Loose Thoughts

Thought #1: How Yuvahl’s History is very much subjective in terms of its effect.

That being said, however, I would not go as far as to say that Sapiens is not subjective at all. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that the only reason it became a best-seller is that it instills in its reader a vivid sensation. Read Sapiens and you will fall for the romance of Harari’s all-encompassing albeit elegantly straight-forward story of mankind – from our humble beginnings on the African Savannah to our current state-of-affairs. You will swell with a feeling of understanding, and a sense of wonder at how much and yet how little has changed. If you are like me, you will be overcome with a humbling sense of global identity while reading about the extent to which all institutions, from a tribe in Papau New Genieu to the United Stated States of America, rest on the same social cognitive foundation.

While Sapiens does not have personally identifiable characters like Friends, it does manage to bottle-up the entire human experience into a narrative that is as universalizing as it is digestible. Drink Hariri’s kool-aid and you will feel like you (yes you!) are part of some sort of historic mission. The feeling is tautologically subjective, but the real question is whether or not this feeling nullifies the objectivity, or truth-value, of Harari’s claims. Or, in other words, can a History be at once objective and subjective?

Thought #2: A more generic summary of Yuvahl Noah Harari

In Sapiens, Yuvahl sets himself up with the grand task of writing an all-encompassing History of humankind. He primes his book with the question, what is it that set Homo sapiens apart from other animals on the African Savannah? What allowed our hunter-gatherer ancestors to transcend their ecological niche and to create, in eventuality, Civilizations, Religions, Nations and Nation-States? For Yuvahl, the answer is cooperation, and more specifically the extent to which our social cognitive machinery enabled (and continues to enable) cooperation. In this way, he argues that we were only able to rise up in the food chain by employing the cooperative thinking made possible by “Theory of Mind,” and argues furthermore that once this thinking was hardwired in us, we were able to make exponential expansions in the size of our “group” through the construction of collectively imagined realities: from the hunter-gatherer band, to (from hunter-gatherer to Civilization), through the construction of collectively-imagined realities: Religion, Nationalism, Ideology and so on. Yuvahl’s History, therefore, is none other than the story of “Theory of Mind” — its evolution in our distant ancestors, and its continued relevance to human cooperation in the 21st century.