Sapiens - Why humans dominate the Earth?

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 – Yuval Noah Harari

There are some books that make you sit up and do a lot of “deep thinking”, make you question your core beliefs and as a result, possibly alter you as a person. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari is one of them.

Harari is an Israeli historian and a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is gay, vegan and a practitioner of Vipasana meditation for 20 years (and vocal about all of them). Harari specialized in medieval and military history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has a Doctorate from Oxford. He has many best sellers and articles to his name, Sapiens being the foremost among them. Sapiens was published in Hebrew in 2011, became a national best seller in Israel and was published in English in 2014; it has since been translated into some 50 languages. It made Harari a superstar.

Sapiens is breath-taking in its scope (which is the entire history of our Human race and projections for the future thrown in for a good measure!), Provocative in its assertions, entertaining in its language; this book is surely an unputdownable.  Some of what is written in the book is not new or original, some are wild assertions too, but the extraordinary writing paints a macro view of the different stages of our evolution through our many revolutions makes this book very engaging and important. As you read, you will agree that Harari does have a different way of looking at things e.g., "we did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us", “Consistency is the playground of dull minds”  (The last one would have been inspired by Oscar Wilde who said “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative” ).

Sapiens is mostly about how we (Humans) came to dominate the Earth - in spite of having many disadvantages and being an “insignificant animal” (sic) and a little about what may lie ahead for us in the years to come. The book traces human history through various human revolutions, It starts with the first, about 70,000 years ago with the cognitive revolution, and then to around 12,000 years ago as the agricultural revolution starts with domestication of plants and animals and start to settle down in colonies; third is the scientific revolution, about 500 years ago that leads to industrial and later information revolution about 50 years ago and then the Biotech revolution – which is just evolving and transforming; probably into bio-engineered cyborgs that could live forever – which in some ways signal the end for Sapiens!

The key change, of course is the start of the cognitive revolution, which set us on a different evolutionary arc. This Cognitive revolution helped us to create stories and imagined realities (myths) like money, country, God (yes, all these are only real because we have collectively chosen to believe so), this enabled us to work in large groups in a flexible, cooperative manner, that in turn enabled us to create economy, empire and religion. This was a game-changer as we out ran (or wiped out) our competitors including our cousins the powerful Neanderthals - who lived until about 40,000 years ago. Much like the network of low powered computers made the mighty standalone mainframes insignificant and eventually obsolete. Long story short; our human domination is the outcome of our cooperation and ability to use tools and technologies and the cooperation is because of our beliefs in common ideological or religious myths.

The future according to Harari, holds dangers and opportunities. From what I read, opportunities for a minority and dangers for the majority, primarily because of the gaps between rich and poor and a huge class of humans who would be rendered useless thru AI. We are seeing both these scenarios are already in play, the divide between poor and rich is wider than ever before – (the Oxfam report states that the wealth gap continued to widen in 2017, with 82% of global wealth generated going to the wealthiest 1%. Another report states that 2,153 billionaires owned as much wealth as the bottom 4.6 billion people in 2019) and more and more workers losing jobs to AI, robotics and automation in general and unable to repurpose themselves (Forrester predicts job losses of 29% by 2030 with only 13% job creation to compensate). Such economic disparity along with job loss is a perfect recipe for political instability and a general moral crisis (Widening income inequality is the defining challenge of our time- 2015 IMF report). History proves that humans have not handled power responsibly, for us the relationship between power and responsibility is inversely proportional.

Harari touches upon various topics across a wide spectrum; globalization, human greed, the definition of happiness; whatever the topic Harari never ceases to surprise with his ability to connect the dots (which at times, does look a little far-fetched) and thus creating an amazing visual of the past and future of mankind. So, as Aristotle said; ‘It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it’ or as Venkat says ‘leave your opinions in the parking lot’ and get ready to ‘immerse yourself’ (this is important) and start to question your values, judgements and the opinions that you left behind at the parking lot!

Sapiens is listed as one of 10 favourite books of Bill Gates and is the Gaurdian’s best brainy books of the decade

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”

― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind