He leaves the question hanging: one could argue, as some of his reviewers have, that Harari believes that our symbolic culture is unmoored from structural constraints and evolves arbitrarily in the drift of history or at the whims of the powerful. He notes that the evolution of cultural norms does not necessarily have to lead to increases in human happiness, but is circumspect about what does drive it. He correctly points out that cultures are never fixed, and he shares with Machiavelli, Heraclitus and myself the view that the ‘contradictions’ in a given culture are the engines of its progress (at pgs 181-184). Socialists and neoliberals can argue about whether the value of money reflects fair exchange or underlying social power, but the fact that the value of money is at its core abstract should inform both perspectives.Īnd how are these myths created and maintained? Harari is close to a description of cultural evolution: he identifies the mechanisms and the academic fields that are informing the emerging evolutionary paradigm in the social sciences, but I think his sources didn’t bring it all together for him. Rather than an individual having to know the value of hundreds of potential exchange goods, and trust in their trading partner doing the same, they only need to know the value of a shared, arbitrary medium of exchange whose value is consistent across society and ultimately backed by the power of the state. Notably, this revolution took place thousands of years before Adam Smith and the Bank of England. Exchange based on money replaced the need for everyone to know the reputation of everyone else. For as Harari points out, trust in the value of money (an essentially worthless commodity in its own right) is the quintessential example of how social institutions unlock human cooperation. My own book discusses the essentially arbitrary value of money but does not connect that to the earlier discussion of trust in abstract rules and norms. Harari’s discussion of money (Chapter 10, in his book) makes this point powerfully. Philosophy, religion, and secular law emerge and evolve because they are more or less effective in generating and sustaining large-scale human cooperation. Harari goes on to argue that myths and stories are expressed not only in art and culture, but in norms and institutions. Harari’s argument is fundamentally the same: he believes the ‘cognitive revolution’ which separated us from our Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins was our capacity to tell stories and myths which construct an imagined order. Institutions, norms, rules and laws allow individuals to trust in the predictability of the behaviour of strangers, provided their fellow citizens are also bound by the names rules and norms. So here are my takeaways: what’s worth knowing from “Sapiens”, by Yuval Noah Harari.Ĭhapter 3 of “ Politics for the New Dark Age” constructs an argument that institutions allow large-scale human societies to overcome collective action problems. Based on Klein’s interview, Harari seems a genuinely weird dude, but (like the similarly strange Nassim Nicholas Taleb) madness seems to be required in project like this. Now I also echo the critiques made by some of Harari’s reviewers that his treatment of topics outside his field of expertise is flippant and sometimes wrong some of his sources seem about ten years out of date and the second half of the book runs off the rails to become an unfortunate exercise in futurism. Harari has hit on some very powerful insights, insights shared with my own work, “ Politics for the New Dark Age”. Having finally read the book a few weeks back, I have to say I misjudged it. Harari’s book, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” has been on my to-read list for a while, but when I skimmed the first few pages in the bookstore, its out-of-date account of human evolutionary history put me off for a book supposedly about the history of our species. But listening to Ezra’s interview with historian Yuval Noah Harari (it’s the March 27 episode, for those interested), something tweaked my interest. I typically find and the merry band of policy wonks at The Weeds to be insufferably smug.
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