Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari — Book Notes

Rating: 9/10

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High-Level Thoughts

Exactly what the title seeks to convey: a brief history of humankind. Harari eloquently proceeds the reader through the development of humankind: the cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution, the unification of humankind, and finally the scientific revolution. Harari describes three forces that shaped human organization: money, religion, and imperialism. A book that will change the way you see human interaction, spark your curiosity in human development, and leave you questioning many of the establishments under which we live. Highly recommend.

Part 1 — The Cognitive Revolution

Chapter 1 — An Animal of No Significance

Neanderthals, Sapiens, and Denisova all we’re humans at one point in Earth
Two theories — interbreed and replacement regarding humans and Neanderthals combining. Recent evidence has come out support interbreeding
At some point drove neanderthals (who were bigger, stronger, but dumber and less socially able) to extinction
Human control of fire rocketed us from right in the middle of the food chain to the top

Chapter 2 — The Tree of Knowledge

The reason we survived over the other humans is our development of language
Two theories — one was to communicate danger more formally (chimps vs. us) and the other the gossip theory
Ability to produce fiction is completely unique to Homo Sapiens
Result of cognitive revolution was first the ability to transmit large information, then the ability to gossip about peers to allow for cohesion of groups roughly 150 in size, then ability to create fictitious elements like religion and LLCs that allow for cohesion of thousands

Chapter 3 — A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

Dogs were domesticated before the Agricultural revolution
Life expectancy of hunter gatherers was almost 50!
Animism is the belief that almost every place, animal, plant etc has awareness and feelings
Theism is the belief that the world is run based on the relationship between humans and a small group of Gods or a God
All this aside, it’s impossible to know about the cultures lived by these groups. There is extreme variance between them and really no hard evidence to back up any real claim

Chapter 4 — Noah’s Ark

Humans settled Australia roughly 45,000 years ago, and while some want to blame climate for the ensuing extinction, the evidence was circumstantial
Alaska to America straight unfroze about 14,000 years ago, allowing for mass settling of all areas of the Americas within about 2,000 years, almost immediately started to kill off all species of big mammals
The idea that humans lived at peace with their environment in the past is not true. We simply didn’t do it in 100 years, it took thousands. Our pace of exenjinction of certain species has simply accelerated with technological advancement

Part 2 — The Agricultural Revolution

Chapter 5 — History’s Biggest Fraud

The idea of the agricultural revolution was to increase quality of life and ease of life — the idea that being a farmer was going to better than a hunter gatherer
Instead, the slow accumulation of habits over a thousand years led humans to dependence on what was once a luxury — this dependence had unforeseen consequences on health and standard of living that were negative such as increased disease, infant mortality, and sheer difficulty of work
Another theory is that we began to cultivate wheat to feed the religious temple in Gobleki Tepe
Cows, sheep, pigs etc, were beneficiaries of the agricultural revolution from a “widesperad DNA” perspective, but from an individual suffering perspective, their quality of life is much lower than a nearly extinct rhinoceros

Chapter 6 — Building Pyramids

Farmers began the agricultural revolution by developing a future anxiety that drove their daily activity
Mass cooperation depends on the imagined realities brought forth to unite groups of people (religion, government, etc) - these myths such as the Declaration or Hamurabi have the power to support entire complex organizations
To instill an imagined reality, you never mention it is actual imagined, and you educate people in the reality thoroughly from a young age
Three things prevent people from realizing the order organizing their lives is imagined
- The imagined order is embedded in the material world. i.e. in individualistic societies, every child has their own room
- The imagined order shapes our desires — i.e. taking a foreign vacation is a result of the marrying of consumerism and romanticism
- The imagined order is inter-subjective — it depends on the ubiquity of thought of a large group, and thus one detractor is unable to sway the mass

Chapter 7 — Memory Overload

With just language, Sapiens ran out of capacity in their memory banks for the complex mathematical information that needed to be stored to operate large scale socities
Starting in Mesopotamia, the Sumerians created the first partial script (could not do poetry, but could store numbers). This system was bass 6
In about 900 AD, the 0-9 number system took hold, and transformed the storage of information infinitely — the next largest move was the creation of Binary 0-1

Chapter 8 — There is No Justice in History

There are negligible biological differences between different races of homo sapiens
American race-based hierarchy stemmed initially from a genetic superiority of Africans to malaria, causing an increase in slaves from Africa
All social hierarchies start with a chance event that is then supported and reinforced through myths and fiction
The idea of natural/unnatural concepts such as homosexuality are based on Christian theology
Man and woman = cultural, male and female = biological. Have been different throughout history
Three theories as to why almost all societies have been patriarchal — muscular dominance, aggressiveness trait dominance, and dependence genes stemming from the raising of a child

Part 3 — The Unification of HumanKind

Chapter 9 — The Arrow of History

Equality and individual freedom are two fundamental values that contradict one another. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction
A catch-22 is a unwinnable situation
Measured by the number of independent societies with their own beliefs about fundamental truths, Earth is tending toward a single united way of operating.
Humans developed the idea of ‘us vs them’. Three universal orders had potential to unit all of humankind: monetary order, political order, and religious order.

Chapter 10 — The Scent of Money

While bartering works with small number of goods, keeping track of the exchange rates for a large array of products is impossible. This is why money was invented
Money is a universal medium of exchange allowing for the coversion of any good into anything else — but trust is the material on which all currencies are minted
First system of money from the same society that writing originated — the Sumerians of Mesopotamia — first was barley, then the silver shekel
By the 1st century AD, nearly the entire globe had the belief in gold and silver coins as the global means of exchange
The global monetary system was brought to equilibrium by arbitrageurs
Money is based on two things: Universal convertibility, and Universal trust

Chapter 11 — Imperial Visions

An empire is a political order with two important characteristics

Must rule over a significant number of distinct peoples, each possessing a different cultural identity and a separate territory
Must have flexible borders and a potentially unlimited appetite

The contemporary critique of empires takes two forms

Empires do not work — not possible le to effectively rule over a large number of peoples
If it can be done, it should not be done, because empires are evil engines

The first empire we have definitive information was the Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great (2250 BC)

The imperial cycle

Small group establishes a big empire
Imperial culture is forged
Imperial culture is adopted by the subject peoples
Subject peoples demand equal status in the name of common imperial values
Empire’s founders lose their dominance
Imperial culture continues to flourish and develop

The idea that disavowing a legacy of a brutal empire into its preceding ‘pure’ cultures is likely instead defending the legacy of an older and not less brutal empire

The new global empire is a result of the interconnectedness of the world growing quickly, as well as the growing appearance of global problems

Chapter 12 — The Law of Religion

Religion can be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order
Must hold there there is a superhuman order which is not a product of human whims
- Based on this order, religion established norms and values that is considers binding
The most successful religions are the ones that espouse a universal superhuman order, and insist on spreading that belief to everyone
Polytheism arose by attributing gods to individual local things such as the fertility god or rain god. It exalted humans as the having the influence on the entire ecosystem based on our adherence to the gods
The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguished it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases — i.e. the Fates for Greece
Protestsants — god suffered for all of us and thus opened heaven to all of us. Catholics — faith not enough, believers had to participate in rituals and do good deeds
Polytheism lives on within monotheism under just a different name, i.e. saints and disciples
Many monotheistic religions devolved into dualist religions, which inherently contradicts itself
Syncretism is the blending of monotheism, dualism, polytheism, and animism, and christianity is the best example
Stoicism, Buddhism, etc were brought about and characters by their disregard of gods and their influence
Suffering is caused by the behavior patterns of ones own mind
Buddhist principles — suffering arises from craving, the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from carving; the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is — known as Dharma
In recent years, religion and the worship of man itself has been labeled ‘ideologies’ which is to say Communism is no different in Islam in what is fundamentally guiding
Liberal humanism — the idea that the liberty of individuals is too important to be messed with. Socialist humanism — humanity is collective rather than individualistic. Evolutionary huuman — idea that humanity is a mutable species, and thus encourage its evolution into superhuman

Chapter 13 — The Secret to Success

The nature in which religion etc unfolded is often viewed as inevitable but instead was extremely probabilistic
Historians struggle with explaining things happened, as they struggle to find causal connections that account for the occurrence of a particular series of events to the exclusion of all others
To acknowledge that history is not deterministic is the acknowledge that it is just a coincidence that most people today believe in nationalism, capitalism , and human rights
Chaotic systems come in two shapes — level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it, i.e. the weather. Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately — i.e. a stock price
Memetics — culture evolution is based on the replication of cultural information units called memes.
Game theory explains how in multi-player systems, views and behavior patterns that harm all players nevertheless manage to take root and spread
Historys choices are not made necesillary the benefit of all humans. The dynamics of history are not directed toward enhancing human well-being. It’s essentially a random process that brings about culture

Part Four — The Scientific Revolution

Chapter 14 — The Discovery of Ignorance

In the last 500 years, we have 14x’d the population, 240x’d the production, and 115x’d overall energy consumptions
Most influential moment of the past 500 years was the detonation of the atomic bomb, as it indicated the humankind had the capability to end its race
Modern science admitted ignorance — it said we have things to discover. Having admitted this, it seeks to gain this new knowledge by gathering observations and using mathematical tools to investigate them. It then takes these new theories and looks to acquire new powers, and in particular develop new technologies
Ancient traditions of knowledge said an individual might be ignorant to something, and thus just need advice of someone wiser. Similarly, an entire tradition might be ignorant of something unimportant. If the god’s didn’t tell us, it must be unimportant
Modern day science admits collective ignorance regarding the most important questions
Mathematics and statistics differentiated the pursuit of knowledge from its more primal ways.
Poverty increasingly seen as a technical problem, and there is two kinds. Social poverty is what witholds from some people the opportunities available to others, and biological poverty which puts the the lives of individuals at risk due to lack of food or shelter
The Gilgamesh Project is the idea that the humankind needs to defeat death instead of accepting it as the inevitable reality
Death suffered its worst setbacks in the area of infant mortality
Almost all scientific research is now dictated by a political agenda. Scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology
The feedback loop between science, empire, and capital has arguable been history’s chief engine for the past 500 years