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While not usually my cup of tea, Amazon Prime offered Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by Yuval Noah Harari, and I thought I’d give it a try. I’d never heard of the author, and don’t usually read anthropology or sociology books, but the blurb made it sound interesting (don’t they always).
I did enjoy the first third. The author discusses two aspects of our ancient past that really grabbed my attention. Unfortunately, he went on to lose it. In a big way. For me, the latter two thirds of the book added little and missed what seemed some key connections.
So, three posts (at least): one each for the two attention grabbers; one more for the book overall. This first one is about our special ability as storytellers.
The dark side is that it’s also about our susceptibility to stories. Underneath it all is that our entire experience of reality is a story our minds create.
The historic story of Us begins about 70,000 years ago, but to understand its significance we must look back roughly 2.3 million years to when recognizable humans — homo habilis — first appeared in Africa.
[Note that I take the term “human” to apply to the genus homo, under which there are a number of species — from habilis to sapiens — all of which are members of the actual human race. What we refer to as “race” is largely a social construct based on ethnic and geographic variation. Yet another social fiction.]
Humble habilis never left Africa, but homo erectus did. They showed up about two million years ago and spread throughout Europe, the Middle East, India, and Asia. Another human species, the Neandertals (homo neanderthalensis), spread throughout Europe and into the Middle East.
These humans all lived in small hunter/gatherer bands. There was limited trade, all barter, so it only happened when both parties had something the other wanted. There was no unification of cultures among bands, each evolved their own customs. It’s not unfair to compare human tribes at this point to animal tribes, especially primate tribes. Humans lived off the land and were mobile.
Then, about 300,000 years ago, homo sapiens — modern humans — showed up. They, too, were hunter/gatherers until (according to Harari) about 70,000 years ago when we lucked into a new idea, perhaps enabled by a genetic mutation, that changed everything. We learned to create and respond to fictions — an ability that let us take over the world.
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Humans, especially sapiens, spread across the world.
Harari calls it the Cognitive Revolution (one of many crucial game changers in our deep history; see next post). Our ability to create fictions is the foundation of culture, government, finance, and religion. It’s why we can have large cities and countries. Politics, laws, and legal justice are fictions we make up in hopes of a stable (very large) society.
In ancient homo sapiens, it allowed large groups to cohere under a shared fiction of “greater good for the group” — a fiction often called patriotism. The rallying cry, “For God and Country!” involves two evocative fictions.
Which brings up an important point: Fictions aren’t bad (or good) just because they’re fictions. Some fictions (for instance: society, country, God, extended family, money) are necessary. Some are even beneficial (for instance: community, charity, and religion). A company is a fiction, but how could we manage without them? Money is another fiction, but we’d be reduced to barter without it.
It’s the content and intent of fiction that makes it either good or bad. Fraudulent emails are a good example of bad fictions. In many cases, it’s a subjective value judgement. Capitalism and socialism are fictions on which opinions vary considerably. For that matter, consider the fictions we call the (political) Left and Right.
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I think we all know, in the back of our minds, that many aspects of life as we live it are based on ideas that aren’t factual. Which isn’t to say they aren’t true.
It can be tempting to divide the world into facts (true) and lies (not true). Most approaches to logic do exactly that. This pushes valid literature (and art in general) into what libraries label “non-fiction” — anything else would be a lie, a counterfeit of some kind. But most libraries have a much larger category: fiction. A category we might describe as a surface of lies overlying deeper truths.
So, rather than two categories, three: facts, lies, and fiction. Animals are mostly factual, things are what they are, but some animals can lie in various small ways (birds and squirrels pretend to bury food to deceive potential thieves that might be watching). Storytelling, however, is uniquely human. It drives human cultures unimaginably far beyond animal ones.
Harari’s contention is that social fiction is why homo sapiens exploded to every corner of the globe, expanding much further than any human species before them, and wiping out other human species they encountered. The entirety of the Americas was devoid of humans until sapiens arrived.
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Yet, while Harari attributes our success in expanding to our facility with fiction, I think he misses the importance of storytelling itself in human culture. The fictions he writes about tend to be fictions people take as social truths (such as government, money, or justice). But I think there is a strong link to fictions we take as fictions, our stories.
The link is important because it expresses what I think is the empowering and central aspect of our fiction ability: imagination. Harari refers often to our collective imagination where our social fictions live yet doesn’t seem to quite recognize the power of the human imagination.
We improve the things we do and make because we wonder: “What if?” We are able to imagine changes that improve things. We can visualize a fictitious future and set about making it into a factual one.
Not just a uniquely human ability, but unique to homo sapiens.
And very possibly why no Neandertals or other homo cousins remain. They couldn’t stand up to our ability to imagine a huge group working together.
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This Cognitive Revolution marks the first occurrence of what ought to be called Sapiens Spread. Remember that homo sapiens appeared on the scene about 300,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until about 70,000 years ago that we set out to conquer the world. Something switched on that hasn’t switched off since.
In the rest of the book Harari describes the onslaught of wave after wave of Sapiens Spread through history. Yet he never seems to connect it back to this first wave, to fully understand or appreciate the basic phenomenon of Sapiens Spread. (“It’s what we do!”)
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As an aside, Immanuel Kant pointed out how the only reality we know is the model of reality (a fiction!) built by our brains based on neural inputs it receives from our eyes, ears, and other senses. Reality, as we each know it, is a story in our mind.
That said, I believe it to be a reasonably accurate one, as far as it goes. We cannot see ultraviolet light, for instance, and being able to do so would add information, but would not make the information we already have more accurate. It’s fashionable in some circles to see our internal model of reality as inaccurate because of how much our senses cannot perceive. Not just as inaccurate but as deceiving or illusionary.
I can’t agree. We evolved to operate in the physical world, and our senses (and brain) are tuned for success in that regard. Granted there is much we don’t perceive, be it ultraviolet or ultrasound, but I’d say our success indicates that what we do perceive we perceive pretty darn accurately.
So, I’d suggest, rather than seeing the reality as deceptive, illusionary, or vastly distorted, see it as a wireframe model. A sufficiently accurate model but missing a lot of detail and color.
Anyway, interesting that a key to our massive global success as a species operates at so many levels, from global finance and countries all the way down to the very basis of our (fictional) (wireframe) mental model of reality.
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My love of fiction goes back to my earliest memories of mom reading sister and I bedtime stories. My parents read to us a lot but didn’t make any effort to teach us to read. That way, when we got to school, we were thirsty to learn this great skill that unlocked infinite new worlds. (Both sister and I are life-long voracious readers.)
So, it was pretty cool to read that the key to our success as a species lies in our ability to create fictions. And, no doubt, along with the ability to create them comes the ability to appreciate them. Even need them. We love stories because we can tell stories.
[Storytelling may have driven spoken and written languages to the richness they have. Bees can communicate where good flowers are to other bees, a simple language suffices to communicate basic world facts. But it requires a rich language to tell (and hear!) beautiful, dramatic, funny, or poignant stories. (How much of language is based on the need to tell a really good joke or tall tale?)]
This aspect of our past is near the beginning of our history, so it’s equally early in the book. At this point, I was thumbs up and really digging the book.
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Which is a good place to leave it until the next post. The rest of this is my highlighted bits and notes that I wrote while reading.
It may say something (though I’m not sure what) that I didn’t highlight much in Part One: The Cognitive Revolution. Only four bits:
There was just one exception to this general rule: the dog. The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution. Experts disagree about the exact date, but we have incontrovertible evidence of domesticated dogs from about 15,000 years ago. They may have joined the human pack thousands of years earlier.
This bit is about events rather after the Cognitive Revolution, but I love dogs, so I highlighted it (more as a thumbs up than as a note for future reference). Truly, dogs and humans have an ancient history.
When dogs dream, do they recall things they’ve experienced, or do they imagine things? If they chase imaginary rabbits, perhaps they have their own small fictions.
We don’t know which spirits they prayed to, which festivals they celebrated, or which taboos they observed. Most importantly, we don’t know what stories they told. It’s one of the biggest holes in our understanding of human history.
An important point. So much of early human history is guesswork.
The wandering bands of storytelling Sapiens were the most important and most destructive force the animal kingdom had ever produced.
A point the author reiterates in various forms. He seems to not think much of homo sapiens (and perhaps for good reason). That said, he does tend to take a good news/bad news approach in most cases. History is often neutral and value judgements come from the winners (and losers).
One example:
At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over 100 pounds. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools.
Australia had never seen any species of human until sapiens, and a variety of megafauna had evolved (including a 650-pound kangaroo). Within a thousand years of homo sapiens showing up, they were gone.
We’ve been doing what we do for a long time.
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From my notes:
Cognitive Revolution = freedom from biology!
Indeed, our ability to imagine a future we can make real may underpin free will.
Stories allow large groups to function. Without fictions only small groups work. Which is why animals (and non-sapiens humans) only exist in tribes.
And even us sapiens prior to the Cognitive Revolution!
Fiction allows rapid social change. DNA does not. Animal behavior tends to be fixed. Neanderthals had bigger brains and were stronger but Sapiens won because fiction allowed unity in large groups.
Freedom from biology!
Things! Nomads only have what they can carry. Hunter gatherers (like animals) have (and need) few tools. Modern civilization has lots of ownership! Land, vehicles, kitchen, bedroom, living room, yard. We need moving companies with large vans now!
One of the many costs of modern life.
Ancient humans each needed broad knowledge of their surroundings and selves. Modern humans specialize in niche fields including low intelligence tasks. Imbeciles can survive and pass on their genes now!
Freedom from biology again.
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Next time: Fiction was a powerful force, but fiction grounded in reality was unstoppable. It led to global revolutions…
Stay fictitious, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.
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