The
subject of Sapiens is a trifle broad, covering as it does, beginning
at the beginning, Big Bang and what followed - being physics,
chemistry, biology and finally culture, throwing in everything but
the kitchen sink, though it is implied.
Once
evolution had produced, according to Harari, the last common
Grandmother of Chimpanzees and humans, we emerged as the genus Homo,
breaking into several main camps - Erectus, Rudolfensis,
Neanderthalensis and Sapiens, with other short-lived (relatively
speaking) members who didn't make it. Of course, neither did the main
ones, except for a ferocious serial killer called Homo Sapien. Harari
accuses this group, us, of virtual genocide in bringing to extinction
the other members as well as hoards of other species and genera.
You
can keep your left thumb marking the timeline just before the first
chapter. It informs us that the Universe has been expanding for 13.5
billion years, the earth settled in around 4.5 billion, a billion
years later organisms emerged, and the genus Homo appeared about 2.5
million. Homo Sapien comes in at 200,000 years and their (our)
cognitive revolution at 70,000. A lot of this stuff you, as a casual
reader, have to, like the Trump follower, take on faith, trust the
experts, although in this case the “experts” have credibility.
The
timeframe in question here is divided up into major revolutions by
the author – after hunting and foraging for a few million years
someone got the fateful idea, about 12,000 years back, to have an
Agricultural Revolution, with its domestication of plants and
animals. This was gradual, despite my wit but carried on until the
Scientific Revolution of only 500 years ago. What made these
revolutions possible also sealed the extinction of the other members
of the Homo club, what Harari calls the Cognitive Revolution of about
70,000 years back. This DNA mutation or whatever, enabled Homo Sapien
to imagine, which enabled complex social structures. Sapien
was no match, one to one, for the stronger Neanderthal but the
capacity to imagine, to “fictionalize”, gave us a fatal, for
them, advantage. And it laid the ground for our own successor, the
non-biological being we are about to create. Harari leads us to this
argument but puts off the sales job to his next book, Homo Deus.
And
that is an impressive feat, to have another book to follow this
comprehensive, dense look at our journey. I would have thought he'd
be exhausted and at most, ferreting around for the energy to begin to
research his next scholarly project. The guy has already done it. But
back to this one. He throws in interesting details like, it took
300,000 years for the daily use of fire to become routine. There is
a persuasive description of how animals became domesticated. He
credits the quirky adoption, in Western Europe, of an attitude of
incomplete knowledge, curiosity, with its eventual dominance, in the
form of a capitalist colonialism. That colonialism was (is) cruel
with dire consequences AND he would argue, benefits. The mindset
retrieved lost knowledge of India's past civilizations, for example,
and united a diverse array of people into the present state of India.
It also engaged in some serious drug dealing, even going to war with
China for its right to sell opium there, gaining also the long-term
lease of what came to be Hong Kong.
Harari
likes to challenge convention, provoke a little controversy. He
suggests that Homo Sapien was more content in the days of
hunting/gathering, had more leisure and enjoyment whereas the
agricultural life brought us tedium and long work days, extending
down the long line to our own over-scheduled lives. He argues that
the ability to imagine myths and religions, beliefs, enabled Sapiens
to create large cities and empires, something the pre-cognitive
peoples lacked. This short-coming limited the size of a band of
foragers to less than 150 members. He lays out some perfectly
arbitrary and ridiculous beliefs, contrasts them with contemporary
thought and suggests that they serve the same function. When someone
says they love their country they don't realize that the whole thing
is fiction, the “country” is an arbitrary area. That the value of
money or property are completely fictive, unreal. He sketches the
development of money from early barley to coinage to electronic
transfer of funds around the planet, all imaginary and based on
trust. Despite the “truth or not” of these beliefs, they unify,
provide the cohesion necessary for a society to thrive, even if it's
only an elite who actually prospers.
Speaking
of controversy, Harari describes Sapien as a vicious, efficient
serial killer. He backs this up by showing that we had reached the
far corners of the earth, spread from Africa, across Europe and Asia,
to Australia, to the tip of South America by 10,000 BC. Wherever we
went, vast numbers of other species went extinct. This trend
continues though of course, like a virulent parasite, we insure our
own demise when we kill our host. We have grown in numbers from one
million 150,000 years ago to today's near 7 billion, crowding other
species out, with our numbers and with our domestication and thus
proliferation of certain species ie, chickens, cows, pigs. All
unsustainable.
Along
with two colleagues, in the late 90s, I attended a 5 day course
called Living on the Edge of Evolution. We covered much of the
same ground as Sapiens and there was an emphasis on values.
What values brought us to this moment in time? What values do we need
to adopt to survive the fate our current values are bringing us to
ie, nuclear holocaust, polluted life system, over-population? The
three of us returned to Atlanta and did several 7 week workshops
using the template of that training in California. The workshops
culminated in intensive weekends in North Georgia where we all left
rejuvenated and optimistic about the future of Sapiens and the life
system. Little did we know what was coming in the Bush/Cheney
administrations, the disappointing Obama presidency and now, the
calamity.
The
author's notion of where Sapien is heading does not cheer me up
either. When I think of how empires have treated their new subjects,
how corporate raiders treat their acquisitions, how the patriarchy
treats women, minorities, slaves... I fear for the people of my home
country when the next empire rumbles into town, China perhaps,
Harari's notion of AI (artificial intellegence) a non-biology critter
or an advanced culture from another galaxy or dimension. We can hope,
despite discouraging precedent, that they will break with the
historical record and come with beneficial intentions. It could, and
should, happen from within but in these discouraging times it is hard
to muster the imagination in that direction.
Post-script:
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The
citizen who identifies with the current leadership supposes that that
leadership represents their interests. Why? Probably because the
leadership seems to mouth important shared values. One way for the
ordinary citizen to free themselves from this association, which I
suggest is actually NOT in that citizen's interests, is to examine
those supposed shared values – racism for example. The average
citizen actually has more in common with workers of other races,
ethnicities and nations than with the so-called leadership and those
who control them, the 1%.
