Sapiens

Start with the puzzle. A hundred thousand years ago there were at least six kinds of human walking the earth, and ours was not the standout. We were not the strongest. Neanderthals were stronger, and the first time the two species met, in the Middle East, the Neanderthals won and we fell back. We were not the obvious genius either, tool for tool. So what flipped?

Harari's answer is a change in how we talk. Somewhere around seventy thousand years ago, he says, the Sapiens brain rewired itself, maybe through a lucky mutation, and we got a new kind of language. The thing that mattered about it was not that we could shout a warning about a lion. Plenty of animals warn each other about lions. It was that we could talk about lions that were not there, and then about things that were never there at all.

Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution.Sapiens, ch. 2

That sounds modest. It is the whole game. A chimpanzee troop tops out at a few dozen, because cooperation past that point needs everyone to personally know everyone. Sapiens smashed straight through the ceiling. A shared story, a tribal spirit, a god, a homeland, lets total strangers who will never meet behave as one body, because they all believe the same invisible thing. Two people who agree on a myth can build a temple together, run a trade route, or march to a war, no introduction required.

An individual human, Harari is happy to point out, is not much. Albert Einstein was clumsier with his hands than any Stone Age hunter. The difference is never one of us against one chimp. It is a million of us who share a story, against everything else alive.

Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That's why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.Sapiens, ch. 2

If fiction is the trick, then most of the modern world turns out to be fiction stacked on fiction. This is the idea the book is loved for, and it is worth getting exactly right. Harari is not saying money or nations are fake. He is saying they are real in a particular way: they exist because we agree they do, and only for as long as we keep agreeing.

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.Sapiens, ch. 2

He calls these things imagined orders. Not lies, he takes care to say, because a lie is something only you believe. An imagined order is something we all believe, and the shared belief is exactly what gives it teeth. The dollar in your pocket, the country on your passport, the company that signs your paycheck, the rights you would go to court to defend: not one of them has a body, and all of them move the world. Here are the big ones, in his words.

Now the book throws its best punch. We are all taught that farming was the great step up: settle down, grow a surplus, build civilization on top of it. Harari says it was a con, and the species that got conned was us.

The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud.Sapiens, ch. 5

The case goes like this. When people switched from foraging to farming, starting about ten thousand years ago, it was a triumph for the species and a downgrade for the person. A field of wheat feeds far more people per acre than a forest does, so the population boomed. But the average farmer worked harder than the average forager, ate a poorer and narrower diet, caught new diseases from living crowded up against animals and other people, and wrecked a spine doing the same heavy motion the body never evolved to do. More humans alive, leading worse lives. Evolution counts copies of itself, not contentment, so the wheat "won" while the people bent over it lost.

Then he turns the camera around, and this is the bit everyone remembers. Who domesticated whom? Wheat was a scrubby wild grass in one corner of the Middle East. Ten thousand years on it blankets the planet, and we are the ones clearing its stones, hauling its water, fighting off its pests, and nursing it through droughts. From the wheat's point of view, we are the livestock.

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.Sapiens, ch. 5

Follow that thread far enough and you reach the quietest, oddest chapter in the book. Ten thousand years of so-called progress: cities, medicine, plumbing, flight, the device in your hand. Are we happier than the hunter-gatherers we left behind? Harari's answer is that, as far as anyone can actually tell, no.

Was the late Neil Armstrong, whose footprint remains intact on the windless moon, happier than the nameless hunter-gatherer who 30,000 years ago left her handprint on a wall in Chauvet Cave?Sapiens, ch. 19

His reasoning runs in two parts. The first is that happiness tracks the gap between what you have and what you expected, so every gain just resets the bar, and you are hungry again by morning. The peasant who wanted a hut and got one, he argues, may have been about as content as the banker who wanted a penthouse and got one. The second part is colder. Our moods are mostly run by a biochemistry that idles around a personal set point, like a thermostat, drifting back to roughly the same level whether you win the lottery or lose a leg. Lasting happiness, on this view, comes from serotonin, not from circumstances.

He ends the chapter somewhere you would not expect a hard-nosed historian to stand: next to the Buddha, with the claim that the chase itself, the endless wanting of the next good feeling, is the very thing that keeps us from peace. It is a lovely passage. It is also the moment to ask the obvious question.

The last move is to aim the story at the future, and it is where Harari shifts from historian to prophet. For four billion years, life changed by natural selection: slow, blind, nobody at the wheel. We are about to take the wheel. Through gene editing, machine implants, and eventually built-from-scratch life, he argues, Sapiens is starting to design its own successors on purpose. Which would mean our species is near its end, replaced by whatever we make next.

The beings that come after us, he writes, will be further from us than we are from the Neanderthals, and the gap will not be a human one anymore. We are turning, in his phrase, into gods: able to engineer life, and starting to take aim at death itself. His closing worry is that we are gods with no idea what we actually want.

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?Sapiens, afterword

Put it all together and you get the question the experts keep circling: what kind of book is this, really? Here is the strongest case against it, and the case for it, side by side.

Whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously.C. R. Hallpike, review of Sapiens, 2017

Hallpike's own summary was that the book is best read not as a contribution to knowledge but as "infotainment," a wild ride across history "dotted with sensational displays of speculation." Then, drily: "By these criteria it is a most successful book." You can hold that and still be glad you read it. The skill is keeping both thoughts in your head at the same time.

There is one last crack worth seeing, because it is the book turning on itself. Harari spends four hundred pages arguing that nobody steers history, that it lurches along on accidents and fictions with no "we" in charge of anything. Then on the final pages he frets that "we" had better decide where to go next. Hallpike's question is a fair one: if the whole book is right, who is this "we" that could suddenly grab the wheel? The very move that makes the history feel so clean, that it is all just a story we tell ourselves, leaves the warning at the end with nothing solid to stand on.

One last thing, because of where this book lands on the shelf. Sapiens shares a birth year, 2011, with another big swing in this collection, David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, and set together the two of them make the real argument.

Deutsch, a physicist, bets everything on us: knowledge has no ceiling, every problem is soluble given the right explanation, and people are the most important things in the universe. Harari, a historian, tells the mirror story: meaning is a fiction we invented, progress has not made us any happier, and we are dissatisfied gods stumbling toward our own replacement. Same species, same year, opposite verdicts. Put them next to each other and you have the live question about what we are, the optimist who thinks we are barely getting started, against the skeptic who suspects we never really knew what we were doing. Harari is the better storyteller of the two. That is the exact reason to read him with your guard up.

This is a distillation of one book, told in my own words; the load-bearing ideas are Harari's, and the criticisms are named and linked so you can weigh them yourself. Quotes are kept short and reproduced for study and comment, cited by chapter. Where a quoted line uses an em dash in the original, it is shown here with a comma instead, with no change to the words, because the site does not use them. No em dashes, anywhere.