MOST SOCIAL OF ANIMALS

Dick Pountain/PQ: Sapiens review/22 February 2015 13:51

“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari

Harvill Secker Sept 2014

Hardcover: 456 pages

Pop science is a big business nowadays, from the cosmological and genetic blockbusters of Hawkings and Dawkins to the hugely popular internet lectures like TED. While some of these works exist mainly to boost their authors' pension funds, a select few are serious reviews of current scientific research expressed in readable and jargon-free language. Among these latter I'd count Dawkins and Hawking but also Jared Diamond, Vaclav Smil and Daniel Lord Smail whose works I've previously reviewed for this journal, and Yuval Noah Harari's provocative treatise “Sapiens”, which applies evolutionary biology to human history with much (if not complete) success certainly belongs among them.

Harari starts from the premise that the genus Homo – a group of higher primates that evolved in East Africa 2.5 million years ago – experienced a sequence of “revolutions” which turned them into ourselves, Homo sapiens, who now own, rule (and are perhaps destroying) the whole planet and all other species. The first of these revolutions, dubbed the Cognitive, happened around 70,000 years ago when certain mutations in brain function created a new strain of hominids who could manipulate abstract symbols. That's to say they detached those warning sounds that most animals employ from the specific events that triggered them, making of them symbols that could be recombined to refer to events in the past, the future or to things that never existed at all. This ability to tell stories and create myths excused us from the brute biological contest of evolution into our own environment of culture, into what Harari calls "imagined orders".

We're the most social of all animals, yet we lack the genetic constraints and bodily specialisations that enforce sociality upon bees, ants or naked mole rats. Instead our sociality evolves through vast accumulations of imagined relations and institutions: "Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination." Money, empires, states, debts, laws, jobs, ranks, joint stock companies all are necessary fictions that collapse if people stop believing in them. But so long as we do believe in them they permit collaboration at scales beyond the pheromone-bound societies of bee or ant, to even encompass the whole planet.

The second revolution was Agricultural, marked by the domestication of animal and plant species that created food surpluses and supplanted the need to hunt and forage. The wholly kin-based foraging bands that were the first human social units gave way to larger, more settled communities – inhabiting, villages then towns, cities and nations – which changed both our social and individual psychologies in profound ways: "... in the subsistence economy of hunting and gathering, there was an obvious limit to such long-term planning. Paradoxically, it saved foragers a lot of anxieties. There was no sense in worrying about things that they could not influence. The Agricultural Revolution made the future more important than it had ever been before." Organised religions emerged: where foragers had felt obliged to placate myriad separate animal spirits, agriculturalists learned to fear omnipotent gods, along with the kings and nobles who ruled on earth in their name (and the parasitic class of priests who interpreted their wishes). Harari's conjectures on the rise of monotheism, and the differences between occidental and oriental theologies are strong points of the book, as are his accounts of the third and fourth, Scientific and Industrial, revolutions.

He applies his evolutionary biology with a defter touch than many competitors, avoiding crude reductionism thanks to a firm grasp of the appropriate ontology. He clearly distinguishes the material from the imaginary and then grants autonomy and agency to both, hence applying biology at its proper level to define the outer bounds within which cultures evolve freely by their own rules. He squarely confronts the historical succession of hierarchies based on pure force, wealth, race, class and gender, making few concessions to either moralism or libertarian pieties: “Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.”

All such hierarchies are based in myth and belief rather than biology: "Since the biological distinctions between different groups of Homo sapiens are, in fact, negligible, biology can’t explain the intricacies of Indian society or American racial dynamics. We can only understand those phenomena by studying the events, circumstances, and power relations that transformed figments of imagination into cruel, and very real, social structures". He continues to further ridicule reductionism with the droll observation that “No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesise...”

Harari's argument reaches its strongest point in a chapter analysing the social psychology of nationalism. Recognising the historical connection between markets, nation states and individualism he postulates that "The nation is the imagined community of the state." The nation state usurps the sociological (and much of the psychological) role formerly held by families and tribes, an unfinished process whose bloody workings-out we're still living through today: "Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them." This approach, with its hints of both Weber and Veblen, illuminates the power of the modern state to defuse class politics (thus contradicting deterministic kinds of Marxism) and the persistent triumph of nationalisms over internationalism. It chimes with George Bernard Shaw's barbed view of patriotism as “Your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it".

Class is what eventually leads Harari's argument awry. Class consciousness is just another imagined order, and one in which trust is fading, so Communism was a secular religion and by implication Marx was wrong to attribute any special status to class. But regardless of whether or not class is a material fact (ie. belongs to the "base" rather than "superstructure") Marx was certainly right that relations of production belong with the deepest and most effectual of social constructs, as Harari in effect acknowledged in his early chapters on the agricultural revolution. Underestimating the potency of class leads him toward a Fukuyama-like vision of the human species uniting globally for the first time under the banner of consumer individualism. However those pesky relations of production will continue to beaver away at the foundations of such a shaky union, because it's not just market-individualism and high technology that shrink the world but also the power of labour to wrest a sufficient share of wealth to buy all the new products. Piketty and others have amply demonstrated that labour's power is currently in retreat and that the oligarchic global “1%” seek instead a return to family dynasties based on inherited wealth as their new world order.

As for the final chapter on techno-futurism, it's as unexpected and about as welcome as a turd on a soufflé. Where in earlier chapters he'd been so adept at rooting out religious themes concealed in secular clothing, Harari finally falls headlong into Wired-magazine-style millenarianism, forseeing our species elevated by genetic-engineering, robotics and artificial intelligence into an immortal super-sapiens. Meanwhile, outside Frankenstein's lab the peasants are congregating with pitchforks and burning brands...