A Response to Yuval
Harari's 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind'
By C. R. Hallpike (December 2017)
The biological title Sapiens is
intended to give the impression of a work of hard-nosed science in the
Darwinian tradition. Human history is presented as 'the next stage in the
continuum of physics to chemistry to biology,' and our ultimate destiny, and
not so very ultimate either, is to be replaced by intelligent machines. It is a
summary of human cultural and social evolution from stone age foraging bands
through the agricultural revolution, writing and the rise of the state and
large-scale societies, through the gradual process of global unification
through empires, money, and the world religions, to the scientific revolution
that began the modern world and its consequences.
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).
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 themfiction, 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.
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.
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).
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.
More unsustainable
claims do not take long to appear. It may well be true that by about 400,000
years ago Man became able to hunt large game on a regular basis, and that in
the last 100,000 years we jumped to the top of the food chain. There also seems
little doubt that after humans migrated out of Africa in the last 70,000 years
or so they exterminated large mammals in Australia, the Americas, and other
parts of the world. But part of his explanation for this is that
Having so recently
been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties
over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical
calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from
this over-hasty jump (pp 12-13).
No, we're not full of
fears and anxieties about our position in the food chain, and never have been,
because a species is not a person who can remember things like having been the
underdog of the savannah tens of millennia in the past. Knowledge of our life
on the savannah has only been vaguely reconstructed by archaeologists and
anthropologists in modern times.
He then describes us
as 'embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees' and claims that
Our societies are
built from the same building blocks as Neanderthal or chimpanzee
societies, and the more we examine these building blocks—sensations,
emotions, family ties—the less difference we find between us
and other apes. (p 42)
In fact, however, if
we study the research on the differences between human infants and chimpanzees,
such as Tomasello's Why We Co-operate (2009), thegreater we
find the differences between us and other apes. Tomasello's studies of
pre-linguistic human infants between 12-24 months and chimpanzees showed marked
differences in behaviour related to co-operation, for example. Human infants
start co-operating at about 12 months, and when 14-18 month infants were put in
situations where adult strangers needed help with problems, the infants, unlike
chimpanzees, spontaneously provided it. Even before speech develops human
infants will try to provide information to adult strangers who need it by
pointing, whereas apes do not understand informative pointing at all. Infants
also have an innate grasp of rules, in the sense of understanding that certain
sorts of activities, like games, should be done in a certain way, whereas apes
do not. 14-24 month old infants also collaborate easily in social games,
whereas chimpanzees simply refuse to take part in them, and infants can also
change and reverse roles in games. Human collaborative activity is achieved
through generalised roles that can potentially be filled by anyone, including
the self. This is the basis of the unique feature of human culture, the
institution, which is a set of practices governed by rules and norms. 'No
animal species other than humans has been observed to have anything even
vaguely resembling [social institutions]' (Tomasello 2009: xi - xii).
For Harari the great
innovation that separated us from the apes was what he calls the Cognitive
Revolution, around 70,000 years ago when we started migrating out of Africa,
which he thinks gave us the same sort of modern minds that we have now. 'At the
individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful
people in history . . . Survival in that area required superb mental abilities
from everyone' (p 55), and 'The people who carved the Stadel lion-man
some 30,000 years ago had the same physical, emotional, and intellectual
abilities we have' (p 44). Not surprisingly, then, 'We'd be able to
explain to them everything we know—from The
Adventures of Alice in Wonderland to the paradoxes of quantum physics—and
they could teach us how their people view the world' (p 23).
It's a sweet idea,
and something like this imagined meeting actually took place a few years ago
between the linguist Daniel Everett and the Piraha foragers of the Amazon
(Everett 2008). But far from being able to discuss quantum theory with them, he
found that the Piraha couldn't even count, and had no numbers of any kind, They
could teach Everett how they saw the world, which was entirely confined to the
immediate experience of the here-and-now, with no interest in past or future,
or really in anything that could not be seen or touched. They had no myths or stories,
so Alice in Wonderland would have fallen rather flat as well.
Harari's belief that
the Cognitive Revolution provided the modes of thought and reasoning that are
the basis of our scientific civilisation could not therefore be further from
the truth. We may accept that people became able to speak in sentences at this
time, and language is certainly essential to human culture, but anthropologists
and developmental psychologists, in their studies of primitive societies, have
found that their language development and their modes of thought about space,
time, classification, causality and the self have much more resemblance to
those of the Piraha than to those of members of modern industrial societies.
The Piraha are an extreme case, but the Tauade of Papua New Guinea, for
example, with whom I lived only had the idea of single and pair, and no form of
calendar or time-reckoning. Harari clearly has no knowledge at all of
cross-cultural developmental psychology, and of how modes of thought develop in
relation to the natural and socio-cultural environments. The people who carved
the Stadel lion-man around 30,000 years ago and the Piraha had the same ability
to learn as we do, which is why Piraha children can learn to
count, but these cognitive skills have to be learnt: we are not born with them
all ready to go. Cross-cultural developmental psychology has shown that the
development of the cognitive skills of modern humans actually requires literacy
and schooling, large-scale bureaucratic societies and complex urban life, the
experience of cultural differences, and familiarity with modern technology, to
name some of the more important requirements (see Hallpike 1979).
While Harari
recognises that we know almost nothing about the beliefs and social
organization of ancient foragers, he agrees that the constraints of their mode
of life would have limited them to small-scale groups based on the family
without permanent settlements (unless they could fish), and with no domestic
animals. But then he launches into some remarkable speculations about what they
might nevertheless have achieved in the tens of thousands of years between the
Cognitive Revolution and the beginning of agriculture.
These long
millennia may have witnessed [my emphasis] wars and
revolutions, ecstatic religious movements, profound philosophical theories,
incomparable artistic masterpieces . . . The foragers may have had their
all-conquering Napoleons who ruled empires half the size of Luxembourg; gifted
Beethovens who lacked symphony orchestras but brought people to tears with the
sound of their bamboo flutes . . . ' and so on (pp 68-9).
Er, no. They
couldn't. All these imagined triumphs of the hunter-gatherers would actually
have required a basis of large populations, centralized political control and
probably literate civilisation, which in turn would have required the
development of agriculture.
This is normally
regarded as, after language, the innovation that made possible the
extraordinary flowering of human abilities. As Harari correctly points out,
agriculture developed independently in a number of parts of the world, and
tribal societies based on farming became extremely common, many of them
surviving into modern times. But he describes the Agricultural Revolution as
'history's biggest fraud' because individuals in fully developed farming
societies generally had an inferior diet and harder work than foragers, and
their food supply depended on a limited range of crops that were vulnerable to
drought, pests, and invaders, unlike the more varied food resources of
hunter-gatherers. These criticisms of agriculture are, of course, quite
familiar, and up to a point legitimate. But if agriculture was really such a
bad deal why would humans ever have gone along with it? Harari begins by
suggesting that wheat and other crops actually domesticated us, and made us
work for them, rather than the other way round, but this doesn't get him very
far in explaining the persistence of agriculture, and instead he argues that
wheat offered nothing to individuals, but only to the species by enabling the
growth of larger populations. But since it is actually individuals who have to
do all the hard work of sowing and reaping this won't do either, so finally he
says that people persisted in the agricultural way of life because they were in
search of an easier life, and couldn't anticipate the full consequences of
agriculture.
Whenever they decided
to do a bit of extra work—say, to hoe the fields instead of
scattering the seeds on the surface—people thought,
"Yes, we will have to work harder, but the harvest will be so bountiful!
We won't have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to
sleep hungry." It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a
better life. That was the plan. (p 97)
It didn't work out
that way, however, because people didn't foresee population growth, poor diet
and disease. Since it would have taken many generations to realise all the
disadvantages of agriculture, by that time the population would have grown so
large that it would have been impossible to go back to foraging, so the
agricultural trap closed on Man for evermore.
The change from
foraging to agriculture as principal mode of subsistence would have actually
taken hundreds of years in many cases, and there are many important advantages
of agriculture which he ignores. It is likely that one of the primary
attractions of planting crops was that it allowed people to live in fixed
settlements for some or all of the year, for a variety of reasons. Some
favoured locations would have provided access to a plentiful supply of food or
water; a whole series of craft activities are all more conveniently carried out
in permanent or semi-permanent settlements; and these are also very convenient
for holding ceremonies such as initiations and feasts. We also know that the
food surplus from agriculture can be used in systems of exchange and
competitive feasting, for trading with different groups, and for feeding
domestic animals. A larger population also has many attractions in itself: it
permits a much richer social life than is possible for small foraging bands,
with more impressive ceremonies, a larger labour force for social
projects such as irrigation and communal buildings, and more effective defence
against local enemies. Agriculture would therefore have had many attractions
which would have been obvious to the people concerned, (see Hallpike
2008:52-65).
Agriculture with the
domestication of animals, then, was the essential foundation for the growth of
really large populations which are in turn essential for the development of
complex cultures and social systems in a new 'tribal' form of social
organization. Land ownership became closely related to kin groups of clans and
lineages, which were in turn the basis of formal systems of political authority
based on elders or chiefs who could mediate in disputes and sometimes assume
priestly functions. A whole variety of groups sprang up based not only on
kinship but on residence, work, voluntary association, age, and gender and these
group structures and hierarchical organization made it much easier to
co-ordinate the larger populations that developed (see Hallpike 2008:66-121).
This tribal organization was the essential precursor of the state, particularly
through the development of political authority which was always legitimated by
descent and religious status. By the state I mean centralised political
authority, usually a king, supported by tribute and taxes, and with a monopoly
of armed force. Although it has been estimated that only about 20% of tribal
societies in Africa, the Americas, Polynesia, New Guinea, and many parts of
Asia actually developed the state, the state was almost as important a
revolution in human history as agriculture itself, because of all the further developments
it made possible, and a large literature on the process of state formation has
developed (e.g. Claessen & Skalnik 1978, Hallpike 1986, 2008, Trigger
2003).
Unfortunately, Harari
not only knows very little about tribal societies but seems to have read almost
nothing on the literature on state formation either, which he tries to explain
as follows:
The stress of farming
[worrying about the weather, drought, floods, bandits, next year's famine and
so on] had far reaching consequences. It was the foundation [my
emphasis] of large-scale political and social systems. Sadly, the diligent
peasants almost never achieved the future economic security they so craved
through their hard work in the present. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang
up, living off the peasants' surplus food. (p 114)
The reader might well wonder how peasants worrying about next year's possible famine could possibly have been the foundation of any major political developments, and why in any case they would have meekly allowed their crops to be plundered, as well as where these rulers and elites suddenly sprang from. If Harari knew more about tribal societies he would have realised that the notion of a leader imposing his will on his followers misses the whole point of leadership in pre-state societies, which is that the leader has to attract people by having something to offer them, not by threatening them, because he has no means of doing this. To have power over people one must control something they want: food, land, personal security, status, wealth, the favour of the gods, knowledge, and so on. In other words, there must be dependency, and leaders must be seen as benefactors. In tribal societies, where people are not self-sufficient in defence, or in access to resources or to the supernatural, they will therefore be willing to accept inequality of power because they obviously get something out of war-leaders, or clan heads, or priests. Political authority in tribal society develops in particular through the kinship system, with hereditary clan heads, who are also believed to have the mystical power to bless their dependents. When states develop we always find that the legitimacy of kings is based on two factors: descent and religion. It is only after the advent of the state can power be riveted on to people by force whether they like it or not, and when it is too late for them to do anything about it except by violent rebellion.
Anyway, what was
needed here to control these much larger populations were networks of mass
co-operation, under the control of kings, and Harari takes us almost
immediately into the world of the ancient empires of Egypt, and Mesopotamia,
and Persia and China. But how were these networks of mass communication
created?
He recognises, quite
rightly, the importance of writing and mathematics in human history, and claims
they were crucial in the emergence of the state:
. . . in order to
maintain a large kingdom, mathematical data was vital. It was never enough to
legislate laws and tell stories about guardian gods. One also had to collect
taxes. In order to tax hundreds of thousands of people, it was imperative to
collect data about people's incomes and possessions; data about payments made;
data about arrears, debts and fines; data about discounts and exemptions. This
added up to millions of data bits, which had to be stored and processed (p
137).
This was beyond the
power of the human brain, however.
This mental
limitation severely constrained the size and complexity of human collectives.
When the amount of people in a particular society crossed a critical
threshold, it became necessary to store and process large amounts of
mathematical data. Since the human brain could not do it, the system collapsed.
For thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, human social networks
remained relatively small and simple (p 137).
But it is simply not
true that kingdoms need to collect vast quantities of financial data in order
to tax their subjects, or that social systems beyond a certain size collapsed
until they had invented writing and a numerical system for recording this data.
If Harari were right it would not have been possible for any kingdoms at all to
have developed in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, because there were no forms
of writing systems in this region until quite late when a few developed under
European or Islamic influence (Ethiopia was a special case.) Nevertheless,
pre-colonial Africa was actually littered with states and even empires that
functioned perfectly well without writing.
They were able to do
this because of the undemanding administrative conditions of early kingdoms.
These are based on subsistence agriculture without money and have primitive
modes of transport, unless they have easy access to river transport like Egypt,
Mesopotamia or China. They also have a simple administrative structure based on
a hierarchy of local chiefs or officials who play a prominent part in the
organization of tribute. The actual expenses of government, apart from the
royal court, are therefore relatively small, and the king may have large herds
of cattle or other stock, and large estates and labourers to work them to
provide food and beer for guests. The primary duty of a ruler is generosity to
his nobles and guests, and to his subjects in distress, not to construct vast
public works like pyramids. The basic needs of a ruler, besides food supplies,
would be prestige articles as gifts of honour, craft products, livestock, and
above all men as soldiers and labourers. In Baganda, one of the largest African
states, with a population of around two million, tax messengers were sent out
when palace resources were running low:
The goods collected
were of various kinds—livestock, cowry shells, iron
hoe-blades, and the cloths made from the bark of a fig-tree beaten out thin
[for clothing and bedding] . . . Cattle were required of superior chiefs, goats
and hoes of lesser ones, and the peasants contributed the cowry shells and
barkcloths . . . the tax-gatherers did not take a proportion of every herd but
required a fixed number of cattle from each chief. Of course the hoes and
barkcloths had to be new, and they were not made and stored up in anticipation
of the tax-collection. It took some little time to produce the required number,
and the tax-gatherers had to wait for this and then supervise the transport of
the goods and cattle, first to the saza[district] headquarters and
then to the capital. The amount due was calculated in consultation with the
subordinates of the saza chiefs who were supposed to know the
exact number of men under their authority, and they were responsible for seeing
that it was delivered (Mair 1962:163). (Manpower was recruited in basically the
same way, and in Africa generally was made up of slaves and corvée labour.)
Nor do early states
require written law codes in the style of Hamurabi, and most cases can be
settled orally by traditional local courts. No doubt, the demands of
administering early states made writing and mathematical notation very useful,
and eventually indispensable, but the kinds of financial data that Harari deems
essential for a tax system could only have been available in very advanced
societies. As we have just seen, very much simpler systems were quite viable.
(Since the Sumerian system of mathematical notation is the example that Harari
chooses to illustrate the link between taxation, writing, and mathematics, it
is a pity that he gets it wrong. The Sumerians did not, as he supposes, use a
'a combination of base 6 and base 10 numeral systems'. As is well-known, they
actually used base 60, with sub-base 10 to count from 1-59, 61-119, and so on.
[Chrisomalis 2010:241-45])
When the Agricultural
Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty
empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint-stock
companies to provide the needed social links. (p 115)
The idea of people
'inventing' religious beliefs to 'provide the needed social links' comes out of
the same rationalist stable as the claim that kings invented religious beliefs
to justify their oppression of their subjects and that capitalists did the same
to justify their exploitation of their workers. Religious belief simply doesn't
work like that. It is true, however, that what he calls universal and
missionary religions started appearing in the first millennium BC.
Their emergence was
one of the most important revolutions in history, and made a vital contribution
to the unification of humankind, much like the emergence of universal empires
and universal money (p 235)
But his chapter on
the rise of the universal religions is extremely weak, and his
explanation of monotheism, for example, goes as follows:
With time some
followers of polytheist gods became so fond of their particular patron that
they drifted away from the basic polytheist insight. They began to believe that
their god was the only god, and that He was in fact the supreme power of the
universe. Yet at the same time they continued to view Him as possessing
interests and biases, and believed that they could strike deals with Him. Thus
were born monotheist religions, whose followers beseech the supreme power of
the universe to help them recover from illness, win the lottery and gain
victory in war (p 242).
This is amateurish
speculation, and Harari does not even seem to have heard of the Axial Age. This
is the term applied by historians to the period of social turmoil that occurred
during the first millennium BC across Eurasia, of political instability,
warfare, increased commerce and the appearance of coinage, and urbanization,
that in various ways eroded traditional social values and social bonds. The
search for meaning led to a new breed of thinkers, prophets and philosophers
who searched for a more transcendent and universal authority on how we should
live and gain tranquillity of mind, that went beyond the limits of their own
society and traditions, and beyond purely material prosperity. People developed
a much more articulate awareness of the mind and the self than hitherto, and
also rejected the old pagan values of worldly success and materialism. As one
authority has put it: 'Everywhere one notices attempts to introduce greater
purity, greater justice, greater perfection, and a more universal explanation
of things' (Momigliano 1975:8-9; see also Hallpike 2008:236-65).
One of the
consequences of this new cultural order was a fundamental rethinking of
religion, so that the old pagan gods began to seem morally and intellectually
contemptible. Instead of this naively human image of the gods, said the Greek
Xenophanes, 'One God there is . . . in no way like mortal creatures either in
bodily form or in the thought of his mind . . . effectively, he wields all
things by the thought of his mind.' So we find all across the Old World the
idea developing of a rational cosmic order, a divine universal law, known to
the Greeks as Logos, to the Indians as Brahman, to the Jews as Hokhma, and to
the Chinese as Tao. This also involved the very important idea that the
essential and distinctive mental element in man is akin to the creative and
ordering element in the cosmos, of Man as microcosm in relation to the
macrocosm.
Intellectually, the
idea that the universe makes sense at some deep level, that it is governed by a
unified body of rational laws given by a divine Creator, became an essential
belief for the development of science, not only among the Greeks, but in the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. As Joseph Needham has said, '. . .
historically the question remains whether natural science could ever have reached
its present stage of development without passing through a "theological
stage" ' (Needham 1956:582).
Against this new
intellectual background it also became much easier to think of Man not as a
citizen of a particular state, but in universal terms as a moral being. There
is the growth of the idea of a common humanity which transcends the boundaries
of nation and culture and social distinctions of rank, such as slavery, so that
all good men are brothers, and the ideal condition of Man would be universal
peace (Hallpike 2016:167-218).
Harari tries to
create a distinction between 'monotheistic' religions such as Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, and 'natural law religions', without gods in which he
includes Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Stoicism, and the Epicureans. From
what I have said about the concepts of Logos, Hokhma, Brahman, and Tao it
should be clear that his two types of religion actually had much in
common. In Christianity, for example, Jesus was almost immediately identified
with the Logos. The Epicureans, however, do not belong in this group at all as
they were ancient materialist atheists who did not believe in natural law of
any kind.
One of the most obvious facts about states in history is that they all were hierarchical, dividing people into different classes with kings and nobles at the top enjoying wealth and luxury, and peasants or slaves at the bottom in poverty, men privileged over women, some ethnic groups privileged over others, and so on. Harari attributes all this to the invention of writing, and to the 'imagined orders' that sustained the large networks involved in state organization.
One of the most obvious facts about states in history is that they all were hierarchical, dividing people into different classes with kings and nobles at the top enjoying wealth and luxury, and peasants or slaves at the bottom in poverty, men privileged over women, some ethnic groups privileged over others, and so on. Harari attributes all this to the invention of writing, and to the 'imagined orders' that sustained the large networks involved in state organization.
The imagined orders
sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people
into make-believe groups, arranged in a hierarchy. The upper levels enjoyed
privileges and power, while the lower ones suffered from discrimination.
Hammurabi's Code, for example established a pecking order of superiors,
commoners and slaves. Superiors got all the good things in life. Commoners got
what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained (p 149).
But since these sorts
of hierarchies in state societies are universal in what sense can they have
simply been 'make-believe'? Doesn't this universality suggest that there were
actually laws of social and economic development at work here which require
sociological analysis? Simply saying that 'there is no justice in history' is
hardly good enough. In particular, he fails to notice two very significant
types of inequality, that of merchants in relation to the upper classes, and of
craftsmen in relation to scholars, which had major implications for the
development of civilisation, but to which I shall return later.
Harari says that
religion and empires have been two of the three great unifiers of the human
race, along with money: 'Empires were one of the main reasons for the drastic
reduction in human diversity. The imperial steamroller gradually obliterated
the unique characteristics of numerous peoples...forging out of them new and
much larger groups (p 213)' These claims have a good deal of truth but they are
also quite familiar, so I shall not go into Harari's discussion of this theme,
except for his strange notion of 'Afro-Asia', which he describes not only as an
ecological system but also as having some sort of cultural unity, e.g. 'During
the first millennium BC, religions of an altogether new kind began to spread
through Afro-Asia' (p 249). Culturally, however, sub-Saharan Africa was
entirely cut off from developments in Europe and Asia until Islamic influence
began spreading into West Africa in the eighth century AD, and has been largely
irrelevant to world history except as a source of slaves and raw materials. And
as Diamond pointed out in Guns, Germs and Steel, Africa is an
entirely distinct ecological system because it is oriented north/south, so that
it is divided by its climatic zones, whereas Eurasia is oriented east/west, so
that the same climatic zones extend all across it, and wheat and horses for
example are found all the way from Ireland to Japan.
Harari says that at
the beginning of the sixteenth century, 90% of humans still lived in 'the
single mega-world of Afro-Asia', while the rest lived in the Meso-American,
Andean, and Oceanic worlds. 'Over the next 300 years the Afro-Asian giant
swallowed up all the other worlds', by which he actually means the expanding
colonial empires of the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British. But to
refer to these nations as 'Afro-Asian' is conspicuously absurd, and the
whole concept of Afro-Asia is actually meaningless from every point of view.
The general idea of Eurasia, however, does make a good deal of
cultural as well as ecological sense, not only because it recognises the
obvious importance of Europe, but because of the cultural links that went to
and fro across it, so that the early navigators of the fifteenth century were
using the Chinese inventions of magnetic compasses, stern-post rudders, paper
for their charts, and gunpowder, and were making their voyages to find
sea-routes from Europe to China and the East Indies rather than relying on
overland trade.
Harari's next major
turning point in world history he refers to, reasonably enough, as 'The
Scientific Revolution'. Around AD 1500 'It began in western Europe, a
large peninsula on the western tip of Afro-Asia, which up till then played no
important role in history.' (272) This is a unconvincing assessment of a region
that had been the seat of the Roman Empire, the Christian Church, and Greek
science which was one of the essential foundations of the Scientific
Revolution. Harari's opinions about how this got started are even less
persuasive:
The Scientific
Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has above all been a
revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific
Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most
important question. (p 279).
This is a statement
whose truth is not immediately obvious, and he justifies it as follows:
Premodern traditions
of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted
that everything that is important to know about the world was already known.
The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past
possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and
oral traditions (pp 279-80).
These traditions may
have claimed to know all that was essential to salvation and peace of mind, but
that kind of knowledge had nothing whatsoever to do with pre-modern traditions
of science. In Europe this meant Aristotle and Greek natural
philosophy but about which, astonishingly, Harari has nothing at all to say
anywhere in his book. Apart from a willingness to admit ignorance and embrace
new knowledge, science
. . . has a common
core of research methods, which are all based on collecting empirical
observations - those we can observe with at least one of our senses - and
putting them together with the help of mathematical tools (p 283).
This is a
nineteenth-century view of what science does, whereas the really distinctive
feature of modern science is that it tests theory by experiment,
and does not simply collect empirical observations. On why
modern science developed specifically in Europe Harari has the following
explanation:
The key factor was
that the plant-seeking botanist and the colony-seeking naval officer shared a
similar mindset. Both scientist and conqueror began by admitting ignorance -
they both said 'I don't know what's out there.' They both felt compelled to go
out and make new discoveries. And they both hoped that the new knowledge would
make them masters of the world (pp 316-17).
Botany was actually
of quite minor importance in the early stages of modern science, which was
dominated by studies of terrestrial and celestial motion (Copernicus, Galileo,
Kepler, and Newton), and by chemistry which involved the revival of Greek atomism.
And Columbus, to take a useful example of 'a colony-seeking naval officer' knew
quite well what was out there. He knew that the earth is round, and concluded
that if he sailed west for long enough he would find a new route to the East
Indies. So when he reached the islands of the Caribbean he was convinced that
their inhabitants were 'Indians' and never changed his mind. I think we can
perhaps do a little better than Harari in explaining the European origin of
modern science.
Greek science was dominated
by the belief that reason, and particularly mathematics, was the true path to
knowledge and its role was to be the tutor of the senses, not to be taught by
them. The idea of performing an experiment did not really exist, and the great
Alexandrian engineer Hero, for example believed that water pressure does not
increase with depth. He defended this belief with an ingenious theory from
Archimedes, but ignored the practical experiment of taking a glass down to the
bottom of a pool where it could easily have been seen that the water rises
higher inside the glass the deeper it is taken. Aristotle's theories of
terrestrial and celestial motion, and Ptolemy's elaborate geometrical model of
the heavens, for example, were seen as triumphs of reason, and were inherited
by the medieval European universities who began a critical study of them. The
importance of Greek science, however, was not that it was right—it
contained fundamental errors—but that it presented
a coherent theoretical model of how the world worked that stimulated thought
and could be tested.
The Islamic world had
transmitted much of Greek science to medieval Europe, and Aristotle in
particular was greatly admired by Muslim scholars as 'The Philosopher'. But
under the influence of the clerics Islam eventually turned against reason and
science as dangerous to religion, and this renaissance died out. In rather
similar fashion, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian closed the philosophy schools
of Athens in 529 AD because he considered them dangerous to Christianity. But
while in the thirteenth century several Popes, for the same reason, tried to
forbid the study of Aristotle in the universities, they were ignored and in
fact by the end of the century Aquinas had been able to publish his synthesis
of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology in the Summa
Theologica.
This illustrates a
vital difference between Europe and the other imperial civilisations. Whereas
the Caliph and the Byzantine Emperor had the authority to impose intellectual
orthodoxy, in Europe the Popes could not enforce their will on society, and
neither could the secular authorities, because there were too many competing
jurisdictions—of the Holy Roman Emperor, of kings, of
free cities, of universities, and between church and state themselves. Another
vital difference was that in the other imperial civilisations there was that
basic gulf between scholars and artisans and between merchants and the rest of
the upper classes to which I referred earlier. Medieval European towns and
cities, however, were run by merchants, together with the artisans and their
guilds, so that the social status of artisans in particular was very much
higher than in other cultures, and it was possible for them to interact
socially with learned scholars. This interaction with scholars occurred in the
context of a wide range of interests that combined book-learning with practical
skills: alchemy, astrology, medicine, painting, printing, clock-making, the
magnetic compass, gunpowder and gunnery, lens-grinding for spectacles, and so
on. These skills were also intimately involved in the making of money in a
commercially dynamic society.
It is highly
significant that this interaction between scholars and artisans also occurred
in the intellectual atmosphere of 'natural magic', the belief that the entire
universe is a vast system of interrelated correspondences, a hierarchy in which
everything acts upon everything else. Alchemy and astrology were the most
important components of this tradition, but by the thirteenth century Roger
Bacon, for example, was arguing that by applying philosophy and mathematics to
the study of nature it would be possible to produce all sorts of technological
marvels such as horseless vehicles, flying machines, and glasses for seeing great
distances. It was not therefore the admission of ignorance that was truly
revolutionary, but the idea that science could be useful in
mastering nature for the benefit of Man.
By the time of
Galileo, whom Harari does not even mention, the idea that science should be
useful had become a dominant idea of Western science. Galileo was very much in
the natural magic tradition and was a prime example of a man of learning who
was equally at home in the workshop as in the library - as is well-known, when
he heard of the Dutch invention of the telescope he constructed one himself and
ground his own lenses to do so. But Galileo was also enormously important in
showing the crucial part that experiment had in the advancement of science. He
was keenly interested in Aristotle's theory of terrestrial motion and is said
to have tested the theory that heavier bodies fall faster than light ones by
dropping them from the leaning tower of Pisa. This is somewhat mythical, but he
certainly carried out detailed experiments with metal balls by rolling them
down sloping planks to discover the basic laws of acceleration. He did not
simply observe, but designed specific experiments to test theories. This is the
hall-mark of modern science, and it emerged in the circumstances that I have
just described so that reason and the evidence of the senses were thus
harmonized in the modern form of natural science. (On the origins of science
see Hallpike 2008:288-353; 396-428).
Science, then, is not
exactly Harari's strong point, so we need spend little time on the concluding
part of his book, which is taken up with speculation about where science and
technology are likely to take the human race in the next hundred years. He
concludes, however, with some plaintive remarks about our inability to plan our
future: 'we remain unsure of our goals', 'nobody knows where we are going', 'we
are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with
all that power' (465-66). He has just written a book showing that mankind's
social and cultural evolution has been a process over which no-one could have
had any control. So why does he suddenly seize upon the extraordinary fiction
that there ought to be some 'we' who could now decide where we all go next?
Even if such a 'we' existed, let us say in the form of the United Nations(!),
how could it know what to do anyway?
Throughout the book
there is also a strange vacillation between hard-nosed Darwinism and
egalitarian sentiment. On one hand Harari quite justifiably mocks the
humanists' naive belief in human rights, for not realising that these rights
are based on Christianity, and that a huge gulf has actually opened up between
the findings of science and modern liberal ideals. But on the other hand it is
rather bewildering to find him also indulging in long poetic laments about the
thousands of years of injustice, inequality and suffering imposed on the masses
by the great states and empires of history, and our cruelty to our animal
'slaves' whom we have slaughtered and exterminated in such vast numbers, so
that he concludes 'The Sapiens reign on earth has so far produced little that
we can be proud of'. But a consistent Darwinist should surely rejoice to see
such a fine demonstration of the survival of the fittest, with other species either
decimated or subjected to human rule, and the poor regularly ground under foot
in the struggle for survival. Indeed, the future looks even better for
Darwinism, with nation states themselves about to be submerged by a
mono-cultural world order, in which we ourselves are destined to be replaced by
a superhuman race of robots. It has been rightly said that
Harari's view of
culture and of ethical norms as fundamentally fictional makes impossible any
coherent moral framework for thinking about and shaping our future. And it asks
us to pretend that we are not what we know ourselves to be - thinking and
feeling subjects, moral agents with free will, and social beings whose culture
builds upon the facts of the physical world but is not limited to them (Sexton 2015:120).
Summing up the book
as a whole, one has often had to point out how surprisingly little he seems to
have read on quite a number of essential topics. It would be fair to say that
whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries
to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously. So we
should not judge Sapiens as a serious contribution to
knowledge but as 'infotainment', a publishing event to titillate its readers by
a wild intellectual ride across the landscape of history, dotted with
sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions
about human destiny. By these criteria it is a most successful book.
References
Chrisomalis, S. 2010. Numerical
Notation. A comparative history. Cambridge University Press.
Claessen, H.J.M., and Skalnik, P.
1978. The Early State. The Hague: Mouton.
Diamond, J. 1997. Guns, Germs
and Steel. London: Vintage.
Everett, D. 2008. Don't Sleep,
There Are Snakes. Life and language in the Amazonian Jungle. London:
Profile Books
Hallpike, C.R. 1979. The
Foundations of Primitive Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hallpike, C.R. 1986. The
Principles of Social Evolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hallpike, C.R. 2008. How We Got
Here. From bows and arrows to the space age. Bloomington, Indiana:
AuthorHouse.
Hallpike, C.R. 2016.
Ethical Thought in Increasingly Complex Societies. Social structure and moral
development. New York & London: Lexington Books.
Mair, L. 1962. Primitive
Government. London: Penguin.
Momigliano, A. 1975. Alien Wisdom.
The limits of Hellenization. Cambridge University Press.
Needham, J. 1956. Science and
Civilisation in China. Vol.2. Cambridge University Press.
Sexton, J. 2015. 'A reductionist
history of humankind', The New Atlantis, No. 47, 109-120.
Tomasello, M. 2009. Why We
Co-operate. MIT Press.
Trigger, B. 2003. Understanding
Ancient Civilizations. Cambridge University Press
_______________________________________
C. R. Hallpike is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University, Canada, and an Oxford D.Litt, and spent a lifetime's research living with mountain tribes in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea and writing many books about them and on morality, religion, culture and social evolution. He is the author of Do We Need God To Be Good? (2017), Ethical Thought in Increasingly Complex Societies: Social Structure and Moral Development (2016), On Primitive Society: and other forbidden topics (2011), and How We Got Here: Bows and Arrows to the Space Age (2008).
Please support New English Review.