sapiens book review catholic

Book Review: Prof. Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens: A Graphic History’

Posted on: January 2, 2021

Consider the phenomenon known as “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”

First written in Hebrew and self-published in Israel in 2011, the book by Yuval Noah Harari found an American publisher in 2014, quickly became an international best-seller in 60 languages, and then morphed into a kind of multi-media empire called Sapienship. Its visionary author, a history professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is now a much sought-after public intellectual, and his career is managed by his husband, Itzik Yahav. When Fareed Zakaria asked Barack Obama what he was reading during an interview on CNN, the President sang the praises of “Sapiens.”

Harari is a gifted writer, and he is not afraid to traffic in the biggest of Big Ideas. He starts by reminding us that Homo sapiens , the last surviving species in the genus known as Homo, started out as unremarkable animals “with no more impact on their environment than baboons, fireflies or jellyfish.” Our unique gift among the other fauna, which emerged about 70,000 years ago, is our ability to imagine things that cannot be detected by the five senses, including God, religion, corporations, and currency, all of which he characterizes as fictions. He points out that we have risen to the top of the food chain only by exploiting and often exterminating other animals, but he predicts that humans, too, are not long for the world. All of these intriguing ideas – and many more — are explored in depth and with wit and acuity in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind.”

The latest manifestation of the “Sapiens” publishing enterprise is “ Sapiens: A Graphic History ” (Harper Perennial), a series that tells much (if not all) of the same sweeping saga in comic-book format. The first volume in the series, co-written by David Vandermeulen and inventively illustrated by Daniel Casanave, is “The Birth of Mankind.”

The first lines of the graphic novel version of “ Sapiens ” echo the original book, which starts with an alternate version of Genesis: “About 14 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang.” The cartoon character who is shown to speak these lines is a caricature of Harari himself, comfortably seated in an armchair while floating in space at the moment of creation. And he continues to play the role of kindly schoolmaster throughout the rest of the book, peering into or entering the comic-book frame and sharing the story-line with his young niece, Zoe, an endearing Indian scientist named Arya Saraswati, and Professor Saraswati’s mischievous pet dog.

It is beyond argument nowadays that the comic book can be enjoyed by adult readers, and some of them are literally so graphic that their intended readers are adults only. “Sapiens: A Graphic History,” however, is child-friendly. For example, when explaining the principle that animals from different species may mate but cannot produce fertile offspring, Harari shows us a horse and a donkey and comments that “they don’t seem to be that into each other.” While many of the illustrations and dialogue bubbles are quite frank, the book serves as a useful primer of history and science for readers of all ages.

The illustrations, too, enliven the story-telling. Casanave wittily alludes to iconic artwork ranging from “American Gothic” and “Guernica” to the Flintstones and “Planet of the Apes.” To illustrate how the discovery of fire resulted in a diet that made human beings healthier, he depicts an idealized male couple standing together over a cooking pot: “Beautiful brain! Perfect smile! Six pack abs! Flat tummy!” The imagery is always cheerful and often funny, which is sometimes at odds with the dialogue bubbles, where the brutality and bloodlust of Homo sapiens over the course of history are described with candor.

Indeed, the graphic novel version of “Sapiens” lacks none of the edginess of the original. “Tolerance isn’t a sapiens trademark,” we are reminded. “In modern times, just a small difference in skin color, dialect or religion can prompt one group of sapiens to exterminate another. Why should ancient sapiens have been any more tolerant? It may well be that when sapiens encountered Neanderthals, history saw its first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign.”

The single most subversive idea in “Sapiens” is the notion that Homo sapiens achieved a great leap forward in evolution because of our unique ability to use language to “invent stuff.” Among the examples that Harari uses is religion: “You could never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him unlimited bananas in ape heaven” is my single favorite line from “Sapiens,” and it’s in the graphic version, too, along with an illustration of a chimp descending Mount Sinai with a pair of tablets in his arms. The story is told, suitably enough, by an imaginary superhero called Doctor Fiction.

THE SINGLE MOST SUBVERSIVE IDEA IN “SAPIENS” IS THE NOTION THAT HOMO SAPIENS ACHIEVED A GREAT LEAP FORWARD IN EVOLUTION BECAUSE OF OUR UNIQUE ABILITY TO USE LANGUAGE TO “INVENT STUFF.”

“All large scale human cooperation depends on common myths that exist only in peoples’ collective imagination,” Doctor Fiction sums up. “Much of history revolves around one big question…how do you convince millions of people to believe a particular story about a god, a nation, or a limited liability company?” History proves that human beings have been perfectly willing to embrace the stories that other human being made up, and “now the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depend on the good grace of imaginary entities, almighty gods, or Google,” as Harari’s comic-book avatar puts it.

The graphic novel ends on a gloomy note. A tough cop named Lopez enlists Harari and Professor Saraswati to assist in the investigation of what she calls “the world’s worst ecological serial killers.” Says the cop: “Wherever these guys go, a whole bunch of bodies always show up.” By now, of course, we know the prime suspect is, as one character says, “all of us.”

Some of my favorite stuff in “Sapiens” is necessarily left out of the first graphic novel, but the author promises to tell the whole story in future titles in the series. In the meantime, of course, there’s always the original book to read, and I’ve gone back to my copy countless times already.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal.

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Be thinking

Sapiens ? a critical review.

I much enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind . It is a brilliant, thought-provoking odyssey through human history with its huge confident brush strokes painting enormous scenarios across time. It is massively engaging and continuously interesting. The book covers a mind-boggling 13.5 billion years of pre-history and history.

Fascinating but flawed

Harari’s pictures of the earliest men and then the foragers and agrarians are fascinating; but he breathlessly rushes on to take us past the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago, to the arrival of religion, the scientific revolution, industrialisation, the advent of artificial intelligence and the possible end of humankind. His contention is that Homo sapiens , originally an insignificant animal foraging in Africa has become ‘the terror of the ecosystem’ (p465). There is truth in this, of course, but his picture is very particular. He is best, in my view, on the modern world and his far-sighted analysis of what we are doing to ourselves struck many chords with me.

Harari is a better social scientist than philosopher, logician or historian

Nevertheless, in my opinion the book is also deeply flawed in places and Harari is a much better social scientist than he is philosopher, logician or historian. His critique of modern social ills is very refreshing and objective, his piecing together of the shards of pre-history imaginative and appear to the non-specialist convincing, but his understanding of some historical periods and documents is much less impressive – demonstrably so, in my view.

Misunderstanding the medieval world

Harari is not good on the medieval world, or at least the medieval church. He suggests that ‘premodern’ religion asserted that everything important to know about the world ‘was already known’ (p279) so there was no curiosity or expansion of learning. When does he think this view ceased? He makes it much too late. He gives the (imagined) example of a thirteenth-century peasant asking a priest about spiders and being rebuffed because such knowledge was not in the Bible. It’s hard to know where to begin in saying how wrong a concept this is.

For example, in the thirteenth century the friars, so often depicted as lazy and corrupt, were central to the learning of the universities. Moreover they were, at that time, able to teach independently of diktats from the Church. As a result, there was an exchange of scholarship between national boundaries and demanding standards were set. The Church also set up schools throughout much of Europe, so as more people became literate there was a corresponding increase in debate among the laity as well as among clerics. Huge library collections were amassed by monks who studied both religious and classical texts. Their scriptoria effectively became the research institutes of their day. One surviving example of this is the fascinating library of the Benedictines at San Marco in Florence. Commissioned in 1437, it became the first public library in Europe. This was a huge conceptual breakthrough in the dissemination of knowledge: the ordinary citizens of that great city now had access to the profoundest ideas from the classical period onwards.

And there is Thomas Aquinas. Usually considered to be the most brilliant mind of the thirteenth century, he wrote on ethics, natural law, political theory, Aristotle – the list goes on. Harari forgets to mention him – today, as all know, designated a saint in the Roman Catholic church.

Harari tends to draw too firm a dividing line between the medieval and modern eras

In fact, it was the Church – through Peter Abelard in the twelfth century– that initiated the idea that a single authority was not sufficient for the establishment of knowledge, but that disputation was required to train the mind as well as the lecture for information. This was a breakthrough in thinking that set the pattern of university life for the centuries ahead.

Or what about John of Salisbury (twelfth-century bishop), the greatest social thinker since Augustine, who bequeathed to us the function of the rule of law and the concept that even the monarch is subject to law and may be removed by the people if he breaks it. Following Cicero he rejected dogmatic claims to certainty and asserted instead that ‘probable truth’ was the best we could aim for, which had to be constantly re-evaluated and revised. Harari is wrong therefore, to state that Vespucci (1504) was the first to say ‘we don’t know’ (p321).

So, historically Harari tends to draw too firm a dividing line between the medieval and modern eras (p285). He is good on the more modern period but the divide is manifest enough without overstating the case as he does.

Short-sighted reductionism

His passage about human rights not existing in nature is exactly right, but his treatment of the US Declaration of Independence is surely completely mistaken (p123). To ‘translate’ it as he does into a statement about evolution is like ‘translating’ a rainbow into a mere geometric arc, or better, ‘translating’ a landscape into a map. Of course, neither process is a translation for to do so is an impossibility. They are what they are. The one is an inspiration, the other an analysis. It is not a matter of one being untrue, the other true – for both landscapes and maps are capable of conveying truths of different kinds.

The Declaration is an aspirational statement about the rights that ought to be accorded to each individual under the rule of law in a post-Enlightenment nation predicated upon Christian principles. Harari’s ‘translation’ is a statement about what our era (currently) believes in a post-Darwinian culture about humanity’s evolutionary drives and our ‘selfish’ genes. ‘Biology’ may tell us those things but human experience and history tell a different story: there is altruism as well as egoism; there is love as well as fear and hatred; there is morality as well as amorality. The sword is not the only way in which events and epochs have been made. Indeed, to make biology/biochemistry the final irreducible way of perceiving human behaviour, as Harari seems to do, seems tragically short-sighted.

Religious illiteracy

I’m not surprised that the book is a bestseller in a (by and large) religiously illiterate society; and though it has a lot of merit in other areas, its critique of Judaism and Christianity is not historically respectable. A mere six lines of conjecture (p242) on the emergence of monotheism from polytheism – stated as fact – is indefensible. It lacks objectivity. The great world-transforming Abrahamic religion emerging from the deserts in the early Bronze Age period (as it evidently did) with an utterly new understanding of the sole Creator God is such an enormous change. It simply can’t be ignored in this way if the educated reader is to be convinced by his reconstructions.

Harari is demonstrably very shaky in his representation of what Christians believe

Harari is also demonstrably very shaky in his representation of what Christians believe. For example, his contention that belief in the Devil makes Christianity dualistic (equal independent good and evil gods) is simply untenable. One of the very earliest biblical texts (Book of Job) shows God allowing Satan to attack Job but irresistibly restricting his methods (Job 1:12). Later, Jesus banishes Satan from individuals (Mark 1:25 et al .) and the final book of the Bible shows God destroying Satan (Revelation 20:10). Not much dualism there! It’s all, of course, a profound mystery – but it’s quite certainly not caused by dualism according to the Bible. Harari either does not know his Bible or is choosing to misrepresent it. He also doesn’t know his Thomas Hardy who believed (some of the time!) precisely what Harari says ‘nobody in history’ believed, namely that God is evil – as evidenced in a novel like Tess of the d’Urbervilles or his poem The Convergence of the Twain .

Fumbling the problem of evil

We see another instance of Harari’s lack of objectivity in the way he deals with the problem of evil (p246). He states the well-worn idea that if we posit free will as the solution, that raises the further question: if God ‘knew in advance’ (Harari’s words) that the evil would be done why did he create the doer?

I would expect a scholar to present both sides of the argument, not a populist one-sided account as Harari does

But to be objective the author would need to raise the counter-question that if there is no free will, how can there be love and how can there be truth? Automatons without free will are coerced and love cannot exist between them – by definition. Again, if everything is predetermined then so is the opinion I have just expressed. In that case it has no validity as a measure of truth – it was predetermined either by chance forces at the Big Bang or by e.g. what I ate for breakfast which dictated my mood. These are age-old problems without easy solutions but I would expect a scholar to present both sides of the argument, not a populist one-sided account as Harari does.

Moreover, in Christian theology God created both time and space, but exists outside them. So the Christian God does not know anything ‘in advance’ which is a term applicable only to those who live inside the time–space continuum i.e. humanity. The Christian philosopher Boethius saw this first in the sixth century; theologians know it – but apparently Harari doesn’t, and he should.

Ignoring the resurrection

In common with so many, Harari is unable to explain why Christianity ‘took over the mighty Roman Empire' (p243) but calls it ‘one of history’s strangest twists’. So it is, but one explanation that should be considered is the resurrection of Christ which of course would fully account for it – if people would give the idea moment’s thought. But to the best of my knowledge there is no mention of it (even as an influential belief) anywhere in the book.

Harari is unable to explain why Christianity ‘took over the mighty Roman Empire'

The standard reason given for such an absence is that ‘such things don’t happen in history: dead men don’t rise.’ But that, I fear, is logically a hopeless answer. The speaker believes it didn’t happen because they have already presupposed that God is not there to do it. Drop the presupposition, and suddenly the whole situation changes: in the light of that thought it now becomes perfectly feasible that this ‘strange twist’ was part of the divine purpose. And the funny thing is that unlike other religions, this is precisely where Christianity is most insistent on its historicity . Peter, Paul, the early church in general were convinced that Jesus was alive and they knew as well as we do that dead men are dead – and they knew better than us that us that crucified men are especially dead! The very first Christian sermons (about AD 33) were about the facts of their experience – the resurrection of Jesus – not about morals or religion or the future.

A one-sided view of the Church

Harari is right to highlight the appalling record of human warfare and there is no point trying to excuse the Church from its part in this. I have written at length about this elsewhere, as have far more able people. But do we really think that because everyone in Europe was labelled Catholic or Protestant (‘ cuius regio, eius religio ’) that the wars they fought were about religion ?

If the Church is cited as a negative influence, why, in a scholarly book, is its positive influence not also cited?

As the Cambridge Modern History points out about the appalling Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572 (which event Harari cites on p241) – the Paris mob would as soon kill Catholics as Protestants – and did. It was the result of political intrigue, sexual jealousy, human barbarism and feud. Oxford Professor Keith Ward points out ‘religious wars are a tiny minority of human conflicts’ in his book Is Religion Dangerous? If the Church is being cited as a negative influence, why, in a scholarly book, is its undeniably unrivalled positive influence over the last 300 years (not to mention all the previous years) not also cited? It’s simply not good history to ignore the good educational and social impact of the Church. Both sides need to feature. [1]

Philosophical fault-lines

I wonder too about Harari’s seeming complacency on occasion, for instance about where economic progress has brought us to. Is it acceptable for him to write (on p296): ‘When calamity strikes an entire region, worldwide relief efforts are usually successful in preventing the worst. People still suffer from numerous depredations, humiliations and poverty-related illnesses but in most countries nobody is starving to death’? Tell that to the people of Haiti seven years after the earthquake with two and a half million still, according to the UN, needing humanitarian aid. Or the people of South Sudan dying of thirst and starvation as they try to reach refugee camps. There are sixty million refugees living in appalling poverty and distress at this moment . In the light of those facts, I think Harari’s comment is rather unsatisfactory.

But there is a larger philosophical fault-line running through the whole book which constantly threatens to break its conclusions in pieces. His whole contention is predicated on the idea that humankind is merely the product of accidental evolutionary forces and this means he is blind to seeing any real intentionality in history. It has direction certainly, but he believes it is the direction of an iceberg, not a ship.

Many of his opening remarks are just unwarranted assumptions

This would be all right if he were straightforward in stating that all his arguments are predicated on the assumption that, as Bertrand Russell said, ‘Man is…but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms’ and utterly without significance. But instead, he does what a philosopher would call ‘begging the question’. That is, he assumes from the start what his contention requires him to prove – namely that mankind is on its own and without any sort of divine direction. Harari ought to have stated his assumed position at the start, but signally failed to do so. The result is that many of his opening remarks are just unwarranted assumptions based on that grandest of all assumptions: that humanity is cut adrift on a lonely planet, itself adrift in a drifting galaxy in a dying universe. Evidence please! – that humanity is ‘nothing but’ a biological entity and that human consciousness is not a pale (and fundamentally damaged) reflection of the divine mind.

The fact that (he says) Sapiens has been around for a long time, emerged by conquest of the Neanderthals and has a bloody and violent history has no logical connection to whether or not God made him (‘her’ for Harari) into a being capable of knowing right from wrong, perceiving God in the world and developing into Michelangelo, Mozart and Mother Teresa as well as into Nero and Hitler. To insist that such sublime or devilish beings are ‘no more than’ glorified apes is to ignore the elephant in the room: the small differences in our genetic codes are the very differences that may reasonably point to divine intervention – because the result is so shockingly disproportionate between ourselves and our nearest relatives. I’ve watched chimpanzees and the great apes; I love to do so (and especially adore gorillas!) but…so near, yet so so far.

Arguable assumptions

Here are a few short-hand examples of the author’s many assumptions to check out in context:

‘accidental genetic mutations…it was pure chance’ (p23)
‘no justice outside the common imagination of human beings’ (p31)
‘things that really exist’ (p35)

This last is such a huge leap of unwarranted faith. His concept of what ‘really exists’ seems to be ‘anything material’ but, in his opinion, nothing beyond this does ‘exist’ (his word). Actually, humans are mostly sure that immaterial things certainly exist: love, jealousy, rage, poverty, wealth, for starters. Dark matter also may make up most of the universe – it exists, we are told, but we can’t measure it.

His rendition of how biologists see the human condition is as one-sided as his treatment of earlier topics.

Harari’s final chapters are quite brilliant in their range and depth and hugely interesting about the possible future with the advent of AI – with or without Sapiens. His rendition, however, of how biologists see the human condition is as one-sided as his treatment of earlier topics. To say that our ‘subjective well-being is not determined by external parameters’ (p432) but by ‘serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin’ is to take the behaviourist view to the exclusion of all other biochemical/psychiatric science. Recent studies have concluded that human behaviour and well-being are the result not just of the amount of serotonin etc that we have in our bodies, but that our response to external events actually alters the amount of serotonin, dopamine etc which our bodies produce. It is two-way traffic. Our choices therefore are central. The way we behave actually affects our body chemistry, as well as vice versa. Harari is averse to using the word ‘mind’ and prefers ‘brain’ but the jury is out about whethe/how these two co-exist. There is one glance at this idea on page 458: without dismissing it he allows it precisely four lines, which for such a major ‘game-changer’ to the whole argument is a deeply worrying omission.

I liked his bold discussion about the questions of human happiness that historians and others are not asking, but was surprised by his two pages on ‘The Meaning of Life’ which I thought slightly disingenuous. ‘From a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning…Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan.’ (p438, my italics). The first sentence is fine – of course , that is true! How could it be otherwise? Science deals with how things happen, not why in terms of meaning or metaphysics . To look for meta physical answers in the physical sciences is ridiculous – they can’t be found there. It’s like looking for a sandpit in a swimming pool. Distinguished scientists like Sir Martin Rees and John Polkinghorne, at the very forefront of their profession, understand this and have written about the separation of the two ‘magisteria’. Science is about physical facts not meaning; we look to philosophy, history, religion and ethics for that. Harari’s second sentence is a non-sequitur – an inference that does not follow from the premise. God’s ‘cosmic plan’ may well be to use the universe he has set up to create beings both on earth and beyond (in time and eternity) which are glorious beyond our wildest dreams. I rather think he has already – when I consider what Sapiens has achieved.

A curiously encouraging end

I found the very last page of the book curiously encouraging:

We are more powerful than ever before…Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. (p466)

Exactly! Time then for a change. Better to live in a world where we are accountable – to a just and loving God.

Harari is a brilliant writer, but one with a very decided agenda. He is excellent within his field but spreads his net too wide till some of the mesh breaks – allowing all sorts of confusing foreign bodies to pass in and out – and muddies the water. His failure to think clearly and objectively in areas outside his field will leave educated Christians unimpressed.

[1] See my book The Evil That Men Do . (Sacristy Press, 2016)

Marcus Paul

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Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever

By Ian Parker

In 2008, Yuval Noah Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write a book derived from an undergraduate world-history class that he was teaching. Twenty lectures became twenty chapters. Harari, who had previously written about aspects of medieval and early-modern warfare—but whose intellectual appetite, since childhood, had been for all-encompassing accounts of the world—wrote in plain, short sentences that displayed no anxiety about the academic decorum of a study spanning hundreds of thousands of years. It was a history of everyone, ever. The book, published in Hebrew as “A Brief History of Humankind,” became an Israeli best-seller; then, as “ Sapiens ,” it became an international one. Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs—evolution, agriculture, economics—while watching their personal narratives, even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility. President Barack Obama, speaking to CNN in 2016, compared the book to a visit he’d made to the pyramids of Giza.

“Sapiens” has sold more than twelve million copies. “Three important revolutions shaped the course of history,” the book proposes. “The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.” Harari’s account, though broadly chronological, is built out of assured generalization and comparison rather than dense historical detail. “Sapiens” feels like a study-guide summary of an immense, unwritten text—or, less congenially, like a ride on a tour bus that never stops for a poke around the ruins. (“As in Rome, so also in ancient China: most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons.”) Harari did not invent Big History, but he updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering. He attached the time frame of aeons to the time frame of punditry—of now, and soon. His narrative of flux, of revolution after revolution, ended urgently, and perhaps conveniently, with a cliffhanger. “Sapiens,” while acknowledging that “history teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise,” suggests that our species is on the verge of a radical redesign. Thanks to advances in computing, cyborg engineering, and biological engineering, “we may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”

Harari, who is slim, soft-spoken, and relentless in his search for an audience, has spent the years since the publication of “Sapiens” in conversations about this cliffhanger. His two subsequent best-sellers—“ Homo Deus ” (2017) and “ 21 Lessons for the 21st Century ” (2018)—focus on the present and the near future. Harari now defines himself as both a historian and a philosopher. He dwells particularly on the possibility that biometric monitoring, coupled with advanced computing, will give corporations and governments access to more complete data about people—about their desires and liabilities—than people have about themselves. A life under such scrutiny, he said recently, is liable to become “one long, stressing job interview.”

If Harari weren’t always out in public, one might mistake him for a recluse. He is shyly oracular. He spends part of almost every appearance denying that he is a guru. But, when speaking at conferences where C.E.O.s meet public intellectuals, or visiting Mark Zuckerberg ’s Palo Alto house, or the Élysée Palace, in Paris, he’ll put a long finger to his chin and quietly answer questions about Neanderthals, self-driving cars, and the series finale of “Game of Thrones.” Harari’s publishing and speaking interests now occupy a staff of twelve, who work out of a sunny office in Tel Aviv, where an employee from Peru cooks everyone vegan lunches. Here, one can learn details of a scheduled graphic novel of “Sapiens”—a cartoon version of Harari, wearing wire-framed glasses and looking a little balder than in life, pops up here and there, across time and space. There are also plans for a “Sapiens” children’s book, and a multi-season “Sapiens”-inspired TV drama, covering sixty thousand years, with a script by the co-writer of Mel Gibson’s “ Apocalypto .”

Harari seldom goes to this office. He works at the home he shares with Itzik Yahav, his husband, who is also his agent and manager. They live in a village of expensive modern houses, half an hour inland from Tel Aviv, at a spot where Israel’s coastal plain is first interrupted by hills. The location gives a view of half the country and, hazily, the Mediterranean beyond. Below the house are the ruins of the once mighty Canaanite city of Gezer; Harari and Yahav walk their dog there. Their swimming pool is blob-shaped and, at night, lit a vivid mauve.

At lunchtime one day in September, Yahav drove me to the house from Tel Aviv, in a Porsche S.U.V. with a rainbow-flag sticker on its windshield. “Yuval’s unhappy with my choice of car,” Yahav said, laughing. “He thinks it’s unacceptable that a historian should have money.” While Yahav drove, he had a few conversations with colleagues, on speakerphone, about the fittings for a new Harari headquarters, in a brutalist tower block above the Dizengoff Center mall. He said, “I can’t tell you how much I need a P.A.”—a personal assistant—“but I’m not an easy person.” Asked to consider his husband’s current place in world affairs, Yahav estimated that Harari was “between Madonna and Steven Pinker .”

Harari and Yahav, both in their mid-forties, grew up near each other, but unknown to each other, in Kiryat Ata, an industrial town outside Haifa. (Yahav jokingly called it “the Israeli Chernobyl.”) Yahav’s background is less solidly middle class than his husband’s. When the two men met, nearly twenty years ago, Harari had just finished his graduate studies, and Yahav teased him: “You’ve never worked? You’ve never had to pick up a plate for your living? I was a waiter from age fifteen!” He thought of Harari as a “genius geek.” Yahav, who was then a producer in nonprofit theatre, is now known for making bold, and sometimes outlandish, demands on behalf of his husband. “Because I have only one author, I can go crazy,” he had told me. In the car, he noted that he had declined an invitation to have Harari participate in the World Economic Forum, at Davos, in 2017, because the proposed panels were “not good enough.” A year later, when Harari was offered the main stage, in a slot between Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron , Yahav accepted. His recollections of such negotiations are delivered with self-mocking charm and a low, conspiratorial laugh. He likes to say, “You don’t understand—Yuval works for me! ”

We left the highway and drove into the village. He said of Harari, “When I meet my friends, he’s usually not invited, because my friends are crazy and loud. It’s too much for him. He shuts down.” When planning receptions and dinners for Harari, Yahav follows a firm rule: “Not more than eight people.”

For more than a decade, Harari has spent several weeks each year on a silent-meditation retreat, usually in India. At home, he starts his day with an hour of meditation; in the summer, he also swims for half an hour while listening to nonfiction audiobooks aimed at the general reader. (Around the time of my visit, he was listening to a history of the Cuban Revolution, and to a study of the culture of software engineering.) He swims the breaststroke, wearing a mask, a snorkel, and “bone conduction” headphones that press against his temples, bypassing the ears.

When Yahav and I arrived at the house, Harari was working at the kitchen table, reading news stories from Ukraine, printed for him by an assistant. He had an upcoming speaking engagement in Kyiv, at an oligarch-funded conference. He was also planning a visit to the United Arab Emirates, which required some delicacy—the country has no diplomatic ties with Israel.

The house was open and airy, and featured a piano. (Yahav plays.) Harari was wearing shorts and Velcro-fastened sandals, and, as Yahav fondly observed, his swimming headphones had left imprints on his head. Harari explained to me that the device “beams sound into the skull.” Later, with my encouragement, he put on his cyborgian getup, including the snorkel, and laughed as I took a photograph, saying, “Just don’t put that in the paper, because Itzik will kill both me and you.”

Unusually for a public intellectual, Harari has drawn up a mission statement. It’s pinned on a bulletin board in the Tel Aviv office, and begins, “Keep your eyes on the ball. Focus on the main global problems facing humanity.” It also says, “Learn to distinguish reality from illusion,” and “Care about suffering.” The statement used to include “Embrace ambiguity.” This was cut, according to one of Harari’s colleagues, because it was too ambiguous.

One recent afternoon, Naama Avital, the operation’s C.E.O., and Naama Wartenburg, Harari’s chief marketing officer, were sitting with Yahav, wondering if Harari would accept a hypothetical invitation to appear on a panel with President Donald Trump.

“I think that whenever Yuval is free to say exactly what he thinks, then it’s O.K.,” Avital said.

Yahav, surprised, said that he could perhaps imagine a private meeting, “but to film it—to film Yuval with Trump?”

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“You’d have a captive audience,” Wartenburg said.

Avital agreed, noting, “There’s a politician, but then there are his supporters—and you’re talking about tens of millions of people.”

“A panel with Trump ?” Yahav asked. He later said that he had never accepted any speaking invitations from Israeli settlers in the West Bank, adding that Harari, although not a supporter of settlements, might have been inclined to say yes.

Harari has acquired a large audience in a short time, and—like the Silicon Valley leaders who admire his work—he can seem uncertain about what to do with his influence. Last summer, he was criticized when readers noticed that the Russian translation of “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” had been edited to make it more palatable to Vladimir Putin’s government. Harari had approved some of these edits, and had replaced a discussion of Russian misinformation about its 2014 annexation of Crimea with a passage about false statements made by President Trump.

Harari’s office is still largely a boutique agency serving the writing and speaking interests of one client. But, last fall, it began to brand part of its work under the heading of “Sapienship.” The office remains a for-profit enterprise, but it has taken on some of the ambitions and attributes of a think tank, or the foundation of a high-minded industrialist. Sapienship’s activities are driven by what Harari’s colleagues call his “vision.” Avital explained that some projects she was working on, such as “Sapiens”-related school workshops, didn’t rely on “everyday contact with Yuval.”

Harari’s vision takes the form of a list. “That’s something I have from students,” he told me. “They like short lists.” His proposition, often repeated, is that humanity faces three primary threats: nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption. Other issues that politicians commonly talk about—terrorism, migration, inequality, poverty—are lesser worries, if not distractions. In part because there’s little disagreement, at least in a Harari audience, about the seriousness of the nuclear and climate threats, and about how to respond to them, Harari highlights the technological one. Last September, while appearing onstage with Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s President, at an “influencers’ summit” in Tel Aviv, Harari said, in Hebrew, “Think about a situation where somebody in Beijing or San Francisco knows what every citizen in Israel is doing at every moment—all the most intimate details about every mayor, member of the Knesset, and officer in the Army, from the age of zero.” He added, “Those who will control the world in the twenty-first century are those who will control data.”

He also said that Homo sapiens would likely disappear, in a tech-driven upgrade. Harari often disputes the notion that he makes prophecies or predictions—indeed, he has claimed to do “the opposite”—but a prediction acknowledging uncertainty is still a prediction. Talking to Rivlin, Harari said, “In two hundred years, I can pretty much assure you that there will not be any more Israelis, and no Homo sapiens —there will be something else.”

“What a world,” Rivlin said. The event ended in a hug.

Afterward, Harari said of Rivlin, “He took my message to be kind of pessimistic.” Although the two men had largely spoken past each other, they were in some ways aligned. An Israeli President is a national figurehead, standing above the political fray. Harari claims a similar space. He speaks of looming mayhem but makes no proposals beyond urging international coöperation, and “focus.” A parody of Harari’s writing, in the British magazine Private Eye , included streams of questions: “What does the rise of Donald Trump signify? If you are in a falling lift, will it do any good to jump up and down like crazy? Why is liberal democracy in crisis? What is the state capital of Wyoming?”

This tentativeness at first seems odd. Harari has the ear of decision-makers; he travels the world to show them PowerPoint slides depicting mountains of trash and unemployed hordes. But, like a fiery street preacher unable to recommend one faith over another, he concludes with a policy shrug. Harari emphasizes that the public should press politicians to respond to tech threats, but when I asked what that response should be he said, “I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t think it will come from me. Even if I took three years off, and just immersed myself in some cave of books and meditation, I don’t think I would emerge with the answer.”

Harari’s reluctance to support particular political actions can be understood, in part, as instinctual conservatism and brand protection. According to “Sapiens,” progress is basically an illusion; the Agricultural Revolution was “history’s biggest fraud,” and liberal humanism is a religion no more founded on reality than any other. Harari writes, “The Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of.” In such a context, any specific policy idea is likely to seem paltry, and certainly too quotidian for a keynote speech. A policy might also turn out to be a mistake. “We are very careful, the entire team, about endorsing anything, any petition,” Harari told me.

Harari has given talks at Google and Instagram. Last spring, on a visit to California, he had dinner with, among others, Jack Dorsey , Twitter’s co-founder and C.E.O., and Chris Cox, the former chief product officer at Facebook. It’s not hard to understand Harari’s appeal to Silicon Valley executives, who would prefer to cast a furrowed gaze toward the distant future than to rewrite their privacy policies or their algorithms. (Zuckerberg rarely responds to questions about the malign influence of Facebook without speaking of his “focus” on this or that.) Harari said of tech entrepreneurs, “I don’t try intentionally to be a threat to them. I think that much of what they’re doing is also good. I think there are many things to be said for working with them as long as it’s possible, instead of viewing them as the enemy.” Harari believes that some of the social ills caused by a company like Facebook should be understood as bugs—“and, as good engineers, they are trying to fix the bugs.” Earlier, Itzik Yahav had said that he felt no unease about “visiting Mark Zuckerberg at his home, with Priscilla, and Beast, the dog,” adding, “I don’t think Mark is an evil person. And Yuval is bringing questions.”

Harari’s policy agnosticism is also connected to his focus on focus itself. The aspect of a technological dystopia that most preoccupies him—losing mental autonomy to A.I.—can be at least partly countered, in his view, by citizens cultivating greater mindfulness. He collects examples of A.I. threats. He refers, for instance, to recent research suggesting that it’s possible to measure people’s blood pressure by processing video of their faces. A government that can see your blood boiling during a leader’s speech can identify you as a dissident. Similarly, Harari has observed that, had sophisticated artificial intelligence existed when he was younger, it might have recognized his homosexuality long before he was ready to acknowledge it. Such data-driven judgments don’t need to be perfectly accurate to outperform humans. Harari argues that, though there’s no sure prophylactic against such future intrusions, people who are alert to the workings of their minds will be better able to protect themselves. Harari recently told a Ukrainian reporter, “Freedom depends to a large extent on how much you know yourself, and you need to know yourself better than, say, the government or the corporations that try to manipulate you.” In this context, to think clearly—to snorkel in the pool, back and forth—is a form of social action.

Naama Avital, in the Tel Aviv office, told me that, on social media, fans of Harari’s books tend to be “largely male, twenty-five to thirty-five.” Bill Gates is a Harari enthusiast, but the more typical reader may be a young person grateful for permission to pay more attention to his or her needs than to the needs of others. (Not long ago, one of Harari’s YouTube admirers commented, “Your books changed my life, Yuval. Just as investing in Tesla did.”)

Harari doesn’t dismiss more active forms of political engagement, particularly in the realm of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but his writing underscores the importance of equanimity. In a section of “Sapiens” titled “Know Thyself,” Harari describes how the serenity achieved through meditation can be “so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it.” “21 Lessons” includes extended commentary on the life of the Buddha, who “taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence, and nothing is completely satisfying.” Harari continues, “You can explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy, of your body, or of your mind, but you will never encounter something that does not change, that has an eternal essence, and that completely satisfies you. . . . ‘What should I do?’ ask people, and the Buddha advises, ‘Do nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ ”

Harari didn’t learn the result of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election until five weeks after the vote. He was on a retreat, in England. In Vipassana meditation, the form that Harari practices, a retreat lasts at least ten days. He sometimes does ten-day retreats in Israel, in the role of a teaching assistant. Once a year, he goes away for a month or longer. Participants at a Vipassana center may talk to one another as they arrive—while giving up their phones and books—but thereafter they’re expected to be silent, even while eating with others.

I discussed meditation with Harari one day at a restaurant in a Tel Aviv hotel. (A young doorman recognized him and thanked him for his writing.) We were joined by Itzik Yahav and the mothers of both men. Jeanette Yahav, an accountant, has sometimes worked in the Tel Aviv office. So, too, has Pnina Harari, a former office administrator; she has had the task of responding to the e-mail pouring into Harari’s Web site: poems, pieces of music, arguments for the existence of God.

Harari said of the India retreats, which take place northeast of Mumbai, “Most of the day you’re in your own cell, the size of this table.”

“Unbelievable,” Pnina Harari said.

During her son’s absences, she and Yahav stay in touch. “We speak, we console each other,” she said. She also starts a journal: “It’s like a letter to Yuval. And the last day of the meditation I send it to him.” Once back in Mumbai, he can open an e-mail containing two months of his mother’s news.

Before Itzik Yahav met Harari, through a dating site, he had some experience of Vipassana, and for years they practiced together. Yahav has now stopped. “I couldn’t keep up,” he told me. “And you’re not allowed to drink. I want to drink with friends, a glass of wine.” I later spoke to Yoram Yovell, a friend of Harari’s, who is a well-known Israeli neuroscientist and TV host. A few years ago, Yovell signed up for a ten-day retreat in India. He recalled telling himself, “This is the first time in ten years that you’re having a ten-day vacation, and you’re spending it sitting on your tush, on this little mat, inhaling and exhaling. And outside is India! ” He lasted twenty-four hours. (In 2018, two years after authorities in Myanmar began a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims, Jack Dorsey completed a ten-day Vipassana retreat in that country, and defended his visit by saying, “This was a purely personal trip for me focused on only one dimension: meditation.”)

At lunch, Pnina Harari recalled the moment when Yuval’s two older sisters reported to her that Yuval had taught himself to read: “He was three, not more than four.”

Yuval smiled. “I think more like four, five.”

She described the time he wrote a school essay, then rewrote it to make it less sophisticated. He told her that nobody would have understood the first draft.

From the age of eight, Harari attended a school for bright students, two bus rides away from his family’s house in Kiryat Ata. Yuval’s father, who died in 2010, was born on a kibbutz, and maintained a life-long skepticism about socialism; his work, as a state-employed armaments engineer, was classified. By the standards of the town, the Harari household was bourgeois and bookish.

The young Yuval had a taste for grand designs. He has said, “I promised myself that when I grew up I would not get bogged down in the mundane troubles of daily life, but would do my best to understand the big picture.” In the back yard, he spent months digging a very deep hole; it was never filled in, and sometimes became a pond. He built, out of wood blocks and Formica tiles, a huge map of Europe, on which he played war games of his own invention. Harari told me that during his adolescence, against the backdrop of the first intifada, he went through a period when he was “a kind of stereotypical right-wing nationalist.” He recalled his mind-set: “Israel as a nation is the most important thing in the world. And, obviously, we are right about everything. And the whole world doesn’t understand us and hates us. So we have to be strong and defend ourselves.” He laughed. “You know—the usual stuff.”

He deferred his compulsory military service, through a program for high-achieving students. (The service was never completed, because of an undisclosed health problem. “It wasn’t something catastrophic,” he said. “I’m still here.”) When he began college, at Hebrew University, he was younger than his peers, and he had not shared the experience of three years of activity often involving groups larger than eight. By then, Harari’s nationalist fire had dimmed. In its place, he had attempted to will himself into religious conviction—and an observant Jewish life. “I was very keen to believe,” he said. He supposed, wrongly, that “if I read enough, or think about it enough, or talk to the right people, then something will click.”

In Chapter 2 of “Sapiens,” Harari describes how, about seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens began to develop nuanced language, and thereby began to dominate other Homo species, and the world. Harari’s discussion reflects standard scholarly arguments, but he adds this gloss: during what he calls the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens became uniquely able to communicate untruths. “As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled,” he writes, referring to myths and gods. “Many animals and human species could previously say ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ ” This mental leap enabled coöperation among strangers: “Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins.”

A dog owner and her friend look at her dog which is wailing in despair.

In the schema of “Sapiens,” money is a “fiction,” as are corporations and nations. Harari uses “fiction” where another might say “social construct.” (He explained to me, “I would almost always go for the day-to-day word, even if the nuance of the professional word is a bit more accurate.”) Harari further proposes that fictions require believers , and exert power only as long as a “communal belief” in them persists. Every social construct, then, is a kind of religion: a declaration of universal human rights is not a manifesto, or a program, but the expression of a benign delusion; an activity like using money, or obeying a stoplight, is a collective fantasy, not a ritual. When I asked him if he really meant this, he laughed, and said, “It’s like the weak force in physics—which is weak, but still strong enough to hold the entire universe together!” (In fact, the weak force is responsible for the disintegration of subatomic particles.) “It’s the same with these fictions—they are strong enough to hold millions of people together.”

In his representation of how people function in society, Harari sometimes seems to be extrapolating from his personal history—from his eagerness to believe in something. When I called him a “seeker,” he gave amused, half-grudging assent.

As an undergraduate, Harari wrote a paper, for a medieval-history class, that was later published, precociously, in a peer-reviewed journal. “ The Military Role of the Frankish Turcopoles: A Reassessment ” challenged the previously held assumption that, in crusader armies, most cavalrymen were heavily armored. Harari proposed, in an argument derived from careful reading of sources across several centuries, that many were light cavalrymen. Benjamin Kedar, who taught the class, told me that the paper “was absolutely original, and really a breakthrough.” It seems to be generally agreed that, had Harari stuck solely to military history of this era, he would have become a significant figure in the field. Idan Sherer, a former student and research assistant of Harari’s who now teaches at Ben Gurion University, said, “I don’t think the prominent scholar, but definitely one of them.”

In academic prose, especially philosophy, Harari seems to have found something analogous to what he had sought in nation and in faith. “I had respect for, and belief in, very dense writing,” he recalled. “One of the first things I did when I came out, to myself, as gay—I went to the university library and took out all these books about queer theory, which were some of the densest things I’ve ever read.” He jokingly added, “It almost converted me back. It was ‘O.K., now you’re gay, so you need to be very serious about it.’ ”

In 1998, he began working toward a doctorate in history, at the University of Oxford. “He was oppressed by the grayness,” Harari’s mother recalled, at lunch. Harari agreed: “It wasn’t the greatest time of my life. It was a culture shock, it was a climate shock. I just couldn’t grasp it could be weeks and weeks and you never see the sun.” He later added, “It was a personal impasse. I’d hoped that, by studying and researching, I would understand not only the world but my life.” He went on, “All the books I’d been reading and all the philosophical discussions—not only did they not provide an answer, it seemed extremely unlikely that any answer would ever come out of this.” He told himself, “There is something fundamentally wrong in the way that I’m approaching this whole thing.”

One reason he chose to study outside Israel was to “start life anew,” as a gay man. On weekends, he went to London night clubs. (“I think I tried Ecstasy a few times,” he said.) And he made dates online. He set himself the target of having sex with at least one new partner a week, “to make up for lost time, and also understand how it works—because I was very shy.” He laughed. “Very strong discipline!” He treated each encounter as a credit in a ledger, “so if one week I had two, and then the next week there was none, I’m O.K.”

These recollections contain no regret, but, Harari said, “coming out was a kind of false enlightenment.” He explained, “I’d had this feeling— this is it . There was one big piece of the puzzle that I was missing, and this is why my life was completely fucked up.” Instead, he felt “even more miserable.”

On a dating site, Harari met Ron Merom, an Israeli software engineer. As Merom recently recalled, they began an intense e-mail correspondence “about the meaning of life, and all that.” They became friends. (In 2015, when “Sapiens” was first published in English, Merom was working for Google in California, and helped arrange for Harari to give an “Authors at Google” talk, which was posted online—an important early moment of exposure.) Merom, who now works at Facebook, has forgotten the details of their youthful exchanges, but can recall their flavor: Harari’s personal philosophy at the time was complex and dark, “even a bit violent or aggressive”—and this included his discussion of sexual relationships. As Merom put it, “It was ‘I need to conquer the world—either you win or you lose.’ ”

Merom had just begun going on meditation retreats. He told Harari, “It sounds like you’re looking for something, and Vipassana might be it.” In 2000, when Harari was midway through his thesis—a study of how Renaissance military memoirists described their experiences of war—he took a bus to a meditation center in the West of England.

Ten days later, Harari wrote to Amir Fink, a friend in Israel. Fink, who now works as an environmentalist, told me that Harari had quoted, giddily, the theme song of a “Pinocchio” TV show once beloved in Israel: “Good morning, world! I’m now freed from my strings. I’m a real boy.”

At the retreat, Harari was told that he should do nothing but notice his breath, in and out, and notice whenever his mind wandered. This, Harari has written, “was the most important thing anybody had ever told me.”

Steven Gunn, an Oxford historian and Harari’s doctoral adviser, recently recalled the moment: “I sort of did my best supervisorial thing. ‘Are you sure you’re not getting mixed up in a cult?’ So far as I could tell, he wasn’t being drawn into anything he didn’t want to be drawn into.”

On a drive with Yahav and Harari from their home to Jerusalem, I asked if it was fair to think of “Sapiens” as an attempt to transmit Buddhist principles, not just through its references to meditation—and to the possibility of finding serenity in self-knowledge—but through its narrative shape. The story of “Sapiens” echoes the Buddha’s “basic realities”: constant change; no enduring essence; the inevitability of suffering.

“Yes, to some extent,” Harari said. “It’s definitely not a conscious project. It’s not ‘O.K.! Now I believe in these three principles, and now I need to convince the world, but I can’t state it directly, because this would be a missionary thing.’ ” Rather, he said, the experience of meditation “imbues your entire thinking.”

He added, “I definitely don’t think that the solution to all the world’s problems is to convert everybody to Buddhism, or to have everybody meditating. I meditate, I know how difficult it is. There’s no chance you can get eight billion people to meditate, and, even if they try, in many cases it could backfire in a terrible way. It’s very easy to become self-absorbed, to become megalomaniacal.” He referred to Ashin Wirathu, an ultranationalist Buddhist monk in Myanmar, who has incited violence against Rohingya Muslims.

In “Sapiens,” Harari went on, part of the task had been “to show how everything is impermanent, and what we think of as eternal social structures—even family, money, religion, nations—everything is changing, nothing is eternal, everything came out of some historical process.” These were Buddhist thoughts, he said, but they were easy enough to access without Buddhism. “Maybe biology is permanent, but in society nothing is permanent,” he said. “There’s no essence, no essence to any nation. You don’t need to meditate for two hours a day to realize that.”

We drove to Hebrew University, which is atop Mt. Scopus. We walked into the humanities building, and, through an emergency exit, onto a rooftop. There was a panoramic view of the Old City and the Temple Mount. Harari recalled his return to the university, from Oxford, in 2001, during the second intifada. The university is surrounded by Arab neighborhoods that he’s never visited. In the car, he had been talking about current conditions in Israel; in recent years, he had said, “many, if not most, Israelis simply lost the motivation to solve the conflict, especially because Israel has managed to control it so efficiently.” Harari told me that, as a historian, he had to dispute the assumption that an occupation can’t last “for decades, for centuries”—it can, and new surveillance technologies can enable oppression “with almost no killing.” Harari saw no alternative other than “to wait for history to work its magic—a war, a catastrophe.” With a dry laugh, he said, “Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran—a couple of thousand people die, something . This can break the mental deadlock.”

Harari recalled a moment, in 2015, when he and Yahav had accidentally violated the eight-person rule. They had gone to a dinner that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to attend. Netanyahu was known to have read “Sapiens.” “We were told it would be very intimate,” Harari said. There were forty guests. Harari shared a few pleasantries with Netanyahu, but they had “no real exchange at all.”

Yahav interjected to suggest that, because of “Sapiens,” Netanyahu “started doing Meatless Monday.” Harari, who, like Yahav, largely avoids eating animal products, writes in “Sapiens” that “modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.” When Netanyahu announced a commitment “to fight cruelty toward animals,” friends encouraged Harari to take a little credit.

“People told me this was my greatest achievement,” Harari said. “I managed to convince Netanyahu of something! It didn’t matter what.” This assessment gives some indication of Harari’s local politics, but Yoram Yovell, his TV-presenter friend, said that he had tried and failed to persuade Harari to speak against Netanyahu publicly. Yovell said that Harari, although “vehemently against Netanyahu,” seemed to resist “jumping into the essence of life—the blood and guts of life,” adding, “I actually am disappointed with it.” Harari, who has declined invitations to write a regular column in the Israeli press, told me, “I could start making speeches, and writing, ‘Vote for this party,’ and maybe, one time, I can convince a couple of thousand people to change their vote. But then I will kind of expend my entire credit on this. I’ll be identified with one party, one camp.” He did acknowledge that he was discouraged by the choice presented by the September general election , which was then imminent: “It’s either a right-wing government or an extreme-right-wing government. There is no other serious option.”

At Hebrew University, his role is somewhat rarefied: he has negotiated his way to having no faculty responsibilities beyond teaching; he currently advises no Ph.D. students. (He said of his professional life, “I write the books and give talks. Itzik is doing basically everything else.”) Harari teaches one semester a year, fitting three classes into one day a week. His recent courses include a history of relations between humans and animals—the subject of a future Harari book, perhaps—and another called History for the Masses, on writing for a general reader. During our visit to the university, he took me to an empty lecture hall with steeply raked seating. “This is where ‘Sapiens’ originated,” he said. He noted, with mock affront, that the room attracts stray cats: “They come into class, and they grab all the attention. ‘A cat! Oh!’ ”

“It’s hard to keep a good friendship when someone’s financial status changes,” Amir Fink told me. Fink and his husband, a musicologist, have known Harari since college. “We have tried to keep his success out of it. As two couples, we meet a lot, we take vacations abroad together.” (Neither couple has children.) Fink went on, “We love to come to their place for the weekend.” They play board games, such as Settlers of Catan, and “whist—Israeli Army whist.”

Fink spoke of the scale of the operation built by Harari and Yahav. “I hope it’s sustainable,” he said. With “Sapiens,” he went on, Harari had written “a book that summarizes the world.” The books that followed were bound to be “more specific, and more political.” That is, they drew Harari away from his natural intellectual territory. “Homo Deus” derived directly from Harari’s teaching, but “21 Lessons,” Fink said, “is basically a collection of articles and responses to the present day.” He added, “It’s very hard for Yuval to keep himself as a teacher,” noting, “He becomes, I guess, what the French would call a philosophe .”

While Harari was at Oxford, he read Jared Diamond’s 1997 book, “ Guns, Germs, and Steel ,” and was dazzled by its reach, across time and place. “It was a complete life-changer,” Harari said. “You could actually write such books!” Steven Gunn, Harari’s Oxford adviser, told me that, as Harari worked on his thesis, he had to be discouraged from taking too broad a historical view: “I have memories of numerous revision meetings where I’d say, ‘Well, all this stuff about people flying helicopters in Vietnam is very interesting, and I can see why you need to read it, and think about it, to write about why people wrote the way they did about battles in Italy in the sixteenth century, but, actually, the thesis has to be nearly all about battles in Italy in the sixteenth century.’ ”

After Harari received his doctorate, he returned to Jerusalem with the idea of writing a history of the gay experience in Israel. He met with Benjamin Kedar. Kedar recently said, “I gave him a hard look—‘Yuval, do it after you get tenure.’ ”

Harari, taking this advice, stuck with his specialty. But his continued interest in comparative history was evident in the 2007 book “ Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100-1550 ,” whose anachronistic framing provoked some academic reviewers. And the following year, in “ The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000 ,” Harari was at last able to include an extended discussion of Vietnam War memoirs.

In 2003, Hebrew University initiated an undergraduate course, An Introduction to the History of the World. Such classes had begun appearing in a few history departments in the previous decade; traditional historians, Kedar said, were often disapproving, and still are: “They say, ‘You teach the French Revolution, and if somebody looks out of the window they miss the revolution’—all those jokes.” Gunn said that “Oxford makes sure people study a wide range of history, but it does it by making sure that people study a wide range of different detailed things, rather than one course that goes right across everything.”

Harari agreed to teach the world-history course, as well as one on war in the Middle Ages. He had always hated speaking to people he didn’t know. He told me that, as a younger man, “if I had to call the municipality to arrange some bureaucratic stuff, I would sit for like ten minutes by the telephone, just bringing up the courage.” (One can imagine his bliss in the dining hall at a meditation retreat—the sound of a hundred people not starting a conversation.) Even today, Harari is an unassuming lecturer: conferences sometimes give him a prizefighter’s introduction, with lights and music, at the end of which he comes warily to the podium, says, “Hello, everyone,” and sets up his laptop. Yahav described watching Harari recently freeze in front of an audience of thousands in Beijing. “I was, ‘Start moving! ’ ”

A woman sardonically reminds her exhusband of who she is and their entire sordid relationship history after he called...

As an uncomfortable young professor, Harari tended to write out his world-history lectures as a script. At one point, as part of an effort to encourage his students to listen to his words, rather than transcribe them, he began handing out copies of his notes. “They started circulating, even among students who were not in my class,” Harari recalled. “That’s when I thought, Ah, maybe there’s a book in it.” He imagined that a few students at other universities would buy the book, and perhaps “a couple of history buffs.”

This origin explains some of the qualities that distinguish “Sapiens.” Unlike many other nonfiction blockbusters, it isn’t full of catchy neologisms or cinematic scene-setting; its impact derives from a steady management of ideas, in prose that has the unhedged authority—and sometimes the inelegance—of a professor who knows how to make one or two things stick. (“An empire is a political order with two important characteristics . . .”) “Guns, Germs, and Steel” begins with a conversation between Jared Diamond and a Papua New Guinean politician; in “Sapiens,” Harari does not figure in the narrative. He told me, “Maybe it is some legacy of my study of memoirs and autobiographies. I know how dangerous it is to make personal experience your main basis for authority.”

It still astonishes Harari that readers became so excited about the early pages of “Sapiens,” which describe the coexistence of various Homo species. “I thought, This is so banal!” he told me. “There is absolutely nothing there that is new. I’m not an archeologist. I’m not a primatologist. I mean, I did zero new research. . . . It was really reading the kind of common knowledge and just presenting it in a new way.”

The Israeli edition, “A Brief History of Humankind,” was published in June, 2011. Yoram Yovell recalled that “Yuval became beloved very quickly,” and was soon a regular guest on Israeli television. “It was beautiful to see the way he handled it,” Yovell added. “He’s intellectually self-confident but truly modest.” The book initially failed to attract foreign publishers. Harari and Yahav marketed a print-on-demand English-language edition, on Amazon; this was Harari’s own translation, and it included his Gmail address on the title page, and illustrations by Yahav. It sold fewer than two thousand copies. In 2013, Yahav persuaded Deborah Harris, an Israeli literary agent whose clients include David Grossman and Tom Segev, to take on the book. She proposed edits and recommended hiring a translator. Harris recently recalled that, in the U.K., an auction of the revised manuscript began with twenty-two publishers, “and it went on and on and on,” whereas, in the U.S., “I was getting the most insulting rejections, of the kind ‘Who does this man think he is?’ ” Harvill Secker, Harari’s British publisher, paid significantly more for the book than HarperCollins did in the U.S.

Harari and Yahav recently visited Harris at her house, in Jerusalem; it also serves as her office. They had promised to cart away copies of “Sapiens”—in French, Portuguese, and Malay—that were filling up her garden shed. At her dining table, Harris recalled seeing “Sapiens” take off: “The reviews were extraordinary. And then Obama. And Gates.” (Gates, on his blog : “I’ve always been a fan of writers who try to connect the dots.”) Harris began spotting the book in airports; “Sapiens,” she said, was reaching people who read only one book a year.

There was a little carping from reviewers—“Mr. Harari’s claim that Columbus ignited the scientific revolution is surprising,” a reviewer in the Wall Street Journal wrote —but the book thrived in an environment of relative critical neglect. At the time of its publication, “Sapiens” was not reviewed in the Times , The New York Review of Books , or the Washington Post. Steven Gunn supposes that Harari, by working on a far greater time scale than the great historical popularizers of the twentieth century, like Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler, substantially protected himself from experts’ scoffing. “ ‘Sapiens’ leapfrogs that, by saying, ‘Let’s ask questions so large that nobody can say, “We think this bit’s wrong and that bit’s wrong,” ’ ” Gunn said. “Because what he’s doing is just building an extremely big model, about an extremely big process.” He went on, “Nobody’s an expert on the meaning of everything, or the history of everybody, over a long period.”

Deborah Harris did not work on “Homo Deus.” By then, Yahav had become Harari’s agent, after closely watching Harris’s process, and making a record of all her contacts. “It wasn’t even done secretly!” she said, laughing.

Yahav was sitting next to her. “He’s a maniac and a control freak,” Harris said. In her own dealings with publishers, she continued, “I have to retain a semblance of professionalism—I want these people to like me. He didn’t care! He’s never going to see these people again, and sell anything else to them. They can all think he’s horrible and ruthless.”

They discussed the controversy over the pliant Russian translation of “21 Lessons.” Harris said that, if she had been involved, “that would not have happened.”

Yahav, who for the first time looked a little pained, asked Harris if she would have refused all of the Russian publisher’s requests for changes.

“Russia, you don’t fuck around,” she said. “You don’t give them an inch.” She asked Harari if he would do things differently now.

“Hmm,” he said. Harari drew a distinction between changes he had approved and those he had not: for example, he hadn’t known that, in the dedication, “husband” would become “partner.” In public remarks, Harari has defended allowing some changes as an acceptable compromise when trying to reach a Russian audience. He has also said, “I’m not willing to write any lies. And I’m not willing to add any praise to the regime.”

They discussed the impending “Sapiens” spinoffs. Harris, largely enthusiastic about the plans, said, “I’m just not a graphic-novel person.” She then told Harari to wait before writing again. “I think you should learn to fly a plane,” she said. “You could do anything you want. Walk the Appalachian Trail.”

One day in mid-September, Harari walked into an auditorium set up in an eighteenth-century armory in Kyiv, wearing a Donna Karan suit and bright multicolored socks. He had just met with Olena Zelenska, the wife of the Ukrainian President. The next day, he would meet Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s former President, and accept a gift box of chocolates made by Poroshenko’s company. Harari was about to give a talk at a Yalta European Strategy conference, a three-day, invitation-only event modelled on Davos. YES is funded by Victor Pinchuk , the billionaire manufacturing magnate, with the aim of promoting Ukraine’s orientation toward the West, and of promoting Victor Pinchuk.

As people took their seats, Harari stood with Pinchuk at the front of the auditorium, and for a few minutes he was exposed to strangers. Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist, introduced himself. David Rubenstein, the billionaire investor and co-founder of the Carlyle Group, gave Harari his business card. Rubenstein has become a “thought leader” at gatherings like YES , and he interviews wealthy people for Bloomberg TV. (Later that day, during a YES dinner where President Volodymyr Zelensky was a guest, Rubenstein interviewed Robin Wright, the “ House of Cards ” star. His questions were not made less awkward by being barked. “ You’re obviously a very attractive woman ,” he said. “How did you decide what you wanted to do?”)

Harari’s talk lasted twenty-four minutes. He used schoolbook-style illustrations: chimney stacks, Michelangelo’s David. Nobody on Harari’s staff had persuaded him not to represent mass unemployment with art work showing only fifty men. He argued that the danger facing the world could be “stated in the form of a simple equation, which might be the defining equation of the twenty-first century: B times C times D equals AHH. Which means: biological knowledge, multiplied by computing power, multiplied by data, equals the ability to hack humans.” After the lecture, Harari had an onstage discussion with Pinchuk. “We should change the focus of the political conversation,” Harari said, referring to A.I. And: “This is one of the purposes of conferences like this—to change the global conversation.” Throughout Harari’s event, senior European politicians in the front row chatted among themselves.

When I later talked to Steven Pinker, he made a candid distinction between speaking opportunities that were “too interesting to turn down” and others “too lucrative to turn down.” Hugo Chittenden, a director at the London Speaker Bureau, an agency that books speakers for events like YES , told me that Harari’s fee in Kyiv would reflect the fact that he’s a fresh face; there’s only so much enthusiasm for hearing someone like Tony Blair give the speech he’s given on such occasions for the past decade. On the plane to Kyiv, Yahav had indicated to me that Harari’s fee would be more than twice what Donald Trump was paid when he made a brief video appearance at YES , in 2015. Trump received a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

In public, at least, Harari doesn’t echo Pinker’s point about money gigs, and he won’t admit to having concerns about earning a fee that might compensate him, in part, for laundering the reputations of others. “We can’t check everyone who’s coming to a conference,” he told me. He was unmoved when told that Jordan Peterson , the Canadian psychologist and self-help author known for his position that “the masculine spirit is under assault,” had cancelled his YES appearance. Later this year, in Israel, Harari plans to have a private conversation with Peterson. Harari said of Peterson’s representatives, “They offered to do a public debate. And we said that we don’t want to, because there is a danger that it will just be mud wrestling.” Yahav had earlier teased Harari, saying, “You don’t argue. If somebody says something you don’t like, you don’t say, ‘I don’t like it.’ You just shut up.”

In Kyiv, Harari gave several interviews to local journalists, and sometimes mentioned a man who had been on our flight from Israel to Ukraine. After the plane left the gate, there was a long delay, and the man stormed to the front, demanding to be let off. There are times, Harari told one reporter, when the thing “most responsible for your suffering is your own mind.” The subject of human suffering—even extreme suffering—doesn’t seem to agitate Harari in quite the way that industrial agriculture does. Indeed, Harari has taken up positions against what he calls humanism, by which he means “the worship of humanity,” and which he discovers in, among other places, the foundations of Nazism and Stalinism. (This characterization has upset humanists.) Some of this may be tactical—Harari is foregrounding a contested animal-rights position—but it also reflects an aspect of his Vipassana-directed thinking. Human suffering occurs; the issue is how to respond to it. Harari’s suggestion that the airline passenger, in becoming livid about the delay, had largely made his own misery was probably right; but to turn the man into a case study seemed to breeze past all of the suffering that involves more than a transit inconvenience.

The morning after Harari’s lecture, he welcomed Pinker to his hotel suite. They hadn’t met before this trip, but a few weeks earlier they had arranged to film a conversation, which Harari would release on his own platforms. Pinker later joked that, when making the plan, he’d spoken only with Harari’s “minions,” adding, “ I want to have minions.” Pinker has a literary agent, a speaking agent, and, at Harvard, a part-time assistant. Contemplating the scale of Harari’s operation, he said, without judgment, “I don’t know of any other academic or public intellectual who’s taken that route.”

Pinker is the author of, most recently, “ Enlightenment Now ,” which marshals evidence of recent human progress. “We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter, and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences,” he writes. “Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, oppressed, or exploited.” He told me that, while preparing to meet Harari, he had refreshed his skepticism about futurology by rereading two well-known essays—Robert Kaplan’s “ The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet ,” published in The Atlantic in 1994, and “ The Long Boom ,” by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, published in Wired three years later (“We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?”).

As a camera crew set up, Harari affably told Pinker, “The default script is that you will be the optimist and I will be the pessimist. But we can try and avoid this.” They chatted about TV, and discovered a shared enthusiasm for “ Shtisel ,” an Israeli drama about an ultra-Orthodox family, and “ Veep .”

“What else do you watch?” Harari asked.

“ ‘ The Crown ,’ ” Pinker said.

“Oh, ‘The Crown’ is great!”

Harari had earlier told me that he prefers TV to novels; in a career now often focussed on ideas about narrative and interiority, his reflections on art seem to stop at the observation that “fictions” have remarkable power. Over supper in Israel, he had noted that, in the Middle Ages, “only what kings and queens did was important, and even then not everything they did,” whereas novels are likely “to tell you in detail about what some peasant did.” Onstage, at YES , he had said, “If we think about art as kind of playing on the human emotional keyboard, then I think A.I. will very soon revolutionize art completely.”

The taped conversation began. Harari began to describe future tech intrusions, and Pinker, pushing back, referred to the ubiquitous “telescreens” that monitor citizens in Orwell’s “ 1984 .” Today, Pinker said, it would be a “trivial” task to install such devices: “There could be, in every room, a government-operated camera. They could have done that decades ago. But they haven’t, certainly not in the West. And so the question is: why didn’t they? Partly because the government didn’t have that much of an interest in doing it. Partly because there would be enough resistance that, in a democracy, they couldn’t succeed.”

Harari said that, in the past, data generated by such devices could not have been processed; the K.G.B. could not have hired enough agents. A.I. removes this barrier. “This is not science fiction,” he said. “This is happening in various parts of the world. It’s happening now in China. It’s happening now in my home country, in Israel.”

Two angry looking cops hold hands as they arrest Cupid for shooting arrows at both of them.

“What you’ve identified is some of the problems of totalitarian societies or occupying powers,” Pinker said. “The key is how to prevent your society from being China.” In response, Harari suggested that it might have been only an inability to process such data that had protected societies from authoritarianism. He went on, “Suddenly, totalitarian regimes could have a technological advantage over the democracies.”

Pinker said, “The trade-off between efficiency and ethics is just in the very nature of reality. It has always faced us—even with much simpler algorithms, of the kind you could do with paper and pencil.” He noted that, for seventy years, psychologists have known that, in a medical setting, statistical decision-making outperforms human intuition. Simple statistical models could have been widely used to offer diagnoses of disease, forecast job performance, and predict recidivism. But humans had shown a willingness to ignore such models.

“My view, as a historian, is that seventy years isn’t a long time,” Harari said.

When I later spoke to Pinker, he said that he admired Harari’s avoidance of conventional wisdom, but added, “When it comes down to it, he is a liberal secular humanist.” Harari rejects the label, Pinker said, but there’s no doubt that Harari is an atheist, and that he “believes in freedom of expression and the application of reason, and in human well-being as the ultimate criterion.” Pinker said that, in the end, Harari seems to want “to be able to reject all categories.”

The next day, Harari and Yahav made a trip to Chernobyl and the abandoned city of Pripyat. They invited a few other people, and hired a guide. Yahav embraced a role of half-ironic worrier about health risks; the guide tried to reassure him by giving him his dosimeter, which measures radiation levels. When the device beeped, Yahav complained of a headache. In the ruined Lenin Square in Pripyat, he told Harari, “You’re not going to die on me. We’ve discussed this—I’m going to die first. I was smoking for years.”

Harari, whose work sometimes sounds regretful about most of what has happened since the Paleolithic era—in “Sapiens,” he writes that “the forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do”—began the day by anticipating, happily, a glimpse of the world as it would be if “humans destroyed themselves.” Walking across Pripyat’s soccer field, where mature trees now grow, he remarked on how quickly things had gone “back to normal.”

The guide asked if anyone had heard of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare—the video game, which includes a sequence set in Pripyat.

“No,” Harari said.

“Just the most popular game in the world,” the guide said.

At dusk, Harari and Yahav headed back to Kyiv, in a black Mercedes. When Yahav sneezed, Harari said, “It’s the radiation starting.” As we drove through flat, forested countryside, Harari talked about his upbringing: his hatred of chess; his nationalist and religious periods. He said, “One thing I think about how humans work—the only thing that can replace one story is another story.”

We discussed the tall tales that occasionally appear in his writing. In “Homo Deus,” Harari writes that, in 2014, a Hong Kong venture-capital firm “broke new ground by appointing an algorithm named VITAL to its board.” A footnote provides a link to an online article , which makes clear that, in fact, there had been no such board appointment, and that the press release announcing it was a lure for “gullible” outlets. When I asked Harari if he’d accidentally led readers into believing a fiction, he appeared untroubled, arguing that the book’s larger point about A.I. encroachment still held.

In “Sapiens,” Harari writes in detail about a meeting in the desert between Apollo 11 astronauts and a Native American who dictated a message for them to take to the moon. The message, when later translated, was “They have come to steal your lands.” Harari’s text acknowledges that the story might be a “legend.”

“I don’t know if it’s a true story,” Harari told me. “It doesn’t matter—it’s a good story.” He rethought this. “It matters how you present it to the readers. I think I took care to make sure that at least intelligent readers will understand that it maybe didn’t happen.” (The story has been traced to a Johnny Carson monologue.)

Harari went on to say how much he’d liked writing an extended fictional passage, in “Homo Deus,” in which he imagines the belief system of a twelfth-century crusader. It begins, “Imagine a young English nobleman named John . . .” Harari had been encouraged in this experiment, he said, by the example of classical historians, who were comfortable fabricating dialogue, and by “ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ,” by Douglas Adams, a book “packed with so much good philosophy.” No twentieth-century philosophical book besides “ Sources of the Self ,” by Charles Taylor, had influenced him more.

We were now on a cobbled street in Kyiv. Harari said, “Maybe the next book will be a novel.”

At a press conference in the city, Harari was asked a question by Hannah Hrabarska, a Ukrainian news photographer. “I can’t stop smiling,” she began. “I’ve watched all your lectures, watched everything about you.” I spoke to her later. She said that reading “Sapiens” had “completely changed” her life. Hrabarska was born the week of the Chernobyl disaster, in 1986. “When I was a child, I dreamed of being an artist,” she said. “But then politics captured me.” When the Orange Revolution began, in 2004, she was eighteen, and “ so idealistic.” She studied law and went into journalism. In the winter of 2013-14, she photographed the Euromaidan protests, in Kyiv, where more than a hundred people were killed. “You always expect everything will change, will get better,” she said. “And it doesn’t.”

Hrabarska read “Sapiens” three or four years ago. She told me that she had previously read widely in history and philosophy, but none of that material had ever “interested me on my core level.” She found “Sapiens” overwhelming, particularly in its passages on prehistory, and in its larger revelation that she was “one of the billions and billions that lived, and didn’t make any impact and didn’t leave any trace.” Upon finishing the book, Hrabarska said, “you kind of relax, don’t feel this pressure anymore—it’s O.K. to be insignificant.” For her, the discovery of “Sapiens” is that “life is big, but only for me.” This knowledge “lets me own my life.”

Reading “Sapiens” had helped her become “more compassionate” toward people around her, although less invested in their opinions. Hrabarska had also spent more time on creative photography projects. She said, “This came from a feeling of ‘O.K., it doesn’t matter that much, I’m just a little human, no one cares.’ ”

Hrabarska has disengaged from politics. “I can choose to be involved, not to be involved,” she said. “No one cares, and I don’t care, too.” ♦

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By Elizabeth Kolbert

By Manvir Singh

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari – review

H uman beings (members of the genus Homo) have existed for about 2.4m years. Homo sapiens, our own wildly egregious species of great apes, has only existed for 6% of that time – about 150,000 years. So a book whose main title is Sapiens shouldn't be subtitled "A Brief History of Humankind". It's easy to see why Yuval Noah Harari devotes 95% of his book to us as a species: self-ignorant as we are, we still know far more about ourselves than about other species of human beings, including several that have become extinct since we first walked the Earth. The fact remains that the history of sapiens – Harari's name for us – is only a very small part of the history of humankind.

Can its full sweep be conveyed in one fell swoop – 400 pages? Not really; it's easier to write a brief history of time – all 14bn years – and Harari also spends many pages on our present and possible future rather than our past. But the deep lines of the story of sapiens are fairly uncontentious, and he sets them out with verve.

For the first half of our existence we potter along unremarkably; then we undergo a series of revolutions. First, the "cognitive" revolution: about 70,000 years ago, we start to behave in far more ingenious ways than before, for reasons that are still obscure, and we spread rapidly across the planet. About 11,000 years ago we enter on the agricultural revolution, converting in increasing numbers from foraging (hunting and gathering) to farming. The "scientific revolution" begins about 500 years ago. It triggers the industrial revolution, about 250 years ago, which triggers in turn the information revolution, about 50 years ago, which triggers the biotechnological revolution, which is still wet behind the ears. Harari suspects that the biotechnological revolution signals the end of sapiens: we will be replaced by bioengineered post-humans, "amortal" cyborgs, capable of living forever.

This is one way to lay things out. Harari embeds many other momentous events, most notably the development of language: we become able to think sharply about abstract matters, cooperate in ever larger numbers, and, perhaps most crucially, gossip. There is the rise of religion and the slow overpowering of polytheisms by more or less toxic monotheisms. Then there is the evolution of money and, more importantly, credit. There is, connectedly, the spread of empires and trade as well as the rise of capitalism.

Harari swashbuckles through these vast and intricate matters in a way that is – at its best – engaging and informative. It's a neat thought that "we did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us." There was, Harari says, "a Faustian bargain between humans and grains" in which our species "cast off its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted towards greed and alienation". It was a bad bargain: "the agricultural revolution was history's biggest fraud". More often than not it brought a worse diet, longer hours of work, greater risk of starvation, crowded living conditions, greatly increased susceptibility to disease, new forms of insecurity and uglier forms of hierarchy. Harari thinks we may have been better off in the stone age, and he has powerful things to say about the wickedness of factory farming, concluding with one of his many superlatives: "modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history".

He accepts the common view that the fundamental structure of our emotions and desires hasn't been touched by any of these revolutions: "our eating habits, our conflicts and our sexuality are all a result of the way our hunter-gatherer minds interact with our current post-industrial environment, with its mega-cities, airplanes, telephones and computers … Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah." He gives a familiar illustration – our powerful desires for sugar and fat have led to the widespread availability of foods that are primary causes of unhealthiness and ugliness. The consumption of pornography is another good example. It's just like overeating: if the minds of pornography addicts could be seen as bodies, they would look just like the grossly obese.

At one point Harari claims that "the leading project of the scientific revolution" is the Gilgamesh Project (named after the hero of the epic who set out to destroy death): "to give humankind eternal life" or "amortality". He is sanguine about its eventual success. But amortality isn't immortality, because it will always be possible for us to die by violence, and Harari is plausibly sceptical about how much good it will do us. As amortals, we may become hysterically and disablingly cautious (Larry Niven develops the point nicely in his description of the "Puppeteers" in the Ringworld science fiction novels ). The deaths of those we love may become far more terrible. We may grow weary of all things under the sun – even in heaven (see the last chapter of Julian Barnes 's A History of the World in 10½ Chapters ). We may come to agree with JRR Tolkien 's elves, who saw mortality as a gift to human beings that they themselves lacked. We may come to feel what Philip Larkin felt: "Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs."

Even if we put all these points aside, there's no guarantee that amortality will bring greater happiness. Harari draws on well-known research that shows that a person's happiness from day to day has remarkably little to do with their material circumstances. Certainly money can make a difference – but only when it lifts us out of poverty. After that, more money changes little or nothing. Certainly a lottery winner is lifted by her luck, but after about 18 months her average everyday happiness reverts to its old level. If we had an infallible "happyometer", and toured Orange County and the streets of Kolkata, it's not clear that we would get consistently higher readings in the first place than in the second.

This point about happiness is a persistent theme in Sapiens . When Arthur Brooks (head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute) made a related point in the New York Times in July , he was criticised for trying to favour the rich and justify income inequality. The criticism was confused, for although current inequalities of income are repellent, and harmful to all, the happiness research is well confirmed. This doesn't, however, prevent Harari from suggesting that the lives lived by sapiens today may be worse overall than the lives they lived 15,000 years ago.

Much of Sapiens is extremely interesting, and it is often well expressed. As one reads on, however, the attractive features of the book are overwhelmed by carelessness, exaggeration and sensationalism. Never mind his standard and repeated misuse of the saying "the exception proves the rule" (it means that exceptional or rare cases test and confirm the rule, because the rule turns out to apply even in those cases). There's a kind of vandalism in Harari's sweeping judgments, his recklessness about causal connections, his hyper-Procrustean stretchings and loppings of the data. Take his account of the battle of Navarino. Starting from the fact that British investors stood to lose money if the Greeks lost their war of independence, Harari moves fast: "the bond holders' interest was the national interest, so the British organised an international fleet that, in 1827, sank the main Ottoman flotilla in the battle of Navarino. After centuries of subjugation, Greece was finally free." This is wildly distorted – and Greece was not then free. To see how bad it is, it's enough to look at the wikipedia entry on Navarino .

Harari hates "modern liberal culture", but his attack is a caricature and it boomerangs back at him. Liberal humanism, he says, "is a religion". It "does not deny the existence of God"; "all humanists worship humanity"; "a huge gulf is opening between the tenets of liberal humanism and the latest findings of the life sciences". This is silly. It's also sad to see the great Adam Smith drafted in once again as the apostle of greed. Still, Harari is probably right that "only a criminal buys a house … by handing over a suitcase of banknotes" – a point that acquires piquancy when one considers that about 35% of all purchases at the high end of the London housing market are currently being paid in cash.

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Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, book review: Eloquent history of what makes us human

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Stands to reason: three big revolutions in our evolution

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It is an impediment to understanding the human story that the innovations that made us human – a long list including the control of fire, articulate language, the development of agriculture and herding, the working of metals, glass and other materials, abstract reasoning – took place over periods out of kilter with the time span of human generations.

Each generation saw itself as living a similar life to its predecessors, with the occasional addition of a slightly better way of accomplishing one thing or another. The true course of events is only now being uncovered by the sophisticated forensic techniques developed by science, not least the sequencing of ancient DNA and the mapping of human migrations through the DNA profiles of people living today.

As a historian, Yuval Harari (who teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) belongs to the school founded by Jared Diamond (who endorses the book on the cover), in applying scientific research to every aspect of human history, not just the parts for which no written accounts exist. In truth, Harari uses less science than Diamond. He emphasizes the difficulty of knowing in detail the lives of our remote forebears and is often content to say – of topics that are being urgently investigated by the more forensically inclined – "frankly, we don't know". His ideas are mostly not new, being derived from Diamond, but he has a very trenchant way of putting them over.

Typical is a bravura passage on the domestication of wheat, in which he floats the conceit that wheat domesticated us. What was once an undistinguished grass in a small part of the Middle East now covers a global area eight times the size of England. Humans have to slave to serve the wheat god: " Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space..." and so on.

Harari proposes three big revolutions around which his story revolves: the Cognitive Revolution of around 70,000 years ago (articulate language); the Agricultural Revolution of 10,000 years ago; and the Scientific Revolution of 500 years ago. The last is part of history, the second is increasingly well understood, but the first is still shrouded in a mystery that DNA research will probably one day clear up.

Although the book is billed as a short history, it is just as much a philosophical meditation on the human condition. One great overriding argument runs through it: that all human culture is an invention. The rules of football; the concept of a limited liability company; the laws relating to property and marriage; the character, actions and notional edicts of deities – all are examples of what Harari calls Imagined Order. He develops this idea into a magnificent, humane polemic, particularly highlighting the sorrows that accrue from society's justification of its cruel practices as either natural or ordained by God (they are neither).

Not only is Harari eloquent and humane, he is often wonderfully, mordantly funny. Much of what we take to be inherent cultural traditions are of recent adoption: "William Tell never tasted chocolate, and Buddha never spiced up his food with chilli".

Towards the end of the book, the influence of thinkers other than Diamond emerges. He rehearses Steven Pinker's argument that objectively (to judge by mortality statistics) the world is, despite appearances, becoming less violent; passages on individual happiness and how it can be assessed alongside more conventional historical topics smack of Theodore Zeldin, both in style and content.

Inevitably, in a "big picture" account such as this, some portions of the canvas are less hatched in than others. For this reader, these later sections seemed weaker, but in the last chapter the brio returns as Harari considers what humankind – who developed culture to escape the constraints of biology – will became now that it is also a biological creator. Sapiens is a brave and bracing look at a species that is mostly in denial about the long road to now and the crossroads it is rapidly approaching.

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On Humanity: A review of “Sapiens”

Valerie Pavilonis

“Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights.” It is with this idea that author Yuval Noah Harari opens his narrative on human culture, society, the past and the future. His book “Sapiens” subtly introduces broader ideas about cultural evolution, until the reader is forced to question their most basic assumptions about our society and its origins. Artfully crafted anecdotes blend together with sweeping rhetorical questions, making it easy, almost necessary, for a reader to doubt their views.

I’ve always been fascinated by stories. This book is no exception as a story in itself, but much of the content analyzes the way humans have used stories to serve collective and personal agendas. Humans tell each other stories about ourselves, about Gods, about money and about anything else we can think of.

“Sapiens” opens with a highly readable take on human evolution, one that incorporates speculative stories, entertaining what-ifs, and several outlandish-sounding (but not altogether unlikely) scenarios that brought Homo sapiens to the top of the dog pile of history. Notably, the theory that cooked food allowed greater brain growth and development is explained in the context of the cognitive revolution. Harari goes into depth on the subject of the cognitive revolution, both because it allowed humans to use math to record food storage and other important numbers, and because it allowed for large scale cooperation, something previously unimagined. Some species, such as termites or ants, are able to function as a large group effectively. However, this is because their only thought is the task which they have been programmed to carry out by millions of years of evolutionary trial and error. The cognitive revolution allowed humans to maintain free will while creating common systems, such as money, that required only belief in order to be realized. This book stresses, in what is perhaps my favorite new idea, that in order for a system like money to function, one must only believe that someone else believes in it.

Of course, Harari weaves these ideas into stories about the first monetary systems, providing both detail and speculation on ancient societies. He builds narratives from some of the first known hunter-gatherers to the first major agricultural civilization to the beginning of globalization. The latter half of the book is dedicated to predictions, sifting through human history to extract likely themes for the future. Harari makes no claims regarding the longevity of the human race, making “Sapiens” at once powerful and realistic.

Just like there are no deeply-rooted societal imbalances that the author fails to touch on -— such as gender dynamics, race relations and the concept of nationalism — so too are there no sacred cows left untouched. In the process of reading this book, I found myself at times confused, unsure of my own beliefs and even downright offended. Near the middle of the volume, he draws the conclusion that if there is a single omnipotent God, he must be evil. Harari admits, however, that “nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.” But there is no denying that Harari’s methodically planned and executed logic draws him and the reader naturally to these conclusions. From his explanations of the random event that was the agricultural revolution to the matter-of-fact description of the mass extinctions perpetrated by humans long before global warming or the industrial revolution, the bits that put you to sleep in AP World History become impossible to put down.

A word of warning: Do not read “Sapiens” all at once. Allow time for the author’s ideas to sink in, enjoy the journey through time on Earth, and wholly immerse in the wondrous intellect and lightning wit that define Harari’s work.

Lazo Gitchos | [email protected] .

Sapiens, maybe; Deus, no: The problem with Yuval Noah Harari

Nick Spencer

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Humans have always liked the big picture. For millennia, holy texts and epic poems have led listeners from horizon to temporal horizon, explaining who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going. Of late, however, this sacred mantle has been assumed by historians whose narratives like to begin with the origins of life, the formation of the earth or even the moment of the Big Bang. Their efforts sell well, if not quite in biblical proportions. Big history, it seems, is big business.

There are any number of reasons for this turn in historical events, but two strike me as particularly relevant. First, history is no longer in the business of converging on London or Washington. A few enthusiastic prognostications aside, the rise of China, and the political convulsions and economic stagnation of the West over recent decades have seen history veer off the path that so many — especially twentieth-century Westerners — believed it was stuck on. History is a bit more interesting, a bit more open, a bit more unpredictable. Now no longer as sure about where we’re heading, we want to look again, afresh, at where we have been, if only to provide us with some clues.

When I was growing up, the technical superiority of China up until about 1500 CE was never mentioned, hardly even known. Now, it is common knowledge, one of those historical facts that casts long shadows over the future.

Second, history has taken a decidedly material tone — not in the sense that Marxist history was always material, but in a still more basic sense. We are more aware than ever before of humanity’s material, biological, and environmental context, of our simply-just-another-part-of-nature nature. It is far harder to tell the tale of human history as one of “Great Men” or “Big Ideas” or “Economic Forces” without paying due attention to the physical stage on which we strut.

This can be microcosmic — such as the way Kyle Harper has explained The Fate of Rome in the fifth century, or Geoffrey Parker the Global Crisis of the seventeenth century in terms of climate change and disease — or it can be macrocosmic — as with Jared Diamond’s biogeographical history of the last 15,000 years, Guns, Germs and Steel , or Ian Morris’s framing a similar story in the human ability to generate energy in Why the West Rules — for Now . Either way, the reader is left in no doubt that the key to human history lies in the use (or abuse) of our physical environment.

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Such fresh, unfamiliar, biologically- and environmentally-attuned “big history” does not come bigger — in several sense of the word — than the works of Yuval Noah Harari. First in Sapiens , published in 2011 and in English in 2014, and then in Homo Deus (2015 and 2016), Harari, an Israeli historian, takes the reader from the Big Bang to a fantastical, vaguely dystopian potential future for our species. (His follow up book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is perhaps less worth discussing.) The books are clever, readable, challenging, discombobulating — and monumentally successful. By 2018, Sapiens had been translated into nearly 50 languages and sold over 10 million copies worldwide, while Deus has reached over 30 translations and several million copies.

They are worth reading, not simply because they are such a phenomenon, but on their merits alone. No one who encounters them can fail to benefit from Harari’s innovative and provocative perspective. At their heart, however, they turn on what seems to me to be a fundamental and ultimately rather problematic error about human beings and the creation in which we live.

“An animal of no consequence”

Sapiens tells the story of the human species from prehistory to today. Deus recapitulates much of this story in its first section, explores in greater detail how we “give meaning” to the world, and then takes the tale towards its post-historical future by looking at how our technological achievements will enhance, replace or destroy us. This is a history that makes the familiar unfamiliar, such as when he talks about the agricultural revolution, usually treated as humanity’s first great leap forward, as one of the biggest disasters ever to have been afflicted human beings. It may have resulted in more of them, but on average each one a lived shorter, more constrained, more exhausting, more painful, disease-ridden life.

Such a pattern — of adventures that turn out to be misadventures — is a familiar one in Harari’s history of humans. No one planned for the industrial revolution to destroy our shared environment. No one wants the digital revolution to wreck human relationships. This is perhaps Harari’s most striking and powerful point. Simply because we humans believe we exercise our (rational) agency at an individual level, we naturally think humanity does the same. But humanity does not “think” in the way that humans do (assuming humans actually do think), and unintended consequences abound at the macro level. Our future is as likely to be accidental as it is intentional.

That does not mean Harari’s history is directionless, however, as if humans only stumble from one catastrophe to another. His history still progresses, just not as predictably or intentionally as we think. As he states in Sapiens , “it becomes crystal dear that history is moving relentlessly towards unity.” Our telos is union, as technology obliterates distance and improves communication. His history is unfamiliar, not because it eschews all narratives of progress, but because it adopts new ones.

Harari’s history also works within the recent “materialisation” and “biologisation” of history, but takes it to a new level. Indeed, this is the root of the problem that hounds the books. The first chapter of Sapiens opens with the clear statement that, despite humans’ long-favoured view of ourselves “as set apart from animals, an orphan bereft of family, lacking siblings or cousins, and, most importantly, parents,” we are simply one of the many twigs on the Homo branch, one of many species that could have inherited the earth. It might have been Homo rudolfensis or Homo erectus or Homo neanderthalensis . It happened to be us. We simply got lucky, for no good reason.

The contingency is essential to his argument. Humans are “an animal of no consequence,” as the title of his first chapter puts it. Up until very recently, in evolutionary terms, we were just another middle-of-the-road, middle-of-the-food-chain species. Others that, like us, now occupy top-spots in their own environments, like sharks, have done so for aeons, sculpted into dominance by evolution over millions of years. Humans can’t even claim that. Contingent in our position, our supremacy is likely to be a decidedly temporary affair: “It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now.”

That being the case, it is pointless to waste time searching for purpose or meaning in our role, either individually or corporately. Evolution shuffled and dealt our species a good hand, or rather, a good brain. We might as well make the most of it, without looking for a reason. “As far as we can tell,” he puts it in Sapiens , “from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning” — or, as he writes in Homo Deus , channelling his inner bard, “to the best of our scientific understanding” the universe is a blind and purposeless process, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. How exactly a scientific “viewpoint” or “understanding” — whatever Harari actually means by that — could detect “meaning” and “purpose,” and what it would look like if it did, is far from clear.

“Imagined realities”

Asserting that there is no capital-R “Reason” why humans found themselves where we are — no Big Historical, Divine or Teleological Reason explaining or predetermining our triumph — is not the same as saying there are no reasons. There certainly are, by Harari’s reckoning. Indeed, it is the historian’s job to root them out, and Harari roots out one big one. Human success rests on our imagination. As he puts it in Homo Deus , we use language to “create” (the word is significant) “meanings” and completely new “realities.” In this alone, we are unique. Thus he writes in Sapiens , “As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.”

More than that, we are able to communicate on a large scale and thereby share the fruit of that imaginative fecundity. We are creatures who not only imagine and believe in myths but have “common myths” — the kind that enable us to work together in far larger numbers than mere kinship or contact would ever allow. Humans have developed an “intersubjective level” by means of which we can imagine, manipulate, and share subjective realities such as (his examples) money, laws, gods, and empires. This marks us out clearly from even our nearest living relatives, such as chimpanzees who, unable to invent and spread similar fictions, are also therefore unable to cooperate in the large numbers that mark human society.

This talent developed — although why is far from clear — in what Harari calls the “Cognitive Revolution,” the point at which history achieved “independence” (again, the word is salient) from biology. The line between biology and the intersubjective reality of the collective human imagination is hard, impermeable, and absolute, as Harari repeatedly makes clear. (If it strikes you as odd that a historian should labour so hard to root our species absolutely in biology and environment, only then to uproot us and our history completely as soon as we cross this “imaginative threshold,” you are on to something.)

Thus, none of the things that humans have imagined over the centuries “exists outside the stories that [we] invent and tell one another.” There are no gods, no money, no human rights, and no laws beyond the “common imagination of human beings.” Much the same can be said of “universal and immutable principles of justices” such as “equality or hierarchy” which only exist in “the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another.” They are “fictions,” “social constructs” or “imagined realities” — vital, significant, world changing, but ultimately not in any way real . They exist , so to speak, only because they are useful: “We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate and forge a better society.” Which is a polite way of saying, they don’t exist.

An example of this is offered with admirable clarity in one of the better known bits of Sapiens , when Harari deconstructs of the famous second sentence of the US Declaration of Independence, in the process eviscerating not only the idea that human equality, rights, and liberty are self-evident (a perfectly fair criticism) but that they exist at all. In reality, they are nothing more than myths — good and useful myths no doubt, but ultimately and fundamentally fictional ones.

“There are no such things as rights in biology,” he writes; which is, for Harari, longhand for “there are no such things as rights.” “Inalienable rights” should, by his reckoning, be translated into “mutable characteristics,” and so forth. By this process, he renders the Declaration to read:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.

What this little vignette drives home is the fact that, for Harari, only biology is “real.” Living things are real. Human organisms are real. But the stuff that comes out of their heads — like rights, liberty, and dignity — is not.

“Biological facts”

How exactly do you know if an entity is real? The question is important if you are going to draw such a hard and fast line between the real and imaginary. Fortunately, Harari tackles the question head on in Homo Deus and gives a typically direct, clear, swashbuckling answer: “Very simple — just ask yourself, ‘Can it suffer?’” If something can suffer, then it is real. Thus, obviously, humans can suffer. Tigers can suffer. Rabbits can suffer. But when a bank goes bankrupt, the bank itself doesn’t suffer; rather, only the people — the savers, shareholders, staff, customers, and so on — suffer. When a country suffers a defeat in a war, the country doesn’t really suffer; only its citizens or subjects. Thus neither a bank nor a country are real.

This may strike the reader as a rather puerile sleight of hand, a linguistic tergiversation intended to win an argument in a debating competition. Most of us simply use “bank” or “country” in this context as a shorthand for the people and relationships in it. By the same token, the planet can’t suffer through environmental abuse, a couple doesn’t suffer in a divorce, and a family can’t suffer from a bereavement because planets, couples, and families don’t exist — only the people that comprise them. As a fair and accurate representation of reality, it’s not entirely convincing.

It is, however, consistent with the argument of the book, however alien it may feel. If only material stuff — like organisms — is real, then the kind of things that emerge from their over-fertile imagination are not; they are possessed, at best, with some vague utility but are ultimately are only of temporary value. In essence, if you adopt a thoroughgoing materialistic and positivistic approach to reality, insisting that only the material and measurable is real, then — amazingly — you will discover that reality is ultimately material and measurable.

All this naturally breeds a determined reductionist attitude to humans themselves. If only material stuff is real – and, importantly, if only physical sciences are able to detect what is real – it follows, as he says in Homo Deus , that “according to the life sciences, happiness and suffering are nothing but different balances of bodily sensations.” Notice the opening qualification: “according to the life sciences.” Similarly, a few pages later, “If science is right and our happiness is determined by our bio-chemical system, then the only way to ensure lasting contentment is by rigging this system.” Or, once again, according to neuroscience, the “deeper parts of your mind know nothing about football or about jobs. They know only sensations.” Harari waves the word “scientific” around like a trigger-happy guerrilla, brandishing the barrel at any moral or metaphysical truth claims that peak out from the undergrowth. Happiness? Goodness? Freedom? Beauty? Holiness? Science cannot find them.

After a while of this, the reader is naturally tempted to ask why science is the only legitimate tool for understanding reality or human life? After all, if you’ve only got a hammer in your toolbox, everything will be a nail. Harari’s answer lies in the material/imaginative divide on which he bases everything. The imaginative — the category into which he conveniently put most of what makes human life meaningful — doesn’t exist. It isn’t real. It is merely parasitic on what is real: our bodies, or our biology, or neurochemistry, or bodily sensations, or whatever. That being so, only those things that can detect, measure and alter biology, neurochemistry, and so on need to be considered. Human life is biology. Biology comprises knowable facts. Debates can be resolved and futures decided by recognition of said facts and manipulation of said biology.

In everyday terms, this breeds the kind of impatient dismissal of tortured ethical debates that one commonly finds among those of a positivistic or scientistic bent. Thus, when writing about abortion in Homo Deus , Harari reasons that although devout Christians oppose abortion and many liberals support it, “the main bone of contention is factual rather than ethical.” Christians and liberals “believe that human life is sacred” and that murder is a crime. They simply disagree “about certain biological facts: such as whether human life begins at the moment of conception, at the moment of birth or at some intermediate point?” No matter. Biologists are here to help, for they are “more qualified than priests to answer factual questions such as ‘Do human fetuses have a nervous system one week after conception? Can they feel pain?’”

This is so muddle-headed that it’s hard to know where to begin. “Devout Christians” and “liberals” (at least the thoughtful ones; we can leave the head-bangers of both sides out of any serious debate) agree about the “biological facts.” They both accept, broadly speaking, when foetuses develop a brain, a central nervous system, a beating heart, and so on. They both agree, broadly speaking, when a foetus may start to experience sensations or feel pain. They disagree on the existential and ethical significance of all of the above. The “biological facts” are not in dispute. It is what they mean in terms of ultimately contested concepts — such as “life,” “rights” or “dignity” — that is hotly disputed. But if you have systematically dismantled any sense of objective “meaning,” this avenue is necessarily closed to you. Hence, biology must be able to cut the Gordian knot.

The fact that Harari apparently honestly believes that “biological facts” will resolve such disagreement over abortion points to nothing more than the inadequacy of the positivist approach he adopts when discussing our species. More cynically, it is an example of what happens when you banish concepts like “meaning” from a debate — because science can’t find it in your neurochemistry — and then smuggle it back in under the biologist’s labcoat.

Harari’s “religion”

It is not for his musings on abortion that Harari has become popular, however. The success of his books, particularly Homo Deus , is based primarily on his sweeping (if quietly hedged and qualified) prognostications for our human future. These, inevitably, are infected by his strict separation of biology and imagination, and his positivistic focus on the former. The result leads him to visions of human destiny and transcendence that are rather different from those, whether religious or secular, with which we are familiar.

The religious ones are most easily dispensed with, Harari having a predictable contempt for religion, one that is not obviously burdened by any real understanding of what he is burying. Thus, we hear that the first chapters of the book of Genesis are a prime example of the common ancient mythology of “a legal contract in which humans promise everlasting devotion to the gods in exchange for mastery over plants and animals.” This does not suggest a particularly close — or indeed, any — reading of the actual text in Genesis which is devoid of the kind of legalism that he finds in other Ancient Near Eastern myths. Indeed, as J. Richard Middleton outlines in considerable detail, there is good reason to believe that the Genesis creation story, and indeed most of Genesis 1-11, is a deliberate subversion of the creation myths of the time.

Along similar lines, we hear that the gods of polytheism are “devoid of interests and biases,” which is hardly the impression we get from Greek mythology. We get the old chestnut about how polytheism was open-minded, and rarely persecuted “heretics and ‘infidels” (try telling that to those sects in the ancient world that denied Caesar’s divinity). We are told that the theory of evolution inspires “unbridled hatred” among devout monotheists. We are told that murder is wrong, not because some god once said “Thou shalt not kill,” but because it causes terrible suffering to the victim and to his family members — as if the two explanations were mutually incompatible. We are even informed that “God-fearing Syria is a far more violent place than the secular Netherlands” — a comparison so far-fetched that not even Richard Dawkins has yet made it.

The closest thing Harari comes to an actual argument about religion is his discussion of (what religions apparently believe about) the soul . Belief in the soul and its eternal destiny is, we are told, central to religion (this essentialising of “religion,” although a necessity in popular writing, sounds an alarm bell). However, it is a belief that is transparently false — though not simply because science cannot detect a soul in humans or any other creatures. Rather, for a soul to exist it must, we are told, be indivisible: “at least, if by soul we mean something indivisible.” (Do we?) This being so, it cannot have evolved, and since everything that exists evolved. QED.

Harari is not clear on where he gets his understanding of the soul; perhaps from early modern discussions, in the wake of Descartes, on how the soul interacts with the body? He says in Homo Deus that the literal meaning of the word “individual” is something that cannot be divided — although why this particular etymology should have any bearing on whatever a soul might be is again far from clear. Nevertheless, it is worth comparing what Rowan Williams, hardly a peripheral Christian thinker, says about the soul and its secular counterpart, the self , if only to underline how simplistic and misleading Harari’s explanation is.

Human essence, according to Williams , is not captured by talking of the “soul,” in the sense of early modern philosophy, “an immaterial individual substance.” Modern ethics and theology, he writes , have been haunted by the idea of the soul or “the authentic self.” This, he insists, however, is an “intellectually shaky and … morally problematic” fiction. Neither soul nor self is a kind of pure core of authenticity that we can reveal “by peeling away layers”; rather, it is “an integrity one struggles to bring into existence.” Selves are not timeless any more than they are abstract. Rather, he writes , “the self lives and moves in, only in, acts of telling.”

Such a clear and unambiguous range of statements about the Christian “religious” understanding of the “soul” or “self” simply underlines how wide of the mark Harari’s analysis is here. No doubt he could quote popular discourse on the “soul” that would support his case, but that is hardly the point. Picking your opponents’ arguments to support your own analysis is a rhetorically smart but ultimately dishonest tactic. Harari’s is less an analysis than an exercise in assuming (or even creating) a religious idea and then showing its inadequacy and incomprehensibility.

“Homo Deus”

Few of Harari’s criticisms of religion will be new to readers. Indeed, in wider public discourse, most of them are familiar simply as heralds for the charge of the rationalist cavalry, galloping over the horizon to rescue human dignity from the clutches of daft, decaying religion. There are moments when Harari sounds like this. The last time people managed to come up with a completely new values, he tells readers towards the end of Homo Deus , was in the eighteenth century when a few enlightened people “began preaching the stirring ideals of human liberty, human equality and human fraternity.” I wonder if Harari really believes that no one had “preached” liberty, equality, and fraternity before the Enlightenment.

Nevertheless, this is not the direction Harari chooses to (or can) travel. His worldview does not admit any redemption through such traditional secular ideologies because they, no less than religions, are ultimately fictions. The tried and tested secular paths to salvation fare no better, under Harari’s withering positivist gaze, than the religious ones.

Thus, for example, liberalism, like every other religion, is based on ideas that it believes to be factual but that simply don’t stand up to rigorous “scientific” scrutiny. Just as scientists found no soul when they opened Sapiens’ black box, they also failed to find any sign of the “will” or the “self.” Hormones and neurons leave no space for freedom. “The electrochemical brain processes that result in murder are either deterministic or random or a combination of both.” Either way, there is no space for free will as a serious or relevant option. Neuroscience cannot detect free will — ergo , free will does not exist.

As with liberalism, so with humanism – although Harari’s use of terminology when it comes to humanism is so idiosyncratic as to be unusable: phrases like “evolutionary humanists such as Hitler” are as silly as they are provocative. Indeed, liberal humanism combines the errors of liberalism (human freedom and will) with the errors of Christian humanism (human dignity, equality, and uniqueness), and is really little more than the discarded husk of Christianity. As he puts it in Sapiens , “The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls.”

With such underlying secular ideologies lying in tatters (because “the life sciences” have thoroughly undermined them), it is obvious that any systems or programmes of reform — whether political, judicial or economic — that are founded on them are equally redundant. “Forget economic growth, social reforms and political revolutions,” Harari writes . Forget democratic elections, too; Google will know your political preferences better than you do. The writing is on the wall for such old-school approaches which have, until now, largely tried “to sweep such inconvenient discoveries under the carpet” They cannot do so forever : “In all frankness, how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political science?” Indeed, why stop at the wall? Why not demolish the departments of law and political science all together? Everything, after all, is basically biology and computing.

In place of all these failed attempts, there is only one path to salvation and transcendence. “Science” has discovered that human behaviour “is determined by hormones, genes and synapses, rather than by free will, let alone a soul.” That being so, we are endlessly and completely manipulable, by means of “drugs, genetic engineering or direct brain stimulation.” It follows for Harari that, “in order to raise global happiness levels we need to manipulate human biochemistry.”

More ambitiously, the endlessly manipulable biological nature of humanity opens up boundless possibilities for human modification and perfectibility about which Harari is admirably blunt. The second great project of the twenty-first century, to ensure global happiness, he writes , “will involve re-engineering Homo sapiens so that it can enjoy everlasting pleasure.” (Does anything sound less appealing?) Once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, “Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end and a completely new kind of process will begin.” It’s a prediction that makes Francis Fukuyama’s famous dream about the end of history look positively sober.

This is the Homo Deus of his book’s title. Humans, as we have known them through history, will disappear. Our species will be upgraded “into gods” through the efforts of “biological engineering, cyborg engineering [or] the engineering of non-organic beings.” As with his rather eccentric understanding of words like “soul” and “humanism,” Harari’s energetic prophecy about human divinisation is dependent on a particular understanding of divinity — he tellingly caveats his discussion of this deification with the weasel phrase “people often misunderstand the meaning of divinity.” His own definition, sort of superhuman bodily and mental faculties, is one that not all readers will share.

What is really “real”?

It is only fair to recognise that, for all his outlandish forecasting and gung-ho prose, Harari slips in enough qualifiers to get himself off the hook.

Near the start of Homo Deus , he says that his predictions are focused “on what humankind will try to achieve in the twenty-first century — not what it will succeed in achieving”. His is “less of a prophecy and more a way of discussing our present choices.” Similarly, at the end of Sapiens he concludes, in a Fukuyama-ish way, that humankind has broken the law of the jungle and there is now, at last “real peace, rather than just absence of war.” For most polities, “there is no plausible scenario leading to full-scale conflict within one year.” But he then goes on to say that “this situation might of course change in the future and, with the world of today might seem incredibly naïve.” A few pages later, he concludes that “we are on the threshold of both heaven and hell … History has still not decided where we will end up, and a set of coincidences might yet send us rolling in either direction.” That pretty much covers all bases.

Such a good hand of “get out of historical jail free” cards should encourage us to see Harari as a provocateur rather than a prophet, but it should not preclude criticism of his provocations. There are many loose threads one might choose to pick at. When he writes that to ensure global happiness we must re-engineer Homo sapiens so that it can enjoy everlasting pleasure , he is eliding two different things — happiness and pleasure — in a way that would make a first year philosophy student wince. He is doing something similar when he says that scientists, when plumbing the inner workings of the human organism, have found no sign of a soul or free will there, or that science has provided no evidence of human equality or dignity.

Such confusions are, however, borne of his deeper conviction that only the material or biological is real; that everything else is merely imaginary, ephemeral, and (inter)subjective; and that there is no organic connection between the two. By its own lights, this is a consistent point of view, but it is not a very persuasive picture of reality — either as we live it or it is constructed. On closer inspection, Harari’s hard and absolute divide between the physical/biological and ideological/imagined is hard to sustain.

Take mathematics. On the surface, maths is a classic example of Harari’s intersubjective reality. Mathematics is non-material. It is non-biological. It is widely shared. The numbers 17, π and i will not be found anywhere in our physical world, in the way an aardvark, a liver, and a chromosome can be. They are presumably, therefore, by Harari’s reckoning, imagined (indeed, imaginary) and not real. And yet in some ways mathematics has a greater claim on being “real” than much that is simply material. It is universal, pervasive, permanent, existing irrespective of human cognition, and, in the famous words of the physicist Eugene Wigner, “unreasonably effective.” Two plus two equalled four and πr 2 was the area of a circle long before humans discovered they were so. Aardvarks, livers, and chromosomes will cease to exist. 17, π, and i will not. Which has a greater claim to being real?

Ethics invites a similar approach. Most people, when talking about right and wrong, have the same sense that mathematicians do when discussing their discipline — namely, that they are saying something real, rather than simply voicing preferences and opinions. In the jargon, people tend to be moral realists at heart. Simply saying that our ethical intuitions and reasoning are no more than the arbitrary illusion thrown up by patterns of firing neurons is not only unsatisfying as an explanation, but threatens to detune the very content of all human thought, which comprises, after all, of patterns of firing neurons. Like mathematicians when they think about their subject, most people when talking about morality have an unerring sense that they are stumbling over a real “landscape” rather than imagining one into existence as they go along.

Aesthetics is a third area. People’s ideas of beauty vary enormously within and between cultures, more so than their ideas of goodness, and this naturally invites a Harari-like assessment that aesthetics is really only an excrescence or epiphenomenon — the kind of intersubjective reality that isn’t real. But, as with ethics, we instinctively find it hard to credit the idea that when we say something is beautiful or harmonious, we are mean nothing more than “I like it.” We like to think we are making a statement about the thing in itself, rather than our own opinions. Moreover, as Iain McGilchrist notes in The Master and his Emissary , “Western and Eastern concepts of beauty, despite having evolved largely independently, are remarkably consonant … there is developing acceptance by psychology and the social science than human universals do exist.” The beautiful may be as real as the good.

The point of these examples is not to invite vexing discussion of mathematical Platonism, moral realism or aesthetics, but merely to underline how that which is real cannot simply be reduced to what biologists (or even Harari’s frequent, catch-all “scientists”) can measure.

The “experience machine”

The positivistic worldview, on which Harari’s whole argument balances, feels least convincing when it comes his prophecies — or provocations — about humans.

Organisms are made up of genes, hormones, neurones, and the like. Scientists can manipulate genes, hormones, and neurones. And therefore scientists can recreate humans by manipulating their genes, hormones, and neurones. The consequence of this is that what have been existential conundrums for the entirety of human history have now become mere glitches. “For men of science,” he says in Sapiens , sounding rather like a Victorian gentleman, “death is not an inevitable destiny, but merely a technical problem.” And, indeed, not just human history. After four billion years “of milling around inside the small of organic compounds, life will suddenly break out into the vastness of the inorganic realm, ready to take up shapes beyond our dreams.” Perhaps so, but this argument — and indeed the whole reductionist, positivist basis on which Harari rests — underestimates the extent to which humans are quite attached to the more holistic, humanistic, emergent understanding of themselves.

In his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia , the philosopher Robert Nozick put forward a now famous argument against the reductionist, hedonist understanding of human nature that is implicit in Harari’s books. He invited readers to imagine an “experience machine” that could detect and then induce maximally pleasurable experiences for anyone plugged into it. Would people value the kind of life that the experience machine offered?

By Harari’s understanding of the human, they would — indeed, they must. If life is reducible to firing neurons and you could guarantee the neurons fired in such a way as generated maximum pleasure for the organism in question, there is no conceivable reason why we would not take that option. Yet, Nozick contended that nearly everybody would decline the option, either because people want to do the actions themselves rather than just experience them, or because they want to be a certain person rather than someone just “floating in a tank … an indeterminate blob,” or because they value “deeper reality.” There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that Nozick’s contention is right.

In other words, Harari’s vision of human beings — simply and solely biological organisms that are now, through arbitrarily-acquired cognitive capacities, in a position to transform ourselves by revising, rewriting or even erasing our material existence — does not come close to reflecting our deepest understanding of ourselves.

In its own limited way, his vision is true, in the same way that it is true the meaning of his books can be reduced to the letters, spaces, and punctuation on each page. It is the kind of truth that, in Iain McGilchrist’s framing of the issue , demonstrates an unrepentant (and wholly inadequate) left-hemispheric approach to the issue of meaning. Yet surely even Harari would recognise that his own books have a meaning that emerges from and is greater than the constituent elements of letters, spaces, and punctuation that make up each page. In the same way, human beings have an emergent existence — in which truths of morality, aesthetics, ideology, religion reside — which is similarly not reducible to the neurones in our head and the genes in our cells.

The great leap backwards

“Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid.” So Harari seeks to dismiss human pretensions to unique and matchless supremacy. He may well be right. His strongest suit, as mentioned at the outset, is humanity’s inclination to stumble into consequences that were unseen or ignored, such as agricultural-derived disease, industrial-derived climate destruction, or electronically-derived de-humanisation. It would be a bravely optimistic person that bets their house against the human potential to leap backwards as well as forwards.

However, if Harari’s intelligent rats do dominate the global landscape, I am willing to bet that they will be using the same principles of mathematics and logic that we do. I bet that they would have a recognisably similar capacity for communication and imagination to ourselves. I bet that they would have an awareness of, an interest in and possibly a framework for ethics, derived from kin selection and reciprocal altruism, which is familiar to our own. I bet they would have generated “intersubjective realities” that bear more than a passing resemblance to some of our own. And I bet they would have similar inchoate beliefs about the mind, morality, beauty, and divinity that lies behind their ratty universe.

Or put another way, Harari is right to shake the throne on which humans seem to think we naturally belong. At their best, Sapiens and Homo Deus offer a crisp and stimulating provocation to such received wisdom. But they do so on the basis of a crudely reductionist and positivistic approach which fails to do justice to the complex, multi-layered human organisms about which he is writing.

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos . He is the author of The Political Samaritan: How Power Hijacked a Parable , The Evolution of the West , and Atheists: The Origin of the Species .

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A GRAPHIC HISTORY: THE BIRTH OF HUMANKIND: VOLUME ONE

by Yuval Noah Harari ; adapted by David Vandermeulen & illustrated by Daniel Casanave & Claire Champion ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 27, 2020

An informative, breathless sprint through the evolution and consequences of human development.

The professor and popular historian expands the reach of his internationally bestselling work with the launch of a graphic nonfiction series.

In a manner that is both playful and provocative, Harari teams with co-creators adept at the graphic format to enliven his academic studies. Here, a cartoon version of the professor takes other characters (and readers) on something of a madcap thrill ride through the history of human evolution, with a timeline that begins almost 14 billion years ago and extends into the future, when humanity becomes the defendant in “Ecosystem vs. Homo Sapiens,” a trial presided over by “Judge Gaia.” As Harari and his fellow time travelers visit with other academics and a variety of species, the vivid illustrations by Casaneve and colorist Champion bring the lessons of history into living color, and Vandermeulen helps condense Harari’s complex insights while sustaining narrative momentum. The text and illustrations herald evolution as “the greatest show on earth” while showing how only one of “six different human species” managed to emerge atop the food chain. While the Homo sapiens were not nearly as large, strong, fast, or powerful as other species that suffered extinction, they were able to triumph due to their development of the abilities to cooperate, communicate, and, perhaps most important, tell and share stories. That storytelling ultimately encompasses fiction, myth, history, and spirituality, and the success of shared stories accounts for a wide variety of historical events and trends, including Christianity, the French Revolution, and the Third Reich. The narrative climaxes with a crime caper, as a serial-killing spree results in the extinction of so many species, and the “Supreme Court of the future” must rule on the case against Homo sapiens . Within those deliberations, it’s clear that not “being aware of the consequences of their actions” is not a valid excuse.

Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-06-305133-1

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020

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by Yuval Noah Harari ; adapted by Yuval Noah Harari , David Vandermeulen & Daniel Casanave ; illustrated by Daniel Casanave

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New York Times Bestseller

by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2023

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.

To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023

ISBN: 9781982181284

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023

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THE RIGHT STUFF

by Tom Wolfe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 1979

Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts. But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill. But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979

ISBN: 0312427565

Page Count: 370

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979

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New in Paperback: ‘Sapiens,’ ‘Men Without Women’

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By Joumana Khatib

June 29, 2018

SAPIENS: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. (Harper Perennial, $22.99.) Harari, an Israeli historian, delves into humanity’s history, exploring why Homo sapiens — once just one human species among several — dominated. This sweeping account attempts to tell a genetic, cultural and social history, with a particular focus on the roles of cognition and agricultural and scientific advancements in our evolution.

MEN WITHOUT WOMEN: Stories , by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen. (Vintage, $16.) In these seven tales, emotionally adrift men long for the women they love; one story compares the experience to “a pastel-colored Persian carpet.” Our reviewer, Jay Fielden, praised the “rainy Tokyo of unfaithful women, neat single malt, stray cats, cool cars and classic jazz played on hi-fi setups.”

WRESTLING WITH HIS ANGEL: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Volume II, 1849-1856 , by Sidney Blumenthal. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) By 1849, Lincoln’s only term as a representative comes to an undistinguished end. The second installment of this biography follows Lincoln as he clashed with his rival, Stephen A. Douglas, who advanced policies that helped expand slavery; eked out a political future; and aligned with the Republicans.

THE BURNING GIRL , by Claire Messud. (Norton, $15.95.) Julia and Cassie, two teenagers in Massachusetts, have been best friends since nursery school, but as they edge into adolescence the friendship begins to unravel. Messud is skilled at capturing the perils and rites of passage that come with being a teenage girl, along with the intimacies and heartbreak of female friendships. Ultimately, the book is “a story about stories — their power, necessity and inevitable artifice,” our reviewer, Laura Lippman, wrote.

WHY WE SLEEP: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams , by Matthew Walker. (Scribner, $17.) Walker, who directs Berkeley’s Center for Human Sleep Science, sees our societal sleep deficit as “the greatest public health challenge we face in the 21st century.” The virtues of sleep, he says — everything from better memory retention to the ability to overcome negative feelings — can dramatically improve your life.

MY ABSOLUTE DARLING , by Gabriel Tallent. (Riverhead, $16.) Fourteen-year-old Turtle is growing up feral in Northern California, raised by her father to be a self-reliant survivalist. Her world is limited to school, where she’s an outcast, and home, where her father trains her and preys upon her. A romance offers an escape, and she must use the skills she learned from her father against him in a fight for her freedom.

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3 mind-blowing facts about humans that I learned from reading 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind'

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" Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind " is a bestseller praised by Barack Obama and Bill Gates.
The nonfiction book explores the history and evolution of humans and the modern world.
Here's a summary of 3 facts I learned and how they helped expand my understanding of humanity.

As an avid reader, my understanding of the world has greatly expanded through novels. I'm accustomed to looking at people through the emotional and psychological lens of relationships and community, always exploring how different social factors and personal histories make us so unique.

And while I've mostly preferred learning through fictional stories and characters, the non-fiction bestseller "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind " not only amplified my understanding of the human condition but also deepened my understanding of human s. The book, a biological, intellectual, and economic account of humankind, explained the biological "why" behind everything I've ever known about people, including myself.

Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, an internationally recognized historian and philosopher, introduced me to concepts that explore the very foundation of how humans evolved from nomadic apes to philosophical beings who ponder the meaning of life. I've been spouting quotes and information from this book ever since I finished reading it, so here are the three most fascinating concepts I learned from "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind."

3 amazing facts I learned from "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind":

Self-preservation is a biological instinct that greatly impacted the course of humankind — and explains some of our problems today..

The early developments of Homo sapiens were entirely biological, centered around sustaining and creating life. Yet some of our evolution's disadvantages heavily outweighed the advantages.

For instance, in the development of the agricultural revolution, humans found that wheat was incredibly difficult to farm, not economically secure, and not even that nutritious. So why did we invest time and energy into farming anyway? According to Harari, farming fulfilled our biological needs by helping communities settle down, give birth to more babies in a shorter amount of time, and feed a larger number of people on a smaller space of land.

To put it into today's terms, the pursuit of an easier life often generates greater hardships. It's called the luxury trap: As Harari puts it, "luxuries tend to become necessities and spawn new obligations." For example, we used to mails letter when we had something to say. Now, we send and receive dozens of emails every day, many of us considering it a necessity to have email access on our phones for even quicker responses. Immediate email correspondence was a luxury that has become a 21st-century necessity, spawning new obligations to be attached to our phones.

It's nearly impossible to break the luxury trap cycle: It's spawned by our biological desire to make life easier so we can conserve time, energy, or money. But humankind's instinct to cater to ourselves also has some positives. It's helped us evolve from farming wheat to generating significant technological advances and boosting our cognitive capacity for empathy, to name a few things.

Because we create societal values, we can determine which values hold the most meaning.

When humans began to trade nomadic life for settlements, we created values to help govern societies. Our societal agreements are based on inter-subjective beliefs — the foundations of society are agreed-upon concepts of law, money, religion, and nations that link billions of humans to an imagined order that does not exist outside of our consciousness. Even the idea of "rights" is not something that exists in biology: It's an imagined order that controls the population because enough people believe in it.

The idea that we fabricated the social concepts that tie us to our political views and institutions might spur an existential crisis, but learning this was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. While fully abandoning the greatest societal contracts would create planet-wide chaos, it can be helpful to remember individual (and often invisible) pressures that we feel to be constantly achieving or fitting into a particular mold don't have as much control over us as we think. If we question some of these imagined constructs, we might find ourselves closer to intellectual freedom.

Happiness is a relatively recent focus for humankind.

As Harari points out, happiness is an incalculable abstraction. The closest measurable figure is pleasure, a chemical sensation that keeps humans alive by rewarding us when we eat or reproduce — not exactly what most of us think when we imagine self-fulfillment.

Yet, as the cognitive revolution carried humankind through advances that would shape all of planet Earth, the importance of happiness emerged. Happiness is subjective, the scale of which has dramatically changed from the Middle Ages to now. But it is also the unit many of us use to determine if our lives feel worthwhile.

In much of the history of humankind, we ignored the idea that happiness drove any kind of evolution. But as we grew through rapid technological evolutions, our motivation has focused more on our subjective well-being. Humankind's search for a meaningful life is how we've managed to survive a history's worth of hardships, such as defending a country's values in a war or exploring new hobbies during a pandemic.

The biological rules that dictated the survival of Homo sapiens for hundreds of thousands of years have changed in only the past few decades. With our advances in medicine, agriculture, and technology, humans have been able to shift our focus from survival and reproduction to happiness and meaning. With this realization that humanity's sole purpose is no longer to survive but thrive , we can prioritize self-actualization.

The bottom line

I learned so many profound theories from this book, and it broadened my understanding of humanity. While we evolved through our survivalist need for self-preservation, the cognitive revolution spawned societies founded on rules and values, some of which now create new barriers to our happiness and wellbeing.

More importantly, learning about our evolutionary history deepened my empathy for humankind and even towards myself. Thanks to this book, my view of my place in the world has shifted, as I remember that I wouldn't be here, typing this, if not for the billions of decisions my ancestors made. It's a borderline magical (and ok, a little overwhelming) realization. It makes me want to pursue a more meaningful life, and extend grace towards others and myself whenever I can. Gaining this perspective is one of the best takeaways a book could possibly give.

Main content

A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari | 4.47 | 962,485 ratings and reviews

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Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Sapiens from the world's leading experts.

Reid Hoffman CEO/LinkedIn A grand theory of humanity. (Source)

Richard Branson Founder/Virgin Group One example of a book that has helped me to #ReadToLead this year is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. While the book came out a few years ago now, I got around to it this year, and am very glad I did. I’ve always been fascinated in what makes humans human, and how people are constantly evolving, changing and growing. The genius of Sapiens is that it takes some daunting, complex themes and breaks them down into a fascinating, simple narrative. (Source)

Bill Gates CEO/Microsoft Both Melinda and I read this one, and it has sparked lots of great conversations at our dinner table. Harari takes on a daunting challenge: to tell the entire history of the human race in just 400 pages. He also writes about our species today and how artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and other technologies will change us in the future. Although I found things to disagree with—especially Harari’s claim that humans were better off before we started farming—I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who’s interested in the history and future of our species. (Source)

Barack Obama Former USA President eval(ez_write_tag([[250,250],'theceolibrary_com-leader-2','ezslot_7',164,'0','1'])); Fact or fiction, the president knows that reading keeps the mind sharp. He also delved into these non-fiction reads. (Source)

Naval Ravikant CEO & Co-Founder/AngelList I’m rereading Sapiens again, because I love that book so much. (Source)

James Cameron It explains human behavior and why we are the way we are in human civilization from soup to nuts. And I’ve read it now a couple of times. It’s a pretty astonishing book. (Source)

Daniel Ek Both sobering and conservatively optimistic in equal measure, it seems even more relevant for us at the moment to learn from our socio-anthropological history. (Source)

Marvin Liao Partner/500 Startups The Joy of Not Working (Zelinkski), Flash Foresight (Burrus), The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Gracian), Sapiens (Yuval), The End of Jobs (Pearson), Deep Work (Newport), Sovereign Individual (Davidson), The Fourth Economy (Davison) & The Monk & the Riddle (Komisar). Every single one of these books completely changed how I looked at everything in the world & literally pushed my life in a new direction. They were Paradigm Shifting as they say. (hate that word but it really was a Paradigm Shift for me). (Source)

Whitney Cummings A great book about [how] we’ve evolved and why we have anxiety. (Source)

Bryan Callen Everybody should read it, it’s an amazing book. A brief history of humankind but it brings us to the present day. (Source)

David Allemann He changed my perspective on what is a true fact and what is human fiction. He also left me wondering: Are we the most aggressive species on earth that will destroy the planet? Or are we programmed for survival and will rise to the challenge? The answer might play out in our lifetimes. (Source)

Katie Keith This is a fascinating account of human history, told from a brand new perspective. It has made me think about what it makes to be human and what makes us different from all other species. It has also helped me to understand our place in history. (Source)

Yaro Starak And then, the best recommendation for me this year was “Sapiens” which was recommended I think 2 years ago by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and that was really enjoyable, I loved “Sapiens” by Yuval Harari. (Source)

Louis Grenier You need to read “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus” by the same author, about the story of humankind and why we are who we are, which is a fantastic read. I think as a marketer, if you don’t understand people and if you don’t understand where we’re coming from, it’s going to be very difficult for you to break away from the crowd, (Source)

Dean Roller Changed my perspective on what it means to be a human being through a detailed history of our human species. I felt it gave me a broader awareness of why I do what I do. (Source)

Cory Zue Sapiens takes a ridiculously high-level view of human fiction/story and does an amazing job reframing how we perceive humanity and culture in a way that makes current-day society feel a bit silly. It’s also a phenomenal history book and chalk-full of really interesting information. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys musing on their/our place in the universe. (Source)

Nicky Cullen Just learning all about our past and our evolution. I'm only 150 pages in but it really is mind-blowing. (Source)

Emi Gal Currently reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and I’m hoping to gain a better understanding of how humans became conscious beings. (Source)

Fabrice Grinda I don’t have an absolute favorite book. There are books that are meaningful to me at a given point in time. Right now that book is Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. The book is incredibly ambitious. It covers the history of humanity starting with modern cognition. It covers everything from why Sapiens ended up on top relative to other hominids, to gender roles, the agricultural revolution, the history of currency, empire and capitalism. It analyses recent developments and speculates as to where we might be heading. (Source)

Sergey Sapelnyk Noah Harari’s Sapiens is a book I enjoyed recently. As someone who reads a significant amount of business books, I feel like it’s easy to disproportionately read books that have a direct impact on your career/job/company etc. Reading Sapiens was interesting and different from what I typically read, and it was a thought-evoking book. Harari tries to explain all of humanity in 400 pages, and how humans have come to thrive throughout history. Although Harari has some disagreeable assumptions, it was overall a reading experience that expanded my perspective on the world. (Source)

Mehdi Kajbaf I think that every career path begins with an understanding of who you are and what matters to you. In that light I will suggest some self discovery books. And of course some great business books. (Source)

Bill Liao The human world occurs in language so best get good at it! (Source)

Dennis Fong Sapiens was awesome. I thought it was... Just fundamentally you learn so much about human history and even like the politics and the situation that we're in today, from it. I thought that was really good. (Source)

Ola Olusoga Selecting one non-business book is also tough. I recently finished Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and it was "wow". Always interesting to dive into human behavior and history for clarity on how we got here and why we are the way we are (culture, society, e.t.c) (Source)

Gunhee Park Some other books I’ve really enjoyed: Sapiens. [...] (Source)

Deepak Chhugani I absolutely prioritize books recommended by friends or certain people. I started Sapiens a few days ago, but will have to see how much time I can actually give it. (Source)

Fabio Schvartsman is the CEO of the Brazilian multinational corporation Vale, which is in the business of mining and metals. He will be reading about some of the more remarkable figures in business and psychology this summer. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind—Yuval Noah Harari Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike—Phil Knight Sigmund Freud en son temps et dans le nôtre—Élisabeth Roudinesco (Source)

Simon Mayo Love this book still https://t.co/0J3ZtEg29R (Source)

Marcellus Wiley “Sapiens” by Yuval Harari Great book! https://t.co/i3iTUoBLUY (Source)

Ryan Shea [Ryan Shea said this is one of his most-recommended books.] (Source)

Lex Fridman Basically one of the things we've created here is we've imagined ideas that we all share. (Source)

Kishore Biyani Fascinating because of its multi-disciplinary approach towards understanding human society, our behaviour and our future. (Source)

Ashton Kutcher The brainy book I seem to be sharing or talking about the most lately. (Source)

Anurag Ramdasan A quitintessential book on the origin of Sapiens. Yuval makes history appealing with his amazing narrative. (Source)

Robert Jones What he’s saying is that the essence of humanity is to build our lives around fictions, and that, I think, is what branding is. It’s creating fictions around ordinary tangible objects—like a can of fizzy drink—or sometimes around things that are themselves fictions like a corporation. So that made me feel that although branding has become a big thing that we all talk about only in the last 30 years or so, it is actually a very human thing. (Source)

Aidan Connolly Many books have changed my view of the world, even when I don’t agree with everything an author says. I have enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari’s books Sapiens & Homo Deus and how humanity might evolve in the presence of AI, Robots and super humans. (Source)

Chris Goward Here are some of the books that have been very impactful for me, or taught me a new way of thinking: [...] Sapiens. (Source)

Rankings by Category

Sapiens is ranked in the following categories:

#12 in 21st Century
#5 in Academia
#3 in Amsterdam
#9 in Ancient Greece
#1 in Ancient History
#1 in Anthropology
#4 in Archaeology
#8 in Atheism
#7 in Audible
#8 in Bestseller
#3 in Biology
#8 in Capitalism
#7 in Consciousness
#3 in Crafts
#5 in Critical Thinking
#3 in Culture
#3 in Current
#10 in Current Affairs
#2 in Documentaries
#7 in Drawing
#1 in Earth Science
#8 in Ecology
#7 in Enlightenment
#1 in Environmental Studies
#1 in Evolution
#1 in Evolutionary Psychology
#1 in Factual
#9 in Focus
#2 in Futurism
#8 in Game Changer
#5 in Genetics
#4 in Geography
#4 in Goodreads
#1 in Hebrew
#6 in Historical Nonfiction
#1 in History
#1 in History Of Religion
#1 in History Of Science
#2 in Hobbies
#2 in Holiday Reading
#4 in How Things Work
#4 in Human Nature
#3 in Human Physiology
#2 in Humanity
#7 in Important
#6 in Influential
#2 in Insightful
#3 in Intellectual
#1 in Interesting
#1 in Israel
#1 in Knowledge
#7 in Learning
#1 in Liberalism
#1 in Life Sciences
#5 in Linkedin
#3 in Meaning Of Life
#2 in Modern History
#1 in Molecular Biology
#3 in Morality
#7 in Must-Read
#2 in Nerdy
#2 in New York Times Bestseller
#1 in Nonfiction
#4 in Perspective
#2 in Philosophy History
#1 in Popular Science
#2 in Possession
#4 in Propaganda
#7 in Psycho
#3 in Quarantine
#2 in Recent
#3 in Recommended
#9 in Research
#9 in Revolution
#1 in Science
#2 in Science and Math
#2 in Scientific
#3 in Scribd
#2 in Singularity
#2 in Smart
#8 in Social
#1 in Social Sciences
#5 in Social Studies
#5 in Sociology
#10 in Sustainability
#12 in Tech
#9 in Thinking
#5 in Thought
#12 in Thought-Provoking
#6 in Wisdom
#1 in World
#1 in World History

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Book Review: Prof. Yuval Noah Harari's 'Sapiens: A Graphic History'
Consider the phenomenon known as "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind." First written in Hebrew and self-published in Israel in 2011, the book by Yuval Noah Harari found an American publisher in 2014, quickly became an international best-seller in 60 languages, and then morphed into a kind of multi-media empire called Sapienship.
A Catholic Life: Book Review: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Book Review: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. It is unfortunate that this book is so highly read by academics and elite business professionals ranging from those in Silicon Valley to Wall Street. Dr. Harari, an atheist, has written a book that is not only logically flawed but written in a way with only contempt for religious - especially Catholics.
Sapiens
It is massively engaging and continuously interesting. The book covers a mind-boggling 13.5 billion years of pre-history and history. From the outset, Harari seeks to establish the multifold forces that made Homo ('man') into Homo sapiens ('wise man') - exploring the impact of a large brain, tool use, complex social structures and more.
Book Review: Yuval Noah Harrari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology: Create email alert. Free access. Book review. First published online January 4, 2021. Book Review: Yuval Noah Harrari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco View all authors and affiliations. Based on: ...
Book Review: Yuval Noah Harrari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
PRE 010.1177/1063851220974260Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical TheologyBook Review book-review2020 Book Review. Book Review 129 The first of the revolutions, the Cognitive Revolution, was sparked by the ... the need for Homo sapiens will vanish. The book closes with three key questions that are worth quoting in full
Yuval Noah Harari Believes This Simple Story Can Save the Planet
With the publication in the United States of his best-selling "Sapiens" in 2015, the Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari arrived at the top rank of public intellectuals, a ...
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind review
That said, Sapiens is one of those rare books that lives up to the publisher's blurb. It really is thrilling and breath-taking; it actually does question our basic narrative of the world.
Yuval Noah Harari Gives the Really Big Picture
February 10, 2020. Harari, who is slim, soft-spoken, and relentless in his search for an audience, defines himself as both a historian and a philosopher. Photograph by Olaf Blecker for The New ...
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
To order Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind for £18.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. Explore more on these topics Science and ...
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, book review: Eloquent history of what
Sapiens is a brave and bracing look at a species that is mostly in denial about the long road to now and the crossroads it is rapidly approaching. Join our commenting forum
On Humanity: A review of "Sapiens"
On Humanity: A review of "Sapiens". "Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights.". It is with this idea that author Yuval Noah Harari opens his narrative on human culture, society, the past and the future.
SAPIENS
The book was originally published in Israel in 2011 and became a best-seller. There is enormous gratification in reading books of this nature, an encyclopedic approach from a well-versed scholar who is concise but eloquent, both skeptical and opinionated, and open enough to entertain competing points of view. As Harari firmly believes, history ...
Book Review: 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' by Yuval Noah
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. By Yuval Noah Harari. HarperCollins, 443 pages, $29.99. Religion provided early versions of the human story: Zoroastrian sacred texts, the Book of Genesis ...
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a book bound to appear on a large number of coffee tables and favorite lists, and be picked up even by those who normally would not find the time for reading. It will certainly not be the next A Brief History of Time, which is often named as the world's top unfinished popular bestseller. Both A Brief History of Time and Sapiens share a similar, worthy ...
Sapiens, maybe; Deus, no: The problem with Yuval Noah Harari
First in Sapiens, published in 2011 and in English in 2014, and then in Homo Deus (2015 and 2016), Harari, an Israeli historian, takes the reader from the Big Bang to a fantastical, vaguely ...
SAPIENS
Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller's existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence. A quirky wonder of a book. 7.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Hebrew: קיצור תולדות האנושות, Qitzur Toldot ha-Enoshut) is a book by Yuval Noah Harari, first published in Hebrew in Israel in 2011 based on a series of lectures Harari taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in English in 2014. The book, focusing on Homo sapiens, surveys the history of humankind, starting from the Stone Age ...
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New in Paperback: 'Sapiens,' 'Men Without Women'
SAPIENS: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. (Harper Perennial, $22.99.) ... Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review's podcast to talk about the latest news in ...
"Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind" Book Review
Learn more. "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" is a bestseller praised by Barack Obama and Bill Gates. The nonfiction book explores the history and evolution of humans and the modern world ...
Book Reviews: Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari (Updated for 2021)
The book is incredibly ambitious. It covers the history of humanity starting with modern cognition. It covers everything from why Sapiens ended up on top relative to other hominids, to gender roles, the agricultural revolution, the history of currency, empire and capitalism.
PDF Review of Yuval Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
Review of Yuval Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. C.R.Hallpike. The biological title Sapiens is intended to give the impression of a work of hard-nosed science in the Darwinian tradition. Human history is presented as 'the next stage in the continuum of physics to chemistry to biology', and our ultimate destiny, and not so very
Thoughts on Yuval Noah Harare's book Sapiens : r/books
eaglecream. Thoughts on Yuval Noah Harare's book Sapiens. I listened to Sapiens a few years ago, and I thought that the ideas that were presented were informative, illuminating, and formed my views on how I think about humanity. Recently I went to buy the hard copy of the book and I found a slew of despairing reviews saying that it is full of ...