SAPIENS IS the sort of book that sweeps the cobwebs out of your brain. Its author, Yuval Noah Harari, is a young Israeli academic and an intellectual acrobat whose logical leaps have you gasping with admiration. That said, the joy of reading him is not matched by any uplift in his message, which is relentlessly accusatory and dismaying. His book presents a brief history of life on earth, starting with the big bang and ending 1,000 years in the future, by which time, he predicts, homo sapiens will be extinct, because science will have replaced us with genetically engineered immortals and “super-cyborgs”, part human, part machine, with faculties we can’t even imagine.
The disappearance of old-style humans is not, it is clear, a prospect he much regrets, for on his reckoning we have proved the most destructive species ever to plague the planet. Almost all the facts in the human story are contested, but, as Harari tells it, our remote ancestors lived peacefully among the other animals for many millenniums until about 70,000 years ago when homo sapiens developed superior cognitive powers and, crucially, invented language.
No one knows how we alone managed this, rather than the other human species, such as Neanderthals, that archeology has discovered. But it was language that enabled us to co-operate, organise, and become the dominant animal. From their African homeland prehistoric humans spread across the globe, colon-ising Australia 45,000 years ago, where they became the Aborigines, then north and south America, where they became the Paleo-Indians. Wherever they went they spread destruction, hunting the larger mammals to extinction. All this happened while we were still primitive foragers. As Harari vividly puts it, we obliterated half the planet’s large-mammal species even before we got round to inventing the wheel.
A second wave of devastation came with the invention of agriculture around 10,000 years ago. Clearing land for the cultivation of cereals meant destroying the habitats of countless animal, bird and plant species, and reinforced humanity’s claim to be the deadliest organism ever. In Harari’s view, agriculture was also a tragedy for humans. With agriculture came private property, social and sexual inequal-ity, greed and exploitation. What had been close-knit, self-helping hunter-gatherer groups were replaced by a social system in which the majority were serfs or slaves, ruled by despots who owned the land. Worse still, agriculture supported far greater numbers of humans than foraging had, so it led eventually to the global population that is now spiralling out of control and can be sustained only by the obscenities of factory farming, described in this book with justified horror.
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Harari does not claim to be original in identifying the invention of agriculture as a world-changing disaster, and, in fact, the credit for this idea seems to belong to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Discourse on the Origin of Inequality put forward almost exactly the same argument in 1754. Since then, research has tended to confirm the disaster scenario. Quite apart from introducing social inequalities, agriculture, it seems, led to a steep decline in the standard of living, because it required full-time labour whereas hunter-gatherers, it is estimated, spent less than 20 hours a week getting food. They also had a healthier diet than farming communities, were less prone to vitamin deficiency, and lived longer.
Harari would like to believe that, in addition to their other advantages, hunter-gatherers were happier than we are. You can see why the thought attracts him. It would be a fitting payoff for our ecological mayhem. However, for once his argument stalls, and peters out in metaphysical niceties. Quantifying happiness seems a patently daft idea, which is no doubt why historians have steered clear of it, as Harari complains they have. Knowing whether those nearest and dearest to you are happy is difficult enough, without imagining that you can get inside the mind of some anonymous bushman who roamed the earth centuries ago.
Mostly, though, Harari’s writing radiates power and clarity, making the world strange and new. His central argument is that language has not just made us top animal, it has also enmeshed us in fictions. Myths, gods and religions appeared with the advent of language, and though they do not really exist outside the stories that we make up, they are enormously strong. Fictions such as Christianity and nationalism can bind millions together in a common cause, and people die for them. Humans, Harari observes, are the only animals that believe in vastly powerful entities that they have never seen, touched or smelt, and that is language’s fault.
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Laws, justice and human rights are all myths or fictions from Harari’s perspective, having no objective reality outside our imagination. Nothing resembling justice exists in the universe. There are no rights in biology. In a bravura passage he deconstructs the most famous lines in the American Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights...”) to show that they are a mishmash of fictions, from the creation myth to the absurd claim that humans are equal. Not that Harari dismisses such fictions as evil conspiracies or useless mirages. We believe in them, he argues, because they bind society together and allow us to co-operate effectively.
At the same time, because we half know that they are fictions, believing in them requires a degree of self-deception, for which Harari adopts the term “cognitive dis-sonance”, meaning the ability to hold contradictory beliefs and values. This is often considered a failure of the human psyche, but Harari applauds it. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, he suggests, it would have been impossible to establish human culture. However, since his book shows that the effect of human culture has been to devastate the world, perhaps the failure to establish it would have been no bad thing.
Harari has his own contradictions. He makes predictions while declaring that prediction is impossible. He argues that history is a “chaos” while treating it as a system of cause and effect. But such blips should not deter readers from treating themselves to this mind-stirring book.
Harvill Secker £25/ebook £13.99 pp440
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