Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

But most imperial elites earnestly believed that they were working for the general welfare of all the empire’s inhabitants.

So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order.

the most important of dualistic religions – Zoroastrianism.

Gautama found that there was a way to exit this vicious circle. If, when the mind experiences something pleasant or unpleasant, it simply understands things as they are, then there is no suffering. If you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness but you do not suffer from it. There can actually be richness in the sadness. If you experience joy without craving that the joy linger and intensify, you continue to feel joy without losing your peace of mind.

Today, the most important humanist sect is liberal humanism, which believes that ‘humanity’ is a quality of individual humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct.

The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls. Without recourse to eternal souls and a Creator God, it becomes embarrassingly difficult for liberals to explain what is so special about individual Sapiens.

Socialists believe that ‘humanity’ is collective rather than individualistic. They hold as sacred not the inner voice of each individual, but the species Homo sapiens as a whole.

which is the same for rich and poor alike. Like liberal humanism, socialist humanism is built on monotheist foundations. The idea that all humans are equal is a revamped version of the monotheist conviction that all souls are equal before God.

Given the state of scientific knowledge in 1933, Nazi beliefs were hardly outside the pale. The existence of different human races, the superiority of the white race, and the need to protect and cultivate this superior race were widely held beliefs among most Western elites.

At the same time, a huge gulf is opening between the tenets of liberal humanism and the latest findings of the life sciences, a gulf we cannot ignore much longer.

When Constantine assumed the throne in 306, Christianity was little more than an esoteric Eastern sect.

Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it.

Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately.

Game theory explains how in multi-player systems, views and behaviour patterns that harm all players nevertheless manage to take root and spread. Arms races are a famous example.

No matter what you call it – game theory, postmodernism or memetics – the dynamics of history are not directed towards enhancing human well-being. There is no basis for thinking that the most successful cultures in history are necessarily the best ones for Homo sapiens.

A modern computer could easily store every word and number in all the codex books and scrolls in every single medieval library with room to spare.

The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge.

Our current assumption that we do not know everything, and that even the knowledge we possess is tentative, extends to the shared myths that enable millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. If the evidence shows that many of those myths are doubtful, how can we hold society together? How can our communities, countries and international system function?

gunpowder was invented accidentally, by Daoist alchemists searching for the elixir of life.

the Chinese used the new compound mainly for firecrackers.

Only in the fifteenth century – about 600 years after the invention of gunpowder – did cannons become a decisive factor on Afro-Asian battlefields.

Many faiths believed that some day a messiah would appear and end all wars, famines and even death itself. But the notion that humankind could do so by discovering new knowledge and inventing new tools was worse than ludicrous – it was hubris. The story of the Tower of Babel, the story of Icarus, the story of the Golem and countless other myths taught people that any attempt to go beyond human limitations would inevitably lead to disappointment and disaster.

For men of science, death is not an inevitable destiny, but merely a technical problem.

scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology.

The Scientific Revolution and modern imperialism were inseparable.

Not long before Cook’s expedition, the British Isles and western Europe in general were but distant backwaters of the Mediterranean world. Little of importance ever happened there.

Europeans managed to conquer America and gain supremacy at sea mainly because the Asiatic powers showed little interest in them.

In 1775 Asia accounted for 80 per cent of the world economy.

The Chinese and Persians did not lack technological inventions such as steam engines (which could be freely copied or bought). They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalised rapidly.

Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world.

European imperialists set out to distant shores in the hope of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories.

There is poetic justice in the fact that a quarter of the world, and two of its seven continents, are named after a little-known Italian whose sole claim to fame is that he had the courage to say, ‘We don’t know.’

Long-distance campaigns of conquest are not a natural undertaking.

What made Europeans exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer.

The Aztecs were convinced that they knew the entire world and that they ruled most of it. To them it was unimaginable that outside their domain could exist anything like these Spaniards.

Only in the twentieth century did non-European cultures adopt a truly global vision.

Another telling example of British scientific curiosity was the deciphering of cuneiform script.

In truth, neither the narrative of oppression and exploitation nor that of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ completely matches the facts.

Due to their close cooperation with science, these empires wielded so much power and changed the world to such an extent that perhaps they cannot be simply labelled as good or evil. They created the world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them.

After William Jones argued that all Indo-European languages descend from a single ancient language many scholars were eager to discover who the speakers of that language had been. They noticed that the earliest Sanskrit speakers, who had invaded India from Central Asia more than 3,000 years ago, had called themselves Arya.

Without imperial support, it is doubtful whether modern science would have progressed very far.

Credit enables us to build the present at the expense of the future. It’s founded on the assumption that our future resources are sure to be far more abundant than our present resources. A host of new and wonderful opportunities open up if we can build things in the present using future income.

If credit is such a wonderful thing, why did nobody think of it earlier?

Over the last 500 years the idea of progress convinced people to put more and more trust in the future. This trust created credit; credit brought real economic growth; and growth strengthened the trust in the future and opened the way for even more credit.

It follows that an increase in the profits of private entrepreneurs is the basis for the increase in collective wealth and prosperity.

Adam smith

What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.

The remains of the wall built by WIC to defend its colony against Native Americans and British are today paved over by the world’s most famous street – Wall Street.

This is why today a country’s credit rating is far more important to its economic well-being than are its natural resources.

Ardent capitalists tend to argue that capital should be free to influence politics, but politics should not be allowed to influence capital.

But in its extreme form, belief in the free market is as naïve as belief in Santa Claus. There simply is no such thing as a market free of all political bias.