1C Agenda 2-21-19: Writing Argumentative Thesis About Cognitive Revolution

Essay Assignments

Essay #1 Due 3-1-19 at 11:59 p.m.

Choice A

Develop an argumentative thesis about Yuval Noah Harari's explanation of the Cognitive Revolution.

Approach That Achieves Specificity:

Using Hasan Minhaj's Patriot Act episode "Supreme" show the dark side of the Cognitive Revolution.

Some things to consider:

Sample Thesis: Hasan Minhaj's takedown of Supreme in his Netflix show The Patriot Act shows the dark side of the Cognitive Revolution: that our collective imagined reality makes us vulnerable to hype, manipulation, FOMO (fear of missing out), and greed.

Choice B

Support, refute, or complicate Harari’s assertion that the “agricultural revolution was the greatest crime against humanity.”

You need minimum 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.

2-14 Homework #1: Read Sapiens up to page 60 and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how “limited liability companies” and “imagined realities” are part of the Cognitive Revolution. See Harari video “Why Humans Run the World.”

2-19 Homework #2: Read Sapiens, up to page 132 and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains Harari makes the claim that the Agricultural Revolution is history’s “biggest fraud.” Review signal phrases.

2-21 Homework #3: Read Sapiens to page 159 and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how “imagined orders and hierarchies” resulted in “unfair discrimination.”

2-26 We will cover arguments for or against Agricultural Revolution ( no peer edit)

2-28 No essay due because it's due March 1 at 11:59 p.m. No homework today. We will look at essay #2 options. If we have time, we will look at essay topic from Hasan Minhaj. We will examine logical fallacies. We will watch Harari’s Ted Talk “Bananas from Heaven.” We will review top 20 grammar errors. Homework #4: Read Sapiens, pages 163-187, and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains the development of money.

Mediocre Informative Thesis for Option A

Humans separated from other mammals through the Cognitive Revolution because humans have superior language skills, a propensity for gossip, and a capacity to share common legal fictions.

The above is too factual and too self-evident.

Improved Argumentative Thesis Statements

The very shared legal fictions that allow us to cooperate on a mass level and dominate other creatures is the same drive that will lead to humans' demise.

While humans are superior to other animals due to their capacity to share imagined stories, these imagined stories have been largely used for evil: slavery, racism, and structural inequality.

Humans' competing legal fictions are coming to a head in the democratic and authoritarian story. According to Timothy Snyder, author of The Road to Unfreedom, the story of inevitability is at war with the story of eternity. This war could lead to the world's destruction.

We can see in the context of Sapiens that without a strong story to believe in, humans cannot attain any kind of success.

Harari's claim that shared fictions created a Cognitive Revolution is too obvious to be worthy of merit. He is simply stating what is self-evident, that humans, unlike other animals, rely on abstractions and language to form societies. To make a fuss over Harari's book is to be ignorant of an already shared understanding of human history.

Choice A

Develop an argumentative thesis about Yuval Noah Harari's explanation of the Cognitive Revolution.

Importance of Counterarguments:

You need a counterargument section to show that you have submitted your thesis to rigorous opposition. This makes you seem more credible and persuasive.

You can find counterarguments for Harari's notion of Cognitive and Agricultural Revolution in C.R. Hallpike essay "A Response to Yuval Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind."

Sample Refutation Thesis

C.R. Hallpike's essay "A Response to Yuval Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" is an attempt to discredit Harari, but Hallpike's critique is too larded with Straw Man, non sequitur, semantic, faulty comparison, and other logical fallacies to be persuasive.

Here is an excerpt that challenges Harari's notion of legal fictions with my interjections:

As an anthropologist who has trodden roughly the same path as Harari in a number of books (Hallpike 1979, 1986, 2008, 2016) I was naturally curious to see what he has to say, but it soon became clear that its claim to be a work of science is questionable, beginning with his notion of culture. Language is obviously the basis of human culture, but one of the central themes of the book is the idea that not just language but what he calls 'fiction' has been crucial in the ascent of Man:

. . . the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all [my emphasis]. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled . . . But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers (p 27).

C.R. Hallpike committing semantic argument fallacy and non sequitur and Straw Man?

The claim that culture is fiction is not an important insight, but is simply a perverse way of stating the obvious fact that culture is a set of shared ideas, and ideas by their very nature can't be material objects. Language has been revolutionary because it has allowed human beings to be linked together by shared ideas into roles and institutions. One cannot see or touch the Prime Minister, for example, but only a human being, and someone who does not know what 'Prime Minister' means has to be told. This can only be done properly by explaining how this role fits into the British Constitution, which in turn involves explaining parliament, cabinet government, the rule of law, democracy, and so on. This world of roles, institutions, beliefs, norms, and values forms what we call culture, but just because the components of culture are immaterial and cannot be seen, touched or smelled does not make them fiction, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, or the myths of Genesis or the Australian Aborigines. We can't see, touch, or smell truth because truth is not a material object, but that does not make it unreal or fictitious either.

Straw Man?

If Harari's test of reality is only what we can see, touch, or smell then mathematics, like truth, should also be a prime example of fiction. Maybe simple integers might just pass his reality test, since we can see groups of different numbers of things, but how 'real' in his sense are zero, negative numbers, irrational numbers like ? or imaginary numbers like the square root of-1? And if mathematics is fiction, then so is the whole of science including the theory of relativity and Darwinian evolution, which Harari would find very embarrassing indeed because he loves science. He is just in a philosophical muddle that confuses what is material with what is real, and what is immaterial with fiction. But the opposite of fiction is not what is material but what is true, and what is fictional and what is true can both only exist in the immaterial world of thought.

Does Hallpike ignore Harari's idea of mass cooperation?

When it comes to the task of explaining social institutions, the idea of culture as fiction is about as useful as a rubber nail:

People easily understand that 'primitives' cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together round the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers (p 31).

Really? He takes the Peugeot motor company, with its image of a lion, and tries to argue that the company itself is no more real than an ancient tribal totem, but nevertheless can form the basis on which large numbers of people could co-operate:

How exactly did Armand Peugeot, the man, create Peugeot, the company? In much the same way that priests and sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history . . . It all revolved around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them . . . In the case of Peugeot SA the crucial story was the French legal code, as written by the French parliament. According to the French legislators, if a certified lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus—a new company was formed (p 34).

But don't beliefs form conventions? And is Hallpike using more non sequiturs?

Harari seems unable to distinguish a belief from a convention, presumably because neither is a material object. Beliefs in ghosts and spirits may be shared by members of particular cultures, but derive from the nature of people's experience and their modes of thought: they did not sit down and deliberately agree to believe in them. Conventions, however, are precisely the result of a collective decision, consciously taken to achieve a certain purpose, and as such are completely different from myths in almost every respect. Peugeot SA rests on the legal convention of a limited-liability company, which performs a very useful social function, and another very useful social convention is the rule of the road by which in Britain we all drive on the left. Neither beliefs in spirits nor social conventions are material objects, but they are still quite different sorts of thing, as are legal documents and magical rituals, and Harari achieves nothing by confusing them.

Choice A

Develop an argumentative thesis about Yuval Noah Harari's explanation of the Cognitive Revolution.

Approach That Achieves Specificity:

Using Hasan Minhaj's Patriot Act episode "Supreme" show the dark side of the Cognitive Revolution.

Hasan Minhaj:

Choice A

Develop an argumentative thesis about Yuval Noah Harari's explanation of the Cognitive Revolution.

Using Hasan Minhaj's Patriot Act episode "Supreme" show the dark side of the Cognitive Revolution.

Some things to consider: