Jordan's Reviews > Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
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TLDR: Frustrating: this is mostly philosophical and political book that suffers under the weight of its own contradictions, ignoring interiors, and claims of cultural relativism that lack a metanarrative or self-awareness.
And enjoyable: historical facts, creative presentations of money, empires, language and ignorance in the role of human (sapien) history.

Since this is such a popular book, and it does say a lot of creative and interesting things, I'll go into a lot of detail about what bothers me about this book and why I want to give it 2-3 stars:

I learned a lot when Harari relays the long history of humans (70,000 years to about 10,000 years ago) or shares various historical facts. But the vast majority of this book is philosophical speculation which often contradicts itself. Sometimes in the same page.

For example Harari talks about how we can't draw very many conclusions about the lives of foragers because all we have is raw physical evidence. And furthermore that the lives were likely incredibly varied given which tribe/culture a homo sapiens was a part of. But the he spends a whole chapter talking about how the agriculture revolution didn't improve people's inner lives... based on comparing to the inner lives of the foragers! This continues throughout the book, playing up the positives of an imagined lifestyle but downplaying the negatives—foragers supposedly "lived better lives than most people agricultural and industrial societies" despite Harari mentioning high childhood mortality (making it hard to play with children, a claim on why the pre-ag society is better), constant warfare (making it hard to hang out, tell stories, and gossip), etc. (eg page 43, 50-52, etc)

From an integral view, he massively overprivileges exteriors and mostly ignores interiors. While taking the long view on history (a nascently developmental, teal perspective) the vast majority of the writing is determined to convey a pluralistic (green) view of how all culture is fiction (not the author's culture, nor is he acknowledging the claims that he's making rest on the all of the history of these 'fictions' building upon each other, see pg 112 for example). I don't disagree that culture is myth, and when Harari isn't doing the extreme version of this he comes up with some creative reinterpretations of things that I found useful. But he's unable to see how the "real" reality of the external world is no more mythological, no less of a co-creation of our meaning making (show me an atom without a device and a theory humans created). And he's unable to construct a metanarrative that places these myths in relationship to each other, showing how they evolve and build on each other in a developmental wave of increasing maturation, differentiation, and integration. And finally, he seems to act as if culture, and interiors in general, are somehow less causative of the human experience and our creations than the external world, a claim which can be deconstructed very quickly by looking at one's own experience in any given moment, much less a day, a lifetime, or a history of a species.

He makes a lot of claims about what's natural and just without claiming that he's making the claim... trying to deconstruct others narratives without owning his own (see page 136-137 for example), and somehow tries to make the claim that "unnatural" is unnatural, and that it only exists because of Christianity? (p 147) He's too smart to actually believe that these cultural taboos didn't predate Jesus or exist elsewhere in the world, but these personal biases insinuate themselves constantly in the text, and undermine some of my trust in a lot of the other claims he makes.

Some highlights include the chapters 10 on Money (basically a trust in other people's trust, and a universal medium of "converting almost everything into almost anything else") and on 11 Empires—he does a brilliant job showing how all different countries, regions, and customs are the product of empires, conglomerations of influences, and that the imperial conquests weren't inherently bad (nor inherently good, but did a lot of both). I really enjoyed this, and this thread came back in later in a powerful way looking at more modern history.

Then again, these aren't my in my field of expertise, and when in ch 12 harari talks about religion it becomes clear again the many places he's wrong or making claims that have already been widely disproven, lack understanding (difference between religion and genuine religious experience for example) or are just extremely biased. For example he does a beautiful job describing an essence of Buddhism (226), while ignoring the various sects more fundamentalist expressions of it, but fails to see that the same is possible of Christianity (or any other religion for that matter).

Y'all get the point... these threads continue throughout the book

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Reading Progress

August 2, 2020 – Started Reading
August 2, 2020 – Shelved
August 22, 2020 – Finished Reading

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