothes, hunting strategies and other survival skills necessary to navigate across the sea from Indonesia to Australia (around 45,000 years ago) and across the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska (around 16,000 years ago). Thus, humans very quickly colonized the "Outer World" of Australia and the Americas, which before then had ecosystems that evolved in isolation for millions of years. The consequence was that most of these continents' megafauna suddenly became extinct: marsupial lions, diprotodons and giant kangaroos in Australia; mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths and sabre-tooth cats in the Americas; elephant birds and giant lemurs in Madagascar. These were some of the biggest ecological disasters in our planet's history, and in each case humans were the most likely culprit. Long before the Industrial Revolution, we were the deadliest species.

"...Farming made us hungry for more..."

Part Two of Sapiens is about the "agricultural revolution" that started about 12,000 years ago.

• Harari calls the domestication of plants and animals "history's biggest fraud". Why? Because it made humans' lives more difficult. Our lives became more monotonous; we worked harder than the average forager; our diets deteriorated in quality; and we became more susceptible to starvation and disease. The need to defend agricultural villages probably made early farmers more violent than their forager ancestors. Despite all this, we domesticated wheat (or rather, as the author puts it, we allowed wheat to domesticate us) because it allowed the human population to grow exponentially, and people at the time did not foresee the negative consequences -- after all, the agricultural revolution probably happened as a series of small incremental improvements. As the author writes: "Since we enjoy affluence and security, and since our affluence and security are built on foundations laid by the Agricultural Revolution, we assume that the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful improvement. Yet it is wrong to judge thousands of years of history from the perspective of today" (p. 93). And there were other victims too: sheep, goats, pigs, chickens and so on were domesticated with sometimes cruel and brutal practices, and even today these animals live in miserable conditions in industrial meat farms. 
• Thanks to agriculture, humans started to develop houses and societies with social systems ruled by an elite of kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers. The large-scale cooperation required to maintain an empire was made possible by shared myths -- i.e. stories about gods, justice, hierarchy and so on, which do not exist outside the imagination of Homo sapiens, but which people nevertheless believe are immutable laws of nature or God. Such myths continue today: see democracy, equality, liberty, capitalism, human rights, and so on. Three reasons why people truly believe in them are (i) the imagined order is embedded in the material world; (ii) dominant myths shape our desires; and (iii) the imagined order is inter-subjective, meaning that it exists in our shared consciousness. Harari concludes: "It follows that in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order" (p. 133).
• The rise of kingdoms, churches, trade networks, laws, taxes, inventories of supplies, calendars etc. meant that humans could no longer store information solely in their brains, because human brains have limited capacity, have been adapted to process particular kinds of information, and lose the information upon death. Therefore, societies developed systems of writing in order to process large amounts of mathematical data. The first full scripts were Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics around 2500 BC, although partial scripts were used in Sumer as early as 3400 BC. With writing came systems of storing and organizing information, and hence bureaucracy.  To this day, bureaucracies (including states, institutions, companies and organizations) use mathematical script and even computerized binary script as their language, even though it does not match the way human brains naturally think.
• The imagined orders that facilitated mass cooperation also created hierarchies -- of men versus women, of whites versus blacks, of rich versus poor, and of free persons versus slaves. These distinctions, whereby the upper groups enjoy privileges while the lower groups suffer oppression, are based in fiction; yet most people have historically argued that they are "natural". In the case of gender, there are indeed biological differences between the male and female sexes, but the cultural roles of men and women have changed over time. For example, a woman in Europe today can hold government office, whereas in ancient Athens she could not, and was legally the property of a man (i.e. husband or father). As Harari explains: "Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It's culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others" (p. 164). While imagined hierarchies differ between different societies, the hierarchy of patriarchy has been found almost everywhere since the agricultural revolution. Harari goes through several potential explanations but finds none of them satisfactory.

"...Money gave us purpose..."

Part Three continues the tale of how humanity came to be unified across the globe. The coalescence of many small and simple cultures into a few big and complex civilizations, starting around 1000 BC with the "universal orders" of money, empires and religion, is the "arrow of history".

• Hunter-gatherers had an economic system based on reciprocity and barter; the monetary order was only established after the rise of cities and kingdoms with large numbers of people whose labor was specialized, at which point barter became infeasible. The first money was probably barley grains in Sumer (around 3000 BC), and the first standardized coins (made from gold or silver) were issued around 640 BC by the King of Lydia. What all different kinds of money have in common is that everybody wants money and everybody believes in it -- believe because its value is derived from our collective imagination and mutual trust. Money is a medium of exchange (allowing people to convert almost anything into almost anything else) and a store of wealth (allowing people to transport their wealth), but it works only because people trust in it. And because political authorities like the Roman emperor relied on gold coins to collect taxes and pay their troops, they took measures to guarantee the coins' value, such as punishing counterfeiting. Interestingly, even merchants in India accepted payments in Roman denarii; thus Harari writes: "For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits" (p. 207).
• Almost all of us are the offspring of one empire or another, and since around 200 - 500 BC, empire has been the most common form of political organization. An empire is characterized by cultural diversity (ruling over many distinct peoples) and territorial flexibility (potentially always expanding), yet it also leads to the reduction in human diversity as conquered peoples get swallowed and digested by the conquering empire. In general, the "imperial cycle" according to Harari goes as follows: A small group (e.g. Romans or Arabs) establishes a big empire --> An imperial culture is forged --> The culture is adopted by its subjects --> The subject peoples demand equal status in the name of common imperial values --> The empire's founders lose their dominance as a unique ethnic group --> The imperial culture continues to flourish and develop. While empires did use war, enslavement, deportation and genocide, the legacy of empire also includes cultural achievements in art, philosophy, justice and charity. Empires often spread ideas, institutions, customs and norms, such as law enforcement, urban planning, and the standardization of weights and measures. As the author notes, it is not black-or-white: "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?" (p. 229). Even when we look to the future, the specter of empire looms: this time, it might be a truly global empire.
• Religion has been another great unifier of humankind because of the role it plays in legitimizing our fragile social orders and hierarchies. Harari defines religion in terms of two elements: firstly, religions assert that there exists a superhuman order; and secondly, religions prescribe human norms and values based on the superhuman order. Note that under this definition, a religion is not required to have supernatural beliefs -- it could also be based on "natural law". Thus, one could argue that Communism, Nazism, nationalism, capitalism and liberalism are all religions. This is consistent with calling Buddhism a religion even though it is based on the natural-law idea that "suffering arises from craving", rather than belief in gods. In modern times (i.e. the past 300 years) we have what Harari refers to as Humanist religions, which maintain that Homo sapiens has "a unique and sacred nature that is fundamentally different from the nature of all other beings and phenomena" (p. 260). But the first dominant religions, dating back to the forager era, were animist: they believed that rocks, plants and animals had spirits equal in status to Homo sapiens. It was after the agricultural revolution and the rise of kingdoms and trade networks that people began to worship gods -- first polytheism, and later monotheism and dualism (the belief that good and evil are two independent powers). Although Christianity is widely considered a monotheistic religion, it has elements of dualism (e.g. belief in an independent Devil/Satan) and polytheism (e.g. the pantheon of saints) and even animism (e.g. ghosts). It is thus an example of syncretism, which Harari claims might be "the single great world religion".
• Why did the English language become more popular than Danish, or Christianity more popular than Zoroastrianism? We cannot know for certain, but Harari gives us two clues. Firstly, the hindsight fallacy makes it seem as if the outcome was inevitable, when there was actually no way to predict it beforehand because history is a chaotic system. Thus, the reason to study history is to widen our horizons of what is possible. Secondly, we have no way to prove that history is working for the benefit of humans. Whether we believe in the memetic evolution of culture, or the arms-race dynamics of game theory, or postmodernist discourses, the most successful cultural ideas do not necessarily have to enhance the well-being of humans.

"...Science made us deadly"

The final part of Sapiens, Part Four, discusses the "scientific revolution", which really started only 500 years ago. The scientific revolution began in western Europe and was arguably history's "most momentous choice".

• Since 1500 AD, human population, production and energy consumption has increased dramatically. Modern technology would be incomprehensible to someone from the year 1000. The scientific revolution has been fueled by the belief that we can obtain new powers (military, economic, and medical) by investing in scientific research. The crucial change has been that, while premodern religions believed that everything worth knowing was already known, modern science is characterized by a willingness to admit ignorance. The method of science is based on making new empirical observations and connecting them with mathematical tools. Scientific research tends to get funded by political and economic institutions, which in turn benefit from the increased power provided to them by science and technology. Thanks to the scientific revolution, modern cultures believe more in the ideal of progress -- that poverty, sickness, wars, famines, old age and even death are problems that we can solve. But science is expensive, and its costs are justified by ideologies. Thus, Harari notes, "science is unable to set its own priorities. It is also incapable of determining what to do with its discoveries" (p. 305). The two main forces that shaped science over the past 500 years were imperialism and capitalism.
• Between 1500 and 1750, European powers (like the British and Spanish) began to send scientific expeditions to explore uncharted territories and discover new lands, plants, animals, and peoples. This led them to "discover" the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Of course, the expeditions were often accompanied by large military forces, which helped the empires claim the land as their own and exterminate huge proportions of the native populations. But why was it Europe that gained supremacy, and not Asian powers like the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Safavid Empire, the Indian Mughal Empire, or the Chinese Ming or Qing dynasties? According to Harari, technology is only part of the answer. More importantly, the Asians "lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalised rapidly" (p. 314). In particular, the European advantage stemmed from modern science and capitalism. The European conquest of territory was intertwined with their conquest of knowledge. The discovery of new lands fueled the drive for imperialism, which in turn fueled the drive for new knowledge that would help the empire control the new territory. In other words, the Europeans were more ambitious than the Persians or the Chinese. Non-European cultures only adopted a truly global vision in the 20th-century, at which point European hegemony collapsed.
• Both science and imperialism were driven by the economics of capitalism. The global economy grew massively in the last five hundred years due in part to increased trust in the future, which made bankers and investors more willing to lend credit. This trust in the future was a consequence of the scientific revolution's idea of progress; people believed that the global pie of wealth could be grown. And in most cases the credit was used by entrepreneurs and merchants to buy real economic growth by increasing their production, which in turn validated people's trust in the future. But perhaps the central idea of capitalism was that the pursuit of private profits would benefit everybody because the rich would reinvest their profits into further increasing production. Even governments adopt this mindset when they invest their tax revenues in education or infrastructure projects so that they will be able to raise more tax revenue in the future. Thus, the "religion" of capitalism (in Harari's words) places economic growth as the supreme good. Scientific projects have the best chance of getting funded if they somehow enable us to increase production. Governments find it easier to raise capital if they have a good credit rating. In fact, it was thanks to the Dutch and British repaying their loans on time and protecting private property rights that they were able, in the 17th-century through the Dutch VOC and in the 18th-century through the British East India Company (both initially private joint-stock companies), to finance massive overseas empires -- whereas the Spanish and French kingdoms began to crumble as people lost trust in their financial wisdom. Today, the free-market doctrine is still influential, yet Harari notes that the market alone cannot protect against fraud, theft and violence, and that greedy capitalists may collude to screw over workers (as was historically the case in the slave trade).
• The economy also requires energy and raw materials, which are finite. So can the pie keep growing? Well, Harari argues that humans have a history of finding new sources of energy and materials, and exploiting existing ones in more efficient ways. A prime example of this is the Industrial Revolution, which began between 1700 and 1830 in Britain with the steam engine. The "secret" of the steam engine was that it converted one type of energy (i.e. the heat from burning coal) into another (i.e. the movement of steam pushing a piston). Following steam power came the discoveries of the internal combustion engine, electricity, and later nuclear power. Humans discovered natural materials like silicon, aluminum and titanium (which our ancestors did not know about) and also invented new materials like plastic and vulcanized rubber. The explosion in productivity due to the Industrial Revolution had profound effects, including effects on agriculture (e.g. industrial animal farming, which creates large amounts of suffering for cows, pigs and chickens) and on human ethics (e.g. consumerism, which promotes indulgent consumption of products and services as a good thing).
• With the Industrial Revolution came ecological degradation but also major changes to our daily lives. For example, people started to structure their days according to a precise timetable system, and society became more urbanized and democratized. However, the most significant upheaval according to Harari was "the collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market". The work that is today performed by clerks, teachers, policemen, social workers, bankers, journalists, carpenters and even tax collectors used to be performed primarily by families and communities. Following the Industrial Revolution, states and markets weakened these traditional bonds by recognizing and treating each person as an individual first and foremost (rather than as a community member), and also by fostering "imagined communities" based on nationalism and consumerism. Despite the constant social, economic and political change over the past 200 years, the world has actually become less violent and more peaceful -- this is thanks to (a) states preventing violent feuds and vendettas between families and communities; and (b) the existence of nuclear weapons and foreign trade preventing wars between states.
• One of the most neglected areas in the study of history is the happiness of individuals. It is clear that since the year 1500, humankind has become immensely wealthier, better fed, less violent, and healthier. The author asks: "But are we happier? [...] If not, what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires, science and industry?" (p. 421). There are a number of problems with the view that progress brings happiness. Firstly, the last couple of decades are a tiny slice of human history; secondly, our consumption may be sowing the seeds of a future catastrophe; thirdly, we are ignoring the suffering of non-human animals; fourthly, the collapse of family and community may have offset our improved material conditions; fifthly, happiness may be determined by expectations (in which case today's mass media and advertising may be creating anxiety) or biochemistry (in which case individual happiness tends to remain stable); and finally, modern secular people may view their lives as less meaningful than medieval religious folk did. That being said, more study of the history of happiness is needed before we can reach rigid conclusions. One interesting approach to look into is the Buddhist idea that happiness comes not from chasing pleasant feelings or avoiding unpleasant feelings, but from living in the present moment and accepting things as they are.

The final chapter in the book is both optimistic and pessimistic, on the basis that history "teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise due to unforeseen barriers, and that other unimagined scenarios will in fact come to pass" (p. 462). In any case, the future is likely to present fundamental transformations that will require us to ask: what do we want to become? Indeed, the future may not contain any Homo sapiens, because we will break away from evolution by natural selection and begin a regime of intelligent design. We may become akin to gods thanks to three technologies: biological engineering (like modifying genes), cyborg engineering (like physically merging our bodies and brains with machines), and engineering new inorganic forms of life (like running artificial brains on computers). But will we use these powers responsibly?

While Sapiens examined where we came from, the next book, Homo Deus, examines where we are going.

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I enjoyed reading Sapiens overall, although there were plenty of occasions where I felt like it is quite a depressing book. For example, the author emphasizes how we Homo sapiens have eradicated numerous species, and continue to treat non-human animals cruelly, and have made life more difficult for ourselves by inventing agriculture, and created fictional hierarchies, and destroyed many local cultures through imperialism, and have reached a point where we may destroy ourselves either through nuclear war or ecological catastrophe. Perhaps most depressingly, all of it may have been for naught because even in today's prosperous times, it is unclear whether people are genuinely more satisfied.

Furthermore, the author seems to take an explicitly nihilistic position, especially in Chapter 19 wherein he writes:

"As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. [...] The scientist who says her life is meaningful because she increases the store of human knowledge, the soldier who declares that his life is meaningful because he fights to defend his homeland, and the entrepreneur who finds meaning in building a new company are no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning in reading scriptures, going on a crusade or building a new cathedral." (p. 438)

This is a point that I disagree with, because it is a misinterpretation of reductionism. As Eliezer Yudkowsky would say, the higher levels of reality exist implicitly in the fundamental level, but that is not the same as nonexistence. Additionally, the quote seems to treat science and religion on equal footing even though science (unlike religion) actually does add to the pool of human knowledge; and if that is the case, why not feel happy about it?

Another point that I disagree with is Harari's characterization of humanism, liberalism, socialism, nationalism and capitalism as "religions". While this is a matter of terminology, Harari's usage is nonstandard (as far as I can tell) and for most people, the supernatural is a key association of the religion concept. To the extent that Buddhism teaches its followers about gods, albeit minor ones, it would still be a religion, but to the extent that Buddhism can remain "Buddhism" after excluding the gods, I would bite Harari's bullet and concede that Buddhism (and Taoism etc.) is an ideology rather than religion.

With the exception of these two points, I mostly agreed with the content. In terms of originality, much of the content is reminiscent of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. For those who are not familiar with Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond basically asks the question, "why did Europeans colonize New Guinea rather than the other way around?" and provides an answer in terms of environmental factors: the continents' axes of orientation and the locally available and domesticable plants and animals are the ultimate causes that explain why some areas developed agriculture earlier than others. Agriculture then led to cities wherein germs spread, but also to the invention of writing and technologies (like ships and steel weapons) and bureaucratic ways of political organization, which are the proximate factors that enabled European conquest. It is especially the discussion of hunter-gatherers, human migration across the Earth, agriculture, writing systems, and empires that is alluded to in Sapiens. However, there are clear differences -- for one, Harari's purpose is not to explain why the Spanish beat the Incas, but to explain why Homo sapiens is "on the verge of becoming a god". Another is that Harari places more emphasis on cultural myths, ethics, hierarchies and religions (hence his focus on humanism, capitalism, science and so on). While Sapiens owes something to Guns, Germs, and Steel (and Harari even gives special thanks to Diamond in the Acknowledgements section), the two books are still sufficiently different for it to be worth reading both.

Sapiens may not be as original as some of the other books I have reviewed on my blog, like The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch, and it may not be as full of practical self-help tips as Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath, or Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. Nevertheless, what it does -- presenting 70,000 years of human history in a way that the layman can understand not merely events but the underlying patterns and trends -- it does well. The style of writing is clear and engaging, and the book is supplemented with photographs, diagrams, maps, and tables. It even begins with a timeline of history, which can serve as a handy reference point (albeit only of the most significant events). This is not an academic textbook, and the author sometimes inserts his personal values (for example, that Buddhism is great or that animal farming is horrible), but on the whole the book has a good balance between formal and informal language. On Goodreads I rated it 5/5 because it is a book that can give anyone a more comprehensive perspective on history without making history boring. Perhaps the most important takeaway is an appreciation for the power of the human imagination.

Stay tuned for the second book!