Sapiens

This review was published in 2018 and describes Harari's historical and future-facing arguments as I read them then.

A longer external summary of the book is available here.

I found the book good, clearly structured, and effective at presenting its ideas.

What if you could compress the history of mankind in one book? That wouldn’t be possible, right? Well, Yuval Noah Harari did his best and wrote Sapiens – A Brief History of Mankind. And he did a very good job indeed.

In the book he follows our species, the Homo sapiens, from inception until the near future. The first revelation for me was the start of our species, I knew there were also Neanderthals, but there were many more species of Homo out there. There might even be (or very probably was) interbreeding between them. But in the end, only the Homo sapiens survived (but some genes of the other branches still live in us, +1 for the selfish gene).

Our human (homo) friends, the Neanderthals were more adept with tools than we might have considered them to be.

In the book you are presented with three revolutions. The first is the cognitive revolution (about 70.000 years ago) that Homo sapiens went through. Here we started our ability to communicate with symbols (something that no other animal can do effectively). The second is the agricultural revolution (about 12.000 years ago). Here groups of people started becoming larger than the natural limit of 155(ish), trade, empires, religion, and money. The third is the scientific revolution (500 years ago). Here we started to really conquer our environment, produce energy and capitalism.

Harari makes an interesting comparison between religion and capitalism, they both are beliefs. People believe in a God, people also believe that their money is worth something. They trust that God will give them guidance, they also believe that the paper you get from a machine out of a wall will make sure you have something to eat tonight. I find the proposition very interesting.

Symbolism is what first got our species started, now it plays a bigger role than ever. We believe in each other, we believe in systems and when we don’t believe in things sometimes things come crashing down (e.g. an economy). Even when you aren’t religious you believe in things that aren’t real, that’s interesting to know.

And what will we believe in when the future becomes the now? What do we want to do with our lives, planet, and history? What legacy will we leave behind and will it do credit to our name? Sapiens means wisdom, let’s hope we use it for the right reasons.

My further notes followed Harari's account of imagined realities: religion, ideology, money, empires and other shared beliefs can help strangers cooperate, while agricultural change benefited grain and population growth more clearly than every individual life. I also noted his account of scientific progress as an admission of ignorance, and his warning that science alone cannot decide which research to pursue or how its results should be used.

Harari also treats history as a system that reacts to predictions about it, unlike weather. My rough notes compared the spread of cultures and memes to genes, asked whether historical change benefits humans, and questioned how myths about liberty and equality can coexist. I was interested in his account of credit as trust in future growth, but also noted his examples of free markets failing where slavery and debt were concerned.

The later chapters left me thinking about the decline in violence, the relationship between expectations and happiness, and the tension between pleasure and meaning. I was particularly interested in his question of what people will want as technology changes what they can do.

Further references from the original review: The Nation and Goodreads. The book trailer and SciShow video about Neanderthal tools were also linked.