Book Reviews

SAPIENS

by Maurice A. Williams
06/05/16
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Sapiens
A Brief History of Mankind
Yuval Noah Harari
© 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-231609-7
Harper Collins
New York, NY
443 pgs., $29

Here is a very interesting book written by someone I, unfortunately, don't agree with.  Dr. Harari, to his credit, has put together a well-integrated summary of human history, starting at the very beginning when humans first evolved in Africa from Homo australopitchecus about 2.5 million years ago.  He discusses several species of early humans designated as such by anthropologists: Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, Homo solensis in Java, Homo floresiensis, which was a dwarf species standing about 3.5 foot tall, and others including Homo denisova, and of course, Homo sapiens, the dominate species and the only species on Earth for the past 10,000 years that had developed language, which gave them an advantage over other species.  No sooner had they arrived at a new location than the native populations became extinct. . . Homo sapiens conquered the whole world thanks above all to its unique language.  I am not sold on the theory that claims mankind simply evolved from animals.  But I did pick up on the significant improvement language was for our early ancestors.

Among other things, language served Homo sapiens as a means of gossip.  Harari makes a point that with the development of language  it became possible to describe and presume that entities, that have no physical manifestations in reality, can be conceived of and dealt with.  Not only gossip, but legends, myths, gods, and religions appeared for the first time with what Harari calls "The Cognitive Revolution".

Here Harari starts a long dissertation on limited liability companies.  These companies are a figment of human collective imagination.  Lawyers call this a "legal fiction."  Harari states that through The Cognitive Revolution we can weave myths such as the Biblical creation story.  Any political state, or a church, or ancient city or a tribe is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination.  Churches are rooted in common religious myths.  Do they really exist as a tangible reality in the physical world?  No!  Harari argues that they are all "legal fictions."  I think this ability to think in the abstract shows that Homo sapiens has a spiritual nature as well as a physical nature.  No animal is capable of "cognitive thought" or of imagining and dealing with "legal fictions."  If I were to look for historical evidence for when the first humans appeared on Earth, I would look for when this Cognitive Revolution occurred.

Harari asks the reader to imagine how difficult it would have been to create states, churches, or legal systems if humans could speak only of concrete things that really exist, like rivers, trees or predatory beasts.  This only amplifies my take on Cognitive Revolution.  Of course, only human beings have this ability, but I do not think it came simply by evolution.  This is evidenced of a spiritual dimension of being human.  Human have spiritual souls as well as physical bodies.  Too many scientists ignore this, and, I think, they get tripped up into specious arguments trying to defend evolution as being the only operative in human evolution.

Harari continues describing how human societies grew ever larger and more complex.  During the first half of the twentieth century, scholars taught that every culture was complex and harmonious, possessing an unchanging essence that defined it for all time.  Today, most scholars of culture have concluded that the opposite is true.  Every culture has its typical beliefs, norms and values, but these are in constant flux.  Even a completely isolated culture cannot avoid change.  There is always some contradictory values within a culture that fuels the change.

For instance, in medieval Europe the nobility believed in both Christianity and chivalry.   They tried to live up to Christianity when they were in church, but when they got home they reverted back to the ideas of chivalry: It is better to die, declared the barons than to live with shame.  If someone questions your honor, only blood can wipe out the shame.  Or the crusades, which was a mix of political correction verses The Lord's command to bring the Gospel to the whole world.  Or the French revolution, a contrary mix of ambition for individual political freedom and fundamental religious values.

Harari states:  Such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture. . . . It's such an essential feature of any culture that it even has a name: cognitive dissonance.  Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche.  In fact, it is a vital asset.  Had people been unable to hold contrary beliefs and values, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture.

Homo sapiens evolved from distinguishing their small family groups as "us" and the larger group of humans as "they."  Gradually, as they learned to co-operate with outsiders in the larger group, they began to imagine them as "brothers" or "friends."  From such a vantage point it becomes crystal clear that history is moving relentlessly towards unity, towards unity in larger and larger groups.  In the first millennium BC, humans gravitated towards three potentially universal groupings.  The first was based on economics, the monetary order; the second was political, the imperial order; the third was religious, the church - Buddhism, Christianity, Islam. 

Since 200 BC, most humans have lived in empires.  Harari thinks it likely that in the future, most humans will gravitate toward one truly global empire, one that dominates over the entire world.  More and more people think that humanity is the legitimate source of political authority, rather than one strong nation to rule over the less well organized people.   They will think that safeguarding and protecting human rights should be the political prerogative of all humans collectively. 

Harari defines religion as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a supernatural order.  To consolidate its widespread social and political order, it must (first) espouse a universal religion that is recognized as true always and everywhere and then (second), it must insist on spreading this belief to everyone.  The best known religions of history that have influenced large segments of humans are Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam.  I disagree with Harari again on his definition of religion.  The very entomology of the word religion means a binding, like binding again.  I think religion is an attempt by people to bind themselves to God.  To posit that religion is simply a belief that people conjure up, I think, misses the crucial element of religion.  Some religions really are purely the aspirations of men, but there are some that are based on a revelation from God, like the Judeo-Christian religion that is based on the revelation God made to Moses.  I personally think this revelation is authentic, no matter whether people believe it or not.  It would be foolish for mankind to establish a state religion that ignores it.

The problem of evil is one of the fundamental concerns of the human mind.  How could the good God allow so much evil and suffering in the world?  Christians, Muslims, and Jews recognize a powerful evil force, which they call The Devil or Satan, who can oppose the good God and wreak havoc.  Humans can not perceive Satan, cannot see him, interview him or make any tangible contact with him, because he is a pure spirit, as is God, whom humans also cannot perceive.

Theists worship Homo sapiens as a species whose nature is fundamentally different from the nature of all other animals and of all other phenomena.  The supreme good is the good of Homo sapiens.  I don't agree with this either.  If God does not exist, I suppose Harari is trying to describe something that looks desirable for all humans, but God does exist, and we humans and the entire universe exist because God created us.  My main criticism here is that Theism does not recognize an eternal God and does not believe humans have immortal souls.  If that's what they hold, then consider some speculation on it.  Each generation of humans, of Theists, when they die, simply become extinct.  The only humans that are active in this world are those who are still alive, and they will soon be come extinct also.  There is not much of a supreme guidance here.  Even Harari admits that Christians believe in a free and eternal soul that resides within each each individual.  Yet the life sciences, over the past 200 years, have found no evidence of a soul.  They found that human behavior is governed by hormones, genes and synapses, rather than by free will.  When observation collides with tradition, we should give precedence to observation.  I think Harari is wrong here once again.  If God does exist and humans do have souls, we all should be cognizant of that.

Today genetic engineering is capable of performing wonders in genetically modified plants and animals.  Researchers are now experimenting not only with modifying living plants and animals, they aim to revive extinct ones like Neanderthal man, and they have already conducted experiments to re-establish a mammoth, and to consider re-engineering man through genetic research.  I think, if God really exists, re-engineering man is a dangerous policy to pursue.

Harari sums up saying that 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was an insignificant animal in a corner of Africa.  Then, within a thousand years, it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem.  Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine attributes of creation and destruction. . . .  We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttle - but nobody knows where we're going. . . We are self-made gods with only the laws of physics. . . . We are accountable to no one. . . . Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?

Harari falls onto the same error most other evolutionists fall into.  He credits Homo sapiens with transforming itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror if the ecosystem.  The theory of evolution does not presume any guidance of evolution, not even by God nor any other intelligence.  I choke on Harari's assumption that humans do it by themselves without any outside guidance.  Lack of guidance is the big flaw in the theory of evolution.  Almost everyone discussing evolution always posits some intelligent agent guiding evolution, in Harari's case Home sapiens itself, but the theory claims that genes are simply mutated, and the mutated genes either improve survivability or impairs it.  Hardcore evolutionists are adamant that there is no intelligence guiding evolution.  I think this position is so counterintuitive that many authors explaining how species evolve attribute the guidance to the evolving species itself.  Like Harari, they attribute the transformation of Homo sapiens to Homo sapiens itself.

One important thing I did pick up from Harari's book, is the modern trend toward globalization.  Harari makes globalization his summation point.  I know from watching the news that political systems in the European nations and in the United States are headed in that direction.  Globalization is the evolutionary trend of humans to finally form a global government bringing all people into a close-knit one-world government with one-world religion.  It will be the utopia that some political leaders have always strived for, the brave new world of human construction.  I once again do not agree with this.  If God really does exist, I think, if humans presume that they are god and pursue their own ends without regard to the God who created them, they are headed toward disaster.

All in all, Sapiens is well written and is interesting to read, but it expresses one man's opinion.  Harari's gift at searching for trends in human conduct is illuminating and will help you understand better what humanness is all about.  I especially picked up on his identifying The Cognitive Revolution and The Cognitive Dissonance.  I hope identifying these two characteristics in human societies might help other scholars in recognizing that humans are different from animals because they have these cognitive abilities that stem from their spiritual nature that they all share.  I recommend reading Sapiens because I think it will be a milestone in human scholarship, but read it with a grain of salt.  Don't let anybody, no matter how erudite they are, lessen your fidelity to the God who created all of us.