Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/utopianstudies.28.1.0214
ISSN2154-9648
Autores ResumoWe are such stuff / As dreams are made on.—Prospero, in Shakespeare, The Tempest (ca. 1619)Only an American could have seen in a single lifetime the growth of the whole tragedy of civilization from the primitive forest clearing. An Englishman grows up to think that the ugliness of Manchester and the slums of Liverpool have existed since the beginning of the world.—Bernard Shaw, Shaw: An Autobiography 1856–1898LUCA [Last Universal Common Ancestor], the researchers say, was the common point of origin for three great domains of life—bacteria, archaea, which are bacteria-like single-cell prokaryotes, and the eukaryotes, a domain that includes all plants and animals [including Homo sapiens].—Avaneesh Pandey, “LUCA: A 4 Billion-Year-Old Ancestor of All Living Things on Earth”Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory … [s]ocial cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It's much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat. (25–26)Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. (29)We are still animals, and our physical, emotional and cognitive abilities are still shaped by our DNA. Our societies are built from the same building blocks as Neanderthal or chimpanzee societies, and the more we examine these building blocks—sensations, emotions, family ties—the less difference we find between us and other apes. (42) How can an early twenty-first century person begin to understand his or her place in the universe? Increasingly wonderful—and ominous—answers to this question are represented by recent efforts to assemble a radically new syllabus for human history. The best such effort is by Yuval Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, in its first English edition and translation in 2014.In the past twenty years, arguably the most important writing in the fields of anthropology and history is by polymath/anthropologist/“Big Historians.” Among the most notable pioneering Big Historians are Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) and Ian Morris in Why the West Rules … for Now (2010). Remarkably parallel to Harari's books, in both length of prehistoric retrospect and schedule of publication, are Michael Tomasello's anthropologically grounded A Natural History of Human Thinking (2014) and A Natural History of Human Morality (2016). A fourth associated title is Nicholas Wade's much admired Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (2006), the key content of which is abruptly no longer current. Meanwhile, there is no hotter topic in paleohistory studies than the extraordinary revelations about Neanderthal humans, as elaborated in Jon Mooallem's January 11, 2017, New York Times Magazine feature “Neanderthals Were People, Too: New Research Shows They Shared Many Behaviors that We Long Believed to Be Uniquely Human. Why Did Science Get Them So Wrong?” Harari's narrative presents new information and electric scientific opinion—giving it as well the integrity of a far more conservative and anthropologically persuasive taxonomy. He also tells his story with an extraordinary compassion for the people and creatures who share the world that paleo-“Sapiens” transformed. And Harari writes and speaks about it with greater clarity than any historian before him.Sapiens is by now available in about thirty languages. Meanwhile, a highly readable sequel, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Hebrew 2015), reached English readers in September 2016. And Harari's stature as a celebrity historian has been cemented, for example, by a September 2016 one-and-a-half-hour YouTube interview of him (www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ1yS9JIJKs; his spoken English is as exceptionally engaging as his English translations of Sapiens and Homo Deus) and strong recommendations of Sapiens by prestigious people, including President Obama (September 4, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnPs8vnZ0I4) and an article by the icon of the information age, Bill Gates. The title of Gates's May 17, 2016, review is seductive: “How Did Humans Get Smart?” (www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Sapiens-A-Brief-History-of-Humankind). Of course, neither Harari nor Gates would claim to know the answer to this ancient question. An accurate title for the review of the book Harari has written is “When Did Humans Get Smart? And Who Did They Become?” Gates counts Harari among the most important writers of “Big History.”Yet what Harari tells us in Sapiens is at once breathtakingly erudite but not fundamentally original. Harari's achievement is to make his special thesis intelligible to a popular audience with an almost Walt Disney élan. Harari says that he studies history to identify the patterns of past events that can forecast useful possible narratives of the future. But he stops Sapiens well short of a Disney fairy-tale closure.The fossil record tells Harari that the increasingly big-brained genus Homo is at least a couple of million years old. Not necessarily contemporaneous in evolutionary synchrony and separated by long migrations over the Afro-Eurasian landmass, from elfin to bulkier than Sapiens in body size, Harari introduces Homo erectus, denisova, ergaster, rudolfensis, soloensis, floresiensis (extinct thirteen thousand years ago?), and neanderthalensis (extinct thirty thousand to forty thousand years ago). All were in the evolutionary marathon that has arrived provisionally in our twenty-first century. Hereafter, the progress will continue, hedged by robotics and cybernetics and scientifically guided, intelligent design evolution. After that for Sapiens, by far, the largest inventory of archeological evidence exists for Homo neandertalensis (the Neanderthals). Our own ancestral Homo sapiens sapiens lived in bodies that were animated with feelings adapted by evolution to the life of hunter-gatherers. Intellectually, however, there were Homers and Caesars and Jesuses/Muhammads and Copernicuses and Newtons and Einsteins among them. As late as twelve thousand years ago the total population of Sapiens on Earth was still not more than seventeen million, the current population of Cairo (53). Fortunately for forager Sapiens in Harari's anthropology, they lived in a gestation and geographic dispersal of more than one hundred thousand heterogeneously cultured tribes of rarely more than about 150 members each. Each tribe was an extended family. All members of a tribe knew each other intimately. Every individual was needed and possessed a genetic and preconscious appetite for the health and well-being of all of the tribe's members. Major violations of the trust this intimacy engendered might be severely punished by banishment or death. Even so, a family of 150 people so emotionally unified would never willingly be disbanded. About forager Sapiens cultures otherwise, “we know next to nothing” (62). Other species, Homo neanderthalensis in particular, spent more than a half-million years in similar social units with no apparent failure of zest for the life they led. Then came the most successful hominid species, Homo sapiens, which Harari postulates experienced a Cognitive Revolution seventy thousand years before the present—giving it an evolutionary advantage, the consequences of which are still being acted out in the posterity we inherit.The Cognitive Revolution enabled Sapiens to make “fictive language.” This development marks a “beginning of history” (ix). It began also the power of Sapiens in its morally fragile innocence to use language to tell stories of its real experience to tribal members who did not share the experience directly and then to tell tales of imaginary experiences, which fascinated everybody but never actually happened to anybody. For forager Sapiens the story-maker and the story were always simultaneously present—a warrant for deliberating a balance of the fiction's unstable credibility with its seduction to suspend one's disbelief. Eventually, fables accumulated that turned into the essentially impersonally authored mythologies we recognize as religions and political ideologies. Around fifty thousand years later, as the engine of the Agricultural Revolution, Sapiens uniquely among all other mammals would use this evolutionary “storytelling” power to enable its members to form political populations of virtually unlimited numbers, which would spread and spread and in this progress overturn the balance and preservation of paleoecologies that had nurtured humans for more than a million years. Such would be the predicament of the nonmigrating society many Sapiens now think of as a warm and fuzzy “farmer's life”—continued by life in forts and towns and, with the invention of writing and money, cities and empires. Neither farm nor empire was possible without deliberately hierarchical/nonegalitarian societies.In other words, after tens of thousands of years, both no longer understood to be a toy and not yet understood to be no longer safe for use by adults without catastrophic consequences, Sapiens’ language was mature in “its ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens … [could] talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled” (27): “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations” (36; italics added). Moreover, “since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths—by telling different stories” (36). “Today … our current post-industrial environment … makes us feel alienated, depressed and pressured” (45)—and afraid. To understand and try to address this anxiety, Harari articulates repeatedly in one context after another that “evolutionary psychologists argue [that] we need to delve into the hunter-gatherer world that shaped us, the world that we subconsciously still inhabit” (45). In Sapiens, Harari's hypothesis of the virtually magical power of language is presented more lucidly and compellingly than ever before in studies of Paleolithic cognition and linguistic development.Twelve thousand years ago Sapiens peoples of every cultural stripe from peaceful to warlike began with a transevolutionary stampede to buy into the charming promises—the waking dream—of the Agricultural Revolution, the Scientific and Industrial revolutions, and the current interdiction of evolution by technologies of genetic engineering (nonsupernatural “intelligent design”). Following one widely respected theory, Harari speculates that “evolution [having] moulded our minds and bodies to the life of hunter-gatherers has condemned us to living unnatural lives that cannot give full expression to our inherent inclinations and instincts, and therefore cannot satisfy our deepest yearnings. Nothing in the comfortable lives of … [a post-Paleolithic] urban middle class can approach the wild excitement and sheer joy experienced by a forager band on a successful mammoth hunt” (423).Before the Agricultural Revolution, we could have a truly wholesome paleodiet and were free of diseases later incubated and farmed along with ordered fields of wheat. Again, Harari's narrative repeatedly sounds a panhistoric sympathy for the creatures and humankind who were fated to reap this increasingly blighted posterity. It is blighted because since the end of forager Sapiens culture the direct familial egalitarian vulnerability and security that every tribal individual shared was lost, and in its place a hierarchical society that required the peonage of the many to support the royalty of the few took root and very soon required the protection and enforcement of the rule by hierarchy with police and armies. In this light, he appreciates the successes of modern scientific medicine in reducing child mortality from 33 percent to less than 5 percent: “Can anybody doubt that this made a huge contribution to the happiness not only of those children who would otherwise have died, but also of their families and friends?” (423). On the negative side: today the only remaining meaningful animal populations are on “farms”—of cattle, pigs, sheep, and chickens, and “if we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then [the triumph of] modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history” (425). So it is when “Sapiens rules the world…. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings” (27–28, 31).Harari is fascinated by the charismatic leaders Jesus and Muhammad, whose superstitionist polytheistic monotheisms have been so painfully normalized in Sapiens history. He also describes an animist, nontriumphalist, nonsupernaturalist Buddhism that is the epitome of an atheological morality. In effect, “Buddha agreed with modern biology and New Age movements that happiness is independent of external conditions,” but he also taught that one must cease the “pursuit of inner feelings” because people are not their feelings, and that the relentless pursuit of particular feelings just traps them in misery.If this is so, then our entire understanding of the history of happiness might be misguided. Maybe it isn't so important whether people's expectations are fulfilled and whether they enjoy pleasant feelings. The main question is whether people know the truth about themselves. What evidence do we have that people today understand this truth any better than ancient foragers or medieval peasants? (443; italics added)This respect for nontheistic, panorganic self-awareness may be part of how the narrative voice of Harari's Sapiens makes its appeal. It is close to a call for a society that includes the developmental experience embodied in a tribal person's vision quest.This review can mention only a sampling of the many topics Sapiens explains with new clarity: for example, the likely genocides by Sapiens of all non-sapiens humans, a predilection that persists in its schedule of genocide in the last four centuries and includes the approximate genocide of all but a small number of animal species on Earth save for cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens. There are explanations of money, the stock market, capitalism, and empire (Sapiens have lived in empires through most of their recordable history); also the antic mirroring of institutionalized religious mythology and political ideological mythology; the “childless elites” of Catholic priests, Buddhist monks, and Chinese eunuchs; and the nature of our planet's ecology (it's all natural—even when there was little or no oxygen in its atmosphere). There are dramatic cliometrics for geologic/ecological epochs, nonhuman animal populations, the history of Sapiens populations, Sapiens’ adoption of dogs, the relative paucity of what is known about Sapiens’ forager ages, and the morally sterile but sensational “achievements” of the Industrial Revolution, science, technology, and artificial intelligence: once the Cognitive Revolution separated Sapiens’ actual experience of biology from Sapiens’ “imagined realities, … cultures [each an “imagined reality”] appeared, [and] they never ceased to change and develop, and these inexorable alterations are [also] what we call ‘history’” (41). And all these commentaries are bound over to us in the spirit of a compassionate animism—wherein Harari recognizes a brotherhood of all organisms with humankind.Harari's book is exceptional in its combination of high science in popular words and simple stories. At the same time, in his master narrative also looms the spirit of science fiction's sobering trope of the awful warning message. On its present course, Sapiens will experience a catastrophe greater than that which Sapiens met in leaving its forager millennia to embrace the chimera of the Agricultural Revolution, only it is now not to be rescued by the Scientific Revolution, exactly because “most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about [and learn to trust], more than 150 human beings” (29). For larger populations, Sapiens has not been able to create societies that are not inherently self-corrupting and guaranteeing of servility for the great majority. Absent an extraordinary intervention, Sapiens appears bent on a self-genocidal destiny.Today, we go fecklessly on, paying little attention to the die-offs of the last of the big ocean animals, deforesting the continents, seeding the seas with plastic, fracking the planetary mantle, effectively transforming Earth into an environment that no human species will likely be adapted to inhabit. Having announced his tentative optimism in the final pages of Sapiens, Harari does not announce his doubts about humanity's survival this explicitly, but his evidence does.The end of Harari's book contemplates a hope for humankind. It imagines a “future” that postulates another order of Cognitive Revolution. It would confer a dimension of cognition that present Homo sapiens would likely regard as a species of divinity. It would not necessarily be limited by current temporal and spatial measurements. It would not be likely to need clocks or title deeds. We may also read his history as incantation and litany.
Referência(s)