In an attempt to get a gold star from teacher and prove he’s a big brain, Yuval Noah Harari tackles the mind-boggling task of writing a narrative history of humanity – homo (hehe) sapiens – condensing some 70,000 years (to be fair most of that was undocumented and could easily be covered) into a modest sub-500 page book! Which he nevertheless almost achieves, albeit in what turns out to be a rather dry and dull read in Sapiens.
Being a student of history, as well as having read a few sociological books on humanity already, I found Sapiens to be unengaging at times with its basic approach. That’s not to say though that I didn’t learn anything from this book. I thought it was interesting that the reason the Renaissance took place in western Europe, along with most major scientific advances, was due to Europeans’ adoption of capitalism. Hence why nowhere else in the world were people motivated enough to make these discoveries and take them as far as they could: no money in it. Start offering up rewards and, voila – progress!
Harari takes quite a dim view to the Agricultural Revolution and looks at the diets of our hunter-gatherer ancestors as vastly more healthy. I sort of agree with his reasoning in that mass-produced, processed food, particularly grain and wheat, is much less healthy than meat and vegetables (not to mention that this diet is probably behind the obesity epidemic currently engulfing the world). If we went back to eating primarily meat and vegetables, there’d be a lot less fat people around with fewer chronic diseases. On the other hand an abundance of easily accessible, somewhat nourishing food also afforded many of us the time to focus on other things, besides looking for sustenance, in order to advance our collective knowledge that much quicker. Yin, yang.
And I take his point too that technology and culture has advanced much faster than humans have. He thinks if we paid more attention to our basic needs – being outdoors, interacting face-to-face with people, exercising – we’d be a lot happier than most of us who sit in chairs at home, at work, or on the way to and from either, staring at screens all day and communicating in the abstract via email, phones, etc. And I agree – we’re not as advanced as we think we are; evolution is slow so it’s worth paying attention to our true nature.
His closing chapters on technology and a merging of humans and machines didn’t exactly blow my mind given how many episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience I’ve listened to – Joe goes on about the forthcoming war with our machine overlords alllll the time! And, with the way humans can operate artificial limbs by thought alone, that’s Harari’s conclusion: that humans have evolved from apes into gods. Once you start looking back at the book from that standpoint, the entire narrative feels a bit pat. But I’ll give him some leeway on this as it is such an enormous topic.
And that’s the biggest issue I have with this book: the subject’s size. It did feel a lot like the author was meandering on a number of topics (Culture! Money! Religion! Anything!), like I was reading some interesting, if unconnected, titbits of random trivia that could’ve benefitted from tighter focus. It doesn’t help that the author is at times maddeningly glib. Like when he asks what makes humans happy. His answer: hormones. Well, duh! But what triggers those hormones is what we really want to know!!
Ultimately Sapiens is an informative read but I honestly can’t say I enjoyed reading it much which I think is down to the subject being too broad. The history of expansion was largely interesting, as were some of the parts on human behaviour, though I found large chunks of the science, economic theory and politics to be too esoteric and/or dreary. At any rate, kudos to Harari for his ambition and erudition, though, because I don’t find everything fascinating, I found myself compelled by only some of Sapiens and just ground through the rest.
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