Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln – any attempt at remoulding will only scratch or break them. Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving.

Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language.

What? How

although Sapiens had already populated East Africa 150,000 years ago, they began to overrun the rest of planet Earth and drive the other human species to extinction only about 70,000 years ago.

About 45,000 years ago, they somehow crossed the open sea and landed in Australia

There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

In the US, the technical term for a limited liability company is a ‘corporation’, which is ironic, because the term derives from ‘corpus’ (‘body’ in Latin) – the one thing these corporations lack.

Lol

Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.

Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers,

Why?

The global trade network of today is based on our trust in such fictional entities as currencies, banks and corporations.

Our societies are built from the same building blocks as Neanderthal or chimpanzee societies, and the more we examine these building blocks – sensations, emotions, family ties – the less difference we find between us and other apes.

The common impression that pre-agricultural humans lived in an age of stone is a misconception based on this archaeological bias. The Stone Age should more accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used by ancient hunter-gatherers were made of wood.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.

But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.

…

It would be a mistake, however, to idealise the lives of these ancients.

But thats what you just did

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

But without it we wouldnt be where we are at today

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

Yet for the average person, the disadvantages probably outweighed the advantages.

?

It offered nothing for people as individuals. Yet it did bestow something on Homo sapiens as a species.

Yeah

It’s likely that more than a few readers squirmed in their chairs while reading the preceding paragraphs.

Not moi!

There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.

Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.

could have taught the Hindu Brahmins a thing or two about purity laws. With

?

good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others.

truth, our concepts ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology.

men have never looked so dull and dreary as they do today.

Lmao

tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values.

say, a Christian really wants to understand the Muslims who attend that mosque down the street, he shouldn’t look for a pristine set of values that every Muslim holds dear. Rather, he should enquire into the catch-22s of Muslim culture, those places where rules are at war and standards scuffle. It’s at the very spot where the Muslims teeter between two imperatives that you’ll understand them best. The

Hm

we are used to thinking about the whole planet as a single unit, but for most of history, earth was in fact an entire galaxy of isolated human worlds. Consider

rise of cities and kingdoms

How did they rise?

Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s. The

*sigh*

tea farming did not exist in India until the mid-nineteenth century, when it was introduced by the British East India Company. It was the snobbish British sahibs who spread the custom of tea drinking throughout the subcontinent.

Lol

2,500 years since Cyrus the Great, numerous empires have promised to build a universal political order for the benefit of all humans. They all lied, and they all failed.

the first religious effect of the Agricultural Revolution was to turn plants and animals from equal members of a spiritual round table into property. This,

thereby exalted not only the status of the gods, but also that of humankind.

We are pick-me's

strive to see the world from the viewpoint of this fundamental principle, to realise that from its eternal perspective all mundane desires and fears are meaningless and ephemeral phenomena. Most

Apathy

if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.1 In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion. The

Oh my...

first monotheist religion known to us appeared in Egypt, c.1350 bc, when Pharaoh Akhenaten declared that one of the minor deities of the Egyptian pantheon, the god Aten, was, in fact, the supreme power ruling the universe. Akhenaten institutionalised the worship of Aten as the state religion and tried to check the worship of all other gods. His religious revolution, however, was unsuccessful. After his death, the worship of Aten was abandoned in favour of the old pantheon. Polytheism

I remember this hahah

have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists.

Lol

theory, once a person believes that the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases, what’s the point in worshipping partial powers? Who would want to approach a lowly bureaucrat when the president’s office is open to you? Indeed, monotheist theology tends to deny the existence of all gods except the supreme God, and to pour hellfire and brimstone over anyone who dares worship them.

monotheist religions expelled the gods through the front door with a lot of fanfare, only to take them back in through the side window.

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

is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief. Dualistic

fact, monotheism, as it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella.

that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it? At

first principle of monotheist religions is ‘God exists. What does He want from me?’ The first principle of Buddhism is ‘Suffering exists. How do I escape it?’ Buddhism

a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam. Islam

defending the murderer, we right what the murderer has wronged. Even

contrast to other humanists, the Nazis believed that humankind is not something universal and eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate.

Hm

in the most prestigious Western universities, using the orthodox scientific methods of the day, published studies that allegedly proved that members of the white race were more intelligent, more ethical and more skilled than Africans or Indians.

:(