Book Review Sapiens a Brief History of Humankind
Book Review | Sapiens: A Cursory History of Humankind past Yuval Noah Harari
Every and so often a non-fiction book captures the attention of the reading public to such an extent that it becomes impossible to ignore. It isn't e'er obvious why. Of a sudden you can't turn around in your local bookshop without knocking over a full display of them and everyone you meet is quoting their favourite fact. Sapiens: A Cursory History of Humankind is definitely i of those books. It was published in English in 2014 and has barely been out of the bestseller lists since.
In this example it isn't actually that hard to understand why. Sapiens takes as information technology discipline the thing nosotros are most interested in — ourselves. And it looks to answer the nearly fundamental of questions — how did all this happen? It approaches that epic task in an engaging, digestible, and often provocative romp through our brief sojourn on Planet Earth.
At its core this is not a happy account of annihilation you could meaningfully telephone call success. As Harari's says:
"the Sapiens regime on earth has then far produced little that we tin can be proud of… [t]ime and time again massive increases in human being power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and ordinarily caused immense misery to other animals".
Not a great review for a species that "stands on the verge of becoming a god".
Harari'due south account of how this came to pass is split up into four sections. He starts with the Cognitive Revolution, in which the terminal slice of the evolutionary puzzle barbarous into place. The Homo Sapiens that emerged from this are, biologically speaking, identical to the states. I institute it humbling to remember that. Despite the manifold differences in how we live those people felt all the aforementioned things we do. They loved, they dreamed, they feared, they fought, and they hoped just as we do. But they did and then in a world we would struggle to even begin to recognise.
The most profound changes in that world were sparked past the subject of the second section: the Agricultural Revolution. For most this marks the start of our story. The point at which nosotros mastered Eden and put it to productive use. Harari describes it as the biggest mistake we've e'er fabricated. Great for humanity's collective domination but utterly miserable for almost all the individuals involved. This dichotomy is something Harari keeps coming back to. Proliferation of a species should not be accounted equally synonymous with success. More is not better.
He comes back to this at the terminate of the volume, exploring what it means to be happy. Equally he points out, there is almost no mode of knowing whether our cushy 21st century lives make us objectively happier than our ancestors. He concludes that objectivity is actually entirely the wrong way to call up about that problem: "[happiness] depends on the correlation between objective status and subjective expectations." More than profoundly still "if yous have a why to live, you tin can conduct almost whatever how."
The rather chilling conclusion is that given our ascent expectations we are probably not notably happier than those who came before us.
After exploring how we transitioned from a nomadic to settled species, the book then moves on to examining humanity'due south inexorable coalescence into a single amorphous system. Harari lightly traces this through various historical examples merely at all times focusing on the meta-narrative. He argues, persuasively, that our success in achieving this unity is ultimately our remarkable ability to create and buy into a diversity of "intersubjective myths". Things that be only in the minds of those who believe in them, have no ground in the physical sciences, merely enable cooperation on a mass calibration. The iii nigh enduring of these accept been our economic organization, imperial or national states, and faith.
The chapters on the development of these interconnected and interdependent systems are probably the section of the volume I found virtually intriguing. To be reminded of the constructed nature of these systems does not to my mind diminish their power. It instead reinforces our remarkable reliance on narrative. To accept created such intricate ways to describe the functioning of our earth to each other, based on nothing more, and aught less, than our collective imagination is really a remarkable feat. But this section as well reminded me how astonishingly recently the world became a single entity. Trade, travel and the substitution of ideas have existed for thousands of years. But a genuinely global population has existed for no more than a couple of centuries. The integration of the final remnants of the isolated worlds into our global community was recent enough that we know the names of those who lived through it. I found information technology impossible to envisage how it must take felt to accept another globe arrive on your beach later numberless generations of your globe being unquestionably the whole earth. We will never know that feeling again.
Finally, Harari brings us up to date by examining the Scientific Revolution. This ane has barely started. Forged in Europe in the heart of the last millenium, so violently exported around the earth, this revolution marked a profound interruption with how humans saw themselves. Harari attributes this shift to a disarmingly elementary cause. We understood nosotros are ignorant. As soon as those scales barbarous the thirst for new knowledge was unquenchable. And so unquenchable in fact that it harnessed itself to the twin systems of capitalism and imperialism to envelop the globe. The reason that this revolution is unfinished is largely a function of time. The other shifts that Harari described play out over 1,000 years or perhaps 10,000s of years. Scientific advances that permit us to move beyond the biological constraints placed on us by evolution will, in Harari'due south telling, exist the matter that shape the next phase of the human experience. Shape us and then greatly in fact that it might be hard to fifty-fifty imagine the consequences.
By the fourth dimension I'd finished the book it wasn't entirely clear to me whether the "brief" in the championship is meant in earnest. For most readers 443 pages of closely typed prose isn't brief. For well-nigh people 100,000 years isn't that cursory either.
I ended upwards realising that the "brief" is best interpreted as an instruction on how Harari intends to guide his reader through time. The book began life as a serial of lectures at the Hebrew Academy in Jerusalem and you lot can still see the vestiges of that approach. The sections are brusk and pacey, the conclusions are business firm and provocative, at that place is a slightly questionable smattering of pictures.
In that location is a lot to be said for this arroyo. It is certainly preferable to a turgid review of academic literature. It is perhaps the only guaranteed manner to ensure the reader keeps going. But it does have drawbacks. I was left wanting to know more well-nigh almost everything. I wish Harari had given himself more time to explore some of the well-nigh interesting transitions in our collective history:
How is it that linguistic communication became and so integral to our success equally a species?
Why did Human Sapiens master exploration, adaption and exploitation, in a manner that no other species was able to?
Why has everything changed and then dramatically in the concluding 200 years after millenia of inertia?
Each of these questions is raised but I'm non certain that I'thousand left with a satisfying respond. Possibly nosotros don't know. Perchance I need to seek my answers elsewhere. I'd love to know. I would as well have loved Harari to spend some more than fourth dimension on the price our planet has paid for this ascendency. There are glimpses of this. The fact that the collective weight of humans and domesticated animals in the world today is 10x the weight of all the large wild animals is amazing. There are 1.5 billions cows and only eighty,000 giraffes (that is xx,000 cows per giraffe!). Only despite this I'm non certain in that location is a full recognition of the fact David Wallace-Wells has made so forcefully; everything that we accept ever known, or always called culture, has existed with a set of climatological parameters that no longer exist. It is sobering to say the to the lowest degree.
At that place is likewise a danger that Hariri's brevity becomes glibness. As human evolution begins to advance after the agricultural revolution (c10,000 years ago) the reader is increasingly left with the sense we are skating across the surface. Much of the academic response to this volume has been dismissive or derogatory. That might be wounded pride or unattractive envy, just a lot of it is probably too fair. There are points at which it feels like the book'south provocations are grounded more in a want to exist provocative, rather than a deep date with the historiography.
This sense of "glibness" was brought into sharper relief when I compared this volume with the only other book I've read of comparable breadth: Steven Pinker'southward Ameliorate Angels of our Nature. I should preface this by maxim that Pinker's book is probably the all-time slice of non-fiction I've ever read. The comparing does not do Sapiens any favours. By focusing on a specific theme, the inexorable decline of violence in human society, Pinker offers the reader a tour-de-force in intellectual argumentation. He ranges from complex statistical analysis, to deep historical research, to pithily explained psychology, and to the physical structures of the rage systems in the brain. At every bespeak you experience like you are in the hands of an proficient without needing to be an expert. He is assured and astonishingly informative at the aforementioned fourth dimension. Pinker also has graphs not pictures. Lots of graphs. Graphs do not maketh a expert book simply they help give information technology weight. I felt in places Harari could have washed with a prissy chart or 2.
None of this is to say Sapiens is not worth your time. It is. It taught me a lot I didn't know and gave me a new style to remember near things I thought I did. I would encourage anyone who hasn't already to option information technology upwards. I'thousand definitely looking forwards to Harari's other work.
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Source: https://medium.com/@chris_jack_hook/book-review-sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-by-yuval-noah-harari-fe64816e59cc
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