Sapiens
Author: Samuel Peterson
Date Published
2017-11-13 (ISO 8601)
72-11-13 (Post Bomb)
Sometimes there is a book or a show that is perfectly timed, giving clarity (or at least a new perspective) to questions or thoughts which may have been lurking in the back of your brain. Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" is such a work. It gives a truly macro-scale picture of human history, and tries to answer the question "How did we get here?". with a distinctive style which made it difficult to put down, and so in the span of a few weeks about 70,000 years whizzed by before my eyes. It is on this book that I'd like to share my thoughts. I shall begin with a distillation of its contents.
So how did we get here?
Sapiens, as the title suggests, is mainly focussed on the last surviving species of human homo sapiens, and the answer to the question "how did homo sapiens get here" put forward in the book is as follows
The big-picture story of Homo sapiens over its 100,000 - 200,000 year history is dominated by three major revolutions of thought and behaviour which were:
- The Cognitive Revolution: ~70,000 years ago
- The agricultural revolution: ~12,000 years ago
- The scientific revolution: ~500 years ago
1. The Cognitive Revolution
Homo sapiens originated in eastern Africa some 150,000 years ago, and for much of that time remained there, one of many human species, and certainly not the most successful in terms of population or territorial reach. Around 70,000 years ago, a small change in the mental traits of homo sapiens resulted in an animal of unprecedented behavioral agility. This is what the book calls the cognitive revolution. At this time we see evidence of homo sapiens suddenly living in a world of fictions, which, it turns out, enables far more complicated social organizations and dynamic behaviour than is observable before this time. This dynamism is best illustrated by the observation that, while remnants from groups of homo sapiens can change over the course of centuries in pre-history, the stone tools left behind by homo erectus are all pretty much the same over the whole 2 million years in which homo erectus lived.
We still live in a world of fictions, by the way, and fictitious social structures have only gained in their intricacy and importance in our daily lives. Everything from the money you use to buy your goods, the limited liability corporations which you either own or which employs you, to the nation in which you reside and the governmental offices which it holds are ultimately just a fiction collectively believed by all of us. Fictions probably exact more selective pressures on us than the environment at the moment, and our interaction with these fictions result in a collective capacity for behavioral change which far outstrips other animal species who rely almost completely on genes to dictate their behaviour, social or otherwise.1
This new behavioral trait enabled Sapiens to out-compete its other human cousins so completely that it drove them all to extinction, along with a large section of whatever mega-fauna happened to be living wherever Sapiens spread. The pace of this spread was meteoric, covering all continents save Antarctica over the span of about 50,000 years. The ecological impact is most clear in land masses where no previous human species reached, such as the Americas and Australia. All sorts of weird creatures like giant sloths, and gigantic birds went extinct right at the same time Sapiens fossils are found. It was, indeed, a mass extinction event.
2. The Agricultural Revolution
For reasons which are not fully known, Sapiens began to domesticate plants and animals for their use around 12,000 years ago in a transition that is called the agricultural revolution. This particular development is in many ways puzzling because of how much it degraded the quality of life for average homo sapiens when compared to likely modes of life as hunter-gatherers. For most of its history, agriculture resulted in lower quality diets, higher rates of mortality due to disease and harsh physical conditions, and higher vulnerability to ecological and political turmoil. Modern readers often have an incorrect impression of what agriculture means for daily life, because the capabilities of agriculture have been radically transformed due to modern industry and scientific understanding.
But for all its harshness on individuals, the net result of agriculture was a higher efficiency of caloric energy extraction for the species as a whole. As an example given in the book, whereas the Jericho valley could only support 100 or so hunter-gatherers, primitive agriculture could support 1000 or so Sapiens in admittedly much harsher conditions for the majority. It was a collective advantage that made the spread of the practice inevitable.
This period, according to the book, led to social constructs which have resulted in a trend of greater unity and interconnectedness between Sapiens communities. These constructs are: money, empire, and (universal) religion. It also caused another mass extinction.
3. The Scientific Revolution
About 500 years ago, western European civilizations cultivated extremely successful methods of scientific inquiry, and integrated these with most aspects of governmental and economic endeavors. The result was that these nations were catapulted to global hegemony. This state of political and economic importance was by no means the norm. In broad strokes, western Europe was for thousands of years relatively poor and insignificant compared to the Middle East and east Asia; for instance: in 1500 western Europe accounted for 10% of global GDP, and by 1913 it accounted for 80% of GDP. The empires created by this shift of power are now largely dismantled (arguably the US has its own empire of indirect rule, though), but the capitalist creed and the scientific method has been adopted with enthusiasm by the rest of humanity.
I am quite tickled by the fact that Sapiens gives the detonation of the first atomic bomb as a defining moment of the scientific revolution and its consequences, which agrees quite nicely with the theme of a previous post of mine. Harari also makes it clear that the scientific revolution is far from over, and it is the principle answer to the main question: "How did we get here?" He also makes the claim, which seems quite plausible, that the scientific revolution will probably be the end Homo Sapiens: either we will kill ourselves by mishandling this new power, or we will transform ourselves into something distinct from what we are now. Oh and we are now going through yet another mass extinction caused by us.
Overall impressions
To make a history of humankind well, one needs adopt an unconventional manner of expression and analysis, because convention is too strongly tied to a particular time -- such temporal provincialism will not make for a convincing narrative. On the other hand, the narrative needs to resonate with the audience of the present. The solution to this challenge that Harari found in this work is to do a great impersonation of what an anthropologist from an alien species would sound like.
So what does an alien think of humanity? Throughout the book the perspective seems to that Homo Sapiens is a fascinating and hideous animal. Humanity is fascinating in that it is the only species originating from planet earth which could possess the to knowledge transform itself according to its own designs. Descendants of man could well outlive its planet of origin, and bring about other forms of life which could never come to be by force of evolution through natural selection; Homo Sapiens could well become a god-like species, Homo Deus, if you will. Along the way, humanity is guilty of sickening cruelties against members of its own species and the animals it has condemned to the hellish realities of industrial agriculture or extermination. Humanity also shows an astounding ignorance of the consequences of its collective action, such as the ecological and social consequences of agriculture or modern industry. The end line in the book speaks volumes:
Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?
If you think such anticipations of godly transformation sounds a bit dramatic, then ask yourself this: Do you really think in the next 1000 years (just to be conservative) that we will not attain near mastery over genetics and biology? And if we do attain this mastery, will we really be content with our current physical and mental limitations, which are considerable? If this is really the end of the line of homo sapiens, then "How did we get here?" is certainly an apt question to ask.
All told, I cannot recommend this book enough. If you think that the pace of modern change is difficult to comprehend, or you are confused as to where it is all leading, then Sapiens might just bring the chaos into better focus. It won't however dispel the chaos, because that is not an illusion -- we certainly live in chaotic times; it will just give you some sense of perspective about just how much the world has been transformed, and perhaps free up your imagination to comprehend the possible routes we all might be going down. My brother, Joe, thinks this should be mandatory reading for everyone, he may well be right.
1: I like to think of this interaction of behaviour with cultural inventions as analogous to the abstract computational model called the Turing Machine, in which a finite state machine's interaction with an infinite memory object results in a turing complete machine capable of computing all computable functions: I.E the one's genes comprise the finite state machine, and one's culture is the memory it interacts with. As the analogy goes, most animal's finite state machine dictates little to no interaction with cultural memory, whereas the finite state machine of Sapiens is designed to interact with it's cultural memory. Expanding on this could well turn into a blog post of its own.