Sapiens

It is a good overview of world history. I really enjoyed the parts that were new to me. I didn't know the story of the fall of the Aztec Empire. I didn't know that China and India were significantly ahead of Europe economically in 1500 and I didn't know why they failed to jump into the Industrial Revolution. I liked the chapters that explained shifting perspectives.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans began to draw world maps with lots of empty spaces – one indication of the development of the scientific mindset, as well as of the European imperial drive. The empty maps were a psychological and ideological breakthrough, a clear admission that Europeans were ignorant of large parts of the world.

Anyone looking at the map and possessing even minimal curiosity is tempted to ask, ‘What’s beyond this point?’ The map gives no answers. It invites the observer to set sail and find out .

Only forty years passed between the moment Einstein determined that any kind of mass could be converted into energy – that’s what E = mc² means – and the moment atom bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear power stations mushroomed all over the globe.

I'd heard a lot of good about this book, and the start was promising, but then I started to get a little annoyed...



There are natural limitations to a book, and a book like this, taking so broad a subject, must of necessity be superficial and selective, but even so, this one quickly wound up feeling far less a history of humankind, and far more a history of Euro-american humankind. Most annoying conisdering how global a view it started with. And so towards the end I come across bits like this:



"When judging modernity, it is all too tempting to take the viewpoint of a twenty-first century middle-class Westerner. We must not forget the viewpoints of a nineteenth-century Welsh coal miner, Chinese opium addict or Tasmanian Aborigine. Truganini is not less important than Homer Simpson."



And that all sounds very good, and I agree, but I wonder how it is that Harari managed to not take his own advice...



I am also left with the feeling that Harari overly romanticises the pre-Agricultural hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but also pre-Industrial societies. Certainly the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions were highly disruptive and brought many disadvantages, but sitting here in the comfort of a stable, 21st century democracy, it's hard not to see the advantages those revolutions have brought. Vaccines, for starters.



Then, looking at the future, the rise of information technology, the possibility of artificial intelligence:



"What is a spaceship compared to an eternally young cyborg who does not breed and has no sexuality, who can share thoughts directly with other beings, whose abilities to focus and remember are a thousand times greater than our own, and sho is never angry or sad, but has emotions and desires that we cannot begin to imagine?

Science fiction rarely describes such a future, because an accurate description is by definition incomprehensible."



I recommend Harari try reading Isaac Asimov. "I, Robot" and "Bicentennial Man" do not match the above description (robots vs. cyborgs), but they do imagine a future where AI has developed to the point of taking on a life of its own.



So, "Sapiens" gets off to a promising start, but quickly descends into a glib, superficial, eurocentric disappointment.

This history of mankind starts out with a bang, reminding us that the truths we hold self-evident are imagined, and seems like an introduction to cultural anthropology presented as a history with economics and assorted other social science ideas thrown in. It becomes less focused as it progresses and sometimes seems less like the work of an Israeli history professor and more like hot air from the guy next to you at the bar. Harari brings up the old saw that Communism and Capitalism are essentially religions. He mentions the term syncretism to describe how people run their religious ideas together as it pleases them, but he seems to take the Nazi's (another religion) "tenets" at face value as if people always followed them for something besides being coerced or for their own self-interest or for some other reason having nothing to do with some psychopath's tenets. If he mentions evolutionary psychology, it is in passing. Harari spends some time discussing our knowledge of the neurotransmitters associated with happiness, but he says, "In addition, most biologists are not fanatics. They maintain that happiness is determined mainly by biochemistry, but they agree that psychological and sociological factors also have their place." To me, this shows a misunderstanding of the whole business. The neurotransmitters are a gross or high-level mechanism that is correlated with some behavior or feeling. They do not preclude any particular associated sociological factor. I wonder if the biologists that he thinks are fanatics, are the ones who would tell him that eventually (if the grant money holds up) all brain activity will be reduced to its physical mechanisms.