Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
There is a sense in which all history is a history of homo sapiens because we are the ones who create history. History is not simply what has happened, it is the story of what has happened. Harari’s book turns the historical gaze upon sapiens themselves and asks who we are and how did we get here. The resulting story is a truly fascinating work.
Harari’s history starts deep in prehistory, 2.5 million years ago when the first human creatures appeared. These creatures were no more significant than any other species. They had distinct social structures but so did lions, dolphins and bees. The original humans were animals just like any other, even to the extent that there were multiple species of humans; homo sapiens, homo erectus, homo neanderthalis et al.
Over millennia these species of humans developed skills. The use of fire to ward off attackers and to transform the environment into one more amenable to human needs. Weaponry to allow the killing of bigger creatures for food. Cooking provides a greater range of food to supply energy-hungry human brains. Gradually, humans started to dominate their world and homo sapiens were the most dominant species of all. Over time, the other species of humans disappeared, with sapiens quite possibly a factor in their demise. Around 12,000 years ago homo floresiensis became extinct leaving homo sapiens as the last species of humans. Sapiens then went on to completely dominate the world, achieving extraordinary things but at a huge cost of inequality and plunder of the planet.
Many works of history focus on highly influential individuals as being the drivers of change. But this can be misleading and it is a path that Harari wisely stays clear of. Heroes of history are frequently only regarded as such because of cultural conditions. The Prussian scientist Humboldt was hugely influential in his lifetime and remains so in Europe and Latin America. But he is almost unknown in the Anglosphere due to nationalistic feelings against Prussia when Humboldt was at his most influential. Harari prefers to look at more broad-based movements where societal changes generated conditions that enabled talented individuals to make highly visible advances. Sir Issac Newton’s work on physics was extraordinary but he was honest enough to admit that all he achieved had been done so by standing on the shoulders of giants. Those giants included Hooke, the Astronomer Royal whose detailed astronomical data provided Newton with the source materials for his work. Hooke, in turn, could not have achieved what he did without those people who invented, developed and designed the telescopes on which he relied.
Harari’s history of sapiens is the history of a highly intelligent, restless and violent species whose instability constantly generated new possibilities for knowledge, dominance, technology and wealth.
This is who we are. Harari creates a gripping account of a species that in all probability annihilated its human cousins. Who tolerated the creation of states and empires that benefitted a tiny elite, an elite that was perhaps as small as one man. Who was content to condemn millions of people who looked a certain way to a lifetime of enslaved misery. Who unquestioningly abide by myths like nation, money and religion and are willing to sacrifice their happiness and lives in pursuit of these fictions. We are a weird, cluttered, traumatised species.
Interestingly, for a historian, Harari is happy to follow the paths he has laid down from the past into the future. Sapiens tend to come together. Villages become towns and towns grow into cities. City-states tend to grow into nations or federations. Ambitious states become empires. The empires of dominance (Roman, Mongol, British, Spanish) have been replaced with democratic institutions like the United States of America, the European Union and the Commonwealth. The author examines the statistics to show that people who live in these democratic structures tend to be wealthier and more secure than those who do not and hence enjoy healthier and longer lives. As an example, consider murder rates. In highly advanced EU countries, one person in 100,000 is likely to be murdered each year. By contrast, between a quarter and a half of all men in indigenous Amazonian tribes can expect to lose their lives to violence. The future, in Harari’s view, lies with the complex, civilised societies that have come to be the norm across the world.
Sapiens was published in 2014 and touches only lightly on the impending climate and ecological crisis. I suspect that had the book been published five years later, Harari would have explored this emerging threat in much greater detail. The crisis is a crisis of consumption. Those of us in developed societies consume far more than we need to power the capitalist economy that provides our physical security, health care and high culture. These societies are arguably better places to live than those that preceded them. The consumption that powers this comfort is the consumption of the Earth’s finite resources. Clean air is only available if we do not pollute it and simultaneously remove the means to clean that air. Clean water is only available so long as it is managed equitably. Fossil fuels are a shortcut to a hot, unstable world. Is there any hope for the future in Sapiens?
Oddly, given the analysis of sapiens’ history thus far, there is. Harari highlights the demise of sapiens’ most destructive activity of all, war. He notes the lack of current mass-casualty conflicts like the First and Second World wars and the American civil war. This observation seems generally true, although the current Russia — Ukraine war bucks the trend. Beneath the trend lies structural reasons why war is less likely. The nations of Europe fought each other for thousands of years but a conflict between EU members is now inconceivable. Although Putin’s Russia is seeking to return Ukraine to the Russian Empire, it has made no such move on the Baltic states: Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. These states are NATO members with a mutual protection treaty. Hence war with a NATO country also becomes inconceivable. A repeat of the American civil war is unthinkable and counties across the Americas are bound by networks of mutual trade. The absence of war is a good place to start addressing issues like climate change.
The United Nations and pretty much all nation-states are signed up to action on climate change. The principal drag on action is the economic dominance of fossil fuel companies. Realising that action on climate change is a death sentence for their industry, these companies have invested heavily in discrediting climate science and diverting public opinion. But Harari is quite clear that when an idea has its time, it is unstoppable. It is expressed in technological innovation, a new climate of thought or a revolution. Nothing in the history of sapiens stays the same for long. Anyone, king, emperor or oil company who stands in the way of the inevitable will be crushed.
The most inevitable thing of all is that sapiens will use all their ingenuity to ensure their survival. We saw off our human cousins. We endured the most awful conflicts and rose again stronger and fairer. We are building global cooperation and gradually starting to respond as a species to a global problem that we have collectively created.
I read Sapiens from the point of view of someone who is frequently incredibly frustrated by the state of the world. I found hope in the book. Although we sapiens have been through a horribly troubled adolescence, there is evidence that we are starting to progress to a more mature adulthood. I just pray it is not too late.
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