Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
I AVOIDED READING THIS BOOK for a long time, because I thought I knew what was in it. It was going to be an anti-religious interpretation of human history, one of those paleo-psychological analyses of human behavior that kicks subjective human experience to the curb and labels it superstition, or worse, _memes_. Humans, the paleo-psychological argument goes, are pre-programmed biological machines whose every behavior can be explained in turns of adaptations for survival. You know, the kind that says women act as they do because they evolved to have an ancient role in the family as nurturers of children; men act as they do way because they evolved into hunter-gatherers. Humans like meat too much because we evolved in an environment of food insecurity, and so instinctively seek out high-calorie nutrition and gorge ourselves to prepare for long periods of food scarcity. (Hence, obesity is a product of evolutionary programming.) Religion is an evolutionary byproduct that gave certain human tribes a competitive edge because it organizes societies that have more than 100 people in it (read the book; it’s in there) and only exists because at one time it allowed tribes that had religion to exterminate tribes that didn’t. In other words, every human behavior can be explained in terms of Darwinian evolution, and experiences like love, trust, belief, and truth are nothing but different configurations of firing neurons. (Harari calls these “figments of our imagination.”)
I don’t exactly object to paleo-psychology. It has its points. I just think it ignores too much, such as the beauty of art, the joy of love relationships, the fulfillment of raising children and sacrificing for them, the importance of having a purpose in life and a reason to live, and the possibility that God, against all odds, exists after all. Everything doesn’t have to be in the genes.
Just because an experience like love or the apprehension of truth can be associated with a specific pattern of neurotransmitter release, that doesn’t mean love or truth can’t correspond to something that is real in another way. For example, a clock is purely mechanical, but its motions correspond to a real thing outside of itself — the passage of time.
Or think of it this way. If I see an apple, what I am aware of is an impression light waves have made on my retina. What I apprehend is a pattern of firing neurons, but that does not mean the apple doesn’t exist outside of my brain. The apple exists in my brain as a chemical image, but also outside of it as well. Truth, love, and faith could also be like that. Why not? We perceive them as real, so maybe they are real.
My initial guess was about 50 percent right. I will admit that *Sapiens* has a lot in it that I didn't anticipate. Harari goes on for a long time about the evolution of economic systems and money. He talks at length about how capitalism works and how it necessarily benefits only a few, but how it evolved into being because it has competitive advantages over societies that lack it. He has much to say about the havoc humans have wreaked on the environment, and points out that a lot of it took place millennia before written history, long before the Industrial Revolution encased the earth in concrete and steel. He did not neglect to point out the significance of the written word in the acceleration of human culture. In these areas, I learned.
But at its heart, Sapiens is more or less what I thought it would be. It is a materialist interpretation of human history. Nothing exists in Harari's mind except atoms and molecules. Everything else -- beauty, justice, love, God -- are "figments of our imagination." That is, we think they exist, but they don't really. Now, he does a lot with these figments. He sees them as sparking human agriculture, economics and finance, nation-states, politics, and civilization. It’s not that he thinks these figments don’t do anything — it’s just that he sees them as the arbitrary product of evolution. They only exist because people make use of them. If evolutionary pressures had been different, maybe there wouldn’t have been human civilization, or human rights, or the Ten Commandments. And maybe, if the pressures change, human culture will morph into something unrecognizable.
He never really gets around to explaining what a *figment* is, or what *imagination* is, which is a sticky point he'd rather elide. (Real philosophers, as opposed to pop philosophers, understand that defining things is where most philosophical arguments break down.) A *figment* is still a thing, an idea that could be objective; and *imagination*, which is another word for thinking, is not something that can be easily dismissed as non-existent using the science Harari thinks is the only thing worth considering. How do you say thinking (imagination) doesn’t exist, when it takes thinking to invalidate it?
Consider, the number *1*, the letter *a*, the color *blue*, the classification of a daisy as a species of flower, or a personal promise. All of these matter to us humans just as much as scientific facts. Granted, they have no meaning in the real world, the material world. You can’t explain the letter *a* to a worm, and your pet cat is utterly unconcerned with the promise you made to your bank to pay off your car loan. But these things matter, and calling them “figments of our imagination” because there is no gene that codes for them runs the dangerous risk of dismissing things that could be real in a different way than atoms and molecules dictate. Aristotle, Kant, and Newton certainly thought they did. And so do I.
And then there is logic and reason, which Harari never bothers to mention. These are not written into our genes any more than legal justice is. Show me the evolutionary purpose of the number 5. Show me the gene that codes for the concept that it can’t be raining and not raining outside my house at the same time. If logic and reason are figments of our imagination, does that mean that what makes sense to me and is nonsense to you can be true and false at the same time? If I argue that horses have four legs and a friend says it has five because he understands the number “five” differently than I do, does that make any sense? If truth is just a figment of our imagination, the answer should be yes.
Harari makes the same mistake many scientists make. He assumes that everything can be understood in terms of science, and therefore, that literature, or philosophy, or theology are not needed to understand the world. Such *figments,* he would say, can be an inhibitor to clear thinking. They need to be called out for the fictions that they are.
It is a seductive idea. But here's the thing — the seduction has already happened and has been rejected as erroneous in philosophy. But Harari, who does not seem well-schooled in philosophy, has missed it. Harari, although he doesn’t know it, is a warmed-over positivist.
_Positivism_ was a school of philosophy that peaked in the early twentieth century. It argued that nothing can be known that can't be scientifically proven or measured. Taken by itself, it seems an interesting hypothesis. It says, let's build a world of knowledge in which everything rests on pure reason or pure fact.
But there's a problem. The statement that “nothing is true that cannot be measured or proven” is itself an unprovable statement. Put another way, you can't prove that the only things that are true are the ones we can back up with facts or measurements. For example, the laws of logic dictate that a statement cannot be true or false at the same time. Can we prove this? No. This is simply something we intuit as truth, but we can’t prove it is so.
We know that 1+1=2. But can we prove it? In every instance, everywhere, for all time? No. I can take an apple and add an apple and show you two apples. I can do the same thing with oranges, pickles, or anything else. But I can’t show you that in every instance, for all time, that 1+1=2. There are too many permutations to run through. It is simply impossible to count all the instances. We believe 1+1=2 because (1) we have never seen a violation of the case, and (2) it just seems obvious. But prove it? No.
In fact, there are some things, perhaps many things, that we commonly accept as true that we cannot prove with measurable facts. Once positivism gained a head of steam, its own adherents realized that this was a serious flaw. Some things can’t be proven, and chief among these is the statement that nothing can be known that can’t be logically proven. Positivists came to concede this argument almost 100 years ago. That is why, in philosophy, there are no longer any positivists.
But in science, there are still positivists lurking around. They include people like Harari, who think that if you can’t prove something scientifically, it cannot be true. It is a figment of our imagination. This new movement, sometimes called scientism, is recast positivism, and it has the same flaws positivism has.
The problem is that positivism is all Harari has. His argument is that most of the cultural history of humanity can be attributed to these figments of our imagination. Things like faith, money, laws, human rights. But he has done nothing to prove these figments are not real. Harari assumes they aren’t, because he is a materialist who does not believe anything exists that is not made up of atoms and molecules. He makes no effort to prove his case — he just assumes that it is so.
Beyond positivism, he has no proof that these things are imaginary. What if they are not imaginary, and human rights are a real thing? In that case, his account of human history falls apart. The development of civilization, if he is wrong, may not be imaginary constructs about myths. Maybe the figments are real. In that case, human history isn’t a manufactured story we tell ourselves. It is a process of discovery, a process of recognizing truth. In that case, Aristotle, not Harari, is correct, and Harari’s brief history of humankind is the myth Harari tells himself. That’s what I believe.
*Sapiens* turned out to be an interesting read that made me think about some things differently, but in the end, Harari's underlying assumption rests on very uncertain grounds. His book becomes, rather than the thought revolution some would have it, a collection of interesting ideas, standing quietly on a fraudulent foundation.
