sapiens summary book review

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

The book in three sentences.

Human history has been shaped by three major revolutions: the Cognitive Revolution (70,000 years ago), the Agricultural Revolution (10,000 years ago), and the Scientific Revolution (500 years ago). These revolutions have empowered humans to do something no other form of life has done, which is to create and connect around ideas that do not physically exist (think religion, capitalism, and politics). These shared “myths” have enabled humans to take over the globe and have put humankind on the verge of overcoming the forces of natural selection.

Sapiens summary

This is my book summary of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. My notes are informal and often contain quotes from the book as well as my own thoughts. This summary also includes key lessons and important passages from the book.

• Human cultures began to take shape about 70,000 years ago.
• There have been three major revolutions in human history: the cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution, and the scientific revolution.
• Prehistoric humans (2 million years old or so) were no more important and impressive than other mammals.
• Homo Sapiens means “wise man.”
• Humans first evolved in Africa about 2.5 million years ago.
• The author believes it is unlikely Homo sapiens will survive for another 1,000 years.
• From about 2 million years ago until 10,000 years ago, multiple human species roamed the earth together. The depiction of man evolving from hunched over to upright incorrectly displays human evolution as a linear trajectory. In fact, the species lived simultaneously.
• Humans have huge brains for their body size.
• Human brains account for 2-3 percent of body size, but use 25 percent of energy.
• Human kind was very much in the middle of the food chain until 400,000 years ago and didn’t leap to the top of the food chain until 100,000 years ago.
• Most animals at the top of the food chain made it there gradually over millions of years. Humans, however, jumped to the top relatively rapidly. This means that the rest of the food chain wasn’t ready and neither were we. Hence we feel anxious and stressed because we aren’t used to being at the top.
• The advent of fire and cooking food may have opened the way for the evolution of a smaller intestinal track and a larger brain.
• There are two theories of how Homo sapiens evolved: Interbreeding theory and Replacement theory. The reality is probably a combination of both theories.
• Perhaps this is why Homo sapiens wiped out the Neanderthals: “They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.”
• The last dwarf species of humans died out 12,000 years ago.
• Homo sapiens conquered the world because of its unique language.
• The Cognitive Revolution occurred between 70,000 to 30,000 years ago. It allowed Homo sapiens to communicate at a level never seen before in language.
• As far as we know, only Homo sapiens can talk about things we have never seen, touched, or smelled. Think religions, myths, legends, and fantasies.
• The telling of myths and stories allow Homo sapiens to collaborate in large numbers in extremely flexible ways. This separates us from all other animals.
• Chimps can’t form groups of more than 50 or so. For humans, the group size is usually 150 or so. Beyond that, you can’t rely on gossip and personal communication. You need something more to get large numbers of people working together.
• Large numbers of people can collaborate by sharing common myths and beliefs.
• In academic circles, stories are known as fictions, social constructs, or imagined realities.
• An imagined reality is not a lie because the entire group believes it.
• Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, humans have been living in a dual reality: the physical reality and the imagined reality.
• The way people cooperate can be changed by changing the stories as myths we tell.
• Because Homo sapiens shared myths were not genetically based, they could adapt and change their behavior as soon as they adapted their new belief. They didn’t have to wait millions of years for a genetic change.
• Homo sapiens are the only animals that conduct trade.
• As far as we know, the humans of 30,000 years ago had the same physical, emotional, and intellectual capabilities that we have today.
• Evolutionary psychology claims that most of our psychology was developed during the period before the Agricultural Revolution about 10,000 years ago.
• The instinct to gorge on high calorie food is wired into our DNA.
• Ever since the Agricultural Revolution, there hasn’t been one predominant way of life for all humans. There have only been options from a variety of cultures.
• The dog was the first animal domesticated by humans around 15,000 years ago.
• In ancient human groups (over 10,000 years ago) there was very little privacy, but also very little loneliness.
• Most of our ancient ancestors had much wider and deeper knowledge of their physical surroundings than we do. They were not unintelligent at all.
• The human collective today knows far more overall than the whole population of 15,000 years ago. However, at the individual level we are much more specialized today. Ancient foragers were the most knowledgable and skillful people in history.
• It is far easier to pass “unremarkable” genes along today than it was 10,000 years ago.
• Our lack of knowledge about prehistoric religions and beliefs is one of the biggest holes in our understanding of human history.
• Humans traveling across the sea and landing in Australia was one of the most important expeditions in history. It marked the moment humans cemented themselves at the top of the food chain.
• Homo sapiens first made it to America about 16,000 years ago.
• The settling of America – across the Siberian peninsula through Alaska into Canada and the United States down through Mexico and Central America into the Andes and the Amazon and all the way to the tip of South America – was one of the most rapid and incredible invasions by a single species the world had ever seen.
• Incredibly, the Agricultural Revolution sprang up independently in many different parts of the world.
• There is no evidence modern humans have become more intelligent with time.
• The Agricultural Revolution actually didn’t make the life of the average human better at first. It did, however, allow humans to collect more food per unit area and thus the overall population multiplied exponentially.
• Fascinatingly, the first few thousand years of the Agricultural Revolution actually made life harder for humans by creating more work, less leisure, and a ballooning population that created more mouths to feed. Each individual generation didn’t see how their life was becoming worse because the small changes were so tiny.
• One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people begin to enjoy new luxuries they tend to become expected and then count on them.
• The evolutionary success of the Agricultural Revolution (greater population) was actually cause for much suffering on the individual level. Not just for humans, but for domesticated animals like cows, sheep, and chickens as well.
• The advent of the Agricultural Revolution marked the time when worries of the future became prevalent: the weather, the crop yield this year, etc.
• The myths that surround us and make up our lives dictate so much of what we believe and what we do.
• Like the ancient Egyptians, most people dedicate their lives to building pyramids. It’s just that the names, shapes, and sizes of the pyramids change from one culture to another.
• In order to change the imagined order, you must first find a group that believes in a current imagined order. New myths must build upon or evolve from previous myths.
• The main purpose of writing is to record numbers, which our brains did not evolve to manage well. Our brains are much better at remembering biological, zoological, and social information.
• There is an ancient writing system used by the Incas known as a quipu. They are not written words at all, but a series of knots of different colors and strings that represent words and numbers.
• Writing has actually changed the way humans think. We can use writing and record keeping to think far more categorically than ever before.
• Numbers are the world’s most prevalent language.
• Social hierarchies, inequality, and so on are human inventions.
• Most rich people are rich because they were born into rich families. Most poor people are poor because they were born into poor families.
• Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time.
• As of 2006, there were still 53 countries where a husband could not be legally prosecuted for raping his wife.
• When it comes to gender inequality: biology enables, culture forbids. The idea of “unnatural” behaviors is actually a result of Christian theology, not biology.
• If it is possible biologically, then it is natural. From a scientific perspective, two men having sex is natural. Traveling at the speed of light is not natural.
• Why are men valued in many cultures more than women?
• All human cultures are filled with inconsistencies. For example, America currently values individual freedom and equality. But these two ideals don’t always play nicely. It is part of the human experience to reconcile them. These inconsistencies aren’t necessarily bad. They force us to think critically. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.
• History is moving relentlessly toward unity. The whole planet is moving toward one world culture.
• The creation of money was purely an intellectual revolution. It doesn’t exist except in our minds.
• More than 90 percent of all money is just electronic data, not physical money.
• Everyone always wants money precisely because everyone else always wants money.
• Empires have been the world’s most common form of political organization for the last 2,500 years.
• In general, empires do not fall because of uprisings. They almost always succumb to outside invasion or splits from within the empower class.
• Most of what we firmly believe is part of “our culture” was actually forced upon us by other empires who conquered our ancestors.
• Despite the obvious negatives of empires taking over a culture, there are many benefits too. Art, music, governance, and more are the result of empires forming. Often, they blended new together with the conquered people to create a new culture.
• It seems obvious that we are moving fast toward a singe global empire. Global markets, global warming, and commonly accepted concepts like human rights make it clear we all need one collective entity, not man states and countries.
• Religion is the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires.
• The Agricultural Revolution was accompanied by a Religious Revolution.
• Interestingly, polytheism is more open and accepting of multiple beliefs even though we often look at it as more barbarian and uneducated than our current beliefs.
• Monotheism seems to push away polytheism, but actually is very similar to polytheistic gods with the use of patron saints. Praying to the patron saints of farmers isn’t much different than praying to the god of rain.
• The central tension with monotheism is how to deal with the fact that there is evil in the world while the omnipoten God is believed to be good and caring. If God is good why would he allow evil things to happen?
• Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied.
• According to Buddhist tradition: the mind naturally craves more in all situations. And all suffering arrives from craving.
• There are a variety of “natural law religions” that are popular today like communism, capitalism, and liberalism.
• Over the last 200 years, science has increasingly revealed that human behavior is determined by hormones, genes, and neurological synapses. If this is true, then for how much longer will we ignore that biology does not agree with the concept of free will?
• To describe how something happened means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another.
• To describe why something happened means to find causal connections that led to this particular series of events to the exclusion of all others.
• The deeper your knowledge of a particular area of history, the harder it becomes to explain why one particular outcome occurred and not another.
• It is an inevitable rule of history that what seems obvious in hindsight is impossible to predict beforehand.
• The are level one and level two Chaotic Systems. Level one does not respond to predictions about it, like the weather and weather forecasts. Level two does respond to predictions about it, like the stock market and analyst reports about rising oil prices.
• There is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humans or that human well being increases overtime. It’s good for the victors, but is it good for us all?
• The Scientific Revolution started in Europe around 500 years ago. The last 500 years have witnessed an unprecedented growth of human impact.
• One difference between religion and science is that science assumes humankind does not know the answers to many of life’s biggest questions. Religion, however, assumes that the important stuff is already known. Science assumes human ignorance.
• Modern culture has been able to admit ignorance more than any previous culture.
• Previous cultures and belief systems compiled their theories using stories. Science compiles its theories using mathematics.
• The story of how Scottish Widows was founded is an awesome example of the power of probability.
• Scientists generally agree that no theory is 100 percent correct. Thus, the real test of knowledge is not truth, but utility. Science gives us power. The more useful that power, the better the science.
• The military arms race drives science forward in rapid fashion. The truth is war prompts many scientific discoveries.
• In the past, the best minds of the day worked on finding ways to give meaning to death. Today, our best minds work on preventing death through biological, hormonal, and genetic means. Science does not take death as an inevitability.
• The economic, religious, and political interests that impact the flow of money into scientific and technological research have a huge impact on the output of science.
• It is not enough to consider science in a vacuum. Economic and capitalistic interests, for example, determine what we research and what to do with the research findings.
• Why did Europeans discover and conquer the Americas? Why not the Chinese or those from India or the Middle East who possessed just as much knowledge and technology as the Europeans? The European ideology to explore the world was the primary difference.
• For most of human history, per capita production remained the same. Since the launch of capitalism, however, per capita production has skyrocketed.
• Modern capitalism has exploded the growth of humankind thanks to the creation of credit, which allows you to borrow money now because we collectively trust that the future will be better than the present.
• Adam Smith’s brilliant insight about capitalism in The Wealth of Nations was that increasing private profits is the basis for increasing collective wealth and prosperity. In other words, by becoming richer you benefit everyone, not just yourself. Both parties get a bigger slice of pie. (Note: this only works if profits get reinvested, not hoarded.)
• For capitalism to work, profits must be reinvested in new production.
• The “religion” of capitalism says economic growth is the supreme because justice, freedom, and happiness requires economic growth.
• All credit is based on the idea that science and technology will advance. Scientists ultimately foot the bill of capitalism.
• The annual sugar intake of the average Englishman rose from nearly zero in the early 17th century to 18 pounds in the early 19th century.
• The life expectancy, child mortality, and calorie intake are significantly improved for the average person in 2014 compared to 1914, despite exponential population growth.
• Until the industrial revolution, human behavior was largely dictated by solar energy and plant growth. Day and night. Summer and winter. Everything was determined by man power and animal power, which were determined by food, which is determined by photosynthesis.
• “This is the basic lesson of evolutionary psychology: a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction.”
• Harlow’s infant monkey studies from the 1950s (and a variety of followup studies) have shown that animals have strong psychological needs as well as purgative physical needs. Note to self: never disregard your psychological needs.
• Each year the United States population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry in the rest of the world.
• Most people don’t realize just how peaceful of the times are we live in.
• In recent years, more people die from suicide each year than from war and violent crime. The same can said for car accidents.
• Live a safe community, drive as little as possible, and love yourself. Violent local crime, car accidents, and suicide are some of the biggest killers of humans.
• War is at an all time low because the costs of war have increased because of nuclear weapons, the benefits of war have decreased because physical resources drive less of the economy and international trade is more lucrative than conquest, and the tightening of international connections because a worldwide culture is less likely to battle itself.
• Our view of the past is heavily influenced by recent events.
• Researchers have investigated nearly all aspects of history, but have rarely have asked whether historical changes have made humans happier.
• Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
• If happiness is based on pleasurable feelings, then increasing our happiness is a matter of increases biochemical release. If happiness is based on meaning, then increasing our happiness is a matter of deluding ourselves about the meaning of our lives.
• One uncommonly cited benefit of religion: belief in the afterlife gives meaning to your life in the present.
• Buddhism has studied happiness for over 2,000 years. Interestingly, Buddhism shares many viewpoints on happiness with science. Most notably, that happiness results from processes within the body and not from the outside world.
• The Buddhist philosophy of happiness centers around the idea that you are not the events that happen to you, but you are also not the feelings you have. You are not your feelings. They are just feelings. Thus, if you understand this, you can release the needs to keep chasing the need to feel happy or to not feel angry or to not feel sad. In other words, you have to understand yourself.
• For close to 4 billion years, every organism developed according to evolution. But in recent decades, humans have begun to evolve according to intelligent design. In other words, there are people who would have been selected out of the gene pool millennia ago, but not today.
• Genetic engineering is allowing humans to break the laws of natural selection.
• The next stage of human history will not only involve biological and technological changes, but also changes in human consciousness and identity. Changes that are this fundamental will call the very term “human” into question.
• Many people think the question we should ask to guide our scientific pursuits is, “What do we want to become?” However, because we seem to be on the path to genetically engineering and programming nearly every facets of our wants, desires, and consciousness, the real question we should ask is, “What do we want to want?”
• In the past 1000 years, humans have evolved to take over the world and are on the verge of overcoming natural selection and becoming gods. Yet, we still seem unhappy in many ways and we are unsure of what we want. Is there anything more dangerous that dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

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James Clear writes about habits, decision making, and continuous improvement. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits . The book has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 60 languages.

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3 mind-blowing facts about humans that I learned from reading 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind'

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• " Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind " is a bestseller praised by Barack Obama and Bill Gates.
• The nonfiction book explores the history and evolution of humans and the modern world.
• Here's a summary of 3 facts I learned and how they helped expand my understanding of humanity.

As an avid reader, my understanding of the world has greatly expanded through novels. I'm accustomed to looking at people through the emotional and psychological lens of relationships and community, always exploring how different social factors and personal histories make us so unique. 

And while I've mostly preferred learning through fictional stories and characters, the non-fiction bestseller "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind " not only amplified my understanding of the human condition but also deepened my understanding of human s. The book, a biological, intellectual, and economic account of humankind, explained the biological "why" behind everything I've ever known about people, including myself.

Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, an internationally recognized historian and philosopher, introduced me to concepts that explore the very foundation of how humans evolved from nomadic apes to philosophical beings who ponder the meaning of life. I've been spouting quotes and information from this book ever since I finished reading it, so here are the three most fascinating concepts I learned from "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind."

3 amazing facts I learned from "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind":

Self-preservation is a biological instinct that greatly impacted the course of humankind — and explains some of our problems today..

The early developments of Homo sapiens were entirely biological, centered around sustaining and creating life. Yet some of our evolution's disadvantages heavily outweighed the advantages.

For instance, in the development of the agricultural revolution, humans found that wheat was incredibly difficult to farm, not economically secure, and not even that nutritious. So why did we invest time and energy into farming anyway? According to Harari, farming fulfilled our biological needs by helping communities settle down, give birth to more babies in a shorter amount of time, and feed a larger number of people on a smaller space of land. 

To put it into today's terms, the pursuit of an easier life often generates greater hardships. It's called the luxury trap: As Harari puts it, "luxuries tend to become necessities and spawn new obligations." For example, we used to mails letter when we had something to say. Now, we send and receive dozens of emails every day, many of us considering it a necessity to have email access on our phones for even quicker responses. Immediate email correspondence was a luxury that has become a 21st-century necessity, spawning new obligations to be attached to our phones. 

It's nearly impossible to break the luxury trap cycle: It's spawned by our biological desire to make life easier so we can conserve time, energy, or money.  But humankind's instinct to cater to ourselves also has some positives. It's helped us evolve from farming wheat to generating significant technological advances and boosting our cognitive capacity for empathy, to name a few things. 

Because we create societal values, we can determine which values hold the most meaning.

When humans began to trade nomadic life for settlements, we created values to help govern societies. Our societal agreements are based on inter-subjective beliefs — the foundations of society are agreed-upon concepts of law, money, religion, and nations that link billions of humans to an imagined order that does not exist outside of our consciousness. Even the idea of "rights" is not something that exists in biology: It's an imagined order that controls the population because enough people believe in it.

The idea that we fabricated the social concepts that tie us to our political views and institutions might spur an existential crisis, but learning this was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. While fully abandoning the greatest societal contracts would create planet-wide chaos, it can be helpful to remember individual (and often invisible) pressures that we feel to be constantly achieving or fitting into a particular mold don't have as much control over us as we think. If we question some of these imagined constructs, we might find ourselves closer to intellectual freedom.

Happiness is a relatively recent focus for humankind.

As Harari points out, happiness is an incalculable abstraction. The closest measurable figure is pleasure, a chemical sensation that keeps humans alive by rewarding us when we eat or reproduce — not exactly what most of us think when we imagine self-fulfillment.

Yet, as the cognitive revolution carried humankind through advances that would shape all of planet Earth, the importance of happiness emerged. Happiness is subjective, the scale of which has dramatically changed from the Middle Ages to now. But it is also the unit many of us use to determine if our lives feel worthwhile. 

In much of the history of humankind, we ignored the idea that happiness drove any kind of evolution. But as we grew through rapid technological evolutions, our motivation has focused more on our subjective well-being. Humankind's search for a meaningful life is how we've managed to survive a history's worth of hardships, such as defending a country's values in a war or exploring new hobbies during a pandemic.

The biological rules that dictated the survival of Homo sapiens for hundreds of thousands of years have changed in only the past few decades. With our advances in medicine, agriculture, and technology, humans have been able to shift our focus from survival and reproduction to happiness and meaning. With this realization that humanity's sole purpose is no longer to survive but thrive , we can prioritize self-actualization. 

The bottom line

I learned so many profound theories from this book, and it broadened my understanding of humanity. While we evolved through our survivalist need for self-preservation, the cognitive revolution spawned societies founded on rules and values, some of which now create new barriers to our happiness and wellbeing.

More importantly, learning about our evolutionary history deepened my empathy for humankind and even towards myself. Thanks to this book, my view of my place in the world has shifted, as I remember that I wouldn't be here, typing this, if not for the billions of decisions my ancestors made. It's a borderline magical (and ok, a little overwhelming) realization. It makes me want to pursue a more meaningful life, and extend grace towards others and myself whenever I can. Gaining this perspective is one of the best takeaways a book could possibly give.

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Sapiens ? a critical review.

I much enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind . It is a brilliant, thought-provoking odyssey through human history with its huge confident brush strokes painting enormous scenarios across time. It is massively engaging and continuously interesting. The book covers a mind-boggling 13.5 billion years of pre-history and history.

Fascinating but flawed

Harari’s pictures of the earliest men and then the foragers and agrarians are fascinating; but he breathlessly rushes on to take us past the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago, to the arrival of religion, the scientific revolution, industrialisation, the advent of artificial intelligence and the possible end of humankind. His contention is that Homo sapiens , originally an insignificant animal foraging in Africa has become ‘the terror of the ecosystem’ (p465). There is truth in this, of course, but his picture is very particular. He is best, in my view, on the modern world and his far-sighted analysis of what we are doing to ourselves struck many chords with me.

Harari is a better social scientist than philosopher, logician or historian

Nevertheless, in my opinion the book is also deeply flawed in places and Harari is a much better social scientist than he is philosopher, logician or historian. His critique of modern social ills is very refreshing and objective, his piecing together of the shards of pre-history imaginative and appear to the non-specialist convincing, but his understanding of some historical periods and documents is much less impressive – demonstrably so, in my view.

Misunderstanding the medieval world

Harari is not good on the medieval world, or at least the medieval church. He suggests that ‘premodern’ religion asserted that everything important to know about the world ‘was already known’ (p279) so there was no curiosity or expansion of learning. When does he think this view ceased? He makes it much too late. He gives the (imagined) example of a thirteenth-century peasant asking a priest about spiders and being rebuffed because such knowledge was not in the Bible. It’s hard to know where to begin in saying how wrong a concept this is.

For example, in the thirteenth century the friars, so often depicted as lazy and corrupt, were central to the learning of the universities. Moreover they were, at that time, able to teach independently of diktats from the Church. As a result, there was an exchange of scholarship between national boundaries and demanding standards were set. The Church also set up schools throughout much of Europe, so as more people became literate there was a corresponding increase in debate among the laity as well as among clerics. Huge library collections were amassed by monks who studied both religious and classical texts. Their scriptoria effectively became the research institutes of their day. One surviving example of this is the fascinating library of the Benedictines at San Marco in Florence. Commissioned in 1437, it became the first public library in Europe. This was a huge conceptual breakthrough in the dissemination of knowledge: the ordinary citizens of that great city now had access to the profoundest ideas from the classical period onwards.

And there is Thomas Aquinas. Usually considered to be the most brilliant mind of the thirteenth century, he wrote on ethics, natural law, political theory, Aristotle – the list goes on. Harari forgets to mention him – today, as all know, designated a saint in the Roman Catholic church.   

Harari tends to draw too firm a dividing line between the medieval and modern eras

In fact, it was the Church – through Peter Abelard in the twelfth century– that initiated the idea that a single authority was not sufficient for the establishment of knowledge, but that disputation was required to train the mind as well as the lecture for information. This was a breakthrough in thinking that set the pattern of university life for the centuries ahead.

Or what about John of Salisbury (twelfth-century bishop), the greatest social thinker since Augustine, who bequeathed to us the function of the rule of law and the concept that even the monarch is subject to law and may be removed by the people if he breaks it. Following Cicero he rejected dogmatic claims to certainty and asserted instead that ‘probable truth’ was the best we could aim for, which had to be constantly re-evaluated and revised. Harari is wrong therefore, to state that Vespucci (1504) was the first to say ‘we don’t know’ (p321).

So, historically Harari tends to draw too firm a dividing line between the medieval and modern eras (p285). He is good on the more modern period but the divide is manifest enough without overstating the case as he does.

Short-sighted reductionism

His passage about human rights not existing in nature is exactly right, but his treatment of the US Declaration of Independence is surely completely mistaken (p123). To ‘translate’ it as he does into a statement about evolution is like ‘translating’ a rainbow into a mere geometric arc, or better, ‘translating’ a landscape into a map. Of course, neither process is a translation for to do so is an impossibility. They are what they are. The one is an inspiration, the other an analysis. It is not a matter of one being untrue, the other true – for both landscapes and maps are capable of conveying truths of different kinds.

The Declaration is an aspirational statement about the rights that ought to be accorded to each individual under the rule of law in a post-Enlightenment nation predicated upon Christian principles. Harari’s ‘translation’ is a statement about what our era (currently) believes in a post-Darwinian culture about humanity’s evolutionary drives and our ‘selfish’ genes. ‘Biology’ may tell us those things but human experience and history tell a different story: there is altruism as well as egoism; there is love as well as fear and hatred; there is morality as well as amorality. The sword is not the only way in which events and epochs have been made. Indeed, to make biology/biochemistry the final irreducible way of perceiving human behaviour, as Harari seems to do, seems tragically short-sighted.

Religious illiteracy

I’m not surprised that the book is a bestseller in a (by and large) religiously illiterate society; and though it has a lot of merit in other areas, its critique of Judaism and Christianity is not historically respectable. A mere six lines of conjecture (p242) on the emergence of monotheism from polytheism – stated as fact – is indefensible. It lacks objectivity. The great world-transforming Abrahamic religion emerging from the deserts in the early Bronze Age period (as it evidently did) with an utterly new understanding of the sole Creator God is such an enormous change. It simply can’t be ignored in this way if the educated reader is to be convinced by his reconstructions.

Harari is demonstrably very shaky in his representation of what Christians believe

Harari is also demonstrably very shaky in his representation of what Christians believe. For example, his contention that belief in the Devil makes Christianity dualistic (equal independent good and evil gods) is simply untenable. One of the very earliest biblical texts (Book of Job) shows God allowing Satan to attack Job but irresistibly restricting his methods (Job 1:12). Later, Jesus banishes Satan from individuals (Mark 1:25 et al .) and the final book of the Bible shows God destroying Satan (Revelation 20:10). Not much dualism there! It’s all, of course, a profound mystery – but it’s quite certainly not caused by dualism according to the Bible. Harari either does not know his Bible or is choosing to misrepresent it. He also doesn’t know his Thomas Hardy who believed (some of the time!) precisely what Harari says ‘nobody in history’ believed, namely that God is evil – as evidenced in a novel like Tess of the d’Urbervilles or his poem The Convergence of the Twain .

Fumbling the problem of evil

We see another instance of Harari’s lack of objectivity in the way he deals with the problem of evil (p246). He states the well-worn idea that if we posit free will as the solution, that raises the further question: if God ‘knew in advance’ (Harari’s words) that the evil would be done why did he create the doer?

I would expect a scholar to present both sides of the argument, not a populist one-sided account as Harari does

But to be objective the author would need to raise the counter-question that if there is no free will, how can there be love and how can there be truth? Automatons without free will are coerced and love cannot exist between them – by definition. Again, if everything is predetermined then so is the opinion I have just expressed. In that case it has no validity as a measure of truth – it was predetermined either by chance forces at the Big Bang or by e.g. what I ate for breakfast which dictated my mood. These are age-old problems without easy solutions but I would expect a scholar to present both sides of the argument, not a populist one-sided account as Harari does.

Moreover, in Christian theology God created both time and space, but exists outside them. So the Christian God does not know anything ‘in advance’ which is a term applicable only to those who live inside the time–space continuum i.e. humanity. The Christian philosopher Boethius saw this first in the sixth century; theologians know it – but apparently Harari doesn’t, and he should.

Ignoring the resurrection

In common with so many, Harari is unable to explain why Christianity ‘took over the mighty Roman Empire' (p243) but calls it ‘one of history’s strangest twists’. So it is, but one explanation that should be considered is the resurrection of Christ which of course would fully account for it – if people would give the idea moment’s thought. But to the best of my knowledge there is no mention of it (even as an influential belief) anywhere in the book.

Harari is unable to explain why Christianity ‘took over the mighty Roman Empire' 

The standard reason given for such an absence is that ‘such things don’t happen in history: dead men don’t rise.’ But that, I fear, is logically a hopeless answer. The speaker believes it didn’t happen because they have already presupposed that God is not there to do it. Drop the presupposition, and suddenly the whole situation changes: in the light of that thought it now becomes perfectly feasible that this ‘strange twist’ was part of the divine purpose. And the funny thing is that unlike other religions, this is precisely where Christianity is most insistent on its historicity . Peter, Paul, the early church in general were convinced that Jesus was alive and they knew as well as we do that dead men are dead – and they knew better than us that us that crucified men are especially dead! The very first Christian sermons (about AD 33) were about the facts of their experience – the resurrection of Jesus – not about morals or religion or the future.

A one-sided view of the Church

Harari is right to highlight the appalling record of human warfare and there is no point trying to excuse the Church from its part in this. I have written at length about this elsewhere, as have far more able people. But do we really think that because everyone in Europe was labelled Catholic or Protestant (‘ cuius regio, eius religio ’) that the wars they fought were about religion ?

If the Church is cited as a negative influence, why, in a scholarly book, is its positive influence not also cited?

As the Cambridge Modern History points out about the appalling Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572 (which event Harari cites on p241) – the Paris mob would as soon kill Catholics as Protestants – and did. It was the result of political intrigue, sexual jealousy, human barbarism and feud. Oxford Professor Keith Ward points out ‘religious wars are a tiny minority of human conflicts’ in his book Is Religion Dangerous? If the Church is being cited as a negative influence, why, in a scholarly book, is its undeniably unrivalled positive influence over the last 300 years (not to mention all the previous years) not also cited? It’s simply not good history to ignore the good educational and social impact of the Church. Both sides need to feature. [1]

Philosophical fault-lines

I wonder too about Harari’s seeming complacency on occasion, for instance about where economic progress has brought us to. Is it acceptable for him to write (on p296): ‘When calamity strikes an entire region, worldwide relief efforts are usually successful in preventing the worst. People still suffer from numerous depredations, humiliations and poverty-related illnesses but in most countries nobody is starving to death’? Tell that to the people of Haiti seven years after the earthquake with two and a half million still, according to the UN, needing humanitarian aid. Or the people of South Sudan dying of thirst and starvation as they try to reach refugee camps. There are sixty million refugees living in appalling poverty and distress at this moment . In the light of those facts, I think Harari’s comment is rather unsatisfactory.

But there is a larger philosophical fault-line running through the whole book which constantly threatens to break its conclusions in pieces. His whole contention is predicated on the idea that humankind is merely the product of accidental evolutionary forces and this means he is blind to seeing any real intentionality in history. It has direction certainly, but he believes it is the direction of an iceberg, not a ship.

Many of his opening remarks are just unwarranted assumptions 

This would be all right if he were straightforward in stating that all his arguments are predicated on the assumption that, as Bertrand Russell said, ‘Man is…but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms’ and utterly without significance. But instead, he does what a philosopher would call ‘begging the question’. That is, he assumes from the start what his contention requires him to prove – namely that mankind is on its own and without any sort of divine direction. Harari ought to have stated his assumed position at the start, but signally failed to do so. The result is that many of his opening remarks are just unwarranted assumptions based on that grandest of all assumptions: that humanity is cut adrift on a lonely planet, itself adrift in a drifting galaxy in a dying universe. Evidence please! – that humanity is ‘nothing but’ a biological entity and that human consciousness is not a pale (and fundamentally damaged) reflection of the divine mind.

The fact that (he says) Sapiens has been around for a long time, emerged by conquest of the Neanderthals and has a bloody and violent history has no logical connection to whether or not God made him (‘her’ for Harari) into a being capable of knowing right from wrong, perceiving God in the world and developing into Michelangelo, Mozart and Mother Teresa as well as into Nero and Hitler. To insist that such sublime or devilish beings are ‘no more than’ glorified apes is to ignore the elephant in the room: the small differences in our genetic codes are the very differences that may reasonably point to divine intervention – because the result is so shockingly disproportionate between ourselves and our nearest relatives. I’ve watched chimpanzees and the great apes; I love to do so (and especially adore gorillas!) but…so near, yet so so far.

Arguable assumptions

Here are a few short-hand examples of the author’s many assumptions to check out in context:

• ‘accidental genetic mutations…it was pure chance’ (p23)
• ‘no justice outside the common imagination of human beings’ (p31)
• ‘things that really exist’ (p35)

This last is such a huge leap of unwarranted faith. His concept of what ‘really exists’ seems to be ‘anything material’ but, in his opinion, nothing beyond this does ‘exist’ (his word). Actually, humans are mostly sure that immaterial things certainly exist: love, jealousy, rage, poverty, wealth, for starters. Dark matter also may make up most of the universe – it exists, we are told, but we can’t measure it.

His rendition of how biologists see the human condition is as one-sided as his treatment of earlier topics.

Harari’s final chapters are quite brilliant in their range and depth and hugely interesting about the possible future with the advent of AI – with or without Sapiens. His rendition, however, of how biologists see the human condition is as one-sided as his treatment of earlier topics. To say that our ‘subjective well-being is not determined by external parameters’ (p432) but by ‘serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin’ is to take the behaviourist view to the exclusion of all other biochemical/psychiatric science. Recent studies have concluded that human behaviour and well-being are the result not just of the amount of serotonin etc that we have in our bodies, but that our response to external events actually alters the amount of serotonin, dopamine etc which our bodies produce. It is two-way traffic. Our choices therefore are central. The way we behave actually affects our body chemistry, as well as vice versa. Harari is averse to using the word ‘mind’ and prefers ‘brain’ but the jury is out about whethe/how these two co-exist. There is one glance at this idea on page 458: without dismissing it he allows it precisely four lines, which for such a major ‘game-changer’ to the whole argument is a deeply worrying omission.

I liked his bold discussion about the questions of human happiness that historians and others are not asking, but was surprised by his two pages on ‘The Meaning of Life’ which I thought slightly disingenuous. ‘From a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning…Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan.’ (p438, my italics). The first sentence is fine – of course , that is true! How could it be otherwise? Science deals with how things happen, not why in terms of meaning or metaphysics . To look for meta physical answers in the physical sciences is ridiculous – they can’t be found there. It’s like looking for a sandpit in a swimming pool. Distinguished scientists like Sir Martin Rees and John Polkinghorne, at the very forefront of their profession, understand this and have written about the separation of the two ‘magisteria’. Science is about physical facts not meaning; we look to philosophy, history, religion and ethics for that. Harari’s second sentence is a non-sequitur – an inference that does not follow from the premise. God’s ‘cosmic plan’ may well be to use the universe he has set up to create beings both on earth and beyond (in time and eternity) which are glorious beyond our wildest dreams. I rather think he has already – when I consider what Sapiens has achieved.

A curiously encouraging end

I found the very last page of the book curiously encouraging:

We are more powerful than ever before…Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. (p466)

Exactly! Time then for a change. Better to live in a world where we are accountable – to a just and loving God.

Harari is a brilliant writer, but one with a very decided agenda. He is excellent within his field but spreads his net too wide till some of the mesh breaks – allowing all sorts of confusing foreign bodies to pass in and out – and muddies the water. His failure to think clearly and objectively in areas outside his field will leave educated Christians unimpressed.

[1] See my book The Evil That Men Do . (Sacristy Press, 2016)

Marcus Paul

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Reviews of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

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A Brief History of Humankind

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• Feb 10, 2015, 464 pages
• May 2018, 464 pages

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A groundbreaking narrative of humanity's creation and evolution that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be "human."

From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity's creation and evolution - a #1 international bestseller - that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be "human." One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us? Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas. Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become? Featuring 27 photographs, 6 maps, and 25 illustrations/diagrams, this provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential reading for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.

1 An Animal of No Significance

ABOUT 1 3 . 5 BILLION YEARS AGO, MATTER, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics. About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry. About 3.8 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology. About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history. Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural ...

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• Of all the human developments described in Sapiens, which one do you think was the most significant in the course of our history?
• By what measures is homo sapiens the dominant species on planet earth?
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• Do you think that the major world religions are comparable to 'shared mythologies' such as nations, corporations and currency? When does a mythology become a reality?
• Humankind has only been present for a minute fraction of planet earth's existence – do you think that our civilization will retain its current position in centuries to come?
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While Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind wouldn't be possible without the innovations and discoveries of our predecessors, it is also a book which proves that it is not beyond the abilities of one man to distill such a huge expanse of history into a single articulate and highly readable volume, even if such a process at times necessarily lends itself to sweeping generalization and a certain oversimplification of statement. Harahi's fierce, almost iconoclastic independence of mind is very much in evidence. He is not afraid to put forward his own interesting — if sometimes overly radical — theories about our past and our possible future. By debunking some deeply held evolutionary myths, he makes us question everything we thought we knew about the human story... continued

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Beyond the Book

The race to the theory of natural selection.

In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , Yuval Noah Harahi identifies three specific "revolutions" which were central to the development of the human species. The first was the Cognitive Revolution; taking place between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, it was responsible for the development and use of language. The second was the Agricultural Revolution which saw homo sapiens abandoning, approximately 12,000 years ago, traditional foraging in favor of farming and permanent settlements. Finally, there is the Scientific Revolution, a much more recent and ongoing phenomenon occurring within the last 500 years. The driving force behind this Scientific Revolution was what Harahi refers to as "the discovery of ignorance" - having realized and ...

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Yuval Noah Harari

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Author and historian Yuval Noah Harari begins Sapiens by noting that for 2.5 million years, humans lived as insignificant animals on Earth. Around 70,000 years ago, humans suddenly began dominating the planet. Over the course of the book, Harari intends to examine several cultural evolutions in human history, including the Cognitive Revolution (70,000 years ago), the Agricultural Revolution (12,000 years ago), and the Scientific Revolution (500 years ago).

He begins by saying that humanity’s ancestors, Homo sapiens —or, Sapiens—were actually one of at least six human species (including Neanderthals) that all disappeared once Sapiens began settling around the globe.

Harari thinks that 70,000 years ago, a random genetic mutation then enabled Sapiens to suddenly evolve new cognitive capacities. He calls this the Cognitive Revolution. Harari notes that animals in nature can only respond to physical phenomena, but Sapiens learned how to make up fictional ideas and believe in things that aren’t actually in the physical world. He gives the modern example of the car brand Peugeot , which exists as more of an idea than a thing. Thousands of people rally around the idea of Peugeot—to make cars and work for the company. They effectively cooperate because of their shared belief in the Peugeot brand. Harari thinks such “imagined realities” have immense power.

Harari then considers human societies between 70,000 and 12,000 years ago, when humans lived as foragers in the wild. He speculates that foragers lived relatively comfortable and happy lives. He estimates that they only worked around 35 hours a week to gather food, their work was stimulating, they didn’t suffer diseases from living in cramped quarters, and they formed close-knit communities where loneliness was rare. During this time, Sapiens spread around the world, causing widespread animal extinctions wherever they went, including most of Australia’s large marsupials (45,000 years ago) and America’s large mammals (16,000 years ago). He sees humanity as a giant human flood (like the flood in the biblical story of Noah’s ark) that kills off animal species, and he worries about a future in which there’ll be no large mammals left.

When the Agricultural Revolution happened 12,000 years ago, humans began gathering around areas where crops grew in the wild. They soon began planting more crops and forming more permanent settlements around them. Harari thinks life got really miserable for most human beings around this time—they had to spend many more hours doing hard labor to raise crops, they had to raise more children to help with farm labor, they lived in cramped quarters that spread disease, and they shifted from a nutritious diet of wild fruits and meats to limited diets of one grain, which made them malnourished. He also thinks people in farming societies suffered tremendous anxiety about their crops, and they were generally more miserable overall. Harari thinks that all this effort to make life easier—by shifting to farming—ended up making life harder for most of humanity.

According to Harari, humans began cooperating in large numbers because they learned how to make up stories—myths, legends, religions, and social values, or “ imagined orders ”—and trust others who also believed in the same myths. Such myths are powerful because people act as if they are true, but Harari stresses that they’re never actually true—they’re made up, and they’re not always fair to everyone who believes in them. Once a myth is established, it becomes so entrenched in people’s minds that it’s hard to escape.

Most imagined orders—like the Hindu caste system, racism, and the patriarchy—establish hierarchies: they argue that some people are inherently superior to others, and that everybody must stick to their place in the social pecking order so that society functions in an orderly fashion. Despite these problems, Harari thinks imagined orders work: they make people cooperate with strangers, which makes human societies flourish. He thinks that three imagined orders with global power—that unite people under the same rules—are money, empires, and religions. He thinks many societies hate each other’s values, but they still cooperate by using and exchanging money. To Harari, empires subjugate and kill people, but they also unite people under a common culture, language, and set of social rules. Religions like Christianity and Islam also unite disparate people around the world. Some of the imagined orders that rule the world today include economic systems like capitalism (making, selling, and buying goods to make profits and generate wealth). From Harari’s perspective, the imagined orders that humanity has come up with so far aren’t necessarily the best ones, and there could be better ones out there.

Before the advent of science, Harari argues, people believed that religious texts already contained all the important knowledge and information about the world. But when the Scientific Revolution happened, humans shifted to a mindset of believing they were ignorant about the world and needed to observe it to learn more. Harari thinks people treat scientific theories like they’re true, but really, they’re just theories that tell stories in the language of mathematics.

Harari sees science and empire as closely intertwined. European imperialists who conquered the Americas, Australia, and many parts of Asia between the 1400s and 1800s often claimed to be conducting scientific research. For example, Captain James Cook ’s expedition to Australia was an effort to map Venus’s path across the Sun, but he also ended up colonizing Australia for Britain. Harari also thinks science and capitalism are closely connected. When Christopher Columbus wanted to sail westward from Europe to India, he approached many rulers for funding (like an entrepreneur). Queen Isabella of Spain effectively extended credit to Columbus to fund his mission (like a bank or venture capitalist), hoping for a monetary payoff down the line.

Harari thinks about the supposed “progress” in human history since the Agricultural Revolution, and he wonders if it has indeed made humanity happier. It’s true that humans are wealthier and healthier than they’ve ever been, but modern people also have high expectations that their lives will be easy, happy, and fun, and they spend a lot of time disappointed and discontented when life is hard. He decides that ancient humans had lower expectations about life, so they were probably happier. He worries about scientific efforts to extend human life indefinitely, as he just sees a future of anxious, depressed, immortal people.

Harari thinks more about science and the future. Today, Harari says, governments and corporations fund scientific research when they think it will make them money. He worries about research into cyborg insects that can spy behind enemy lines, cross-breeding DNA to create new species, and artificial intelligence. He sees scientific progress as moving forward at an alarming pace, and he’s skeptical about whether such new inventions are actually good for humanity. Harari concludes that humanity has changed dramatically since its foraging days 70,000 years ago—but he’s not sure it’s gotten better. He thinks humanity’s well-being has actually decreased over time, and he concludes that people are more discontent than ever.

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Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, book review: Eloquent history of what makes us human

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It is an impediment to understanding the human story that the innovations that made us human – a long list including the control of fire, articulate language, the development of agriculture and herding, the working of metals, glass and other materials, abstract reasoning – took place over periods out of kilter with the time span of human generations.

Each generation saw itself as living a similar life to its predecessors, with the occasional addition of a slightly better way of accomplishing one thing or another. The true course of events is only now being uncovered by the sophisticated forensic techniques developed by science, not least the sequencing of ancient DNA and the mapping of human migrations through the DNA profiles of people living today.

As a historian, Yuval Harari (who teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) belongs to the school founded by Jared Diamond (who endorses the book on the cover), in applying scientific research to every aspect of human history, not just the parts for which no written accounts exist. In truth, Harari uses less science than Diamond. He emphasizes the difficulty of knowing in detail the lives of our remote forebears and is often content to say – of topics that are being urgently investigated by the more forensically inclined – "frankly, we don't know". His ideas are mostly not new, being derived from Diamond, but he has a very trenchant way of putting them over.

Typical is a bravura passage on the domestication of wheat, in which he floats the conceit that wheat domesticated us. What was once an undistinguished grass in a small part of the Middle East now covers a global area eight times the size of England. Humans have to slave to serve the wheat god: " Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space..." and so on.

Harari proposes three big revolutions around which his story revolves: the Cognitive Revolution of around 70,000 years ago (articulate language); the Agricultural Revolution of 10,000 years ago; and the Scientific Revolution of 500 years ago. The last is part of history, the second is increasingly well understood, but the first is still shrouded in a mystery that DNA research will probably one day clear up.

Although the book is billed as a short history, it is just as much a philosophical meditation on the human condition. One great overriding argument runs through it: that all human culture is an invention. The rules of football; the concept of a limited liability company; the laws relating to property and marriage; the character, actions and notional edicts of deities – all are examples of what Harari calls Imagined Order. He develops this idea into a magnificent, humane polemic, particularly highlighting the sorrows that accrue from society's justification of its cruel practices as either natural or ordained by God (they are neither).

Not only is Harari eloquent and humane, he is often wonderfully, mordantly funny. Much of what we take to be inherent cultural traditions are of recent adoption: "William Tell never tasted chocolate, and Buddha never spiced up his food with chilli".

Towards the end of the book, the influence of thinkers other than Diamond emerges. He rehearses Steven Pinker's argument that objectively (to judge by mortality statistics) the world is, despite appearances, becoming less violent; passages on individual happiness and how it can be assessed alongside more conventional historical topics smack of Theodore Zeldin, both in style and content.

Inevitably, in a "big picture" account such as this, some portions of the canvas are less hatched in than others. For this reader, these later sections seemed weaker, but in the last chapter the brio returns as Harari considers what humankind – who developed culture to escape the constraints of biology – will became now that it is also a biological creator. Sapiens is a brave and bracing look at a species that is mostly in denial about the long road to now and the crossroads it is rapidly approaching.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

by Yuval Noah Harari ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 10, 2015

The great debates of history aired out with satisfying vigor.

Harari (History/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) provides an immersion into the important revolutions that shaped world history: cognitive, agricultural and scientific. The book was originally published in Israel in 2011 and became a best-seller.

There is enormous gratification in reading books of this nature, an encyclopedic approach from a well-versed scholar who is concise but eloquent, both skeptical and opinionated, and open enough to entertain competing points of view. As Harari firmly believes, history hinges on stories: some stories for understanding, others prompting people to act cooperatively toward common goals. Of course, these stories—“ ‘fictions,’ ‘social constructs’ or ‘imagined realities’ ”—can be humble or evil, inclusive or self-serving, but they hold the power of belief. Harari doesn’t avoid the distant past, when humans “were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish,” but he is a skeptic and rightfully relies on specific source material to support his arguments—though he is happy to offer conjectures. Harari launches fully into his story with the cognitive revolution, when our brains were rewired, now more intelligent and creative, with language, gossip and myths to fashion the stories that, from politicians to priests to sorcerers, serve to convince people of certain ideas and beliefs. The agricultural revolution (“lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers”) comes next and firmly establishes the intersubjectivity of imagined orders: hierarchies, money, religion, gender issues, “communication network[s] linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals.” Throughout, the author revels in the chaos of history. He discusses the good and bad of empires and science, suggests that modern economic history comes down to a single word (“growth”), rues the loss of familial and societal safety nets, and continues to find wonder in the concept that “the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system.”

Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0062316097

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | GENERAL HISTORY

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Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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by David Grann

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

More by Elie Wiesel

by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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Sapiens: Summary and Review

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

See all 300+ book summaries and reviews

My main takeaway from this book is that the inter-subjective reality is in fact “real”, and shouldn’t be dismissed just because it isn’t “really” “real”. The imagined order is stable to a degree that you should not underestimate, because changing the imagined order requires coordinated changing of minds of everyone.

1. An Animal of No Significance

Fire is the original invention, it’s the first leverage factor that allowed one human to destory hundreds of other animals

2. The Tree of Knowledge

• Fictions, and the ability to create/believe in them, is what makes humans able to cooperate in groups larger than 150
• Toolmaking is of little consequence unless it’s coupled with an ability to cooperate with others - Lots of other animals make tools, but they can’t cooperate with strangers.

3. A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

See The World Until Yesterday for a deeper dive into the topics in this chapter.

4. The Flood

As humans spread around the world, they caused mass extinctions of local flora and fauna.

5. History’s Biggest Fraud

See The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

6. Building Pyramids

“Human rights” doesn’t exist insofar as it does not derive from objective reality, but instead subjective beliefs (e.g. we were created by God, and therefore equal under his eyes.)

The imagined order “feels” real to us because it can become embedded in the material world. Though the imagined order exists only in our minds, it can be woven into the material reality around us, and even set in stone. Most Westerners today believe in individualism. This is reinforced because every child gets their own room, which they can decorate at will, and which parents are forbidden to enter without knocking first.

The imagined order shapes our desires: If romanticism (the idea that you should maximise experiences) matters, then you should spend your money on holidays. However if status matters, then you should build Pyramids with your money.

7. Memory Overload

Writing was a revolutionary technology that let us cooperate in large groups because it let us remember far more than we normally could remember about just the 150 closest people to us.

8. There is No Justice in History

Discrimination can perpetuate for millenia due to negative feedback loops stemming from what were originally accidental happenstances.

9. The Arrow of History

This chapter describes how the “us vs. them” mentality slowly encompassed larger and larger groups of “us”.

10. The Scent of Money

Money is the ultimate technology for tolerance and cooperation.

Tolerance flourished on the other side of the hill too. Muslim merchants in North Africa conducted business using Christian coins such as the Florentine florin, the Venetian ducat and the Neapolitan gigliato. Even Muslim rulers who called for jihad against the infidel Christians were glad to receive taxes in coins that invoked Christ and His Virgin Mother.

11. Imperial Visions

How empires rise and fall.

The Taj Mahal. An example of ‘authentic’ Indian culture, or the alien creation of Muslim imperialism?

12. The Law of Religion

Religions are defined as a “superhuman order”. In this view, ideologies like communism or capitalism are also “religions” because they require the belief in an imagined superhuman order.

13. The Secret of Success

Why study history?

14. The Discovery of Ignorance

“Knowledge is Power”, in WWI and WWII, commanders took to science in the hopes that new technology would create more destructive weapons that could help win an edge over the enemy. This was not the case in pre-industrial warfare, as commanders focused mostly on strategy and tactics instead of technological innovation, it wasn’t obvious that technological innovation was an advantage.

15. The Marriage of Science and Empire

Scientific ignorance is in some way an accidental byproduct of colonialism. The discovery of previously unknown lands forced European intellectuals to admit they were ignorant about the world, so they would fastidiously study these new discoveries, the better to conquer the newly discovered realms. Without colonialism, the prevailing attitude was “we know everything about our kingdom and our kingdom is the only place that matters anyway”.

16. The Capitalist Creed

Capitalism is also in some way an accidental byproduct of colonialism, as the discovery of previously unknown lands changed credit mentality from the world being zero-sum to the world being positive-sum, and this trust in the future being better than the present kicked off a low interest rate world where we could actively invest into and build teh future.

17. The Wheels of Industry

Capitalism commits evils not because it is evil, but because it is indifferent to evil.

Some religions, such as Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed. The Atlantic slave trade did not stem from racist hatred towards Africans. The individuals who bought the shares, the brokers who sold them, and the managers of the slave-trade companies rarely thought about the Africans. Nor did the owners of the sugar plantations. Many owners lived far from their plantations, and the only information they demanded were neat ledgers of profits and losses.

Just as the Atlantic slave trade did not stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not motivated by animosity. Again, it is fuelled by indifference. Most people who produce and consume eggs, milk and meat rarely stop to think about the fate of the chickens, cows or pigs whose flesh and emissions they are eating. Those who do think often argue that such animals are really little different from machines, devoid of sensations and emotions, incapable of suffering. Ironically, the same scientific disciplines which shape our milk machines and egg machines have lately demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that mammals and birds have a complex sensory and emotional make-up. They not only feel physical pain, but can also suffer from emotional distress.

18. A Permanent Revolution

It used to be that families were the police, retirement plan, childcare, etc. Now all these operations are outsourced to the state. Stronger states mean weaker families and even stronger states in a perpetual cycle.

19. And They Lived Happily Ever After

How to be happy in modern society.

Most history books focus on the ideas of great thinkers, the bravery of warriors, the charity of saints and the creativity of artists. They have much to tell about the weaving and unravelling of social structures, about the rise and fall of empires, about the discovery and spread of technologies. 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. We had better start filling it.

20. The End of Homo Sapiens

Is life just data processing algorithms? This chapter sets the stage for Yuval’s next book, Homo Deus.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari: Summary & Notes

Rating : 9/10

Available at : Amazon

Related : Homo Deus , Guns, Germs and Steel

Get access to my collection of 100+ detailed book notes

An outstanding book on the history of humans, including cultures, religion, and economic development.

It took me a couple reads to fully appreciate, but it's guaranteed to elevate your level of understanding of the modern world, and of humans. Highly recommend.

Part One - The Cognitive Revolution

1 - an animal of no significance.

Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different. This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms.

2 - The Tree of Knowledge

Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal.

Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number. Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. There is no need for formal ranks, titles and law books to keep order.

Peugeot is a figment of our collective imagination. Lawyers call this a ‘legal fiction’. It can’t be pointed at; it is not a physical object. But it exists as a legal entity. Just like you or me, it is bound by the laws of the countries in which it operates. It can open a bank account and own property.

Peugeot belongs to a particular genre of legal fictions called ‘limited liability companies’. The idea behind such companies is among humanity’s most ingenious inventions.

Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has 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.

In other words, while the behaviour patterns of archaic humans remained fixed for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens could transform their social structures, the nature of their interpersonal relations, their economic activities and a host of other behaviours within a decade or two.

The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call ‘cultures’.

3 - A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

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.

While people in today’s affluent societies work an average of forty to forty-five hours a week, and people in the developing world work sixty and even eighty hours a week, hunter-gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats – such as the Kalahari Desert work on average for just thirty-five to forty-five hours a week.

The foragers’ secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet.

4 - The Flood

If we combine the mass extinctions in Australia and America, and add the smaller-scale extinctions that took place as Homo sapiens spread over Afro-Asia – such as the extinction of all other human species – and the extinctions that occurred when ancient foragers settled remote islands such as Cuba, the inevitable conclusion is that the first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom.

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. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans. Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, the large sea animals suffered relatively little from the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions. But many of them are on the brink of extinction now as a result of industrial pollution and human overuse of oceanic resources. If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion.

Part Two - The Agricultural Revolution

5 - history’s biggest fraud.

Even today, with all our advanced technologies, 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 (called ‘corn’ in the US), 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.

Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. They told a tale of progress fuelled by human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the gruelling, dangerous, and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers.

That tale is a fantasy. There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. 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.

The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. 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.

Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums.

The Luxury Trap

Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface – people thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.’ 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. Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.

Then why didn’t humans abandon farming when the plan backfired? Partly because it took generations for the small changes to accumulate and transform society and, by then, nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently. And partly because population growth burned humanity’s boats. If the adoption of ploughing increased a village’s population from a hundred to no, which ten people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the good old times? There was no going back. The trap snapped shut.

The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.

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. Let’s take another familiar example from our own time. Over the last few decades, we have invented countless time-saving devices that are supposed to make life more relaxed – washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, computers, email. Previously it took a lot of work to write a letter, address and stamp an envelope, and take it to the mailbox. It took days or weeks, maybe even months, to get a reply. Nowadays I can dash off an email, send it halfway around the globe, and (if my addressee is online) receive a reply a minute later. I’ve saved all that trouble and time, but do I live a more relaxed life?

Sadly not. Back in the snail-mail era, people usually only wrote letters when they had something important to relate. Rather than writing the first thing that came into their heads, they considered carefully what they wanted to say and how to phrase it. They expected to receive a similarly considered answer. Most people wrote and received no more than a handful of letters a month and seldom felt compelled to reply immediately. Today I receive dozens of emails each day, all from people who expect a prompt reply. We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.

The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted. Nobody plotted the Agricultural Revolution or sought human dependence on cereal cultivation. A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying water buckets under a scorching sun.

Victims of the Revolution

From a narrow evolutionary perspective, which measures success by the number of DNA copies, the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful boon for chickens, cattle, pigs and sheep.

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.

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

6 - Building Pyramids

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.

True Believers

Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’.

This is why cynics don’t build empires and why an imagined order can be maintained only if large segments of the population – and in particular large segments of the elite and the security forces – truly believe in it. Christianity would not have lasted 2,000 years if the majority of bishops and priests failed to believe in Christ. American democracy would not have lasted 250 years if the majority of presidents and congressmen failed to believe in human rights. The modern economic system would not have lasted a single day if the majority of investors and bankers failed to believe in capitalism.

The Prison Walls

How do you convince 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.

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.

Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’.

Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better.

7 - Memory Overload

Because the Sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny. A conscious effort has to be made to sustain laws, customs, procedures and manners, otherwise the social order would quickly collapse.

8 - There is No Justice in History

Different societies adopt different kinds of imagined hierarchies. Race is very important to modern Americans but was relatively insignificant to medieval Muslims. Caste was a matter of life and death in medieval India, whereas in modern Europe it is practically non-existent. One hierarchy, however, has been of supreme importance in all known human societies: the hierarchy of gender. People everywhere have divided themselves into men and women. And almost everywhere men have got the better deal, at least since the Agricultural Revolution.

A significant number of human cultures have viewed homosexual relations as not only legitimate but even socially constructive, ancient Greece being the most notable example. The Iliad does not mention that Thetis had any objection to her son Achilles’ relations with Patroclus. Queen Olympias of Macedon was one of the most temperamental and forceful women of the ancient world, and even had her own husband, King Philip, assassinated. Yet she didn’t have a fit when her son, Alexander the Great, brought his lover Hephaestion home for dinner.

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.

Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.

Part Three - The Unification of Humankind

9 - the arrow of history.

Every culture has its typical beliefs, norms and values, but these are in constant flux. The culture may transform itself in response to changes in its environment or through interaction with neighbouring cultures. But cultures also undergo transitions due to their own internal dynamics. Even a completely isolated culture existing in an ecologically stable environment cannot avoid change. Unlike the laws of physics, which are free of inconsistencies, every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions. Cultures are constantly trying to reconcile these contradictions, and this process fuels change.

If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values. It’s such an essential feature of any culture that it even has a name: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture.

Human cultures are in constant flux. Is this flux completely random, or does it have some overall pattern? In other words, does history have a direction? The answer is yes. Over the millennia, small, simple cultures gradually coalesce into bigger and more complex civilisations, so that the world contains fewer and fewer mega-cultures, each of which is bigger and more complex. This is of course a very crude generalisation, true only at the macro level. At the micro level, it seems that for every group of cultures that coalesces into a mega-culture, there’s a mega-culture that breaks up into pieces.

One of the most interesting examples of this globalisation is ‘ethnic’ cuisine. In an Italian restaurant we expect to find spaghetti in tomato sauce; in Polish and Irish restaurants lots of potatoes; in an Argentinian restaurant we can choose between dozens of kinds of beefsteaks; in an Indian restaurant hot chillies are incorporated into just about everything; and the highlight at any Swiss café is thick hot chocolate under an alp of whipped cream. But none of these foods is native to those nations.

The Global Vision

From a practical perspective, the most important stage in the process of global unification occurred in the last few centuries, when empires grew and trade intensified.

We begin with the story of the greatest conqueror in history, a conqueror possessed of extreme tolerance and adaptability, thereby turning people into ardent disciples. 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

Shells and Cigarettes

Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services.

Because money can convert, store and transport wealth easily and cheaply, it made a vital contribution to the appearance of complex commercial networks and dynamic markets. Without money, commercial networks and markets would have been doomed to remain very limited in their size, complexity and dynamism.

The Gospel of Gold

For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits.

Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation.

Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively.

The Price of Money

Money is based on two universal principles:

a. Universal convertibility: with money as an alchemist, you can turn land into loyalty, justice into health, and violence into knowledge.

b. Universal trust: with money as a go-between, any two people can cooperate on any project.

11 - Imperial Visions

Evil Empires?

In our time, ‘imperialist’ ranks second only to ‘fascist’ in the lexicon of political swear words. The contemporary critique of empires commonly takes two forms:

• Empires do not work. In the long run, it is not possible to rule effectively over a large number of conquered peoples.
• Even if it can be done, it should not be done, because empires are evil engines of destruction and exploitation. Every people has a right to self-determination, and should never be subject to the rule of another.

From a historical perspective, the first statement is plain nonsense, and the second is deeply problematic.

The truth is that empire has been the world’s most common form of political organisation for the last 2,500 years. Most humans during these two and a half millennia have lived in empires. Empire is also a very stable form of government. Most empires have found it alarmingly easy to put down rebellions. In general, they have been toppled only by external invasion or by a split within the ruling elite. Conversely, conquered peoples don’t have a very good record of freeing themselves from their imperial overlords. Most have remained subjugated for hundreds of years. Typically, they have been slowly digested by the conquering empire, until their distinct cultures fizzled out.

This does not mean, however, that empires leave nothing of value in their wake. To colour all empires black and to disavow all imperial legacies is to reject most of human culture. Imperial elites used the profits of conquest to finance not only armies and forts but also philosophy, art, justice and charity. A significant proportion of humanity’s cultural achievements owe their existence to the exploitation of conquered populations.

Good Guys and Bad Guys in History

There are schools of thought and political movements that seek to purge human culture of imperialism, leaving behind what they claim is a pure, authentic civilisation, untainted by sin.

These ideologies are at best naïve; at worst they serve as disingenuous window-dressing for crude nationalism and bigotry.

Nobody really knows how to solve this thorny question of cultural inheritance. Whatever path we take, the first step is to acknowledge the complexity of the dilemma and to accept that simplistically dividing the past into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere. Unless, of course, we are willing to admit that we usually follow the lead of the bad guys.

12 - The Law of Religion

Today religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement and disunion. Yet, in fact, religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires. Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is. 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. This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.

Religion can thus be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order . This involves two distinct criteria:

• Religions hold that there is a superhuman order, which is not the product of human whims or agreements.
• Based on this superhuman order, religion establishes norms and values that it considers binding. Many Westerners today believe in ghosts, fairies and reincarnation, but these beliefs are not a source of moral and behavioural standards. As such, they do not constitute a religion.

Despite their ability to legitimise widespread social and political orders, not all religions have actuated this potential. In order to unite under its aegis a large expanse of territory inhabited by disparate groups of human beings, a religion must possess two further qualities. First, it must espouse a universal superhuman order that is true always and everywhere.

Second, it must insist on spreading this belief to everyone. In other words, it must be universal and missionary.

Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists. A religion that recognises the legitimacy of other faiths implies either that its god is not the supreme power of the universe, or that it received from God just part of the universal truth. Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition.

So, 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.

In fact, monotheism, as it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. Scholars of religion have a name for this simultaneous avowal of different and even contradictory ideas and the combination of rituals and practices taken from different sources. It’s called syncretism. Syncretism might, in fact, be the single great world religion.

The Law of Nature

All the religions we have discussed so far share one important characteristic: they all focus on a belief in gods and other supernatural entities.

During the first millennium BC, religions of an altogether new kind began to spread through Afro-Asia. The newcomers, such as Jainism and Buddhism in India, Daoism and Confucianism in China, and Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism in the Mediterranean basin, were characterised by their disregard of gods.

Gautama grounded these meditation techniques in a set of ethical rules meant to make it easier for people to focus on actual experience and to avoid falling into cravings and fantasies. He instructed his followers to avoid killing, promiscuous sex and theft, since such acts necessarily stoke the fire of craving (for power, for sensual pleasure, or for wealth). When the flames are completely extinguished, craving is replaced by a state of perfect contentment and serenity, known as nirvana (the literal meaning of which is ‘extinguishing the fire’). Those who have attained nirvana are fully liberated from all suffering. They experience reality with the utmost clarity, free of fantasies and delusions. While they will most likely still encounter unpleasantness and pain, such experiences cause them no misery. A person who does not crave cannot suffer.

Buddha spent the rest of his life explaining his discoveries to others so that everyone could be freed from suffering. He encapsulated his teachings in a single law: suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is.

This law, known as dharma or dhamma , is seen by Buddhists as a universal law of nature.

The first principle of monotheist religions is ‘God exists. What does He want from me?’ The first principle of Buddhism is ‘Suffering exists. How do I escape it?’

The Worship of Man

The last 300 years are often depicted as an age of growing secularism, in which religions have increasingly lost their importance. If we are talking about theist religions, this is largely correct. But if we take into consideration natural-law religions, then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervour, unparalleled missionary efforts, and the bloodiest wars of religion in history.

The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.

Religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order. The theory of relativity is not a religion, because (at least so far) there are no human norms and values that are founded on it.

Theist religions focus on the worship of gods. Humanist religions worship humanity, or more correctly, Homo sapiens . Humanism is a belief that Homo sapiens has a unique and sacred nature, which is fundamentally different from the nature of all other animals and of all other phenomena. 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. The supreme good is the good of Homo sapiens . The rest of the world and all other beings exist solely for the benefit of this species.

At the dawn of the third millennium, the future of evolutionary humanism is unclear. For sixty years after the end of the war against Hitler it was taboo to link humanism with evolution and to advocate using biological methods to upgrade’ Homo sapiens. But today such projects are back in vogue. No one speaks about exterminating lower races or inferior people, but many contemplate using our increasing knowledge of human biology to create superhumans.

At the same time, a huge gulf is opening between the tenets of liberal humanism and the latest findings of the life sciences, a gulf we cannot ignore much longer. 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.

13 - The Secret of Success

But saying that a global society is inevitable is not the same as saying that the end result had to be the particular kind of global society we now have. We can certainly imagine other outcomes.

1. The Hindsight Fallacy

This is one of the distinguishing marks of history as an academic discipline – the better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another.

It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.

2. Blind Clio

We cannot explain the choices that history makes, but we can say something very important about them: history’s choices are not made for the benefit of humans. There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along.

Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host.

This approach is sometimes called memetics. It assumes that, just as organic evolution is based on the replication of organic information units called ‘genes’, so cultural evolution is based on the replication of cultural information units called ‘memes’. Successful cultures are those that excel in reproducing their memes, irrespective of the costs and benefits to their human hosts.

Part Four - The Scientific Revolution

14 - the discovery of ignorance.

Modern science differs from all previous traditions of knowledge in three critical ways:

a. The willingness to admit ignorance . Modern science is based on the Latin injunction ignoramus – ‘we do not know’. It assumes that we don’t know everything. Even more critically, it accepts that the things that we think we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge. No concept, idea or theory is sacred and beyond challenge.

b. The centrality of observation and mathematics . Having admitted ignorance, modern science aims to obtain new knowledge. It does so by gathering observations and then using mathematical tools to connect these observations into comprehensive theories.

c. The acquisition of new powers . Modern science is not content with creating theories. It uses these theories in order to acquire new powers, and in particular to develop new technologies.

The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all 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.

Ancient traditions of knowledge admitted only two kinds of ignorance. First, an individual might be ignorant of something important. To obtain the necessary knowledge, all he needed to do was ask somebody wiser.

Second, an entire tradition might be ignorant of unimportant things. By definition, whatever the great gods or the wise people of the past did not bother to tell us was unimportant.

All modern attempts to stabilise the sociopolitical order have had no choice but to rely on either of two unscientific methods:

a. Take a scientific theory, and in opposition to common scientific practices, declare that it is a final and absolute truth . This was the method used by Nazis (who claimed that their racial policies were the corollaries of biological facts) and Communists (who claimed that Marx and Lenin had divined absolute economic truths that could never be refuted).

b. Leave science out of it and live in accordance with a non-scientific absolute truth . This has been the strategy of liberal humanism, which is built on a dogmatic belief in the unique worth and rights of human beings – a doctrine which has embarrassingly little in common with the scientific study of Homo sapiens.

Knowledge is Power

In 1620 Francis Bacon published a scientific manifesto tided The New Instrument . In it he argued that ‘knowledge is power’. The real test of ‘knowledge’ is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us. Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 per cent correct. Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge.

The Sugar Daddy of Science

To channel limited resources we must answer questions such as ‘What is more important?’ and ‘What is good?’ And these are not scientific questions. Science can explain what exists in the world, how things work, and what might be in the future. By definition, it has no pretensions to knowing what should be in the future. Only religions and ideologies seek to answer such questions.

In short, scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology. The ideology justifies the costs of the research. In exchange, the ideology influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries.

15 - The Marriage of Science and Empire

Why Europe?

What potential did Europe develop in the early modern period that enabled it to dominate the late modern world? There are two complementary answers to this question: modern science and capitalism.

16 - The Capitalist Creed

A Growing Pie

In 1776 the Scottish economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations , probably the most important economics manifesto of all time.

In the new capitalist creed, the first and most sacred commandment is: ‘The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.’

That’s why capitalism is called ‘capitalism’. Capitalism distinguishes ‘capital’ from mere ‘wealth’. Capital consists of money, goods and resources that are invested in production. Wealth, on the other hand, is buried in the ground or wasted on unproductive activities.

Columbus Searches for an Investor

Capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail to defend private individuals and their property. Instead, it flows into states upholding the rule of law and private property.

The Capitalist Hell

This is the fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism. It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner. On the contrary, the craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way.

17 - The Wheels of Industry

Life on the Conveyor Belt

This is the basic lesson of evolutionary psychology: a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction. The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of animals, while neglecting their subjective needs.

The Age of Shopping

The modern capitalist economy must constantly increase production if it is to survive, like a shark that must swim or suffocate. Yet it’s not enough just to produce. Somebody must also buy the products, or industrialists and investors alike will go bust. To prevent this catastrophe and to make sure that people will always buy whatever new stuff industry produces, a new kind of ethic appeared: consumerism.

Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a positive thing. It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption. Frugality is a disease to be cured.

It has succeeded. We are all good consumers. We buy countless products that we don’t really need, and that until yesterday we didn’t know existed. Manufacturers deliberately design short-term goods and invent new and unnecessary models of perfectly satisfactory products that we must purchase in order to stay ‘in’. Shopping has become a favourite pastime, and consumer goods have become essential mediators in relationships between family members, spouses and friends. Religious holidays such as Christmas have become shopping festivals. In the United States, even Memorial Day – originally a solemn day for remembering fallen soldiers – is now an occasion for special sales. Most people mark this day by going shopping, perhaps to prove that the defenders of freedom did not die in vain.

The flowering of the consumerist ethic is manifested most clearly in the food market. Traditional agricultural societies lived in the awful shade of starvation. In the affluent world of today one of the leading health problems is obesity, which strikes the poor (who stuff themselves with hamburgers and pizzas) even more severely than the rich (who eat organic salads and fruit smoothies). Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world. Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products – contributing to economic growth twice over.

How can we square the consumerist ethic with the capitalist ethic of the business person, according to which profits should not be wasted, and should instead be reinvested in production? It’s simple. As in previous eras, there is today a division of labour between the elite and the masses. 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 capitalist-consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum.

In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist-consumerist ideal. 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. How, though, do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.

18 - A Permanent Revolution

Modern Time

Yet all of these upheavals are dwarfed by 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. As best we can tell, from the earliest times, more than a million years ago, humans lived in small, intimate communities, most of whose members were kin. The Cognitive Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution did not change that. They glued together families and communities to create tribes, cities, kingdoms and empires, but families and communities remained the basic building blocks of all human societies. The Industrial Revolution, on the other hand, managed within little more than two centuries to break these building blocks into atoms.

Most of the traditional functions of families and communities were handed over to states and markets.

The Collapse of the Family and the Community

Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, social security steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins

But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities. When neighbours in a high-rise apartment building cannot even agree on how much to pay their janitor, how can we expect them to resist the state?

Imagined Communities

Like the nuclear family, the community could not completely disappear from our world without any emotional replacement. Markets and states today provide most of the material needs once provided by communities, but they must also supply tribal bonds. Markets and states do so by fostering ‘imagined communities’ that contain millions of strangers, and which are tailored to national and commercial needs. An imagined community is a community of people who don’t really know each other, but imagine that they do.

The two most important examples for the rise of such imagined communities are the nation and the consumer tribe. The nation is the imagined community of the state. The consumer tribe is the imagined community of the market. Both are imagined communities because it is impossible for all customers in a market or for all members of a nation really to know one another the way villagers knew one another in the past.

Consumerism and nationalism work extra hours to make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community as ourselves, that we all have a common past, common interests and a common future. This isn’t a lie. It’s imagination.

19 - And They Lived Happily Ever After

Secondly, even the brief golden age of the last half-century may turn out to have sown the seeds of future catastrophe. Over the last few decades, we have been disturbing the ecological equilibrium of our planet in myriad new ways, with what seem likely to be dire consequences. A lot of evidence indicates that we are destroying the foundations of human prosperity in an orgy of reckless consumption.

Finally, we can congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern Sapiens only if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals.

If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.

Counting Happiness

One interesting conclusion is that money does indeed bring happiness. But only up to a point, and beyond that point it has little significance.

Another interesting finding is that illness decreases happiness in the short term, but is a source of long-term distress only if a person’s condition is constantly deteriorating or if the disease involves ongoing and debilitating pain. People who are diagnosed with chronic illness such as diabetes are usually depressed for a while, but if the illness does not get worse they adjust to their new condition and rate their happiness as highly as healthy people do.

Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health. People with strong families who live in tight-knit and supportive communities are significantly happier than people whose families are dysfunctional and who have never found (or never sought) a community to be part of. Marriage is particularly important. Repeated studies have found that there is a very close correlation between good marriages and high subjective well-being, and between bad marriages and misery.

But the most important finding of all is that happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.

If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society – mass media and the advertising industry – may unwittingly be depleting the globe’s reservoirs of contentment.

The Meaning of Life

Another is that the findings demonstrate that happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments. Rather, happiness consists in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile. There is an important cognitive and ethical component to happiness.

As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. 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.

So perhaps happiness is synchronising one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.

Know Thyself

Buddha agreed with modern biology and New Age movements that happiness is independent of external conditions. Yet his more important and far more profound insight was that true happiness is also independent of our inner feelings. Indeed, the more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them, and the more we suffer. Buddha’s recommendation was to stop not only the pursuit of external achievements, but also the pursuit of inner feelings.

To sum up, subjective well-being questionnaires identify our well-being with our subjective feelings, and identify the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of particular emotional states. In contrast, for many traditional philosophies and religions, such as Buddhism, the key to happiness is to know the truth about yourself – to understand who, or what, you really are. Most people wrongly identify themselves with their feelings, thoughts, likes and dislikes. When they feel anger, they think, ‘I am angry. This is my anger.’ They consequently spend their life avoiding some kinds of feelings and pursuing others. They never realise that they are not their feelings, and that the relentless pursuit of particular feelings just traps them in misery.

If this is so, then our entire understanding of the history of happiness might be misguided. Maybe it isn’t so important whether people’s expectations are fulfilled and whether they enjoy pleasant feelings. The main question is whether people know the truth about themselves. What evidence do we have that people today understand this truth any better than ancient foragers or medieval peasants?

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.

At the time of writing, the replacement of natural selection by intelligent design could happen in any of three ways: through biological engineering, cyborg engineering (cyborgs are beings that combine organic with non-organic parts) or the engineering of inorganic life.

Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, perhaps the real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?’, but ‘What do we want to want?’ Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven’t given it enough thought.

Afterword: The Animal that Became a God

Seventy thousand years ago, homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction.

Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But 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.

In the last few decades we have at last made some real progress as far as the human condition is concerned, with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating more rapidly than ever before, and the improvement in the lot of humanity is too recent and fragile to be certain of.

Moreover, 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. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles – but 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. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. 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?

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Tyler DeVries

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

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3 Sentence Summary

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited the earth. This is a scientific exploration of what traits led to the dominance of Homo sapiens and how we have evolved to evade the laws of natural selection and now design the world around us. Sapiens is a book that explores what it means to be “human,” by investigating the past, observing the present, and looking to the future.

5 Key Takeaways

• Storytelling and shared beliefs make large scale cooperation possible.
• The Agricultural Revolution was a luxury trap. Population growth exploded, but people lived under far worse conditions.
• Money, imperialism, and religion are the forces that unified humankind into a global society.
• The Scientific Revolution was built upon man’s willingness to admit his ignorance.
• There is no proof that human wellbeing inevitably improves as history rolls along.

Sapiens Summary

Please Note

The following book summary is a collection of my notes and highlights taken straight from the book. Most of them are direct quotes. Some are paraphrases. Very few are my own words.

These notes are informal. I try to organize them by chapter. But I pick and choose ideas to include at my discretion.

The Cognitive Revolution

1) an animal of no significance.

• Animals much like modern humans first appeared ~2.5 million years ago.
• Prehistoric humans were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.
• Homo sapiens —the species sapiens (wise) of the genus Homo (man).
• The rise of sapiens kickstarted the Cognitive Revolution about 70,000 years ago.
• Until about 10,000 years ago, many different human species coexisted.

Skeletons in the Closet

Homo sapiens are just one of many different species of humans that once lived.

• Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals) lived in Europe and western Asia.
• Homo erectus (Upright Man) populated eastern regions of Asia and survived there for 2 million years making it the most durable human species ever.
• Homo soloensis (Man from the Solo Valley) occupied the island of Java in Indonesia.
• Homo floresiensis were dwarf humans, reaching a max height of only 3.5 feet and weighing no more than fifty-five pounds. They lived on the Indonesian island of Flores.
• Homo denisova lived in Siberia.
• Homo rudolfensis (Man from Lake Rudolf) evolved in East Africa.
• Homo ergaster (Working Man) evolved in East Africa as well.

There may be many more lost relatives of ours still waiting to be discovered.

The Cost of Thinking

• All humans have extraordinary large brains compared to other animals.
• Big brains are a huge energy drain.
• We paid for our large brains by spending more time searching for food and muscle atrophy.
• Upright walking on two legs is another singular human trait.
• Our hands evolved to perform intricate tasks and produce sophisticated tools.
• 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens jumped to the top of the food chain so quickly that the ecosystem did not have time to adjust.

Having 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. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.

A Race of Cooks

• 300,000 years ago, humans were using fire on a daily basis.
• Fire allowed humans to cook, which made many more foods digestible.
• Chimpanzees spend five hours a day chewing raw food. Humans spend one hour eating cooked food.
• By shortening the intestinal track and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.

Our Brother’s Keepers

• 70,000 years ago, Sapiens from East Africa spread from the Arabian peninsula, and from there they quickly overran the entire Eurasian landmass.
• The ‘Interbreeding Theory’ suggests that Sapiens bred with other human populations and people today are the outcome of this interbreeding.
• The ‘Replacement Theory’ suggests that Sapiens could not breed with other humans and killed them off either directly by force or indirectly through competition of resources.
• 1-4% of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA.
• Whether Sapiens are to blame or not, no sooner had they arrived at a new location than the native population became extinct.

2) The Tree of Knowledge

• 70,000-30,000 years ago witnessed the invention of boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows, and needles. The first objects that can reliably called art date from this era, as does the first clear evidence for religion, commerce and social stratification.
• This time period is referred to as the Cognitive Revolution.
• We don’t know what caused it. The best guess is a random genetic mutation.

Our language is amazingly supple. We can connect a limited number of sounds and signs to produce an infinite number of sentences, each with a distinct meaning. We can thereby ingest, store and communicate a prodigious amount of information about the surrounding world.

• Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks to our unique language.
• Gossip is essential for cooperation in large numbers.
• A truly unique feature of our language is the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist.
• Fiction allows us to imagine things collectively. A common belief helps us cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

The Legend of Peugeot

• The maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals.
• Larger numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis.

• Corporations are modern day figments of our collective imagination.
• Limited liability companies are legally independent from the people who set them up, or invested money in them, or managed them.

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.

Bypassing the Genome

• Archaic humans only changed their behavior, invented new tools, or settled new territory as a result of genetic mutations or environmental pressures.
• Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have been able to change their behavior quickly, transmitting new behaviors to future generations without any need of genetic or environmental change.

History and Biology

• The Cognitive Revolution is the point when history declared its independence from biology.
• Historical narratives replace biological theories to explain our development.

3) A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

• It’s hard to guess how the ancients lived because there are so few artifacts.
• It’s also problematic to extrapolate the lives of modern forager societies to ancient ones.
• Today’s forager societies have been influenced by neighboring agricultural and industrial societies.
• Modern forager societies have survived mainly in areas with difficult climate conditions and inhospitable terrain. This may provide a very misleading model for understanding ancient societies that roamed fertile areas.
• Lastly, the most notable characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies is how different they are from one another.

The Original Affluent Society

• Dogs were the first domesticated animal. About 15,000 years ago.
• The human collective knows far more today than the ancients. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.
• The ancients were as fit as marathon runners and had the physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve even after years of practicing yoga or t’ai chi.
• They worked just 35-45 hours a week.
• They enjoyed more diverse experiences throughout their days.
• Ancients ate a varied and nutritious diet.
• Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases.
• 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’.
• Their world could still be harsh and unforgiving. High child mortality, minor accidents by today’s standards could be a death sentence, and confrontations with other foraging bands could be extremely violent.

4) The Flood

• 45,000 years ago Sapiens crossed the sea to Australia. Experts are hard-pressed to explain this amazing feat.
• The moment the first hunter-gatherers set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that Homo sapiens climbed to the top rung in the food chain on a particular landmass and thereafter became the deadliest species in the annals of planet Earth.
• The settlers of Australia transformed the ecosystem beyond recognition.
• Within a few thousand years, of the 24 Australian animal species weighing 100 pounds or more, 23 became extinct.

Guilty as Charged

• Change in weather patterns 45,000 years ago is weak evidence to support such a massive extinction.
• When climate change causes mass extinctions, sea creatures are usually hit equally hard. Yet there is no evidence of any significant disappearance of oceanic fauna 45,000 years ago.
• Mass extinctions, like the one seen in Australia, occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia whenever people settled another part of the Outer World.
• Large animals breed slowly. Plus, Australian giants had no time to learn to run away. They would have been surprised to find themselves in danger to punitive humans.
• Sapiens may have also used fire to intentionally burn large areas to create open grasslands.

The End of Sloth

• Within 2,000 years of Sapiens’ blitzkrieg across America, North America lost 34 out of its 47 genera of large mammals. South America lost 50 out of 60.

Noah’s Ark

• Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools.
• 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 now.

If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion. Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark.

The Agricultural Revolution

5) history’s biggest fraud.

• Sapiens ceased being foragers 10,000 years ago when they began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species.
• No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years.
• Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers.
• A handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes were responsible for domesticating Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.
• Wheat did not offer a better diet. It did not give people economic security. Nor could wheat offer security against human violence.
• Wheat 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 enable Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.

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.

The Luxury Trap

• Wheat began to thrive as temperatures warmed at the end of the Ice Age.
• When humans burned down forests and thickets, this also helped wheat.
• Where wheat became abundant, the game and other food sources were also plentiful. Nomadic bands could gradually give up their foraging lifestyle and settle down into permanent camps.
• They quickly learned more advanced cultivation techniques until they became farmers.
• With the move to permanent villages and the increase in food supply, the population began to grow.
• But disease riddled settlements combined with malnourishment led to soaring child mortality. In most agricultural societies at least one out of every three children died before reaching twenty.
• Population growth burned humanities boats. There was no going back to foraging.

The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? but by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.

• One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
• We invent countless time saving devices that promise to make our lives more relaxed, yet do just the opposite. Email is a great example.

Victims of the Revolution

• Domesticated animals—sheep, chickens, donkeys, and others—supplied food, raw materials, and muscle power.
• Today the world contains about a billion sheep, a billion pigs, more than a billion cattle, and more than 25 billion chickens.
• Despite massive growth in population around the world, most domesticated animals live short and cruel lives. This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.

6) Building Pyramids

• Ancient farmers might seem dirt poor to us, but a typical family possessed more artifacts than an entire forager tribe.

The Coming to the Future

• Foragers discounted the future because they lived hand to mouth. This saved them a lot of anxieties. There was no sense in worrying about thing that they could not influence.
• But farmers must always keep the future in mind and must work in its service.
• From the very advent of agriculture, worries about the future became major players in the theatre of the human mind.
• The stress of farming was the foundation of large-scale political and social systems.

An Imagined Order

• 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.

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 reality.

Prison Walls

• 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 insist that it’s an objective reality created by the gods or laws of nature.
• You also educate people thoroughly by constantly reminding them of the principles of the imagined order.
• E.g. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experience as we can.
• E.g. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible.

Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. But few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.

7) Memory Overload

• The human brain is not well adapted to storing and processing numbers.
• Between 3500 and 3000 BC, the Sumerians were in southern Mesopotamia invented the first written language—cuneiform.

Signed, Kushim

• The first texts of history contain no philosophical insight, poetry, legends, or laws. They are economic documents, recording the payment of taxes, accumulation of debt, and the ownership of property.
• Quipus were colorful cords made of wool or cotton with knots tied in different places. By combining different knots on different cords with different colors, it was possible to record large amounts of mathematical data.

The Wonders of Bureaucracy

• Written records require a good cataloging and retrieval system. Pharaonic Egypt, ancient China, and the Inca Empire all created special schools in which professional scribes, clerks, librarians and accountants were rigorously trained in the secrets of data-processing.

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.

The Language of Numbers

• Arabic numerals were first invented by the Hindus, but the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe.
• Anyone who wishes to influence the decisions of governments, organizations, and companies must learn to speak in numbers.
• Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master.

8) There is No Justice in History

• Humans organized themselves in mass-cooperation networks by creating imagined orders and devising scripts.
• Scholars know of no large society that has been able to dispense with discrimination altogether.
• Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.
• Even if somebody is born with a particular talent, that talent will usually remain latent if it is not fostered, honed and exercised. Not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities. Whether or not they have such an opportunity will usually depend on their place within their society’s imagined hierarchy.

The Vicious Circle

• Those once victimized by history are likely to be victimized yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.
• Culture tends to argue that it forbid only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.
• Your sex (male or female) are biological categories with objective qualities that have remained constant throughout history. Meanwhile, gender (man or woman) is a cultural category with qualities that are inter-subjective and undergo constant changes.

What’s So Good About Men?

• Not their physical strength. Human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power.
• Not their natural aggression. Empire-builders are cooperative. They know how to appease, manipulate and see things from different perspectives.
• Not their competitive drive to reproduce. The theory that women needed men to protect them while they were pregnant ignores that they could have easily relied on other women.

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.

The Unification of Humankind

9) the arrow of history.

• Every culture has its typical beliefs, norms, and values, but these are in constant flux.
• Freedom and equality are seen as fundamental values in Western cultures. But they contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short changes equality.
• Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programs.
• Republicans want to maximize individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider.
• Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset.

[Contradictions] are culture’s engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species. Just as when two clashing musical notes played together force a piece of music forward, so discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, re-evaluate and criticize. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.

The Spy Satellite

• Over the millennia, small, simple cultures gradually coalesce into bigger and more complex civilizations.
• Over the last few centuries, all cultures were changed almost beyond recognition by a flood of global influences.

The Global Vision

• 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.
• Money is the greatest global conqueror of all.

10) The Scent of Money

• Hunter-gatherers had no money. They shared their goods and services through an economy of favors and obligations.
• The rise of cities and kingdoms and the improvement in transport infrastructure brought about new opportunities for specialization.
• Complex societies gave rise to the need for money.

Shells and Cigarettes

• Money was not a technological breakthrough. It was a purely mental revolution.
• Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services.
• Cowry shells were used as money for about 4,000 years all over Africa, South Asia, East Asia and Oceania. Taxes could still be paid in cowry shells in British Uganda in the early twentieth century.
• In modern prisons and POW camps, cigarettes have often served as money.
• Coins and banknotes are a rare form of money today. 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% of all money exists only on computer servers.

How Does Money Work?

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

• Dollars have value only in our common imagination. In other words, money isn’t a material reality—it’s a psychological construct.
• Barley was the first type of money because people could trust in its inherent biological value—you could eat it. But it was difficult to transport.
• The real breakthrough in monetary history occurred when people gained trust in money that lacked inherent value, but was easier to store and transport.
• The first coins were struck around 640 BC by King Alyattes of Lydia, in western Anatolia.

The Gospel of Gold

• The invisible forces of supply and demand made it such that different cultures all around the world came to value gold in the same way.

The Price of Money

• Money can corrode local traditions, intimate relations, and human values.
• Although money builds universal trust between strangers, this trust is invested not in humans, communities or sacred values, but in money itself and the impersonal systems that back it.
• Money alone did not unify humankind. We cannot disregard the equally crucial role of steel.

11) Imperial Visions

• All empires eventually fall, but they tend to leave behind rich and enduring legacies. Almost all people in the twenty-first century are the offspring of one empire or another.

What is an Empire?

• Empires rule over a significant number of distinct peoples, each possessing a different cultural identity and a separate territory.
• Empires have flexible borders and a potentially unlimited appetite to conquer more nations and territories.
• Empires were one of the main reasons for the drastic reduction in human diversity.

Evil Empires?

• Empires have been the world’s most common form of political organization for the last 2,500 years. It’s also a very stable form of government.
• Building and maintaining an empire usually requires the vicious slaughter of large populations and the brutal oppression of everyone who was left.
• This does not mean, however, that empires leave nothing of value in their wake. A significant proportion of humanity’s cultural achievements owe their existence to the exploitation of conquered populations.
• Today most of us speak, think and dream in imperial languages that were forced upon our ancestors by the sword.

Good Guys and Bad Guys in History

• Even if we were to completely disavow the legacy of a brutal empire in the hope of reconstructing and safeguarding the “authentic”cultures that preceded it, in all probability what we will be defending is nothing but the legacy of an older an no less brutal empire.
• If an extreme Hindu nationalist were to destroy all the buildings left by the British conquerors, such as Mumbai’s main train station, what about the structures left by India’s Muslim conquerors, such as the Taj Mahal?
• The thorny question of cultural inheritance is complex. Simplistically dividing the past into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere.

The New Global Empire

• Today’s states are fast losing their independence. Not one of them is really able to execute independent economic policies, to declare war as they please, or even run its own internal affairs as it sees fits.
• The global empire is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group. It is ruled by a multi-ethnic elite, and is held together by a common culture and common interests.

12) The Law of Religion

• Today religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement and disunion. Yet, in fact, religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires.
• Religion can be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.
• The majority of ancient religions were local and exclusive. Universal and missionary religions began to appear only in the first millennium BC.

Silencing the Lambs

• 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.

The Benefits of Idolatry

• Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’.
• 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 to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.

The Battle of Good and Evil

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

The Law of Nature

• During the first millennium BC, new religions spread that were characterized by their disregard of gods. Examples are Jainism and Buddhism in India, Daoism and Confucianism in China, and Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism in the Mediterranean basin.
• The central figure is a human being, Siddhartha Gautama.
• Siddhartha saw that people suffered not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague, but also from anxiety, frustration and discontent.
• When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless.
• The only way to end the vicious cycle is to simply understand things as they are. Then there will be no suffering.
• To accept sadness as sadness, joy as joy, pain as pain, Siddhartha developed a set of meditation techniques that train the mind to experience reality as it is, without craving. These practices train the mind to focus all its attention on the question, “What am I experiencing now?” rather than on “What would I rather be experiencing?”

Suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is. Buddha

The Worship of Man

• The last 300 years has seen the rise of secularism.
• People believe in ideologies like Capitalism, Communism, Nationalism, or Liberalism with as much zeal as they believe in theist religions.
• Ideologies and religions are essentially the same thing.
• Humanist religions worship Homo sapiens and believe that we have a unique and sacred nature fundamentally different from all other animals and phenomena.
• Liberal humanism believes that “humanity” is a quality of individual humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct. “Human rights” are their commandments.
• Socialist humanism believes that “humanity” is collective rather than individualistic. Whereas liberal humanism seeks as much freedom as possible for individual humans, socialist humanism seeks equality between all humans.
• Evolutionary humanism believes that humankind is not something universal and eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate. Nazis are the most famous representatives of this way of thinking.

13) The Secret of Success

• Saying that a global society was inevitable is not the same as saying that the end result had to be the particular kind of global society we now have.

The Hindsight Fallacy

• The better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another.
• Possibilities which seem very unlikely to contemporaries often get realized. When Constantine assumed the throne in 306, Christianity was little more than an esoteric Eastern sect. If you were to suggest then that it was about to become the Roman state religion, you’d have been laughed at.
• History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic.

Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. 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.

• History is not made for the benefits of humans.

The Scientific Revolution

14) the discovery of ignorance.

• The last 500 years have witnessed a phenomenal and unprecedented growth in human power.
• Population has grown 14X, production has grown 240X, and energy consumption has grown 115X.
• Development of the atomic bomb in 1945 not only changed the course of history, but also gave humankind the capability to end it.
• Humans have increasingly come to believe that they can increase their capabilities by investing in scientific research.

• Modern science is built upon a willingness to admit that we do not know, the centrality of observation and mathematics, and the acquisition of new powers.
• Ancient traditions of knowledge only admitted two kinds of ignorance: An individual may be ignorant to something important, or an entire tradition might be ignorant of unimportant things.
• Modern-day science is a unique tradition of knowledge, inasmuch as it openly admits collective ignorance regarding the most important questions.

The Scientific Dogma

• Knowledge is connecting observations with mathematical theories.
• In medieval Europe, logic, grammar and rhetoric formed the educational core. Today’s students study mathematics and other exact sciences.

Knowledge is Power

• Not everybody understands quantum mechanics, cell biology, or macroeconomics. Nevertheless, we all benefit from the power science gives us.
• Utility is the best test for truth. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge.
• Napoleon’s troops, led by all his tactical genius, still wouldn’t stand a chance against an inept general with modern weaponry.
• Gunpowder was invented in China 600 years before cannons became a decisive factor in battle. The Chinese used the new compound for firecrackers.
• Science, industry and military technology intertwined only with the advent of the capitalist system and the Industrial Revolution.

The Ideal of Progress

• Until the Scientific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress. They thought the golden age was in the past.
• Admitting our ignorance, combined with new power from scientific discoveries, led people to suspect that real progress was possible after all.
• E.g. poverty. Many cultures have viewed poverty as an inescapable part of an imperfect world. In many countries around the world today, biological poverty is a thing of the past. Individuals are protected from personal misfortune by insurance, state-sponsored social security and NGOs.

The Gilgamesh Project

• For men of science, death is not an inevitable destiny, but merely a technical problem.
• Our best minds are not wasting their time trying to give meaning to death. Instead, they are busy investigating the physiological, hormonal and genetic systems responsible for disease and old age.
• Pills, injections and sophisticated operations save us from a spate of illnesses and injuries that once dealt an inescapable death sentence.
• A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal.

The Sugar Daddy of Science

• Science is a very expensive affair.
• Most scientific studies are funded because somebody believes they can help attain some political, economic or religious goal.
• Science is unable to set its own priorities. It is also incapable of determining what to do with its discoveries.
• Scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology. The ideology justifies the costs of the research. In exchange, the ideology influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries.
• 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

• The Scientific Revolution and modern imperialism were inseparable.

Why Europe?

• Between 1500 and 1750, western Europe gained momentum and became master of the “Outer World,” meaning the two American continents and the oceans. But only because the great powers of Asia showed little interest in them.
• The global center of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850 when Europeans humiliated the Asian powers in a series of wars and conquered large parts of Asia.
• Today all humans are, to a much greater extent than they usually want to admit, European in dress, thought and taste.
• European influence and dominance from 1850 onward was due to a large extent on their military-industrial-scientific complex and technological wizardry.
• The Chinese and Persians did not lack technological inventions such as steam engines (which could be freely copied or bought). They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalized rapidly.
• Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way even before they enjoyed any significant technological advantages.

The Mentality of Conquest

• Modern science flourished in and thanks to European empires.
• The plant-seeking botanist and the colony-seeking naval officer shared a similar mindset that began by admitting ignorance and compelled them to go out and make new discoveries.
• During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans began to draw world maps with lots of empty spaces. The empty maps were a psychological and ideological breakthrough, a clear admission that Europeans were ignorant of large parts of the world.
• Europe did not enjoy an outstanding technological edge to the rest of the world. What made Europeans exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer.

Rare Spiders and Forgotten Scripts

• Linguistics received enthusiastic imperial support. The European empires believed that in order to govern effectively they must know the languages and cultures of their subjects.
• Without such knowledge, it is unlikely that a ridiculously small number of Britons could have succeeded in governing, oppressing and exploiting millions of subjects.
• Modern Europeans came to believe that acquiring new knowledge was always good.
• Imperialists claimed that their empires were not vast enterprises of exploitation but rather altruistic projects conducted for the sake of the non-European races.
• Due to their close cooperation with science, these empires wielded so much power and changed the world to such an extent that perhaps they cannot be simply labelled as good or evil. They created the world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them.

16) The Capitalist Creed

• To understand modern economic history, you really need to understand a single word: Growth.
• For most of history the economy stayed much the same size.
• Credit enables us to build the present at the expense of the future. It’s founded on the assumption that our future resources are sure to be far more abundant than our present resources.

A Growing Pie

• Over the last 500 years the idea of progress convinced people to put more and more trust in the future. This trust created credit; credit brought real economic growth; and growth strengthened the trust in the futures and opened the way for even more credit.

Adam 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 the new capitalist creed, the first and most sacred commandment is: “The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.”
• Capitalism has gradually become more than just an economic doctrine. It now encompasses an ethic—a set of teachings about how people should behave, educate their children and even think.
• Ask a capitalist how to bring justice and political freedom to a place like Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, and you are likely to get a lecture on how economic affluence and a thriving middle class are essential for stable democratic institutions.
• Capitalism’s belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of almost everything we know about the universe.
• Banks and governments print, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill.

Columbus Searches for an Investor

• Napoleon made fun of the British, calling them a nation of shopkeepers. Yet theses shopkeepers defeated Napoleon himself, and their empire was the largest the world has ever seen.

In the Name of Capital

• The amount of credit in an economy is determined not only by purely economic factors, but also by political events such as regime changes or more ambitious foreign policies.

The Cult of the Free Market

• At the end of the Middle Ages, slavery was almost unknown in Christian Europe. During the early modern period, the rise of European capitalism went hand in hand with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Unrestrained market forces, rather than tyrannical kings or racist ideologues, were responsible for this calamity.
• Free-market capitalism cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner.
• After 1908, and especially after 1945, capitalist greed was somewhat reined in, not least due to the fear of Communism. Yet inequities are still rampant.

17) The Wheels of Industry

• Counterintuitively, 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 Secret in the Kitchen

• The steam engine was the first invention to convert heat into movement.
• The internal combustion engine revolutionized human transportation and turned petroleum into liquid political power.

An Ocean of Energy

• Every few decades we discover a new energy source, so that the sum total of energy at our disposal just keeps growing.
• All human activities and industries put together consume about 500 exajoules annually, equivalent to the amount of energy earth receives from the sun in just ninety minutes.

Life on the Conveyor Belt

• Today in the United States, only 2% of the population makes a living from agriculture, yet this 2% produces enough not only to feed the entire US population, but also to export surpluses to the rest of the world.
• Without the industrialization of agriculture the urban Industrial Revolution could never have taken place—there would not have been enough hands and brains to staff factories and offices.

The Age of Shopping

• The modern capitalist economy must constantly increase production in order to survive. Who is supposed to buy all this stuff?
• Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a positive thing.
• Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression.
• Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.
• 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 rich invest while the poor buy.

18) A Permanent Revolution

• The future is unlikely to yield a lack of resources, but very likely to destroy what remains of the natural habitat and drive most other species to extinction.
• Destruction of the ecosystem may increase the frequency of human-induced natural disasters.

Modern Time

• The Industrial Revolution turned the timetable and the assembly line into a template for almost all human activities.
• Public transportation solidified our dependence on strict time-keeping.
• Cheap but precise portable clocks became ubiquitous.
• Today, a single affluent family generally has more timepieces at home than an entire medieval country.
• The role of family and the local community has been replaced by the state and the market.

The Collapse of the Family and the Community

• A person who lost her family and community around 1750 was as good as dead. She had no job, no education and no support in times of sickness and distress.
• Over time, states and markets used their growing power to weaken the traditional bonds of family and community. Policemen were sent to stop family vendettas and replace them with court decisions. The market sent its hawkers to wipe out long-standing local traditions and replace them with ever-changing commercial fashions.
• “Be your own individual.” You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead.
• But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power of the impersonal state and market wield over our lives.

Until not long ago, the suggestion that the state ought to prevent parents from beating or humiliating their children would have been rejected out of hand as ludicrous and unworkable. In most societies parental authority was sacred. Respect of and obedience to one’s parents were among the most hallowed values, and parents could do almost anything they wanted, including killing newborn babies, selling children into slavery and marrying off daughters to men more than twice their age. Today, parental authority is in full retreat. Youngsters are increasingly excused from obeying their elders, whereas parents are blamed for anything that goes wrong in the life of their child.

Imagined Communities

• The consumer tribe is the imagined community of the market because it is impossible for all customers in a market to know one another the way villagers knew one another in the past.
• In recent decades, national communities have been increasingly eclipsed by tribes of customers who do not know one another intimately but share the same consumption habits and interests.

Perpetuum Mobile

• Over the last two centuries, the pace of change became so quick that the social order acquired a dynamic and malleable nature. It now exists in a state of permanent flux.
• Today, even a thirty-year-old can honestly tell disbelieving teenagers, “When I was young, the world was completely different.”
• The only characteristic of modern society of which we can be certain is the incessant change.
• The seven decades that have elapsed since the end of WWII 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.

Peace in Our Time

• Most people don’t appreciate just how peaceful an era we live in. We easily forget how much more violent the world used to be.
• In the year following the 9/11 attacks, despite all the talk of terrorism and war, the average person was more likely to kill himself than to be killed by a terrorist, a soldier or a drug dealer.
• The decline of violence is due largely to the rise of the state. Throughout history, most violence resulted from local feuds between families and communities.

Pax Atomica

• The price of war has gone up dramatically.
• The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb.
• Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms.
• The profits of war have declined.
• Wealth today is less in material things and more concentrated in human capital and organizational know-how. Both are difficult to conquer by military force.
• Peace has become more lucrative than ever.
• For the first time in history the world is dominated by a peace-loving elite—politicians, business people, intellectuals and artists who genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable.
• The tightening web of international connections erodes the independence of most countries lessening the chance that any one of them might single-handedly let slip the dogs of war.

19) And They Lived Happily Ever After

• Historians avoid raising the question: Does “progress” make people happier?
• New aptitudes, behaviors and skills do not necessarily make for a better life.
• Some argue an inverse correlation between human capabilities and happiness. Power corrupts.
• When judging modernity, it is all too tempting to take the viewpoint of a twenty-first-century middle-class Westerner. We must not forget the viewpoints of a nineteenth-century Welsh coal miner, Chinese opium addict or Tasmanian Aborigine. Truganini is no less important than Homer Simpson.
• We can’t judge this era too quickly. Even the brief golden age of the last half-century may turn out to have sown the seeds of future catastrophe.
• We can congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern Sapiens only if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals.

Counting Happiness

• Social, ethical and spiritual factors have as great an impact on our happiness as material conditions.
• Perhaps people in modern affluent societies suffer greatly from alienation and meaninglessness despite their prosperity. And perhaps our less well-to-do ancestors found much contentment in community, religion and a bond with nature.
• Money brings happiness only up to a point, and beyond that it has little significance.
• Illness is only a source of long-term distress if the condition continues to deteriorate or causes ongoing pain.
• Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health.
• Improvement in material conditions over the past two centuries may have been offset by the collapse of family and community. If so, the average person may well be no happier today than in 1800.
• Happiness = Expectations – Reality

We moderns have an arsenal of tranquilizers and painkillers at our disposal, but our expectations of ease and pleasure , and our intolerance of inconvenience and discomfort, have increased to such an extent that we may well suffer from pain more than our ancestors ever did.

Chemical Happiness

• People are made happy by pleasant sensations in their bodies.
• We are predisposed to maintain a certain threshold of happiness. Some people are naturally more cheerful than others.
• If we accept the biological approach to happiness, then history turns out to be of minor importance, since most historical events have had no impact on our biochemistry.
• When we finally realize that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry.

The Meaning of Life

• According to a study by Daniel Kahneman, happiness may consist in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile.
• Perhaps happiness is synchronizing one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions.

20) The End of Homo Sapiens

• The replacement of natural selection by intelligent design could happen in any of three ways: through biological engineering, cyborg engineering, or the engineering of inorganic life.
• Geneticists hope to revive extinct animals.
• Prosthetics have been engineered to be controlled by the electrical signals from the brain.
• The next stage of history will include not only technological and organizational transformations, but also fundamental transformations in human consciousness and identity.

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Sapiens Summary

1-Sentence-Summary: Sapiens is your guide to becoming an expert on the entire history of the human race as it reviews everything our species has been through from ancient ancestors to our dominating place in the world today.

Favorite quote from the author:

Table of Contents

Video Summary

Sapiens review, audio summary, who would i recommend the sapiens summary to.

Try this fun little experiment right now. Extend both arms out from your body so they make a horizontal line. Stretch them as far as you can. Let this span represent the history of our Earth. What length between your arms would represent human history? 

If you think it’s as big as an arm, elbow, or hand, you’d be pretty far off. Amazingly, our time here would only represent a tiny amount so small you’d need a microscope to see it!

Even though our existence on Earth is relatively short, we’ve come far . What steps led us to dominate the planet like we do? In Yuval Noah Harari ’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , he reviews each step that got us here. You’ll learn each of the elements in our history, from language and money to science, that made us who we are.

Here are the 3 most interesting lessons this book teaches about our species:

• The ability to think gave early humans language, which eventually led to agricultural advances allowing them to grow exponentially. 
• Improvements in trade were only possible with the invention of money and writing.
• With better economic and communication means, scientific progress gave our race the abilities necessary to get to where we are today. 

Are you ready for an exciting crash course on the entire history of mankind? Here we go!

If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.

Lesson 1: Exponential population growth began with agricultural advances after early humans had the ability to think and speak.

Homo sapiens had some distinct advantages that let them get ahead of other human species on earth. Most importantly are the differences in humans brains. These began with the Cognitive Revolution around 70,000 years ago. This was a time when mental development rose relatively suddenly, setting our ancient ancestors apart.

With their newfound better brains , Homo sapiens could outperform other species of humans. Forming communities, developing better hunting tools, and building simple trade networks made everything about life and survival easier. 

As the ability to communicate grew, so did the population. Language set our species apart from others because it made us able to distribute information more freely. This helped early people share lessons about predators and food with each other. Because humans could cooperate as a society and flexibly, ideas spread which made even more progress possible. 

Not long later, the Agricultural Revolution gave humans another great advantage. By deserting old hunting and gathering methods for farming, mankind further improved their situation. This new method, although slow to begin, was far more efficient than the old ways, and let population growth explode.

Things were looking up but there was a problem. Coping with this larger community would require mankind to make even more advances to get to where we are today.

Lesson 2: The inventions of money and writing let mankind trade more efficiently, paving the way for further expansion.

With agriculture, humans became more efficient with their time and energy. This let some people begin doing other work like weaving or blacksmithing. These individuals would then trade or barter with farmers, exchanging their goods for food. While this new system was better, it quickly became inefficient. 

Let’s imagine that you’re living at the time and you’ve chosen blacksmithing as your profession. Your assortment of knives and swords provide good means to trade for food, like pork. Seems easy enough to just make the trade. But what if the farmer in your town already has a knife? Or maybe he’s not got a pig to kill for you yet. He can promise you one, but how do you know he’ll be honest about it?

It’s easy to see how having writing and money would make your situation a lot better. With the ability to record your transaction with the farmer, you can make sure he keeps his word if he needs to promise you a pig. And if you don’t have anything he needs, you can just sell your knife for currency, like barley, to make the transaction.

From here, advancements for Homo sapiens began happening rapidly. Pretty soon laws helped regulate everything to be safer. With the ability to write, economies and governments could grow. Society began to flourish, and the next step was science.

Lesson 3: Our society today is a result of explosive technological and scientific growth that came after our ancestors could trade and communicate better.

Now that they had efficient food, trading, and writing methods, our ancestors could begin thinking more. This led to a scientific revolution with many people considering ways to improve their way of life. Experimentation and exploration became common, and massive leaps in astronomy, physics, and medicine made life significantly better.

Take the child mortality rate, for example. We may take for granted the ability to have children that don’t die young, but this wasn’t always the case. Before medical advancements , it was common for two or three children to die prematurely in even the richest families. Today, things are even better and only one out of every 1,000 kids dies in childhood. 

Humans also saw opportunities to expand globally. Governments helping fund explorers and scientists saw great expansions in their empires. Christopher Columbus’s journey to America as well as that of James Cook to the South Pacific are just a couple of examples. Rapid growth into these areas followed these explorations, paving the way for the globalization we have today.

Although we’ve had our times of war, the history of mankind has now come to a place of great peace and prosperity. Some may see our unification as homogeneous and boring, but the lack of war in recent years is unprecedented. And while we may deal with other modern problems, but we can thank the advancements of each of our ancestors for the pleasant place we find ourselves in now.

Well that was an interesting read for sure! Sapiens  is jam-packed with everything you need to know about the history of our species . It was fascinating to learn about the steps in our progression from early man to our technologically advanced society today.

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The 27-year-old who doesn’t know much about history but would like a crash course in it, the 54-year-old that’s religious but wants to gain a more balanced view of mankind’s history, and anyone who’s curious about how our species got to where it is now.

Last Updated on December 5, 2022

Luke Rowley

With over 450 summaries that he contributed to Four Minute Books, first as a part-time writer, then as our full-time Managing Editor until late 2021, Luke is our second-most prolific writer. He's also a professional, licensed engineer, working in the solar industry. Next to his day job, he also runs Goal Engineering, a website dedicated to achieving your goals with a unique, 4-4-4 system. Luke is also a husband, father, 75 Hard finisher, and lover of the outdoors. He lives in Utah with his wife and 3 kids.

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• Book Review: Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Introduction

When I read non-fiction books these days, I get a nagging feeling that the author could have communicated the idea in a much shorter book. Many books these days, especially in the self-help category, are bloated works converted from one or two blog posts. But very rarely you come across a masterpiece book and wish that it was bigger. Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari is one such book!

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli professor of history at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His free YouTube course "A brief History of Humankind" covering 17 lessons and 62 videos is very popular. He wrote "Sapiens" originally in Hebrew and was later translated to other languages including English.

In less than 500 pages, Harari takes us through an exhilarating journey of human history. The topic of human history is so large, that it is a real challenge to decide what to include and what to ignore. Harari takes a high level view of human life over the centuries, but he also takes us through the perspective of common people when needed. Most of the things that traditional history textbooks usually cover are only very briefly touched upon.

Harari argues that it is our ability to gossip and believe in collective myth that has led to the unprecedented growth of human species. Everything that is the foundation of modern human civilization – money, religion, capitalism, consumerism and democracy is the result of our ability to believe in collective myth. Harari claims that it has enabled us to bypass evolution and even become gods on earth!

I am a huge fan of history and once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. The book triggers your imagination and curiosity. Harari tells many interesting stories. The lack of "political correctness" and "relaxed historical accuracy" may annoy or anger some readers! Here is an advice for easily offended readers – treat it as fiction!

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

Summary: Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind

Sapiens book is organized into 4 main parts covering last 70,000 years of human history,

• The Cognitive Revolution – Harari argues that it is our ability to gossip and believe in collective myth that led to the unprecedented growth of human species. He argues that it is this sudden ability that enabled us to be the only dominant human species on the planet. This part also takes a look at the day to day lives of early humans and explores the link between human growth and extinction of other animal species.
• The Agricultural Revolution – Is agricultural revolution history’s biggest fraud? Harari argues that for the farmers, this revolution manly offered suffering and death. This is an interesting conclusion since we think about agricultural evolution as a major achievement of human species. In more recent times, we have even started romanticizing farming and agriculture. This part also covers the evolution of language and bureaucracy.
• The Unification of Mankind – Harari argues that even though human culture has been in constant flux through the centuries, there has always been a definite direction to where we are going. Humans across the planet now form one large family. This part also explores the roles played by money, religion and imperial vision in unification of mankind.
• The Scientific Revolution – This section explores some of the reasons behind rapid industrial and scientific growth of European nations. Harari argues such a rapid advance is made possible by our acceptance of the fact that we know little about the world around us. It is our acceptance of ignorance that fuelled rapid scientific innovations. This section also explores the unification of the state, business and science.  Obviously there are dangers in the marriage of business and science.

Each of the above parts have 4 or 5 chapters dealing with topics related to that era. For example, one chapter looks at the origins of money while another chapter explores why agricultural revolution may be a disaster as far as individuals are concerned. Sometimes you get to hear an interesting story, sometimes you get to see a photograph of historical significance.

After going through the entire human history, finally Harari turns into the philosophical questions of human existence such as the meaning of human life and human happiness. He briefly touches upon the consumerism and its effects on human happiness. He points out that we are on the threshold of becoming the gods on earth!

Review: Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind

Harari’s Sapiens is an excellent summary of human history. It mainly covers the last 70,000 years of human history. But it is not merely about history as Harari is more interested in the motivations of the people behind history. And it is also full of his own conclusions ! He argues that the large-scale cooperation of human beings is what made us the masters of the planet.  He also briefly touches on philosophy and the chemical and biological interpretations of our behavior.

For any historian, it is important to at least partially suspend his personal beliefs while explaining historical findings. Harari does a very good job at that. He presents multiple viewpoints and theories of a historical event without actually taking sides. He admits that even today we are ignorant of many things including ancient history which left no evidence for us to study. However when it comes to conclusions, he has his own ideas which are very compelling!

Even though Harari doesn’t take any side in the debate of animal rights and vegetarianism, he paints a grim picture of the plight of domestic animals. There is no doubt that we are very brutal when it comes to industrial handling of animals used for meat and milk. The book contains plenty of horror stories. Historically my own local culture has been much more considerate towards the domestic animals, but money and industrialization is changing that. But here again, we need to be aware of the food requirements of 700 billion people!

One controversial part of the book is where Harari calls the agricultural revolution as history’s biggest fraud! He rightly points out that agricultural life has lead to lot of human suffering – tyranny of the elite classes, the quick spread of deadly diseases etc. Some are critical of this conclusion and argues that he underestimated the challenges faced by the so called happy "hunter-gatherers".

But we need to be aware that it is nearly impossible to make a judgment of history from our current privileged life. Many of the ideas and behaviors of my local community may be unacceptable to someone from a western country. In such a scenario, how can we judge people who lived thousands of years ago?

Towards the end of the book, Harari does a broad analysis of human happiness, looking not just at the philosophical question, but also the chemical and biological findings behind it. This section is sure to leave the reader confused if not completely depressed!

The small stories and intriguing photographs interspersed across the chapters makes the book a memorable read. It made me curious enough to investigate the background of the Lion-man , learn more about Gobekli Tepe and study the Buddhist teachings. And it made me think about what we are doing to our domestic animals bred for meat and milk.

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind is a brilliant piece of work. It is full of shocking and thought provoking stories. The vivid, crispy and witty language will dazzle you and its conclusions may even change your perspective on life. This is a masterpiece, get your copy today!

What do we want to want?

My Rating: 9/10

Further Reading/Additional Resources

• Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind (Amazon US)
• Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind (Amazon India)
• Harari’s YouTube Course on A Brief History of Humankind
• Photos of Oldest Temple (Gobekli Tepe)
• The Lion Man
• A Look at Cognitive Revolution
• The Last Tasmanian
• The Black War
• The "Earmouse"
• How Commercial Hatchery Works?

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Book Summary Sapiens , by Yuval Noah Harari

In Sapiens , Yuval Noah Harari uses concepts from biology, history, and economics to tell the story of us, Homo sapiens . We start 2.5 million years ago, when Sapiens make their historical entrance, and end in the future, when the creation of an artificially created superhuman race may mark the end of the Sapiens species. Along the way, we learn how our ability to create imagined realities led to our dominance over other species. We watch as the Agricultural Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, imperialism, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution change our species in lasting, and not always positive, ways.

Ultimately, we’re left with one question: As we design our future, who do we want to become? Asking the right questions may be more important than finding the right answers. Read this summary to explore our history as a species—in doing so, you’ll see today’s world in an entirely new way.

1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of Sapiens

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari uses concepts from physics, chemistry, biology, and history to tell the story of us, Homo sapiens.

Our history is punctuated by four major revolutions: The Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. We’ll look at each revolution and how it dramatically redirected the course of human history.

The Cognitive Revolution

2.5 million years ago, Homo sapiens was just one of eight human species. The first major revolution for Sapiens was the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago. Before that point, Sapiens weren’t particularly special and weren’t superior to the other seven human species. The Cognitive Revolution involved the development of three new abilities, all related to language, that helped Homo sapiens outpace their fellow humans.

Ability #1: Flexible Language

One reason the language of Sapiens was different was that it was more complex. Rather than communicating simple ideas the way green monkeys do (“Careful! A lion!” or “Careful! An eagle!”), the language of Sapiens could warn someone about a lion, describe its location, and plan how to deal with it. This allowed them to plan and follow through on complex actions like avoiding predators and working together to trap prey.

Ability #2: Gossip

A second distinction of the Sapiens language was its ability to convey gossip. We think of gossip as a bad thing, but using language to convey information about other people is a way to build trust. Trust is critical for social cooperation, and cooperation gives you an advantage in the struggle to survive and pass on your genes. Sapiens could form groups of up to 150 people. They didn’t need to know every group member personally to trust them. In a battle, a small group of Neanderthals was no match for a group of 150 Sapiens.

Ability #3: Fictions

A third benefit of the Sapiens’ language was how it was used to create fictions, also known as “social constructs” or “imagined realities.”

Being able to communicate information about things that don’t exist doesn’t seem like an advantage. But Sapiens seem to be the only animals who have this ability to discuss things that don’t have a physical presence in the world, like money, human rights, corporations, and God.

Collective Fictions

In and of itself, imagining things that don’t exist isn’t an asset—you won’t aid your chances of survival if you go into the forest looking for ghosts rather than berries and deer.

What’s important about the ability to create fictions is the ability to create collective fictions, fictions everyone believes. These collective myths allow people who’ve never met and otherwise would have nothing in common to cooperate under shared assumptions and goals.

Although imagined, these myths are crucial. Without collective fictions, the systems built on them collapse. And as we’ll see, most of our modern systems are built on these imagined realities. These myths are powerful, and the fact that they’re not rooted in objective reality doesn’t undermine them.

Collective fictions allowed early Sapiens to cooperate within extremely large groups of people, most of whom they’d never met, and it rapidly changed their social behavior.

The Agricultural Revolution

About 10,000 years ago, between 9500 and 8500 BC, Sapiens started shifting from forager lifestyles to a life revolving around agriculture. This was the Agricultural Revolution. It was so successful for our species that we went from 5-8 million foragers in 10,000 BC to 250 million farmers by the first century AD.

The move from foraging to agriculture wasn’t necessarily a conscious choice. Rather, it was a gradual process of small, seemingly insignificant changes. Let’s see how those small changes add up to a monumental revolution.

The Spread of Wheat

18,000 years ago, the last ice age retreated, increasing rainfall. This was great for wheat and other grains, which started to spread. Because there was more wheat, people started eating more of it, taking it back to their campsites to grind and cook. On the way to the campsite, some of the small grains were sprinkled along the path, helping the spread of wheat.

Humans burned the forests to create clearings that attracted animals. This also cleared the area of large trees and bushes that would have competed with the wheat for sunlight and water. Where wheat prospered, nomads would settle for a few weeks, enjoying the plenty. A few weeks turned into a few more, and over generations, these areas became permanent settlements.

People started storing grain for later and invented stone scythes, pestles, and mortars. Because they saw that wheat grew better when it was buried deep in the soil rather than sprinkled on top, humans began to hoe and plow the fields. Weeding, watering, and fertilizing followed. With all this time spent on tending the wheat, there was less time to hunt and gather. Sapiens had become farmers.

The move toward farming wasn’t an obvious benefit, since it led to a number of drawbacks.

• Agriculture was much harder than foraging and hunting for food, and it left farmers more vulnerable to disease and hunger.
• Farmers also had a less nutritious diet than foragers due to its lack of variety.
• When agriculture succeeded, all the extra food they grew resulted in a population boom. More people meant closer living quarters, leading to disease epidemics. Child mortality soared.

Most of the surplus went to the elite, and they probably did live better lives than their ancestors. But...

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Sapiens Summary Part I: Revolution of the Mind | Chapter 1: An Insignificant Species

Our history is punctuated by four major revolutions: The Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution. Part I (Chapters 1-4) explores the Cognitive Revolution and the events leading up to it.

We’ll look at each revolution and how it dramatically redirected the course of human history, but to understand these upheavals, we need to go back to a time when Homo sapiens was just one of multiple human species (and not a very distinguished species, at that).

Multiple Human Species

We think of our own species as the only humans, distinguished from and superior to every other species on earth. But when we, Homo sapiens , arrived on the scene 2.5 million years ago, we weren’t anything special. We existed in the middle of the food chain, as often prey as we were predators, and we weren’t even the only humans.

The Eight Human (Homo) Species

Humans evolved in East Africa from a genus of apes. These early humans settled all over the world, and as the climates and conditions...

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Sapiens Summary Chapter 2: Language, Gossip, and Imagined Realities

The first major revolution for Sapiens was the Cognitive Revolution. Before that point, Sapiens weren’t particularly special among animals. Over time, they had evolved the abilities to cross oceans and invent things like bows and arrows, sewing needles, oil lamps, and art. They had become humans that we’d recognize today, with our level of intelligence and creativity. But until the Cognitive Revolution of 70,000 years ago, they weren’t superior to other humans.

Although the use of fire hastened Sapiens’ ascent, it was the Cognitive Revolution that ultimately distinguished Sapiens from other humans.

What caused the Cognitive Revolution? No one’s really sure, but it was probably a chance gene mutation that changed the way the brain was wired.

The Cognitive Revolution involved the development of three new abilities, all related to language, that helped Homo sapiens outpace their fellow humans.

Their language gave Sapiens a huge advantage over their fellow animals, including their fellow humans.

Language itself isn’t particularly special—apes and monkeys communicate vocally, as do elephants, whales, and...

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Sapiens Summary Chapter 3: The Life of a Forager

We’ve only been working in offices and, before that, as farmers and herders, for the last 12,000 years. For hundreds of thousands of years before that, the majority of our species’ history, we were foragers.

We Don’t Know Much About Foragers

Because foragers moved every week, sometimes every day, they had few personal possessions. They only had what they could carry themselves, without the aid of wagons or pack animals. Consequently, Sapiens during the period between the Cognitive Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution left few artifacts. Dependence on the few artifacts discovered creates an incomplete and even misleading picture of our ancestors.

It’s also hard to talk about how early Sapiens lived because there was no single way of life (as there isn’t now). Still, attempting to piece together how our ancestors lived from 70,000 to 12,000 years ago can give us insight into our modern society.

The Few Things We’re Pretty Sure Of

• There weren’t many humans. The whole human population was smaller than the number of people living in Cairo today.
• Sapiens lived in bands of up to several hundred individuals.
• **Neighboring bands...

Sapiens Summary Chapter 4: Human Migration and Mass Extinction

Before the Cognitive Revolution, humans lived solely on the landmass of Afro-Asia and a few surrounding islands. They didn’t alter these environments and ecosystems dramatically. Animals on the African and Asia continents had evolved alongside humans and knew how to avoid them and hold their own.

But as humans migrated to other parts of the world, parts wholly unprepared to face the threat of human beings, this would change. This chapter looks at the ecological impact of human migration to Australia, America, and then the rest of the world.

Human-Caused Extinction in Australia

Somehow, humans managed to cross the sea barrier after the Cognitive Revolution. No one’s really sure how, but the best theory is that Sapiens in Indonesia learned how to build boats and managed to reach Australia. Human colonization of Australia is one of the most important events in history, on par with the moon landing. It was here that Sapiens rose to the top of the food chain and became the deadliest species in Earth’s history.

Before the arrival of humans, Australia was home to many large animals that sound mythical to modern ears. They included:

• A kangaroo that was six feet tall...

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Sapiens Summary Part II: Revolution of the Land | Chapter 5: Farming

Part Two details the second major upheaval of the Sapiens’ way of life: The Agricultural Revolution. Chapter 5 charts the advent of farming while also introducing a concept that we’ll return to throughout the rest of the book: the idea that success isn’t the same thing as happiness .

Sometimes, our evolutionary success is at odds with our well-being and happiness. Evolutionary success is pretty easy to judge and quantify—the more individuals of your species that survive, and the more copies of your DNA in existence, the more successful you are. Happiness, on the other hand, is harder to quantify. (We’ll spend a whole chapter, Chapter 19, breaking down the meaning and theories of happiness.)

Another recurrent theme, explored in the previous chapter, is that Sapiens isn’t the only species that matters . As we examine their history, we should also look at how the success of Sapiens affected other species.

The Success (and Suffering) of People During the Agricultural Revolution

About 10,000 years ago, between 9500 and 8500 BC, Sapiens started shifting from forager lifestyles to a life revolving around agriculture. This was the Agricultural Revolution. It was so...

Sapiens Summary Chapter 6: The Rise of Anxiety and the Political Order

Prior to the Agricultural Revolution, people didn’t live in houses. They roamed, following herds of animals or finding areas of more plant growth. With domestication of plants and animals, humans began living in houses (the word “domesticate” comes from the Latin for “house”).

The home, a new concept, measured a few dozen feet. It represented a separation from the rest of your band. Whereas nomads lived together, with the development of the house we became more individualistic, self-centered animals.

We also separated ourselves from the rest of nature. We cleared forests and fields, planted trees and proclaimed them “ours,” fenced off “our” land, and eliminated pesky weeds and animals. We were the masters of our individual universes, but this came with a lot of responsibility and the anxiety that attends it.

Anxieties About the Future

Nomadic foragers hadn’t given too much thought to what the future had in store. They were mostly focused on what they did and had in the present. There was little they could do to influence future events, so they didn’t worry about it. This saved them a lot of anxiety.

But** the Agricultural Revolution required a focus on the...

Sapiens Summary Chapter 7: The Invention of Writing

The social orders and cooperative systems of some species are maintained because the information for their maintenance is encoded in their DNA. For example, the behavior that makes a female bee fulfill her role as either a worker or queen is programmed into her genes.

But imagined systems aren’t encoded in our DNA, so we have to memorize the roles and behaviors they require. This worked for Sapiens for a while, but our systems became complex and required more information than one brain could hold.

Limits of the Brain

The brain isn’t good at storing information. It has a limited storage capacity and it doesn’t last forever. When humans die, so do their brains. All the information contained in a single brain is lost. Transmitting information to other brains is possible, but how much can be transmitted is limited, and what is transmitted may be muddied and distorted.

Further, the brain has evolved to store some types of information better than others. We’re good at remembering information about the qualities and behavior patterns of plants and animals, information about topography, and information about social ties. This information was crucial to the survival of...

Sapiens Summary Chapter 8: The Imagined Reality of Justice

As we’ve seen, Sapiens evolve genetically to organize themselves into large groups, so they formed societies through the use of imagined orders and writing.

Imagined Hierarchies

We require these imagined orders to function, but they’re not equitable or impartial. They result in systems that discriminate some and privilege others. In fact, there’s no known society that doesn’t discriminate.

Hierarchies have a purpose: they let us know how to interact with others without actually knowing them , which in theory is more efficient and lets us function in large societies. For instance, a woman selling flowers doesn’t know all her customers personally. To figure out how to divvy up her energy and time, she uses the social cues dictated by each person’s place in the hierarchy—such as the way he’s dressed, his age, and, often, his skin color—to determine who is the executive, likely to buy a lot of expensive roses, and who is the messenger boy, only able to afford daisies.

Almost all hierarchies are imagined (we’ll look at a possible exception, the hierarchy of males and females, at the end of this chapter). But we usually claim that they’re natural. For example,...

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Sapiens Summary Part III: The Creation of a Global Society | Chapter 9: The Direction of Cultural Evolution

Culture is the “network of artificial instincts” that connect us, myths so ingrained that we take them for granted. As we’ve seen, these myths allow us to cooperate and thrive in large groups.

Cultures aren’t static. They may have values and norms based on tradition, but they’re still in constant flux. Chapter 9 looks at how cultures evolve, whether that evolution is linear, and where our cultures are headed.

The Value of Cognitive Dissonance

Cultural changes may be a result of pressures from external factors like the environment or neighboring cultures. Or they may be the product of internal factors like the contradictions inherent in every culture. Psychologists call these contradictions cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs when we hold two or more thoughts or beliefs that are incompatible with one another.

Every single culture contains contradictions that lead to cognitive dissonance, and they’re actually beneficial. This is because cultures continually attempt to resolve and reconcile the contradictions in their myths. This leads to change, allowing for a more creative and dynamic species. Contradictions in our beliefs force us to examine them and...

Sapiens Summary Chapter 10: The Monetary Order

The first unifier of humankind is money. Money is a relatively recent invention. Hunter-gatherers didn’t have money because they found, killed, or produced everything they needed to survive. They shared what they had in their small bands in return for favors. For instance, if you gave your band member a piece of your meat, you expected her to give you some of her berries in return.

Economies of Favors and Bartering

Even at the start of the Agricultural Revolution, there was little need for money. Villages were self-sufficient, and what they couldn’t provide for themselves they bartered for in other villages. Although some individuals had expertise in an area like shoemaking or medicine, villages were too small for anyone to have a full-time occupation other than farming.

This changed with the growth of societies and improving transportation. In large cities where there were many people in need of your goods or services, it made sense to specialize in shoemaking, medicine, law, or carpentry, and depend on the reciprocity of your customers for your other needs. Specialization also allowed individuals to grow their expertise, which benefited the entire community.

Sapiens Summary Chapter 11: The Imperial Order

Money has brought the disparate worlds on Earth into one global community, but the market doesn’t always win. We can’t view human history solely through the lense of economy. While gold and silver had a huge impact in shaping our world, steel did as well.

The second unifier of humankind is empire. An empire is a political system that meets 2 requirements:

1. It rules over a large number of people living in distinct areas and of distinct cultural heritages. For example, the Roman Empire was comprised of diverse cultural communities in Europe, North Africa, and parts of Asia.

2. It can take in increasingly more territories without changing, in any fundamental way, the overall functioning, structure, and identity of the system. This distinction is a little subtler. Let’s compare Great Britain today and the British Empire of the past. Great Britain has definite borders. To extend or alter them would change Great Britain’s basic structure and identity. Great Britain isn’t an empire. In contrast, a century ago, the British Empire encompassed territories all over the world and still retained its British identity. The fact that it could maintain its identity while expanding...

Sapiens Summary Chapter 12: The Religious Order

The third unifier of humankind is religion.

Today, we often think of religion as something that divides rather than unites. Yet religion has a crucial role in supporting our other imagined orders, orders that have led to our success as a species.

Because the social orders on which our societies are founded are imaginary, they’re fragile. Religion’s role is to give “superhuman legitimacy” to these orders, making them hard to challenge. This makes social orders more stable.

But not all religions unify, and not all belief systems are religions. Let’s look first at the definition and requirements that make a belief system a religion, and then we’ll look at the additional requirements that give particular religions their unifying function.

To be a religion, a system has to meet two requirements:

1. The system has to be predicated on the belief in a “superhuman” order. As used here, “superhuman” is defined as “not the product of human actions.” For instance, professional soccer shares a lot in common with religion: it contains rituals, rites, and laws. But because these rituals and laws are determined by humans (in this case, FIFA), professional soccer isn’t a...

Sapiens Summary Chapter 13: Success and Alternate Paths of History

The creation of a global society was probably inevitable, but not the type of global society. For instance, the language of our global society is English. Why is English so prevalent and not, say, Danish? Why are we a society dominated by monotheistic religions and not dualistic ones?

We don’t know the answers to these questions, but there are two things we can say about history: 1) It isn’t predictable and 2) Its progress doesn’t necessarily benefit humans.

History Isn’t Predictable

The hindsight fallacy (or hindsight bias) is the human tendency to believe that events that have already happened were more predictable than they actually were. Looking back, we think we could have predicted how history would unfold—it seems obvious in hindsight. But while today we can describe how history has unfolded so far, we can’t say why it’s turned out the way it has.

For example, we can detail the events leading up to Christianity’s take-over of the Roman Empire, but we can’t determine the causal links between these events. We don’t know why Emperor Constantine chose to convert to Christianity when he could have continued to practice his own polytheistic religion....

Sapiens Summary Part IV: Revolution of Science | Chapter 14: Knowing We Don’t Know

In the last 500 years, we’ve seen unprecedented scientific and technological growth, so much so that a time traveler from 1500 would recognize very little of our world. For instance, since 1500, the world population has grown from 500 million Sapiens to 7 billion. Every word and number in every book in every medieval library could be easily stored on a modern computer. Further, we’ve built skyscrapers, circumnavigated the earth, and landed on the moon. We’ve discovered the world of bacteria, can now cure most diseases caused by it, and even engineer bacteria for use in medicines.

All of these advances were made possible by the Scientific Revolution.

Changes in the Way We Understand the World

In many ways, the Scientific Revolution was the result of a shift in the way Sapiens viewed the world and its future. We post-Scientific Revolution Sapiens understand the world differently than our ancestors:

1. We are willing to acknowledge our ignorance: Today, we assume there are gaps in our knowledge, and we even question what we think we know. As we’ll see below, this wasn’t the norm before the Scientific Revolution.

2. We emphasize observation and mathematics: ...

Sapiens Summary Chapter 15: The Quest for Knowledge...and Land

As we know, those in power rarely seek knowledge for knowledge’s sake. As Europeans set out to conquer the world in the 18th century, imperialism and the Scientific Revolution became not only inseparable but indistinguishable. Expeditions had the dual purpose of colonizing new territories and making scientific discoveries, and each goal aided the other.

Before we explore how science and empire tied the knot, we need to ask a crucial question: Why were the Europeans the ones who took over the world?

European Dominance

Cortes only had 550 men. Yet he managed to conquer an empire of millions, the Aztecs. Similarly, England was a tiny, inconsequential island in the 18th century, yet Captain Cook’s arrival in Tasmania led to the near-extermination of Tasmania’s native population, who were hunted and driven off the land by the new settlers. Although it seems almost inevitable in hindsight, it wasn’t obvious that England would defeat Tasmania. How did Europe, such a tiny part of the world, come to dominate it? Prior to Cook’s expeditions, Britain and western Europe were negligible influences on the world stage.

Asia was the more likely world power. The Ottoman Empire,...

Sapiens Summary Chapter 16: The Myth of Capitalism

Science, in both its discoveries and the mindset it fostered, was one of the two greatest aids to imperialism. Capitalism was the other.

The Idea of Growth

To understand our modern economy, you really only need to know one thing: it’s growing .

This seems obvious to us, but for most of history, the economy remained static. Growth is a relatively recent phenomenon, and its incline has been steep: In 1500, global production was about $250 billion. Today, it’s around $60 trillion.

The Banker, the Baker, and the Contractor

To understand this enormous growth, let’s look at a hypothetical example:

Mr. Greedy is a banker. Mr. Stone , a contractor, finishes a job and puts his payment, $1 million, in Mr. Greedy’s bank. Now the bank has $1 million in capital.

Meanwhile, Mrs. McDoughnut wants to start a bakery in town, but she doesn’t have the money to buy a property for her business or buy the tools needed for her business. So she goes to Mr. Greedy at the bank to get a loan. Mr. Greedy loans her $1 million.

Mrs. McDoughnut needs a contractor to build her bakery, so she hires Mr. Stone for $1 million. She pays him and Mr. Stone puts this money into his...

Sapiens Summary Chapter 17: Revolution of Industry

Economic growth requires more than just trust in the future and the willingness of employers to reinvest their capital. It needs resources, the energy and raw materials that go into production. While the economy can grow, our resources remain finite.

At least, that’s what we’ve thought for centuries. But the energy and raw materials that are accessible to us today have increased as a result of the Industrial Revolution. We now have both better ways of exploiting our resources and resources that didn’t exist in the worlds of our ancestors.

For instance, for over 300 years, humans built increasingly more advanced vehicles, from carts and wagons to trains, cars, jets, and spaceships. In 1700, the vehicle industry relied almost entirely on wood and iron, so its resources were limited. But since 1700, humans have invented or discovered new materials such as plastic, rubber, aluminum, and titanium. We also have new energy sources. The industry relied on muscle power in 1700, but today factories use petroleum combustion engines and nuclear power stations to manufacture their vehicles.

As long as science keeps making discoveries, our resources are, if not infinite, at least...

Sapiens Summary Chapter 18: Revolution of Society

The Industrial Revolution caused many upheavals to society, including urbanization, the rise in power of the common person, the decline of patriarchy, and democratization. But the two biggest upheavals to society were artificial time and the replacement of family and community with state and market.

Major Change #1: Artificial Time

The Industrial Revolution brought the industrialization of time, our turn away from natural time to mechanized time.

Agricultural v. Industrial Time

Most societies in history couldn’t make accurate measurements of time, and it didn’t really matter. Time was dictated by the day and the seasons. This was “agricultural time.” The sun told you when to wake up and go to work and when to go home and go to sleep, and it also told you when to harvest your crops and when to plant new ones. You didn’t need a more accurate measure of time than where the sun was in the sky.

But with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, precise time started to matter. Let’s see why: if you’re a shoemaker in medieval times, you make every part of the shoe, from the sole to the buckle. If another shoemaker shows up late for work, it doesn’t affect you. But if you...

Sapiens Summary Chapter 19: Theories of Happiness

The Agricultural, Cognitive, and Industrial Revolutions have merged nations, creating a global empire. Further, these revolutions have grown our economy, giving us “superhuman” powers. Have these revolutions increased our happiness, as well? If they haven’t, what was the point? Can we call ourselves successful if we’re not happier today than we were yesterday?

Many researchers have used “subjective well-being” as a stand-in for happiness. This implies that happiness is a feeling, either one of pleasure in the moment or one of contentment in the long term. This theory depends on the assumption that we can judge people’s happiness by asking them how they feel. Although we can’t ask our ancestors how they felt, we can take current findings and apply them retroactively. To determine the progress of happiness, we’ll look at four theories of happiness: the “expectations” theory of happiness, the biological theory of happiness, the “finding meaning” theory of happiness, and the “present moment” theory of happiness.

The “Expectations” Theory of Happiness

**The most significant finding in the study of happiness is that long-term happiness is based on the gap between our...

Sapiens Summary Chapter 20: The Birth of a New Species

So far, we’ve discussed the history of Homo sapiens . But what about its future?

The future of our species may be relatively short, not because we cause ourselves to go extinct, but because we become an entirely new species.

For almost 4 billion years, species have evolved according to the principles of natural selection. For example, proto-giraffes who had longer necks than their contemporaries could reach higher branches and access more food. Therefore, they had a better chance of survival and passing on their genes. According to science, this wasn’t the product of intelligent design. It was the product of surviving animals passing on the characteristics that led to their survival.

For the last 4 billion years, species, including Sapiens, have been constrained by these laws of natural selection, but today, we’re on the brink of replacing natural selection with intelligent design.

With the Agricultural Revolution came a huge leap forward in the move from natural selection to intelligent design. This is when Sapiens started mating animals. Rather than merely wishing for slow, fat chickens, a sapiens could mate a fat hen with a slow cock to produce, fat, slow offspring....

Shortform Exercise: Reflect on Sapiens

Sapiens is full of counterintuitive ideas and new ways to view our history. Which ones impacted you the most?

What are your key takeaways from the book? In what ways do you see the world differently now than before reading the summary?

Table of Contents

75 pages • 2 hours read

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

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Part 1 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “the cognitive revolution”, part 1, chapter 1 summary: “an animal of no significance”.

When humans first evolved in Africa about 2.5 million years ago, they were no more significant than any other insect or animal. Multiple human species competed for resources with each other and other animals. For many centuries, humans remained solidly in the middle of the food chain; they began to regularly hunt large game about 400,000 years ago and leaped to the top of the food chain about 100,000 years ago. The domestication of fire and the cooking of food allowed the simultaneous development of a shorter digestive tract and a larger brain. Humans’ large brain uses about 25 percent of energy supplies. The combination of cooking, quicker energy absorption through a shorter digestive tract, and large brain resulted in a rapid move to the top of the food chain that was disruptive to the rest of the food chain and to human development as well.

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Sapiens Summary | Yuval Noah Harari

A brief history of humankind.

Life gets busy. Has  Sapiens  been gathering dust on your bookshelf? Instead, pick up the key ideas now.

We’re scratching the surface here. If you don’t already have the book, order the  book  or get the  audiobook for free  to learn the juicy details.

Yuval Noah Harari’s Perspective

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli public intellectual and historian. He is currently a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds a Ph.D. from Jesus College, Oxford. Sapiens was Yuval’s breakthrough work. He has since published two more books: Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century .

Sapiens provides a scientific perspective on the history of humans through three revolutions. Yuval Noah Harari begins the book with our cognitive revolution, which occurred 70,000 years ago. Then, he describes our agricultural revolution of 12,000 years ago. Finally, he outlines the scientific revolution of 500 years ago. These three revolutions have shaped the humans we are today and the planet we inhabit.

About Sapiens

Sapiens has been incredibly popular since being published in English in 2014. The book is based on a lecture series that Yuval previously taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Sapiens made it onto the New York Times best-seller list. Also, the book won the National Library of China’s Wenjin Book Award for the best book published in 2014. Bill Gates has also ranked Sapiens among his ten favorite books. The book has now been translated into 45 languages.

Humans in Their First Form

Humans first appeared about 2.5 million years ago in a part of East Africa. The most relevant species to modern humans is Homo Erectus. Homo Erectus is an extinct species of archaic humans. Upon traveling from East Africa to other parts of the world, Homo Erectus evolved into multiple forms of homo, such as Neanderthalensis in Asia. It is not until 300,000 years ago that modern humans emerged, or Homo Sapiens. 

What separated Homo Sapiens from the other species within the Homo genus is our large brains. Homo Sapiens also have an unusually high energy expenditure associated with their brain. The Homo Sapien brain consumes 25% of energy at rest, while the norm for other apes is 8%.

We utilized our brainpower to create sharp tools and develop complex social networks. Homo Sapiens evolved as social animals based on the long gestation period for children. A child taking a long time to raise suggests that Homo Sapiens are adapted for developing strong social ties.

Homo Sapiens’ use of fire was also fundamental to its survival. Carefully managed fires were not only used for clearing forests, but also for cooking food. Fire allowed Homo Sapiens to eat food that was far easier to digest. Easily digestible food is an essential feature of Homo Sapiens’ survival. Food that is hard to digest requires long intestines. However, both long intestines and large brains are energy drains. Therefore, cooking food allowed Homo Sapiens to develop shortened intestines and utilize the excess energy to grow their brains further.

Neanderthals had already learned to use fire long before the emergence of Homo Sapiens, but they eventually died out. There are two main theories why Homo Sapiens prospered, and other Homo Species did not:

The Interbreeding Theory

Homo Sapiens started coming across other Homo species, such as Homo Neanderthalensis. Hence, this resulted in the species gradually emerging together. This theory is supported by DNA evidence. Even today, modern Europeans seem to contain Neanderthal DNA. 

The Replacement Theory

“Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.” – Yuval Noah Harari

The replacement theory suggests that Homo Sapiens pushed other species out. As Homo Sapiens had superior skills and technology (tools), they were able to push other Homo species toward extinction. This could have been by stealing food or through more violent means. 

Both Might Be Correct

Yuval explains that it is most likely that both of these occurred. A combination of interbreeding and replacement allowed Homo Sapiens to develop communication skills and conquer the globe. 

The Cognitive Revolution

As previously mentioned, what made Homo Sapiens unique was the structure of their brains. Yuval describes the period where a significant leap in brain evolution occurred as the cognitive revolution. This period supposedly occurred approximately 70,000 years ago. The Cognitive Revolution involved the development of far more sophisticated communities. Plus, the development of hunting based on more advanced techniques and tools. 

As expected, with the development of communities and hunting practices came the first recognizable examples of trade networks. These trade networks were primitive but meant that more Homo Sapiens could have access to food and resources. 

More significant movement by Homo Sapiens also characterized the Cognitive Revolution. Using their super brain power, Homo Sapiens created snowshoes and warm clothing out of skin and hair. These clothes allowed Homo Sapiens to inhabit cooler parts of the world, such as America and the Arctic. Unlike other Homo Species, Homo Sapiens were, therefore, able to find food and resources in even the harshest environments. Yuval provides an example of these skills in action. Homo Sapiens would have had to withstand the cold temperatures of the Siberian passage to inhabit America. Therefore, they must have learned to team together to hunt large mammoths for food. Plus, they created clothing that would prevent them from freezing to death. 

Homo Sapiens Have Always Encouraged Extinction

“The romantic contrast between modern industry that “destroys nature” and our ancestors who “lived in harmony with nature” is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of life.” – Yuval Noah Harari

In the modern world, extinctions are a widespread issue. However, this is not purely a modern phenomenon. Instead, the development of hunting techniques in Homo Sapiens led to a trail of extinctions. Just 50,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens would have inhabited the same land as 20-foot tall Sloths and Armadillos the size of cars. However, within a couple of thousand years of Homo Sapiens’ existence the vast majority of these animals had been pushed to extinction. 23 out of 24 species larger than 50 Kg became extinct within a few thousand years of Homo Sapiens travelling to Australia. The marsupials, mammals with baby-carrying pouches, failed to adapt to the onslaught of the humans. Similarly, in America, Mammoths, Mastodons, and many other native animals faltered under the influence of Homo Sapiens’ pressure. The same story has been repeated wherever Homo Sapiens go. 

In this book, Yuval explains that there have been three main extinctions related to Homo Sapiens’ development. First wave extinction occurred when Homo Sapiens were hunter-gatherers, and they first entered new ecosystems. The second wave extinction occurred when Homo Sapiens became farmers. Farming was associated with the burning of forests and grasslands to grow crops. Finally, the third wave extinction is the Industrial Revolution. 

The Industrial Revolution started in the 18th century and still takes place today. The invention of the steam engine and electricity freed us from our day-night and winter-summer cycle. We can now work and produce whenever we want. Production has been increased considerably by electricity. The invention of electricity encouraged consumerism. We can now create so much produce that a mentality around buying things is needed. Historically, religion has generally encouraged austerity. In the modern world, we accept consumerism and encourage consumption for the sake of consumption. Capitalism wins twice with overconsumption. As a society, we over-consume food, alcohol, and cigarettes. Capitalists in the form of pharmaceutical companies, diet fads, and private healthcare sell you the ‘cure’ to your overconsumption. 

“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 capitalist–consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal. 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 reign 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. How though do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.” – Yuval Noah Harari

Complex Language Helped Homo Sapiens to Thrive

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death, in monkey heaven. Only Sapiens can believe such fictions. But why is it important? […] Fiction is of immense importance because it enabled us to imagine things collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. And it is these myths that enable Sapiens alone to cooperate flexibly with thousands and even millions of complete strangers.” – Yuval Noah Harari

The reason that is often given for human superiority is our complex language. This same complex language is what helped Homo Sapiens to survive and thrive. The development of a complex language facilitated the spreading of information. Homo Sapiens were able to advise each other on how to hunt and distribute food. It also allowed Homo Sapiens to develop complex responses to threat e.g., the danger of predators. However, arguably the most critical impact of language development was gossip. Language facilitated Homo Sapiens in creating and believing in myths. These myths helped larger numbers of Homo Sapiens to collaborate and cooperate regarding a common understanding. These myths still unite us today: 

• Religion is a myth
• Nation-states are myths
• Limited-liability corporation is a myth
• The US declaration of independence is a myth

They are all figments of our imagination. Yuval explains that we laugh at the primitive myths of early Homo Sapiens. Yet, we are still connected and collaborate based on similar non-physical entities. 

“Christianity, capitalism, democracy, all are imagined orders with a large number of believers.” – Yuval Noah Harari

Each of these benefits was highly important for Homo Sapiens’ domination. This domination would have been won by forming more substantial groups. Neanderthals would have beaten Sapiens in one-to-one combat. However, Yuval points out that the most critical benefit of complex communication is the sense of community it creates. Shared understanding between members of a group is relatively unique. Although animals like bees work together towards a common goal, the level of understanding is seemingly less detailed. The understanding between Homo Sapiens was more fluid than other animals, allowing Homo Sapiens to adapt their social structure based on changes in the environment. 

The Agricultural Revolution

Language was hugely influential in the development of small communities. However, it is agriculture that helped these communities grow into the global society we see today. To become a global society, Homo Sapiens had to transition from foragers to farmers. 

The vast majority of Homo Sapiens’ history has been spent in a nomadic lifestyle. Homo Sapiens would not settle in one area as they were always tracking prey and looking to forage for food. Therefore, they just traveled to places where food was plentiful and stayed there until they had to find more food. However, approximately 12,000 years ago, this lifestyle changed. The start of the Agricultural Revolution was a shift from finding food to creating food. 

There were many benefits to hunting and foraging instead of farming. Firstly, a hunter-gatherer may only have to spend a few hours a day collecting enough food. In comparison, the farmer has to work all day on the fields to produce a bountiful harvest. Plus, the food that a farmer during that time could harvest would have been wheat. Wheat was hard to digest and lacking nutrients. Despite this, wheat went from an unknown crop to a crop spread everywhere on the planet. 

Homo Sapiens were not designed for agriculture and farming. Wheat demanded protection from pests and animals, but Homo Sapiens were not initially adapted to meeting these demands. This begs the question, ‘why did Homo Sapiens start to farm?’ Historians suggest that the change to agriculture was a slow, gradual process. With each generation, the process became more societally ingrained. On top of this, as farmers multiplied, they cleared more land that had previously been used by foragers. This started to make agriculture a necessity, and foraging no longer a viable option. 

Agriculture did have one major advantage: efficiency. Once Homo Sapiens had learned how to farm edible plants that were nutrient-rich, it was possible to increase food supply significantly. You could grow large amounts of food in minimal areas. After perfecting this, Homo Sapiens started to domesticate animals. Homo Sapiens started by slaughtering the most aggressive and weak animals first. Then, as animals became more domesticated, they became more economically viable as a food product. 

“Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueler with the passing of the centuries.” – Yuval Noah Harari

The symptom of high food supply was a significant increase in Homo Sapiens’ population. The Agricultural Revolution led to permanent settlements, which ultimately facilitated the conception of more children. Plus, the agricultural revolution encouraged Homo Sapiens to specialize in different fields. Individual Homo Sapiens no longer had to search for their food. Instead, they could become blacksmiths or weavers and trade these items for food. 

Issues arose when a surplus of food and commodities could be made. Food was integral, but eventually, the farmer would have enough knives or winter coats. The bargaining chip for other specialisms became less useful. The solution to this problem was money. 

Money Helped Solve the Problem of Surplus

“Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.” – Yuval Noah Harari

Based on this issue of surplus, approximately 5,000 years ago, money and writing were developed. Yuval explains that the first civilization to start using money in society were the Sumerians of Mesopotamia. In modern terms, Mesopotamia includes parts of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Kuwait. This society also started using clay tablets for etching people’s transactions using the simplest of economic symbols. Therefore, coins and gold were used as a currency, while the development of writing was integral for preventing corruption. Money helped create a central mechanism so that every seller knows the price of a good in a single currency. This approach helped the economy remain stable for a while. Yuval points out that, just like religion, money is a myth that we created and still utilize today. Anything can be used as a currency, as long as it is easy to transport, store, and has a wide enough acceptance. For example, Yuval uses the example of cigarettes being used as currency in Nazi concentration camps. 

The development of writing was also integral as Homo Sapiens’ memories are limited. Only a certain amount of information could (and still can be) stored by Homo Sapiens. 

As societies continued to grow, things became more complicated.

Laws Helped Regulate Money

As societies became larger and more complex, it became essential to develop economic laws. These laws required systems of authority, such as Kings or Emperors. Although modern societies view these authority figures as cruel, Yuval explains that they provided Homo Sapiens with political, social, and economic stability. 

Rulers, at this time, created their authority through religion. If people were willing to accept the ruler was placed there by Gods, they were far more willing to follow the ruler’s laws. Giving the example of Mesopotamia again, Yuval described how King Hammurabi was able to legitimize his laws by declaring that Gods had appointed him. Then, imperialism led to cultures becoming even larger. Diverse ethnicities and religious groups combined in society due to imperial campaigns. 

The Scientific Revolution

“The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all 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. Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions. Ordinary mortals gained knowledge by delving into these ancient texts and traditions and understanding them properly. It was inconceivable that the Bible, the Qur’an or the Vedas were missing out on a crucial secret of the universe – a secret that might yet be discovered by flesh-and-blood creatures.” – Yuval Noah Harari

The Scientific Revolution is the revolution that modernized Homo Sapien societies. In Homo Sapiens’ past, there had been a belief in Gods. These Gods were out of our control, and this meant Homo Sapiens often followed blindly. However, the scientific revolution allowed all Homo Sapiens, even the ‘mortals,’ to develop our understanding of the world. Homo Sapiens started to consider how they could improve the world through science, rather than through praying. 

The scientific revolution was characterized by gigantic leaps in our understanding of medicine, astronomy, and physics. Focusing on experimentation and observation allowed us to hugely improve the wellbeing of the average Homo Sapien in society. For example, child mortality rates have dropped considerably. Thousands of years ago, even the wealthiest members of society would lose two or three children to premature deaths. Today, infant mortality worldwide is only 1 in every 1,000 children. 

In addition to benefiting Homo Sapiens’ health, the scientific revolution also developed how we viewed economies. European governments looked to explore new land through explorers such as Columbus. These explorations encouraged colonization and further connections being drawn between countries on a global level. These interactions allowed more complex forms of currency to be developed than silver and gold. However, it came at the cost of indigenous people’s lives. 

European imperialism and the Scientific Revolution underpin the capitalist society we live in today. European governments used the scientific method and exploration to enlarge their empires and increase their profits. One of the negative impacts of this, though, was pushing for a homogenous society. The UK’s colonies covered over half of the world at one point. Hence, local customs, cultures, and laws were pushed out. European norms and science were forced on these indigenous countries. The European’s empire may have long since finished, but other countries are still dealing with cultural inheritance. 

Globalization Is on the March

Because of our history and the development of technology, we are now all interconnected. The consequence is that Homo Sapiens have never been more peaceful. Wars are now very rarely fought over resources, as resources are in such abundance. 

Some challenge globalization and dislike the cultural diversity it creates. Despite this, there are multiple benefits to globalization. Modern nations depend on each other for prosperity, and there are trade links between almost all countries. This reliance on each other leads to a much lower risk of war. It is in a country’s best interest to maintain peace as their own country’s prosperity is now partly dependent on the prosperity of other countries. Yuval explains that these factors mean that no recognized independent nation has been conquered and eliminated since WWII in 1945. 

Yuval explains that the 20th century was the most peaceful century ever. Some might see this as surprising due to the two world wars. However, 30% of all adult males were the victim of murder during the hunter-gatherer era. This percentage is now roughly 7%. Science helped encourage people to obey laws that forbid murder and violence, which encouraged stable societies and economies. These societies can now work together on a globalized scale, which further encourages peace. 

We Still Have Lots to Do

Although we are currently living in the most peaceful time, we must also pay attention to potential sources of conflict. Climate change and water potentially becoming a scarcity could encourage violence. Hence, we must do what we can to prevent these disasters from occurring. 

Yuval considers whether our development and improvements in health, wealth, and knowledge have made us happier. Yuval thinks not. Although there might be more short-term rises in happiness or sadness in the modern world, our happiness levels hover around the same level as they have been for a while. 

On top of this, although societies might be slightly happier than historical societies, wealth is currently distributed to a small number of people. Indigenous people, women, and people of color have continued to be given fewer opportunities to benefit from the improvements we see in today’s world. 

Yuval describes happiness as when our delusions about the meaning of our life synchronize with the collective delusions. Hence, in the modern age, we are left unhappy when we see advertisements as they increase our subjective expectations. 

What Does the Future Hold?

Yuval concludes the book by thinking about Homo Sapiens’ future. As a species, we are currently testing our biological limits through considerable advances in technology and science. Biotechnology and Bionics could mean that humans live for far longer and in different capacities. For example, Jesse Sullivan lost both his arms. However, he has been provided with bionic arms that he can operate using his thoughts. Decades ago, Jesse would have had a considerably worse life than he does today. Concerning aging, scientists have found ways to double the life span of sea life through genetic engineering. With the speed at which technology is advancing, we could see humans living for considerably longer and aging far slower. 

If Homo Sapiens eventually develop a way to live forever, there is no doubt that we will grasp it. Yuval explains that by this point, we can no longer describe ourselves as Homo Sapiens. We will be a new species altogether. This is what Yuval covers in his next book, Homo Deus. The future species could be part Human and part God. 

We rate this book 4.7/5.

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Stadiums are more than a symbol. They are built to exclude some people and include others

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Book Review

The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play

By Frank Andre Guridy Basic Books: 368 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

We generally enter stadiums to watch football or baseball, or see a huge concert, or perhaps cheer on a favorite political candidate. Chances are such activities don’t lead directly to serious consideration of how and for whom public spaces are used, or how these spaces reflect the strengths and weaknesses of American democracy. But after reading Frank Andre Guridy’s “The Stadium,” you might just find yourself thinking as much about the history of these cavernous facilities as the games on the field.

Subtitled “An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play,” Guridy’s deeply researched book delivers just that. This is a progressive-minded study of inclusion and exclusion, the relationship of highly visible buildings to their neighborhoods, and the ways in which stadiums and arenas have succeeded and ways they’ve failed to live up to the country’s ideals.

It is also a defense of the midcentury “concrete donut” stadium — think Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, or San Francisco’s Candlestick Park — which, Guridy argues, fostered a democratic spirit despite their usual location on the city’s outskirts. Conversely, it offers a critique of the quaint “jewel box” facilities (pioneered by Baltimore’s Camden Yards) that tend to cater to wealth and gentrification despite their centralized urban locations.

A meticulous, pain-filled history of the senseless slaughter at Kent State

Historian Brian VanDeMark seeks the truth behind the May 4, 1970, campus massacre, as experienced by students, National Guard, officials and the families of those who died.

Aug. 5, 2024

Guridy, a professor of history and African American studies at Columbia University, has set himself a daunting task with many potential pitfalls. Such a book could lean too hard into a study of buildings, which would appeal to readers of an architectural bent but perhaps not a general audience. It also could turn the endeavor into a work of sports history; games, after all, are what most people think of when they hear the word “stadium.” The book contains elements of both subjects, but Guridy is after something bigger than either.

“The Stadium” is a work of social history, about the interaction of people, places and ideas, segregation both legal and de facto, mingling and isolation, money and power. This is a series of vivid scenes that add up to a big picture.

One of those scenes unfolds in the heart of Los Angeles. The publicly managed Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum opened in 1923 (one of many stadiums designed as memorials to World War I veterans), built to draw the Olympics to Los Angeles (which it did, in 1932). By the 1970s it had long been racially integrated, as opposed to, say, Tulane stadium in New Orleans, where for many years visiting football teams had to bench their Black players. (In 1956, as Guridy writes of Louisiana, “the state legislature banned interracial mixing at sporting events and at virtually all social functions.”)

But at the Coliseum, progress wasn’t measured merely on the playing field. In 1972, seven years after the Watts uprising, the facility hosted the first Wattstax concert, a benefit showcase of Stax recording artists featuring Isaac Hayes, the Staples Singers and many other acts. As Guridy writes, “The audience of a hundred thousand was the largest crowd of black people at a public event in the United States since the March on Washington in 1963.” At this moment, the stadium was the site of social change and cultural celebration.

Other subjects explored here include the 1982 Gay Games held at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco (the U.S. Olympic Committee played legal hardball to make sure Gay Games organizers couldn’t officially use the word “Olympics”); the history of Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington, D.C, essentially a national monument where demeaning stereotypes of Native Americans were regularly acted out as entertainment for Redskins fans; and the battle to allow female journalists into stadium locker rooms and press boxes, led largely by Melissa Ludtke, who in 1978 was a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit that eventually won female sports reporters equal access to Major League Baseball locker rooms. (Ludtke has written a fine new book, “Locker Room Talk,” that chronicles this struggle in detail.)

At its heart, “The Stadium” is a story of access and representation in the most public and crowded of places, where rituals of community and, often, patriotism are played out for all to see. Like many sports fans, Guridy casts a critical eye on the premium now placed on luxury seating, which prices many fans out of the picture, and the preponderance of garish corporate sponsorship, which now makes stadiums look like billboard markets where a game happens to be unfolding.

Guridy occasionally loses the forest for the trees as he zooms in on an episode that demonstrates a particular point he wants to make. But when he takes a detour into a specific event, prompting you to wonder where we might be going, he usually manages to loop back to the main road.

“The Stadium” maintains a grasp on the stadium as an idea, and an ideal. In this book the stadium is us, writ large, for better or worse. It is where we live out our national dreams and, sometimes, our fantasies.

Chris Vognar is a freelance culture writer.

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