Thoughts and Notes on SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

Reflections on Harari’s, Sapiens as Postmodern History

Beware of Anyone Who Uses the Term Postmodern

Yuval Hoah Harari’s Sapiens, while a weighty tome, is history written for non-specialists.  It enjoys the endorsements of Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.  It’s a “page-turner,” which is a good trick for a book that attempts to capture the entire story of the human race.  Harari doesn’t burden his reader with even the most fundamental anthropological terms.  The well-known term Neolithic, which refers to the onset of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, doesn’t make a single appearance in the book.  Many paperback copies of Sapiens sit on shelves with beach sand in the binding.

Harari’s lively chronicle, which beckons presidents, high school students and moms sitting around the pool, carries a more formidable challenge.  It’s postmodern.  It arises out of that new way of viewing the world that has given us relativistic physics, LGBTQ rights, political correctness, and Critical Race Theory.  Most people, most intellectuals, could not define postmodernism, and those who could seem not to want to.  In fact, if someone uses the term postmodern too many times in an essay or talk, he or she probably doesn’t really understand it.  A crude way to locate postmodernism is to see it as that vague idiocy that your dad thinks has been wrecking the world, or at least universities, since 1972.  A more favorable way to think of  thinking about post-modernity is to see it as a collection of developments which challenge any idea that one way of living is valid for everyone. 

With these cautions stated, it strikes me that Harari presents facts that have been known for decades in the fresh framework(s) of contemporary critical thinking.   This is a history that kicks over the pedestals supporting the pantheon of Modern deities, namely progress, heterosexuality, Christianity, Western Civilization, capitalism, and the like.  He does this with readable, often antic, prose that never lapses into the jargon of anthropology, the quirky lingo of contemporary philosophers, or the orthodoxies of modernity’s absolutes.   The result is a fresh framework from which we can think anew about our place in the human drama without the monkey of traditional values ever on our backs.

Progress isn’t Always a Good Idea

A prominent feature of postmodernism is its challenge to the idea that the world is always getting better.  Most adults can remember when optimism about where the world was going seemed simply to be common sense.  Your neighbor, who always felt dreary about politics or science or the poor probably needed to take a pill or talk with someone, because everyone agreed that progress was going to fix all problems as it had for millennia before. 

Sapiens narrates the great developments of the human movement and cheerfully and entertainingly states that there have been a lot of steps backwards.  He’s not just talking about people planting the wrong crops or launching an attack that failed.  He’s talking about titanic developments—like domesticating animals and plants and settling into communities—that have proven to be catastrophic mistakes that we can’t reverse. 

Harari’s Kafkaesque description of the Agricultural Revolution borders on comedic.  He begins by describing the late Paleolithic era, foraging and mammoth-hunting, as the zenith of human happiness and achievement.  Twelve thousand years ago and before saw a humanity that roamed freely, unencumbered by too many neighbors, eating a wide and reliable diet pulled off of trees and bushes.  In this Garden of Eden people were impressively intelligent, strong as Olympians, and contented. 

Then came the rise of agriculture.  The human diet narrowed to four or five grains that were easily improved by tedious selection of the seeds that produced plants with the greatest hardiness and yield.  Too busy to forage, the new farmers settled into a life of compulsions—starchy food, freeloading neighbors, big families, and constant worry.  The domestication of animals took a similar course.  Pigs, chickens, cattle, horses, and sheep were all improved, penned, tragically mistreated.  The whole bargain traded the numerical proliferation of a handful of domesticated plants and animals for the freedom and happiness of all involved.

Worst of all, people couldn’t lapse back into their hunter-gatherer traditions.  First of all, enough generations had elapsed that no one even remembered foraging.  And even if they could, there were too many mouths to feed and constant labor clearing, plowing, weeding, hoeing and watering in order to stay one step away from starvation.

Traditionally, historians and anthropologists studied and wrote with an unconscious assumption that human history ratcheted forward, providing better and better lives for all people.  It’s unimaginable that a college textbook on anthropology in the early 1960’s would notice that as Neolithic food surpluses and populations swelled that the individuals were miserable.   

Deconstruction

I had a friend recently who divorced his wife and immediately jumped into the older adult dating scene.  He had no trouble finding dates and sexual partners, all of whom he called, “girls.”   He fancied himself as an expert on relationships and would talk at length about newly discovered generalities and principles of dating.  Over the period of several months he developed a kind of doctrine of women, which included pronouncements on female motivations, desires, and vulnerabilities.   All of this was, not surprisingly, patently offensive and never would have served as a reliable guide for anyone else working to navigate through his or her own relationships. 

 I tell this story to make this point:  The way we talk often creates a narrative world that, despite its pretense as insight, is disconnected, and sometimes totally discontented, to anything in the real world.   If my friend had shared his dating discoveries in the hearing of the women with whom he had a relationship they may have been infuriated and embarrassed. 

The intellectual sensitivity to the difference between a happening in the tangible world and what we tell ourselves about that happening is what the term deconstruction points to.   Most of us grow up and absorb values from our families and community.  In my case, I uncritically absorbed the idea that White, college-educated Americans, especially males were the world’s leadership group.  I later would add Christianity to pantheon of values.  We were the ones who were on the right track in pursuit of the perfect human life.  We were the innovators, the source of enlightenment for the rest of humanity.  I grew up in a world that, when we read a newspaper story of riots, crime, or famine, we would think: “Damn!  I’m sure glad we’re okay!”  

In my case, I absorbed the values of my social world.  Free markets were vastly superior to planned economies such as those in Communist Russia.  I believed this in elementary school, which must have made me more intelligent than the entire socialist world.  I absorbed traditional opinions about marriage and fidelity, characteristics of racial groups, the moral code, and the canon of books that every educated person needed to have read.   In each area, I didn’t realize that my ideal was entirely an idea system that had very little hard evidence to support it.  Despite the fact that my ideas about maleness or femaleness were unattached to hard evidence, they were enshrined in my personal value system as sacred principles. 

Deconstruction is the process which notices the validity of my sacred principles and the degree they are tied to hard evidence.  One example, which grows out of my recent reading in the history of American racism, is the confidence in the American “level playing field.”  One wonders how many social or charitable programs assume that people of all races and backgrounds have an equal chance of succeeding and becoming prosperous in the United States today.  It’s amazing that despite abundant evidence to the contrary, millions of Americans approach social problems with the assumption that the only reason that some people are poor is because they lack motivation and the tenacity that the rest of us have.  Deconstruction in the case of the fairness of the economic system is learning about the scores of ways that incarceration, poor schools, discrimination in lending and hiring, and on and on tilt the field.

Harari tells the story of humankind with a keen eye to the narratives that support race, class, and gender hierarchies.  He describes how the caste system in India, which is perpetuated entirely by a narrative of human differences, has been in the making for 3000 years.  Harari speculates that Indo-Aryan people subjected the indigenousness people of the Indian sub-continent to a strict organization of status and work.  They invoked the purity doctrines from Hinduism to classify certain populations as polluted.  This kept some groups isolated and disempowered to change their status.  Through its history, the Indian caste system has affected millions of lives, often to their detriment.  And it is based entirely on an elaborate idea system that is entirely the product of the human imagination.

Harari insists that all human hierarchy, everywhere there is a boss and worker, master and slave, aristocrat and peasant, there is a supporting thought apparatus, which is entirely a social construct.  He states elegantly: “it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.”[1]

Sapiens isn’t entirely negative about the made up narratives that underwrite human principles and the myth systems that provide the common values, which enable large groups of people to cooperate.  Harari has it that Homo sapiens’ ability to form imaginary worlds is the cognitive innovation of 70,000 years ago that enabled us to become the Earth’s dominating life form.   At that point several species of the genus Homo coexisted on the planet.  Homo sapiens, the group that finally became dominant, was not necessarily the strongest.  Rather, our species figured out how an infinite number of individuals could be organized under a commonly held ideal or myth. 

It’s the same principle that enables a group of doctors and nurses, who may not even know each other, to be able to work together even under battlefield conditions.  What enables them to cooperate?  They’re all medical practitioners.  They’ve trained under the same principles.  They understand how their tasks fit together.  Their work is organized around commonly principles of medical practices. 

The Cognitive Revolution was the invention of abstract, commonly held ideals.  These enabled Homo sapiens to hunt and fight cooperatively, to divide labor and organize communities.  It is also this principle of myth building that has supported thousands of religions, social orders, ethical systems, cooperations, and groupings of people.

Exploring and exposing these imaginative systems is a big theme in Harari’s book.

Empires

Hurari breaks with the vague consensus and asserts that empires are probably a good idea, especially because they move humanity along a path that he thinks is inevitable–the path towards unification.

I had some difficulty with this section. If empires and the unification that comes through being united under an empire, where are the empires today? The United States?

The Soviet Union’s breakup illustrates a postmodern trend towards tribalism. If meta-narratives are eroding; or universal ideals that unite otherwise disparate peoples, like Communism in Soviet Union, why are they fragmenting?

Additionally, biblical religion appears to be a critique and alternative to empires. The critique of empire threading through The Book of Revelation’s imagery is a fine example of the incompatibility of faith in God and enthusiasm about one’s empire.

Empire	Origin	Capital	From	To	Duration	Biblical Connection
Akkadian Empire	Sumer	Akkad	2300 BC	2200 BC	100	Predessor kingdom to Assyria and Babylonia. Mentioned in Genesis 10.10. Nimrod is famously associated with Akkadian Empire.
Assyria	Mesopotamia	Assur , later  Nineveh	2025 BC	609 BC	1119	Associated with prophets Amos, Hosea, and First Isaiah. Invaded Northern Kingdom and annhiliated 10 tribes of Israel
Babylonian Empire	Mesopotamia	Babylon	1900 BC	1600 BC	300
Egyptian Empire	Egypt	Various, including  Thebes ,  Akhetaten ,  Pi-Ramesses ,  Memphis	1550 BC	1077 BC	473	The primary biblical story is of the escape from Egypt who had turned the descendants of Abraham into state slaves.
Mitanni Empire	Syria	Washukanni	1500 BC	1300 BC	200
Hittite Empire	Anatolia	Hattusa	1460 BC	1180 BC	280	See also Neo-Hittite.
Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy)	Israel	Jerusalem	1050 BC	586 BC	486	Considers the Start of Saul's reign, through the dual kingdoms of the  Kingdom of Israel (Samaria)  and  Kingdom of Judah , until the  Babylonian  conquest of Judah.
Zhou Dynasty	China	Fenghao ,  Wangcheng ,  Chengzhou	1046 BC	256 BC	794
Carthaginian Empire	North Africa	Carthage	814 BC	146 BC	504
Kushite Empire	Egypt ,  Nubia	Not specified	760 BC	656 BC	104
Neo-Babylonian Empire	Mesopotamia	Babylon	626 BC	539 BC	87	Prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Babylon laid seige on Jerusalem and carried community leaders off to Babylon.
Median Empire	Persia	Ecbatana	625 BC	549 BC	76
Achaemenid Empire	Persia	Various, including  Pasargadae ,  Ecbatana ,  Persepolis ,  Susa ,  Babylon	550 BC	330 BC	220	Under Cyrus, exiles from Judah were free to return to Palestine. Esther takes place in Persian Empire
Pandyan Empire	Ancient India	Madurai  . Also  Tirunelveli ,  Korkai  for few years	500 BC	1350	1850
Nanda Empire	India	Pataliputra	450 BC	350 BC	100
Macedonian Empire	Macedonian Kingdom	Pella	334 BC	323 BC	11	Founded by Alexander the Great.
Mauryan Empire	Ancient India	Pataliputra	321 BC	185 BC	136
Seleucid Empire	Persia ,  Mesopotamia ,  Syria	Seleucia ,  Antioch	312 BC	63 BC	249	See also Diadochi.
Ptolemaic Empire	Egypt	Alexandria	305 BC	30 BC	275	Was Predicted in Daniel
Chera Dynasty	Ancient India	Vanchi Muthur	300 BC	300	600
Parthian Empire	Persia	Various, including  Asaak ,  Hecatompylos ,  Ecbatana ,  Ctesiphon ,  Nisa	247 BC	224	471
Satavahana Dynasty	India	Amaravathi village, Guntur districtDharanikota	230 BC	220	450
Qin Dynasty	China	Xianyang	221 BC	206 BC	15
Han Dynasty	China	Chang'an ,  Luoyang ,  Xuchang	206 BC	220	426
Armenian Empire	Armenia	Tigranakert	190 BC	428	618
Shunga Empire	India	Pataliputra ,  Vidisa	185 BC	73 BC	112
Dacian Kingdom	Romania	Sarmizegetusa Regia	168 BC	106	62
Pontic Empire	Pontus	Amaseia ,  Sinope	120 BC	47 BC	73
Kanva Dynasty	India	Pataliputra ,  Vidisha	75 BC	30 BC	45
Goguryeo	China ,  Korea	Jolbon ,  Gungnae City ,  Pyongyang	37 BC	668	705
Roman Empire	Italy	Rome ,  Constantinople	27 BC	1453	1480	Jesus was executed by Roman troops. The Book of Revelation is an extended critique of the Roman Empire likening it to a great beast. The Revelation sees Babylon as a precursor to Rome

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Reading Notes

132: People are primates. animals. Somewhere back in time our first parent was an ape. Eve did not exist.

In order to distinguish humans from the rest of the monkeys in our ancestry we need to posit a first parent who had no mother or father or clan. An orphan who came from nowhere.

There are also other humans (not homo sapiens) in our background.

He thinks we have a 1000 years left.

Churches have been brought into the service of preserving not only Christianity, but a whole bunch of myths and archaic customs.

All from the genus “homo” have large brains

192: Why did humans evolve such big brains? The answer is unknown.

compared with other animals, humans are born earlier in their developmental process. This is evolution’s strategy to get the growing enlarged skull through the birth canal. Then it takes years for other organs to develop.

The lengthy childhood affords adaptability

225: Humans weren’t always at the top of the food chain. For a long time they struggled.

Is thinks due to these forebears? Is there anything to learn from their physical shivering, fearful, brutish lives?

Humans found themselves at the top of the living world, before having time to develop a capacity for such leadership. This sudden dominance has overwhelmed the ecosystem and ourselves.

Excursus: I never realized that non-sapien humans were using tools and fire before they died out and Homo sapiens broke out.

Racism is an ignorance useful only for the subjugation of large portions of the population.

Sapiens came to be the dominant of the human species. The question is: how did we eliminate other humans. Two theories prevail. We either interbred with other humans bringing forth a Homo sapien offspring, or, more likely, we replaced all other human species. The replacement theory is the current favorite. There is some small percentage of Neanderthal DNA in today’s humans, which means that some very small amount of inter-breeding.

544: It is the human capacity to produce fictive or social constructs that enables cooperation with strangers and thus larger groups of people. These constructs are religions, countries, corporations, etc.

548: The dual reality of humans: tangible objects and imagined realities.

554: Cultural evolution can move much more quickly, owing to the fact that myths can be changed more quickly than biological evolution can change our bodies. This fictive world became the stage on which people could cooperate.

558: Animals cannot change without genetic change. This is why human evolution, that is, in the genus “homo,” evolution took so long. The cognitive ability to change the fictive reality is what accelerated progress so quickly.

Excursis: Culture would be a fictive reality which is influenced by Christianity. An important question is whether something real happened in the Christ event. I think the answer is that there was aphysical event, which had a radical influence on the fictive reality. Doubters would have wanted to deny God’s physical intervention.

I think there is a dialogue between the physical world and the fiactive reality.

Race then is a fictive reality. Much of religion is as well.

History and Biology

631: The discussion moves to discuss culture.

658: The explosion of the mythic or fictive reality allowed knowledge to be held by groups rather than in individuals.

666: A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

671: The fad of remembering that we are evolved to a hunter-gatherer level, a life-style which humans lived for tens of thousands of years.

706: Cognitive Revolution: 70,000 years ago, Agricultural Revolution: 12,000

Monogamy, marriage is a tool of oppression. The domination of women’ssexual availability and child-bearing, plus social recognition, which can be passed from father to son. The “me-too” movement in some ways breaks this pattern.

Conservatism in general serves as a

717: Physical objects mediate fictive reality. Look in any Cracker Barrel.

724: For paleolithic man, very few artifacts. Artifacts are scarce for hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherer societies are quite different from one another.

744: There were 5 – 8 million humans on the earth at the eve of the agricultural revolution. Thousands of tribes and languages, cultures.

747: Fictive reality enabled different kinds of lives for similar people in similar ecological circumstances.

755: Big point: there is no such thing as a natural human (traditional societies) way of life that can serve as a guide. The cognitive revolution made possible a wide range of styles of living and approaches to the challenge of being human.

759: conclusions for people 10,000 b.c.

Excursis: Working people may actually be smarter and more reflective than their affluent neighbor. Doesn’t Emerson and Thoreau say as much?

837: Human misery was invented in 10,000 b.c.

849: The paleolithic secret was its diet, which was varied and probably gave rise to the current diet fad, the Paleo Diet.

857: The Neolithic Revolution sucked! Farmers eat lots of the same thing. Beware of diets of limited variety. Hunter-gathers suffered less from infectious diseases.

909: Animism, the belief that all things have mind and emotion, also tends to draw the human mind to a particular, rather than General, source of spiritual encounter.

929: Not much is known about the animistic religion of late Paleolithic humans.

966: Were ancient gatherers warlike or peaceable? There are advocates for both sides.

971: In the American Northwest during the 19th and 20th centuries violence with forager groups was commonplace. Likewise with Northern Australia during the same period.

986: Only a small percentage of humans die of battlefield violence, then and now.

989: During the 20th century, 5% of human deaths were due to human on human violence.

1000: The Curtain of Silence

The most dramatic epics are shrouded by an impenetrable curtain of silence. Political alliances leave little evidence. Tens of thousands of years of human history have been lost because no evidence exists that preserves clues into its nature.

1020: While we know little about foragers, we do know that they had much going on and that they had a significant destructive impact on the natural world.

The Flood

1025: Before cognitive revolution, all humans lived on the African-Asian landmass. All humans were on the African continent or Asia. The Americas and Australia, both isolated by water, had not been reached.

1030: The earth had several distinct ecosystems with different animals and plants.

1038: Indonesia’s Sapiens developed sea-faring abilities around 45,000 years ago, enabling them to cross the water and reach Australia.

1045: Sea crossings to places like Australia opened to Sapiens huge new territories.

1053: Forty-five thousand years ago, Australia’s new settlers both adapted to the new ecosystem and transformed it.

1061: One feature of that ecosystem was the mammals were all marsupials

Guilty as Charged

1068: The author wants to give 3 pieces of evidence that implicate humans in the destruction of the Australian ecosystem. First, it probably wasn’t climate change that brought the mass extinction to Austrailia. This is because there’s always climate change afoot.

1091: Sapiens spread throughout the world and wherever they set up habitation, mass extinction followed.

1111: Humans used fire-agriculture to burn under-brush in order to produce grasslands.

1130: First, humans in “New World” arrive in North America 14,000 b.c., They come over the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.

1141: The Ice Age was the good old days.

Noah’s Ark

1183: Sapiens drove 1/2 of the world’s animal species to extinction. Wherever men and women went, massive extinction of animals and plants followed. This was especially visable on small islands with unique animals.

1209: Three waves of extinction. The first followed the arrival of foragers. The second followed the arrival of farmers (agriculture). The third wave comes with the arrival of industry.

Excursus: I’m impressed how the Bible harmoniaes with science’s best insights. Primative peoples brought about the destruction of thousands of species. Genesis, in contrast, identifies companionship with animals as part of each person’s human vocation. Genesis 2:18-20

The Agricultural Revolution: History’s Biggest Fraud

Excursus: Most of human history is spent foraging, perhaps symbolized by the depiction of life in the Garden of Eden. The Fall introduced agriculture. Genesis 3.17-19; Genesis 4.1-16.

1250: Harari makes the point that agriculture developed spontaneously in several places. All of sudden 10,000 years ago people started manipulation of a few plants and animals for food and a few other things.

1274: A handful of plant species domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

1288: The author’s description of the woes that wheat brought to humanity serves as a scientific commentary on Genesis 3.17-19.

1340: Hormones in humans respond to good times and bad and more or less children are conceived.

1343: Fertility is calibrated hormonally in response to food availability.

1370: Wheat required more and more care, consuming time that otherwise would go for foraging. Settled life and population increases were conjoined.

1374: In cramped settlements diseases and child mortality soared. In religion, the gods were sexualized and fertility absolutized.

1413: Harari talks about the trap and revenge of agriculture. He hasn’t so far mentioned that farming came with an upswing in fertility religion, which was also demanding.

Excursus: Harari makes the powerful point that grain cultivation created a vicious cycle of effects.

1458: Israelites were herders, Israel’s kings were shepherds.

1473: Tribes of pastoral herders. This seems to be…

Excursus: There is something faintly pastoral, agricultural about evangelicals. They are extraordinarily interested in sex and marriage. Evangelicals hover over families providing schools and marriage counseling. Evangelicals love father-daughter dances, condemning family-eroding homosexuals and, more recently, transgendered people. Progressive churches, on the other hand often minister to singles, homosexuals etc.

1481: The proliferation of chickens, cattle, sheep, and pigs has guaranteed their misery.

1515: The prohibition of boiling slaughtered calf in its mother’s milk.

Excursus: Harari makes a powerful point that evolutionary success is the amount of NDA that is produced. Domesticated chickens are numerous and from an evolutionary perspective, successful. Evolutionary success does not equate to individual happiness.

Building Pyramids

1546: 10,000 BC population 5-8 million; By 33 a.d. 1-2 million foragers, 250 million farmers

1554: With settled existence came smaller territory and small dwellings, to which people became very attached. From the dwelling as center, people cleared the land surrounding them.

1574: The farmer’s mindset was increasingly future-oriented.

1603: Farming with all of its stresses and demands also invited social stratification. The food surpluses supported an elite class of kings, soldiers, priests, and wise men.

An Imagined Order

1607: Population density arose with agriculture. Division of land and surpluses, rather than sheer want led to conflict.

1614: At its zenith the Roman Republic, now extremely wealthy, collapsed into division and warfare. Harari is making the point that agriculturally supported civilizations give rise to an elite class, territory disputes, and wealth and poverty.

Myths

These were around in paleolithic times. The neolithic revolution brought an explosion of myth-making and religious behavior. This was precisely the swamp that the Old Testament warns against.

1639: This myth-making enabled whole empires containint millions of subjects to rise and flourish. The Roman Empire had over 100 million subjects.

1649: Most cooperation is involuntary. He really blows up the myth of progress.

Excursus: We need to understand that biblical faith is a powerful opposition to agricultural, fertility religion with its pre-occupation with sex and fertility. Harari’s idea about myth being simply a narrative that keeps people behaving themselves brings all meta-narratives on a par.

2094: These developments were a mixed blessing because they led to hierarchies.

2105: American order consecrated the hierarchy.

2112: Every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.

Excursus: Harari speaks repeatedly of the fictive order. This is the story we tell ourselves about how the gods or nature or whatever underwrites what we think is true. The social construction of reality. Race, according to Harari, is part of the fictive order

2146: All complex societies establish order through imagined categories, fictive orders, myths. Narratives. Harari is deconstructing these.

The Vicious Cycle

2183: Enforcement of social hierarchy and divisions is best handled by suggesting that some groups are polluting. Holiness or purity are important religious topics.

2374: The most widespread hierarchy is gender. Harari extends his thoughts that it is the narrative about male and female roles and functions, and marriage.

What’s So Good About Men?

2397: Harari mulls the mystery that most societies are patriarchal, which seems to spring from no special occurrence. This order is possibly because men are stronger, possibly better organizers, or possibly more aggressive.

2449: The strongest, most aggressive brute has little chance in a war. Wars are won by leaders who can keep peace at home, pursuade others, and organize.

2463: Masculine genes that succeed belong to the most ambitious, aggressive, competitive men. Submissive, caretaker genes made it to the next generation for women.

Excursus: Trump appears to lack the skills to enlist cooperation, manipulate, traits which LBJ or Clinton clearly possessed.

III: The unification of Humankind

The Arrow of History

2510: Cultures, at beginning of 20th century were believed to have set characteristics that would only change when acted upon from the outside.

2513: Cultures are in constant flux, in part because they are a bundle of contradictions. Harari gives the example of the medieval knight who is a Christian and chivalrous, mutually incompatible ideals. This is why change or flux is inevitable.

2527: The contemporary tension between equality and individualism.

2555: Teleological principle says that micro-cultures want to congeal into macro-cultures. The macro…really macro view…is that humankind is moving towards unity.

Excursus: So modernity sees purposeless conformity to laws? Post-modernity sees a teleological perspective.

2639: Homo Sapiens are the only species.

2679: Harari tells story of the amazing cooperation by users of gold coins bearing religious symbolism, by Muslims and Christians alike.

2651: Harari speaks of universal orders–economic, political, and religious. By “universal,” he means that people are capable of conceiving the entire world as trading partners, governed by universally embraced laws. Likewise we can envision the whole of humanity embracing one god, such as the vision of the Great Commission.

Excursus: Money, politics, and religion are all topics about which Christianity has a good deal to say.

How Much is It?

2699: Specialization came with the development of cities. The economy of favors and obligations doesn’t work with large numbers of people.

2746: Most of the world’s 60 trillion in money exists once again as a fictive reality on computers.

2750: Money greatly facilitates and simplifies transactions.

Indulgences were the commodifying of religious salvation. Ever since the Reformation and the discrediting of indulgences, fund raising been a big part of the church.

2769: Money converts, stores, and transports wealth.

2773: Money is a psychological construct.

2792: The crucial factor of trust did not exist with history’s first known money–Sumerian barley money. In three thousand b.c. money, like writing, were developed to meet intensifying economic activities.

2803: Money, which has no inherent value, is easy to carry and is an easy means of exchange.

2819: Coins, rather than ingots, eliminated the need to weigh the metal and were stamped by an authority to certify the purity of the silver. Counterfeiting is not only stealing, it is a breach of sovereignty.

2846: The Chinese established a coinage system close enough to that of the Romans, which facilitated trade across political and cultural lines.

2858: Once trade connects two areas, supply and demand tends to equalize prices. I’m guessing that this is because commodities can be purchased from any supplier.

2869: Money is a great binding and force for tolerance.

The Price of Money

2873: Money’s two principles: universal convertibility and universal trust. Money is also a leveler. There are less and less “priceless things.” Money attempts to commodify everything. It secularizes everything.

II. Imperial Visions.

2928: Most past cultures have sooner or later fallen prey to the armies of some ruthless empire.

What is an Empire?

2932: 1. It is dominance over a distant people or culture. 2. It has Flexible borders and an unlimited appetite.

Empires represent the second uniting, consolidating force for humankind

Evil Empires

2958: Empires are the homes of most people and they usually succeed at digesting and obliterating the cultures they bring under domination.

2993: Harari says that empires use the spoil of local cultures to finance learning and culture of the whole

It’s for Your Own Good

3035: There is a tendency for empires to see themselves as acting on behalf of the subjugated people–acting for their own good.

3058: Empires made travel, trade, laws easy to establish over large territory. Standardization

3069: Empires were agents of religious conversion

Good Guys and Bad Guys in History.

The Law of Religion

3217: Religion joins empires and money as the third great unifier of humanity. This is because religion gives legitimacy to these regimes. Again, the pretense of religion is that it is rooted in something objectively real–God–as opposed to the fictive reality that supports the empire, money and so on.

Excursus: Wouldn’t the concept of the self also be a fictive unifier of humanity? Maybe it would better be described as “identity.” Everyone has an identity. Facebook or an online identity shows how malleable one’s self is.

3220: Religion is a system of values founded on a superhuman order.

3228: Religion, as opposed to superstitions, needs to guide behavior and to possess two characteristics it must claim to be universally valid and it must seek to make itself universally believed.

Excursus: This is clearly incorrect. Only Judaism, Christianity and Islam possess these two characters.

3232: He is correct about the rise of “prophetic” missionizing/universal religions in the 1st century. Harari deems this development as significant. Rather, he said 1st millennium BC. This is too early.

3243: The Agricultural Revolution was accompanied by a religious one.

3250: He’s saying that the universal/missionary religions elevated people above plants and animals.

3254: He is suggesting a fundamental structural change as follows: Humans felt elevated by the agricultural revolution above plants and animals which were not domesticated. In turn, humans began to appeal to gods for assistance with the crops and livestock.

3269: The trade of life for life was part of the bargain. The important center here is life as a divine attribute and gift to humanity.

3273: Polytheism involved much interaction between humans and deities including sexual activity. He sees the re-ordering of the religious apparatus as an elevation not only of more universal, but also of humans themselves.

3503: Polytheism also elevates humans. The choosers of the gods are greatly empowered.

4450: Most kingdoms never considered traveling a long distance in order to conquer a place. Most empires kept their military ventures close, extending their own borders and defending their own territory.

4459: Alexander the Great usurped from the Persians parts of their empire.

4476: Spain did not enjoy any technological edge over Zheng He’s fleet. But European explorers combined conquest and exploration.

Invasion from Outer Space

4480: The Aztecs didn’t realize that the Spanish were decimating Caribbean peoples, and were unprepared when the Conquistadores came for them Likewise, the Incas were little aware of the Aztec’s situation of defeat and were unprepared when Pizarro came for them. Hubris lolled the Aztecs into a trance, which told them they knew the whole world.

Rare Spiders and Fortgotten Scripts

For Europeans building an empire was a scientific operation. This might bring to light an insight about education. Suppose students were taught to gather data, or knowledge whenever they traveled or conducted business. Every project becomes an experiment or information gathering operation

Early Maps

The Discovery of Ignorance

3794: The scientific revolution has fundamentally enriched and empowered Homo Sapiens.

[1] Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens (p. 169). Harper. Kindle Edition.