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4.18 AVERAGE
4.18 AVERAGE
Revisited to review this book, i read it in april 2019 and can still vividly remember sections of it now, it was described to me when recommended as “a book that would irreversibly change how i see the things going forward”and i think this comment still holds true
informative
medium-paced
reflective
slow-paced
Become convoluted and had a number of inaccuracies.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
informative
slow-paced
esse livro redimensiona a história, organiza minhas angústias, constrói uma lente em terceira pessoa pra eu ler o mundo e, mesmo não sendo uma ficção, é fundamental para escrever um sci-fi.
e já que nada existe, eu me sinto livre.
e já que nada existe, eu me sinto livre.
The book doesn’t go into enough detail, but I guess that makes sense considering it’s the entirety of human history condensed into one book. I think it’s overly ambitious and can’t possibly be more than a pop science book. I also think a lot of the language used isn’t specific enough and many of the arguments made by the author aren’t well thought out or are simply wrong (for a guy living in Israel he sure doesnt know a lot about Judaism)
I really should have learned by now that bestsellers aren’t going to cut it for me, at least in the non-fiction genre. If you have at least a university-level knowledge of history, this book is not going to do anything for you. Most of the ‘insights’, if you can call them that, in this book are primarily the author’s own opinions on various historical trends with a few sprinkles of actual historical events thrown in for good measure. This had been on my to-read shelf for a while, so I’m glad I can finally chuck it off of there—I’m just glad I didn’t bother with ever getting a physical copy of this. Thanks, library!
Aside from the superficiality of the book, the structure of the book is rather odd. It begins with a sort of anthropological and biological bent, which is what had me interested in the first place—I enjoy reading about hominids and early evolutionary history. But this is merely the setup for the rest of the book, which deals more with culture and human endeavors generally. Amusingly enough, the beginning of the book takes great care to stress that ‘human’ will be used in a broad sense to refer to all human species, extinct ones included, throughout history—how generous! Yet, beyond the first third of the book, the term ‘human’ is used interchangeably with ‘Sapiens’ once we’ve moved past Harari’s dreaded Agricultural Age.
Other reviews have mentioned Harari’s weird hangups about the agricultural revolution, so I won’t get into that too much. I can respect a certain amount of skepticism that humans haven’t evolved to live as agriculturists and that perhaps being a hunter-gatherer is better for us physiologically or something; nonetheless, as Harari points out, we can’t turn the clocks back now. So I am not entirely sure what the fuss is, calling agriculture a ‘fraud’ or ‘scam’. I enjoy having food to eat that I don’t have to scrounge out myself… leaves me lots of time to write scathing Goodreads reviews! (Yes, I know hunter-gatherers were supposedly the image of free time, but that does seem a rather quaint modern noble savage stereotype.)
The other issue with the book is that it tends to flirt with things like biological or geographical determinism on the one hand (ugh, at one point, he even cites Jared Diamond*), but still wants to retain some semblance of human responsibility and agency on the other. I mean, compatabilism exists, sure, but you can’t have your cake and eat it two ways—there’s only one cake. Harari’s concept of ‘imagined fictions’ also aren’t that revolutionary; social constructs are a thing, and were quite commonplace even before Harari’s book—I suppose he gets the credit for making them more mainstream or something like that. There is also the issue of footnotes—first of all, I love footnotes, and I’m glad that he actually bothered to include some. However, the decision to cite certain sentences and not others seemed rather arbitrary; there were several moments where Harari claimed something that was not backed up with any citations whatsoever, and other times where he cites random inane facts that nobody would care about.
His understanding of certain concepts like religion and culture are not that nuanced, and often times reduced to quite simple portrayals. I can understand that this book is meant as a ‘brief’ overview of human history, but the resultant picture leaves one wanting, and I worry that it has imparted a quite overly simplified version of certain creeds and beliefs to readers. Harari reassures us that history can be quite complex, but his personal bent on being contrarian (e.g. “Sapiens are the most destructive species ever” or “empires were actually not that bad, really” or “agriculture is a fraud” or even Pinker-esque “we live in the most peaceful era in history”) rather makes this book more dogmatic (in the sense of doxa, as opposed to episteme).
I don’t have the time or energy to do a visceral deep-dive into the book, but there were definitely a few moments where I noticed extremely incorrect statements. I’ll highlight a few here based on my notes:
“Neanderthals could share information about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably could not tell – and revise – stories about tribal spirits. Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behaviour to rapidly changing challenges.”
Well, it’s certainly been shown that neanderthals conducted ritualistic funerary practices, so it isn’t that much of a stretch to imagine that they might have had spiritual or religious tendencies. I’m not sure why Harari discredits this entirely.
“It’s reasonable to presume, then, that the greater part of their mental, religious and emotional lives was conducted without the help of artefacts.”
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And this highlights a recurring problem in the book: Harari makes a lot of presumptions and waffling statements, lots of ‘it might be this way’.
“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.”
This seems to fly right in the face of the cyborg and transhumanist chapters towards the end of the book. The fact that humans can make artificial limbs does not make them natural limbs.
“The Egyptians, the Romans and the Aztecs did not send missionaries to foreign lands to spread the worship of Osiris, Jupiter or Huitzilopochtli (the chief Aztec god).”
Huitzilopochtli is hardly the chief Aztec god; his temple on the Templo Mayor was opposite the one to Tlaloc, let alone the fact that his cult was actually brought out of obscurity by the Aztecs.
“There is one logical way of solving the riddle [i.e., the problem of evil]: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.”
A quick look on the Wikipedia page for ‘misotheism’ shows that belief in evil gods is not unheard of. “One example is Eshu, a trickster god from Yoruba religion who deliberately fostered violence between groups of people for his own amusement, saying that "causing strife is my greatest joy." Many polytheistic deities since prehistoric times have been assumed to be neither good nor evil (or to have both qualities). Likewise, the concept of the demiurge in some versions of ancient Gnosticism is often portrayed as a generally evil entity.”
“The newcomers, such as Jainism and Buddhism in India, Daoism and Confucianism in China, and Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism in the Mediterranean basin, were characterised by their disregard of gods.”
The concept of a supreme power or Zeus or divine entity is actually central to Stoic cosmology, but sure, call it a ‘disregard of gods’, which is entirely inaccurate. Cynics and Epicureans for sure had a disregard of the gods, but for other reasons than the Buddhists and Daoists.
“At the end of the Middle Ages, slavery was almost unknown in Christian Europe.”
…What? I don’t think you need to be a historian to understand that this statement is bizarre. There was slavery in the Byzantine empire, in the Crusader states, in Christian Iberia, in Moldavia and Wallachia, in Poland, Russia, and even Christianized Scandinavia. And that’s just from the headings from the Wikipedia article on ‘Slavery in medieval Europe’; I’m not a historian of slavery but I’m sure they’d have a lot more to say on this.
I will stop there because I’ve gone through a lot of notes already and the point has been made. Suffice to say, the inaccuracies alone aren’t devastating, but the compilation of several inaccuracies in a work like this is just sloppy. Harari is a historian, but he’s trying to put his hands in every single academic pie—towards the end he even gets into neuroscience with the biochemistry of happiness! And sure, he does cite experts, but the desire to write a book that talks about every single possible subject from someone who isn’t an expert in all of those fields will inevitably results in missteps like the ones I’ve outlined. (Also, does that remind you of a certain other book? Cough, Diamond.)
There is some interesting talk at the end of happiness and viewing history through the lens of happiness; I do think this is an important element for Harari to highlight, seeing that history is so often the discipline of events and peoples and trends, rather than analyzing the impact of those things. But it isn’t developed much further than ‘this should be a thing’, and much of the book consists of the same historical methodology that he is criticizing here, with the exception of his big insight of course of ‘agriculture bad’.
There are also some laughably inaccurate characterizations of sci-fi fiction. For instance, he describes this as something that sci-fi apparently hasn’t dealt with: “…an eternally young cyborg who does not breed and has no sexuality, who can share thoughts directly with other beings, whose abilities to focus and remember are a thousand times greater than our own, and who is never angry or sad, but has emotions and desires that we cannot begin to imagine.” Conclusion: Harari has apparently not read much sci-fi at all, because those are all things I’ve read in countless sci-fi works.
To conclude, this book was not worth my time, though Harari’s sarcastic style and speedrun of history was easily digested. I’ll be kind and even say there were moments of brevity and even laughter and even a few interesting historical anecdotes in the text. It sort of reminded me of the old Crash Course videos on history, in a way. If you aren’t experienced in history and want an uncomplicated portrayal with opinions spoonfed to you, this book might be exactly up your alley and even be revolutionary. It would be a great coffee table book to prove to others that you enjoy intellectual pursuits without having to actually dive into complex and nuanced scholarly works—and sure, that isn’t going to be for everybody, so I can see why this was a bestseller.
* Also, based on other reviews I’ve read, I want to take a moment to warn any potential reader of this review that Jared Diamond is NOT a ‘better’ alternative. His famous work Guns, Germs, and Steel has long been criticized by anthropologists for adopting a very much out-of-date geographical determinist view of history. Not to mention the fact that he is an ornithologist, but somehow considers his hobby in history sufficient to write a definitive work on anthropology and history. Birds and humans are not the same, dude.
Aside from the superficiality of the book, the structure of the book is rather odd. It begins with a sort of anthropological and biological bent, which is what had me interested in the first place—I enjoy reading about hominids and early evolutionary history. But this is merely the setup for the rest of the book, which deals more with culture and human endeavors generally. Amusingly enough, the beginning of the book takes great care to stress that ‘human’ will be used in a broad sense to refer to all human species, extinct ones included, throughout history—how generous! Yet, beyond the first third of the book, the term ‘human’ is used interchangeably with ‘Sapiens’ once we’ve moved past Harari’s dreaded Agricultural Age.
Other reviews have mentioned Harari’s weird hangups about the agricultural revolution, so I won’t get into that too much. I can respect a certain amount of skepticism that humans haven’t evolved to live as agriculturists and that perhaps being a hunter-gatherer is better for us physiologically or something; nonetheless, as Harari points out, we can’t turn the clocks back now. So I am not entirely sure what the fuss is, calling agriculture a ‘fraud’ or ‘scam’. I enjoy having food to eat that I don’t have to scrounge out myself… leaves me lots of time to write scathing Goodreads reviews! (Yes, I know hunter-gatherers were supposedly the image of free time, but that does seem a rather quaint modern noble savage stereotype.)
The other issue with the book is that it tends to flirt with things like biological or geographical determinism on the one hand (ugh, at one point, he even cites Jared Diamond*), but still wants to retain some semblance of human responsibility and agency on the other. I mean, compatabilism exists, sure, but you can’t have your cake and eat it two ways—there’s only one cake. Harari’s concept of ‘imagined fictions’ also aren’t that revolutionary; social constructs are a thing, and were quite commonplace even before Harari’s book—I suppose he gets the credit for making them more mainstream or something like that. There is also the issue of footnotes—first of all, I love footnotes, and I’m glad that he actually bothered to include some. However, the decision to cite certain sentences and not others seemed rather arbitrary; there were several moments where Harari claimed something that was not backed up with any citations whatsoever, and other times where he cites random inane facts that nobody would care about.
His understanding of certain concepts like religion and culture are not that nuanced, and often times reduced to quite simple portrayals. I can understand that this book is meant as a ‘brief’ overview of human history, but the resultant picture leaves one wanting, and I worry that it has imparted a quite overly simplified version of certain creeds and beliefs to readers. Harari reassures us that history can be quite complex, but his personal bent on being contrarian (e.g. “Sapiens are the most destructive species ever” or “empires were actually not that bad, really” or “agriculture is a fraud” or even Pinker-esque “we live in the most peaceful era in history”) rather makes this book more dogmatic (in the sense of doxa, as opposed to episteme).
I don’t have the time or energy to do a visceral deep-dive into the book, but there were definitely a few moments where I noticed extremely incorrect statements. I’ll highlight a few here based on my notes:
“Neanderthals could share information about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably could not tell – and revise – stories about tribal spirits. Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behaviour to rapidly changing challenges.”
Well, it’s certainly been shown that neanderthals conducted ritualistic funerary practices, so it isn’t that much of a stretch to imagine that they might have had spiritual or religious tendencies. I’m not sure why Harari discredits this entirely.
“It’s reasonable to presume, then, that the greater part of their mental, religious and emotional lives was conducted without the help of artefacts.”
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And this highlights a recurring problem in the book: Harari makes a lot of presumptions and waffling statements, lots of ‘it might be this way’.
“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.”
This seems to fly right in the face of the cyborg and transhumanist chapters towards the end of the book. The fact that humans can make artificial limbs does not make them natural limbs.
“The Egyptians, the Romans and the Aztecs did not send missionaries to foreign lands to spread the worship of Osiris, Jupiter or Huitzilopochtli (the chief Aztec god).”
Huitzilopochtli is hardly the chief Aztec god; his temple on the Templo Mayor was opposite the one to Tlaloc, let alone the fact that his cult was actually brought out of obscurity by the Aztecs.
“There is one logical way of solving the riddle [i.e., the problem of evil]: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.”
A quick look on the Wikipedia page for ‘misotheism’ shows that belief in evil gods is not unheard of. “One example is Eshu, a trickster god from Yoruba religion who deliberately fostered violence between groups of people for his own amusement, saying that "causing strife is my greatest joy." Many polytheistic deities since prehistoric times have been assumed to be neither good nor evil (or to have both qualities). Likewise, the concept of the demiurge in some versions of ancient Gnosticism is often portrayed as a generally evil entity.”
“The newcomers, such as Jainism and Buddhism in India, Daoism and Confucianism in China, and Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism in the Mediterranean basin, were characterised by their disregard of gods.”
The concept of a supreme power or Zeus or divine entity is actually central to Stoic cosmology, but sure, call it a ‘disregard of gods’, which is entirely inaccurate. Cynics and Epicureans for sure had a disregard of the gods, but for other reasons than the Buddhists and Daoists.
“At the end of the Middle Ages, slavery was almost unknown in Christian Europe.”
…What? I don’t think you need to be a historian to understand that this statement is bizarre. There was slavery in the Byzantine empire, in the Crusader states, in Christian Iberia, in Moldavia and Wallachia, in Poland, Russia, and even Christianized Scandinavia. And that’s just from the headings from the Wikipedia article on ‘Slavery in medieval Europe’; I’m not a historian of slavery but I’m sure they’d have a lot more to say on this.
I will stop there because I’ve gone through a lot of notes already and the point has been made. Suffice to say, the inaccuracies alone aren’t devastating, but the compilation of several inaccuracies in a work like this is just sloppy. Harari is a historian, but he’s trying to put his hands in every single academic pie—towards the end he even gets into neuroscience with the biochemistry of happiness! And sure, he does cite experts, but the desire to write a book that talks about every single possible subject from someone who isn’t an expert in all of those fields will inevitably results in missteps like the ones I’ve outlined. (Also, does that remind you of a certain other book? Cough, Diamond.)
There is some interesting talk at the end of happiness and viewing history through the lens of happiness; I do think this is an important element for Harari to highlight, seeing that history is so often the discipline of events and peoples and trends, rather than analyzing the impact of those things. But it isn’t developed much further than ‘this should be a thing’, and much of the book consists of the same historical methodology that he is criticizing here, with the exception of his big insight of course of ‘agriculture bad’.
There are also some laughably inaccurate characterizations of sci-fi fiction. For instance, he describes this as something that sci-fi apparently hasn’t dealt with: “…an eternally young cyborg who does not breed and has no sexuality, who can share thoughts directly with other beings, whose abilities to focus and remember are a thousand times greater than our own, and who is never angry or sad, but has emotions and desires that we cannot begin to imagine.” Conclusion: Harari has apparently not read much sci-fi at all, because those are all things I’ve read in countless sci-fi works.
To conclude, this book was not worth my time, though Harari’s sarcastic style and speedrun of history was easily digested. I’ll be kind and even say there were moments of brevity and even laughter and even a few interesting historical anecdotes in the text. It sort of reminded me of the old Crash Course videos on history, in a way. If you aren’t experienced in history and want an uncomplicated portrayal with opinions spoonfed to you, this book might be exactly up your alley and even be revolutionary. It would be a great coffee table book to prove to others that you enjoy intellectual pursuits without having to actually dive into complex and nuanced scholarly works—and sure, that isn’t going to be for everybody, so I can see why this was a bestseller.
* Also, based on other reviews I’ve read, I want to take a moment to warn any potential reader of this review that Jared Diamond is NOT a ‘better’ alternative. His famous work Guns, Germs, and Steel has long been criticized by anthropologists for adopting a very much out-of-date geographical determinist view of history. Not to mention the fact that he is an ornithologist, but somehow considers his hobby in history sufficient to write a definitive work on anthropology and history. Birds and humans are not the same, dude.
This is literally the history of the human species up to 2014, and the opportunities that 2014 allows for. It's my history. It's your history.
Learn. Your. History!
Learn. Your. History!