Sapiens, Ch. 6 and 7: Sick and tired of living among all these awful people? No time to sit around waiting for a cooperation instinct to evolve? Just build prisons!

There are only three posts left in my (ninth) journey through Sapiens. This is the first of those final three.

I started with so much to say just about one page at a time! Along the way I began lumping pages together, to the point where I was posting about whole chapters. And today, I'm lumping Chapters 6 (Building Pyramids) and 7 (Memory Overload) together. 

Why all this lumping? Well, you could say that, at this point, so many pages feel so similar that they no longer seem like distinct entities. If they were fossils, then I'd lump them into the same species. And at some point there's only so much you can say about one species. 

(wiiiiiink)

You could also say, especially if you too have read Sapiens, that at some point, while you maintain the urge to graffiti the margins, you eventually lose the will to engage beyond that.

Like, every time I've read Chapter 6 I swear I'm going to talk to someone, anyone, about Harari's treatment of the Declaration of Independence, but I never have. We never had time for that in class, as our focus was on prehistory and evolutionary biology broadly, and I never discussed this book with anyone outside of class. And today, I'm still not going to do it. At this point, it's just exhausting, thinking you need to respond or simply react to every unexamined assumption, whim, or intentional rhetorical device (hard to tell them apart) and that includes the ones you might agree with or concede!

The Declaration of Independence bit, however, is not like that. It's just irritating. But it seems like it's supposed to be? A commenter on a previous post described Harari as a troll. This is one of those times it feels like maybe he is. 

Regardless, the Declaration of Independence bit seems to misunderstand, misrepresent, or completely ignore what "all men are created equal" is supposed to mean in that document. It means, I think (sorry but I spent some formidable years in Canada and didn't sit through all the same stuff American kids did), but it means, I think, UNDER THE LAW. 

The document is a legal one, first and foremost, and so it is describing what the law can circumscribe and that people can, possibly, enact and enforce. It is not, first and foremost, an ethos or philosophy about human nature, per se! Though it obviously has been interpreted as such and we can assume those things are baked into it. People wrote it, after all. 

Still, it's meant to describe the law, not actual humanity. And maybe I'm misreading. Maybe the Declaration of Independence's assertion of equality is just a springboard for the opportunity to ponder how evolution's truth includes that everyone is unique and that therefore no one is equal to anyone. And so, Holy shit... (bong riiiiiiiiip)... Would we or could we even write the Declaration of Independence today, given that we know evolution is true??? 

(That right there, by the way, is a gateway for lefties and righties, alike, to join hands and sing the inconvenient truths of racism and sexism, and to rationalize eugenics together.)

But this bit doesn't read like stream of consciousness. It reads like he's plotting to pit science vs. the law in order to really hammer home the enormity of imagined orders, when, in this instance, there doesn't need to be a conflict. That is, there doesn't need to be a conflict if one considers the difference between science and law. But if Harari doesn't see that science, too, is an imagined order, like law, then I'm not sure I'd enjoy it if he took this bit any further.

Right. Imagined orders. These chapters bring the fictions of prior chapters to a whole new level, at least in size and power. Imagined orders are such tremendous fictions that Harari describes them as traps (like agriculture) and prisons. 

On. page 110 he writes that, "Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages." Okay good. Culture, myth, etc. ... these are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. They build up and evolve (so to speak) over time and are very real in the sense that they impact us, and we them, over that time. 

"Rather," he continues, "they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively." As usual, here is a claim with no acknowledgment that it's untestable or unverifiable. I presume we're supposed to agree with this claim and not even see it that way, but see it as matter-of-fact, based on the assumptions in many prior pages of the book noted on in prior posts and, here, starting on page 100...

What on earth? I'm really interested in knowing why he can state so plainly that foragers and farmers have distinctly different impressions of the future with only farmers being the ones who "must always keep the future in mind and must work in its service." And, again, I'm sure there is a rich and fascinating literature on what people all over the world think, now, about the future and how it factors into their lives, but to project this onto our ancestors so breezily is ... exactly what this book has been doing with so much else up until this point, so is anyone surprised? But that's just a prologue to set the mood so we can go where we really need to go: instincts. 

After introducing "imagined orders" as the thing without which we could not cooperate at scale, I wondered about the basis for that claim, since there's really no counterfactual or way to go back and interfere with humanity's natural history and see if large-scale cooperation could have happened any other way. I mean, sure it's tough to imagine it happening any other way, but what if the prison of an imagined order is limiting our imaginations? 

Anyway.. .get a load of page 102... 

There have been horrible calamities in recorded history. Examples involving food shortages and wars are given. "The problem at the root of such calamities," writes Harari, "is that humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals."

Hopefully by now everyone can sense that what Harari writes as if fact, is indeed not a fact because it is not knowable. 

Who's to say when and where what he describes was true? And who's to say that, even if it was so simple over all those millions of years, that that social condition was so genetically-sourced that as human populations grew there was, what many scholars call, an "evolutionary mismatch" resulting in undesirable conditions. Well, lots would say, but who's to say they'd be talking about facts? 

About the problem at the root of such calamities, Harari says, "The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve."

I'm having deja vu. Are you? I'm seeing starlings and swarming insects and so many schools and herds ... and so I searched back through old posts in this series to find 

my little freakout about his claim that without language we could not cooperate in large numbers. We're dealing with the same ideas here with imagined orders, except it's worse. He's telling us that cooperation in other animals comes through genes but in us is ...

(a) biologically absent (whooooooooooaaaa, man...I'm not at all someone who assumes social behaviors are ever instincts but even I have to say you can't know if such an instinct isn't there based only on life experience, which is the only way to make such a claim... whew!) 

and (b) only happening through culture/ fictions/ imagined orders. Fucking hell. 

Here's proof: "Despite the lack of such biological instincts, during the foraging era, hundreds of strangers were able to cooperate thanks to their shared myths."

Shared myths are massively important for human existence, to be sure. While it's fascinating, satisfying, and sometimes thrilling to read about the power of culture, why it has to be smashed together with complete "evolutionary" (note the scare-quotes there) bullshit is... 

unpleasant. Especially when he tacks on, "However, this cooperation was loose and limited." 

(And then he goes on, to the next page to, once again, have sapiens "join[ing] forces to wipe out a Neanderthal band.") 

Oh. So we don't have the biological equipment to do any better than the world as we know it. And the culture isn't up to peace and love either. And so... we're... fucked I guess.

And that's the feeling of the entire chapter (and the next one) if a reader is not there already. The nihilism. So, by the time you read about how nothing is objectively good, which may be true and may be a valuable and even rewarding intellectual issue (I certainly think it is), it doesn't land neutrally. Here, it's kind of landing like a blow or, at least, like it's nudging you to roll over and just give up because nothing's true. I don't want to put that on Harari because I doubt he wants people to believe that or enact that belief, given his thoughts on vegetarianism in prior chapters and race and sexuality in the next. But, again, I'm thinking of the recent commenter who said he's a troll. 

Chapter 7 is full of fascinating things and is even delightful at times. But, unfortunately, it begins with an outdated view of animal behavior that supports his claims about and simplistic view of imagined orders. 

This business (see pic below) about instinctual rules for play being hard-wired into genes both baselessly overestimates the in-born programming involved and woefully underestimates the complexity of being a puppy (or any non-human animal, or plant, or fungus, etc.) in this world. By extension, those outdated ideas hold humans apart from nature in a way that's far more fiction than fact. 

Like I said, the rest of Chapter 7 is fascinating and dappled with bursts of joy. That's why the final thoughts, set off only with a double line break, is pretty twisted, in relief. If you read the chapter, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. But here's the last page for you to see where it just cuts off with AI "attempting to wipe out the human race."  

Yes, have a nice future, students whose professors had you read this book for a class, not realizing that some of you are of the generation who actually says, out loud, in public "I never asked to be born." O, this world. This prison of a world. 

Good thing Chapter 8 is actually more good than bad. Too bad it doesn't read that way the first time through. Since most people read books only once, so many people take away more bad than good from Chapter 8! That's next. To be continued...