“Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don´t know what they want?”
A fingerprint is the logo Yuval Noah Harari has chosen as his brand. The significance of this? Maybe it is a clue to how since humans have rounded the Earth, their marks could never be undone and are perhaps the single species that seeks to become gods themselves.
I had heard so many recommendations to read this book and though while I browsed it more than once and found superficially no new information, a deep encounter with it opened my eyes to some of the things I will be sharing here in this post.
The three revolutions that shaped us
Sapiens is the study of how we came to be in our present societies. Harari explores what he qualifies as the three most significant developments which transformed the course of history: The Cognitive Revolution (“when history declared its independence from biology”), the Agricultural Revolution (“history's biggest fraud”) and the Scientific Revolution (a revolution of ignorance for humans). Harari shows deep interest in how these affected humans, I mean Sapiens, and their environment.
One of the most beautiful ideas that I find is that we live according to imagined realities such as money. These are constructs that bind us together to ensure large numbers of people can cooperate efficiently. As Harari puts it, money succeeded where gods and kings could not, by involving the creation of an inter-subjective reality that only exists in people's shared imagination, a purely mental revolution.
“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 or Google”.
The diversity of imagined realities resulted in many types of behavior patterns that originated the different cultures we know today. The author exposes cleverly a series of questions that erupted as our species moved forward: How did having more food available for an increasing population left less leisure time and a poorer diet? How did we become self-centered creatures? What impact did attachment to a structure such as a home have in our psyches? How did we become so concerned about the future? And how does the fact that we believe in shared myths impact our present lives?
After having been through the Agricultural Revolution, Harari demonstrates that evolutionary success does not always decrease individual suffering. We have come a long way, from considering our planet an “entire galaxy of isolated human worlds” to viewing it as a single unit. With time, the triad Empire-Money-Science has propelled progress like never seen before and these three compartments still depend on one another to survive.
With the Industrial Revolution we learned the meaning of adapting to the workings of the clock, and we saw the weakening of the family and local community in favor of state and market. The Modern Cycle boosts a strong individual that answers to the laws of supply and demand, while its economy of favors weakens.
Going Beyond
Now we seek to break the laws of natural selection to replace them with intelligent design, trespassing never trodden limits, to tinker with genes. Maybe we will stop being the Sapiens we are today.
The author also looks at certain problems from the perspective of inequality between countries. Harari explains that maybe Third World discontent is fomented by the exposure to First World standards, can we ever bridge that gap and content all?
To challenge us further, this book wants us to think about the foundations of our happiness. What do we want to become and what do we want to want? Does happiness depend on our self-delusion? Are we creating the most unequal of societies by technological advancements? Or are we putting everyone up to speed? Each one of us must face these modern dilemmas shaping our future today.
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