Book Review — Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

During the development of mankind of the last thousand years, human has been successful in eliminating disease, war, and hunger. That has not been the case until late centuries. The author walked through the history of human starting from the ancient time where people hunt and gather fruits for life. And allow readers to experience the environment of each time people are facing with his words.

Eliminating Disease, War, and Hunger

The discover of penicillin extend human life expectancy intensively. The discover of nuclear weapon has changed war, while small country with nuclear weapon can threaten stronger countries, most conflicts are negotiated and resolved before it actually happens. Two reasons led to today’s peaceful world: one, the price to break peace is too high. And two, valuable resources are no longer material like in the past, where wars happened because people want to rob others’ off land or gold mines. Nowadays valuable resource are mostly intellectual, and war cannot rob people off their intellectual.

Farming and agriculture keeps us fed and no short of food. Farming means while domestic animals have natural urges to be active and feed their babies, human deprive them off that. Cattle live a life of serving human as their only purpose.

Fiction or real?

So what makes human the dominant all animals and species? It is the way we can build trust among strangers fast and at scale. What powers this believe behind the scene is the common believe in fictional ideas. Like money, like sports, and like nations. We share the same trust on fictional ideas to make this system work.

Money is one of those things based on common trust to work. It is backed by authorities and nations. What enable banks and the entire economy is our trust in the imaginary future. The trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world. It is also established on political power. That’s why the economy is fluctuates with politics so much.

If you watch closer, a lot of things in life is fictional. From religion to American football, they are all based on imaginary rules followed by human to make people trust the same rule and follow the same goal. Doing so we can trust complete strangers and make benefit exchanges which powers capitalism.

Capitalism and Science

For capitalism, growth never ends. It’s a cogwheel that we cannot stop. But maybe we should slow down the growth and be happy with what we already got.

Another part that fuels capitalism is science revolution. Modern science are used to create more profit which can fund more science research. And the cycle never ends. A growing area in scientific research is neural science and biotech. When the research starts from curing people, it will inevitable be used for upgrading the wealthy. While people live longer, our values will change too. Think about it. Marriage age will be postponed if people can now live up to 150 years on average.

The Modern Era

Every era has their own believes and justices. In earlier times, people believe in war, their enemies are pure evil. It is complete justice and God’ will to kill their opponents in the battle field. In the time of the Nazi’s, German people believes that Jewish people is meant to be wiped out. Just like those times, modern society believes that all of mankind is the legitimate source of political authority, and that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics. We just need to remember, this belief of all human right is equal doesn’t appear until recently. The society developed this justice over time till today.

Most people today believe in nationalism, capitalism, and human rights/individualism. To acknowledge this fact actually frees my mind from a lot of things. Because these believes are not deterministic. It is just a coincidence that we believe these in today’s society. In a different time, it would be nonsense to people.

Individualism makes us depend less on families and communities. The nation and market takes over. Marriage used to be a family decision, now it’s based on market standards. Many needs and industries derive from that: beauty, fashion, gym, bar and restaurants, to live up to the market’s ideal of beauty. It also left us as alienated individuals.

Today we are in this imaginary community of nation and consumer tribe, believing that we belongs to the same nation with millions of people we do not know personally. We believe we share common past, common interests, and common future, which is all based on imagination. We also been part of tribes of consumers who we don’t know but shares the same consumption habits and interests.

The rise of nation helps form the peace in our time. With certain oppressive dictatorships exceptions, nations’ courts and police system increased the level of security worldwide.

Final notes

Studying history helps us widen our horizons. What happened in history is not inevitable or natural. There’re some many possibilities so that the world could turn out to be arranged completely different.

True happiness is to know when to stop chasing after ephemeral feelings. Buddhism suggests that is the real root of suffering. In modern society, we are told to listen to ourselves, vote from your heart, and buy what you want. But these feelings aren’t really originated from us. Companies can engineer that process and make you feel like it’s your idea, or your “free will”.