CapitalistImperialistPig

A couple of broad themes emerge in Harari's book: How did humans develop the capability to cooperate in large groups of strangers? And his answer: the social constructs, which he usually calls myths, that they develop. He exhibits and discusses two, each of far reaching historical and practical importance: The Code of Hammurabi (1776 BC), and the Declaration of Independence (1776). He exhibits some samples: (209) If a superior man strikes a woman of superior class and thereby causes her to miscarry her fetus, he shall weigh and deliver ten shekels of silver for her fetus. (210) If that woman shall die, they shall kill his daughter. Sound fair? He has some problems with the Declaration too. He notes: 'Cooperation' sounds very altruistic, but it is not always voluntary and seldom egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation. The peasants paid for the burgeoning cooperation networks with their precious food...

Harari calls the agricultural revolution "History's Greatest Fraud." Wheat domesticated humans, and humans, on average, wound up a lot worse off. Hunter gatherers are exposed to the elements and to predation by large carnivores, but they have a lot of compensations. They eat a highly varied diet, and a nutritious one, because it's the diet millions of years of evolution prepared us for. Because they move constantly, they reproduce slowly, which retards population growth. Since they live in small isolated groups, without domestic animals, they are relatively free of disease. For most, a few hours of work each day suffices to provide them with food and other requirements. Most people in agricultural societies, by contrast, eat a very narrow diet, live in crowded villages, side by side with their own filth, and reproduce rapidly. Agriculture typically requires long hours of literally backbreaking labor - slipped and herniated disc's become common only after t...

Most people today recognize that we humans are currently responsible for a vast wave of extinctions and ecodestruction. They may be less familiar with our long history in that regard. Africa and Asia have been occupied by humans for a couple of million years, so the large animal inhabitants had a long time to learn to fear and avoid the new maximum predator. This was not true for the new lands Sapiens reached after what Harari calls the cognitive revolution. First on the menu was Australia. Humans reached it about 45,000 years ago after learning to cross substantial sea barriers. They were the first large terrestrial animal to get there in many millions of years. Within two thousand years of their arrival, nearly all species of large animal had been exterminated. Humans also altered the plant biosphere by setting fire to forests. This pattern has been repeated with each new land Sapiens has reached, Madagascar, the Americas, New Zealand and Pacific and Arctic islands. Sapien...

And as imagination bodies forth. The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name....Midsummer Night's Dream Act V, Scene 1. A few years ago I took a history of mankind course online from Yuval Noah Harari. His course was closely related to his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which at the time was only available in Hebrew and German. I recently bought the English version, and have started reading it. Harari is not afraid to challenge popular opinion or dogma. He refers to gods, nations, religions, human rights and corporations as imaginary entities. Not that he thinks there is anything wrong with that. On the contrary, he believes that the "cognitive revolution" that separated us from our neandertal, denisovan, erectus and other brother species of Homo extant 70,000 years ago began with our ability to create such cultural constructs as tribes, tribal totems, and tribal spirit...