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A review by lpm100
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
5/5 stars
"The uncomfortable process of man turning himself into a god."
*******
Of the book:
-20 chapters; 416 pps of prose
-21 pps/chapter
-135 citation notes (0.3/page; 6.75/chapter)
It's well worth it:
It has elements of Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy, and History all rolled into one.
This book is interesting in the same way that designer outfits are: people may not like your style, but they will pay attention to the cut of the cloth.
Similarly, a lot of his conclusions I disagree with but the way that he states them (as a speaker of English as a second language) is impressive and thoughtful.
And let's be clear that almost nothing here is new; it's just that he finds new ways to weave together old ideas in a way to make them interesting.
I see the purpose of this book as something like: chemical reactions follow predictable pathways under certain circumstances that don't depend on specific molecules; human civilizations and the aggregate human civilization is subject to the same laws, but we just have to learn what they are more carefully by studying the systems in question.
With what other books does this have resonances? MANY, but the ones that stick out most to me are:
1. "The Third Chimpanzee," Jared Diamond (Denisovans. Neanderthals. The Golden Age that never was: humans have been eating everything in sight for a LONG time.)
2. "The 10,000 Year Explosion," by Cochran and Harpending. (Evolution has been recent, copious, and regional. Influx of Neanderthal DNA into non-African populations.)
3. "Gums, Germs, and Steel," Jared Diamond (People that live in preliterate societies are walking encyclopedias about their natural environment because they have to be)
4. "The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time
Book," Keith Houston.
5. "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World," by Simon Winchester. (Standardization of units such as time and length as need for nation building.)
Part I (The Cognitive Revolution): there were several other human species, and Homo sapiens won out. He spread very quickly from East Africa to the rest of the world, and ate half the world species out of existence. Common myths (the myth of the corporation or religious myths) enable large numbers of people to work together - - and they're also the cause of many wars.
Part II (The Agricultural Revolution): Farming started about 10,000 years ago, and nothing new has been domesticated in the last 20 centuries. Author takes the view that the Agricultural Revolution made human beings worse off than hunter-gatherers. Many more slipped discs arthritis, and hernias. Much longer work days, less social contact and a more monotonous diet. But, more people could survive per unit of area and poorer conditions, and 1,000 copies of such DNA is more evolutionarily successful than 100 copies of hunter-gatherer DNA. (The author expands this line of reasoning also to domesticated animals, who live miserable lives but exist in large numbers.) Other quantum leaps were: the invention of writing, and storage systems as well as mathematics.
Part III (The Unification of Humankind): Many human beings had no idea of one another's existence 10,000 years ago, and these days the slow, relentless progress of trade and contact is slowly homogenizing mankind. Empires also do the same. Indians started out as subject people of snooty Englishmen, and eventually adopted things that remain long after the English left. (Cricket. Tea. English judicial system. English language.) If somebody wanted to purge a culture of "foreign influences," it would be very difficult. Empire, money, and religion are all great unifiers of mankind.
Part IV (The scientific Revolution): This is easily the most dense and thoughtful section. It took a great deal of time before a significant number of people realized that there is knowledge in the world to be found independent of religious texts. The colonization of certain countries was a chance for the Europeans to expand / actualize their scientific knowledge, and it is different to the way that the Chinese empire saw its role. Science and government have been married since the time of European colonization. Reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution as a "revolution in energy conversion." Before the industrial revolution, the extended family was the appropriate decision making unit for the individual. Eventually, that became the nuclear family and it is being slowly destroyed by an encroaching state. No this is not going to stop, because even though the case could have been made that the Agricultural Revolution was not the best it went ahead anyway, and similar to with the "permanent revolution" of industrialization. Happiness is relative and that explains how globalization also creates craving: young men of today compare themselves to Cristiano Ronaldo and not the people in their immediate environment as in times past. It also explains how people lived better under Hosni Mubarak than earlier generations, but still overthrew him. A peasant who completed his mud hut is relatively just a satisfied as a banker who finally paid off his New York penthouse... Because happiness is ultimately relative and not absolute.
Could man get so good with technology that he ends up replacing himself? It sure does seem that way....
Second order thoughts:
1. This author has a political ax to grind, and it is showing. It's like he is creating new language to describe postmodernism. (That's the land where everything is "socially constructed." He neologizes the term "imagined reality/hierarchy/etc ")
He also predictably makes the hackneyed comparison to the caste system in India and segregation in the United States. NO, it is not that black people were/are to be a social "spiritual pollution." It's just that they are (as a matter of fact) the source of a lot of crime, and not everybody wants to live around that.
There are a couple of subchapters called "The Cult of the Free Market" and "The Capitalist Hell," so there's that.
2. Some things that he says are just empirically false. ([p.136]: ".... Objective biological differences, such as skin color and hair type, but there is no evidence that the difference is extend to intelligence or morality.") Others are questionable. (The word "Eurasia" is well attested, but for some reason he insists on calling it "Afro-Asia."
3. He has bought into the sex≠gender/patriarchy hysteria, and as in Israeli Jew, it seems supremely improbable that he can really believe this. (No wonder this book was so popular.)
4. His thinking is crystal clear when he places liberalism, Communism, and Nazism among the pantheon of natural law religions. He would have been clearer if he had put Environmentalism in. The thinking gets a bit more muddled when he puts capitalism and nationalism in the same subset as the first three.
5. Harari cites a number of iron laws of history. Probably would have been better if he'd put them all in one list in the appendix.
6. Harari's argument against determinism is something that we have all heard before: it may have turned out this way, but there's no reason it could not have been otherwise. (I think the first time I ever read this was in Milan Kundera's "The Joke.")
7. Gilgamesh Project: if its succeeds, I wonder what could be the point? Time is valuable when it's finite, but if it's infinite then what is the value of a life? Also, a lot of bad ideas just have to wait for people who have them to die. If people could live forever, is progress installed eternally? Where do we put all these people? How many babies can each person have?
Neat factoids:
1. Wheat covers 870,000² mi of the Earth's surface, 10 times the size of Britain.
2. The cuneiform script was used in the Middle East for 3,000 years and was completely forgotten around 1,000 years ago. And rediscovered in the 1830s in India in the context of the British cataloging their new conquest.
4. No small part of the Netherlands getting out from abundant Spanish rule was the fact that they were significantly more skillful financiers of War than the Spaniards were.
5. Headlines notwithstanding, these times are a lot more peaceful when they have ever been: In the year 2000, wars caused the deaths of $310,000 individuals but violent crime killed another $520,000. Even so, it is 1.5% of the 56 million people who died in that year. 1.26 million died in car accidents and 815,000 people committed suicide.
6. 300 million Indians were managed by less than 5,000 British officials, 40 to 70,000 British soldiers, and maybe another 100, 000 British business people. (A ratio of 1714: 1.)
7. Sometimes technology can do things that probably shouldn't be done. Of course, people plan to reconstruct a woolly mammoth from an element. And now that the Neanderthal genome has been sequenced, we can implant that DNA into a Sapiens ovum (lots of women have already volunteered to give birth to a neanderthal).
8. Other Frankenstein technologies in the pipeline: retinal prosthesis, bionic arms activated by thought, insect cyborgs, direct two-way brain computer interface that allows the reading of human brain signals.
9. Mapping the first human genome took 15 years and cost 3 billion dollars. Today a person's genome can be decoded within a few weeks at the cost of a few hundred dollars.
Quotes:
1. One of history's iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
2. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was plowing fields and carrying water buckets.
3. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them.
4. The truly unnatural behavior......simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture is ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesize, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.
5. The victory of Rome over Numantia was so complete that the victors co-opted the very memory of the vanquished.
6. So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order...... In fact, monotheism is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist god, but also in the dualist devil, and polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts.
7. It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable and hindsight was far from obvious at the time.
8. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.
Verdict:
This is a huge, thoughtful book. I'm of a mind to keep it in reread it several years later because there's probably too much information to be picked up on a first pass.
Vocabulary:
coprolite
First Wave Extinction (caused by foragers)
Second Wave Extinction (caused by farmers)
Third Wave Extinction (caused by industrialization)
partial script
full script
quipus
millares
Jacob Bernoulli's Law of Large Numbers
lacuna
Gilgamesh Project
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
5/5 stars
"The uncomfortable process of man turning himself into a god."
*******
Of the book:
-20 chapters; 416 pps of prose
-21 pps/chapter
-135 citation notes (0.3/page; 6.75/chapter)
It's well worth it:
It has elements of Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy, and History all rolled into one.
This book is interesting in the same way that designer outfits are: people may not like your style, but they will pay attention to the cut of the cloth.
Similarly, a lot of his conclusions I disagree with but the way that he states them (as a speaker of English as a second language) is impressive and thoughtful.
And let's be clear that almost nothing here is new; it's just that he finds new ways to weave together old ideas in a way to make them interesting.
I see the purpose of this book as something like: chemical reactions follow predictable pathways under certain circumstances that don't depend on specific molecules; human civilizations and the aggregate human civilization is subject to the same laws, but we just have to learn what they are more carefully by studying the systems in question.
With what other books does this have resonances? MANY, but the ones that stick out most to me are:
1. "The Third Chimpanzee," Jared Diamond (Denisovans. Neanderthals. The Golden Age that never was: humans have been eating everything in sight for a LONG time.)
2. "The 10,000 Year Explosion," by Cochran and Harpending. (Evolution has been recent, copious, and regional. Influx of Neanderthal DNA into non-African populations.)
3. "Gums, Germs, and Steel," Jared Diamond (People that live in preliterate societies are walking encyclopedias about their natural environment because they have to be)
4. "The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time
Book," Keith Houston.
5. "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World," by Simon Winchester. (Standardization of units such as time and length as need for nation building.)
Part I (The Cognitive Revolution): there were several other human species, and Homo sapiens won out. He spread very quickly from East Africa to the rest of the world, and ate half the world species out of existence. Common myths (the myth of the corporation or religious myths) enable large numbers of people to work together - - and they're also the cause of many wars.
Part II (The Agricultural Revolution): Farming started about 10,000 years ago, and nothing new has been domesticated in the last 20 centuries. Author takes the view that the Agricultural Revolution made human beings worse off than hunter-gatherers. Many more slipped discs arthritis, and hernias. Much longer work days, less social contact and a more monotonous diet. But, more people could survive per unit of area and poorer conditions, and 1,000 copies of such DNA is more evolutionarily successful than 100 copies of hunter-gatherer DNA. (The author expands this line of reasoning also to domesticated animals, who live miserable lives but exist in large numbers.) Other quantum leaps were: the invention of writing, and storage systems as well as mathematics.
Part III (The Unification of Humankind): Many human beings had no idea of one another's existence 10,000 years ago, and these days the slow, relentless progress of trade and contact is slowly homogenizing mankind. Empires also do the same. Indians started out as subject people of snooty Englishmen, and eventually adopted things that remain long after the English left. (Cricket. Tea. English judicial system. English language.) If somebody wanted to purge a culture of "foreign influences," it would be very difficult. Empire, money, and religion are all great unifiers of mankind.
Part IV (The scientific Revolution): This is easily the most dense and thoughtful section. It took a great deal of time before a significant number of people realized that there is knowledge in the world to be found independent of religious texts. The colonization of certain countries was a chance for the Europeans to expand / actualize their scientific knowledge, and it is different to the way that the Chinese empire saw its role. Science and government have been married since the time of European colonization. Reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution as a "revolution in energy conversion." Before the industrial revolution, the extended family was the appropriate decision making unit for the individual. Eventually, that became the nuclear family and it is being slowly destroyed by an encroaching state. No this is not going to stop, because even though the case could have been made that the Agricultural Revolution was not the best it went ahead anyway, and similar to with the "permanent revolution" of industrialization. Happiness is relative and that explains how globalization also creates craving: young men of today compare themselves to Cristiano Ronaldo and not the people in their immediate environment as in times past. It also explains how people lived better under Hosni Mubarak than earlier generations, but still overthrew him. A peasant who completed his mud hut is relatively just a satisfied as a banker who finally paid off his New York penthouse... Because happiness is ultimately relative and not absolute.
Could man get so good with technology that he ends up replacing himself? It sure does seem that way....
Second order thoughts:
1. This author has a political ax to grind, and it is showing. It's like he is creating new language to describe postmodernism. (That's the land where everything is "socially constructed." He neologizes the term "imagined reality/hierarchy/etc ")
He also predictably makes the hackneyed comparison to the caste system in India and segregation in the United States. NO, it is not that black people were/are to be a social "spiritual pollution." It's just that they are (as a matter of fact) the source of a lot of crime, and not everybody wants to live around that.
There are a couple of subchapters called "The Cult of the Free Market" and "The Capitalist Hell," so there's that.
2. Some things that he says are just empirically false. ([p.136]: ".... Objective biological differences, such as skin color and hair type, but there is no evidence that the difference is extend to intelligence or morality.") Others are questionable. (The word "Eurasia" is well attested, but for some reason he insists on calling it "Afro-Asia."
3. He has bought into the sex≠gender/patriarchy hysteria, and as in Israeli Jew, it seems supremely improbable that he can really believe this. (No wonder this book was so popular.)
4. His thinking is crystal clear when he places liberalism, Communism, and Nazism among the pantheon of natural law religions. He would have been clearer if he had put Environmentalism in. The thinking gets a bit more muddled when he puts capitalism and nationalism in the same subset as the first three.
5. Harari cites a number of iron laws of history. Probably would have been better if he'd put them all in one list in the appendix.
6. Harari's argument against determinism is something that we have all heard before: it may have turned out this way, but there's no reason it could not have been otherwise. (I think the first time I ever read this was in Milan Kundera's "The Joke.")
7. Gilgamesh Project: if its succeeds, I wonder what could be the point? Time is valuable when it's finite, but if it's infinite then what is the value of a life? Also, a lot of bad ideas just have to wait for people who have them to die. If people could live forever, is progress installed eternally? Where do we put all these people? How many babies can each person have?
Neat factoids:
1. Wheat covers 870,000² mi of the Earth's surface, 10 times the size of Britain.
2. The cuneiform script was used in the Middle East for 3,000 years and was completely forgotten around 1,000 years ago. And rediscovered in the 1830s in India in the context of the British cataloging their new conquest.
4. No small part of the Netherlands getting out from abundant Spanish rule was the fact that they were significantly more skillful financiers of War than the Spaniards were.
5. Headlines notwithstanding, these times are a lot more peaceful when they have ever been: In the year 2000, wars caused the deaths of $310,000 individuals but violent crime killed another $520,000. Even so, it is 1.5% of the 56 million people who died in that year. 1.26 million died in car accidents and 815,000 people committed suicide.
6. 300 million Indians were managed by less than 5,000 British officials, 40 to 70,000 British soldiers, and maybe another 100, 000 British business people. (A ratio of 1714: 1.)
7. Sometimes technology can do things that probably shouldn't be done. Of course, people plan to reconstruct a woolly mammoth from an element. And now that the Neanderthal genome has been sequenced, we can implant that DNA into a Sapiens ovum (lots of women have already volunteered to give birth to a neanderthal).
8. Other Frankenstein technologies in the pipeline: retinal prosthesis, bionic arms activated by thought, insect cyborgs, direct two-way brain computer interface that allows the reading of human brain signals.
9. Mapping the first human genome took 15 years and cost 3 billion dollars. Today a person's genome can be decoded within a few weeks at the cost of a few hundred dollars.
Quotes:
1. One of history's iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
2. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was plowing fields and carrying water buckets.
3. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them.
4. The truly unnatural behavior......simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture is ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesize, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.
5. The victory of Rome over Numantia was so complete that the victors co-opted the very memory of the vanquished.
6. So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order...... In fact, monotheism is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist god, but also in the dualist devil, and polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts.
7. It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable and hindsight was far from obvious at the time.
8. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.
Verdict:
This is a huge, thoughtful book. I'm of a mind to keep it in reread it several years later because there's probably too much information to be picked up on a first pass.
Vocabulary:
coprolite
First Wave Extinction (caused by foragers)
Second Wave Extinction (caused by farmers)
Third Wave Extinction (caused by industrialization)
partial script
full script
quipus
millares
Jacob Bernoulli's Law of Large Numbers
lacuna
Gilgamesh Project