Book Summary: Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

This very detailed summary of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Around 70,000 years ago, homo sapiens developed superior cognitive functions and wiped out other human species. Harari then describes our species’ changes throughout the Agricultural Revolution (around 12,000 years ago) and Scientific Revolution (500 years ago). He finishes by looking into the future, which may soon see the end of Sapiens as we know it.

Sapiens is often compared to Jared Diamond’s book, Guns Germs and Steel (read my summary of it here). Harari even mentions Jared Diamond in his acknowledgements. You can read my comparison of the two books here to find out which one I prefer.

Buy Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind at: Amazon | Kobo (affiliate links)

Key Takeaways

• Originally, homo sapiens (which I will just call “sapiens” from here on) was just another animal that lived alongside other human species such as Neanderthals and homo erectus.
• The Cognitive Revolution happened around 70,000 years ago.
  • At this time, sapiens developed some superior cognitive functions that caused it to wipe out other human species. Those cognitive functions gave sapiens both the desire and ability to do so.
  • In particular, sapiens developed the ability to think in terms of shared myths. Examples of shared myths include money, capitalism, religion, nationalism, and liberalism.
  • These shared myths enabled sapiens to work together in large numbers – and this was what gave us an edge over other human species.
• The Agricultural Revolution occurred around 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.
  • Contrary to popular belief, the Agricultural Revolution was a trap. It was an enormous boon for sapiens as a species, as agriculture enabled sapiens to dramatically increase in numbers.
  • But the lives of individual farmers were oftentimes worse than the lives of hunter-gatherers. Farmers had to work harder, their nutrition was worse (as it was less varied), and their livelihoods were riskier (e.g. more vulnerable to droughts, plagues, etc).
  • Humans had not evolved to live together in large numbers, so we don’t have biological instincts for that. Instead, humans relied on two inventions for mass cooperation:
    • Imagined orders. These are based on shared myths and are inter-subjective (i.e. they exist in the minds of many). As such, only an alternative imagined order could change them.
    • Writing/scripts. These enabled large kingdoms and societies to develop. Without writing or scripts, rulers would not be able to know how much resources they had or levy taxes effectively.
• The Scientific Revolution happened merely 500 years ago, in the 1500s.
  • The key word in the Scientific Revolution was “growth”. Before the Scientific Revolution, people believed the best was in the past.
  • Science, imperialism and capitalism worked together to enable such growth. Governments (imperialism) and businesses (capitalism) funded science. There wouldn’t have been such growth without this funding. In turn, science produced technological breakthroughs that brought returns to such investment.
  • The Scientific Revolution inarguably gave us significant increases in material living standards and wealth, at least on average. But it is not clear whether those advances have translated to an increase in average happiness.
  • If you also consider the well-being of other animals and the environment, you could say the Revolutions have been negative overall. The vast majority of animals alive today are those in factory farms and their treatment is appalling. Cows, pigs and chicken far outnumber wild animals.
• The future of Sapiens:
  • We are now at an unprecedented point in human – and even world – history. We could be on the cusp of “becoming a god”.
    • Humans now have the technology possible to transcend our biology. For example, we might be able to upload our brains to a computer or replace our physical body parts with sturdier exteriors.
    • We can perform genetic engineering, and also engineer inorganic beings (e.g. computer AI).
    • Harari also mentions the ability to destroy the earth through a nuclear war, but very briefly.
  • But what have we actually achieved with all our abilities? Have we decreased the amount of suffering in the world? Probably not – we haven’t necessarily improved human well-being, and we’ve usually caused other animals to suffer greatly.
  • We are more powerful than ever, but have little idea of what to do with that power. And we seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Harari concludes by asking: “Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”

Detailed Summary of Sapiens

Before the Cognitive Revolution

• Homo sapiens (“Wise Man”) is a species (sapiens) of human (genus homo). The homo genus is part of the broader “great apes” family.
  • An animal belongs to the same species if they mate with each other and produce fertile offspring. Horses and donkeys are not part of the same species because their offspring, mules, are sterile. In contrast, a bulldog and a spaniel are part of the same species even though they may look very different.
  • Species evolved from a common ancestor are part of the same “genus”. The plural of genus is genera.
  • Genera is grouped into families such as cats (lions, cheetahs, house cats) and dogs (wolves, foxes, jackals).
• Before the Cognitive Revolution, there were other human species:
  • Homo neanderthalensis (“Neanderthals”) were found in Europe and western Asia. They were bulkier than us sapiens and well-adapted to the cold.
  • Homo erectus (“Upright Man”) was found in eastern Asia.
  • Homo soloensis (“Man from the Solo Valley”) was found in Indonesia and were suited to the tropics.
  • Homo floresiensis was also found on a small Indonesian island (Flores) and only reached a height of one metre max.

What happened to the other human species?

• There are two theories:
  • Interbreeding theory. When Sapiens spread into other human lands, they interbred until the two populations merged. If this is true, today’s Eurasians are a mix of Sapiens and Neanderthals and today’s East Asians are a mix of Sapiens and Erectus.
  • Replacement theory. Sapiens and other humans had different anatomies, mating habits and body odours. When they came across each other, they had little sexual interest in each other. Even if they did, they were too genetically different by then to produce fertile children. So other human species died out or were killed off. If this is true, were are all pure Sapiens, traced back to East Africa.
• In recent decades, the Replacement Theory had been more popular. But in 2010 they found some evidence supporting the Interbreeding Theory:
  • 1-4% of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal.
  • Up to 6% of the unique human DNA of Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan.
• Harari thinks, however, that both theories got some things right.
  • The percentage of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA is quite small, so there wasn’t a complete “merger” between Sapiens and other humans.
  • Around 50,000 years ago, Sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans were probably at that borderline point where they were almost, but not quite, separate species. They were quite different in a lot of ways but it was still possible on occasion for interbreeding to produce a fertile offspring.

Humans are social because of our large brains

• Humans have very large brains compared to other animals. Giant brains are rare in the animal kingdom.
  • Neanderthal brains were even larger than a modern Sapiens’ brain, which is about 1,200-1,400 cubic cm in size.
  • Large brains are a drain on the body. They are heavy (especially in a large skull) and require a lot of fuel. The Homo Sapiens brain consumes 25% of the body’s energy at rest, while other apes’ brains only require 8% energy.
  • Because humans had such large brains, they had to spend more time searching for food and their muscles atrophied.
• The reason humans are so social is because compared to other animals, humans are born premature.
  • Natural selection favoured early births. Human babies’ heads were so big, childbirth became a major hazard for the mothers. So women who gave birth earlier, when the baby’s head was still quite small and supple, tended to fare better and could have more children.
  • Many vital systems in a human newborn are still underdeveloped. The babies are therefore helpless, and dependent for many years on their elders.
  • A mother could not forage enough food for both herself and her offspring alone. So evolution favoured humans that formed strong social ties.

Humans rose to the top of the food chain

• Prehistoric humans were insignificant. They had no greater impact on their environment than any other animal.
• A key step to humans’ rise to the top of the food chain was the domestication of fire.
  • While humans may have made occasional use of fire earlier, around 300,000 years ago, several human species were using fire on a daily basis.
  • Fire enabled humans to eat more kinds of foods, as it allowed us to cook foods that we cannot digest in their natural forms (e.g. wheat, rice, potatoes).
  • As a result of cooking, humans’ teeth could be smaller and intestines shorter (long intestines consume a lot of energy).

The Cognitive Revolution (70,000 years ago)

• The Cognitive Revolution occurred between 70,000 to 30,000 years ago.
• At this time, new ways of thinking and communicating appeared.
  • Around 70,000 years ago, Sapiens left Africa and reached Europe and East Asia.
  • Around 45,000 years ago, Sapiens reached Australia.
  • Inventions such as boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows, needles (for sewing clothing), first appeared. Evidence of art, religion, commerce and social stratification also appeared.
• We’re not quite sure what caused the Cognitive Revolution. The most commonly believed theory is just accidental genetic mutations in Sapiens’ brains enabled them to think and communicate in unprecedented ways. We also don’t know why this occurred in Sapiens rather than in other human species – may just be pure chance.

The Cognitive Revolution marked the point where humans became not just “another animal”

• Until the Cognitive Revolution, human activity belonged to the realm of biology.
• From the Cognitive Revolution onwards, historical narratives replaced biology as our main way to explain human development.
• Arguments about humans’ “natural way of life” (e.g. whether we are naturally monogamous or not) miss the point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single “natural way of life” for Sapiens. There are just a bewildering number of different possibilities.

Our ability to cooperate in very large numbers is unique

• Before the Cognitive Revolution, early humans’ social structured were probably similar to chimpanzees’:
  • Chimps live in groups of several dozen individuals. As the number of chimps in a group increases, the social order destabilises. Eventually there’s a rupture and some chimps form a new troop.
  • Separate groups of chimps seldom cooperate and tend to compete instead.
  • Chimpanzees’ social structure is hierarchical, with one dominant member (the “alpha male”). When two males fight for the alpha male position, they do it by forming coalitions of supporters. The alpha wins not because he is physically stronger but because he has a stronger coalition.
• Some other animals like ants and bees can work in very large numbers, but they do so in a very rigid way. Sapiens cooperate with countless numbers very flexibly.

Gossip helped Sapiens form larger and more stable groups

• Using gossip, Sapiens can convey information about who is trustworthy. This allowed small bands to expand into larger ones, and enabled Sapiens to cooperate more effectively.
• But gossip has its limits. Sociological research shows that the maximum “natural” size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150. That is, most people cannot intimately know, or gossip effectively about, more than 150 humans.
• Below this 150 threshold, groups can maintain themselves based on gossip. They don’t need formal ranks, titles and laws to keep order.
• Individually, or in small groups, we are very similar to chimpanzees. It’s only when we cross the 150 threshold that significant differences emerge. And when we reach thousands of people, the differences are astounding.

Fiction and myth helped form even larger groups

• Harari thinks that Sapiens managed to cross the 150 threshold because of fiction.
• The most unique feature of our language is that it can enable us to talk about fiction and myth – things that do not exist at all.
  • Monkeys can communicate to each other in a limited way. They can alert each other to different types of threats (e.g. an eagle as opposed to a lion).
  • Sapiens can communicate much more information. They can communicate the exact location of the lion and how to get there, they can gossip, and they can talk about things that do not exist.
• Examples of things that only exist in the common imagination of humans are religion, nations, money, human rights, laws and justice. Harari talks about each of these in more depth later in the book.

• For example, the company Peugeot SA only exists in our collective imagination. It is a limited liability company, and is what lawyers would call a “legal fiction”.
  • Peugeot SA would exist even if its managers were dismissed and all its shares sold. On the flipside, the company could be dissolved while its factories, employees and shareholders live on.
  • The French legal code allows such companies to be created by following the proper processes. To create Peugeot SA, a lawyer “performed all the right rituals and pronounced all the necessary spells and oaths”. Then millions of people will behave as if the company exists.

Fiction and myth allowed humans to change their behaviour quickly

• Since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens could change their behaviour quickly without changing their genes or environment. In contrast, genes largely determine the behaviour of other social animals.
  • In the same environment, animals of the same species will tend to behave in a similar way. [I think he means in the way they organise themselves socially, rather than how they act individually.] For example, common chimpanzees have a genetic tendency to live in hierarchical groups with an alpha male. A closely related species, bonobos, usually live in more egalitarian groups dominated by female alliances. But female common chimps won’t stage a feminist revolution and take over the group.
  • Similarly, early humans did not initiate any revolutions. [How does Harari know this?] As far as we can tell, changes in social patterns, invention of new technologies and settlement of new habitats resulted from genetic mutations and environmental pressures rather than cultural initiatives. So it took early humans hundreds of thousands of years to make those steps.
  • For example, the Catholic Church has survived for centuries even though celibacy of priests goes against the most fundamental principle of natural selection. It has done this not by passing on a “celibacy gene” but by passing on Catholic stories and canon.

The key to Sapiens’ success was our ability to use fiction and myth

• In a one-on-one brawl, a Neanderthal would have probably beaten a Sapiens.
• But unlike Sapiens, Neanderthals did not have fiction, so they were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers and could not adapt their social behaviour quickly.
  • Archaeologists have found 30,000 Sapiens sites containing shells found very far from the coast. Harari says this is evidence of trade, and that no animal other than Sapiens engages in trade.
  • Trade is based on fictions, because it cannot exist without trust. Strangers in a tribal society establish trust by appealing to a common god, mythical ancestor, or totem animal. [This seems a bit dubious to me. People can trade in the form of barter without trust – as long as they carry out the exchange immediately. Moreover, I think that early trade began as reciprocal favours between people or families that knew each other, rather than in the “tit-for-tat” way we think of today. So the seashells could have also been exchanged that way.]
  • Neanderthals usually hunted alone or in small groups. Sapiens developed hunting techniques that relied on cooperation between dozens of individuals, perhaps even different bands. For example, they might surround a herd of horses and chase them into a narrow gorge to make it easier to kill them.
• Sapiens may have also traded information, which could have given them an advantage over Neanderthals and other humans.

We know little about ancient beliefs and social structures

• It’s hard to determine what ancient people believed. There is little evidence to go off and the evidence we do have is open to interpretation.
• Ancient foragers mostly held animistic beliefs.
  • Animism is not a specific religion, but a generic name for thousands of very different religions and beliefs. Just as there are lots of different theist beliefs, which all vary significantly, animistic beliefs probably varied just as much.
  • Animism is the belief that almost everything (e.g. plants, animals, places) has awareness and feelings, and can communicate directly with humans. So they might believe that a particular rock has desires and feelings.
  • The entities are all local beings rather than universal gods (contrast with theism).
  • There is no strict hierarchy in animism. Non-human entities do not exist solely to provide for men, nor are they all-powerful gods.
• We know very little about the sociopolitical world of ancient foragers. Scholars can’t even agree on the basics, such as whether there was private property, nuclear families, or monogamous relationships. Different bands probably had different structures.
• For example, hunter-gatherers built the structures at Göbekli Tepe around 9,500 BC.
  • The structures had no obvious utilitarian purpose, and probably had a cultural purpose.
  • Whatever that purpose was, they obviously thought it was worth a huge amount of time and effort. It must have taken thousands of foragers from different bands and tribes cooperating over an extended period of time.
  • Harari thinks that only a sophisticated religious or ideological system could have sustained such efforts.

Because Sapiens rose to the top of the food chain so quickly, the ecosystem did not have time to adjust

• Early humans were solidly in the middle of the food chain. Despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, humans rarely hunted large game and lived mostly by gathering plants, insects, small animals, eating carrion. They also had to constantly worry about larger predators.
• About 400,000 years ago, humans began to hunt large game on a regular basis.
• In the last 100,000 years, homo sapiens jumped to the top of the food chain.
• Other animals at the top of the food chain (e.g. lions, sharks) evolved into their positions gradually over millions of years. The ecosystem could develop checks and balances. As lions became deadlier, gazelles evolved to run faster, etc.
• Humans first arrived in Australia around 45,000 years ago. Within a few thousand years, virtually all large animals went extinct. Like Jared Diamond, Harari subscribes to the overkill hypothesis. One reason Harari mentions that (I think) Diamond does not, is that climate change should affect sea creatures as much as land creatures. But there’s no evidence of many sea creatures disappearing 45,000 years ago.
• Sapiens were the only human species to reach America, about 16,000 years ago. Again, within 2,000 years of sapiens’ arrival, a lot of the Americas’ mammals had gone. North America lost 34 out of its 47 genera of large mammals while South America lost 50 out of 60. Sabre-tooth cats, which had been around for more than 30 million years, vanished.
• At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, there were about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over 50kg. By the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about 100 remained.
• Harari notes that if people today knew how many species we’d already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive.

The Agricultural Revolution (12,000 years ago)

• For most of human history, Sapiens were foragers. Foragers had to move often, so they had very few possessions.
• There’s no evidence that humans grew more intelligent over time:
  • Scholars once thought the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity, fuelled by brain power. Harari disagrees and says there’s no evidence people became more intelligent with time.
  • In fact, there’s some evidence that the average Sapiens brain today is smaller than it was during foraging times. To survive as a forager, everyone had to be mentally sharp and have a lot of survival skills. Now, we can rely on others for survival and people no longer have to be mentally sharp to pass on their genes.

The Agricultural Revolution was a trap

• On an individual level, farmers fared worse than hunter-gatherers:
  • Farming was physically hard on the body. Farmers had lots of physical ailments such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. The Sapiens body had evolved to climb trees and run after gazelles. It had not evolved to clear rocks and carry water buckets.
  • Farming diets were less nutritious. Foraging generally provided a good and varied diet. Humans had been foragers for hundreds of thousands of years, so their bodies were well adapted to it. In premodern times, agricultural populations got most of their calories from a single crop.
  • Farming was also more precarious. Because foragers had a varied diet, they were less susceptible to famine. They could eat other food sources or move to other areas when a particular food source failed. In contrast, agricultural societies starve if a drought, fire or earthquake devastates the annual crop.
  • Farming led to more infectious diseases. Most of those diseases came from domesticated animals and transferred to humans after the Agricultural Revolution. In addition, most people in agricultural and industrial societies also lived in dense and unhygienic permanent settlements.
• Hunter-gatherers today work for just 35-40 hours gathering food. It may be that ancient hunter-gatherers worked even less, as they lived in more fertile areas. Moreover, they didn’t have many household chores. [Yes but very few people – at least in the developed world – have to work longer than 35 hours a day simply to buy food and shelter. The reason most of us work longer than that is to buy other stuff. I also thought farmers didn’t work that many hours historically – their hours were certainly less consistent than ours, at least.]
• Average life expectancy for an ancient forager was just 30-40 years, but this was mostly because child mortality was common. If a child made it past the first few years, they had a good chance of reaching the age of 60, and some even made it to their 80s. [What’s a “good chance”? That’s an ambiguous term.]

We shouldn’t idealise ancient foragers too much, though

• Harari admits it would be a mistake to idealise the lives of the ancient foragers, though. Their lives were still pretty brutal by today’s standards:
  • Foragers occasionally abandon or even kill unwanted babies or children, or old or disabled people who can’t keep up with the band.
  • But Harari points out that they might view this the same way that many today view abortion or euthanasia. The truth is every human society is complex, and we should beware of demonising or idealising it.

Why didn’t humans realise farming was a trap?

• Harari gives two reasons why humans didn’t abandon farming:
  • First, it took generations for small changes to accumulate and transform society. By the time it did, nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently.
  • Secondly, population growth burned that bridge. Once a village’s population has increased from 100 to 110, it needs to produce enough food for 110. You won’t have 10 people volunteering to starve so that others could go back to the good old times.
• Moreover, even if some bands didn’t take up farming and remain hunter-gatherers, the ones that did become farmers could grow a lot faster. So simply by sheer numbers, they could overtake hunter-gatherers. [There’s also the point that food production allowed significant advances in technology, which helped farmers overtake hunter-gatherers. Examples include the Bantu expansion in Africa and the Yayoi lifestyle overrunning the Jomon in Japan.]

The Agricultural Revolution helped Sapiens as a species

• Agriculture led to population explosions.
  • Agriculture allows much more food to be produced per unit of territory. This supported increased populations.
  • Living in permanent settlements also allowed women to have a child every year.
• The evolutionary success of a species if measured by the number of copies of its DNA. So solely on that metric, the Agricultural Revolution was a boon for humans as well as our domesticated animals. But the numerical success of a calf’s species doesn’t alleviate an individual calf’s suffering.
• Farming also benefited a tiny minority of “elites”:
  • Rulers and elites took food surpluses generated by peasants and left them with only a bare subsistence. These food surpluses fuelled politics, wars, art and philosophy, and built temples, palaces, and forts.
  • Until the late modern era, more than 90% of humans were peasants. The elites – kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers – are the ones who end up in history books.

Agriculture involved – and still involves – a lot of animal cruelty

• The natural lifespan of a wild chicken is about 7-12 years. Cattle live to about 20-25 years. But the vast majority of domesticated chickens and cattle are killed when they are a few weeks or few months old for economic reasons.
• Taming animals almost always involves castrating the males to restrain male aggression. It also allows humans to control the herd’s procreation [“Unnatural” selection].
• To ensure that pigs can’t run away, farmers in New Guinea slice off a chunk of their noses. This causes severe pain whenever the pig tries to sniff and prevents them from finding food. In another part of New Guinea, farmers gouge out pigs’ eyes. Pigs then become completely dependent on human owners.
• Cows, goats and sheep produce milk only after giving birth, and only as long as their offspring are suckling. To continue a supply of milk, farmers need to have offspring available for suckling, without them drinking all the milk.
  • A common method to do this was to slaughter the calves and kids shortly after birth, milk the mother for what they could, and get her pregnant again.
  • In modern dairy farms, a milk cow lives for about 5 years during which she is almost constantly pregnant.
  • Some shepherd tribes used to kill the offspring, eat it, and stuff its skin. They would then place the stuffed offspring next to the mother to encourage her to produce milk.
  • A Nuer technique was to tie a ring of thorns around a calf’s mouth so that it pricks the mother and causes her to resist suckling.
  • Tuareg camel breeders in the Sahara would puncture or cut off parts of the nose or upper lip of young camels to make suckling painful, so they wouldn’t consume too much milk.

Wars and revolutions happen because humans have not evolved to live together in large numbers

• Food shortages did not cause most wars and revolutions in history. The main cause was that humans have not evolved to live together in such large numbers:
  • For millions of years, humans lived in small bands of a few dozen individuals.
  • There were only a few thousand years from the Agricultural Revolution to the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. This was not enough time for an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.
  • People could cooperate during the foraging era because of shared myths. But this cooperation was loose and limited, and Sapiens bands continued to live independently for the most part.
• Most human cooperation networks were based on oppression and exploitation. Even though “cooperation” sounds altruistic, it is not always voluntary and is seldom egalitarian.

Two famous myths: the Code of Hammurabi (1776 BC) and the American Declaration of Independence (AD 1776)

• Hammurabi was a famous Babylonian king. The Code of Hammurabi was a collection of laws and judicial decisions. It served as a basis for a uniform legal system across the Babylonian Empire and persisted long after Hammurabi died.
  • The Code divided people into 2 genders and 3 classes: superior people, commoners and slaves. Children were not independent persons, but were the property of their parents.
• In the American Declaration of Independence, the colonies declared that their inhabitants were no longer subjects of the British Crown. The Declaration proclaimed universal and eternal principles of justice, inspired by a divine power.
• Both the Code and the Declaration imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice such as hierarchy (the Code) or equality (the Declaration).
• Harari argues that these universal principles only exist in Sapiens’ minds and have no objective reality.
  • The idea that all humans are equal is an idea from religion and creationism. It comes from the idea that every person has a soul, and all souls are equal before God. But if you don’t believe in souls or God, what does being “equal” really mean? Evolution is based on difference, not equality.
  • Similarly, there is no such thing as “rights” or liberty in biology. These are political ideals rather than biological phenomenon.

Imagined orders

The objective, subjective and inter-subjective

• Objective things exist independently of human consciousness and beliefs. For example, radioactive emissions are dangerous even if people don’t believe in them.
• Subjective things exist in the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual. It disappears or changes if that individual changes their beliefs.
• Inter-subjective things exist in the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. Examples include law, money, gods and nations.

We need myths to preserve an imagined order

• To preserve a social order, sometimes you need violence and coercion. But you can’t sustain order by violence alone. You need at least some true believers. Why else should soldiers, police maintain order? An imagined order can only be maintained if large segments of the population, particularly the elite and the muscle, truly believe in it.
• To make people believe in an imagined order:
  • You must not admit that the order is imagined. Instead, you must insist that it is an objective reality that gods or nature created.
  • You must educate people in the imagined order from the time they are born. The principles of the imagined order should be incorporated into everything – fairy tales, songs, etiquette, and even things like architecture and fashions.

• Because the Sapiens social order is imagined, we don’t pass it on genetically through our DNA. We have to sustain it through laws, customs, manners, etc instead.

Why don’t people realise the order is imagined?

3 main factors prevent people from realising that the order is imagined:
1. The imagined order is embedded in the material world. For example, Westerners today generally believe in individualism. The design of Western houses reflects this. Children often have their own rooms with doors that they may even lock. In medieval times, people did not believe in individualism. Private rooms were accordingly very rare and youths would sleep in a large hall.
2. The imagined order shapes our desires. For example, the idea of “follow your heart” came from a combination of 19th century Romantic myths and 20th century consumerist myths. Romanticism was the idea that we should have as many different experiences as we can. Consumerism tells us that to be happy, we must buy products and services. People may desire holidays abroad because they believe in the myths romantic consumerism.
3. The imagined order is inter-subjective (i.e. it exists in many individuals).
– Even if a single individual changes their beliefs, or dies, the inter-subjective thing will persist. But if most individuals in the network change their beliefs or die, the inter-subjective thing will change or disappear.
– It’s difficult to change an imagined order because you would need to change the consciousness of billions of people. To accomplish this will require a complex organisation, such as a political party, ideological movement or religion.
– To establish a complex organisation in turn requires getting many strangers to cooperate with one another, so they will need to believe in some shared myths. So to change an existing imagined order, you need an alternative imagined order.

Writing and mathematical data

Societies grew larger once they developed the ability to write and handle mathematical data

• Foragers never had to handle much mathematical data. But to maintain a large kingdom, maths and numbers were important. For one, rulers had to collect taxes. Without maths and numbers, rulers wouldn’t know what resources it had access to.
• For thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, societies remained relatively small because humans couldn’t process mathematical data.
• The first ones to do so were the Sumerians. The Sumerians invented a partial script that dealt with mathematical data. It was a partial, as opposed to a full, script because it couldn’t express everything people could talk about, like poetry.
• The Incas could also process mathematical data through their system of “quipu”. Quipu involves tying knots on colourful cords. (Scholars today still have not deciphered their system.)
• Even harder than inventing writing was inventing systems to readily organise and retrieve information. [So Knowledge Management has been a problem for thousands of years!] What sent the Sumerians, Egyptians, Chinese and Incans apart were that they developed good ways to archive, catalogue and retrieve records as well. Most other ancient societies with writing did not, so we still don’t understand their languages.

The impact of writing changed the way humans think

• Clerks and accountants think in a “non-human” fashion – they think like filing cabinets. This is not their fault. It’s needed to provide the services required by their government or organisation. [This point feels too judge-y to me, despite his caveat that it’s not their fault. He doesn’t explain or develop his point either so I don’t really make too much of it. ]

Hierarchies

• Complex human societies seem to require hierarchies and unjust discrimination. We don’t know of any large society in history without any discrimination.
• Hierarchies serve an important function. They let strangers know how to treat one another without wasting time and energy becoming personally acquainted. For example, a car dealer has to use social cues to distinguish between those who might buy his cars and those who definitely will not. He can’t make a detailed enquiry of every individual. [This is unconvincing, or at least the example is poor one. Society would hardly fall apart if car dealers spent some extra time talking to people too poor to buy their cars. People will self-select – i.e. poor people don’t generally spend a lot of time in expensive car dealerships – so the car dealer won’t have decide who to sell to amongst a horde of people. Besides, many rich people nowadays dress in very casual clothes so the traditional cues may not be reliable anyway.]
• Most sociopolitical hierarchies have no logical or biological basis.

How do hierarchies arise?

• Hierarchies usually arise from a historical accident. They are then perpetuated over many generations through myths.
• One example is the Hindu caste system:
  • The caste system arose when Indo-Aryan people invaded the Indian subcontinent 3,000 years ago. [It seems like the Indo-Aryan invasion creating the caste system is an old theory that has now been “thoroughly disproved“, “debunked” or at least “heavily debated and contested.]
  • Some groups aren’t even recognised as a caste – these are the Untouchables. Even the members of the lowest caste avoided mingling with them. The Untouchables had to live apart from all other people and live in demeaning ways and conditions.
  • The caste system and its laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Indians continued to believe in it long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten.
• Differences in natural abilities are usually mediated through imagined hierarchies. Most abilities have to be nurtured and developed, but not everyone gets a chance to develop their abilities. Whether or not they have a chance to do so usually depends on their place within their society’s hierarchy.
• Humans have a biological survival mechanism that makes us feel an instinctive revulsion towards people or things that might potentially carry diseases (e.g. sick people, dead bodies). So one way to keep a particular group isolated is to convince people that they are a source of “pollution”.
• Discrimination often gets worse with time. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. The educated become more educated, the ignorant become more ignorant.

Gender hierarchies

• The gender hierarchy has been of supreme importance in all known human societies.
• In almost every society, men have gotten the better deal. Patriarchy has been the norm in almost all agricultural and industrial societies.
• Many societies treated women as the property of men.
  • Raping a woman was a property crime – the victim was the man who owned her, rather than the woman herself. As such, the legal remedy was to transfer “ownership” of the woman to the rapist.
  • As of 2006, there were still 53 countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for raping his wife.

Biology vs culture

• Obviously there are biological differences between the sexes. But Harari argues that every society has accumulated many cultural ideas and norms around gender that have little to do with biology.
• Some terms:
  • Harari uses the terms “male” and “female” to describe those who are biologically male or female based on their chromosomes.
  • The terms “man” and “woman” to describe social categories.
  • Scholars usually distinguish between “sex” (a biological category) and “gender” (a cultural category).
• Masculinity and femininity are inter-subjective and constantly change.
• What being a “man” or “woman” means has differed dramatically across different societies:
  • For example, in 18th century France, a portrait of King Louis XIV showed him wearing a long wig, stockings, high-heeled shoes, with a dancer’s posture. All those things would be considered “feminine” today but were considered masculine at the time.
  • Throughout most of history, and in the animal kingdom, dominant males have been colourful and flamboyant. For example, Native American chiefs with feathered headdresses, Hindu maharajas in silks and diamonds, male peacocks with bright feathers.

Why has patriarchy been so universal?

• Since patriarchy is so universal, Harari doubts that it is the result of some historical accident (unlike most other hierarchies). He thinks there is probably a universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued men over women. But we do not know what that reason is.
• Harari outlines 3 theories, none of which he finds convincing:
  • Muscle power. The most common theory is that men are physically stronger than women, so they have used that strength to force women into submission. Harari has several objections to this theory:
    • Men are only stronger than women on average, and only with regard to certain types of strength.
    • There is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. Rather, there is often an inverse relation between physical strength and social power.
      • Sixty-year-olds usually exercise power over those in their 20s.
      • Societies throughout history have mainly excluded women from jobs that require little physical effort (e.g. priesthood, law, politics), while allowing them to work in hard manual labour in the fields, crafts and the household.
      • In forager societies, the most politically dominant person was usually the one with the best social skills rather than the most physical strength.
      • In organised crime, the big boss is usually not the strongest man, but an older man who gets younger, fitter men to do his dirty work.
      • The lower classes usually do the manual labour in most societies.
  • Aggression. The theory is that because men usually control the armed forces, they can control civil society as well. They then use that control to fight more wars, which gives them more control of society.
    • Recent studies of hormonal and cognitive systems support the idea that men have more aggressive and violent tendencies and are therefore better suited for the armed forces.
    • However, Harari points out that a female government could control an all-male soldiery. To manage a war, you don’t need much physical strength or aggressiveness. Wars are complex projects that require organisation, co-operation and appeasement. [I think aggressiveness probably does help in managing a war. Or at least in getting promoted to a position where you are responsible for managing a war. Not physical aggressiveness, but a broader concept – like assertiveness and ruthlessness. Seems plausible that males might be biologically more assertive than females. Men are more assertive in salary negotiations, for example, even though that (usually) doesn’t involve physical aggression.]
    • In many societies throughout history, the top officers did not work their way up from the bottom. Elites automatically became officers without serving as soldiers.
    • The “militarily incompetent” Augustus succeeded in establishing a stable imperial regime. Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great were much better generals but neither achieved this. People attribute Augustus’ success to his mildness and clemency. [“Militarily incompetent”? Really? Augustus himself may not have been a great general, but his right hand man, Marcus Agrippa, certainly was. Additionally, perhaps Alexander the Great could’ve established an empire if he hadn’t died at the age of 32. Augustus didn’t become emperor until he was 36. ]
    • We often stereotype women as being better at manipulation, appeasement and seeing things from others’ perspective. If that’s true, then women should have made excellent politicians and empire-builders. But this rarely happened.
  • Patriarchal genes. The theory is that ambitious, aggressive and competitive men were most able to pass down their genes to the next generation.
    • Women had to be pickier about their sexual partners than men were, since they would have go through pregnancy and nurture them for years. During that time, she’d need a lot of help.
    • The kind of women who spent time fighting for power were less likely to leave their genes to the future generations. [This makes some sense. Bearing children is a big setback for ambitious women to this day.]
    • Harari’s objection to this theory is that it assumes women depended on men for external help, rather than on other women, and that male competitiveness made men socially dominant. [Am I missing something here? I don’t think this theory hinges on either of these assumptions. Unless by “socially dominant”, Harari simply means “more able to find women to sleep with”. But that doesn’t sound implausible to me. Especially as aggressive and competitive males could have passed on their genes by raping women.]
    • Harari argues that women, even if dependent on men, could use their superior social skills to cooperate among themselves, while manoeuvring and manipulating the aggressive, autonomous and self-centred men. [Even if women had superior social skills they could use to outmanoeuvre men, so what? Is Harari suggesting that manipulative women were more likely to pass down their genes? I don’t get the logic here. ]

Homosexuality

• A significant number of human cultures viewed homosexual relations as not only legitimate, but socially constructive (e.g. ancient Greece).
  • Culture argues that it only forbids what is “unnatural”. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. If it is possible, by definition it is also natural.
  • Our cultural concepts of “natural” and “unnatural” do not come from biology but from Christian theology. There, the idea of “natural” means something “in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature”. But evolution has no intention or purpose.
  • Harari argues that “biology enables, culture forbids”. Biology doesn’t mind if men like other men. It is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s just culture that prevents people from realising some possibilities.

The world is moving towards unity

• This is only true at the macro level. If you just look at decades or centuries, it’s hard to say if the world is becoming more diverse or unified. But over millenia, small, simple societies have combined into bigger, more complex societies.
• The world now contains fewer and fewer mega-cultures, but each one is bigger and more complex than cultures in the past.
  • Around 10,000 BC, the world had thousands of different “human worlds”. [Not quite sure what Harari means by that term.]
  • By 2000 BC, there were just hundreds or at most, a few thousand.
  • Today, almost all humans share the same geopolitical system (the world is divided into internationally recognised states), economic system (capitalist market forces), legal system (human rights and international law are valid everywhere, at least theoretically) and scientific system (experts worldwide have the same views about structure of atoms or treatment of tuberculosis). [I accept Harari’s general point about the world being more unified, but I think he overstates the level of unity here.]
• Harari talks in depth about 3 potentially universal orders, which were largely responsible for this trend towards unity: money, imperialism and religion.

Money

• Hunter-gatherers had no money. Each band gathered and made almost everything it required. Band members would share goods and services with each other through favours and obligations. This works when numbers are small and everyone knows each other.
• This didn’t really change until the rise of cities and kingdoms, and improvements in transport infrastructure. Villages then began to specialise and trade – this required money.
  • Barter is too difficult because it requires a double coincidence of wants and too many exchange rates.
  • Money solves these two problems as it allows people to store wealth and easily compare the value of different goods and services. It’s also (usually) easy to transport.
• Money was invented many times in many places. It was a purely mental, inter-subjective invention.
• Money allowed large, complex and dynamic markets to emerge. Without it, markets would have stayed small.

Money as a system of mutual trust

• The most basic quality of money is that you want it because other people want it. So you can exchange money for whatever you want or need. If no one else wanted money, you wouldn’t want it either. Money is therefore a system of mutual trust.
• In the first versions of money, people didn’t have this trust. So “money” were things with real intrinsic value. For example, the first known money was Sumerian barley.
• The real breakthrough came when people gained trust in money that had no inherent value, but was easier to store and transport. For example, the silver shekel appeared in Mesopotamia around 2500 BC.
• Money is the only trust system that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and does not discriminate based on religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. People who don’t know or trust each other can still cooperate effectively using money.
• Harari argues that the entire world has been unified in a single economic and political sphere because of a shared belief in money. Once two areas are connected by trade, supply and demand tend to equalise the prices of transportable goods [Arbitrage]. So even if Indians have no use for gold, the fact that Mediterranean people want it would be enough to make the Indians want it. [Seems like it was the trade and transport links that connected people first then, and the money followed. If the Indians had no way to trade with the Mediterranean people (or other people who used gold), they still wouldn’t want gold. ]

Different forms of money

• Money took many forms such as shells, cattle, skins, salt, grain, beads, etc. Even today, most transactions involve moving electronic data rather than physical banknotes. There is about $60 trillion of money in the world, but only $6 trillion of coins and banknotes.
• Before coins, people used unmarked metal ingots. But these were cumbersome as people had to weigh them for every transaction. It was also hard to tell if an ingot was pure silver or just covered in a silver coating.
• Coins solved this problem because they bore the mark of the king or ruler, guaranteeing the amount of precious metal in that coin. For example, the Roman emperor guaranteed the denarius coin and the coin bore his name and picture. Counterfeiting has therefore always been punished much more seriously than other crimes of deception.

The dark side of money

• Money can corrode local traditions, intimate relations and human values, replacing them with the cold laws of supply and demand.
• Humans have always believed in “priceless” things, such as honour, loyalty, morality and love. These things lie outside the domain of the market and shouldn’t be bought or sold. But money has always tried to break through these barriers.
• Even though money builds universal trust between strangers, that trust is not between the humans, but in the money itself and the impersonal systems that back it.
• It’s common now to believe that the market will always prevail, but this is naïve. Warriors, religion and others have repeatedly trounced merchants and reshaped economies. So we cannot understand the unification of humankind as a purely economic process.

Imperialism

• The Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great (2250 BC) is the first empire we have definitive information about.
• Empire have been the most common form of political organisation for the last 2,500 years. Most humans in that time period have lived in empires, and almost all people in the 21st century are the offspring of an empire.
• All human cultures today are at least in part the legacy of imperialism. There are some schools of thought and political movements that try to purge human culture of imperialism, but Harari thinks these are at best naïve. At worst, they can serve as disingenuous window-dressing for nationalism and bigotry.
• Empires have changed the world so much that they can’t be simply labelled “good” or “evil”.
• Today, the world is still divided into about 200 states. But none of these states are truly independent. The states depend on each other and increasingly share the same global problems (e.g. nuclear weapons, climate change). We cannot deal with these problems without global cooperation.

Characteristics of empires

• An empire is a political order with 2 important characteristics:
  1. It has to rule over a significant number of distinct peoples (more than 2 or 3), each with a different cultural identity and separate territory.
  2. It has flexible borders and can take in more and more nations and territories without altering their basic structure or identity.
• Because of these two characteristics, empires have managed to unite diverse peoples under a single political umbrella. Empires were one of the main reasons for the drastic reduction in human diversity.
• The following are not necessary requirements for an empire:
  • Empires don’t have to emerge from military conquest.
  • They do not have to be ruled by autocrats.
  • Size does not really matter. The Athenian Empire was smaller than today’s Greece, and the Aztec Empire was smaller than today’s Mexico.
• Other common characteristics:
  • Stability. Generally, empires have only been toppled by an external invasion or a split within the ruling elite. It’s uncommon for conquered peoples to topple an empire. Even when one empire fell, it didn’t mean its subjects became free. Usually a new empire stepped in.
  • Oppression. Often this involved wars, enslavement, deportation and genocide.

How empires fostered unity

• Humans, like other social animals, are naturally xenophobic.
• But from around 500 BC on (Cyrus the Great of Persia), imperialism has tended to be inclusive and all-encompassing:
  • This is partly because it’s easier to rule a standardised empire. It’s harder to rule an empire with lots of little districts, each with its own laws, writing, language and money.
  • But imperialists also genuinely believed that by spreading their ideas, institutions and customs, they were improving the lives of their subjects. They often thought conquered peoples were primitive, barbarians, or otherwise inferior. This belief also helped empires gain legitimacy.
• Empires were, however, influenced by the culture of their subject peoples too. For example, the Greeks heavily influenced the imperial culture of Rome.
• Over time, this assimilation broke down the barriers between the conquerors and the conquered. But the process of assimilation was often painful and traumatic. It could take decades or even centuries until the imperialists accepted the conquered as equal to them.
• Later in the book, Harari talks about how the European imperial expeditions transformed the history of the world. Those expeditions were extraordinary because long-distance campaigns of conquest are “not a natural undertaking”. [Odd that he uses the term “natural”. Earlier in the book when discussing homosexuality he said that from a biological perspective, everything that is possible is also natural. ] For most of history, human societies were too busy with local conflicts to consider exploring and conquering distant lands.
• Between 1405 and 1433, for example, the Chinese Zheng He led enormous armadas which carried close to 30,000 people – much more than Columbus’ fleet which only carried 120. But the Chinese did not try to conquer or colonise the countries they visited, and their expeditions were not deeply rooted in Chinese politics and culture. A change in Chinese politics in the 1430s abruptly terminated these expeditions.

Religion

• Religion asserts that human laws are not made up by humans, but by some absolute and indisputable authority. By placing some fundamental laws beyond challenge, religion ensures social stability.
• Religion is a system of human laws that is founded on a belief in superhuman (not supernatural) laws.
  • It has to be an entire system of laws, rather than an isolated custom or belief. Knocking on wood for luck is not a religion.
  • Superhuman laws are those note based on human decisions. For example, football is not a religion because everyone knows humans invented it.

How religion fostered unity

• To unite disparate groups of humans a religion also needs to be universal and missionary:
  • A universal religion espouses a superhuman order that is true everywhere at all times.
  • A missionary religion insists on spreading this belief to everyone.
• While most religions we know of today meet these two criteria, not all religions do. Most ancient religions were local and exclusive, and had no interest in converting others. Since people’s lives took place within a few hundred square kilometres, local spirits were enough.
• Universal and missionary religions only began to appear less than 3000 years ago, when kingdoms and trade networks expanded. People then needed to contact spirits and gods who had power over an entire kingdom or trade area.

Polytheism

• Polytheism saw humans with a higher status than under animism. Animism saw humans as just one of many creatures in the world, equal in status to plants and animals. Under polytheism, humans had a special relationship with the gods and could affect the world through praying, sacrifices and sins.
• Like monotheism, most polytheists (and even animist) religions believed in a supreme power governing the universe, but they saw that power as disinterested in human affairs. In contrast, polytheist gods with only partial powers, have interests and biases. Humans could therefore make deals with these partial powers and ask for their help.
• Polytheism is inherently open-minded and accepting of different gods. Polytheists that conquered other peoples did not try to convert their subjects. They only required subject peoples to respect the empire’s gods and rituals.
  • For example, the Roman Empire did not require the Christians to give up their beliefs, but did expect them to respect Roman gods as a declaration of political loyalty. This was incompatible with Christian monotheist beliefs, and so Christians refused to compromise.
  • The Romans viewed this as being a politically subversive faction and reacted by persecuting Christians. But even this, Harari claims, was half-hearted. More Christians were killed by other Christians during the 24-hour St Bartholomew’s Day slaughter than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.
  • Sometimes the imperialists would even adopt the subject people’s gods. For example, the Romans added the Asian goddess Cybele and Egyptian goddess Isis to their gods.
• Sometimes polytheists became quite attached to a particular god and began to drift away from polytheism towards monotheism.

Monotheism

• Monotheism is the belief that there is only one god.
• Christianity was the big breakthrough in monotheism. It began as a relatively small Jewish sect. Christianity then served as a model for Islam, another monotheist religion that appeared in the 7th century.
• Monotheists tend to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists, since they believe only they have the message of the one true God. Today, monotheism (with aspects from polytheism and dualism) dominates outside of East Asia.

Dualism

• Dualism is the belief that there are two opposing powers: good and evil. Dualists believe that evil is an independent power, not created by the good God or subordinate to it.
• The most important dualistic religion is Zoroastrianism, which arose in Central Asia between 1500 and 1000 BC. Zoroastrians saw the world as a battle between the good god, Ahura Mazda, and the evil god, Angra Mainyu. Humans had to help the good god.
• Dualism faded when monotheistic Muslims overran the Zoroastrian Sassanid Empire. But aspects of dualism persist in monotheistic religions today.
• The problem with dualism is that it doesn’t explain who enforces the laws governing the battle between good and evil. So dualism explains evil but not order, while monotheism explains order but not evil.

Syncretism

• Syncretism is the mixing of different religions and beliefs.
• Polytheism aspects remain in monotheist religions as some continue to view a supreme power as too distant and alien for their mundane human needs. For example, Christians have saints, which are like the old polytheistic gods. In some cases, they were the same gods in disguise – the goddess Brigid of the Celtics in Ireland became St Brigit.
• There is also dualism in monotheist religions.
  • For example, Christians believe in Satan and heaven and hell. The Old Testament does not mention heaven and hell at all – there’s no suggestion that people’s souls live on after they die.
  • Harari views dualism as being fundamentally incompatible with monotheism: “Monotheists have to practise mental gymnastics to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God allows so much suffering in the world.”
  • Harari suggests one way to solve the riddle is to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the universe, and that God is evil. But no one in history has believed this. [How can that theory explain good things in the world then? Unless you believe there are no truly good things.]

Natural law religions

• Some religions believe that the superhuman order governing the world is the product of natural laws rather than gods. Harari refers to these as “natural law religions”. Some of these religions still recognised gods, but their gods were subject to the natural law.
• Around 2000-3000 years ago, these natural law religions spread through Afro-Asia. Examples include Jainism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Epicureanism. [I’m hardly an expert but I thought Stoicism and Cynicism were more philosophies than “religions”. There do seem to be a lot of similarities between Stoicism and Buddhism though. Harari seems to take a very broad interpretation of “religion”.]
• Harari talks in some detail about the example of Buddhism.
  • The central figure in Buddhism is a human, Siddhartha Gautama.
  • Gautama discovered that root of all human suffering was craving and desire. When we experience something bad, our minds crave to be rid of it. Even when we experience something good, our minds crave that it remains and intensifies. Our mind is therefore always dissatisfied and restless.
  • The solution is therefore to free our minds from desire and just experience things as they are. Nirvana is the name of this state, where perfect contentment replaces craving. Nirvana literally means “extinguishing the fire”.
  • Gautama developed a set of meditation techniques, and ethical rules to help achieve this state. Examples of those rules included avoiding killing, promiscuous sex and theft, since those acts increase desire and craving.
  • The law that suffering arises from craving, known as dharma, is seen as a universal law of nature that applies everywhere. Buddhism continues to worship various gods, but the gods cannot influence this universal law.
  • But 99% of Buddhists did not attain nirvana, so focused instead on more mundane goals and worshipping gods that they hope will help them get there. As time went on, Buddhist sects developed pantheons of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. These are human and non-humans with the capacity to achieve nirvana but forego this liberation out of compassion to help the humans still trapped in suffering. Buddhists began worshipping these enlightened beings.
• Harari also describes liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism as natural law “religions”, even though he recognises they usually do not describe themselves as such. But he thinks they fit the bill, if a religion is a system of human norms and values founded on belief in a superhuman order.

Humanism

• Humanism is the belief that Homo sapiens is unique and fundamentally different from all other animals and other phenomena. There are 3 rival sects that fight over the exact definition of “humanity”.
  • Liberal humanism is the sect most prevalent today. They believe that “humanity” is a quality of individual humans, and that liberty of the individual is sacrosanct. Their commandments are known as “human rights”. Liberal humanism beliefs come from the traditional Christian belief in eternal individual souls. Without this belief, liberals struggle to explain what is so special about individual humans.
  • Socialist humanism believes that “humanity” is collective rather than individualistic. What is sacred is not each individual, but the Sapiens species as a whole. Socialist humanism seeks equality between all humans. Like liberal humanism, socialist humanism also has monotheist origins as all souls are equal before God.
  • Evolutionary humanism believes that humankind is not eternal but can evolve or degenerate. The Nazis were the most famous example of evolutionary humanists. Their main aim was to protect humans from degenerating and to encourage its progressive evolution. They believed the Aryan race could turn man into superman, while Jews and blacks were inferior. Aryans therefore should not breed with Jews or black. Since 1945, genetic research has shown that differences between human races were far smaller than the Nazis had thought.
• Harari argues that our more recent scientific findings challenge the beliefs of liberal humanism. Scientists have not been able to find a “soul”. Human behaviour is not determined by free will, only hormones, genes and synapses.

The Scientific Revolution (500 years ago)

• The Scientific Revolution started around 1500 AD. During the Scientific Revolution, humans obtained enormous new powers by investing in scientific research.
• Growth and other progress since then has been enormous:
  • Around 1500 AD, there were about 500 million humans in the world. Today there are 7 billion, a 14-fold population.
  • Production and energy consumption have increased even more dramatically – 240-fold and 115-fold, respectively.
  • The average life expectancy was well below 40 years, and is now around 67 years worldwide. In developed countries, it’s even higher at around 80 years.
  • Child mortality used to be very high. Until the 20th century, between a quarter to a third of children in agricultural societies died. In England today, only 0.5% of babies die in their first year, and 0.7% die before age 15.
• The defining moment of the past 500 years was the detonation of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. It was from that moment that humans had the capability to end history.

Before the Scientific Revolution

• Before 1500 AD, people thought that everything important to know about the world had already been discovered, and that the golden age was in the past.
  • Their aim was therefore to preserve knowledge rather than increase it, by reading texts such as the Bible, Qur’an and the Vedas.
  • People did not generally think about discovering new inventions, medications or weapons, or increase economic growth. They just didn’t think it was possible for humans to make much progress.
  • For example, many cultures viewed poverty as inevitable. But today, people increasingly think it is possible to solve poverty.
• There are 3 key ways in which modern science differs from previous traditions of knowledge:
  1. It is willing to admit ignorance. It assumes we don’t know anything, and accepts that what we think we know could turn out to be wrong.
  2. Observation and mathematics. Modern science obtains new knowledge by gathering observations and using mathematical tools. We then connect observations into comprehensive theories.
  3. Acquisition of new powers. Modern science doesn’t just create theories, it also uses these theories to acquire new powers and develop new technologies.
• While today there is a strong link between science and technology, this was not always the case.
  • Before 1500 AD, they were separate fields. When Francis Bacon connected the two in the early 1600s, it was a revolutionary idea.
  • Today, the military engages in a lot of science and technology research. But until the 19th century, most military innovations were organisational changes, rather than technological ones.
  • For example, the Roman army was the best army at the time, but it had no technological advantage over its rivals. Their weapons were largely the same for many centures. Its strength lay in its efficiency, organisation, discipline and size.
  • Similarly, in ancient China, most generals and philosophers did not think about inventing new weapons. Gunpowder, their most important military invention, was invented accidentally by Daoist alchemists searching for the elixir of life. The Chinese mainly used it for firecrackers.

The interrelationship between science, imperialism and capitalism

• Science is very expensive. A key reason why there has been so much scientific progress in the last 500 years is because of governments, businesses and foundations to fund it.
• Most scientific studies are funded because their funders believe the results may help achieve some political, economic or religious goal.
• The main motivation for most scientists may well be intellectual curiosity rather than some political, economic or religious goal. However, scientists rarely get free rein to decide what to study, or what to do with its findings.
• For example, scientific curiosity precipitated James Cook’s voyage to New Zealand and Australia.
  • In the 1760s, astronomers wanted to find out how far the sun is from the earth. One way to do this is to observe when Venus passes between the sun and the earth from several different places in the world, and use trigonometry to calculate the distance.
  • People thought the next Venus transits would occur in 1761 and 1769, so expeditions went out to observe the transits from different points.
  • The Royal Society sent an astronomer, Charles Green, to Tahiti. It was very costly to do so, so they also sent along other scientists and artists to produce drawings of new lands, plants, animals and peoples that they would encounter. During that voyage, they also visited Australia and New Zealand and several Pacific islands.
  • The Royal Navy provided the ship. James Cook, a naval officer, was the commander of the expedition. The navy also provided sailors and marines, and equipped the ship with weaponry.
  • On that same voyage, Cook managed to prove James Lind’s suspicions that citrus fruits would prevent scurvy. This discovery greatly contributed to the British’s naval strength.
  • Cook’s expedition was therefore both a scientific and military expedition.

Science and imperialism

• European dominance began between 1750 and 1850. From 1850 on, European dominance was largely due to the military-industrial-scientific complex and technology. Before 1850, however, the technological gap between Europe, Asia and Africa was small. Why then, did the military-industrial-scientific complex arise in Europe?
• Harari credits modern science and capitalism for European dominance. Europeans were already used to thinking and behaving in scientific and capitalist ways before they had any significant technological advantages. When the technological advantages arose, they could better harness them.
• Harari argues that it wasn’t the inventions themselves (which could be easily copied or bought) but the West’s values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that gave them the edge. France and the US could quickly follow Britain because they already shared the most important British myths and social structures. The Chinese and Persians could not catch up as quickly because they thought and organised their societies differently.
• Before the Europeans, imperialists tended to think they already understood the world, and just sought to spread their world views.
• In contrast, European imperialists set out hoping to obtain new knowledge, as well as new territories. Almost every important military expedition that left Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries also had scientists on board. Modern science and modern empires were both motivated by the feeling that there was something important to explore and master.
• For example:
  • Europeans in the 15th and 16th centuries drew world maps with empty spaces. These empty spaces effectively admitted that they didn’t know about large parts of the world. Most other cultures’ maps did not have empty spaces, simply leaving out parts they don’t understand, or filling them in with imaginary monsters and stuff.
  • In India, the British made an effort to learn about their spiders, butterflies, extinct Indian languages and to dig up Indian ruins.
  • European empires supported the study the linguistics. They believed that to govern effectively, they had to understand the languages and cultures of their subjects.
  • Cuneiform script was used in the Middle East for close to 3,000 years, but could not be deciphered for a long time. In the 1830s, a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, went to Persia. There, he came across an enormous inscription on a cliff face in cuneiform script in 3 languages: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. He managed to decipher the Old Persian part (which wasn’t that different from modern Persian), which helped him understand the Elamite and Babylonian parts.
• Science also helped legitimise imperialism.
  • Europeans came to view acquiring new knowledge as always good, and empires always produced a lot of new knowledge.
  • The empires’ new knowledge also allowed them to claim to benefit the conquered peoples and bring them better medicine, education, infrastructure, and legal systems. See, for example, Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”. However, these benefits didn’t necessarily occur. When the British conquered Bengal, for example, their only interest was to enrich themselves.
• But science has also been used by imperialists in sinister ways.
  • For example, in the past, biologists, anthropologists and linguists have provided “proof” that Europeans are superior to other races, allowing Europeans to claim they have the right to rule over others.
  • When the Western empires declined in the late 20th century, racism similarly declined. But the belief in Western superiority did not. Racism was just replaced by culturism. People today justify superiority in terms of differences between cultures rather than differences between races. Harari notes that culturism is much harder to disprove than racism.

Science and capitalism

• Capitalism played an important role in the rise of modern science.

What allows our economy to flourish is our trust in the future

• For most of history, the economy was largely the same in per capita terms. (It did grow in absolute terms, but only because of population increases and settlement of new lands.)
• Before the modern era, money could only represent and convert things that actually existed in the present. This constrained growth.
  • For example, a baker trying to start up a bakery today could borrow from a bank to do so, if the bank is satisfied that the bakery would earn enough income to repay its loan. The bakery is effectively borrowing against its future income stream. But in the past, this would not have been possible. A person therefore could not start a bakery unless they had an income stream, but they couldn’t get an income stream without starting the bakery. [In practice, this would mean that a person would need to save up enough from some other income stream to finance the bakery herself, or have enough assets to act as collateral for the loan. Note that Harari explained this using a rather long example which I have paraphrased and shortened here.]
  • In the modern era, humans invented “credit” to get around this dilemma. Credit assumes that future resources will be greater than present resources. Harari notes that credit arrangements have existed in some form in all known human cultures, but the problem there was that people didn’t know how to use it. People rarely wanted to extend much credit because they didn’t trust the future would be better than the present. [This sounds dubious to me. You don’t have to trust that the future in general would be better than the present in order to trust that the future income of a particular person would be greater than at present. I’d generally be willing to bet that a 20-year-old’s income would increase over time, even if sceptical about the future generally. A possible alternative reason why credit now is much greater than credit in the past is because counterparty risk has reduced. Previously, people may have been unwilling to lend to strangers, since they won’t know whether that person is likely to have the ability, or inclination, to repay them. But the development of credit reporting in the 1800s may have mitigated this risk.]
  • Harari claims that this was a cycle. With limited credit, people had trouble starting new businesses. Because they couldn’t start new businesses, the economy didn’t grow. Because the economy didn’t grow, people assumed it never would.
• The Scientific Revolution was all about progress. The idea is that if we admit ignorance and invest in research, things will improve. This idea then translated into economic terms. People began to trust more in the future, which created credit, which brought growth, which strengthened trust in the future.

Capitalism requires that profits be reinvested

• In Adam Smith’s book, The Wealth of Nations, he claimed that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is what drives collective wealth. This was a revolutionary idea not just from an economic perspective, but also from a moral and political perspective. Harari claims that Smith thought that being rich meant being moral. [No he didn’t.]
• In capitalism, the first and most sacred commandment is: “The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.” [I don’t think this is actually true.]
  • In pre-modern times, people believed the level of production was more or less constant, so there wasn’t much point to reinvesting profits. Medieval noblemen therefore emphasised generosity and conspicuous consumption.
  • Today, there are many businesspeople richer than the medieval nobility. But they are less interested in extravagant consumption and spend much less of their profits on non-productive activities. [Is there any evidence for this? I mean, I can believe that rich people today spend less as a percentage of their overall profits than medieval nobility. But that could just be because rich people today are much richer than in medieval times and so they don’t need to spend as much as a percentage of their profits to achieve the same – or higher level of consumption. Harari also mentions generosity. There are a bunch of billionaires today who have committed to giving away the majority of their wealth under the Giving Pledge. I’d be surprised if this level of giving was common in medieval times – I would have thought people back then prioritised passing wealth down to their children more than people today do.]

Capitalism and imperialism

• Capitalism also played an important role in the rise of European imperialism. And it was European imperialism that created the capitalist credit system in the first place.
• In China, India and the Muslim world, credit played only a secondary role. Kings and generals tended to despise merchants. In Europe, however, king and generals adopted the mercantile way of thinking until merchants and bankers became the “elite”.

Being able to raise finance easily made it easier to conquer others

• The discovery of America was the foundational event of the Scientific Revolution, because the desire to conquer America made Europeans search for knowledge quickly.
  • In 1484, Christopher Columbus asked the king of Portugal to finance a fleet to sail west to find a new trade route to East Asia. The king declined. Columbus eventually managed to convince Queen Isabella of Spain to finance him instead.
  • Following Columbus’ success, princes and bankers became more willing to finance expeditions. But expeditions remained very risky and many returned home empty-handed.
• To increase the number of potential investors and reduce the risk they each incurred, Europeans invented limited liability joint-stock companies. Using these companies, many investors could pool their capital so each risked only a small amount. Their liability was also capped at that amount. Moreover, you could easily enter and exit an investment by buying and selling shares. This system financed explorations and conquests more efficiently than any kingdom or empire.
• The Dutch managed to overtake Spain because they were better at raising finance:
  • In the 16th century, Spain was the most powerful state in Europe with a vast global empire. The Netherlands on the other hand was tiny, ruled by Spain, and had no natural resources. Within just 80 years, the Dutch won independence from Spain, built a global empire and became the richest state in Europe.
  • The Dutch managed to do this because they were good at repaying their loans. Their judicial system also protected private property rights. In contrast, the Spanish courts were subservient to the king. So people preferred to do business with Dutch merchants than the Spanish king. Note that it was the Dutch merchants, rather than the Dutch state, who built the Dutch Empire.
• Back then, it was common for private companies to hire soldiers, generals, admirals, ships, and even entire armies:
  • The most famous Dutch joint-stock company, Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) was formed in 1602. VOC ruled a large part of Indonesia for close to 200 years. The Dutch state only took control of Indonesia in 1800.
  • Similarly, it was the British East India Company, rather than British state, that conquered India. The company had up to 350,000 soldiers, considerably more than the British monarchy did.

Governments also take military actions to protect financial interests

• Another example of how capitalism and government were linked was the First Opium War between Britain and China.
  • The British East India Company (and others) made fortunes by exporting opium to China.
  • In the late 1830s, the Chinese government banned drug trafficking, but the British just ignored the law. The Chinese then began to confiscate and destroy drug cargos.
  • The British drug cartels had close connections with government, and many MPs and Cabinet ministers held stock in the drug companies. So in 1840, Britain declared war on China in the name of “free trade”.
• Britain interfered in the Greek rebellion against the Ottoman Empire because of money:
  • In 1821, the Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman Empire.
  • London financiers convinced Greek rebel leaders to issue Greek Rebellion Bonds on the London stock exchange. Investors bought these bonds to make a profit, support the Greek cause, or both.
  • When the Turks looked like they would defeat the rebels, British bondholders were afraid of losing their money. The British accordingly sank the main Ottoman flotilla in 1827, in the Battle of Navarino.

But an extreme belief in the free market is naïve

• Some free-market capitalists believe that capital should be free to influence politics, but politics should not be allowed to influence capital as that would hinder economic growth.
• Harari argues that, in its extreme form, belief in the free market is naïve for several reasons:
  • There is simply no such thing as a market without any political bias.
  • The most important economic resource is trust in the future, and markets by themselves offer no protection against things like fraud, theft and violence, which threaten this trust.
  • More fundamentally, Harari is concerned that giving markets completely free rein can allow things like slavery to flourish. The Atlantic slave trade was driven by free market forces, rather than by racism, and was not controlled by any government. Harari also takes a dim view of the Industrial Revolution, saying that it “condemned millions of workers to a life of abject poverty”.

Our growth is not constrained by energy, but by our ability to harness it

• In theory, energy and raw materials are finite, so the economic system will collapse if they run out.
• But Harari argues that we should not be afraid of running out energy, because there is plenty of energy in the world. We just don’t necessarily have the knowledge to harness and convert it.

• In the past, science has found new resources, as well as more efficient ways of exploiting them.
  • For example, before the Industrial Revolution, humans relied on muscle power (both human and animal muscle) because we didn’t know how to convert energy from one form to another. Almost everything was fuelled by solar energy, captured by plants, and converted to muscle power.
  • Steam engines were the most important invention in the history of energy production. They work by burning some kind of fuel (e.g. coal), and the resulting heat then boils water, producing steam. The steam expands and pushes a piston, which then moves, along with anything connected to it. Heat energy is then converted to movement.
  • The earliest engines were very inefficient – a lot of coal was needed to pump out a tiny amount of water. But the British were able to use them to extract water from coal mines, where coal was abundant.
  • In the following decades, the engines became more efficient and were used in more applications. Engines were connected to looms and cotton gins, making it a lot cheaper to produce textiles. In 1825, a steam engine was connected to a train.
  • Another example is the internal combustion engine.
• As humans got better at harnessing and converting energy, that also solved the problem of scarcity of raw materials. Humans could access raw material deposits that they couldn’t previously, and they could also transport them from more distant locations. Humans also invented completely new raw materials, such as plastic, and discovered previously unknown natural ones, such as silicon and aluminium.

The Industrial Revolution was a Second Agricultural Revolution

• The Industrial Revolution gave us an unprecedented amount of cheap and abundant energy and raw materials. This caused an enormous increase in productivity.
• The impact was felt first and foremost in agriculture.
  • Artificial fertilisers, industrial insecticides, hormones and medications made fields and animals a lot more productive.
  • Refrigerators made it possible to store produce for months.
  • Ships and aeroplanes made it possible to transport food quickly across long distances.
• Farm animals are usually treated in appalling conditions. Often they are mass-produced in factory-like facilities. For example, in a commercial hatchery, chicks are put onto a conveyor belt. The male chicks and any imperfect female chicks are picked off and asphyxiated in gas chambers, dropped into automatic shredders, or simply thrown into the rubbish, where they are crushed to death.
• Before the industrialisation of agriculture, most food produced went to feeding peasants and farm animals. There was not much of a surplus to feed others, so almost 90% of the population were peasants involved in food production.
• Today, in the US, only 2% of the population work in agriculture. Not only do they produce enough to feed the entire US population, they also generate surplus to export to the rest of the world.

Consumerism is needed to sustain capitalism

• The modern capitalist economy has to constantly increase production. But this means someone has to buy the products, else the industrialists and investors will go bust. This led to the rise of consumerism.
• Consumerism is the idea that the consumption of ever more products and services is good, and that frugality is bad.
• Harari thinks that consumerism has been successful at achieving its goals, and that we are all good consumers now. Religious holidays like Christmas have become shopping festivals, and the US spends more money on diets each year than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the world.

We are destroying our environment

• Humans have drastically changed the world around us.
  • The combined mass of all 7 billion people in the world is about 300 million tons.
  • The combined mass of all domesticated farmyard animals (e.g. cows, pigs, sheep and chickens) is about 700 million tons.
  • In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals (e.g. porcupines, penguins, elephants, whales), is less than 100 million tons.
• Harari notes that ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity. Our resources are constantly increasing and he thinks this is likely to continue. But as we do this, we may destroy what remains of the natural habitat and drive most other species to extinction.
• That ecological degradation may endanger our own survival, thanks to global warming, rising oceans and widespread pollution.

Before the Industrial Revolution, we relied heavily on family and local communities

• Before the Industrial Revolution, daily life for most humans took place within the nuclear family, extended family, and the local intimate community.
  • Most people worked in the family business or their neighbours’ family businesses.
  • The family also acted as the welfare system, health system and education system. If a person fell sick, the family took care of them. When the person grew old, the family supported them. When the person died, the family took care of their children. If a person wanted to build a hut, the family would help out.
  • When a need was too great for just the family to meet, the local community helped out. The community offered help based on local traditions and an economy of favours, in contrast to the free market’s laws of supply and demand.
  • Less than 10% of commonly used products and services were bought in the market. Most human needs were taken care of by the family and community. [How does he know this? And was this true at all times before the Industrial Revolution in all places? ]
• The reason societies relied so heavily on families and communities was because they did not have enough food surpluses to support a lot of bureaucrats, police, social workers, teachers or doctors. So the societies did not develop mass welfare, healthcare or educational systems. Harari thinks that many kingdoms and empires were really just large protection rackets since they took from the peasants but gave nothing back.
• In addition, intervention was difficult because of transportation and communication issues. Many kingdoms even preferred to cede basic royal prerogatives like taxation and violence to remote communities, instead of intervening.
• Family and community life shouldn’t be idealised, though.
  • Families and communities could oppress people just as brutally as modern states and markets, and often came with tension and violence.
  • It was also arguably less reliable as a safety net – a person who lost their family and community around 1750 was as good as dead, with no job, education, or support in times of sickness and distress.

The Industrial Revolution replaced family and local community with the state and the market

• Over time, states and markets gained power and used that power to weaken traditional family and community bonds. The state and the market encouraged people to become individuals:
  • “Marry whomever you desire, without asking for permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner.” [Harari makes this sound a lot more intentional than I suspect it was in reality.]
  • Tax authorities treat us as individuals – we don’t have to pay our neighbours’ taxes.
  • Courts also see us as individuals – we are not punished for our family’s crimes.
  • Women are seen as individuals, with economic and legal rights independent from their family and community.
• But the liberation of the individual has come at a cost. Families and communities have weakened. In the past, parental authority was sacred in most societies. Parents could do almost anything, including killing newborns and selling children into slavery.
• Harari writes that “Today, parental authority is in full retreat. Youngsters are increasingly excused from obeying their elders, whereas parents are blamed for anything that goes wrong in the life of a child.” [Seems a bit OTT. I think parental authority is still very strong, but it will vary depending on the culture. Also Harari just asserts this without providing any evidence. ]
• Markets and states also supply tribal bonds by fostering “imagined communities”.
  • These are communities of people who don’t really know each other but imagine that they do.
  • Two examples Harari gives are the nation and the consumer tribe (e.g. vegetarians, Manchester United fans). Nations and consumer tribes are inter-subjective realities.

We are living in the most peaceful period in human history

• The late modern era has seen unprecedented levels of violence and horror, as well as of peace.
  • In medieval Europe, there were about 20 to 40 murders each year per 100,000 people. Today, the global average is 9 murders each year per 100,000 people. In Europe, it’s only 1 murder a year per 100,000 people.
  • Harari attributes this decline in violence mostly to the rise of the state. Historically, most violence was from local feuds between families and communities.
• In particular, the period since the end of WWII has been the most peaceful in human history – by a wide margin.
  • This is particularly surprising because there was more economic, social and political change than any previous era. [Was there really more economic change in this period than during the Industrial Revolution? How would you even measure the relative size of such change?]
  • In 1945, Britain ruled a quarter of the world. Thirty years later, it ruled just a few small islands. It retreated from most of its colonies relatively peacefully. The French empire was a bit more stubborn but still retreated relatively quickly and peacefully. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989 was even more peaceful.
  • Since 1945, states don’t generally invade and conquer other states.
• Harari acknowledges that there have been periods of relative calm before, such as in Europe between 1871 and the start of WWI. But he thinks this time is different. Harari thinks there is now “real peace”, not just absence of war, though he acknowledges that the situation could change in the future. [Obviously this was written before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But that event really calls into question Harari’s claim that this time really is different. So too does the rise of China. See e.g. Graham Allison’s Destined for War – Can America and China Escape Thucydides Trap.]
• Harari identifies several factors contributing to this peace:
  • First, the price of war has gone up dramatically thanks to nuclear weapons.
  • Second, the profits of war have declined. In the past, wealth consisted of material things like land, cattle, slaves and gold, which could be captured in a war. Now, wealth consists mostly of human capital, which is harder to capture in a war. Harari does acknowledge that there are still wars like the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, that occur in places where wealth is still the old-fashioned material type.
  • Peace has also become more lucrative. Foreign trade and investment create wealth and are more likely to thrive in peacetime.
  • Global political culture has drastically changed. In the past, many elites saw war as a positive good, or at least a necessary evil. The elite today genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable.

Are we any happier now?

• There are several different views:
  • A common view is that as human capabilities have increased, we have used those capabilities to alleviate miseries and fulfil aspirations. So we must be happier than people in medieval times, and they in turn must have been happier than hunter-gatherers.
  • Another view argues the opposite. These people think that there is an inverse correlation between human capabilities and happiness. While counterintuitive, this view argues that our happiness is influenced more by things like family and community (which have deteriorated in recent years) than by material living conditions (which have improved dramatically).
• Historians rarely ask if humans are happier now than in the past.

There’s no proof that human well-being must improve over time

• There is no proof that cultures that tend to benefit humans will succeed and spread, or that less beneficial cultures will disappear.
• We don’t even have an objective scale by which to measure such benefit. Different cultures define “good” differently.
• Memetics is the idea that cultural evolution is based on the replication of cultural information units called “memes”. Successful cultures are those that excel in reproducing their memes, whether or not they benefit the humans that spread them. This view sees culture as kind of a mental infection or parasite, with humans as its host.
• Postmodernism is like memetics, but with discourse rather than memes as the cultural building blocks. Postmodernists also think culture propagates regardless of whether it benefits humans.

What we know about happiness

• In recent decades, psychologists and biologists have attempted to study human happiness. The field is still evolving, so it’s too early to adopt rigid conclusions. Instead, Harari outlines a few different approaches to it.
• The generally accepted definition of happiness is “subjective well-being”. It’s usually measured by getting people to fill in questionnaires.
• From those studies we have learned:
  • Money does bring happiness, but only up to a point. Beyond that point, it doesn’t have much effect.
  • Illness reduces happiness in the short term. It can also reduce happiness in the long-term, but only if the person’s condition is constantly deteriorating or involves ongoing and debilitating pain.
  • Family and community seem to affect our happiness more than money and health.
  • Marriage seems particularly important to happiness – there is a very close correlation between how good a marriage is and a person’s happiness. [How do they measure how “good ” a measure is? Is it self-reported or have they tried to find objective measures? If self-reported, it could just be that optimistic people are both more likely to assess their marriages as being good and their happiness levels as being high. ]
• Perhaps most importantly, we have learned that happiness does not depend on objective conditions of wealth, health or community. Instead, it depends on the relation between objective conditions and our subjective expectations.
  • Over time, winning the lottery has the same impact on people’s happiness as a horrific car accident. When things improve, expectations can increase even more than that increase, leaving us feeling dissatisfied. When things get worse, expectations fall.
  • We can’t guess how happy other people are by imagining ourselves in their shoes, because that’s combining our expectations with their material conditions. In reality, their happiness is determined by their subjective expectations and we can’t imagine those.
  • If happiness is determined by expectations, then mass media and the advertising industry may be making us all less happy.
• Even immortality could make us unhappy, as our expectations change:
  • The Gilgamesh Project is the quest for immortality. Some scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal, in the sense that they won’t die of old age. They could still however die from an accident or trauma.
  • If we figured out how to prevent people dying from old age, the vast majority of people probably could not afford the treatments. Those people may well be unhappier than they currently are, because their expectations have increased.
  • At the same time, the people who could afford the new treatments may not be happier either. The new therapies could extend life and youth, but not revive corpses. Moreover, they might become more averse to taking even small risks. They might also feel more sad at losing a loved one.

Is happiness just biochemical?

• Biologists use happiness questionnaires and correlate the answers with biochemical and genetic factors.
• They have found that our subjective well-being is determined by a complex system of nerves, neurons, synapses and biochemical substances like serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.
• Our internal biochemical system seems to be programmed to keep happiness relatively constant. It’s like an air-conditioning system that keeps the temperature the same in both winter and summer. Just like air-conditioning systems can be set at different temperatures, human happiness levels can differ from person to person, too.
• However, while most biologists argue that happiness is mainly determined by biochemistry, they also agree that psychological and sociological factors can play a role.
• Harari points out that if we accept the biological approach to happiness, then history doesn’t matter, since most historical events don’t affect our biochemistry. The only historical development that has significance is the finding that our biochemistry is the key to happiness. In that case, should we stop wasting our time with politics and social reforms and focus instead on directly manipulating our biochemistry? That is what happens in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World.

Does happiness involve finding a greater meaning?

• Another view is that happiness is not just having more happy than unhappy moments. Rather, it consists of seeing one’s life as meaningful as a whole.
• For example, Daniel Kahneman has found that when asking people to recount happy and unhappy moments, a lot of the moments involved in bringing up a child are unhappy (e.g. changing nappies, washing dishes, etc). Yet most people describe their children as the greatest source of happiness.
• This suggests a meaningful life can bring happiness even in the midst of hardship.
• However, as far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has no meaning. Any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion. So do we just need to be more deluded to be happier?

The Buddhist view of happiness

• Buddhists have studied happiness for 2,500 years.
• According to Buddhism, most people identify happiness with pleasant feelings and suffering with unpleasant feelings. People therefore crave to experience more pleasure and avoid pain.
• The problem, however, is that our feelings are fleeting. So if you want to experience pleasant feelings, you have to constantly chase them, and drive away unpleasant feelings.
• Buddhism says that the real root of suffering is this never-ending pursuit of fleeting feelings. It causes us to constantly feel tense, restless and dissatisfied. We are liberated from suffering only when we understand the fleeting nature of all our feelings and stop craving them.
• Harari thinks that if this is true, the key to happiness is whether people know the truth about themselves. And we don’t have evidence to suggest that people today understand this truth any better than we did in the past.

The future

History is not deterministic and we cannot predict the future

• Many people prefer history to be deterministic. Determinism is appealing because it implies that our world and beliefs are a natural and inevitable product of history.
• But history cannot be explained deterministically and cannot be predicted. History is chaotic. Many forces interact together in very complex ways. Small changes can produce huge differences in outcomes.
• History is a Level 2 chaotic system:
  • Level 1 chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it – e.g. the weather.
  • Level 2 chaos does react to predictions about it, so cannot be predicted accurately – e.g. the stockmarket, politics.
• The social order today changes very quickly and is constantly in a state of flux. We don’t know where we’ll “end up”. Our view of the past is often distorted by recent events.
  • While the last few decades have been an unprecedented “golden age” for humanity, we don’t know yet if this is a fundamental permanent shift or something more fleeting.
  • Our recent golden age might have sown the seeds of future catastrophe. We have been changing the ecological balance of Earth in many ways, which are likely to have dire consequences.
  • Moreover, if you consider the well-being of animals, our “golden age” may not be a golden age at all. Over the last 200 years, tens of billions of animals have been subjected to more cruelty than any time in the past.

Transcending biological limits

• Humans are now transcending the biological limits that govern all other living beings. For example, we are breaking the laws of natural selection and replacing them with intelligent design.
  • Starting about 10,000 years ago, during the Agricultural Revolution, we used selective breeding to farm animals that best suited our needs. But selective breeding still had limits – you could only select for characteristics that existed in the species’ wild gene pool.
  • Today, scientists break the laws of natural selection completely. For example, a fluorescent green rabbit named Alba was created using a gene found in jellyfish.
• There are three ways we could replace natural selection with intelligent design:
  • Biological engineering,
  • Cyborg engineering, or
  • Engineering inorganic life.
• These technologies could potentially create the most unequal of all societies.

Biological engineering

• Biological engineering is deliberate human intervention on the biological level (e.g. implanting a gene), aimed at modifying an organism’s shape, capabilities, needs or desires.
• One example is castrating bulls to create less aggressive oxen. Another more disturbing example is of an “ear” (made of cattle cartilage cells) growing on the back of a real, live mouse.
• Currently, we’re only using a fraction of the potential of genetic engineering. Most of the organisms now being engineered are plants, fungi, bacteria and insects, as there’s less political opposition.
• Geneticists are also trying to revive extinct creatures. A team of Russian, Japanese and Korean scientists has recently mapped the genome of ancient mammoths, which could lead to the birth of the first mammoth in 5,000 years.
• There’s also been a suggestion that we could implant reconstructed Neanderthal DNA into a Sapiens egg, producing the first Neanderthal child in 30,000 years.
• In theory, we may be able to produce “superhumans” through biological engineering. Geneticists have already managed to create genius mice with much better learning and memory than normal. The main obstacles are ethical and political ones, rather than scientific capabilities.

Cyborg engineering

• Cyborgs are beings that combine organic and non-organic parts – e.g. a human with bionic hands.
• Examples:
  • The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing cyborg insects by implanting chips, detectors and processors in them. The insects could then be controlled remotely and transmit information.
  • A Germany company, Retina Implant, is developing a retinal prosthesis that may allow blind people to gain partial vision.
  • There are bionic arms that can be controlled by thought alone, from the neural signals in a person’s brain. Bionic arms can be made a lot more powerful than organic ones, and can even be operated at a distance.
  • Currently there is a project trying to devise a direct two-way interface between the brain and computer. The aim is that computers would be able to read human brain signals directly and the human brain would also be able to read the computer’s signals directly. Maybe such an interface could be used to directly link a brain to the Internet, or even link several brains together creating an “Inter-brain-net” of sorts.

Engineering inorganic beings

• The most obvious example of this is computer artificial intelligence (AI).
• The Human Brain Project aims to recreate a human brain inside a computer. If successful it would allow life to move from the organic to the inorganic realm.

The end of homo sapiens

• The real potential of the above-mentioned technologies is to change Homo sapiens itself. Sapiens now stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire eternal youth and the abilities to create and destroy life.
• Harari argues that the last days of Homo sapiens are fast approaching. Unless we get destroyed by some nuclear or ecological catastrophe, the pace of technological development will soon cause Homo sapiens to get replaced by completely different beings – different physically, cognitively and emotionally.
• The future is unknown and Harari acknowledges that not everything he’s predicted will be realised in full.
• But the key point is that the next stage of history could very well include fundamental transformations in human consciousness and identity. These transformations could be so fundamental they call the very term “human” into question.
• If you ask scientists why they undertake such projects, they’ll usually say it’s to cure disease and save lives. No one can really argue with this justification. This is why the Gilgamesh Project is the flagship of science. But it opens the door to monsters that we cannot control:

• If the era of Sapiens is coming to an end, we should ask ourselves: “what do we want to become?” And since we might be able to engineer even our own desires, perhaps we should ask: “what do we want to want?”

Other Interesting Points

• The Bari Indians thought that a child was born from the accumulation of sperm in a woman’s womb. So a good mother would want to have sex with different men, especially while pregnant, so that her child gets the best qualities of those men.
• The Stone Age should be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used then were wooden.
• Dogs were the first animals domesticated by humans. We have evidence this occurred around 15,000 years ago, before the Agricultural Revolution.
• Ancient foragers could turn a flint stone into a spear point within minutes. [How does he know this?]
• The Sumerians used a combination of base-6 and base-10 numeral systems. Their base-6 system is why a day is divided into 24 hours and the circle into 360 degrees.
• The Arabic numerals were first invented by Hindus (modern Arabs actually use a set of digits that look different from what we call the “Arabic numerals”). But the Arabs get the credit because they used and spread the system after they invaded India.
• The dinar currency used in Jordan, Iraq, Serbia and some other countries got its name from the Roman denarius coin.
• Bernoulli’s Law of Large Numbers is the principle that it is much easier to accurately predict the average outcome of many similar events than to predict a single event.
• Harari used an example of how, applying this law, two Scottish ministers were able to calculate how much clergymen should pay into a life insurance fund, and accurately how much money the fund would have by 1765 (they were only one dollar off!).
• Harari claims that the fund, Scottish Widows, is still around today and is one of the largest insurance and pension funds in the world. But that is incorrect – the fund Harari talked about was the Scottish Ministers’ Widows Fund, which wound up in 1993. Scottish Widows is a completely separate fund, which was not established until 1812.
• The name “America” comes from Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian sailor who took part in several expeditions to America. Two texts claiming that America was a new continent, rather than East Asian islands, were attributed to Amerigo. A respected mapmaker, Martin Waldseemüller, published new maps showing that new continent. He mistakenly thought that Amerigo had discovered it, so named the continent after him.
• When the Spaniards first arrived in Mexico, natives carrying incense burners accompanied them wherever they went. The Spaniards thought this was a sign of respect. It turned out that the natives did this because they thought the Spaniards smelled really bad.
• In the past, British cities and towns had their own local time, which could differ from London’s by up to half an hour. For example, 12:00 in London could be 12:20 in one city and 11:50 in another one. In 1880, the government adopted a single national time – the first time in history that a country did this.

My Thoughts

Sapiens is an extremely ambitious book with some very interesting ideas. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I enjoyed hearing Harari’s ideas, and he covered a lot of different areas in the book. I would like to think that I learned some things reading Sapiens, but I also feel sceptical that the things I think I’ve learned are actually true. This is due to several reasons.

First, I had read on Wikipedia that subject matter experts had been very critical of Sapiens. So I may have been predisposed to be sceptical of the book.

Second, I came across some things that even I knew wrong (or thought was dubious and looked up to confirm them). For example:

• the theory that the Indo-Aryan invasion creating the Indian caste system has been debunked. I don’t know when it was debunked and it’s possible that the strongest evidence against it only came out after Harari wrote Sapiens. But Harari writes about it like it’s an undisputed fact, rather than a theory.
• at one point, Harari describes Augustus Caesar as “militarily incompetent”. I studied the rise of Augustus in high school. To this day I remember that Augustus’ best friend and right hand man, Marcus Agrippa, was incredibly impressive militarily (as an aside, he was also an impressive governor and architect, responsible for construction of both the Pantheon and Pont du Gard). Now, arguably this proves Harari’s point that you do not have to be a great military general yourself, as long as you surround yourself with great generals. But to describe Augustus as “militarily incompetent” without at least mentioning his various military successes(through Agrippa) was definitely misleading.
• Harari suggests that before the modern era, growth was constrained due to the difficulties in financing new businesses as people would not lend money against a future income stream. But this seems wrong. Loans have long before the modern era, and pretty much all loans are against future income streams.
• Harari mixes up Scottish Widows with the unrelated Scottish Ministers’ Widows Fund. It’s an understandable mistake, and very minor in the grand scheme of things, but still a bit sloppy.

Thirdly, there are some points or opinions that Harari just throws out there without developing much. He also writes in a very confident way (in my opinion, overly confident) where he states his opinions as if they are facts. For example:

• He claims that hierarchies are important by reference to a car dealership example. As explained above, there are many issues with that example.
• Harari states that writing systems have made us think in compartmentalised and bureaucratic ways, without elaborating further.
• At one point, Harari writes: “Today, parental authority is in full retreat. Youngsters are increasingly excused from obeying their elders, whereas parents are blamed for anything that goes wrong in the life of a child.” This is just a bald assertion, with absolute no examples or other evidence to back it up. It’s also hyperbolic.
  If he’d been caveated as appropriate and used a more moderate tone, I probably wouldn’t have felt the need to keep my bullshit detector on high alert while reading this book.

Harari’s writing style also left something to be desired. When a book covers so much ground, a clear structure and narrative is imperative. The basic structure of the book – split up between the Cognitive Revolution, Agricultural Revolution, Scientific Revolution and then looking toward the future – is sound. But within this broad framework, the writing often meanders. My summary above largely follows the order of Sapiens, with a few changes to try and make it more coherent. But it’s still not very coherent.

At times it feels like Harari just wants to tell you about random things he finds interesting, without explaining how it ties in with the point(s) he’s making. And it’s not entirely clear what Harari’s key points are, either. Before I read the book, I asked a friend to tell me what it was about, in a nutshell. She laughed told me that she had thought it was about what we need to do to stop making the same mistakes, while her ex-boyfriend had thought that it was the opposite – that we will be forever doomed to repeat the same mistakes. I’m not sure I agree with either of them, really.

Harari is certainly pretty critical of humans as a species and apprehensive about what our future holds. Yet I’m not sure that this is the main point of the book, as he doesn’t really raise these concerns until maybe the last quarter of the book. It just happens to be in the final part of the book, which is what most people remember and take away from it. The first half of the book focused a lot more on how fiction, myth and imagined orders enabled humans to cooperate in large numbers, even though we hadn’t evolved to live in such large groups. But Harari doesn’t circle back to that idea at the end, tying it in with his predictions for the future.

I couldn’t help thinking that Sapiens would have been much better had it been split into at least two separate books. Each book could then make its point clearly, and more convincingly. As it stands, Sapiens feels like an entertaining, but disjointed, old yarn.

Buy Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind at: Amazon | Kobo <– These are affiliate links, which means I’ll earn a small commission if you make a purchase through these links. I’d be grateful if you considered supporting the site in this way! 🙂

If you enjoyed this summary of Sapiens, you may also like:

• Book Summary: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
• Sapiens vs Guns, Germs and Steel
• Book Summary: The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant