Our 28th prompt comes from AK. They ask:
What book(s) are you currently reading?
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AK,
This is one of the best questions to ask me, as I am always in the middle of a book at any given time. Reading is one of my favourite pastimes. I’m currently reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
I started this book in February, but abandoned it in favour of something shorter and more entertaining, promising myself that I would return to it ASAP. Well, here we are three months later – I’m finally finishing the book. This book came to me as a result of a wacky tweet I sent out last year. I said: *puts on tin foil hat* What if we did not domesticate plants? What if they domesticated us? This had just occurred to me, and I thought the best thing to do was to share this fledgling thought with the internet. I expected to be called out for being absurd, but instead @gitts replied to me and said “Harari?” and I said “huh?” Then he explained to me that Yuval Harari had written a whole book based on this thesis. So much for original thought.
History is presented from humanity’s point of view. Unfortunately this is all we have, since plants and animals can’t talk and tell us what they may know. As you can tell from the title, Harari attempts to condense our history as a species into one book. It is a great attempt. It also presents a very humbling view of humanity. It reminds us that 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was just but one of many human species. We lived alongside Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalis and Homo soloensis. However, we are the last ones standing. How did this happen?
Well, we underwent a number of revolutions, starting with the cognitive revolution. Around 70,000 years ago, something awoke in us and we moved from our place of origin in East Africa (some of us are still here) to the rest of the planet. We are capable of co-operation at a large scale. However, you may ask, don’t animals also cooperate and live in groups? You would be right, but animals live in much smaller groups than human beings because they have to have close ties. We, on the other hand, have language. Through language, we are able to create myths and convey our ideas to large audiences, creating a large scale binding effect. Think about it: gods, justice, rights and freedoms, economic systems and so on are intangible – they exist in our minds, yet they motivate us to common action.
Around 11,000 years ago, we underwent another revolution – the agrarian revolution (further reading on this: #15: Can we really enjoy work?). We moved from hunting and gathering to farming. We domesticated plants and animals…or did we? Harari argues that we did not domesticate wheat, it domesticated us. In fact, the agrarian revolution marked the start of much of the modern day anguish we experience. Harari says, it was a Faustian bargain between humans and grains in which our species cast off its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted towards greed and alienation. According to him, it was history’s biggest fraud, and I am tempted to agree. He provides evidence on how, more often than not, we ate worse, worked longer, experienced a higher risk of starvation, lived in crowded areas, were more susceptible to disease, and experienced new forms of insecurity and worse forms of hierarchy.
We have experienced more revolutions since – the scientific revolution around 500 years ago, the industrial revolution around 250 years ago, and the information revolution around 50 years ago, but our bodies still think we live in the Savannah, hunting and gathering. In many ways, our crises arise from “the way our hunter-gatherer minds interact with our current post-industrial environment.” All in all, the book is greatly informative, and it challenges many ideas that are taken for granted. Though I’m not yet done reading it (I should be done by Sunday, this book is quite long), I would definitely recommend it.
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This post is part of a daily writing experiment that I’m running for a year. I’d love it if you took part! ?