Sapiens Study Guide
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Teach first half of the book.
Essay #1 Option
Support, refute, or complicate Harari’s assertion that the “agricultural revolution was the greatest crime against humanity.”
Lesson One Study Questions
One. That Sapiens is an exclusive species today emerging from several species of great apes is both “peculiar and incriminating.” Explain.
The window of history of a dominant, exclusive species called Sapiens is rather small. Further, it appears that as a species we tend to kill other species. Killing our competition appears to be part of our nature. Our tendency toward violence seems to contradict our self-aggrandizing name “homo sapien,” which means “wise man.”
Three revolutions define Sapiens as the dominant species:
Cognitive Revolution from 70,000 years ago.
Agricultural Revolution from 12,000 years ago.
Scientific Revolution from 500 years ago.
Two. What are defining characteristics of Sapiens?
We have big brains that suck 25% of body’s energy.
We walk upright on two legs, freeing our hands for fine motor skills and advanced communication.
We are born underdeveloped and as babies require a lot of nurture and protection.
We have advanced rapidly from the middle of the food chain to the top of the food chain resulting in disrupting the ecosystem and killing other species, often to the point of extinction.
We learned to use fire to alter our environment and to cook food that otherwise could not be digested efficiently.
Because we are insecure in our Top Dog Food Chain position, we are like “Banana Republic dictators” full of fear and anxiety over our apex role, and as a result we inflict cruelty, havoc, and destruction everywhere we reign. In other words, we are warmongers. Peaceful existence is the exception, not the rule (11).
Reading Sapiens reinforces the Hobbesian notion of the “barbarian throng,” which can only be controlled by fear and rule of law.
Three. What two competing theories explain the emergence of Sapiens as the exclusive species?
One is Interbreeding Theory, which states that Sapiens and Neanderthals mated and evolved into the Sapiens we are today.
The second is Replacement Theory, which states that Sapiens committed genocide against other species, including the Neanderthals. If this theory is true, all of us can be traced back to East Africa from 70,000 years ago.
Sapiens have a religious-based belief that they are exclusive to the animal kingdom, superior and apart, but in fact they were related to other species, which they wiped out:
Soloensis and Denisova were wiped out 50,000 years ago.
Neanderthals were wiped out 30,000 years ago.
Flores Island dwarf-like humans were wiped out 12,000 years ago (18).
Four. How did language cause Sapiens to become more advanced than other species?
From 70,000 to 30,000 years ago, Sapiens embarked upon the Cognitive Revolution.
They developed “supple” language to form advanced communications: storytelling to create myths and legends which created self-identity, morality systems, alliances, enemies or “The Other”; legal systems, religions, art, gossip,collective beliefs, and social cooperation.
Managing tribes led to alpha males and alpha females. This type of dominance was based on connecting with others, building coalitions, managing conflicts, and creating “brand identity” (25).
Five. How did “legal fiction” advance Sapiens to develop cities, political systems, and business enterprises?
We read one of the book’s most important passages: “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths” (26).
Religious, nationalist, and judicial values and beliefs can bind alliances between people who have never met each other. They share a common commitment based on a common value system.
This value system is based on shared beliefs. These beliefs emerge from shared stories.
“Yet none of these things exist outside the stories people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings” (27).
To make a successful business, Harari asserts that we must be “powerful sorcerers” and “tribal shamans.” He uses the example of Peugeot. Like Rolex, Mercedes, and Apple, Peugeot is an entity that does not exist as a person or a group of persons, but as a brand, an idea, a symbol.
Giving value to a symbol or a brand is unique to Sapiens, and this activity has a great influence on human affairs.
Peugeot is a “legal fiction” and a “figment of our collective imagination” (29).
Peugeot is a corporation, a legal entity, an institution that pays taxes. Individuals are not sued, but the corporation Peugeot can be sued.
Peugeot as a legal fiction is what is called a limited liability company. Before Sapiens invented the limited liability company, they were at too much risk to have their own business because they, not the legal fiction, were liable in the event of being sued. Their children could be sold into servitude, they could lose all of their possessions, and they could be put into prison simply because they were liable for any shortcomings or violations their company presented.
Such legal exposure discouraged people from innovation. In the wake of a limited liability company, however, innovation flourished.
Therefore, limited liability companies, the product of legal fiction, are a huge force in accelerating creativity, business, and innovation.
Harari observes a comparison between religion and business: Both require a story and “hocus pocus” to emerge and exist in people’s collective imagination. Religion needs stories to supports its divine claims. Businesses need the legal magic of lawyers to produce paperwork with legal codes to create a fabrication.
These fabrications, or “legal fictions,” propel human lives in large numbers and disrupt the evolution of societies.
“Telling effective stories is not easy,” the author writes, but the successful, compelling stories create immense power for those in are held in authority of these stories because “millions of strangers to cooperate and to work towards common goals” (31).
A college is not a professor, a group of professors, or a bunch of administrators. A college is an idea, a legal fiction that provides a positive narrative to the community. This positive narrative is about upward mobility and personal enrichment. If the story does not corroborate with reality in some compelling way, the legal fiction or the brand is in danger of weakening or being completely upturned into something else.
When we speak of legal fictions, we are not speaking of lies. Harari writes:
“An imagined reality is not a lie.”
Rather, an imagined reality is a shared value or belief system such as “justice for all,” “diversity in education and the workplace,” “overcoming structural inequality,” “individualism over utilitarianism,” “sacrifice to the family and community and public duty over personal pleasure and personal fulfillment” and so on.
The above are imagined realities that millions of people may share and that millions of others may reject in favor of some contradictory belief system.
Because of the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens live in a dual reality: the objective reality of the world around us and the imagined reality of value systems that are sustained by compelling stories (32).
Competing myths or stories can radically alter our value systems. For example, the author observes France in 1789 when myths supporting “divine right of kings” were supplanted by myths supporting “sovereignty of the people.”
In the United States with structural inequality getting worse and worse, American Millennials are not as friendly toward stories about American democracy and equality and therefore are not necessarily supportive of democratic ideals. Millennials may in fact reject stories that support notions of democratic ideals and equality.
Shared stories or “imagined realities” make humans cooperate toward common goals and have the effect of making Sapiens dominate all other species on the planet.
This is why we cannot overestimate the effects of “legal fictions” or “imagined realities” on the Apex Predator status of Sapiens.
One of the biggest effects of legal fictions is trade. We trade objects based on the object’s value, and the value is based on some story.
Apple computer is a story about creativity, hipster coolness, and innovation.
Rolex and Mercedes are stories about achieving the ultimate in success of “making it.”
Such stories existed tens of thousands of years ago for jewels, spices, fabrics, precious metals, etc.
Trade established the need for trust and trade stimulated world travel, further propelling Sapiens toward world domination (36).
Shared imagined realities also created culture. In fact, culture is defined as a shared imagined reality and the ways this shared imagined reality manifests itself.
Before the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens were defined by biology but after the Cognitive Revolution Sapiens were defined by imagined realities, which comprised of their culture.
Six. How does the pre-agriculture period affect Sapiens today?
Harari observes that “nearly entire history” of Sapiens is pre-agricultural society, also known as foraging society or hunting and gathering society.
This historical period defines who we are today.
After foraging, Sapiens lived for 10,000 years in Agricultural Age: farmers and herders.
For only 200 years, we have lived in Industrial Age: urban labourers and office workers.
Our gorging gene is traced to our need to eat before competing predators could eat our kill and our discovery of sweet fruit. Of course, now we’re maladapted to all the calorie-dense food produced in the Industrial Age.
We may be slighter dumbber with slightly smaller brains than foragers because foragers had to have everyday survival skills and know how to work in the environment whereas we can be lazy slobs, turn on a light, turn on a computer, flip a switch, order a pizza, and watch Netflix (49).
In many ways, foragers had a “more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle” than industrial Sapiens. In affluent societies today, people work 45 hours a week with little free time and few friends, are full of stress, and overworked to deal with declining real wages. In developing countries, people today may work 80 hours a week and are essentially work bots.
In contrast, foragers had leisure time with one another and worked maybe 3-6 hours a day (50).
Foragers had a more diverse, nutritious diet as opposed to a diet of monocrops, same crops, and same food for farmers. Today, we load up on processed food and sugar.
Of course, Harari points out, foragers often led short, brutish lives, often rife with infanticide and similar atrocities, but on balance their lives could be richer and more affluent than the lifestyles of those in Agricultural and Industrial Periods.
Seven. Why is human visitation to Australia one of the “most important events in history”?
We see how destructive Sapiens are to ecosystems living apart from human contact.
We see Sapiens as the “deadliest species in the annals of planet Earth” (64). Within a few thousand years, all of the continent’s giant animals became extinct.
Sapien colonization on any new landfront is a massive disaster. Sapiens leave mass destruction in their wake.
If time, show video:
YouTube Ted Talk Video: Harari’s “Why Humans Run the World”
Sapiens Lesson Two
Choice A:
Develop an argumentative thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates the claim that Harari’s analysis of Sapiens is tinged with the bias of misanthropy.
Choice B:
Support, refute, or complicate Harari’s assertion that the “agricultural revolution was the greatest crime against humanity.”
Study Questions for Lesson Two
One. Why does Harari call the narrative about human agriculture as a sign of progress a “fantasy” and one of the most stupid myths foisted on society?
For 2.5 million years, foragers lived relatively healthy lives. Then 10,000 years ago, Sapiens learned to “manipulate the lives of a few animal and plant species” with the belief that this domestication of plants and animals would make it easier to produce more fruits, grain, and meat.
But only select areas of the Earth have the climate for agriculture, so that the remaining parts of the Earth are dependent on a small land mass for food.
Secondly, there is no evidence that Sapiens had mastered the “secrets of nature” any better than foragers (79).
In fact, farmers worked harder, longer hours and ate a less nutritious diet than foragers (79).
Foragers were in less danger of starvation and disease (79).
Two. Who or what was guilty of manipulating Sapiens into abandoning a foraging lifestyle for agriculture?
The “culprits” were a “handful” of plants, such as wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated Sapiens. A glaring example is that in a few millennia, Sapiens spent night and day tending to wheat all over the world. Their work increased from 5 hours as foragers to three times that much as farmers. They got fat, over exhausted, and malnourished in the process.
Wheat was horrible. It was high maintenance. It was attacked by bugs and rodents. It was greedy for water. It required animal feces for nourishment.
The human body is not meant for farming. All the toil destroyed the body by damaging the spine, creating scoliosis, arthritis, hernias, and a host of other afflictions (80).
Economically, wheat was a disaster. One bad crop or more could destroy a whole family and lead to starvation and destitution.
According to Harari, farming is not a sign of intelligence and evolution. Farming is a sign of stupidity and de-evolution.
The appeal or Faustian Bargain of wheat is that it offered more “food per unit of territory” and therefore allowed massive population expansion of Sapiens (82). We read: “This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: The ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”
The Agricultural Revolution was not based on a legal fiction or a decision. The Agricultural Revolution was a “trap.” Harari calls it the “Luxury Trap.”
In this trap, babies died more often from disease and malnutrition (less milk and more gruel) but so many more babies were being born that the population continued to grow. Yet life was brutal. In farming societies, 1 in 3 children died before turning 20.
Three. Why did Sapiens continue with the brutal farming life?
Sapiens “could not fathom the full consequences of their decisions.” Likewise, most continue to use smartphones and social media without knowing the effects of these gadgets that are taking up so much of people’s time.
Further, Sapiens drank the wrong Kool-Aid from the adage “If you work harder, you would have a better life.”
Harari observes that it is human nature that once we invest time and effort into something, we resist cutting our losses; rather, we continue to slog ahead in the face of our evident self-destruction and misery. He cites the example of modern day humans working hard to pay for elaborate lifestyles where they cannot afford and suffer immense misery as they try to live beyond their means, yet they cannot or will not choose any other way of life (87).
Harari also observes that domesticating animals led to their widespread misery and we can infer our insensitivity to that misery has compromised who we are morally as human beings with souls (93). There is no comparing the misery of animals domesticated for slaughter with the quick death an animal suffers at the hands of a hunter.
In other words, we were “successful” from an evolutionary standpoint, but we were also compromised. In the words of Harari, “This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution” (96).
Farmers lived in artificial enclaves, were alienated from nature, tortured livestock, and were prone to greed. They also had to constantly fret over future weather conditions whereas foragers could live in the present. Farming created a peasant society, which was an exploited class of people that joined the exploited animals.
Eventually, a myths about agricultural society emerged that glorified “the homeland” and some all-powerful patriarchal god in order to draw tens of thousands to these farming cities and create “mass cooperative networks.” These places use myths to create an “imagined order” as a refuge from life’s chaos even though this “imagined order” may present its own chaos.
Social order is maintained through some religious code of absolute and eternal principles that also establish authority and hierarchy. For example, we can look to the Hammurabi Code, the Ten Commandments, or the Declaration of Independence to refer to “universal and eternal principles of justice,” which Harari argues are neither universal or eternal. Nor are they true. For example, he observes, we are not created; rather, we evolve. In addition, he argues we have no equality because evolution defines us by differences to sameness (109).
So Harari is arguing that a lot of societal myths are designed encourage mass cooperation. Of course, one could argue that this is a manipulation of sorts.
These myths are important because they create a social contract of cooperation, social reciprocity, and condemnation of brutality; in the absence of these myths, hordes of the human race may resort to being the “barbarian throng” that the philosopher Thomas Hobbes feared.
Five. Can myths be eradicated by bloodshed?
The short answer is no. Harari observes that the institution of slavery in the United States based on the myth of white supremacy resulted in the Civil War against forces that rejected the white supremacy myth, but even in the loss of the Civil War, many whites still proudly brandish the Confederate flag, venerate Confederate generals in the form of statues and monuments of various kinds, and hold white supremacy beliefs.
Myths live because their adherents believe they come from God or are an “indisputable law of nature” or a necessary for keeping order or some other deeply held belief that the adherents share with their tribe.
Myths imbue the culture in the form of art, fairy tales, poetry, literature, TV, movies, etc. Look at the Jim Crow Museum on Youtube and you will find how white supremacy saturated American culture with myths of white superiority.
The American myth of the masculine pioneer creates a deeply seated love for guns that does not exist in any other country.
The American myth of “follow your passion” deludes Americans into believing they will have their “dream job” if they are simply “true to themselves and their real inner passion,” when in fact only about 2% of people have a career that could be called their dream job. Most people work jobs to support themselves and their families, and they make the best of it regardless of how unpleasant the job usually is.
The myth of consumerism tells us we cannot be happy unless we work our butts off to buy lots of stuff we don’t need, and the myth works because the majority of people go down Consumer Road and often die there.
The myth of consumerism has infected our notion of marriage so that we desire to experience our spouse as a “consumer experience,” and if the experience is less than our expectations dictate, we are entitled to seek a new consumer experience in the form of a new spouse until “we get it right.”
Six. What is the key question in understanding human history in the millennia after the Agricultural Revolution?
How did humans organize in mass cooperation networks when they lacked the biological instincts, such as ants and bees, to do so?
Humans created “imagined orders and devised scripts” (131).
These scripts created artificial hierarchies or economic and social stratification with Haves and Have-Nots, lords and serfs, royalty and peasants.
Hurari breaks the system down into Superiors, Commoners, and Slaves, and this stratification was reinforced by some “divine code” or other.
People in power and privilege like to talk about “justice and equality” but only as a smokescreen in order to perpetuate their advantage over others.
Political and religious codes, Hurari observes, are canards, deceptions, BS, that the powerful create to pacify and to shut up the masses.
These codes help maintain civil order and control, but they do little to help promote equality and justice.
Social codes, Hurari observes, emphasize purity on one hand and pollution on the other. To scapegoat, marginalize, and eliminate a certain group of people (minorities, women, Jews, gays, to name a few Hurari refers to on page 138), these people are dehumanized by the code.
Hurari points out that the morally repulsive and abhorrent slave trade in America was supported by phony codes that supported ideas of white supremacy and black inferiority in order to get white people to cooperate with the evil system of slavery.
Hurari further points out that many societies created codes that designated women as a man’s property. Universally speaking, humans have made man codes or patriarchal codes because, according one theory, men are more violent and aggressive (154). But in the end, Hurari says no one theory can explain patriarchal systems.
Seven. How does Hurari’s argument above support his larger argument that the Agricultural Revolution is the greatest fraud perpetrated on the human race?
Clearly, exploiting of the less fortunate is part of the social control and mass cooperation, and Hurari makes the case these codes did not exist in forager society; rather, they flourished in the Agricultural Period.
Lesson Three
Sapiens with Ishmael
Summary of Sapiens by Terry Ortlieb
Cognitive Revolution Part I by Terry Ortlieb
Agricultural Revolution Part I by Terry Ortlieb
AR Part II by Terry Ortlieb
Harari Theory on Unification by Terry Ortlieb
Addressing charges of superficiality in Harari by Terry Ortlieb
Teacher critiques Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (with brilliance)
Lesson Three of Sapiens Using Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael
One. What was the consequence of Sapiens’ evolution to tools, social ties, making fire, and ascent to top of the food chain?
We became, in the words of Daniel Quinn, “Takers,” wreaking havoc on the ecological system.
There were just about a million of us in East Africa in the beginning. Today, we’ve eclipsed 7 billion, and we’re so overpopulated it’s hard, for example, to find housing in Los Angeles.
Sapiens’ brain power and social bonding apparently made them more cunning warriors than their different populations, such as Neanderthals, and this resulted in genocide or interbreeding or both.
Over 70,000 years Sapiens “have conquered the globe.”
From Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
And Examine Counterarguments
One. We are in captivity to mythologies and stories that shape our identity, purpose, and behavior.
Two. Fictions, as Yuval Noah Harari tells us, separate Sapiens from other creatures.
Three. We absorb these stories from “Mother Culture” from our youth so that we embrace their systems and rules without questioning it.
Four. Takers are post-Agriculture. Leavers are foragers (41). Their lives are governed by radically different fictions.
Five. “Culture is people enacting a story” (43).
Six. What is the “creation myth” that is destroying the world? That the world was created for man. Man is entitled to use the planet as a vast resource for his pleasure.
Seven. Agriculture made man the dominant species.
Eight. Agriculture gave birth to culture, to the story that that Earth is for mankind to take (73).
This story “casts mankind as the enemy of the world” (80).
Nine. Agriculture Gives Us Unbridled Man Hellbent on Destruction of the Earth
In Ishmael we read:
“Man was at last free of all those restraints that . . . The limitations of the hunting-gathering life had kept man in check for three million years. With agriculture, those limitations vanished, and his rise was meteoric. Settlement gave rise to division of labor. Division of labor gave rise to technology. With the rise of technology came trade and commerce. With trade and commerce came mathematics and literacy and science, and all the rest. The whole was under way at last, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
But in spite of man’s mastery, he cannot restrain himself in ways that will save the planet from his own ruin and self-destruction.
His blindness to his defects combined with his unbridled appetites, greed, and rapacity combine to make his own undoing.
Rebuttal:
Can we blame agriculture then? Or should we blame man’s own hubris, pride, and irrational passions?
Counterargument to Rebuttal:
Daniel Quinn and Harari might answer that though the above is true agriculture provides man the juggernaut, the rapidly-moving vehicle to accelerate his self-destructive tendencies.
Ten. Taker culture relies on the stories of religious prophets to propel its worldview and its narrative; in contrast, Leavers don’t rely on prophets.
The prophet stories tend to be hopeless in terms of life on this world: They give a “story of hopelessness and futility, a story in which there is literally nothing to be done. Man is flawed, so he keeps on screwing up what should be paradise, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You don’t know how to live so as to stop screwing up paradise, and there’s nothing you can do about that. So there you are, rushing headlong toward catastrophe, and all you can do is watch it come” (95).
Eleven. Taker Culture is Narcissistic
Takers believe they are exceptions to Laws of Nature because they are the “end product” and center of creations. All their religious writings say so. In this regard, their religious writings reinforce their childish, narcissistic view of the world and themselves. This is the view that both Daniel Quinn and Yuval Noah Harari have of religion.
Could it be that they are taking the worst of Taker society and asking us to see it as the generalization that fails to address the complexities of post-Agricultural society?
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