Harari’s thesis for this book is most clearly stated in chapter 13 of Sapiens, titled “The Secret of Success.” The first line reads “Commerce, empires, and universal religions eventually bought virtually every Sapiens on every continent into the global world we live in today.” Given the bigness of this ambition, it’s impossible to cover all parts of this book. But a few salient points do leap out.
Hariri’s thesis is a compelling (if not particularly original) view of history, and the fact that it is most emphatically stated in chapter 13 says something about this book. It’s that the earlier parts of this book leading up to said chapter are the best.
Though occasionally falling into a this-happened-and-then-that-happened pattern of some big history books, Harari manages to keep things lively by offering some original insights from time to time.
His earliest provocative insight is about the agricultural revolution. Harari starts off by talking about how humans have domesticated animals. Cows, dogs, pigs, sheep, and more have been a part of human society for millennia, and have been enormously successful from an evolutionary lens.
But at what cost? They live miserable lives cooped up in pens, fattened to an unhealthy degree in preparation for the abattoir. The average calf in a modern industrial farm spends its four-month life separated from its mother at birth, never allowed to play with other calves, and is eventually consigned to hamburgerdom.
According to Harari, “cattle represent one of the most successful animal species ever to exist. At the same time, they are some of the most miserable animals on the planet.”
The argument is that the mere propagation of genes from one generation to another is good from an evolutionary standpoint, but can be terrible for millions of individuals. He takes this point to its most provocative extreme when talking about the agricultural revolution.
Instead of humans domesticating wheat, Harari claims the opposite happened: Wheat forced humans to settle down and leave their nomadic lives at a considerable cost. To gain more food per unit territory and a population boom, millions of individual humans sacrificed their health and freedom. This is because “the currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes.”
It’s a theme that Harari drives home again and again. Every decision humans make for purportedly ‘good’ reasons has several bad side effects.
Another early example of this is his support of the importance of useful fictions — beliefs that while not empirically true nevertheless help groups cohere.
A metric called Dunbar’s Number posits that humans can have relationships with no more than 150 people at a time. Then how do the largest organizations of humans like the United Nations link nearly all of the planet’s nearly eight billion people?
They do this by bringing people under a series of beliefs. In the case of the UN, the preamble says these beliefs include saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war, reaffirming faith in fundamental human rights, establishing conditions under which justice and respect for international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life.
Similarly, the agricultural revolution required humans to plan ahead for the first time and believe in a common future. They did this because the revolution was powered by wheat, which is notoriously prone to diseases and subject to seasonal cycles like other plants. Unglamorous as it sounds, wheat invented the future.
As human populations grew from the agricultural revolution, it became increasingly difficult to manage larger populations as forager bands grew into villages, villages grew into cities, and cities joined kingdoms.
Useful fictions are necessary, low-resolution systems of thought to keep things in order by setting a common future for people to aspire to.
Harari says, “we believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.”
This, he claims, might be one big reason why religions and ideologies exist. He makes this claim even clearer when he straightforwardly calls political ideologies religions.
So Christianity calls for souls to join the kingdom of God, liberalism strives to ensure equal human dignity for every person, and nationalism aims to unite people within an arbitrary border to create a glorious future for their patch of land.
What Harari misses is how galvanizing ‘the other’ can be to the forging of useful fictions. In other words, each useful fiction that defines an in-group must also create another useful fiction to define or at least exclude an out-group.
So we can easily imagine a band of foragers defining themselves in opposition to the decadent villagers who have settled down during the agricultural revolution. Ideological left-wing Twitter mobs often exaggerate the differences between themselves and the right-wingers by circulating increasingly dishonest and cartoonish versions of the opposing ideology. Right-wingers do the same.
Today, we are seeing a really potent example of in-group out-group myth-making going on in front of our own eyes with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Zelenskyy’s courageous stand combined with the ruthlessness of the Russian invasion has galvanized Ukraine’s identity both within and without the country. The invasion has effectively strengthened both a sense of intra-Ukrainian solidarity, an understanding of Ukrainians as not-Russian, and the creation and galvanization of said useful fiction in the mind of the world.
All this is despite the fact that Ukraine and Russia are so historically similar that their warring leaders have the same name with slightly different spellings: Vladimir and Volodymyr.
Unfortunately, his book hits its weakest part post chapter 13, when he starts talking about colonialism. He is certainly correct that commerce, empires, and universal religions created the modern world, but his rather lukewarm defense of colonialism grates at some point.
He does call out the depredations of colonialism. He also makes an important point about how mercantilist greed led to severe exploitation within Europe as well. In the chapter titled “The Capitalist Creed,” Harari talked about how the British commodified war itself with an enlightening example.
When the Greeks rose up against the Ottomans, London financiers issued tradable Greek Rebellion Bonds on the stock exchange. The Greeks promised to repay the bonds with interest if they won their independence. So when the Ottomans were on the precipice of suppressing the rebellion, the British attacked and sank the Turkish fleet at the Battle of Navarino. Though Greece was now free, its economy was mortgaged to British creditors for decades.
Elsewhere he mentions how the East India Company maximized profits during the Bengal Famine of 1770 while millions of people died.
The point missing here is that while colonialism undeniably led to the modern world with its many benefits, it wasn’t created for the benefit of the colonized. And in the interim, millions upon millions perished in a thoroughly grotesque montage. Just because evil has happened in history doesn’t retroactively make it good if several good things happened in the distant future — even if they were directly connected to said evil. In fact, if history is in some sense a series of evil things happening interspersed with good things (pessimistic, I know), any evil thing can have been a catalyzing cause for a good thing to happen downstream. But the original motivations and execution were still evil and should be derided.
Historian Jon Wilson has stated this in his book India Conquered, where he effectively takes down the mawkish romanticism of empire promulgated by such figures as Boris Johnson. A review by Michael Dodson enumerates one such example — the Indian Railways. They’ve long been shown as “a much touted ‘gift’ of infrastructural investment to the subcontinent, are instead shown to have come relatively late to India, as compared to the rest of the world, in the face of official indifference to their economic utility. In truth it was all quite different from Sir Bartle Frere’s 1863 speech on the coming of the railway age in India as a celebration of progress.”
To use a less politically charged example of colonization/conquest, the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 AD introduced several new customs, cultural elements, and enriched the English language. does it make William the Conqueror a ‘good’ figure? Just because the Third Reich provided opportunities for Werner Von Braun, who later went on to father the Saturn V rocket, should we thank the Reich for getting humans to the moon?
After a certain point, Harari seems to start treating history from a European perspective. That point is the Scientific Revolution. I don’t blame him per se. He is a professor at the Hebrew University in Israel, which while in the middle east hews closer to the west in perspective than Tsinghua University in China. I would have liked to see more about the contributions made by the middle east, India, and China in Sapiens.
That said, there were several really illuminating passages in the fourth and weakest part of the book as well. I had always assumed that liberal economics was the most important reason for the post-war long peace as it is called. If more countries are interlinked in their supply chains, then they’re more averse to battling one another. Yes, I’m aware of the irony of this statement during the Ukraine-Russia war, which may be the end of the long peace. We don’t know yet.
But Harari further expands on this and mentions four big factors: the price of war has gone up exponentially with the invention of nuclear weapons, its profits have declined because of the triumph of human capital and organizational know-how as currencies, and how lucrative peace has become because of foreign trade and investments.
Despite the long discussions on capitalism, empires, and science, a more existential theme coalesces at the end: happiness. Have all the wars, famines, legal structures, scientific inventions and more made us happy? He concludes — rather bitterly — they haven’t.
In the epilogue, he calls us the animal that became a god and ends with: Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?
A solemn thought indeed.
