Yuval Noah Harari.  Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

In a paragraph

Homo Sapiens have progressed through the cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution and the scientific revolution, eliminating other homo species and megaflora. We create collective fictions such as hierarchies, nations, religions and money that facilitate cooperation.  We do not know enough about historic and current happiness, but the agricultural revolution probably reduced happiness.

Key points

• Originally an animal of no significance. The species Sapiens (wise) of the genus Homo (man). It’s our current exclusivity, not that multi-species past, that is peculiar – and perhaps incriminating. Extinction of Neanderthals around 30,000 years ago, Homo Floresiensis 13,000 years ago. Humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust.

• New ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal.

• Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. Sapiens have been living in a dual reality: the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and the inter-subjective imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers, which has made us the masters of creation.

• For nearly the entire history of our species, Sapiens lived as foragers. There hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens, only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies.’

• The historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of.

• Most of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize, potatoes, millet and barley. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

• Around 10,000 BC, before the transition to agriculture, earth was home to about 5–8 million nomadic foragers. By the first century AD, only 1–2 million foragers remained, but their numbers were dwarfed by the world’s 250 million farmers. Attachment to ‘my house’ and separation from the neighbours became the psychological hallmark of a much more self-centred creature. They accumulated objects that tied them down. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets. Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation.

• 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. Never admit that the order is imagined, insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature and woven into the tapestry of life. Most people dedicate their lives to building pyramids, only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.

• 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 compartmentalisation and bureaucracy. There are no lawyer bees while the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant.

• ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others. During the last century gender roles have undergone a tremendous revolution, which makes the history of gender so bewildering. If, as is being demonstrated today so clearly, the patriarchal system has been based on unfounded myths rather than on biological facts, what accounts for its universality?

• Every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions. Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality. Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the first people to foresee the potential unity of humankind.

• Money was created many times in many places. Its development required no technological change, it was a purely mental revolution. More than 90 per cent of all money exists only on computer servers. Money frees apple sellers from the need to search out apple-craving shoemakers, because everyone always wants money. Money is a universal medium of exchange that enables people to convert almost everything into almost anything else. Money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct, a figment of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. Initially, when the first versions of money were created, people didn’t have this sort of trust, so it was necessary to define as ‘money’ things that had real intrinsic value.  Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively. We do not trust the stranger, or the next-door neighbour – we trust the coin they hold. People rely on money to facilitate cooperation with strangers, but they’re afraid it will corrupt human values and intimate relations.

• The imperial steamroller gradually obliterated the unique characteristics of numerous peoples, forging out of them new and much larger groups. Benevolent imperial vision.  The New Global Empire. 

• Religion can be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order. Universal and missionary religions contributed to the unification of humankind. Polytheist Greeks and Hindus thought that deals could be done with lesser gods, while the supreme power has no interests and biases. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. Liberal politics follow the Christian belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature, but science finds no soul.

• What looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable. There is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humans because we lack an objective scale on which to measure such benefit. Like evolution, history disregards the happiness of individual organisms.

• The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. Mere observations are not knowledge – to understand the universe, we need to connect observations into comprehensive theories. Earlier traditions usually formulated their theories in terms of stories, but modern science uses mathematics. There are very few equations, graphs and calculations in the Bible but Newton showed that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Those who attempted to reduce biology, economics and psychology to neat Newtonian equations have discovered that these fields have a level of complexity that makes such an aspiration futile.

• Until the Scientific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress. The stories of Babel and Icarus told of hubris.  Poverty, sickness, wars, famines, old age and death itself were not the inevitable fate of humankind. They were simply the fruits of our ignorance.  Societies have suffered from two kinds of poverty: social poverty, which withholds from some people the opportunities available to others; and biological poverty, which puts the very lives of individuals at risk due to lack of food and shelter. Perhaps social poverty can never be eradicated, but in many countries around the world biological poverty is a thing of the past. The poor are not necessarily always with us.

• The European scientists and conquerors both began by admitting ignorance and both felt compelled to go out and make new discoveries. Amerigo Vespucci, unlike Columbus, was modern as he believed he had found a new continent. The White Man’s burden.

• Smith’s claim that the selfish urge to increase profits is the basis for collective wealth is revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but also for morals and politics. People become rich not by despoiling others, but by increasing the size of the pie. The empires built by bankers and merchants in frock coats and top hats defeated the empires built by kings and noblemen in gold clothes and shining armour. The mercantile empires had shrewder finances: nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest. Better to do business with merchants than with kings. Capitalism asks that the rich remain greedy and make more money, and that the masses indulge their cravings and buy more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do.

• The most momentous social revolution that ever befell humankind: the collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market.

• Most countries no longer engage in full-scale war for the simple reason that they are no longer independent. We are witnessing the formation of a global empire.

• But are we happier? Historians seldom ask such questions. Yet these are the most important questions one can ask of history. This is the biggest lacuna in our understanding of history. Most current ideologies and political programmes are based on rather flimsy ideas concerning the real source of human happiness. The transition first to agriculture and then to industry has left us to living unnatural lives.  Factory farming might well be the greatest crime in history. Improvement in material conditions may have been offset by the collapse of the family and the community. Advertising may unwittingly be depleting the globe’s reservoirs of contentment. Evolution has moulded us to be neither too miserable nor so happy. Happiness is a biochemical mechanism so happiness begins within and Prozac may help more than political change.  A meaningful life can be satisfying even in the midst of hardship. If our ancestors believed the promise of an afterlife, they may have viewed their lives as more meaningful than us.

• Sapiens are replacing natural selection with intelligent design. Human enhancement may favour the rich.

• We are more powerful than ever before but have very little idea what to do with all that power. We are wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

Comments

I loved Sapiens when I first read it.  But this was because I was a virgin about long history.  I was exhilarated by the book’s ambition to cover the full human story from biology to modernity and by the vigour of the writing. I happily went through the book twice and found myself highlighting numerous fine phrases.

Later I came to see the book’s weaknesses.  Inspired by Sapiens I had read further about long history, found better books, and seen that Sapiens is somewhat slap-dash and often doesn’t get things right.

I have recently reread the book in depth and have concluded that both my initial enthusiasm and my later cooling were appropriate.  Sapiens is indeed a gripping introduction to long history and to certain themes and so can be a good first read, but it lacks rigour, so needs to be treated with caution and followed by further reading.  It is rightly loved by the layman and downgraded by specialists.

Sapiens is a thrilling read, and an impressive intellectual achievement, but it really needed another six months of editing, caveating and fact checking. Harari can lack balance and overstate his case.  For example, he says that myths distinguish us from chimps when really culture more broadly (cumulative knowledge and practices) makes humanity special, and fictions are only a part of culture. Other weaknesses that struck me were his overstatement of the importance of empires, his misunderstanding of modern humanism, and an excessively negative and moralistic attitude to human development.

But for me these negatives are far outweighed by the positives.  The book vividly presents several important, non-controversial facts that are not widely appreciated and can be revolutionary to readers. The book has changed perspectives by teaching about the outlines of long history, the extinction of Neanderthals and megafauna, the significance of fictions and, the nature of money.  Beyond this, Harari gives fascinating, well-expressed angles on more debateable matters. Here, I am generally sympathetic to his perspective which is close to mine – I particularly agree with his atheism, his utilitarian-style thinking and his view of the centrality of making good decisions.

Yes, Sapiens could have benefitted from greater academic rigour.  But it is a valuable book for its compelling writing, its presentation of underappreciated facts and for its many thought-provoking ideas.

Links

Sapiens at Amazon UK

Yuval Noah Harari website

Harari on People I Mostly Admire podcast

Long History: Humanity’s Past and Future as a Cultural Species.  My blogpost discussing eight other great books on long history.

EXTRACTS

Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

 1. Animal of No Significance

Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Cultures, History

Cognitive Revolution, Agricultural Revolution and Scientific Revolution

Insignificant animals

The species Sapiens (wise) of the genus Homo (man).

Homo sapiens, too, belongs to a family. This banal fact used to be one of history’s most closely guarded secrets. Great apes. Homo sapiens has kept hidden an even more disturbing secret. Not only do we possess an abundance of uncivilised cousins, once upon a time we had quite a few brothers and sisters as well.

Australopithecus, Southern Ape, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo soloensis, Homo floresiensis.

It’s our current exclusivity, not that multi-species past, that is peculiar – and perhaps incriminating. As we will shortly see, we Sapiens have good reasons to repress the memory of our siblings.

What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years? Frankly, we don’t know. Humankind paid for its lofty vision and industrious hands with backaches and stiff necks. Women paid extra.

Humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust.

Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Fire also opened the first significant gulf between man and the other animals. Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language.

2. The Tree of Knowledge

The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution.

Our language is amazingly supple.

The most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.

An ivory figurine of a lion-man from the Stadel Cave in Germany (c. 32,000 years ago).

Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal.

Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.

Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We

can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story.  Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

Typical chimpanzee troop consists of about twenty to fifty.  The maximum natural size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. A critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

Peugeot is a figment of our collective imagination. Lawyers call this a ‘legal fiction’.

Fictions, social constructs or imagined realities.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.

In 1789 the French population switched almost overnight from believing in the myth of the divine right of kings to believing in the myth of the sovereignty of the people.

Fast lane of cultural evolution.

As long as Homo erectus did not undergo further genetic alterations, its stone tools remained roughly the same – for close to 2 million years!

The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology.

To understand the rise of Christianity or the French Revolution, it is not enough to comprehend the interaction of genes, hormones and organisms. It is necessary to take into account the interaction of ideas, images and fantasies as well.

One on one, even ten on ten, we are embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees. Significant differences begin to appear only when we cross the threshold of 150 individuals, and when we reach 1,000 – 2,000 individuals, the differences are astounding.

The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation. [Culture broadly rather than only myths distinguishes humanity]

Sapiens create more and more complex games, which each generation develops and elaborates even further.

3. A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

For nearly the entire history of our species, Sapiens lived as foragers.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.

We have incontrovertible evidence of domesticated dogs from about 15,000 years ago.

Loneliness and privacy were rare.

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.

The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies. It would be a mistake, however, to idealise the lives of these ancients. We should beware of demonising or idealising it on the basis of a superficial acquaintance. 

4. The Flood

Were the Australian extinction an isolated event, we could grant humans the benefit of the doubt. But the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.

Eucalyptus trees were rare in Australia 45,000 years ago. But the arrival of Homo sapiens inaugurated a golden age for the species. Since eucalyptuses are particularly resistant to fire, they spread far and wide while other trees and shrubs disappeared.

The elephant birds and the giant lemurs, along with most of the other large animals of Madagascar, suddenly vanished about 1,500 years ago.

Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive.

Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution

5. History’s Biggest Fraud

More than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize, potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.

The average farmer worked harder than the average forager and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat.

This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive.

Humans, like many mammals, have hormonal and genetic mechanisms that help control procreation.

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.

This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.

6. Building Pyramids

Around 10,000 BC, before the transition to agriculture, earth was home to about 5 – 8 million nomadic foragers. By the first century AD, only 1 – 2 million foragers remained (mainly in Australia, America and Africa), but their numbers were dwarfed by the world’s 250 million farmers.

Attachment to ‘my house’ and separation from the neighbours became the psychological hallmark of a much more self-centred creature. They accumulated more and more things – objects, not easily transportable, that tied them down.

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets. Astounding networks of mass cooperation.

Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation.

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.

According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’.

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. How the imagined order is woven into the tapestry of life.

The teenage son of a medieval baron did not have a private room.  Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. ‘Experiences.’

Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other.

Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.

7. Memory Overload

Researchers have failed to locate lawyer bees.

The earliest Sumerian writing was a partial rather than a full script.

It is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror..

Egyptians developed another full script known as hieroglyphics.

They studied and internalised techniques of cataloguing, retrieving and processing information very different from those used by the brain. In the brain, all data is freely associated. Clerks and accountants think in a non-human fashion. They think like filing cabinets.  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 compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.

Set aside the traditional human way of thinking and learn to think anew.

Mathematical script has given rise to an even more revolutionary writing system, a computerised binary script.

8. There Is No Justice in History

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. Hammurabi’s Code, for example, established a pecking order of superiors, commoners and slaves. Superiors got all the good things in life. Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained. The rulers argued that the caste system reflected an eternal cosmic reality rather than a chance historical development.

Since the biological distinctions between different groups of Homo sapiens are, in fact, negligible, biology can’t explain the intricacies of Indian society or American racial dynamics. We can only understand those phenomena by studying the events, circumstances, and power relations that transformed figments of imagination into cruel – and very real – social structures.

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 realise some possibilities while forbidding others.

During the last century gender roles have undergone a tremendous revolution. These dramatic changes are precisely what makes the history of gender so bewildering.

If, as is being demonstrated today so clearly, the patriarchal system has been based on unfounded myths rather than on biological facts, what accounts for the universality and stability of this system?

Part Three: The Unification of Humankind

9. The Arrow of History

Every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions. Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality.

Discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, re-evaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.  Cognitive dissonance. Human cultures are in constant flux.

For 12,000 years, nobody else knew the Tasmanians were there,

The single global culture is not homogeneous.

The first universal order to appear was economic: the monetary order. The second universal order was political: the imperial order. The third universal order was religious: the order of universal religions.

Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the first people who managed to transcend the binary evolutionary division, ‘us vs them’, and to foresee the potential unity of humankind.

This conqueror is money. People who do not believe in the same god or obey the same king are more than willing to use the same money.

10. The Scent of Money

Money was created many times in many places. Its development required no technological change. it was a purely mental revolution.

In fact, even today coins and banknotes are a rare form of money. The sum total of money in the world is about $60 trillion, yet the sum total of coins and banknotes is less than $6 trillion. More than 90 per cent of all money exists only on computer servers. Accordingly, most business transactions are executed by moving electronic data from one computer file to another, without any exchange of physical cash. Only a criminal buys a house, for example, by handing over a suitcase full of banknotes. As long as people are willing to trade goods and services in exchange for electronic data, it’s even better than shiny coins and crisp banknotes – lighter, less bulky, and easier to keep track of.

Money also frees apple experts from the need to search out apple-craving shoemakers, because everyone always wants money. This is perhaps its most basic quality.  Money is thus a universal medium of exchange that enables people to convert almost everything into almost anything else.

Money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct.

People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted.

Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

Initially, when the first versions of money were created, people didn’t have this sort of trust, so it was necessary to define as ‘money’ things that had real intrinsic value. History’s first known money – Sumerian barley money – is a good example. Set weights of precious metals eventually gave birth to coins. Whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.

Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively. We do not trust the stranger, or the next-door neighbour – we trust the coin they hold. If they run out of coins, we run out of trust.

People rely on money to facilitate cooperation with strangers, but they’re afraid it will corrupt human values and intimate relations.

Brutal warriors, religious fanatics and concerned citizens have repeatedly managed to trounce calculating merchants, and even to reshape the economy.

11. Imperial Visions

They could lose battle after battle but still win the war. An empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is not really an empire.

Cultural diversity and territorial flexibility.  In the past there were many more distinct peoples in the world, Empires were one of the main reasons for the drastic reduction in human diversity. The imperial steamroller gradually obliterated the unique characteristics of numerous peoples (such as the Rumanians), forging out of them new and much larger groups.

Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great (c. 2250 BC).

Cyrus, on the other hand, claimed not merely to rule the whole world, but to do so for the sake of all people. ‘We are conquering you for your own benefit,’ said the Persians.

Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Benevolent imperial vision. Imperial periods were henceforth seen as golden ages of order and justice.

The New Global Empire.  Nationalism is fast losing ground. More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority,

Safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics. Global government.

12. The Law of Religion

The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority.

Religion can thus be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.

As far as we know, universal and missionary religions began to appear only in the first millennium BC. Their emergence was one of the most important revolutions in history and made a vital contribution to the unification of humankind, much like the emergence of universal empires and universal money.

The first religious effect of the Agricultural Revolution was to turn plants and animals from equal members of a spiritual round table into property.

Much of ancient mythology is in fact a legal contract in which humans promise everlasting devotion to the gods in exchange for mastery over plants and animals – the first chapters of the book of Genesis are a prime example.

Animism did not entirely disappear at the advent of polytheism.

Polytheism thereby exalted not only the status of the gods, but also that of humankind.

most polytheist and even animist religions recognised such a supreme power that stands behind all the different gods, demons and holy rocks. In classical Greek polytheism, Zeus, Hera, Apollo and their colleagues were subject to an omnipotent and all-encompassing power – Fate (Moira, Ananke).

In Hindu polytheism, a single principle, Atman, controls the myriad gods and spirits, humankind, and the biological and physical world. Atman is the eternal essence or soul of the entire universe, as well as of every individual and every phenomenon.

The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, care sand worries of humans.

The Greeks did not waste any sacrifices on Fate, and Hindus built no temples to Atman.

Precisely because their powers are partial rather than all-encompassing, gods such as Ganesha, Lakshmi and Saraswati have interests and biases. Humans can therefore make deals with these partial powers.

The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance. Since polytheists believe, on the one hand, in one supreme and completely disinterested power, and on the other hand in many partial and biased powers, there is no difficulty for the devotees of one god to accept the existence and efficacy of other gods. Polytheism is inherently open-minded, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions.

On 24 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre.

Akhenaten institutionalised the worship of Aten as the state religion and tried to check the worship of all other gods.

Judaism, for example, argued that the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases, yet his chief interest is in the tiny Jewish nation and in the obscure land of Israel. ‘Local monotheism’.

The monotheist religions expelled the gods through the front door with a lot of fanfare, only to take them back in through the side window. Christianity, for example, developed its own pantheon of saints, whose cults differed little from those of the polytheistic gods. St Brigit.

Dualistic religions espouse the existence of two opposing powers: good and evil.

Monotheism explains order but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.

Zoroaster (Zarathustra) Zoroastrians saw the world as a cosmic battle between the good god Ahura Mazda and the evil god Angra Mainyu. Humans had to help the good god in this battle. Zoroastrianism inspired a number of other dualist religions, such as Gnosticism and Manichaeanism. Logically, it is impossible. Either you believe in a single omnipotent God, or you believe in two opposing powers, neither of which is omnipotent.

And why argue that body and matter are evil? After all, everything was created by the same good God. But monotheists could not help but be captivated by dualist dichotomies,

Belief in heaven (the realm of the good god) and hell (the realm of the evil god) was also dualist in origin. There is no trace of this belief in the Old Testament, which also never claims that the souls of people continue to live after the death of the body.

The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts.

Syncretism

The central figure of Buddhism is not a god but a human being, Siddhartha Gautama.

Train the mind to experience reality as it is, without craving. A state of perfect contentment and serenity, known as nirvana (the literal meaning of which is ‘extinguishing the fire’).

Islam, Buddhism and Communism are all religions, because all are systems of human norms and values that are founded on belief in a superhuman order. (Note the difference between ‘superhuman’ and ‘supernatural’. The Buddhist law of nature and the Marxist laws of history are superhuman, since they were not legislated by humans. Yet they are not supernatural.)

Humanists believe that the unique nature of Homo sapiens is the most important thing in the world, and it determines the meaning of everything that happens in the universe. [This is wrong]

The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls.

Evolutionary evolve or degenerate. Aryan race. Superman. The meaning of life is struggle.

‘The person who attempts to fight the iron logic of nature thereby fights the principles he must thank for his life as a human being.

Our liberal political and judicial systems are founded on the belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature, indivisible and immutable, which gives meaning to the world, and which is the source of all ethical and political authority. This is a reincarnation of the traditional Christian belief in a free and eternal soul that resides within each individual. Yet over the last 200 years, the life sciences have thoroughly undermined this belief. Scientists studying the inner workings of the human organism have found no soul there. They increasingly argue that human behaviour is determined by hormones, genes and synapses, rather than by free will – the same forces that determine the behaviour of chimpanzees, wolves and ants. Our judicial and political systems largely try to sweep such inconvenient discoveries under the carpet. But in all frankness, how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political science?

13. The Secret of Success

The Hindsight Fallacy.  To describe ‘how’ means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another. To explain ‘why’ means to find causal connections that account for the occurrence of this particular series of events to the exclusion of all others. What looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.

History cannot be explained deterministically, and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic. So many forces are at work and their interactions are so complex that extremely small variations in the strength of the forces and the way they interact produce huge differences in outcomes.  Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it.  Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it,  Revolutions are, by definition, unpredictable. A predictable revolution never erupts.

We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.

There is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humans because we lack an objective scale on which to measure such benefit.

Different cultures define the good differently, and we have no objective yardstick by which to judge between them. The victors, of course, always believe that their definition is correct. [Disagree with this moral relativism]

Memetics. Memes. irrespective of the costs and benefits to their human hosts.

Nationalism as a deadly plague that spread throughout the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

No matter what you call it – game theory, postmodernism or memetics – the dynamics of history are not directed towards enhancing human well-being.

Like evolution, history disregards the happiness of individual organisms.

History has a very wide horizon of possibilities, and many possibilities are never realised.

It is conceivable to imagine history going on for generations upon generations while bypassing the Scientific Revolution, just as it is conceivable to imagine history without Christianity, without a Roman Empire, and without gold coins.

Part Four: The Scientific Revolution

14. The Discovery of Ignorance

Human population has increased fourteenfold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.

Modern science differs in three critical ways: The willingness to admit ignorance – ignoramus – ‘we do not know’. The centrality of observation and mathematics. The acquisition of new powers.

A revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.

To obtain knowledge, all he needed to do was ask somebody wiser. Whatever the great gods or the wise people of the past did not bother to tell us was unimportant.

Biologists admit that they still don’t have any good explanation for how brains produce consciousness. Physicists admit that they don’t know what caused the Big Bang, or how to reconcile quantum mechanics with the theory of general relativity.

If the evidence shows that many of those myths are doubtful, how can we hold society together?  How can our communities, countries and international system function? All modern attempts to stabilise the sociopolitical order have had no choice but to rely on either of two unscientific methods: Take a scientific theory, and in opposition to common scientific practices, declare that it is a final and absolute truth. Or leave science out of it and live in accordance with a non-scientific absolute truth. [Other options, including the best available view.]

Mere observations, however, are not knowledge. In order to understand the universe, we need to connect observations into comprehensive theories. Earlier traditions usually formulated their theories in terms of stories. Modern science uses mathematics. There are very few equations, graphs and calculations in the Bible.

Newton showed that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Some chapters (for example) boil down to a clear-cut equation; but scholars who attempted to reduce biology, economics and psychology to neat Newtonian equations have discovered that these fields have a level of complexity that makes such an aspiration futile. This did not mean, however, that they gave up on mathematics. A new branch of mathematics was developed over the last 200 years to deal with the more complex aspects of reality: statistics. Scottish Widows.

There is an irresistible drift towards the exact sciences – defined as ‘exact’ by their use of mathematical tools.

A good historian can find precedent for everything. But an even better historian knows when these precedents are but curiosities that cloud the big picture. Generally speaking, most premodern rulers and businesspeople did not finance research about the nature of the universe in order to develop new technologies, and most thinkers did not try to translate their findings into technological gadgets.

Until the Scientific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress.  Hubris: the story of the Tower of Babel, the story of Icarus, the story of the Golem and countless other myths taught people that any attempt to go beyond human limitations would inevitably lead to disappointment and disaster.  When modern culture admitted that there were many important things that it still did not know, and when that admission of ignorance was married to the idea that scientific discoveries could give us new powers, people began suspecting that real progress might be possible after all. As science began to solve one unsolvable problem after another, many became convinced that humankind could overcome any and every problem by acquiring and applying new knowledge. Poverty, sickness, wars, famines, old age and death itself were not the inevitable fate of humankind. They were simply the fruits of our ignorance.

Franklin’s empirical observations, coupled with his knowledge about the qualities of electrical energy, enabled him to invent the lightning rod and disarm the gods.

‘The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me’ (Mark 14: 7). Today, fewer and fewer people, including fewer and fewer Christians, agree with Jesus on this matter. Poverty is increasingly seen as a technical problem amenable to intervention.  Societies have suffered from two kinds of poverty: social poverty, which withholds from some people the opportunities available to others; and biological poverty, which puts the very lives of individuals at risk due to lack of food and shelter. Perhaps social poverty can never be eradicated, but in many countries around the world biological poverty is a thing of the past. [Fine paragraph]. In many societies more people are in danger of dying from obesity than from starvation.

Some scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident,

The feedback loop between science, empire and capital has arguably been history’s chief engine for the past 500 years.

15. The Marriage of Science and Empire

An even worse fate befell the natives of Tasmania. Having survived for 10,000 years in splendid isolation, they were completely wiped out, to the last man, woman and child, within a century of Cook’s arrival.

Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way even before they enjoyed any significant technological advantages. When the technological bonanza began, Europeans could harness it far better.

Europe and Europeans no longer rule the world, but science and capital are growing ever stronger.

Both scientist and conqueror began by admitting ignorance – they both said, ‘I don’t know what’s out there.’ They both felt compelled to go out and make new discoveries. And they both hoped the new knowledge thus acquired would make them masters of the world.

The lunar astronauts asked him what the native’s phrase meant: ‘Don’t believe a single word these people are telling you. They have come to steal your lands.’

To Columbus, the idea that he had discovered a completely unknown continent was inconceivable for him. Could the Bible have missed half the world? In his refusal to admit ignorance, Columbus was still a medieval man. The first modern man was Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian sailor who took part in several expeditions to America. America is named after a little-known Italian whose sole claim to fame is that he had the courage to say, ‘We don’t know.’

These European explore-and-conquer expeditions are so familiar to us that we tend to overlook just how extraordinary they were. The Zheng He expeditions prove that Europe did not enjoy an outstanding technological edge. What made Europeans exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer.

Within twenty years, almost the entire native Caribbean population was wiped out. The Spanish colonists began importing African slaves to fill the vacuum. This genocide took place on the very doorstep of the Aztec Empire, yet when Cortés landed on the empire’s eastern coast, the Aztecs knew nothing about it. Ten years after Cortés landed in Mexico, Pizarro arrived on the shore of the Inca Empire.

Imperial scholars. A British team excavated Mohenjo-daro, and discovered the first great civilisation of India, which no Indian had been aware of. Henry Rawlinson. William Jones.

In Rudyard Kipling’s words, ‘the White Man’s burden’.  The Great Bengal Famine.

We no longer say, ‘It’s in their blood.’ We say, ‘It’s in their culture.’

16. The Capitalist Creed

Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.  In Smith’s story, people become rich not by despoiling their neighbours, but by increasing the overall size of the pie.

The empires built by bankers and merchants in frock coats and top hats defeated the empires built by kings and noblemen in gold clothes and shining armour. The mercantile empires were simply much shrewder in financing their conquests. Nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest.

Columbus did not give up. He pitched his idea to Queen Isabella to invest.

Better to do business with merchants than with kings,

17. The Wheels of Industry

Counter-intuitively, while humankind’s use of energy and raw materials has mushroomed in the last few centuries, the amounts available for our exploitation have actually increased.

The Industrial Revolution has been a revolution in energy conversion.

In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally, minding every penny. Today, the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well-heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need.

The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’

The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions – and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do.

18. A Permanent Revolution

Ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity.

Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change.

Timetable.  In 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich. Today, a single affluent family generally has more timepieces at home than an entire medieval country.

The most momentous social revolution that ever befell humankind: the collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market.

Three ancient frames: the nuclear family, the extended family and the local intimate community. Village life involved many transactions but few payments.

The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them.  The liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals.

Parental authority is in full retreat.

Imagined communities. Nations existed in the distant past, but their importance was much smaller than today because the importance of the state was much smaller.

The post-war years have been the most peaceful era in human history – and by a wide margin. This is surprising because these very same decades experienced more economic, social and political change than any previous era. Most people don’t appreciate just how peaceful an era we live in. The decline of violence is due largely to the rise of the state.

Since 1945 most empires have opted for peaceful early retirement.

The Soviet collapse in 1989.  Never before has such a mighty empire disappeared so swiftly and so quietly. Gorbachev.

Today humankind has broken the law of the jungle. There is at last real peace, and not just absence of war. For most polities, there is no plausible scenario leading to full – scale conflict within one year.

This situation might of course change in the future and, with hindsight, the world of today might seem incredibly naive. Yet from a historical perspective, our very naivety is fascinating. Never before has peace been so prevalent that people could not even imagine war.

Today, wealth consists mainly of human capital and organisational know-how. Consequently, it is difficult to carry it off or conquer it by military force.

Ours is the first time in history that the world is dominated by a peace-loving elite – politicians, businesspeople, intellectuals and artists who genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable.

There is a positive feedback loop between all these four factors. The threat of nuclear holocaust fosters pacifism; when pacifism spreads, war recedes and trade flourishes; and trade increases both the profits of peace and the costs of war.

Most countries no longer engage in full-scale war for the simple reason that they are no longer independent.

We are witnessing the formation of a global empire. Like previous empires, this one, too, enforces peace within its borders.

If this chapter had been written in 1945 or 1962, it would probably have been much glummer. Since it was written in 2014, it takes a relatively buoyant approach to modern history. [and 2023 is less buoyant]

19 And They Lived Happily Ever After

But are we happier? Historians seldom ask such questions. Yet these are the most important questions one can ask of history. Most current ideologies and political programmes are based on rather flimsy ideas concerning the real source of human happiness. Nationalists believe that political self-determination is essential for our happiness. Communists postulate that everyone would be blissful under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Capitalists maintain that only the free market can ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number, by creating economic growth and material abundance and by teaching people to be self-reliant and enterprising. What would happen if serious research were to disprove these hypotheses? So far historians have avoided raising these questions – not to mention answering them. They have researched the history of just about everything – politics, society, economics, gender, diseases, sexuality, food, clothing – yet they have seldom stopped to ask how these influence human happiness.

The transition first to agriculture and then to industry has condemned us to living unnatural lives that cannot give full expression to our inherent inclinations and instincts.  Over the last two centuries modern medicine has decreased child mortality from 33 per cent to less than 5 per cent. Can anyone doubt that this made a huge contribution to the happiness not only of those children who would otherwise have died, but also of their families and friends?

Modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.

Counting Happiness. ‘Subjective well-being’.

If people are happier in democracies and married people are happier than divorcees, a historian has a basis for arguing that the democratisation process of the last few decades contributed to the happiness of humankind, whereas the growing rates of divorce indicate an opposite trend.

The possibility that the immense improvement in material conditions over the last two centuries was offset by the collapse of the family and the community. Medieval peasants went without washing for months on end, and hardly ever changed their clothes – they had what they wanted.

Mass media and the advertising industry – may unwittingly be depleting the globe’s reservoirs of contentment.

Biochemical mechanisms. Happiness and misery play a role in evolution only to the extent that they encourage or discourage survival and reproduction. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that evolution has moulded us to be neither too miserable nor so happy. It enables us to enjoy a momentary rush of pleasant sensations, but these never last for ever.

An air-conditioning system that keeps the temperature constant.  Human happiness conditioning systems also differ from person to person.

Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can startle it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to its set point.

History can change the external stimuli that cause serotonin to be secreted, yet it does not change the resulting serotonin levels, and hence it cannot make people happier.

If so, what good was the French Revolution? If people did not become any happier, then what was the point of all that chaos, fear, blood and war? Biologists would never have stormed the Bastille. People think that this political revolution or that social reform will make them happy, but their biochemistry tricks them time and again.

Prozac, for example, does not change regimes, but by raising serotonin levels it lifts people out of their depression. Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness begins within.’

Huxley’s disconcerting world is based on the biological assumption that happiness equals pleasure.  When counting moments of joy and moments of drudgery, bringing up a child turns out to be a rather unpleasant affair.

As Nietzsche put it, if you have a way to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship,

If our ancestors believed the promise of everlasting bliss in the afterlife, they may well have viewed their lives as far more meaningful and worthwhile than modern secular people,

So, our medieval ancestors were happy because they found meaning to life in collective delusions about the afterlife? Yes. As long as nobody punctured their fantasies, why shouldn’t they? As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose.

If happiness is based on feeling pleasant sensations, then in order to be happier we need to re-engineer our biochemical system. If happiness is based on feeling that life is meaningful, then in order to be happier we need to delude ourselves more effectively.

‘Know thyself!’ The implication was that the average person is ignorant of his true self and is therefore likely to be ignorant of true happiness.

Most males spend their lives toiling, worrying, competing and fighting, instead of enjoying peaceful bliss, because their DNA manipulates them for its own selfish aims.

Buddha’s recommendation was to stop not only the pursuit of external achievements, but also the pursuit of inner feelings.

Scholars began to study the history of happiness only a few years ago, and we are still formulating initial hypotheses and searching for appropriate research methods.

Yet they say nothing about how all this influenced the happiness and suffering of individuals. This is the biggest lacuna in our understanding of history.

20. The End of Homo Sapiens

Homo sapiens is transcending those limits. It is now beginning to break the laws of natural selection, replacing them with the laws of intelligent design.

Throughout history, the upper classes always claimed to be smarter, stronger and generally better than the underclass. They were usually deluding themselves. With the help of new medical capabilities, the pretensions of the upper classes might soon become an objective reality.  An eternally young cyborg. Whereas we and the Neanderthals are at least human, our inheritors will be godlike. Beings with emotions and identities like ours will no longer exist, and our place will be taken by alien life forms whose abilities dwarf our own.

Few of these forecasts came true. On the other hand, nobody foresaw the Internet.

What do we want to become? This question, sometimes known as the Human Enhancement question. Even the field of bioethics prefers to address another question: ‘What is it forbidden to do?’

Afterword: The Animal that Became a God

The master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem.

Did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.

The situation of other animals is deteriorating more rapidly than ever before, and the improvement in a lot of humanity is too recent and fragile to be certain of.  Despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals, and we seem to be as discontented as ever.  Nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before but have very little idea what to do with all that power.

We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Jared Diamond, who taught me to see the big picture.