Review of “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (2/5)

Hello again. I’m back for part two of my detailed review of Sapiens. In part one, we started with the emergence of several hominid species appearing a couple of million years ago. That was then followed by “the Cognitive Revolution” about 70,000 years ago, which brought Homo sapiens from a place of relative obscurity to the cusp of global dominance. That dominance would be built off the back of “the Agricultural Revolution”, which started about 12,000 years ago and is the topic of part two of Sapiens. But what kind of revolution was this and was it a good thing? Let’s look at the four chapters in this section of the book to learn more. As before, I’ll share quotes from the 2014 eBook and then react to them along the way. 
 
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Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
Chapter 5 History’s Biggest Fraud

• (p. 87) For 2.5 million years humans fed themselves by gathering plants and hunting animals that lived and bred without their intervention.
• (p. 87) All this changed about 10,000 years ago, when Sapiens began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species. From sunrise to sunset humans sowed seeds, watered plants, plucked weeds from the ground, and led sheep to prime pastures. This work, they thought, would provide them with more fruit, grain, and meat. It was a revolution in the way humans lived—the Agricultural Revolution.
• (p. 90) The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.
• (p. 90) The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.
• (p. 91) Human spines, knees, necks, and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis, and hernias.
• (p. 92) Farming societies have, until very recently, relied for the great bulk of their calorie intake on a small variety of domesticated plants. In many areas, they relied on just a single staple, such as wheat, potatoes, or rice. If the rains failed or clouds of locusts arrived or if a fungus infected that staple species, peasants died by the thousands and millions.
• (p. 93) It offered nothing for people as individuals. Yet it did bestow something on Homo sapiens as a species. Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.
• (p. 94) The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. … This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
• (p. 97) It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan. The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children.
• (p. 98) One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally, they reach a point where they can’t live without it.
• (p. 100) But there’s another possibility. Maybe it wasn’t the search for an easier life that brought about the transformation. Maybe Sapiens had other aspirations, and were consciously willing to make their lives harder in order to achieve them.
• (p. 101) The only way to build Göbekli Tepe was for thousands of foragers belonging to different bands and tribes to cooperate over an extended period of time. Only a sophisticated religious or ideological system could sustain such efforts.
• (p. 104) Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived.
• (p. 109) This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.

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Ouch. I’ve always found this denigration of the agricultural revolution (and lionization of hunter-gatherer life) to miss the point about everything great that modernity permits. But Harari backs up his judgment with lots of facts about diet, leisure time, and illnesses. For more on this, my friend and author Rob Swigart wrote a fascinating book called Mixed Harvest: Stories from the Human Past that explores this time in human history. It’s a groundbreaking mix of short stories interwoven with scientific facts that provided Rob with inspiration.
 
Still, I do have hope that all of the progress enabled by more food, more people, and more specialization will one day inarguably lead to better things. We’re in the middle of this living experiment right now and it’s not looking too good in the political landscape these days. Fermi’s paradox also makes us wonder if techno-civilizations can last. But I’m still a long-term optimist about this. Misery is not a necessity for progress. We can do better if we throw off the “elites” who don’t care about others’ misery. Nothing in evolution precludes that and “the arc of the moral universe is long.” We are not doomed to a repugnant conclusion. The wonderful book Small Giants profiled several businesses that “chose to be great instead of big”. Sapiens could do the same. My co-authored paper “Rebuilding the Harm Principle” addressed this in much more detail and is one example of how we could consciously design our society to achieve aspirations other than mere maximalization of profits and populations.
 
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Chapter 6 Building Pyramids

• (p. 110) Farming enabled populations to increase so radically and rapidly that no complex agricultural society could ever again sustain itself if it returned to hunting and gathering.
• (ppp.113-4) The stress of farming had far-reaching consequences. It was the foundation of large-scale political and social systems. Sadly, the diligent peasants almost never achieved the future economic security they so craved through their hard work in the present. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.
• (p. 114) The mere fact that one can feed a thousand people in the same town or a million people in the same kingdom does not guarantee that they can agree how to divide the land and water, how to settle disputes and conflicts, and how to act in times of drought or war.
• (p. 115) The problem at the root of such calamities is that humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals. The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms, and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.
• (p. 115) Despite the lack of such biological instincts, during the foraging era, hundreds of people were able to cooperate thanks to their shared myths.
• (p. 115) Stories about ancestral spirits and tribal totems were strong enough to enable 500 people to trade seashells, celebrate the odd festival, and join forces to wipe out a Neanderthal band, but no more than that. Mythology, the ancient sociologist would have thought, could not possibly enable millions of strangers to cooperate on a daily basis. But that turned out to be wrong. Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined.
• (p. 116) we mustn’t harbor rosy illusions about ‘mass cooperation networks’ operating in pharaonic Egypt or the Roman Empire. ‘Cooperation’ sounds very altruistic, but is not always voluntary and seldom egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation.
• (p. 122) Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.
• (p. 124) We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.
• (p. 126) How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature.
• (p. 126) You also educate people thoroughly. From the moment they are born, you constantly remind them of the principles of the imagined order, which are incorporated into anything and everything. They are incorporated into fairy tales, dramas, paintings, songs, etiquette, political propaganda, architecture, recipes, and fashions.
• (p. 127) Three main factors prevent people from realizing that the order organizing their lives exists only in their imagination:
• (p. 127) a. The imagined order is embedded in the material world.
• (p. 127) b. The imagined order shapes our desires.
• (p. 131) c. The imagined order is intersubjective.
• (p. 132) imagined orders are intersubjective, so in order to change them we must simultaneously change the consciousness of billions of people, which is not easy. A change of such magnitude can be accomplished only with the help of a complex organization, such as a political party, an ideological movement, or a religious cult. However, in order to establish such complex organizations, it’s necessary to convince many strangers to cooperate with one another. And this will happen only if these strangers believe in some shared myths. It follows that in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.

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It may be a historical fact that “Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up”, but it is an evolutionary fact that mass cooperation beats selfish competition in the long run. We don’t need a genetic instinct for mass cooperation to evolve either. We just need special conditions, as identified in the book Prosocial. We Sapiens are already fully equipped to mentally create larger and larger tribes that we identify with and support. The rise in the blink of evolutionary time of cities, regions, nations, and international blocs for which people give their lives is clear evidence of this. We just have to continue this trend to its logical conclusion. Most human cooperation networks may have been geared towards oppression and exploitation, but that is only history, not fate. The principles of equality, fairness, and justice may not have objective validity. (Jeremy Bentham called these natural rights “nonsense on stilts”.) But it is a clearly observable fact that following these principles does improve the lives and well-being of communities who agree to follow them. This fact does not need to be hidden away from the masses via imagined stories. Instead, the worldview of evolutionary philosophy could provide a rational basis for exactly the kind of ideological movement that inspires worldwide, intersubjective agreements for cooperation. We need only to spread the meme that all of life is in this fight against death together. And we can do better collectively than we can in warring tribes.
 
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Chapter 7 Memory Overload

• (p. 134) puppies throughout the world have the rules for rough-and-tumble play hard-wired into their genes.
• (p. 135) Bees don’t need lawyers, because there is no danger that they might forget or violate the hive constitution. The queen does not cheat the cleaner bees of their food, and they never go on strike demanding higher wages.
• (p. 136) evolutionary pressures have adapted the human brain to store immense quantities of botanical, zoological, topographical, and social information.
• (p. 138) Alas, the first texts of history contain no philosophical insights, no poetry, legends, laws, or even royal triumphs. They are humdrum economic documents, recording the payment of taxes, the accumulation of debts, and the ownership of property.
• (p. 146) The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalization and bureaucracy.

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Well, that is a sweeping generalization about the impact of human script. I highly doubt that free association and holistic thinking was better before the written word. I would argue that holistic thinking is actually much easier to generate after the invention of abstract terminology and the sweeping views that “immense quantities of information” can give us. Sure, compartmentalization does happen, but even that has driven immense gains in knowledge by providing dedicated areas of specialization to millions and millions of inquisitive researchers. And we can always strive for consilience across these disciplines once they are established.
 
As for bureaucracy, that gets a bad rap too. Without proper management and incentives, bureaucracies can of course become sclerotic. In fact, my first job after my MBA degree was “making government more efficient” in the FBI Special Advisor Program, which was entirely dedicated to improving bureaucracy. (Long before Elon Musk and DOGE made a mockery of that calling.) But as David Sloan Wilson has written:
 
“Cooperative social life requires regulation. Regulation comes naturally for small human groups but must be constructed for large human groups. Some forms of regulation will work well and others will work poorly. We can argue at length about smart vs. dumb regulation but the concept of no regulation should be forever laid to rest.”
 
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Chapter 8 There Is No Justice in History

• (p. 149) Understanding human history in the millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organize themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.
• (p. 149) The imagined orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people into make-believe groups, arranged in a hierarchy. The upper levels enjoyed privileges and power, while the lower ones suffered from discrimination and oppression.
• (p. 150) it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.
• (p. 152) Modern Westerners are taught to scoff at the idea of racial hierarchy. They are shocked by laws prohibiting blacks to live in white neighborhoods, or to study in white schools, or to be treated in white hospitals. But the hierarchy of rich and poor—which mandates that rich people live in separate and more luxurious neighborhoods, study in separate and more prestigious schools, and receive medical treatment in separate and better-equipped facilities—seems perfectly sensible to many Americans and Europeans.
• (p. 154) All societies are based on imagined hierarchies, but not necessarily on the same hierarchies. What accounts for the differences?
• (p. 158) Separation of the races was maintained by racist legislation and social custom. The result was a self-reinforcing cycle of cause and effect, a vicious circle.
• (pp. 160-1) Such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an imagined hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence. Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time.
• (p. 164) How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others.
• (p. 164) A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has 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.
• (p. 165) evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago.
• (p. 166) Biologically, humans are divided into males and females. A male Homo sapiens has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome; a female Homo sapiens has two Xs. But ‘man’ and ‘woman’ name social, not biological, categories. While in the great majority of cases in most human societies, men are males and women are females, the social terms carry a lot of baggage that has only a tenuous, if any, relationship to the biological terms.
• (p. 170) Since most masculine and feminine qualities are cultural rather than biological, no society automatically crowns each male a man, or every female a woman. Nor are these titles laurels that can be rested on once they are acquired.
• (p. 172) there is some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood. We do not know what this reason is. There are plenty of theories, none of them convincing.
• (p. 177) How did it happen that in the one species whose success depends above all on cooperation, individuals who are supposedly less cooperative (men) control individuals who are supposedly more cooperative (women)? At present, we have no good answer.

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These are very good examples to pay attention to, but evolutionary studies have even more to teach us about Harari’s “single question” here. (“How did humans organize themselves in mass-cooperation networks?”) I’ve already written at length about David Sloan Wilson’s organization called Prosocial that is working on answering this and improving such mass-cooperation. See Prosocial (In Theory) and Prosocial (In Practice) for more on that.
 
Overall, I found this second part of Sapiens to be unnecessarily pessimistic and a bit speculative and uninformed about the ways that cooperation has been achieved. But it did provide a powerful presentation of the dangers of ignoring these lessons (which we still need to learn!). Next time, part three will about the further “unification of humankind”. Since this is a key element of Why Evolutionary Philosophy Matters, I can hardly wait.