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A review by sheisnovel
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
1.0
There was no reason for this book. It should be titled "A Brief Opinion of Humankind" since most of it is Harari's personal opinion. It's embarrassing an academic could put this to print and have this marketed as non-fiction. How this made it to the best seller's list is beyond me.
I couldn't tell if he was upset at being human or that he mixed every social science theory and put it into a blender to see what was going to come out on the other end.
It seems he really enjoyed Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" (Harari uses the phrase "imagined order"). A must read for any anthropologist or political theorist, but nation building is Anderson's term for an imagined community, and is known to have fault in not considering communities based on collective identity (ethnicity, gender, class). The emphasis for Anderson lays with language/communication which can disseminate the masses, thus leading to nation building. Totally missed here with Harari.
He writes:
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature.
*sigh*
He also writes:
a. The imagined order is embedded in the material world.
b. The imagined order shapes our desires.
c. The imagined order is inter-subjective.
*sigh*
I tried to find the credit to Anderson also, but alas I didn't see it either.
I challenge someone to write the debunking version of this, because it's calling for it.
I'm tired. This book exhausted and did not enlightened me and
I couldn't tell if he was upset at being human or that he mixed every social science theory and put it into a blender to see what was going to come out on the other end.
It seems he really enjoyed Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" (Harari uses the phrase "imagined order"). A must read for any anthropologist or political theorist, but nation building is Anderson's term for an imagined community, and is known to have fault in not considering communities based on collective identity (ethnicity, gender, class). The emphasis for Anderson lays with language/communication which can disseminate the masses, thus leading to nation building. Totally missed here with Harari.
He writes:
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature.
*sigh*
He also writes:
a. The imagined order is embedded in the material world.
b. The imagined order shapes our desires.
c. The imagined order is inter-subjective.
*sigh*
I tried to find the credit to Anderson also, but alas I didn't see it either.
I challenge someone to write the debunking version of this, because it's calling for it.
I'm tired. This book exhausted and did not enlightened me and