In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari uses concepts from physics, chemistry, biology, and history to tell the story of us, Homo sapiens.
Our history is punctuated by four major revolutions: The Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. We’ll look at each revolution and how it dramatically redirected the course of human history.
2.5 million years ago, Homo sapiens was just one of eight human species. The first major revolution for Sapiens was the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago. Before that point, Sapiens weren’t particularly special and weren’t superior to the other seven human species. The Cognitive Revolution involved the development of three new abilities, all related to language, that helped Homo sapiens outpace their fellow humans.
One reason the language of Sapiens was different was that it was more complex. Rather than communicating simple ideas the way green monkeys do (“Careful! A lion!” or “Careful! An eagle!”), the language of Sapiens could warn someone about a lion, describe its location, and plan how to deal with it. This allowed them to plan and follow through on complex actions like avoiding predators and working together to trap prey.
A second distinction of the Sapiens language was its ability to convey gossip. We think of gossip as a bad thing, but using language to convey information about other people is a way to build trust. Trust is critical for social cooperation, and cooperation gives you an advantage in the struggle to survive and pass on your genes. Sapiens could form groups of up to 150 people. They didn’t need to know every group member personally to trust them. In a battle, a small group of Neanderthals was no match for a group of 150 Sapiens.
A third benefit of the Sapiens’ language was how it was used to create fictions, also known as “social constructs” or “imagined realities.”
Being able to communicate information about things that don’t exist doesn’t seem like an advantage. But Sapiens seem to be the only animals who have this ability to discuss things that don’t have a physical presence in the world, like money, human rights, corporations, and God.
In and of itself, imagining things that don’t exist isn’t an asset—you won’t aid your chances of survival if you go into the forest looking for ghosts rather than berries and deer.
What’s important about the ability to create fictions is the ability to create collective fictions, fictions everyone believes. These collective myths allow people who’ve never met and otherwise would have nothing in common to cooperate under shared assumptions and goals.
Although imagined, these myths are crucial. Without collective fictions, the systems built on them collapse. And as we’ll see, most of our modern systems are built on these imagined realities. These myths are powerful, and the fact that they’re not rooted in objective reality doesn’t undermine them.
Collective fictions allowed early Sapiens to cooperate within extremely large groups of people, most of whom they’d never met, and it rapidly changed their social behavior.
About 10,000 years ago, between 9500 and 8500 BC, Sapiens started shifting from forager lifestyles to a life revolving around agriculture. This was the Agricultural Revolution. It was so successful for our species that we went from 5-8 million foragers in 10,000 BC to 250 million farmers by the first century AD.
The move from foraging to agriculture wasn’t necessarily a conscious choice. Rather, it was a gradual process of small, seemingly insignificant changes. Let’s see how those small changes add up to a monumental revolution.
18,000 years ago, the last ice age retreated, increasing rainfall. This was great for wheat and other grains, which started to spread. Because there was more wheat, people started eating more of it, taking it back to their campsites to grind and cook. On the way to the campsite, some of the small grains were sprinkled along the path, helping the spread of wheat.
Humans burned the forests to create clearings that attracted animals. This also cleared the area of large trees and bushes that would have competed with the wheat for sunlight and water. Where wheat prospered, nomads would settle for a few weeks, enjoying the plenty. A few weeks turned into a few more, and over generations, these areas became permanent settlements.
People started storing grain for later and invented stone scythes, pestles, and mortars. Because they saw that wheat grew better when it was buried deep in the soil rather than sprinkled on top, humans began to hoe and plow the fields. Weeding, watering, and fertilizing followed. With all this time spent on tending the wheat, there was less time to hunt and gather. Sapiens had become farmers.
The move toward farming wasn’t an obvious benefit, since it led to a number of drawbacks.
Most of the surplus went to the elite, and they probably did live better lives than their ancestors. But the Agricultural Revolution didn’t immediately translate to a better life for most individuals.
In the last 500 years, we’ve seen unprecedented scientific and technological growth, so much so that a time traveler from 1500 would recognize very little of our world. For instance, since 1500, the world population has grown from 500 million Sapiens to 7 billion. Every word and number in every book in every medieval library could be easily stored on a modern computer. Further, we’ve built skyscrapers, circumnavigated the earth, and landed on the moon. We’ve discovered the existence of bacteria and can now cure most diseases caused by it, even engineer bacteria for use in medicines. All of these advances were made possible by the Scientific Revolution.
In many ways, the Scientific Revolution was the result of a shift in the way Sapiens viewed the world and its future.
We post-Scientific Revolution Sapiens understand the world differently than our ancestors:
1. We are willing to acknowledge our ignorance: Today, we assume there are gaps in our knowledge, and we even question what we think we know. This wasn’t the norm before the Scientific Revolution.
2. We emphasize observation and mathematics: Rather than getting our knowledge from divine books, we use our senses and the technologies available to us to make observations. We then use mathematics to connect these observations and make them into a coherent theory.
3. We strive for new powers: Knowledge is only valuable in its use to us. We don’t develop theories for the sake of knowing more. We use theories to gain new powers — in particular, new technologies.
4. We believe in progress, whereas our ancestors believed that the golden age was behind them.
In the late 16th century, Francis Bacon made the connection between scientific research and the production of technology, but the relationship didn’t become really strong until the 19th century. Bacon saw that assessing how “true” knowledge is isn’t a good yardstick because we can’t assume that any theory is 100% correct. A better yardstick is how useful that knowledge is.
War has developed both science and technology. By WWI, governments depended on scientists to develop advanced aircraft, efficient machine guns, submarines, and poison gases. During WWII, the Germans held on for so long because they believed their scientists were on the verge of developing the V-2 rocket and jet-powered aircraft, weapons that may have turned the tide of the war. Meanwhile, Americans ended the war with a piece of new technology, the atomic bomb.
Our views on the value of technology have strayed so far from those of our ancestors that we now turn to technology to solve our global conflicts. The US Department of Defense is currently investing research money on bionic spy-flies that stealthily track the movements of enemies and fMRI scanners that can read hateful thoughts.
Economic growth requires more than just trust in the future and the willingness of employers to reinvest their capital. It needs resources, the energy and raw materials that go into production. While the economy can grow, our resources remain finite.
At least, that’s what we’ve thought for centuries. But the energy and raw materials that are accessible to us today have increased as a result of the Industrial Revolution. We now have both better ways of exploiting our resources and resources that didn’t exist in the worlds of our ancestors.
Our ancestors were limited in how they could harness and convert energy.
First, they had limited resources. Before the Industrial Revolution, humans burned wood and used wind and water power for energy. But if you didn’t live by a river, if you ran out of trees in your area, or if the wind wasn’t blowing, you were out of luck. The ways people could access energy were limited.
Second, there was no way to convert one type of energy into another. For example, they couldn’t harness the wind and then turn that energy into heat to smelt iron.
The discovery of gunpowder introduced the idea that you could convert heat energy to movement, but this was such an odd concept that it took 600 years for gunpowder to be used widely in artillery.
Another 300 years passed before the invention of the steam engine, which also converted heat to movement, through the pressure of steam. After this, the idea of turning one type of energy into another didn’t seem so foreign. People became obsessed with discovering new ways to harness energy. For example, when physicists realized that the atom stores a lot of energy, they quickly devised ways to release it to make electricity (and bombs). The internal combustion engine turned petroleum, previously used to waterproof roofs and lubricate axles, into a liquid that nations fought wars over. Electricity went from being a cheap magic trick to something we use everyday and can’t imagine living without.
For most of history, goods were scarce. People lived frugally, and frugality was a virtue. In an odd twist, today, we have too much stuff. Rather than supply not meeting demand, demand didn’t always meet the supply. We needed buyers.
This prompted the new ethic of consumerism. Frugality became a bad word, and people were taught by industries that consuming was a positive thing. Self-indulgence is “self-care” and frugality is “self-oppression.”
Consumerism has changed our values, habits, and health.
Consumerism seems to conflict with the capitalist mentality of wasting nothing and reinvesting profits. While the two codes of ethics do conflict, they can inhabit the same space as the “capitalist-consumer ethic,” because this combined ethic has different rules for different people. The capitalist-consumer ethic tells the rich to invest and the poor to buy. The rich believe in frugality and investing, and the poor believe in buying and indulging. The rich manage their investments while the poor buy televisions and new phones they don’t need. The spending of the poor supports the wealth accumulation of the rich. The capitalist-consumer ethic allows the rich to keep getting richer and the poor to keep getting poorer.
For the last 4 billion years, species, including Sapiens, have been constrained by the laws of natural selection, but today, we’re on the brink of replacing natural selection with intelligent design. This poses questions we’ve never had to answer before.
We could be in the process of creating the most unequal society in history. The richest have always felt they were the smartest and most capable, but throughout history, this has been a delusion. Now, we’re approaching an era in which you could pay to increase your intelligence and give you superhuman skills. The rich and powerful might actually become objectively smarter and more skilled than the rest of humanity.
The only value our current debates will have in the history of our species is their ability to shape the ideas and values of the designers who will create our successors. The important thing to ask now, as this design gets underway, is, “What do we want to become?”
But even our wants may change. Scientists may soon be able to manipulate our desires. Perhaps the better question is, “What do we want to want?”
In the history of humankind, this has been an enduring problem: we don’t know what we want. We’ve reduced famine and war, but we haven’t reduced suffering, our own or that of other species. We’re as discontent as ever and we don’t know where we’re going or what we want the outcomes to be. This is a recipe for disaster.
In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari uses concepts from physics, chemistry, biology, and history to tell the story of us, Homo sapiens.
Our history is punctuated by four major revolutions: The Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution. Part I (Chapters 1-4) explores the Cognitive Revolution and the events leading up to it.
We’ll look at each revolution and how it dramatically redirected the course of human history, but to understand these upheavals, we need to go back to a time when Homo sapiens was just one of multiple human species (and not a very distinguished species, at that).
We think of our own species as the only humans, distinguished from and superior to every other species on earth. But when we, Homo sapiens, arrived on the scene 2.5 million years ago, we weren’t anything special. We existed in the middle of the food chain, as often prey as we were predators, and we weren’t even the only humans.
Humans evolved in East Africa from a genus of apes. These early humans settled all over the world, and as the climates and conditions differed from place to place, they acquired different traits and became different species.
We tend to think of the evolution of humans as a linear progression from Homo erectus to Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, but at least six human species were alive when our own lived on earth, and others may yet be discovered. The known human species included Homo soloensis, Homo floresiensis, Homo denisova, Homo rudolfensis, and Homo ergaster. The three that will play the biggest roles in this book are:
1. Homo neanderthalensis (“Man from the Neander Valley”): Also known as Neanderthals, these humans lived in western Asia and Europe. They were more muscular than we were and they had bigger brains than we did (or do today). We’ll see why the Neanderthal species died out, even though Neanderthals were superior to Sapiens in many ways.
2. Homo erectus (“Upright Man”): These humans lived in eastern Asia for almost 2 million years, making them likely to be the longest-living human species ever. (As we’ll see, it’s unlikely that Homo sapiens will be around 2,000 years from now, let alone 2 million.)
3. Homo sapiens (“Wise Man”): Us. Our species of man also evolved in East Africa.
Throughout, the term “Sapiens” refers to our own species while the term “human” refers to all the members of the Homo genus.
Of the eight known human species, only one survived. Before we discuss how Sapiens became the dominant humans, let’s look at what all the human species had in common.
Mammals that are 130 lbs typically have a brain that’s an average of 12 cubic inches. In contrast, the brains of early humans were 36 cubic inches. Today, our average brain size is 73-85 cubic inches, and the brains of Neanderthals were even bigger than ours.
It seems like large brains would give us and our fellow humans an obvious advantage over other animals, but it wasn’t necessarily an asset to early humans.
Big brains take a lot of energy to fuel. Our brains make up 2-3% of our body weight, but use 25% of our energy. (The brains of our ape siblings only use 8% of their energy.)
This drain of energy caused two main problems:
When you’re in the middle of the food chain, trying to catch small animals and keep out of the way of big ones, using your energy to power your brain instead of your muscles isn’t the smartest strategy.
We still don’t really know why we evolved such large brains when there was little use for them in early history. It was a bad use of our energy.
Like having a big brain, walking upright seems like an unequivocally positive trait to us today, in part because we still walk upright and can’t imagine moving any other way. There were both advantages and disadvantages to walking upright.
Pros:
Cons:
Narrow hips especially had far-reaching consequences for humans, creating a domino effect that led to helpless babies. This was because the women who survived the dangerous activity of childbirth (and continued to pass on their genes through subsequent births) were the ones who gave birth early in the fetus’s gestation, when the baby’s head was smaller and undeveloped.
Consequently, women evolved to give birth earlier when the fetus is less developed. This means that human infants are undeveloped and helpless compared with other animal infants. For instance, a colt can start to run soon after birth, and a kitten finds food on its own after a few weeks. But human children are dependent on their parents for years.
The fact that human children were vulnerable for years after birth meant that human adults had to care for and protect them for years. Like having a big brain, this wasn’t an obvious advantage for early humans. They needed their energy for activities like escaping the jaws of larger, stronger animals.
Despite the risks involved in caring for vulnerable infants, their existence created unique social situations for humans. These situations and the resulting societal bonds may have contributed to the rise of human dominance in the animal kingdom.
There were two unique results of human children being born prematurely:
Result #1: The “It Takes a Village” Mentality: Because children were so helpless, mothers relied on family members and neighbors to raise them. Many other animal genera (plural of “genus”) didn’t have the need to form these social bonds.
Result #2: The Potential for Socialization: Children born relatively helpless are (relative) blank slates. As such, their societies can shape them through education and socialization to be whatever they want them to be. Whereas other mammals are born like glazed earthenware coming out of the kiln (if you try to reshape them, they’ll break), humans are born like molten glass, easily formed and reformed.
We shared much in common with our fellow humans. How did we rise from the middle of the food chain to the top? And how did we become the last humans standing?
The domestication of fire changed the game, giving humans power over the natural world that no other animal possessed. Fire was a source of light. It was warmth in the cold months and a weapon in moments of conflict. You could even use fire to burn through impassable underbrush, changing the landscape to fit your needs.
The most important use of fire was cooking. Cooking food made it easier to digest. Since digestion was easier, the long intestine became shorter. This development was especially important. Big brains and big intestines both use a lot of energy. By allowing humans to better digest food and evolve shortened intestines, fire may have indirectly contributed to the brain getting a greater share of the body’s energy. As the brain got more energy, it got bigger.
When humans mastered fire, they finally gained a key to developing dominance over animals that were stronger and faster than they were.
Sapiens wasn’t the only species that used fire. Why did it come to dominate?
Early theories suggested that either A) Sapiens bred with other humans, merging the various human species, or that B) Sapiens were too genetically different from other species to procreate with them, meaning that all humans currently alive are pure sapiens.
Both of these theories are flawed. For years, Theory B had more archeological evidence to support it. But then the results of a 2010 project to map the Neanderthal genome showed that 1-4% of Middle Eastern and European DNA is Neanderthal DNA. A few months later, results from an analysis of the DNA of newly-discovered Denisova showed that 6% of Melanesian and Aboriginal Australian DNA is Denisovan DNA. These results are still new and need to be confirmed. Even if they are confirmed, they don’t suggest a “merger” of genes as in Theory A—such small percentages hardly suggest that two species of humans “merged.” What they do suggest is that a small amount of interbreeding happened, enough that we still harbor the DNA of another species, but it was rare.
The current evidence leaves us with two options to explain the disappearance of other humans.
What made Sapiens the superior species that pushed other humans to extinction? Harari argues the most likely answer is language. We’ll cover that next.
The first major revolution for Sapiens was the Cognitive Revolution. Before that point, Sapiens weren’t particularly special among animals. Over time, they had evolved the abilities to cross oceans and invent things like bows and arrows, sewing needles, oil lamps, and art. They had become humans that we’d recognize today, with our level of intelligence and creativity. But until the Cognitive Revolution of 70,000 years ago, they weren’t superior to other humans.
Although the use of fire hastened Sapiens’ ascent, it was the Cognitive Revolution that ultimately distinguished Sapiens from other humans.
What caused the Cognitive Revolution? No one’s really sure, but it was probably a chance gene mutation that changed the way the brain was wired.
The Cognitive Revolution involved the development of three new abilities, all related to language, that helped Homo sapiens outpace their fellow humans.
Their language gave Sapiens a huge advantage over their fellow animals, including their fellow humans.
Language itself isn’t particularly special—apes and monkeys communicate vocally, as do elephants, whales, and parrots. One reason the language of Sapiens was different was that it was more complex. Rather than communicating simple ideas the way green monkeys do (“Careful! A lion!” or “Careful! An eagle!”), the language of Sapiens could warn someone about a lion, describe its location, and plan how to deal with it. This allowed them to plan and follow through on complex actions like avoiding predators and working together to trap prey.
A second distinction of the Sapiens language was its ability to convey gossip. We think of gossip as a bad thing, but using language to convey information about other people is a way to build trust. Trust is critical for social cooperation, and cooperation gives you an advantage in the struggle to survive and pass on your genes.
Even today, most of our communication is gossip, if we define gossip as talking about other people. If we hear from a friend that the banker down the street offers fair interest rates on mortgage loans, we feel comfortable doing business with that banker, even though he’s a stranger. On the flip side, if we hear that the banker is a fraud, we stay away from her. Gossip helps us avoid strangers who may cheat us or be undependable.
Neanderthals probably didn’t have the capability to gossip. Their language was equipped to talk about lions and bison, but not other people. When they couldn’t talk about others, they couldn’t assess the trustworthiness and dependability of strangers. That meant they could only cooperate with the people they knew intimately, family members and close locals.
Because an animal can only know so many other animals intimately, the lack of the ability to gossip kept Neanderthal groups small. Sapiens, on the other hand, could form groups of up to 150 people. They didn’t need to know every group member personally to trust them. In a battle, a small group of Neanderthals was no match for a group of 150 Sapiens.
A third benefit of the Sapiens’ language was how it was used to create fictions, also known as “social constructs” or “imagined realities.”
Being able to communicate information about things that don’t exist doesn’t seem like an advantage. But Sapiens seem to be the only animals who have this ability to discuss things that don’t have a physical presence in the world, like money, human rights, corporations, and God.
For instance, you can’t convince a monkey to give you its banana on the argument that if it does, it will get unlimited bananas when it dies and goes to heaven. Your negotiations with monkeys are limited because you can only promise rewards that exist materially in this world. Monkeys can’t create imagined realities like heaven.
In and of itself, imagining things that don’t exist isn’t an asset—you won’t aid your chances of survival if you go into the forest looking for ghosts rather than berries and deer.
What’s important about the ability to create fictions is the ability to create collective fictions, fictions everyone believes. These collective myths allow people who’ve never met and otherwise would have nothing in common to cooperate under shared assumptions and goals.
Collective fictions aren’t the same as lies. These aren’t lies because everyone collectively believes them. For example, members of the UN weren’t lying when they insisted that Libya’s government respect the rights of its citizens, even though Libya, human rights, and the UN itself are all imaginary realities, or social constructs. The borders that separate Libya from other countries are man-made, not physical features of the landscape; human rights is a concept many of us believe in, but rights don’t exist outside our collective imagination; and, like Libya, the UN is a social construct, an organization that has no physical existence.
While humans lived without these social constructs for millennia, today, imaginary realities in some cases matter more than objective realities. For instance, the survival of actual entities like rain forests and endangered river dolphins depends on the charity of imaginary entities like the United States and non-profit organizations.
Let’s look at a modern example of how we unquestioningly accept imagined realities and treat them as real entities.
Example: Peugeot and the Power of Entities that Don’t Exist
Does the carmaker Peugeot exist?
It must. The corporation employs 200,000 people, makes 1.5 million cars a year, and earns about 55 billion euros annually.
But in what way does Peugeot exist? Can you locate it in physical reality?
The company isn’t its cars. The cars could all go away and the company would still exist.
The company isn’t its employees, its factories, or its machinery. A natural disaster could wipe out every factory and every employee, and the company would still exist and be able to get a loan, build new factories, and hire new workers.
The company is not its founder (who’s dead) or its managers and shareholders, who could be dismissed today without threatening the company’s existence.
So how can it exist? Peugeot, as with other corporations, has no existence in the physical world. It’s an idea, a collective myth we all agree to believe in. This myth is so powerful that this imaginary entity can buy property, pay taxes, open a bank account, and be bound by laws.
We grant these legal fictions, called limited liability companies, the same rights as people (the concept of “rights” is a fiction, too). We treat LLCs like flesh-and-blood people.
The Birth of Limited Liability Companies
The Problem
It wasn’t always the case that a business owner could divorce himself from his business. In the 13th century, before the (imaginary) existence of LLCs, if you owned a business, you were personally liable for everything that happened with that business.
So if your product broke, your customer could sue you personally. If you borrowed money and the business flopped, you had to pay back the debt out of pocket. If you couldn’t, you might have to sell your personal property or sell your children into servitude.
When you are your business and your business is you, starting a business is a scary prospect. People didn’t want to take the financial risk, and this impeded entrepreneurship.
The Solution
The solution to this problem was limited liability companies. The company became an entity independent of its founder, manager, or any other person or physical entity.
We’re so used to these corporations that we forget they’re imaginary, existing only in our minds and invented only to shield their founders from too much personal responsibility.
Back to Peugeot
Often, the problem with imaginary things is that it’s hard to get others to believe them (their power comes only with collective belief in them). But in France in the 1890s, if you got a lawyer to go through the ritual required of the French legal code (another fiction), involving writing down the correct words on a fancy sheet of paper and signing it, you could create a totally imaginary company that millions of French citizens would tacitly agree to believe.
French law validated the existence of Peugeot. In other words, one imaginary entity legitimized another imaginary entity.
We can see the advantages of flexible language, gossip, and shared fictions by comparing chimp social groups with Sapiens social groups.
When chimps become alpha males, leaders of their troops, it’s usually due to the fact that they’ve created strong social ties with the members of the group. But in order for this social structure to work, everyone in the troop has to know the others well. Chimps who haven’t met won’t trust each other and won’t know who is of higher rank.
The fact that everyone has to know one another limits the troops to between 20 and 50 chimps. Otherwise, the group destabilizes and the troop breaks up into smaller troops, which generally don’t cooperate with each other.
Until the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens functioned in social groups similar to those of chimps. But the ability to gossip meant that members didn’t have to know all the other members intimately—they could know them through word of mouth.
This means that Sapiens social groups can be much bigger than chimp social groups. But you can still only effectively gossip about a maximum of 150 people—beyond this number, it’s just too hard to keep track of all the people. Even today, businesses with fewer than 150 people don’t necessarily need concrete rules and a clear hierarchy to function. Because everyone knows each other well, social bonds keep the order. Beyond 150 people, the group becomes chaotic as there’s no way to be intimately connected with, or gossip about, so many people.
So gossip was a good first step toward creating large, cohesive groups (and, consequently, dominating other animals, including humans). But Sapiens have managed to found cities, nations, and empires of hundreds of millions of subjects. How did they cross the 150 threshold?
This is where common myths, or collective fictions, come into play. Cities, nations, and empires aren’t real entities. They exist only in the collective mind of the group.
For example, churches can hold sway over millions of people all over the world because of the belief system that binds their followers to each other, even when they’re strangers and have nothing else in common.
Likewise, citizens of a nation are often tied together by common ideals established by the nation’s founders and the shared stories they tell the world about themselves.
If we could only talk about things that really existed, like rivers, mountains, and lions, we’d never be able to form the powerful social and cooperative networks created by “imaginary” entities like churches and nations. The world would be chaotic.
Although imagined, these myths are crucial. Without collective fictions, the systems built on them collapse. And as we’ll see, most of our modern systems are built on these imagined realities. These myths are powerful, and the fact that they’re not rooted in objective reality doesn’t undermine them.
Collective fictions allowed early Sapiens to cooperate within extremely large groups of people they’d never met, and it rapidly changed their social behavior.
The Neanderthals were perhaps the human species, other than Sapiens, most likely to survive. As we’ve learned, they had strong bodies and large brains and were superior to Sapiens in both these qualities.
But in the struggle for dominance and, ultimately, survival, they were no match for Sapiens. The Cognitive Revolution, and the language, fictions, and cooperative skills that came with it, gave Sapiens a leg up in trade and hunting.
Archeologists find shells from distant coasts in Sapiens settlements, showing that Sapiens must have traveled far and been good navigators. Both navigation and interaction with strangers necessitates good communication skills, cooperation, and shared myths. For instance, you need to be able to trust strangers to trade with them. Foreign Sapiens traders probably engendered this trust by calling upon a shared mythical ancestor or god. They probably also used the trust that comes from believing in the same myths to trade information, widening their network of knowledge.
There’s no evidence that Neanderthals traded. They made their tools from local materials. In fact, no other animals trade. Sapiens had a huge advantage here.
While Neanderthals hunted by themselves or in small family groups, Sapiens hunted in large, cooperative groups. Because there were so many of them, and they knew how to communicate effectively, Sapiens could surround an entire herd of wild horses, chase them into a tight spot where they were trapped, and slaughter them.
If Neanderthals and Sapiens were living in the same area and competing for the same food sources, Sapiens usually won.
Usually, it takes a genetic mutation to significantly change behavior, and that takes hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, of years.
For example, common chimpanzees live in hierarchical groups led by the alpha male, whereas their relatives the bonobos live in egalitarian groups led by females. Chimps can’t suddenly decide that they too want to live in an egalitarian society. Their social behavior is ingrained in their genes. Such a change would have to come from their DNA.
Until the Cognitive Revolution, the social and technological evolution of Sapiens also depended on changes in DNA. But the Cognitive Revolution—and the language, collective fictions, and cooperation it brought with it—allowed Sapiens to evolve much faster than other humans. We can now change our social structures, interpersonal behavior, and economic behavior within decades, rather than over hundreds of years.
Example: The Power of the Pope
We can see how the advent of “fictions” made social evolution independent of biological evolution in the example of the Pope.
In the societies of our chimp relatives, the alpha male uses his position of power to mate with as many females as possible, ensuring that he passes his genes to the next generation. In the animal world, this is the primary, instinctive goal—to survive long enough to pass on your DNA and keep your ancestral line alive. The sole purpose of gaining power is to help you survive and procreate.
However, in modern human societies, power is divorced from procreation and institutions are passed along not through genes but through fictions.
For example, Catholic priests, Buddhist monks, and Chinese eunuchs all hold sway over their societies. They’re also meant to be celibate. Their celibacy isn’t the result of limited resources or a lack of females. It’s also not the product of a genetic mutation.
There’s no genetic basis or survival need for the Catholic Church, but it hasn’t died out. It’s passed from one generation to the next via stories rather than genes.
We’ve only been working in offices and, before that, as farmers and herders, for the last 12,000 years. For hundreds of thousands of years before that, the majority of our species’ history, we were foragers.
Because foragers moved every week, sometimes every day, they had few personal possessions. They only had what they could carry themselves, without the aid of wagons or pack animals. Consequently, Sapiens during the period between the Cognitive Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution left few artifacts. Dependence on the few artifacts discovered creates an incomplete and even misleading picture of our ancestors.
It’s also hard to talk about how early Sapiens lived because there was no single way of life (as there isn’t now). Still, attempting to piece together how our ancestors lived from 70,000 to 12,000 years ago can give us insight into our modern society.
Foragers had many advantages over their descendants.
Westerners spend an average of 40-45 hours working a week (and some people in developing countries work up to 80 hours a week). Even modern foragers, who generally live in inhospitable environments, hunt and gather for 35-45 hours a week.
It’s very possible that early foragers spent much less time working to find food and resources. Many of them lived in lands much more fertile than the Kalahari Desert. They also didn’t have the chores that take up our time today, like vacuuming, paying bills, and washing dishes.
There were a couple of reasons foragers were taller and healthier than Sapiens after the Agricultural Revolution.
Varied Diet
Because early foragers might eat berries, snails, and rabbit one day and mushrooms, fruits, and mammoth the next, they were rarely malnourished. They got all the nutrition they needed from the variety in their diets.
Farmers, and the societies that depend on them, tend to rely on calories from a single crop, like wheat or rice. Relying on one food means you’re not getting the variety of nutrients you need to be healthy.
Less Disease
Many diseases afflicting Sapiens’ descendants came from domesticated animals. Because their only domesticated animal was the dog, there was less opportunity for the spread of disease.
Additionally, forager populations were spread thinly across the land. Epidemics were uncommon. Later societies would live in close quarters and unhygienic environments, fueling the spread of dangerous epidemics.
Although foragers had many advantages over later Sapiens, we shouldn’t idealize their societies. Foragers dealt with issues that have decreased over time.
For instance, child mortality was high. Interactions with wild animals often resulted in death. People who slowed down the group, including the elderly, disabled, and children, may have been killed.
Our ancestors were neither wholly good nor wholly bad. Just like us, they were human, doing their best to survive in sometimes difficult circumstances.
There are gaps in our knowledge about foragers that probably won’t ever be filled.
Yes, but we can’t know much about our ancestors’ fictions. We can make guesses about their beliefs, but those guesses often say more about our modern biases than about what foragers thought and felt.
Most experts agree that early foragers were animists rather than theists.
Our forager ancestors probably believed that all animate things (mice, deer, and spirits) and inanimate things (rocks, rivers, and trees) had feelings and desires. They also had the capability to reward or punish Sapiens for their actions.
Because animism is non-hierarchical, there were no walls separating people from the rest of the natural world. People were not of a higher status than other animals, plants, spirits, and inanimate objects. Forager Sapiens didn’t believe that spirits, trees, and animals existed to serve or please them.
Animism doesn’t refer to a particular religion. Within this general concept, there were probably many religions practiced and beliefs believed by foragers.
Although we don’t know what early foragers believed, we do know that they had fictions.
For example, in Russia, archeologists discovered burial site containing numerous graves. Most of the graves were unnotable, but one contained the skeletons of two children, a boy and a girl. The children were adorned with thousands of ivory beads and fox teeth and were surrounded by statuettes and other ivory objects.
Carving the beads alone would have involved 7,500 hours of work. It was clear that there was something special about these kids. But these kids were too young to have achieved prominence in their band by being great leaders or hunters.
We don’t know why they were special, but it’s clear that this band held some kind of imaginary reality that gave the children status beyond their DNA or their ability to help the band survive and procreate.
Even though we’ll never know what our ancestors believed, what their social structures looked like, or what political strife occurred, it’s crucial that we speculate. If we don’t ask how foragers shaped our current world, we might assume that they didn’t. But, as we’ll see in the next chapter, Sapiens after the Cognitive Revolution reshaped the natural and social worlds around them, legacies we still grapple with today.
Before the Cognitive Revolution, humans lived solely on the landmass of Afro-Asia and a few surrounding islands. They didn’t alter these environments and ecosystems dramatically. Animals on the African and Asia continents had evolved alongside humans and knew how to avoid them and hold their own.
But as humans migrated to other parts of the world, parts wholly unprepared to face the threat of human beings, this would change. This chapter looks at the ecological impact of human migration to Australia, America, and then the rest of the world.
Somehow, humans managed to cross the sea barrier after the Cognitive Revolution. No one’s really sure how, but the best theory is that Sapiens in Indonesia learned how to build boats and managed to reach Australia. Human colonization of Australia is one of the most important events in history, on par with the moon landing. It was here that Sapiens rose to the top of the food chain and became the deadliest species in Earth’s history.
Before the arrival of humans, Australia was home to many large animals that sound mythical to modern ears. They included:
In just a few thousand years, all of these animals, and many more, were gone. 23 out of the 24 animals weighing 100 or more pounds became extinct.
Some researchers blame the climate, but this is a weak argument for three reasons.
Reason #1: Australia’s climate did change 45,000 years ago, when humans came to Australia, but the climate changes all the time, and this particular change wasn’t especially dramatic. Is it a coincidence that 90% of the large animals in Australia vanished right after humans arrived? The giant diprotodon, for example, had survived at least ten ice ages before humans came.
Reason #2: Climate change usually affects land and sea creatures equally. But 45,000 years ago, when humans spent far more time on land that navigating the sea, only land animals were affected.
Reason #3: It wasn’t just Australia. Wherever humans went, they left a trail of extinction behind. For example, Sapiens only reached New Zealand about 800 years ago. Within a couple hundred years, most of the local megafauna was gone, as was 60% of local bird species. There are numerous examples like this, making Sapiens in particular “look like an ecological serial killer.”
Reason #1: Although large, these Australian species weren’t hard for humans to kill.
Large animals have long pregnancies and don’t have as many children as smaller species, so they breed slowly. Even if humans only killed a few diprotodons every year, deaths could outnumber births, causing the species’ extinction within a few thousand years.
Also, because large animals had no prior experience with humans, and because humans were small and didn’t look particularly menacing, these animals didn’t run away. They didn’t have time to evolve a fear of humans. Humans caught them off guard.
Reason #2: Humans used fire agriculture.
Humans burned dense thickets to create grasslands that were easy to navigate and attracted game. Not only did this lure animals into the vicinity to be killed, it changed the vegetation. This, in turn, impacted the animals who ate the vegetation, and the animals that ate those animals. This caused the food chain to collapse.
Reason #3: Human actions may have pushed an ecosystem weakened by climate change over the edge.
Climate change may have played a part. Large animals were vulnerable to two very different threats. Regardless, humans played a crucial role. Animals may have bounced back from climate change, but humans didn’t give them a chance.
The disaster in Australia 45,000 years ago was the first mass extinction caused by humans, but it wasn’t the largest. The next major disaster was in America, 16,000 years ago.
Sapiens were the only humans to make it to America. They came in large numbers from Siberia, when the end of an ice age revealed a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. Sapiens likely followed large prey like reindeer and mammoths into Alaska. Both were great sources of fat and fur, and hunters thrived.
For a species that evolved in Africa, Sapiens were quick to figure out how to adapt to this cold and inhospitable land. They made snowshoes, used needles to sew layers of furs and skins into thermal clothing, and made new weapons to kill their new prey.
In just a couple thousand years, maybe less, Sapiens had adapted to ecosystems and climates as diverse as those of the eastern U.S., the Mexican desert, the Amazon basin, and the Andean mountain valleys. They did all this adapting without altering their genes.
Again, wherever humans went, they brought the powers of mass extinction with them. Animals native to North America included:
Shortly after Sapiens arrived, these species were gone. Of 47 large animal genera in North America, 34 went extinct. Of 60 large animal genera in South America, 50 went extinct. Thousands of smaller animal species also went extinct.
The pattern seen in Australia and America repeated itself all over the world. Between the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions, humans caused half of the world’s large beasts to go extinct. And this pattern holds beyond the Agricultural Revolution. For example, Sapiens only set foot for the first time in Madagascar 1,500 years ago. Not coincidentally, this is also the time that most of Madagascar’s large animals disappeared.
Only a few islands, like the Galapagos Islands, were spared, but only because they were so remote that humans didn’t reach them until the modern age.
The mass extinction following the Cognitive Revolution is called the First Wave Extinction. After the Agricultural Revolution came the Second Wave Extinction. We’re now experiencing the Third Wave Extinction. All three waves are caused by humans.
Unless we as a species make massive changes, whales, sharks, and dolphins will probably follow the diprotodons, ground sloths, and mammoths into the abyss.
Part Two details the second major upheaval of the Sapiens’ way of life: The Agricultural Revolution. Chapter 5 charts the advent of farming while also introducing a concept that we’ll return to throughout the rest of the book: the idea that success isn’t the same thing as happiness.
Sometimes, our evolutionary success is at odds with our well-being and happiness. Evolutionary success is pretty easy to judge and quantify—the more individuals of your species that survive, and the more copies of your DNA in existence, the more successful you are. Happiness, on the other hand, is harder to quantify. (We’ll spend a whole chapter, Chapter 19, breaking down the meaning and theories of happiness.)
Another recurrent theme, explored in the previous chapter, is that Sapiens isn’t the only species that matters. As we examine their history, we should also look at how the success of Sapiens affected other species.
About 10,000 years ago, between 9500 and 8500 BC, Sapiens started shifting from forager lifestyles to a life revolving around agriculture. This was the Agricultural Revolution. It was so successful for our species that we went from 5-8 million foragers in 10,000 BC to 250 million farmers by the first century AD.
This gradual movement started independently in the Middle East, China, and Central America, areas that had plants and animals, like wheat and sheep, that were easy to domesticate. The movement had a monumental impact on not only the way we live today but on our diet. 90% of the calories in the modern diet comes from plants domesticated by our ancestors, like wheat, rice, and potatoes.
Many people have suggested that the Agricultural Revolution was the product of a species that was becoming more intelligent, but there’s no evidence of this. The move toward farming isn’t necessarily common sense.
For example, agriculture was much harder than foraging and hunting for food, and left farmers more vulnerable to disease and hunger. Farmers also had a less nutritious diet than foragers due to its lack of variety.
Agriculture also led to promotion of disease. All the extra food they grew resulted in a population boom. More people meant closer living quarters, leading to disease epidemics. Child mortality soared.
Most of the agricultural surplus went to the elite, and they probably did live better lives than their ancestors. But the Agricultural Revolution didn’t translate to a better life for most individuals.
We won the game of evolution, which judges our success based on how many of us there are on the planet, but we lost individually. In other words, the Agricultural Revolution allowed more people to survive, but the conditions under which each individual lived were worse.
Wheat is one of the most successful plants ever, but its success happened gradually and was probably not planned consciously by Sapiens.
About 870,000 square miles of the earth are covered by wheat. This is the area of Britain, multiplied by 10.
We like to think we’re the masters of our land, and everything that grows on it, but humans didn’t domesticate wheat. Wheat domesticated humans.
Humans hadn’t evolved for this work. It killed their backs, knees, necks, and feet. Further, there’s evidence of new injuries like slipped discs, hernias, and arthritis.
And what did wheat offer in return? Not much. Wheat doesn’t have many vitamins and minerals. It didn’t offer a better diet for Sapiens. And it didn’t offer more stable living. Wheat cultivation was dependent on external factors like plentiful rain, no swarms of locusts, and no fungus. A lot had to go right for wheat to grow and thrive.
Further, if people had a plot of land, they also had to protect that land from neighbors. Unlike foragers, when farmers didn’t get along with others in their band, it wasn’t easy to pick up and move. Farmers stayed and fought. Therefore, wheat didn’t offer a more peaceful way of life. Some studies indicate that 15% of deaths at the time were the result of human violence.
There was one benefit, however: life lived in one place, in a home and with fences, did provide more protection from wild animals and the elements.
The move from foraging to agriculture wasn’t necessarily a conscious choice. Rather, it was a gradual process of small, seemingly insignificant changes that added up to a monumental revolution.
18,000 years ago, the last ice age retreated, increasing rainfall. This was great for wheat and other grains, which started to spread. Because there was more wheat, people started eating more of it, taking it back to their campsites to grind and cook. On the way to the campsite, some of the small grains were sprinkled along the path, helping the spread of wheat.
Humans burned the forests to create clearings that attracted animals. This also cleared the area of large trees and bushes that would have competed with the wheat for sunlight and water. Where wheat prospered, nomads would settle for a few weeks, enjoying the plenty. A few weeks turned into a few more, and over generations, these areas became permanent settlements.
People started storing grain for later and invented stone scythes, pestles, and mortars. Because they saw that wheat grew better when it was buried deep in the soil rather than sprinkled on top, humans began to hoe and plow the fields. Weeding, watering, and fertilizing followed. With all this time spent on tending the wheat, there was less time to hunt and gather. Sapiens had become farmers.
Animals were also affected by the transition to agriculture. Evolutionarily speaking, animal farming has been a huge success for domesticated animals. After humans, the most numerous large mammals in the world are cows, pigs, and sheep.
But as with humans, the Agricultural Revolution may have brought evolutionary success, but it didn’t bring success for the individual animal. Domestication of animals made their lives far worse than during pre-agriculture times. For example, in the wild, chickens live 7-12 years and cows live 20-25 years. But domesticated chicken and cows are allowed to live only a few weeks to a few months.
Although we don’t often think about it, animals like bulls and horses have social ties and social structures, just like other animals. Domestication breaks those ties, separating infants from mothers at birth. This was true during the Agricultural Revolution, and it’s true now. Rather than freely roaming the land, domesticated animals are bridled and kept in cages or pens barely bigger than their bodies. Calves, for instance, spend their few months alive in cages with only inches of wiggle room. They never have contact with other calves. Further, they’re not allowed to walk because this strengthens their muscles, and strong muscles mean tough steak.
Whether male or female, farm animals have it rough. Males are often castrated or mutilated to make them more docile. Many female farm animals are there to produce milk. To lactate, cows, sheep, and goats need to give birth, so the females are continually pregnant for most of their lives. And once they give birth, the baby is sent to the meat industry, or worse: it’s common practice to kill the newborns to keep them from drinking the mother’s precious milk.
Some animals did actually find individual success with the success of their species. Sheep, dogs, cats, and many horses live comfortable lives. But for most domesticated animals (and humans), the power and success of the collective meant the suffering of the individual during the Agricultural Revolution.
Prior to the Agricultural Revolution, people didn’t live in houses. They roamed, following herds of animals or finding areas of more plant growth. With domestication of plants and animals, humans began living in houses (the word “domesticate” comes from the Latin for “house”).
The home, a new concept, measured a few dozen feet. It represented a separation from the rest of your band. Whereas nomads lived together, with the development of the house we became more individualistic, self-centered animals.
We also separated ourselves from the rest of nature. We cleared forests and fields, planted trees and proclaimed them “ours,” fenced off “our” land, and eliminated pesky weeds and animals. We were the masters of our individual universes, but this came with a lot of responsibility and the anxiety that attends it.
Nomadic foragers hadn’t given too much thought to what the future had in store. They were mostly focused on what they did and had in the present. There was little they could do to influence future events, so they didn’t worry about it. This saved them a lot of anxiety.
But the Agricultural Revolution required a focus on the future. There were three reasons:
Reason #1: Agriculture depends on seasonal cycles that last a year. If you’re in the harvest season and you’re not thinking ahead about the next cultivation season, you won’t have a harvest next year. What farmers do today affects what happens next year, or even years from now.
Reason #2: Agriculture is risky. Droughts, floods, and pestilence, among other calamities, could take out a farmer’s entire harvest. If farmers didn’t plan ahead, building up reserves, they starved. Consequently, farmers were always anxiously looking at the sky, trying to anticipate storms, dry periods, and floods.
Reason #3: Unlike their nomadic ancestors, farmers could actually do something today to influence events tomorrow. For example, they could sow more seeds, dig another canal, and plant more trees. The responsibility to plant the seeds that wouldn’t yield for decades kept them forever looking forward.
Peasant farmers rarely achieved the security they sought. Surplus went to more and more children, or the elites that lived off them. They always had just enough to survive, perpetually working just to have enough to eat.
Where did the elites come from? Why did they have the power to take the farmers’ surplus and keep them living at the subsistence level?
People evolved to cooperate in small groups. As their way of life changed rapidly, there was no time for Sapiens to evolve the skills of mass cooperation. As groups of people got bigger, they needed some kind of organizing structure, a way to help people work together to divide land, settle disputes, and keep the peace. Organizing so many people involved creating myths that served as the links between previously distinct bands of people. This was the foundation of cooperation.
Cooperation didn’t necessarily mean egalitarian collaboration. Cooperation was often built on oppression. Those in power exploited the farmers to maintain the system.
Fictions can foster cooperation among nations and empires. We’ll look at the Code of Hammurabi and the Declaration of Independence together to demonstrate how these seemingly dissimilar documents actually function very similarly.
Fictions can be useful. We like to think that political orders are founded on truths, but in reality, political orders are unable to function without relying on fictions.
In 1776 BC, the Babylonian Empire was the biggest in the world, with over a million subjects. King Hammurabi established a code that presented his power and legal system as mandated by the gods. The code emphasized hierarchy, breaking the population into “superior people,” commoners, and slaves. Your worth was established based on your class and gender.
The idea was that if everyone accepted this code, the empire’s million subjects could cooperate with each other. And it worked. People believed the myth that the gods dictated these laws, rights, and differing human worths, and the Code of Hammurabi is still known today.
It’s easy to think of the Code of Hammurabi as a myth. It may not be as easy to think of our own country’s foundational document as a myth.
Similar to Hammurabi’s assertion that his code came from the gods, Thomas Jefferson justifies the rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence by writing that they are “endowed by [men’s] Creator.” Both have a divine source. Also like the Code of Hammurabi, the Declaration of Independence was written as a way to unify disparate groups of people.
Unlike the Code, the Declaration is based not on hierarchy but on equality. Who’s right? Neither. The concepts of rights and equality are just as much myths as the concepts of hierarchy and of value based on class and gender. They exist only in the mind.
In order for the phrase “all Men are created equal” to be true, we’d have to find that sentiment in the physical world. But there’s no sense in which we are equal in objective reality. People have different genes, are influenced by different environments, develop different personalities, and have different chances of success and survival. The evolution of our species depends on our differences, our genetic mutations.
There’s also no objective existence of “rights.” For example, birds don’t fly because they have the right to fly. They fly because they have wings. Likewise, “liberty” is a concept humans invented. You can’t measure it and it doesn’t exist outside our minds.
None of this means that the Declaration of Independence is a lie or worthless. It has helped create a stable, cooperative society. In fact, collective myths are the only way to organize large groups effectively.
A natural order, which has its basis in physical reality, is stable. Gravity will continue to exist even if we stop believing in it. Radioactivity will still be dangerous, even if we don’t know it.
But imagined orders, systems based on myths, aren’t stable. There’s no guarantee that they’ll last. Consequently, there are two requirements for maintaining them.
Requirement #1: Coercion
The myth creators or sustainers need to continually enforce people’s belief in the fiction. This is often done with violence. Armies, courts, and police officers make sure that people comply with the imagined laws of the imagined order. For example, when many Americans decided that African slaves should enjoy the right to freedom, they had to fight a war to enforce this principle in the South.
Requirement #2: True Believers
Coercion isn’t easy—it’s actually hard to coordinate violence. Armies, courts, and police officers won’t be effective at enforcing the imagined order if they don’t believe in it, or, at least, something. Soldiers and officers must believe in the myth of God, the nation, honor, or money—it doesn’t matter what myth they choose to believe, as long as the resulting behaviors lead to enforcing the political order. So, for instance, a soldier may not believe in the imagined political order he’s supposed to defend, but if he believes in the myth of money, he may enforce the political order anyway.
How do you get people to believe in the imagined order in the first place?
First of all, you don’t tell people that it’s imagined. You maintain that the society was created by gods or nature, thereby making it part of objective reality.
Next, you constantly remind people of the imagined order’s principles, until the imagined order feels like a natural order. You can do this by inundating your citizens with these principles from childhood in the forms of fairy tales, art, traditions, propaganda, and fashions.
We live the principles of our imagined orders in daily life. It even affects our architecture. Compare how architecture differs in individualistic societies vs. collectivist societies.
In the West, we believe that we’re all individuals, unique in the world, and that only we know our true worth. When you’re a kid in school and your classmates make fun of you, your teachers tell you to just ignore them. They don’t define your worth. Only you know your worth.
Our architecture expresses this belief in individualism. Houses consist of many rooms so that each child can have his or her own space. These rooms have doors, locks, and are often decorated by the child, with posters and colors that the child feels represent her. Parents often have to ask permission to enter the child’s room. If you have your own space, you can’t help but grow up feeling like an autonomous individual, believing your worth is defined and expressed by you.
Architecture is part of the material, “real” world. But it reinforces an imagined principle.
Medieval communities, on the other hand, didn’t believe in the myth of individualism. In their imagined order, your worth was determined by those outside of you, by the gossip about you and your place in the social hierarchy. You had to defend your good name at all times, at all costs. Nothing mattered more.
Medieval architecture reflected this myth. Castles contained few, if any, private rooms. Even the children of noblemen slept in a large hall with the other children. Everyone was on display and accountable. If you never have privacy and are in constant contact with others, you can’t help but grow up believing that your worth is determined by the people around you.
Again, something in the real world (architecture) reinforced a principle of the imagined order (collectivism).
Both Romantic myths from the 19th century and consumerist myths from the 20th century influence what we desire. Even when we think we’re making our own, personal decisions by following our hearts, what our heart wants is probably influenced by these myths. Further, the whole idea that you should “follow your heart” comes from the myths of the Romantic period.
Take the tourism industry, for example. We all want to go on vacation. We think this is a natural thing to want to do. It’s not. A chimpanzee wouldn’t think of using his hard-earned status to take a trip to another chimpanzee’s territory.
Our ancestors wouldn’t have done this, either. While today, a millionaire might take his wife on a trip to Paris to help them weather a rough patch in their marriage, an ancient Egyptian might have built his wife the lavish tomb she coveted.
Traveling is not a natural, biological urge. So why do we want to go so badly?
Romanticism and Consumerism find their marriage in the tourism industry, which sells you experiences on the assumption that they will enrich your life.
It’s hard to realize that the organizing principles of your life are just imaginary when everyone else takes them for granted as well. When everyone else believes something, and it’s something embedded in your culture since you were born, it feels natural for you to believe it too.
Further, it’s hard to change the imagined order when it exists in the collective mind, not just yours. When something exists in the collective imagination of a population, it’s called inter-subjective. Something that is inter-subjective depends on a group believing in it. If one individual stops believing in it, the inter-subjective item is still there. So one person can’t change a collective imagined order on her own. You not only have to convince the people around you that it’s imaginary, but you have to replace it with another imagined order, one even more powerful, because we can’t function without them.
The social orders and cooperative systems of some species are maintained because the information for their maintenance is encoded in their DNA. For example, the behavior that makes a female bee fulfill her role as either a worker or queen is programmed into her genes.
But imagined systems aren’t encoded in our DNA, so we have to memorize the roles and behaviors they require. This worked for Sapiens for a while, but our systems became complex and required more information than one brain could hold.
The brain isn’t good at storing information. It has a limited storage capacity and it doesn’t last forever. When humans die, so do their brains. All the information contained in a single brain is lost. Transmitting information to other brains is possible, but how much can be transmitted is limited, and what is transmitted may be muddied and distorted.
Further, the brain has evolved to store some types of information better than others. We’re good at remembering information about the qualities and behavior patterns of plants and animals, information about topography, and information about social ties. This information was crucial to the survival of our ancestors. For example, they needed to know which mushrooms were good to eat and which near-identical mushrooms would kill them, so they got adept at observing and memorizing subtle visual signs.
But the brain did not evolve to memorize numbers, which would become important during the Agricultural Revolution. Hunter-gatherers didn’t need to know how much fruit was on a tree. Because of the brain’s limitations for memorizing numbers, societies remained relatively small for thousands of years after the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution. They just couldn’t store the data needed to grow their societies. But kings needed to collect taxes to support their widening kingdoms, and this involved numbers.
The solution was writing. Although today we connect the word “writing” with “literature,” early writing was used to record tax payments, debts, and property ownership, not to write poems and stories. Writing also wasn’t invented to record spoken language. It was invented to fill a gap, to succeed where spoken language failed. It was needed to record data.
The Sumerians invented writing in southern Mesopotamia between 3500 BC and 3000 BC. Eventually, the Sumerians wanted to record more than just mathematical data, so they gradually added signs to their script, which developed into a script capable of representing spoken language. We call it cuneiform.
People who weren’t accountants started writing. Kings used cuneiform to give orders, priests used it to write down oracles, and citizens wrote letters. Also around 2500 BC, the Egyptians developed hieroglyphics. Soon after, societies in China and Central America developed full scripts.
It was only after the spread of full scripts that people started writing histories, dramas, prophecies, and poetry. Works that existed only through the passing down of oral tradition, such as the Hebrew Bible, the Iliad, and the Buddhist Tripitaka, began to be written down.
Inventing cataloguing and retrieval systems for data is much harder than inventing writing itself. Finding information on clay tablets, which the Sumerians used to store much of their data, or in the records stored in the knots of thousands of quipu cords, used to record numerical data in the Andes, proved difficult. How do you sort through all that information?
In order to use all this data, societies had to figure out how to organize it and how to find specific pieces of information when they were needed. Sumer, pharaonic Egypt, ancient China, and the Inca Empire all thrived because of their organization of written information. These societies had schools that trained scribes to read, write, catalog, retrieve, and process information, in addition to using dictionaries and calendars.
These organizational systems changed the way Sapiens think. Generally, we free associate to locate information stored in our brains. But a scribe wouldn’t get very far free-associating. He had to reprogram his thinking to work within these artificial, non-natural systems of organization. Holistic thinking gave way to compartmentalization.
A huge advance in the written form was the invention of the signs representing 0 to 9, invented by the Hindus but refined and circulated by the Arabs. We call them Arabic numerals. This was the foundation of the mathematical notation we use today.
This is a partial script (it can’t record spoken language), but that hasn’t stopped it from being the most used language in the world. No matter what language a country speaks, almost everyone speaks the language of mathematics.
Mathematical script increased the efficiency of recording, processing, and transmitting data, and it broadened the capacity of human potential. Even today, advanced written script can lead to new human capabilities. For instance, most brains can’t comprehend the details of quantum mechanics because they aren’t wired to do so. But physicists can because they’ve retrained their brains to think less like humans and more like computers, and they have the aid of processing systems like mathematical script. Much of their “thought process” takes place outside of their heads, on a chalkboard or a computer.
As we’ve seen, Sapiens evolve genetically to organize themselves into large groups, so they formed societies through the use of imagined orders and writing.
We require these imagined orders to function, but they’re not equitable or impartial. They result in systems that discriminate some and privilege others. In fact, there’s no known society that doesn’t discriminate.
Hierarchies have a purpose: they let us know how to interact with others without actually knowing them, which in theory is more efficient and lets us function in large societies. For instance, a woman selling flowers doesn’t know all her customers personally. To figure out how to divvy up her energy and time, she uses the social cues dictated by each person’s place in the hierarchy—such as the way he’s dressed, his age, and, often, his skin color—to determine who is the executive, likely to buy a lot of expensive roses, and who is the messenger boy, only able to afford daisies.
Almost all hierarchies are imagined (we’ll look at a possible exception, the hierarchy of males and females, at the end of this chapter). But we usually claim that they’re natural. For example, capitalists believe that the rich are wealthy because they have better business sense, make better choices, and are smarter and harder working. They earn their wealth and the high-quality health care, education, and nutrition that come with it. But (according to Harari) it’s proven that most rich people are wealthy because their parents were wealthy, and that most poor people are poor because their parents were poor. Wealth is rarely purely “earned.”
Just because our hierarchies are imagined doesn’t mean there isn’t diversity in our biological aptitudes and abilities. Some people are smarter or more skilled than others. But we don’t succeed or fail based on these aptitudes alone. Society still largely determines who wins and who loses by dictating whose abilities are nurtured and who gets what opportunities.
Imagined societies are generally propped up by three elements: a historical accident, the fear of pollution, and the vicious cycle of discrimination.
Historical Accident: The roots of prejudicial hierarchies often lie in a random occurrence in history rather than biological differences.
Fear of Pollution: Humans are biologically programmed to feel repulsed by people and animals that might carry disease. This is a survival instinct. But although the fear is biologically-based, its historical manipulation and exploitation is based in fiction. If you want to ostracize a group (such as Jews, gays, blacks, or women), tell your society that they’re polluted and could contaminate you if you interact with them.
Vicious Cycle of Discrimination: Once a random historical event that benefits one group and discriminates against another occurs, that hierarchy is perpetuated by the people who benefit from it. This reinforces the prejudices used to justify the system. These prejudices, in turn, help maintain the system, and the cycle continues.
Let’s look at how these three elements perpetuate discrimination in America.
Example: Racial Discrimination in America
Historical Accident
One of the primary sources of America’s racial hierarchy is the slave trade of the 16th through 18th centuries. In a sense, it was a historical accident that Europeans imported to America millions of slaves from the African continent rather than Europe or Asia.
Firstly, it was cheaper to get slaves from Africa than Asia because Africa was closer to America.
Secondly, a slave trade already existed in Africa. It made financial sense to buy slaves from a market that already existed rather than create a new market on a different continent.
- Thirdly, plantations in American colonies like Virginia, Haiti, and Brazil were plagued by yellow fever and malaria, diseases that originated in Africa. Africans had, over time, become more immune to these diseases than Europeans or Asians, so it made economic sense to invest in people who would live longer to work the plantations. Let that irony sink in: the genetic advantage of immunity contributed to the social disadvantage of Africans. They were slaves to masters who were genetically inferior to them in this sense.
Fear of Pollution
The Europeans justified their dominance in America by exploiting the idea that blacks were filthy and carried diseases. Even after the abolishment of slavery in America in 1865, the stigma of being unpure continued and intensified. The “Jim Crow” laws in the South were established to “protect” whites from being violated and contaminated by blacks. Whites thought they could catch diseases by studying in the same schools, shopping in the same stores, and eating at the same restaurants as blacks. Interracial sex was considered the filthiest and most dangerous violation.
Vicious Cycle of Discrimination
While the institution of slavery was still in place, theologians spread the idea that blacks were descendents of Ham, the son of Noah whose offspring were cursed to be slaves. Biologists used the myth of moral and intellectual inferiority to justify African slavery. After slavery was abolished, these myths perpetuated the prejudices that created them, creating a vicious circle.
The Cycle of Economic Disadvantages
The Fourteenth Amendment gave all citizens equal protection under the law, regardless of race. But 200 years of slavery meant that even with these legal changes, the newly free blacks were poor and uneducated. Their chances of getting a well-paid job were low. Therefore, the chance that their children, and their children’s children, would get a good education and a good job were also low.
The Cycle of Racial Disadvantages
But of course, their disadvantages weren’t purely economic.
The Industrial Revolution and subsequent flood of immigrants created an America in which many people were able to start their lives in America poor and end them rich. But although the rags-to-riches story rang true for many immigrants, it didn’t for blacks. Discrimination kept their education and job prospects low. Whites saw their lack of education and money as a result of their laziness and ignorance rather than their lack of opportunity. They also viewed them as dissolute and unclean—polluted, essentially. The stigma reinforced their inability to get jobs, which in turn reinforced the stigma.
Rather than getting better over time, discrimination gets more entrenched over time. Money begets money, and poverty begets poverty. The cycle doesn’t get broken on its own over time. Whites think that because slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, it can no longer explain the discrepancy between white and black career and monetary success in America. Whites see few black professors, doctors, and lawyers, and conclude that this is because they’re not intelligent or hard-working enough to be professors, doctors, and lawyers. This prejudice keeps employers from hiring qualified black candidates, and the vicious circle continues.
Racial prejudice has become so ingrained in our culture that we’ve stopped seeing it, even when it’s right in front of our faces in the form of the Anglo beauty ideals promoted by every commercial and billboard.
The genetic differences between groups of Sapiens are negligible. Genes can’t explain why some groups are privileged and others aren’t. We must see these historical developments in terms of chance events that are perpetuated by those who benefit.
However, there’s one hierarchy that is based in biology: the division of Sapiens into males and females.
In order to understand which elements of the men/women divide are natural, or biological, and which are socially constructed, we need to understand the difference between “sex” and “gender.”
Because what makes someone a man or woman is based on a culture’s myths, the definitions of “man” and “woman” have varied greatly across the world and over the centuries. “Masculine” and “feminine” are also subjective terms based on myth, not biology. Because people are biologically male or female but no one is inherently masculine or feminine, people are pressured to relentlessly prove their masculinity or femininity throughout their lives through rituals such as getting into fights, applying makeup, watching football, and wearing dresses.
While sex characteristics have remained constant over time, characteristics of masculinity and femininity have changed dramatically. This is one way you know that these characteristics are social rather than biological. For example, in the 18th century, King Louis XIV was the picture of virile masculinity, shown in an official portrait in a long curly wig, tights, high heels, and colorful, sumptuous fabrics. In contrast, a portrait of Barack Obama in a suit shows the ideal of masculinity in the 21st century: dark colors and simple, streamlined lines.
Many societies have used biological differences to argue that males and females should have certain rights and behave in certain ways. When an individual or group does something society doesn’t approve of, it’s called “unnatural.”
For instance, throughout history, society has held varying views on the naturalness of homosexuality. In today’s Greece, society holds that females should be sexually attracted to males and vice versa, and that this is a “biological reality” because humans evolved the ability to have sex to procreate, and homosexual relationships do not result in procreation. They believe homosexuality is unnatural. But cultures of ancient Greece saw homosexuality as natural and productive, a way to cement male bonds. Both Achilles in the Iliad and Alexander the Great had male lovers.
So who’s right? Modern or ancient Greece? One way to determine if a behavior is “biologically determined” or a “biological myth” is to remember that “Biology enables, Culture forbids.” From the perspective of biology, if something is possible, it’s natural. Conversely, if something is unnatural, it can’t exist in nature, making it impossible. In this way, biology enables. If something is forbidden, it’s the culture that’s doing the forbidding, not nature.
When we argue that men shouldn’t have sex with other men because sex is meant to produce children, it sounds like we’re making a biological argument. But it’s actually a Christian one.
Theologians believe that God created each of our organs for a specific purpose, and if we use them for any other purpose, that use is “unnatural.” Therefore, to a theologian, because God didn’t intend sex organs to be used for anything other than procreation, homosexuality is unnatural. This is “theological nature.”
But according to “biological nature,” God doesn’t create organs. Evolution does. And evolution doesn’t “create” an organ for a specific purpose. How animals use their organs changes throughout the history of their species.
For example, mouths evolved so organisms could get nutrients from their environments. If any other use of the mouth is “unnatural,” we have to ban kissing and speaking. But the fact that our “worm-like ancestors” didn’t kiss or speak doesn’t make these behaviors unnatural for us.
Similarly, many animals use sex for purposes other than procreation. For instance, chimpanzees use sex to form alliances and ease tensions. These uses aren’t unnatural simply because they weren’t the original purposes of sex. If biology makes these behaviors possible, they’re natural.
Since the Agricultural Revolution, most cultures have valued males over females, regardless of how each culture defined men and women. Why? Is there a biological basis for this preference?
We can’t explain the prevalence of patriarchy throughout the world and history the same way we can explain other stratifications in society. Patriarchy is too universal to be explained by accidental events.
It’s more likely that the answer is biological, but researchers still have no idea what it is. The book covers three theories.
Another version of this theory says that males used their strength to monopolize agricultural tasks involving manual labor, like plowing. This gave them power over food production, which gave them power over society.
But there are problems with this theory. Females historically were forbidden from entering professions in law and religion, which require little physical work, but have worked in the fields and done the taxing household chores. Furthermore, there are plenty of women stronger than men, but they don’t have much more social power than weaker women. This pokes holes in this theory.
Further, the historical record shows little relation between physical strength and social power. Slaves in 19th-century Alabama were far stronger than their masters, yet they weren’t the ones in power. In fact, throughout history, the people with the least power in a society are the ones doing the hardest physical work, and those with the most power do the least physically demanding work. Humans rarely choose their leaders by having them compete in a boxing or wrestling match.
Males’ control of armies has made them controllers of society as well. The more control over society they had, the more wars they could fight, and the more wars they fought, the more power they gained in society. Studies of male hormones and cognitive systems lend evidence to the theory that males are more aggressive than females (and therefore make better soldiers).
Similar to the problems with Theory #1, while aggressive men may make better combat soldiers, those in the ranks are usually not the ones in power. It’s the generals and politicians who have the power, and being a general or politician requires less aggressiveness and physical strength and more tact, organizational skills, and cooperation. It also requires the ability to view a situation from multiple perspectives. Being an aggressive person makes you a bad choice to run a war.
Females are stereotyped for having more tact than men and being better able to see things from multiple viewpoints. If these stereotypes are true, females would make better generals and politicians than men. Therefore, their biology should make females more powerful than men, not less.
A variation of Theory #2, Theory #3 says that males had to compete against one another to impregnate females, so they evolved to be aggressive and competitive. Conversely, females didn’t have trouble finding a male to impregnate them, but they did have trouble getting food while they were pregnant and caring for young children. Therefore, they evolved to be submissive and dependent on males to provide for them. Females who weren’t submissive and who fought for power didn’t have as good a chance at securing a mate and passing on their genes.
There are problems with this theory, too. Even if they were necessarily dependent, it’s not obvious why females would be dependent on males rather than other females. Females of many species, such as bonobo chimpanzees and elephants, form networks of females to collectively raise children. The societies of these species are also matriarchal rather than patriarchal.
Because females had to work together, they developed more refined social skills. Males, on the other hand, spent their time competing, and their social skills remain weak. We’d expect the most cooperative and socially skillful to be those in power. But history didn’t turn out this way, and we still don’t know why.
Culture is the “network of artificial instincts” that connect us, myths so ingrained that we take them for granted. As we’ve seen, these myths allow us to cooperate and thrive in large groups.
Cultures aren’t static. They may have values and norms based on tradition, but they’re still in constant flux. Chapter 9 looks at how cultures evolve, whether that evolution is linear, and where our cultures are headed.
Cultural changes may be a result of pressures from external factors like the environment or neighboring cultures. Or they may be the product of internal factors like the contradictions inherent in every culture. Psychologists call these contradictions cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs when we hold two or more thoughts or beliefs that are incompatible with one another.
Every single culture contains contradictions that lead to cognitive dissonance, and they’re actually beneficial. This is because cultures continually attempt to resolve and reconcile the contradictions in their myths. This leads to change, allowing for a more creative and dynamic species. Contradictions in our beliefs force us to examine them and reassess, and this moves culture forward.
For example, in the West, we prize both equality and individual freedom, but we can’t have them both.
In America, Democrats favor equality. They’re willing to sacrifice the individual freedoms of a few (such as raising taxes for the rich) to make a more equitable society. Republicans, on the other hand, favor individual freedom. They don’t believe that others should be able to tell them how to spend their money, for instance, and they aim to increase individual freedom, even if it comes at the price of a widening income gap and poor Americans who can’t afford health care.
Because people resolve a culture’s contradictions in different ways, those contradictions lead to the multitude of varied opinions necessary for a creative, productive culture. A culture’s contradictions are its most telling features.
Due to the attempt to resolve cognitive dissonances, cultures are continually evolving. Is this evolution random?
History has a direction, and it’s toward unity. Speaking generally, over time, many small cultures tend to merge to form fewer, larger, more sophisticated cultures. Despite disintegration at the micro-level throughout history, such as the spread of Latin throughout the world dissolving into many regional and national languages, the overall trend is toward the consolidation of many distinct worlds.
Today, we have a global culture, but for most of history, the earth was a “galaxy of isolated human worlds.” In 10,000 BC, there were thousands of distinct cultures. But by AD 1450, 90% of the world’s population lived in the “mega-world” of Afro-Asia, in which Asia, Europe, and Africa were connected by culture, politics, and trade. By 1788, the world of Afro-Asia had absorbed all the rest, including Tasmania, the last autonomous world.
Consequently, today, all humans are tied by:
This doesn’t mean that the global culture is homogeneous, but it does mean that we all “speak the same language,” metaphorically.
Our survival instincts predispose us to divide the world into the people around us, “Us,” and everyone else, “them.” But just within the last few centuries, three “orders” have begun to dissolve this biological antagonism. These imagined orders are particularly remarkable because they run counter to our biological tendency to divide, instead being based on the potential of every human to be part of a single, united society.
The next three chapters examine each order in detail. They are the monetary order (Chapter 10), the imperial order (Chapter 11), and the religious order (Chapter 12).
The first unifier of humankind is money. Money is a relatively recent invention. Hunter-gatherers didn’t have money because they found, killed, or produced everything they needed to survive. They shared what they had in their small bands in return for favors. For instance, if you gave your band member a piece of your meat, you expected her to give you some of her berries in return.
Even at the start of the Agricultural Revolution, there was little need for money. Villages were self-sufficient, and what they couldn’t provide for themselves they bartered for in other villages. Although some individuals had expertise in an area like shoemaking or medicine, villages were too small for anyone to have a full-time occupation other than farming.
This changed with the growth of societies and improving transportation. In large cities where there were many people in need of your goods or services, it made sense to specialize in shoemaking, medicine, law, or carpentry, and depend on the reciprocity of your customers for your other needs. Specialization also allowed individuals to grow their expertise, which benefited the entire community.
The problem with an economy of favors is that it only works when you know people well. If you provide a free service to a stranger, that stranger may never reciprocate. This makes an economy of favors ineffective for cooperation in large groups.
Bartering also poses problems:
Problem #1: Bartering forces participants to repeatedly reevaluate exchange rates for a variety of commodities.
For example, if an apple grower wants to barter his apples for a new pair of shoes, the shoemaker needs to decide how many apples to ask for, dependent on the quality of the apples in question, the relative time and cost of making the particular shoes requested, and whether or not he really wants the apples. And it doesn’t stop with apples. The shoemaker has to do these mental calculations for every other commodity he might come into contact with. If you sell your goods in a market with 100 different commodities, you need to have memorized 4,950 different exchange rates to do business with your fellow sellers and buyers. This makes bartering ineffective for large communities.
Problem #2: Bartering depends on the other person wanting what you have to offer. If you want to trade your apples for a new pair of shoes and the only shoemaker in town doesn’t like apples, or already has enough apples, you’re out of luck.
Some communities in history, such as the Inca Empire and the Soviet Union, tried to establish a central bartering system where products and services were collected centrally and then redistributed to those who needed them. These attempts were inefficient at best, disastrous at worst.
Money is anything that A) systematically represents the value of goods and services, and B) people are willing to use in exchange for goods and services. Money isn’t a material reality. It’s another shared myth that allows us to cooperate with strangers and in large groups.
Money has three benefits over the previous systems based on favors or bartering:
1. It can convert almost anything into almost anything else. Unlike with bartering, you can convert even abstract qualities into money. For example, a discharged soldier can exchange his bravery for knowledge when he uses his military benefits to fund his college education.
This is beneficial because, unlike when trying to trade your apples for shoes, you don’t have to worry if the shoemaker will want or need your money. Everyone wants money, and everyone wants it because everyone else wants money. This means that you can exchange money for almost anything.
2. It allows you to store your wealth conveniently. Some things that are valuable, like time, can’t be stored. Other valuable things, like avocados, go rotten quickly. Early currencies like grain were storable, but they were large and bulky, requiring lots of space, and you had to protect them from mold, rats, and water, among other dangers.
Money like coins, paper currency, and computer bits can be stored conveniently and relatively securely.
3. It’s easy to transport. Forms of wealth like grain or real estate can’t be easily transported, so you’re limited in where you can do business. On the other hand, you can carry coins and cowry shells (early and widespread forms of currency) wherever you go. The transition from bartering to money allowed communities to grow and broaden their trade networks.
Cattle, animal skins, grain, salt, beads, and cloth have all been used as currency in various cultures and time periods. While we think of coins and banknotes when we think of money, these are actually rare forms of currency today. Of the $60 trillion in the world, only $6 trillion of that sum is made up of material currency. Over 90% of all money exists only as electronic data on computer servers.
The first types of money, like barley in Sumer in 3000 BC, had inherent value because it was edible. However, the most common forms of money, the currencies used for ease of storage and transport, like shells, dollars, and silver, don’t have any inherent worth.
Take silver, for example. You can’t eat it. You can’t make clothes or shelter from it. It’s far too soft to be used in tools. What’s it good for? We use it in jewelry, luxury goods that display to others our social status, but it has no value beyond its value as a status symbol. It’s valuable because we all believe it’s valuable.
So, why would anyone trade a bag of rice, something that has inherent value as a source of nutrition, for something as useless as a chunk of soft metal, a shell, or some pieces of green paper? Why do we place so much importance on them?
Because we trust other people value it too. Trust is the foundation of our economic system. You believe that the piece of colored paper that is the dollar bill has value because your neighbor believes it has value. And your neighbor believes it has value because you believe it has value. And you both believe it has value because your government believes it has value and demonstrates this by requiring you to pay your taxes with it.
Bills and coins that bear the identification marks of the kingdom or government, modeled after the first coins made in western Anatolia in 640 BC, give the currency value because they show that an authority can guarantee them. If you trust the king, you can trust the currency with his stamp on it.
Our financial system is entirely dependent on this mutual trust. Without it, the dollar bill is just a piece of paper. This crucial element of trust binds our financial system to our political and ideological systems. When we lose trust in our leaders, the people and systems giving value to our money, we lose trust in the value of money. We momentarily stop believing in the collective fiction (and the stock market takes a plunge).
(Shortform note: money is therefore a key example of an Imagined Reality made possible by the Cognitive Revolution, from Chapter 2.)
Money brought cultures that had little in common together. The gold coins used from Rome to India were close enough to the coins used in China that all these areas developed commercial and monetary relations. The whole world became a single monetary zone by the late modern era, leading to the creation of a single global financial and political community. Even if they didn’t speak the same language or believe in the same god, people from every corner of the globe shared the imagined belief in the value of silver and gold.
Why did they share this belief? How did they all come to believe in the same currencies when previously, some believed in cowry shells, some in barley, some in cloth, and some in beads. How did the currency become unified, the system of mutual trust in gold spreading across the globe?
It has to do with supply and demand. To understand this, let’s look at a hypothetical example. Let’s say that India and the Mediterranean start trading with each other. Indians don’t value gold. To them, it’s a relatively useless metal. It’s worthless. But in the Mediterranean, gold is a status symbol, used in jewelry and crowns to highlight the wearer’s prestige. In the Mediterranean, gold is extremely valuable.
So what happens? When trading, Mediterranean merchants notice that they can get gold for next to nothing in India, where it’s worthless. So they trade their goods for a lot of gold in India and sell the gold at a high price back in the Mediterranean. As the demand for Indian gold increases, and Indians see how badly the Mediterraneans want it, the value of gold in India goes up. Meanwhile, the Mediterranean is flooded with gold and its value drops.
With the value of gold rising in India and dropping in the Mediterranean, gold’s value in both places equalizes. Additionally, because the Mediterraneans believe in the value of gold, the Indians start to believe in its value, too. They value it because the Mediterranean merchants want it. The Indians want gold so they can trade it for what it is they actually want.
In this way, money encourages unity far more easily than religion because “whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.” This is much easier.
Money unified disparate groups and solved many of the problems faced by bartering economies, but it brought with it a host of new problems.
Problem #1: Our community and family values are often at odds with the global monetary system. We honor loyalty and morality and love. But money has led knights to switch their loyalties to the lord willing to hand over the most money; money has led Christians, cautioned against mortal sins, to murder and steal, then use their new money to buy forgiveness from their religion; and money has led parents to sell some of their children into slavery in order to feed the others. Historically, when monetary and community values clash, monetary values win.
Problem #2: Our monetary system trains us to trust it, something that’s impersonal and lacking in inherent value, over other humans. We don’t really trust strangers. We just trust the money in their hands. When strangers run out of money, we no longer trust them.
While some call money the root of all evil, it’s still the pinnacle of cooperation and toleration among people with diverse languages, beliefs, and cultures. It crossed (and weakened) the instinctual divide between “us” and “them.” It created a global system in which we’re forced to share a belief and trust one another, and it’s a system of trust that doesn’t discriminate on the grounds of race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.
Money has brought the disparate worlds on Earth into one global community, but the market doesn’t always win. We can’t view human history solely through the lense of economy. While gold and silver had a huge impact in shaping our world, steel did as well.
The second unifier of humankind is empire. An empire is a political system that meets 2 requirements:
1. It rules over a large number of people living in distinct areas and of distinct cultural heritages. For example, the Roman Empire was comprised of diverse cultural communities in Europe, North Africa, and parts of Asia.
2. It can take in increasingly more territories without changing, in any fundamental way, the overall functioning, structure, and identity of the system. This distinction is a little subtler. Let’s compare Great Britain today and the British Empire of the past. Great Britain has definite borders. To extend or alter them would change Great Britain’s basic structure and identity. Great Britain isn’t an empire. In contrast, a century ago, the British Empire encompassed territories all over the world and still retained its British identity. The fact that it could maintain its identity while expanding made it an empire rather than a nation.
These two requirements have given empires the ability to unite diverse groups and territories under one government. This unification is also one of the reasons that the world today is much less diverse than it was before the rise of empires.
In modern times, “empire” and “imperialism” are bad words. They’re accused of destroying and exploiting local resources and ways of life. The establishment and maintenance of many of the most successful empires did involve destruction and violence, including war, enslavement, and genocide. But as we’ll see throughout this chapter, empires have shaped the world in positive ways as well, and in fact, much of our human culture is based on the legacies of empire.
As discussed in Chapter 9, Sapiens have evolved the survival instinct to distinguish “us” from “them.” For example, the name of Sudan’s Dinka people means “people,” as if members of other tribes aren’t even human. Similarly, the name of Sudan’s Nuer group means “original people” and the name of the Yupik people in Alaska and Siberia means “real people.” We’re programmed to care only about “us,” ourselves and those immediately around us, who share our language, beliefs, and customs.
It’s surprising, then, that since Cyrus the Great of Persia established the first Persian Empire around 550 BC, kings and emperors have claimed to conquer territories and people for their own good. And there was some benefit for conquered people—uniting different nations under one government facilitated the dissemination of ideas, technology, and goods.
It was to the advantage of the ruler to encourage this spread of ideas and goods. For one thing, it made ruling easier. It’s hard to run an empire in which every territory has its own language, currency, and laws. Encouraging trade and the transmission of ideas helped standardize government policies and structures.
It also justified their rule. If kings spread what they saw as their own culture’s superior language, currency, and laws, they could feel they were doing so for the benefit of all subjects. And whether they were planning cities, standardizing measures, or imposing taxes, rulers and their administrations genuinely believed they were working for the good of all subjects.
This has happened throughout history. Cyrus the Great wanted to bring all the benefits of being Persian subjects to new cultures while letting them maintain their traditions. He famously ordered that exiled Jews be allowed to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple and even gave them the money to do so. Similarly, Chinese emperors believed they were educating their barbarian neighbors. Muslim caliphs sought to share Muhammad’s revelation. Brits sought to introduce the world to liberalism and free trade. And Americans believe it’s their moral duty to establish democracy and the concept of human rights in developing countries, even if they have to do it through war.
In a world in which we’re programmed to be xenophobic, these rulers attempted to be inclusive and unite different people under one political system.
Imperialism began to dissolve cultural divides in two ways:
Way #1: After hundreds of years, the conquered people had so assimilated that there was no trace left of their original culture.
For example, by the time the Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, it had absorbed the Numantians, Samnites, Umbrians, and Etruscans, among other groups. These groups didn’t gain independence with the end of Roman rule because they no longer existed. Everyone who could trace their ancestry back to these groups now spoke Latin, worshipped Roman gods, and lived just as their fellow Romans did. They were Roman now, not Umbrian or Etruscan.
Way #2: Because of their inclusivity and tolerance of conquered cultures, rulers often adopted and spread norms, beliefs, and traditions from the people they conquered.
In this way, empires became hybrids of the civilizations they conquered. For example, imperial Roman culture “was Greek almost as much as Roman,” and the Abbasid culture was a hybrid of Greek, Arab, and Persian cultures.
Although tolerance and dissolving antagonism are good things, the process often eradicated local cultures or altered them beyond recognition, and it was often difficult for conquered subjects to adapt to the hybrid culture.
Today, the world is smaller and more united because of the dissolving of past cultures, and the legacies of empires are innumerable. As opposed to the thousands of languages spoken by our ancestors, today, most of us speak an imperial language. Many native groups of European colonies embraced the Western values of self-determinism and human rights and used these values against their Western masters in their fights against colonial rule. There’s no going back to a “pure” culture, one untainted by imperialism. Its legacies are everywhere, and to somehow extract these legacies would by to destroy every contemporary culture.
India’s Imperial Legacies
The conquest of India by the British Empire was brutal. Millions of Indians lost their lives and hundreds of millions more were exploited and mistreated. It’s understandable that some would want to try to return India to a state prior to the rule of the British Raj.
But this would mean a return to a fragmented territory. When the British invaded, they also united the numerous warring kingdoms and tribes that existed there. The British created a shared Indian identity.
To take away all British imperial legacies, you’d also have to remove the justice system, the government structure, the railroad network, democracy, the game of cricket, and chai tea.
And, if you succeeded in doing this, you’d be left not with the original, “pure” Indian culture, but rather the legacies of the equally-brutal Muslim empires of the Mughal and the sultanate of Delhi, which ruled India before the Brits. To do away with these legacies, you’d have to destroy one of India’s most iconic buildings, the Taj Mahal, among other structures and customs.
And if you succeeded here? You’d have the legacies of the Gupta Empire, the Kushan Empire, and the Maurya Empire to contend with.
You can’t really divorce a country from its imperial legacies.
As the world gets smaller and smaller, we’re moving toward a single global empire. We’re becoming decreasingly nationalistic, and governments have become more and more interested in protecting human rights around the world rather than just in their own countries.
Today, countries can’t function independently. The actions and values of other countries affect our economic policies, our social policies, and our ability to wage wars. We’re affected by global markets, international human rights organizations, and NGOs. International issues such as global warming are increasing the need for a unified global community. No one country can function on its own.
The third unifier of humankind is religion.
Today, we often think of religion as something that divides rather than unites. Yet religion has a crucial role in supporting our other imagined orders, orders that have led to our success as a species.
Because the social orders on which our societies are founded are imaginary, they’re fragile. Religion’s role is to give “superhuman legitimacy” to these orders, making them hard to challenge. This makes social orders more stable.
But not all religions unify, and not all belief systems are religions. Let’s look first at the definition and requirements that make a belief system a religion, and then we’ll look at the additional requirements that give particular religions their unifying function.
To be a religion, a system has to meet two requirements:
The religions that revolutionized the world and led us toward a more global empire have two more requirements.
Religions that are both universal and missionary appear relatively recently in history. These religions have the power to bolster our imagined social orders and unify humanity on a grand scale.
Animism is a belief system in which all objects, animate or inanimate, have a soul. According to these religions, humans must consider the feelings and desires of rocks and mountains as well as plants and other animals.
Most religions of hunter-gatherers were animistic. These religions were local rather than universal. Hunter-gatherers typically didn’t travel far in their lifetimes, so they shaped their religion around their own particular territories. This meant that the religion of one forager band in the Ganges Valley might forbid the cutting down of a fig tree to keep the tree’s spirit from exacting revenge. The religion of a forager band in the Indus Valley might forbid the hunting of white-tailed foxes because once a white-tailed fox had led the band to an area abundant with obsidian.
Because they weren’t universal, these religions weren’t missionary. There was no reason for the Indus band to try to convince the people in the Ganges band not to hunt white-tailed foxes—the Ganges band didn’t have any stories or experiences related to the fox, and might not even have foxes in the area.
The Agricultural Revolution led to a religious revolution. In previous, animistic belief systems, man was no better than other animals, plants, and geographical features. For instance, man didn’t consider himself superior to a sheep just because he hunted sheep, just as he wouldn’t consider himself inferior to tigers just because they hunted him.
But when hunter-gatherers became farmers, suddenly man had dominion. Rather than equals in the spiritual realm, sheep and grains became objects farmers owned and protected jealously. Man and his concerns became the center of religious belief.
While man suddenly had more control over the animal and plant kingdoms than he’d ever had before, his control wasn’t complete. He still had to contend with drought, epidemics, and sickly lambs. He could no longer pray and make offerings to the ewe to have healthy lambs, as he could have in an animate religion, because the ewe was now his property and theoretically under his control. You don’t pray to something less powerful than you are. Man had to find someone or something else to worship, someone to control the things he couldn’t.
Gods originated as a way to solve this problem. The job of gods was to mediate between humans and the rest of the natural world, over which man now wanted control. Humans worshipped gods in return for dominance over plants and animals.
As empires and trade networks grew, the worlds of individuals got larger. Rather than appealing to a few local gods, people now needed a pantheon that could address all the new needs of an expanded world. This was the origination of polytheism, the belief in many gods. Gods usually had distinct personalities and functions. For example, there was a goddess to address infertility, a god to make it rain, and a god to bring luck in war.
Although polytheism came to dominate the religious landscape, animism didn’t disappear. As we’ll see, legacies of animistic belief remain today. What did disappear was the belief that humans were just one among many beings with souls. Polytheism brought man center stage and changed the way we viewed ourselves and our world.
Although it may have downgraded the status of plants and fellow animals, polytheism was remarkably tolerant of other religions, a feature we don’t see as often with monotheistic religions, which promote belief in a single god.
Polytheism’s plurality of gods made it tolerant by nature. Since they already believed in the existence of many gods, it wasn’t difficult for people to believe that another god existed and was effective at meeting the needs of another group of people.
Rulers of polytheistic empires didn’t try to convert their conquered subjects. For example, the Egyptians, Romans, and Aztecs asked that their new subjects respect their gods (since these gods were the foundation of the empire, holding up the imaginary social order), but they allowed them to continue worshipping their local gods as well. In some cases, the rulers added gods of conquered peoples to their own pantheon. For example, the Romans adopted the goddess Cybele from Anatolia, and the goddess Isis from Egypt.
Over time, some polytheistic worshippers became particularly fond of one deity over the others and eventually started worshipping only that deity. This was the origin of monotheistic religions.
This single god retained the biases and interests of the polytheistic gods. Unlike the supreme powers of polytheism, who were impersonal and uninterested in the lives of humans, monotheism’s supreme powers had personalities and took an active role in the human world. This meant people could negotiate with God, praying to Him and providing offerings. You can only negotiate with a divine being if that divine being has biases and can intervene in the human world.
The first monotheistic religions, like the worship of Aten in Egypt and early Judaism, failed to spread because they weren’t universal. For instance, the Jewish God was only interested in Israel and the Jewish people, so Judaism didn’t have much to offer people of different ethnicities who lived outside of Israel.
Christianity, however, had growing power. It was the first missionary religion. Christians believed that their incarnated supreme power had died on the cross for the sins of all humans, making this a religion applicable to everyone. Paul of Tarsus, one of the first leaders of what was then a Jewish sect, believed everyone should know the gospel, the good news that Jesus had died for their salvation. So Christianity was both universal and missionary, meeting the requirements of a revolution-inciting religion.
Monotheism is inherently less tolerant than polytheism. If you only believe in one god, and believe that this god is the supreme power of the entire universe, you can’t also believe in the existence of another religion’s god. Your god has to be the only god. Therefore, in order to convert others to your religion, you need to discredit all the other gods and the religions built around them. This belief in one truth has made monotheists far more fervent in spreading their truth, discrediting other religions, and converting non-believers around the world.
Monotheism’s lack of tolerance, ironically, allowed it to spread and take over. In the first century AD, there were few monotheists. By the 16th century, monotheistic religions dominated most of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Today, almost everyone outside of East Asia practices a monotheistic religion, and our global imagined political order is bolstered by monotheism.
Although we tend to think of the belief in a god or gods as a requirement for a system of thought to be a religion, it’s not. Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Epicureanism, among others, don’t place importance on gods or a supreme being, although, for the most part, they don’t deny the existence of gods, either. These religions are based on natural laws rather than the laws of gods.
For example, the most popular natural law religion is Buddhism, whose central figure isn’t a god but a person, Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. The natural law in Buddhism is that suffering is caused by “the behavior patterns of one’s own mind” rather than the whims of gods and goddesses. If you learn to see pleasure and pain as mere sensations, neither good nor bad, you lose your attachment or aversion to them. This eradicates suffering. You still feel pain or pleasure, but they don’t cause suffering. We’ll return to Buddhist philosophy, and how it relates to happiness, in Chapter 19.
As outlined at the beginning of this chapter, a system need only meet two criteria to be a religion: it needs to be based on the belief in a superhuman order and it needs to establish norms and values. By this definition, there are many other religions, some we don’t normally think of as religions, such as capitalism, Communism, and Nazism.
Further, these religions meet the 3rd and 4th criteria that give a system power to legitimize political orders and change history. These religions are both universal and missionary.
For instance, like Buddhism, Communism is a religion based on natural laws. In the case of Communism, these laws were discovered not by the Buddha but by Marx, Engles, and Lenin. Communism’s holy book is Marx’s Das Kapital and its holidays are the First of May and November 7th, the anniversary of the October Revolution. Devout Communists have been expected to give up faith in other religions, such as Christianity, and spread the gospel of Marx and Lenin. When viewed this way, Communism is a religion just as much as Buddhism or Christianity are.
Other non-theistic religions, get their own chapters: capitalism is discussed in Chapter 16 and nationalism is discussed in Chapter 18.
The remainder of this chapter focuses on the religion of humanism. Humanist religions worship Homo sapiens rather than God or gods. They believe that man is special and that his sacredness distinguishes him from plants and other animals. Other species exist only for the benefit of Sapiens and the sacredness of man is the most important aspect of the universe.
Throughout the rest of the book, we’ll see how humanistic beliefs have shaped our world. First, let’s look at what these religions teach. There are three sects:
1) Liberal Humanism
Liberal humanists believe that the sacredness of humanity lives in every individual. Therefore, the most important thing is to protect each individual’s sacredness and freedom. This is where our modern idea of “human rights” comes from. For instance, because liberal humanists believe in the sanctity of every individual, they object to the death penalty. They’d rather put murderers in prison and help them rediscover their sanctity than kill them.
2) Socialist Humanism
Social humanists believe that the sacredness of humanity lives in the collective, the Sapiens species as a whole. The most important thing is to protect the equality of individuals in the species (rather than the individual freedom favored by liberal humanists). Inequality denies our sanctity because it privileges unimportant qualities like wealth or skin color. When we favor the rich over the poor, for example, it shows that we value money over the sanctity possessed by all humans, regardless of their net worth.
3) Evolutionary Humanism
Evolutionary humanists believe that we need to actively direct the evolution of our species, making sure we evolve into superhumans rather than subhumans.
Naziism is the most famous form of evolutionary humanism. The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was the most advanced form of Sapiens, and that interbreeding with lower forms like Jews, homosexuals, and the mentally ill would pollute the superior race and lead us toward devolution into subhumans. Their goal was to assist natural selection in the development of a superhuman race.
Evolutionary humanism was a surprisingly common religion in the West. Western politicians believed it was their duty to keep their countries pure and white by limiting immigration from places like China and even Italy. World War II caused Hitler’s enemies in the West to finally disavow the racism that was actually pretty common in their countries.
The Future of Humanism
We live in social orders based on humanist principles, even though science increasingly shows that our behavior is determined not by souls and free will but by DNA and hormones. These are the same elements that determine the actions of chimpanzees and ants, meaning we’re not so special after all. But as long as our imagined social orders are founded on humanist principles, we’ll probably continue to believe in our inherent superiority.
The creation of a global society was probably inevitable, but not the type of global society. For instance, the language of our global society is English. Why is English so prevalent and not, say, Danish? Why are we a society dominated by monotheistic religions and not dualistic ones?
We don’t know the answers to these questions, but there are two things we can say about history: 1) It isn’t predictable and 2) Its progress doesn’t necessarily benefit humans.
The hindsight fallacy (or hindsight bias) is the human tendency to believe that events that have already happened were more predictable than they actually were. Looking back, we think we could have predicted how history would unfold—it seems obvious in hindsight. But while today we can describe how history has unfolded so far, we can’t say why it’s turned out the way it has.
For example, we can detail the events leading up to Christianity’s take-over of the Roman Empire, but we can’t determine the causal links between these events. We don’t know why Emperor Constantine chose to convert to Christianity when he could have continued to practice his own polytheistic religion. He also could have converted to Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, or Buddhism, all of which were available to him at the time. But he chose Christianity, which, as we’ll see, was actually an unlikely choice.
The less we know about a historical period, the more we tend to think that the events of that period were inevitable. The more we learn, the more we see all the roads untaken, some of which were more probable. History often takes unexpected turns—what seems inevitable now was seen as extremely unlikely at the time.
For instance, if you were to suggest in AD 306 that Christianity, an obscure sect of Judaism, would become the religion of the Roman Empire, your contemporaries would laugh at you. Similarly, no one could have reasonably predicted that a tiny Russian faction called the Bolsheviks would take over their country in a matter of years. It’s not that anything is possible in history. It’s just that there are far more options than we realize.
For the same reasons we can’t explain why history happened the way it did, we can’t predict the future. We can’t know if we’re out of the global economic crisis or if China will become the world’s leading superpower.
Why do we fall for the hindsight fallacy? We like to think that history is deterministic because it means that everything that has happened was supposed to happen. It’s comforting. Conversely, it’s unnerving to realize that all the events leading up to this moment could have easily turned out differently and that it’s only a coincidence that most of us today believe in collective fictions such as capitalism and human rights.
One reason we can’t explain history or predict the future is that history is chaotic—it’s too complex to understand how all the variables interact. Not only is history chaotic, it’s a “level two” chaotic system.
A level one chaotic system is not affected by predictions we make about it. For example, the weather is a level one chaotic system. We can make predictions about the weather tomorrow, but those predictions don’t have the ability to change the weather tomorrow.
A level two chaotic system is affected by predictions we make about it. For example, the oil market is a level two chaotic system. If we predict that the price of oil will increase from $90 a barrel today to $100 a barrel tomorrow, traders will buy a bunch of oil today so they can benefit from the rise in price tomorrow. But this action increases oil prices today, which in turn changes the price of oil tomorrow.
Similarly, politics is a level two chaotic system. If someone were to have predicted the Arab Spring and told Egypt’s President Mubarak that a revolution was imminent, he would have taken actions to prevent it, perhaps lowering taxes and increasing government handouts. In doing so, he likely would have prevented the Arab Spring, nullifying the original prediction.
Level two chaotic systems, like history, are inherently unpredictable.
If there are so many unknowns, and we can’t use our knowledge of history to predict the future, what’s the point of studying it?
We study history to better understand what’s happening today. It’s important to realize that nothing in our lives or the world is inevitable. Just as the past had many variables, the present is full of possibilities, and we should never assume that a single path is natural or unavoidable.
For example, studying how Europeans came to have power over Africans reminds us that this power dynamic has nothing to do with racial inferiority and superiority. History could have easily turned out differently, perhaps with Africans enslaving Europeans. We study history, in part, to remind ourselves that our discriminatory hierarchies are based on random events and the fictions that spring from them. They aren’t natural and they weren’t inevitable.
The other thing we can say with confidence about history is that it doesn’t care about us. We like to think that as history progresses, life for humans gets better, but there’s no reason to think that what’s good for humans is also what’s good for history or vice versa. As we’ll see in Chapter 19, our well-being doesn’t necessarily increase as history moves forward.
Similarly, there’s no reason to think that just because Christianity and Islam defeated other religions, they are therefore the best religions for humanity. We have no objective way to judge what’s best or even what’s good because different cultures define “good” differently.
Still, we believe that the way things are is the way they should be, for two reasons:
We think that cultures exist to serve us, but we’re actually serving them. Scholars in different fields have different analogies to describe this process. Therefore, this concept has three names: mimetics, postmodernism, and game theory.
Many scholars compare cultures to parasites, an approach called mimetics. Just as parasites live in human hosts, feed off of them, and “care” only about multiplying and spreading from host to host (often at the expense of the host’s health), humans are just the hosts and vehicles of cultures. In other words, cultures don’t exist for the benefit of humans; rather, they infect and feed off humans.
If this analogy sounds threatening, it should. Cultures live inside our minds and spread from person to person. They often weaken or even kill the host when the host is willing to die to propagate the culture, such as those who’ve died in the name of Naziism, democracy, Christianity, human rights, Islam, and nationalism.
Scholars in the humanities call the process of humans serving cultures “postmodernism.” For example, they talk about nationalism as a plague that infiltrated the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. It started in a few countries, then spread to its neighbors, leaving war and genocide in its wake. Nationalism was purportedly good for humans, but it actually weakened and killed its hosts. It was and is only good for itself.
Scholars in the social sciences call this process game theory. For example, they compare arms races to a game that no one wins. Arms races benefit no country or individual. Like a parasite, an arms race hurts all the players involved, and yet the players still spread the system. If Pakistan buys more weaponry, so does India. When India develops a nuclear bomb, Pakistan develops one in response. When Pakistan increases the size of its navy, so does India. At the end of this process, the balance of power between the two countries is exactly the same as it was before the arms race started, but both countries have bankrupted themselves, spending money that could have been used for health care or education. Systems like arms races only benefit themselves.
Because the progress of history is inherently unpredictable, we can’t explain why today’s world is the way it is. But we should remember that, just as history is unpredictable, history isn’t inevitable, and our world isn’t the product of benevolent hands of time. It’s important to question our values, cultures, and systems, and ask why we adhere to them in the first place.
In the last 500 years, we’ve seen unprecedented scientific and technological growth, so much so that a time traveler from 1500 would recognize very little of our world. For instance, since 1500, the world population has grown from 500 million Sapiens to 7 billion. Every word and number in every book in every medieval library could be easily stored on a modern computer. Further, we’ve built skyscrapers, circumnavigated the earth, and landed on the moon. We’ve discovered the world of bacteria, can now cure most diseases caused by it, and even engineer bacteria for use in medicines.
All of these advances were made possible by the Scientific Revolution.
In many ways, the Scientific Revolution was the result of a shift in the way Sapiens viewed the world and its future. We post-Scientific Revolution Sapiens understand the world differently than our ancestors:
1. We are willing to acknowledge our ignorance: Today, we assume there are gaps in our knowledge, and we even question what we think we know. As we’ll see below, this wasn’t the norm before the Scientific Revolution.
2. We emphasize observation and mathematics: Rather than getting our knowledge from divine books, we use our senses and the technologies available to us to make observations. We then use mathematics to connect these observations and make them into a coherent theory.
3. We strive for new powers: Knowledge is only valuable in its use to us. We don’t develop theories for the sake of knowing more. We use theories to gain new powers, new technologies in particular.
4. We believe in progress, whereas our ancestors believed that the golden age was behind them.
Let’s look at the history of each of these features of the scientific mind.
Man’s acknowledgment of his own ignorance was the breakthrough that launched the Scientific Revolution. This awareness of ignorance leads to experiments that take us closer to knowledge. For instance, today, biologists readily admit that they don’t know how our brains produce consciousness and physicists acknowledge that they don’t know what caused the Big Bang. The acknowledgment of these gaps motivates researchers to fill them.
Before the Scientific Revolution, Sapiens got the majority of their knowledge from their religions. The traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, among others, claimed that anything worth knowing was already known. You could find these revelations in the holy texts. Any information missing from these texts was unimportant—If God wanted us to know how spiders weave webs, He would have put it in the Bible.
In contrast, even today’s most established scientific theories would still be debatable if new evidence emerged that contradicted them. Generally, we’re far more open to questioning what we think we know.
Before around 1500, collecting scientific observations about the world was unnecessary because all of the world’s important knowledge was already contained in the holy texts. The holy texts used stories to link various observations together and create a coherent theory.
Today, rather than stories, we use math to link observations. For example, Newton’s three equations, made public in 1687, aim to explain and predict the motion of everything in the universe.
There are benefits to using math. Stories can’t reliably make predictions about the future—they can only tell you something about the past. But mathematical equations are extraordinary in their ability to predict. For instance, if you’re trying to set up a life-insurance fund for the families of deceased clergymen in Scotland, but you don’t know how much each clergyman should contribute in his lifetime, equations can tell you with surprising accuracy how many ministers would die every year, how many family members they’d leave behind, and how many years widows would outlive their husbands. The use of math to link observations allowed previous knowledge to be useful in predicting the outcomes of new situations.
Even though most of us don’t understand modern scientific fields, science is respected because of the almost magical powers it gives us. Presidents and officers don’t really care how nuclear physics works, but they certainly understand the uses of a nuclear bomb.
The most sought-after power of the modern age is the power of technology. The relationship between science and technology is recent, even though now we tend to confuse and conflate them, thinking that new technology only comes from scientific research and that the purpose of scientific research is to develop new technology.
Before the 19th century, power came from organizational improvements rather than developments in technology. Rulers and commanders didn’t bother to finance research. They didn’t think technology could be more helpful than strategy. For example, the army of the Roman Empire had no technological advantage over Carthage’s army or the army of the Seleucid Empire. But the Roman army was organized, disciplined, and large. It won many wars because of these qualities.
The history of gunpowder sheds light on how little technology was valued. Gunpowder was an accidental discovery, made by alchemists trying to develop the elixir of life. The Chinese didn’t immediately recognize the military use of gunpowder because they didn’t think that new military technology was going to be what won wars for them. They used gunpowder mainly for fireworks. It took 600 years for Sapiens to recognize how useful cannons could be. There had been so little technological progress for so long that our ancestors dismissed advances as amusing toys.
In the late 16th century, Francis Bacon made the connection between scientific research and the production of technology. Bacon saw that assessing how “true” knowledge is isn’t a good yardstick because we can’t assume that any theory is 100% correct. A better yardstick is how useful that knowledge is.
This relationship between science and technology didn’t become strong until the 19th century. But from that point on, it accelerated quickly. By WWI, governments depended on scientists to develop advanced aircraft, efficient machine guns, submarines, and poison gases. During WWII, the Germans held on for so long because they believed their scientists were on the verge of developing the V-2 rocket and jet-powered aircraft, weapons that may have turned the tide of the war. Meanwhile, Americans ended the war with a piece of new technology, the atomic bomb.
Our views on the value of technology have strayed so far from those of our ancestors that we now turn to technology to solve all our global conflicts. The US Department of Defense has invested research money into bionic spy-flies that stealthily track the movements of enemies and fMRI scanners that can read hateful thoughts.
Before the Scientific Revolution, people didn’t believe in progress. They believed the golden age was behind them, and if the great prophets and saints of the past couldn’t solve the world’s problems, neither could they.
At best, they thought a messiah would come to earth and solve all its problems. To think that humans could solve these problems was hubris, and stories about Icarus and the Tower of Babel made it clear that humans shouldn’t overstep and aspire to godly powers.
But with the admission of ignorance came the possibility of discovery and progress. When Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a storm and discerned that lightning was an electrical current rather than the hammer of an angry god, he invented the lightning rod, effectively taking the power of lightning away from the gods. By Franklin’s time, this was no longer seen as hubris. This was the epitome of scientific research producing useful technology.
In the New Testament, Jesus says that “The poor you will always have with you” (Mark 14:7), and our ancestors truly believed that the problem of poverty would see no progress. But today, poverty is declining due to technological advances in agronomy and medicine and the relief efforts of private companies, government organizations, and NGOs. In some countries, people are far more likely to die of obesity than poverty.
The more scientific discoveries Sapiens made, the more they perceived progress. This motivated them to continue searching for discoveries, reinforcing the cycle.
Perhaps one of the biggest consequences of the Scientific Revolution is the way we perceive and deal with the “problem of death.” Through most of history, people have regarded death as inevitable, but even that “knowledge” is becoming questionable as scientists openly tackle this thorniest of problems.
One source of thorns in that most religions are meaningless without the concept or reality of death. Religion teaches us to live life in accordance with its laws so that we can find peace in the afterlife. Without death, many religions no longer make sense.
Whereas death used to be solely a religious problem, it’s now seen as a technical problem. Today, we can revive a fluttering heart with a pacemaker; we can kill cancer with drugs and radiation; we can conquer bacteria with antibiotics. We’ve developed new treatments and artificial organs that can extend life, and the average life expectancy has increased from 25 years, in the centuries before the Scientific Revolution, to 67 years (80 years in the developed world). Some think that humans will become “a-mortal” (immune to deaths caused by “natural causes,” rather than accidents) by 2050.
Further, today’s newest and most widespread religions, such as liberalism, socialism, and feminism, make no mention of the afterlife, reflecting the growing idea that we won’t ever have to die, and that what happens during life is more important than what comes after it.
Research is expensive, and often money does more than brilliance in making important discoveries. Modern science has made the impact it has because governments, businesses, and private donors have given billions of dollars to scientific research. If Galileo or Darwin had never been born, their discoveries would probably have been made eventually by someone else (in fact, Alfred Russel Wallace formulated the theory of natural selection independently of Darwin and only a few years after Darwin did). But if European governments hadn’t financed scientific research, Darwin and Wallace wouldn’t have had the data they needed to come up with their theories in the first place. Scientific progress depends on the money invested in it.
Science is usually funded for political, religious, and economic goals, not out of altruism. For example, in the 16th century, kings financed geographical expeditions rather than child psychology, because the expeditions would give them the information needed to conquer new lands, while child psychology wouldn’t. People with money and power dictate the scientific agenda.
We can’t not fund politically. When resources are limited, science itself has no way of determining which projects to fund. For instance, if we’re judging scientific discoveries based on their usefulness, how do we determine usefulness? And for whose use? If we have a limited amount of resources, should we use our discoveries about genetics to cure cancer, create genetically engineered humans, or alter foods? Science can’t answer these questions. That’s the job of those with power and the social structures they maintain.
Our imagined orders—our religions and ideologies—finance research. In return, they determine how its discoveries are used (and what gets studied in the first place). Therefore, we can’t just look at the scientific discoveries themselves to understand the origins and impact of the Scientific Revolution. We need to look at history’s social and political orders: imperialism (Chapter 15) and capitalism (Chapter 16).
As we know, those in power rarely seek knowledge for knowledge’s sake. As Europeans set out to conquer the world in the 18th century, imperialism and the Scientific Revolution became not only inseparable but indistinguishable. Expeditions had the dual purpose of colonizing new territories and making scientific discoveries, and each goal aided the other.
Before we explore how science and empire tied the knot, we need to ask a crucial question: Why were the Europeans the ones who took over the world?
Cortes only had 550 men. Yet he managed to conquer an empire of millions, the Aztecs. Similarly, England was a tiny, inconsequential island in the 18th century, yet Captain Cook’s arrival in Tasmania led to the near-extermination of Tasmania’s native population, who were hunted and driven off the land by the new settlers. Although it seems almost inevitable in hindsight, it wasn’t obvious that England would defeat Tasmania. How did Europe, such a tiny part of the world, come to dominate it? Prior to Cook’s expeditions, Britain and western Europe were negligible influences on the world stage.
Asia was the more likely world power. The Ottoman Empire, Safavid Empire, Mughal Empire, and the Ming and Qing dynasties were all extremely powerful. Asia accounted for 80% of the world’s economy in the late-18th century. Until 1850, the military strength of Asian and European nations was relatively equal: there was no significant scientific, military, or technological gap between the two.
Europeans rose to dominance only when they conquered Asian territories in a series of wars between 1750 and 1850. Scientific and technological gaps started to appear, and almost as soon as they appeared, they widened.
For example, commercial railroads opened in 1830, and by 1850, there were 25,000 miles of railroads in the West, but only 2,500 miles in all of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. China’s first railroad, built by Europeans, didn’t open until 1876, and the Chinese destroyed it a year later.
Why did it take the East so long to catch up to the West? Just as Easterners hadn’t understood the militaristic importance of gunpowder when they accidentally invented it, Eastern leaders didn’t see how new technologies were going to serve them. While Westerners accepted their ignorance and started to believe in the idea of progress, Eastern rulers clung to their power and strove to maintain the status quo.
In contrast, European nations could more easily follow the lead of countries like England because they shared common values, myths, and sociopolitical structures (more on these, below). Asian empires lacked these common myths. The two ideological advantages that the West had over the East were science and capitalism (discussed in the next chapter). We’ll continue exploring science’s role in empire-building below.
Today, almost all humans dress like Europeans, eat like Europeans, think like Europeans, speak like Europeans, and listen to music influenced by Europeans. We are products of European culture no matter where we live.
Science provided imperialists with many practical advantages: They could navigate the seas with more accuracy, conquer lands with advanced weapons, and keep themselves and their new subjects alive with medicines to cure the diseases of newly conquered lands. But more importantly, science gave imperialists the “ideological justification” they desired to continue invading the territories of other nations.
#1: Science operated on the belief that new knowledge is always a positive thing to have and a good in and of itself. Following this logic conquering foreign lands must also be a good thing since it allows for the discovery of new knowledge.
#2: Science spread benefits such as improved medicine, education systems, and railroads. So imperialists were altruistically serving the people they conquered by improving their lives with the progress and prosperity that comes with science.
#3: Science said that Europeans were the superior race due to the (questionable) evidence that Aryans were the original speakers of the “pure” language that spawned all the Indo-European languages. Combined with the theory of natural selection, they theorized that Aryans must have intermarried in India and Persia and lost their work ethic and rationality. Only Aryans in Europe remained pure. Therefore, imperialists had the right and duty to rule over other races.
In this way, European imperialism was built on the rationalizations of “science.” Other empires lacked the science that provided both the practical means and the justification to conquer new lands.
As mentioned above, science gave Europeans practical advantages, but these advantages weren’t huge. Later, modern science would bring empires huge technological advances such as machine guns, canned food for soldiers, railroads, medicines, and the atomic bomb. But in the beginning of Europe’s imperial dominance, what gave European empires the edge was the fact that scientists and naval officers both admitted their ignorance and shared the desire to make new discoveries. Scientists admitted they didn’t know everything about plants, animals, and the stars; officers admitted that they didn’t know every land on earth. Both had an insatiable drive to fill these gaps in knowledge, and both believed that with knowledge came mastery.
Although this thirst for knowledge seems natural to us now (in large part because we are the descendants of this mindset), it was unlike any imperial attitude in history. The Arabs, for example, believed they knew everything there was to know about the world. They didn’t conquer Spain, Egypt, or India to learn more. They conquered these nations to spread their own knowledge rather than gain new knowledge.
Prior to the 15th century, many Europeans had the same attitude. Empires created and used world maps that were full of detail, even when those details weren’t actually known to be true. Whatever a mapmaker didn’t know, he’d make up. Rulers and the mapmakers they employed weren’t willing to acknowledge their ignorance.
Although we think of him today as the “discoverer” of America, Christopher Columbus falls in with the old guard of Europeans unwilling to acknowledge the ignorance of his times.
When Columbus reached what we now call the Bahamas in 1492 and named the people he found there “Indians,” it was because he believed he had reached what we now call the East Indies or the Indonesian archipelago. Columbus stuck to this claim for the rest of his life, even when, in 1502, Italian Amerigo Vespucci argued that the discovered area was a land previously unknown to Europeans and the Scriptures. It was unfathomable to Columbus and most of his contemporaries that there could be an entire continent completely unknown to Europeans and the Bible.
But the prevalence of this attitude soon started to wane. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans started making maps with empty spaces, rather than filling unknown areas with false details or imaginary monsters. It showed they admitted their ignorance of the world. Further, the gaps in the map provided ambitious explorers the motivation to fill them.
The discovery of this new continent jump-started the Scientific Revolution. It showed Europeans their ignorance about the world and demonstrated the occasional need to trust observations over Scripture. It also motivated Europeans to conquer these previously-unknown lands, and in order to do so, they needed to collect data on the geography, climate, plants, animals, and cultures of the Americas. They needed science to better prepare them to rule strangers. They established global empires and trade networks that brought isolated civilizations together. This was also when disparate cultures started to merge, forming a single worldwide society.
Even when non-European empires like Ottoman, the Mughal, and the Chinese were aware of the lands Europeans were “discovering,” they weren’t interested in conquering faraway lands themselves. What set the Europeans apart from Asian kingdoms like the Ming dynasty is that Europeans had the ambition to conquer. Because North and South America were open playing fields, Europeans got all the wealth and resources of these lands, which allowed them to go back and invade parts of Asia, too.
Example: British Colonization of India and the Marriage of Science and Empire
Unlike when the Muslims conquered India, the British brought with them scientists to not only study Indian geography, geology, zoology, and culture, but also to get data on rare spiders, uncover ruins, and discover the origins of extinct Indian languages.
British officers were expected to spend up to three years studying Hindu and Muslim law; the Sanskrit, Urdu, and Persian languages; and Tamil, Bengali, and Hindustani culture. The British believed that knowledge of your subjects was essential to ruling them. The education of British officers in India a true marriage of imperial and scholarly goals.
The British discovered India’s first notable civilization, a civilization even the Indians weren’t aware of, when they explored forgotten ruins. They discovered that the languages of Sanskrit and Hindu shared a common ancestor with Greek and Latin languages. Scientists made breakthroughs that spawned new areas of research still explored today.
This wasn’t knowledge for the sake of knowledge. The work of British scientists allowed a small British population of 175,000 to rule a country of 300 million Indians. Knowledge was their imperial superpower.
Science, in both its discoveries and the mindset it fostered, was one of the two greatest aids to imperialism. Capitalism was the other.
To understand our modern economy, you really only need to know one thing: it’s growing.
This seems obvious to us, but for most of history, the economy remained static. Growth is a relatively recent phenomenon, and its incline has been steep: In 1500, global production was about $250 billion. Today, it’s around $60 trillion.
To understand this enormous growth, let’s look at a hypothetical example:
Mr. Greedy is a banker. Mr. Stone, a contractor, finishes a job and puts his payment, $1 million, in Mr. Greedy’s bank. Now the bank has $1 million in capital.
Meanwhile, Mrs. McDoughnut wants to start a bakery in town, but she doesn’t have the money to buy a property for her business or buy the tools needed for her business. So she goes to Mr. Greedy at the bank to get a loan. Mr. Greedy loans her $1 million.
Mrs. McDoughnut needs a contractor to build her bakery, so she hires Mr. Stone for $1 million. She pays him and Mr. Stone puts this money into his bank account.
Mr. Stone now has $2 million in the bank. But only $1 million is actually located in the bank’s safe. For every dollar banks actually have, they’re allowed to loan $10, meaning that 90% of the money we keep in banks is not physically at the bank. If everyone suddenly wanted to withdraw money at the same time, this would cause problems.
Why isn’t this a fraud? Again, our imagined realities and shared trust in these imagined realities allow this to work. We hold a shared belief that the future will be good, and this good future includes growth. We trust that Mrs. McDoughnut’s business will be a success and that the bank will remain solvent.
This optimism about progress in the future is what drives our economic system and without it, there’d be no growth. Until relatively recently, this trust in the future didn’t exist, and this limited the growth of the economy.
Indeed, in the past, money could convert almost anything into almost anything else, but those things had to exist. For instance, money couldn’t represent the resources Mrs. McDoughnut hoped to have in the future, once the bakery started making a profit. In an economy without trust in the future, banks wouldn’t loan Mrs. McDoughnut money. The only way she could build her bakery would be to find a contractor willing to wait to be paid until after the bakery was built and making a profit. As this wouldn’t be likely, Mrs. McDoughnut wouldn’t establish her bakery. If many people faced this problem of resources, the economy would remain stagnant.
The modern agreement to represent future (and therefore imaginary) resources with money today is called credit. Credit is founded on the assumption that the future will have more abundant resources than the present.
Loans existed in the pre-modern era, but not commonly for strangers and not on a large scale. This was because people didn’t trust the future to produce more resources than the present. They believed that the economy couldn’t grow because resources were limited. Because resources were limited, and money could only represent things that actually existed, wealth was limited. In other words, there was only so much money to go around. If one baker was prospering, that meant the baker down the street had to be starving. A set amount of wealth meant that if you had it, it was because you were taking it away from someone else.
With this mindset, extending credit was risky. It was not at all a sure thing that the person you lent money to would prosper and be able to pay you back.
The Scientific Revolution brought the idea of progress. If we admit our ignorance, we can take steps to eradicate our ignorance, and this leads to progress. This mindset extended to the economy as well. For instance, new trade routes opened and flourished without damaging the business of the old trade routes. The bakery specializing in cakes didn’t ruin the neighboring bakery specializing in bread.
Trust in the future allowed for the widespread use of credit. Credit allowed the economy to grow. This growth gave people hope in the future and they extended more credit, continuing the cycle of growth.
Before the notion of progress, people believed that being wealthy was sinful. This was a Christian idea based on the assumption that there was a fixed amount of wealth and resources to be had.
Now, people started to see their wealth as independent of others’ poverty. Further, not only was individual wealth not a sin, it was a societal good. Leading this new morality of money was Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith contended that an employer’s profits benefit society because the employer reinvests his profits in hiring more employees. By hiring more employees, the employer more widely spreads the business’s profits. In a sense, greed is good for everyone.
People started thinking of money-making as a public good. If you’re poor, then you can’t buy your neighbor’s goods, which hurts both of you. If your neighbor is poor, then she can’t buy your goods, which, again, hurts both of you. If just one of you is poor, you both lose. Of course, if both of you are rich, you both win.
This also brought about an ethic about how profits should be used. In the past, rulers and the wealthy had spent their wealth on tournaments, palaces, banquets, wars, and charities. Now, they were expected to reinvest their profits in production, which would increase profits, which could then be reinvested, continuing the cycle.
This reinvested money is called capital. Capital is the term for money and resources that are invested in the production of a product or service. Money buried in a treasure chest in the sand isn’t capital—it’s not put to work. But income invested in the stock market is capital—it’s being put to work. This is how the “religion” of capitalism gets its name.
Capitalism brought with it an additional code of ethics, building on the ethics of individual wealth. It declared that economic growth was the “supreme good” because you couldn’t have a just and free society without it. For instance, a capitalist might say that because a stable government depends on a thriving middle class, you can bring political freedom to Zimbabwe by teaching tribesmen about thrift and free enterprise.
Capitalism has changed the goals of science. Capitalism asks, “How will this research help my company increase production and profits?” If science can’t answer that, it doesn’t get funding.
But science has also affected capitalism. In many ways, the founding assumptions of capitalism don’t make sense. Why do we think that our resources will be more abundant tomorrow than they are today? A pack of wolves doesn’t look at a herd of sheep and think it will keep growing, day after day, even as they keep eating.
In order to make our sunny predictions about the future true, science needs to keep churning out discoveries and technology, such as the discovery of America or the internal combustion engine, that increase our resources or productivity. Until science comes up with a new gadget or discovery, governments often generate bills and coins out of thin air, in the hopes that science will discover something big before the bubble bursts.
Science and the economy depend on each other to stay afloat.
Columbus’s voyage was a turning point in the history of how we view our own ignorance. This set off the Scientific Revolution. The voyage was also a turning point in how humans viewed credit. Columbus’s voyage was immensely successful. His discoveries allowed Spain to conquer America and establish gold and silver mines and tobacco plantations. This success made it easier for other explorers to get their trips financed by governments and big businesses. Everyone wanted to make money off the next big discovery, so governments had to trust explorers.
This trust paid off. Explorers used credit to travel and make new discoveries. These discoveries resulted in the colonization of new lands. These colonies provided new sources of wealth. These profits increased the trust of governments in explorers. And the governments handed out more credit.
One reason Europe took over the world while Asian empires and dynasties watched passively was that Asian emperors despised merchants and kept their distance from them. Instead of doing business with merchants, Asian rulers implemented higher taxes to generate more money. In contrast, European kings and generals adopted the perspective of the merchants. They knew that while no one wanted to pay taxes, everyone was happy to invest in the empire’s conquests in the hopes of making their fortunes.
The system was mostly successful, but not all ships came back with new wealth and discoveries, and many didn’t come back at all. Limited liability joint-stock companies provided the solution. They allowed an investor to risk only a small amount of money by pooling the money of a group. The payoffs for the individual were often huge.
Clearly, capitalists have served the government. But history also provides numerous examples of the government serving capitalists, doing their bidding. The balance of power started to shift in the 18th and 19th centuries, prompting the question, “who really runs the nation? The government or the wealthy?” Let’s look at just one of many examples of money dictating law.
In the 19th century, the British East India Company (a joint-stock company) exported opium and other drugs to China. Millions of Chinese became addicted to opium, wreaking havoc on the nation, and in the 1830s the Chinese government decided to ban British drug merchants from doing business in China.
The merchants ignored the ban. In response, the Chinese destroyed their drug cargos. This initiated the First Opium War (1840-42). Many British government officials held stock in the drug companies, so Britain declared war on China, fighting, they said, for free trade.
When the British won, not only did China have to agree to let the British drug merchants do business in their country, but they had to give Britain control of Hong Kong. At this point, about 40 million Chinese, a tenth of the population, were addicts.
The British were willing to sacrifice the health and economic freedom of the Chinese to protect the capitalist system and its profits.
Capitalists have reason to champion the system. It’s spurred economic, scientific, and imperial growth the way few other imagined realities have. But what happens in situations when it fails to work? Let’s look at two critiques of capitalism.
Most capitalists believe that the government shouldn’t be involved in monitoring or controlling the market (although it’s fine for the market to wield control over the government). This is the idea of a free-market.
The problem is that no market is truly free of politics. As we’ve seen, the most important ingredient of a functioning capitalist economy is trust. If people don’t have trust in the future, they won’t buy shares or give out loans.
This trust is eroded when people cheat and steal, and a free market offers no protection against these dangers. It’s the job of governments to protect people from these dangers and enforce the law. The government has to be involved in the market to keep us safe.
Capitalism is built on Adam Smith’s assumption that employers will reinvest their profits and hire more employees. There are two primary reasons to doubt this assumption: monopolies and the slave trade.
Capitalists say that if an employer doesn’t reinvest his or her profits and instead makes a profit by lowering wages and increasing work hours, the best employees will leave and find a new employer. This is the safeguard of capitalism, they say.
But in a monopoly, it gets harder for an employee to find a job somewhere else. This allows employees to take advantage of workers, and workers can do little about it.
Historically, employers have also removed payment altogether. This was how the European slave trade started.
When Europeans developed large sugar plantations in America, Europeans started eating more and more sugar. The demand for sugar in Europe skyrocketed. But extracting sugar was labor-intensive, and not many paid workers wanted to spend their days under a hot sun in malaria-infested fields. They demanded a high payment.
But increasing worker wages meant increasing the cost of sugar, which would have made it too expensive for most Europeans. So the plantation owners got rid of payment altogether and exchanged contract laborers for slaves. This made sugar cheaper, and it also made it a profitable business to have a share in. In the 18th century, investments in the slave trade could yield 6% per year.
The Atlantic slave trade wasn’t necessarily the result of racism. People who owned plantations and Europeans who bought stock lived far from the plantations and never thought much about the slaves. It was the money in their pockets that kept the slave trade going.
Taking monopolies, slavery, and other types of exploitation into account, there’s no way for free-market capitalism to make sure that wealth is distributed fairly or earned justly. Capitalism doesn’t ensure equality.
Economic growth requires more than just trust in the future and the willingness of employers to reinvest their capital. It needs resources, the energy and raw materials that go into production. While the economy can grow, our resources remain finite.
At least, that’s what we’ve thought for centuries. But the energy and raw materials that are accessible to us today have increased as a result of the Industrial Revolution. We now have both better ways of exploiting our resources and resources that didn’t exist in the worlds of our ancestors.
For instance, over 300 years humans built increasingly more advanced vehicles, from carts and wagons to trains, cars, jets, and spaceships. In 1700, the vehicle industry relied almost entirely on wood and iron, so its resources were limited. But since 1700, humans have invented or discovered new materials such as plastic, rubber, aluminum, and titanium. We also have new energy sources. The industry relied on muscle power in 1700, but today factories use petroleum combustion engines and nuclear power stations to manufacture their vehicles.
As long as science keeps making discoveries, our resources are, if not infinite, at least not finite.
Our ancestors were limited in how they could harness and convert energy.
First, they had limited resources. Before the Industrial Revolution, humans burned wood and used wind and water power for energy. But if you didn’t live by a river, if you ran out of trees in your area, or if the wind wasn’t blowing, you were out of luck.
Second, there was no way to convert one type of energy into another. For example, they couldn’t harness the wind and then turn that energy into heat to smelt iron.
The only machine that could convert one type of energy into another was the body. For instance, animals get their energy from plants. Plants get their energy from the sun. Because animals were so efficient at converting food (whose energy originated as solar energy) into movement, muscle power was the main method of production. Humans used their muscles to build carts, oxen used their muscles to plow fields, and horses used their muscles to transport goods.
But the reliance on animal labor led to reliance on plant growth cycles and the sun. This was a problem. When the sun shone and the wheat grew, peasants could harvest, tax collectors could get their money from the peasants, and newly wealthy soldiers and kings started thinking about war. But when the sun didn’t come out in the winter and the wheat didn’t grow, the actions of the whole community came to a standstill.
The discovery of gunpowder introduced the idea that you could convert heat energy to movement, but this was such an odd concept that it took 600 years for gunpowder to be used widely in artillery.
Another 300 years passed before the invention of the steam engine, which also converted heat to movement, through the pressure of steam. After this, the idea of turning one type of energy into another didn’t seem so foreign. People became obsessed with discovering new ways to harness energy. For example, when physicists realized that the atom stores a lot of energy, they quickly devised ways to release it to make electricity (and bombs). The internal combustion engine turned petroleum, previously used to waterproof roofs and lubricate axles, into a liquid that nations fought wars over. Electricity went from being a cheap magic trick to something we use everyday and can’t imagine living without.
The Industrial Revolution was really all about finding ways to convert and discover energy sources. Rather than being a limited resource, the energy we have access to just keeps growing. Some people worry that we’re using up all the energy on earth, such as that stored in fossil fuels, but there’s energy all around us if we can only figure out how to harness it.
For example, the sun sends to earth 3,766,800 exajoules of energy every year. For context, human industries and activities consume only 500 exajoules annually, which the sun can provide us in a mere 90 minutes. Other promising sources of energy are nuclear energy and gravitational energy.
Although our sources of energy may be limited, we’re nowhere near reaching those limits.
Accessing more energy could also help us with the problem of limited raw materials. When we harness energy in new, more efficient ways, or tap into unavailable sources of energy, we have access to more resources. Energy gives us the tools to get to materials we couldn’t access before, like iron mines in Siberia.
Scientific discoveries have also increased our resources. We’ve invented new raw materials like plastic and silicon, and science has also made some previously known resources more accessible. For example, aluminum was discovered in the 1820s, but it was expensive and difficult to separate from its ore. In the 1860s, it was more expensive than gold. It was only when chemists devised a way to extract it cheaply that it could be used widely.
Although we think of the Industrial Revolution as an urban phenomenon, it impacted agriculture first. Tractors replaced muscle power and new fertilizers, insecticides, and hormones increased the productivity of fields and farm animals. Additionally, refrigerators, ships, and airplanes allowed farmers to transport their goods all over the world.
Plants and animals became mechanized, viewed as pieces of the industrial machinery rather than living beings. For instance, still today, most dairy cows live their entire lives in an enclosure so small they can’t turn around. They sit and stand in their urine and feces. They get their food from one machine and get milked by another. Calves are separated from their mothers at birth.
Science has demonstrated that mammals and birds feel pain and experience emotions. Science has also shown that forcing them to live in these unnatural environments is distressing for them. This is an area where we ignore science to uphold the myths that keep capitalistic societies functioning.
Our methods of animal husbandry didn’t stem from our hatred of animals. Our methods stemmed from an economic incentive and indifference toward the suffering of animals. We just don’t think about them.
We’ve shaped our world to fit our needs. In the process, we’ve destroyed habitats and many of the species that lived there. We’ve created environments full of the animals most useful to us. If you weighed all the humans on earth today, we’d weigh about 300 million tons. Farm animals like cows, pigs, and chickens would weigh a cumulative 700 million tons, compared with 100 million tons of large wild animals, from porcupines to whales. We’ve prized farm animals at the expense of other species, but some may feel farm animals came off worse in the bargain.
The mechanization of plant cultivation and animal husbandry founded our current socio-economic order. In the past, the majority of food produced in fields and farms went to the peasants and animals working them. Peasants made up 90% of the population before the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, today, only 2% of the population earns its money from fields and farms, but that 2% not only feeds the entire U.S. population but also sends its surplus to other countries.
Because fewer people were needed in the fields, more people flooded the cities, and urban production increased. We now produce huge amounts of steel, clothing, and buildings, plus many things previously unimaginable like cell phones and dishwashers. Whereas most Sapiens in history lived with too little or just enough, we now live with an abundance of material goods.
For most of history, goods were scarce. People lived frugally, and frugality was a virtue. In an odd twist, in the modern era, we have too much stuff. Rather than supply not meeting demand, demand didn’t always meet the supply. We needed buyers.
This prompted the new ethic of consumerism. Frugality became a bad word, and people were taught by industries that consuming was a positive thing. Self-indulgence is “self care” and frugality is “self-oppression.”
Consumerism has changed our values, habits, and health. For instance, we think it’s normal that manufacturers make poor-quality, short-term goods and then invent new models that we don’t need but are told we do. Shopping is a huge part of holidays like Christmas and Memorial Day. In many countries, the poorest, who live on pizza and hamburgers, are more likely to die of obesity rather than starvation. We spend huge amounts of money on food, and then we spend huge amounts of money on diet products, doubly supporting the growing economy.
Consumerism seems to conflict with the capitalist mentality of wasting nothing and reinvesting profits. While the two codes of ethics do conflict, they can inhabit the same space as the “capitalist-consumer ethic” because this combined ethic has different rules for different people. The capitalist-consumer ethic tells the rich to invest and the poor to buy. The rich believe in frugality and investing, and the poor believe in buying and indulging. The rich manage their investments while the poor buy televisions and new phones they don’t need. The spending of the poor supports the wealth accumulation of the rich. Following the capitalist-consumer ethic enables the rich to keep getting richer and the poor to keep getting poorer.
The Industrial Revolution caused many upheavals to society, including urbanization, the rise in power of the common person, the decline of patriarchy, and democratization. But the two biggest upheavals to society were artificial time and the replacement of family and community with state and market.
The Industrial Revolution brought the industrialization of time, our turn away from natural time to mechanized time.
Most societies in history couldn’t make accurate measurements of time, and it didn’t really matter. Time was dictated by the day and the seasons. This was “agricultural time.” The sun told you when to wake up and go to work and when to go home and go to sleep, and it also told you when to harvest your crops and when to plant new ones. You didn’t need a more accurate measure of time than where the sun was in the sky.
But with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, precise time started to matter. Let’s see why: if you’re a shoemaker in medieval times, you make every part of the shoe, from the sole to the buckle. If another shoemaker shows up late for work, it doesn’t affect you. But if you work in a factory that makes shoes today, and your job is to work the machine that makes the sole, others depend on you to do your role promptly. If you’re late for work, and the soles don’t get made, it holds up the process for everyone else.
Businesses needed a way to keep everyone on the same schedule, so they mandated that every worker come to work at the same time (regardless of where the sun was in the sky), eat lunch at the same time (regardless of whether they were hungry), and leave at the same time (regardless of whether they’d finished their project).
These schedules became the model for almost everything we do in our day-to-day lives, even those things that don’t involve coordinating with other workers.
The railway system played a large part in popularizing the use of timetables. In Britain in 1784, each city had its own local time, dependent on the rise and setting of the sun. Before easy transportation and communication between cities, it didn’t matter that each city ran on its own time. But the development of faster trains in 1830 meant people could get to other cities more easily, and the time discrepancies became an inconvenience. The train companies started making schedules according to Greenwich Observatory time rather than local times. This prompted the first establishment of a national time, in 1880, and Brits had to start living according to an artificial clock rather than the natural time dictated by the position of the sun in the sky.
Today, we do everything according to artificial time, and it’s hard to not know what the time is: it’s on your watch, your phone, your laptop, TV, and the microwave.
Traditionally, you lived your life in the bubbles of three levels of intimate groupings.
In the past, these three sub-communities provided almost everything you needed to survive. Even with the rise of markets, Sapiens bought fewer than 10% of their products and services from people outside their sub-communities. They depended on the economy of favors. You would help your neighbor repair his roof after heavy rains without expecting any payment, and you would expect him to help you repair your roof if it leaked.
The rise of kingdoms didn’t change the reliance of individuals on these three levels of community. It was difficult for rulers of kingdoms to be involved in the daily lives of subjects, even if they wanted to be. Agricultural communities didn’t produce enough surplus to feed a police force, teachers, and social workers, so communities had to meet these needs on their own. The lack of ease of transportation and communication also meant that rulers couldn’t micromanage the towns under their jurisdiction. They mainly built infrastructure like roads and provided protection in times of war.
But these sub-communities started to disintegrate. The Industrial Revolution diminished the importance of family and community by empowering the market, making transportation and communication easier, and giving governments the means to provide towns with teachers, policemen, and social workers. The market—the world of buying, selling, and advertising—and the state came to influence almost every aspect of our lives.
The state and the market convinced us to sever family and community ties by selling us on the dream of individualism. We were told that if we became individuals, we could marry whomever we wanted, have whatever job we wanted, and live wherever we wanted. The state and the market assured us that they would take care of us, providing the food, shelter, employment, insurance, and protection that was previously provided by families and communities. The state and the market gave us choices that weren’t available when we depended solely on our communities, and this was too attractive to pass up.
Markets and States Have Replaced Families and Communities
| Then
(Dependence on Families & Communities) |
Now
(Dependence on Markets & States) |
|
| In times of sickness: | Your family took care of you | You depend on health insurance |
| When in need of work: | You worked in the family business or the neighbor’s business | You depend on the market for work |
| When in need of an education: | Your parents, grandparents, and older siblings taught you | You attend government-run schools or private schools with curricula influenced by government policy |
| When desiring to open a business: | Your family raised the money | The bank loans you money |
| When desiring to marry: | Your family chose (or at least vetted) your spouse | You court in bars or online and pay designers, gym owners, and dieticians to help you meet beauty standards set by the market |
| When desiring to build a house: | Your family helped you build it | You hire a construction company and get a mortgage from the bank |
| In times of conflict: | Your family defended you | The police protect you |
| In old age: | Your children supported you and served as your pension fund | You hire a nurse or live in a senior citizens’ home |
While dependence on the state and market rather than family and community give us more employment, travel, and marriage opportunities, this dependence has also weakened us. When we're alienated and untied from families and communities, it’s easier for the market to exploit us and the state to persecute us. We’re weaker as individuals than we were as a group.
The widespread adoption of artificial time and the replacement of family and community with the state and market were huge, lasting changes in society. Could we count peace as one of the major changes of the modern world?
We tend to think of our era as a violent one, but since World War Two, we’ve been living in the most peaceful era in history. Because we didn’t live thousands of years ago when the human world was particularly violent, we don’t know how relatively peaceful our time is, and as wars become less frequent the ones that do occur get more attention.
War is no longer part of everyday life, no longer the norm. Whereas it used to be routine for a state to conquer neighboring states, that’s rare now. Not only do we not conquer other territories, but we also don’t cling to ones that used to be ours: Throughout history, the collapses of most empires have been violent bloodbaths, but since World War II, most empires have collapsed relatively peacefully, including the British Empire, the French Empire, and the Soviet Union.
Real peace isn’t just the absence of war. It’s the implausibility of war. We now see international wars as highly unlikely. This has never happened in history before now. At the moment, it seems implausible that there will be major wars in the future, although there are a few exceptions (Israel and Syria, or the USA and Iran, for example). How did war become implausible?
1. The increased cost of war: The advent of nuclear weapons increased the financial cost of war, but more importantly, it increased the cost in human lives and threatened the very existence of individual nations. Because the use of nuclear weapons could be “collective suicide,” no country wants to use the most powerful weapons it has. Consequently, no single nation can establish international dominance through its weaponry. This decreases the likelihood of war.
2. The decreased profits of war: Nations used to become rich by looting from the territories they conquered. They could do this because wealth existed primarily in the form of material goods like fields, slaves, and gold. Today, wealth often isn’t material. For instance, California’s wealth initially came from its gold mines. But now, California’s wealth comes from the tech and film industries. The riches exist only in the minds of Silicon Valley engineers and Hollywood directors. If China wanted to invade California, they wouldn’t be able to loot much of value. This decreases the likelihood of war.
3. The increased profits of peace: The importance of foreign trade means that peaceful foreign relations are profitable. The U.S. and China are incentivized to maintain peaceful relations because they both benefit from their mutual trade.
4. The rise of pacifism: We’re in the first era in history in which war is generally seen as evil and the elite wants peace rather than colonization.
5. The interdependence of countries: The prior four reasons reinforce one another: The fear of nuclear destruction leads to pacifism. Pacifism leads to a flourishing of trade relations. Trade makes peace more profitable and war more costly. Most importantly, governments can no longer function independently. No country is powerful enough to initiate a war on its own. The widening of society’s borders to encompass the whole world practically enforces international peace.
The Agricultural, Cognitive, and Industrial Revolutions have merged nations, creating a global empire. Further, these revolutions have grown our economy, giving us “superhuman” powers. Have these revolutions increased our happiness, as well? If they haven’t, what was the point? Can we call ourselves successful if we’re not happier today than we were yesterday?
Many researchers have used “subjective well-being” as a stand-in for happiness. This implies that happiness is a feeling, either one of pleasure in the moment or one of contentment in the long term. This theory depends on the assumption that we can judge people’s happiness by asking them how they feel. Although we can’t ask our ancestors how they felt, we can take current findings and apply them retroactively. To determine the progress of happiness, we’ll look at four theories of happiness: the “expectations” theory of happiness, the biological theory of happiness, the “finding meaning” theory of happiness, and the “present moment” theory of happiness.
The most significant finding in the study of happiness is that long-term happiness is based on the gap between our expectations and reality. If the gap is large and reality is far from meeting your high expectations, you’re unhappy. If the gap is small or nonexistent, you’re happy. For example, if you expect to get an ox cart from your father when you come of age and you get an ox cart, you’re happy. But if you expect to get a new Ferrari on your 16th birthday and you get a used Toyota, you’re unhappy.
Solving this problem isn’t as easy as just lowering our expectations. When our lives get better, we expect more. So the more we get, the more we want.
We can find evidence of the wealth or health of our ancestors, but it’s hard to measure the expectations people had in the past. This complicates the task of answering the question, “are we happier now than we were then?” For example, we have less pain than our ancestors did because we have more painkillers and tranquilizers. But because we expect less pain, we may suffer more than our ancestors did when we experience pain. But we can’t know for sure. We can’t put ourselves in the shoes of our ancestors because we inevitably take our modern expectations with us.
For example, we change our clothes every day, so we assume it must have been awful to live as a medieval peasant, who didn’t change her clothes often and went months without washing. But medieval peasants were used to living in unwashed bodies and clothes and didn’t seem to have minded. Daily washing and clothes-changing are modern expectations.
We may be unhappier than our ancestors merely because expectations are so much higher. This is due, in part, to the media and advertisements. They manipulate our expectations and erode our contentment. A teenager living 5,000 years ago judged his appearance against his fellow villagers, most of whom were old and wrinkled or still children. Most teenage boys of the past probably felt pretty good about how they looked. In contrast, today, a teenager is bombarded by images of movie and sports stars on TV, the internet, and billboards. He’s much less likely to feel confident in his appearance because the expectations are higher. We don’t compare ourselves against our ancestors. We compare ourselves against our contemporaries.
As expectations continue to increase, it’s possible our happiness will continue to deteriorate. For example, we talk about immortality as the biggest breakthrough for happiness. What could be happier than not dying? But the expectation of immortality, contrasted with reality, will bring new problems. The poor probably won’t be able to afford the technologies that make people immortal. This will make them feel angrier and more oppressed than previously. The gap between their expectations (immortality) and reality (mortality) will widen dramatically.
The rich, who can afford the technology to be immortal, will feel anxious. Although they may not die of natural causes, they could still be hit by a car or their city could be bombed by a terrorist. The gap between their expectations (immortality) and reality (the world will always contain life-threatening dangers) could make them risk-averse and paranoid. Further, when death is no longer natural, losing a child or spouse will be even more heartbreaking than it is now.
According to biologists, our happiness is determined by the biochemical reactions caused by hormones like oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine. This implies that happiness comes from pleasurable feelings—whether we win the lottery or fall in love, happiness comes not from the experiences themselves but from the resulting flood of hormones and electrical signals in our brains.
Unfortunately, we have evolved to remain in a relatively static state of happiness. It wouldn’t be prudent for the success of our species to be happy all the time. For example, sex evolved to be pleasurable so that men would be motivated to spread their genes. But this pleasure also evolved to be limited. If orgasms lasted forever, males wouldn’t bother doing anything else, like hunt for food, eat, or look for other available females.
Like an air conditioner, our biomechanical system is programmed to return to a set point, and every individual has a slightly different set point. Some air conditioners are set to 70 degrees Fahrenheit and some are set to 20. Similarly, some people’s happiness levels are set to fluctuate between levels 6 and 10 and level out at 8, whereas other people’s levels fluctuate between 3 and 7 and level out at 5. This means that some people are wired to be happier and some wired to be gloomier, regardless of external circumstances like money or health.
For example, the French Revolution brought about many changes: it did away with the monarchy, gave peasants land, and gave citizens rights. But it didn’t change the biochemical systems of French individuals. Consequently, the revolution may not have had much of an impact on French happiness. Those who were happy before the revolution were happy after it. Those who had griped about Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette before the revolution probably griped about Robespierre and Napoleon after it. Their genetic predispositions, and therefore outlooks on life, remained the same.
The biological theory suggests that historical developments have had no effect on happiness since biologically, we’re pretty much the same as we were 5,000 years ago. The only historical event that could have possibly impacted our happiness was the development of antidepressants that change our biochemistry, like Prozac. But we don’t like this idea. We’re troubled by happiness that comes from a pill, although we’re not sure why.
Some studies suggest that our biochemistry and pleasurable feelings aren’t everything when it comes to happiness. For instance, studies show that when you break down the actions involved in raising a child, you don’t get pleasurable sensations. Instead, you get dishwashing, diaper changing, temper tantrums, and various expenses. There are far more unpleasant moments than pleasant ones when raising a child. On the face of it, childrearing doesn’t seem like something that’s going to bring much happiness. Yet it does. Parents say that having children brings them more happiness than anything else in life. Are they lying? Deluding themselves?
The “finding meaning” theory of happiness says that you’re happy if you view your life as having a purpose. Even hardships can contribute to happiness if you find meaning in them. Children often serve to give meaning and purpose to the lives of their parents. This makes parents happy to have children.
What does this mean for the history of happiness? Our ancestors were far more religious than we are today. Secularism and secular religions are on the rise. Our ancestors were more likely to believe in bliss in the afterlife, and this belief gave their lives meaning. If you’re promised rewards for your struggles, you’re far more content and tolerant of hardship today.
But if you don’t believe in the afterlife and don’t feel like there’s an overarching purpose to life, how do you remain content in a world of so much hardship? Our imagined realities give life meaning. Capitalism and the secular humanistic “religions” discussed in Chapter 12 allow people to view their lives as having a purpose, even if they don’t believe they’ll be rewarded in heaven.
Science, on the other hand, doesn’t offer this comfort. From the scientific point of view, life has no meaning. Evolution doesn’t have a purpose. Natural selection works “blindly.” This means that any meaning you ascribe to your life, whether it comes from a capitalist, humanist, or religious point of view, is a delusion. Therefore, your happiness depends on your ability to align your particular delusion with the delusions of society. As long as everyone tells the same myths about meaning, you can convince yourself of the reality of that myth. You can believe your life is meaningful and through this belief find happiness.
All the options so far are dependent on our feelings. As a society, we privilege our feelings, urging individuals to be true to themselves and follow their hearts. We judge what is good and moral based on our feelings.
Although this is our prevailing worldview now, it’s an oddity in history. For most of history, religions have given objective standards for what makes something good and moral. This makes sense. Surely not everything that feels good is good. If we ask heroin addicts when they’re happiest, they’re going to tell us it’s when they shoot up. Does that make heroin the key to happiness?
Buddhism is a famous example of a religion that doesn’t give precedence to pleasurable feelings in determining happiness. According to the Buddhist view, when we identify who we are with what we feel, we cause ourselves to suffer.
Feelings are not all-important. They’re just sensations. We shouldn’t be attached to good feelings or averse to bad feelings. Craving pleasure leads to suffering—we’re either discontent because we don’t have the pleasure we want, or we’re anxious about losing the pleasure we have. The root of suffering is chasing and grasping at pleasure while we run from and try to rid ourselves of pain.
Happiness isn’t an emotional state and comes not from pleasurable feelings but from accepting the sensations as they are, without attributing value to them. In this way, we live in the present moment, not anticipating pleasure in the future. We focus on knowing ourselves and knowing that we are not our sensations and emotions.
From this point of view, we can’t really make assumptions about the history of happiness. We can’t tell if the ancients knew themselves any better (or worse) than we do today.
It’s not important to know which theory of happiness is correct. What’s important is that we know the different approaches and understand that we can’t leave the question of happiness out of the equation when we’re assessing historical progress.
So far, we’ve discussed the history of Homo sapiens. But what about its future?
The future of our species may be relatively short, not because we cause ourselves to go extinct, but because we become an entirely new species.
For almost 4 billion years, species have evolved according to the principles of natural selection. For example, proto-giraffes who had longer necks than their contemporaries could reach higher branches and access more food. Therefore, they had a better chance of survival and passing on their genes. According to science, this wasn’t the product of intelligent design. It was the product of surviving animals passing on the characteristics that led to their survival.
For the last 4 billion years, species, including Sapiens, have been constrained by these laws of natural selection, but today, we’re on the brink of replacing natural selection with intelligent design.
With the Agricultural Revolution came a huge leap forward in the move from natural selection to intelligent design. This is when Sapiens started mating animals. Rather than merely wishing for slow, fat chickens, a sapiens could mate a fat hen with a slow cock to produce, fat, slow offspring. In this way, Sapiens sped up the natural selection process, manipulating what characteristics it selected. Still, Sapiens had no way to give entirely new traits to chicken offspring. They had to work only with the traits that arose naturally in chicken.
Today, scientists can introduce new traits into species, traits that species didn’t contain in the wild. For instance, in 2000, French scientists implanted a gene from a fluorescent green jellyfish into a rabbit embryo to create a fluorescent green rabbit.
All the revolutions discussed in this book, from the Cognitive Revolution to the Industrial Revolution, have been momentous, but none except the Scientific Revolution has altered our biology. This may be the most important revolution in our biology in the history of life on earth.
In the future, intelligent design could replace natural selection in one of three ways (or a combination of the three): biological engineering, cyborg engineering, or inorganic life engineering. We’ll look at each in turn.
This is when scientists intervene with an organism’s biology to change its physical, behavioral, or emotional characteristics. For example, in the past, we did this through castration: we could make a bull less aggressive or preserve a young boy’s soprano voice by removing his testicles.
Recent examples of biological engineering include:
Researchers are even planning to bring back to life species that are long extinct, including Neanderthals.
But all biological engineering projects are controversial. Religious activists say man shouldn’t “usurp God’s role” by creating new species. Animal rights activists fight against the suffering caused to animals used in intelligent design experiments. Human rights activists worry that genetic engineering will lead to the creation of superhumans who could wield power over the rest of us.
It’s true that we’re on the brink of being able to tinker with genetically engineering humans. This could potentially turn us into a different species altogether. Many people have ethical objections to this possibility, but those objections probably won’t stand in the way for long. For instance, if we discover a way to cure Alzheimer’s that also happens to improve the memories of healthy people, will ethics and politics really be able to keep healthy humans from taking advantage of this discovery?
This is when scientists combine inorganic parts with organic life. For example, humans (organic life) with bionic hands (inorganic) might be considered cyborgs.
Today, most of us are cyborgs: We have pacemakers and hearing aids, and even cell phones and computers have become a part of us, storing and processing data and therefore relieving our brains of those tasks.
Recent examples of cyborg engineering include:
The most ambitious current cyborg project aims to create a brain-computer interface that would allow two-way communication between the two. This brings up all sorts of questions about how we define identity. If we can download our memories to a collective memory bank and then directly access the memories of others, remembering experiences as if they had happened to us personally, what does this mean about the nature of the self? What would define your sense of self if everyone could have the same experiences you did by accessing your external memory?
This is when researchers create beings out of completely inorganic materials. This life could evolve independently of the person who created it. For example, computer programs that learn and evolve on their own would be examples of inorganic life engineering.
Computer viruses are the prototype for this type of being. Although they’re not intelligent, they can spread and multiply on their own, and even evolve. Mutations, either the result of an intentional or unintentional flaw by the virus’s programmer, can affect the virus’s evolution. If the mutation happens to be one that makes it easier for the virus to spread through the Internet and harder for it to be caught by antivirus programs, the virus will evolve into a “species” with these qualities.
Potential, imminent advances in this field make us question how we define “life.” If we can download the contents of our brains onto a hard drive and then run that hard drive on our laptops, does the laptop now “think”? Does it feel? If it does think and feel, is it you thinking and feeling (it’s your brain, after all). If it’s not you, who is it?
Currently, the most ambitious inorganic life engineering project is being conducted by the Human Brain Project. The team is working on creating a human brain inside a computer. If it succeeds, with all the neural networks of the brain exactly replicated with electronic circuits, is that computer a person?
These are questions we just don’t have answers to yet, because this is the first time in history we’ve had reason to ask them.
Even though some of these advances are far in the future, we’re already dealing with the consequences of biological engineering, cyborgs, and inorganic life. Landmark advances in DNA mapping force us to ask questions now that will be even more relevant tomorrow.
It took fifteen years to map the human genome, but today you can have your DNA mapped in a few weeks. The ease cheapness of DNA mapping has brought personalized medicine, but it’s also brought ethical issues and new questions:
We could be in the process of creating the most unequal society in history. The richest have always felt they were the smartest and most capable, but throughout history, this has generally been a delusion. Now, we’re approaching an era in which you could pay to increase your intelligence and give you superhuman skills. The rich and powerful might actually become objectively smarter and more skilled than the rest of humanity.
We can’t predict the future. When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, people predicted we’d all be living on Mars by now. We tend to predict one thing and then history moves in an entirely different direction. For instance, no one predicted the Internet.
Our current political dramas and social conflicts will be irrelevant to our superhuman successors. As a different species, they may have little interest in Christianity or Islam, Communism or capitalism, or even gender. This species may not even be human.
The only value our current debates will have in the history of our species is their ability to shape the ideas and values of the designers who will create our successors. The important thing to ask now, as this design gets underway, is, “What do we want to become?”
But even our wants may change. Scientists may soon be able to manipulate our desires. Perhaps the better question is, “What do we want to want?”
In the history of humankind, this has been an enduring problem: we don’t know what we want. We’ve reduced famine and war, but we haven’t reduced suffering, our own or that of other species. We’re as discontent as ever and we don’t know where we’re going or what we want the outcomes to be. This is a recipe for disaster.
Sapiens is full of counterintuitive ideas and new ways to view our history. Which ones impacted you the most?
What are your key takeaways from the book? In what ways do you see the world differently now than before reading the summary?
What major directions for humanity are the most important to you?