“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari
It is hard to do such a dense and well written book justice in a short blog post. I really enjoyed the content and writing style.
Much of content overlaps with books like “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “The third Chimpanzee” by Jared Diamond. The mass extinctions and genocides directly attributed to our ancestors are covered. The book is very careful to draw clear boundaries around the limits of our historical knowledge.
The first concept that really got me thinking was Culture as shared myth or fiction. Getting large groups of humans to live together requires mechanisms to limit anti-social behaviour, but violence and surveillance do not scale well. Shared fictions like the hierarchy of royalty over common people can be much more effective at regulating behavior. The clearest example from the book is the concept of a corporation. It exists only because people accept that it exists. It does not exist because a few people scribbled on some paper, although the ritual can be important. A corporation is technically just a group of people. What binds them together is an imagined construct of hierarchy, rules, values and an identity which is accepted as real by potentially millions of people.
One of my favorite lines of the book:
Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy
disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and
inevitable.
Every culture from the Greeks to modern democracy to Communist Russia made the same claim of being natural and inevitable. The book even takes on imaged hierarchies like racial and gender and dismantles their proponents. Money is another convenient shared fiction that many people claim as inevitable. It also makes the excellent point that our current society places rich above poor and this is no more natural than placing men above women or whites above blacks. It makes the current discussions of wealth inequality even more urgent.
There is so much thought provoking material in this book I cannot cover it all. The last section talks about the future of our species: changing our genetics, becoming cyborgs and creating an intelligence more capable than our own. Each of these paths has mind boggling possibilities. The final line of the book sums it up very well:
Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real
question facing us is not "What do we want to become?" but "What
do we want to want?" Those who are not spooked by this question
probably haven't given it enough thought.
It is a book that changed the way I see and think about the world. That is highest praise for a book that I can think of.
Rating: Highly recommended