Sapiens, to The End: Fictions Based on Fictions, Eating Fictions Round and Round

We climaxed in the last post. So, this final post, in what started as a page-by-page review of Sapiens by Harari, is a sort of epilogue.

Tired of the taste of tale?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros#/media/File:Serpiente_alquimica.jpg

Let's cozy down, one more time, into his way of painting the evolved human condition (Chapter 10, pages 195-196):

"Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, 'we' and 'they'. We are people like you and me, who share our language, religion and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for them. We were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing. We don't want to see any of them in our territory, and we don't care an iota what happens in their territory. They are barely even human." 

Putting aside the problems that some scientists and scholars (both of human and nonhuman animals) have with the concept of “instinct” (see de Waal's book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?), let’s consider the evidence that Harari provides to back up his assertion about Sapiens' evolved psyches.

“In the language of the Dinka people of the Sudan, ‘Dinka’ simply means ‘people’. People who are not Dinka are not people."

Does he provide evidence that the Dinka believe that non-Dinka are not people or are barely even human? No.

But aren't you tempted to believe his second sentence given the first? 

Careful! Don't! It's a sneaky non-sequitur. I'm sure there's an official philosophical term for that blundering fallacy/ manipulative technique (can't tell which it is, but can't help but assume it's the first).

Does he provide evidence that calling oneself ‘people’ is necessarily separating your people-ness or humanity from members of other tribes or cultures? No.

Does he provide evidence that calling oneself 'people' is necessarily dehumanizing others? No. 

We call our moon Moon. No one who knows of other moons believes that our moon is the only real or true moon in the solar system, do they? 

All this lack of actual evidence missing from the entire book seems bad for buying the assumption that dividing the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ is an evolved instinct. 

Harari’s example is terribly misleading for an additional reason: the Dinka were named by colonial Europeans who trafficked in the same myths about human nature that are modernized in Sapiens. 

In “The Dinka myth: How a South Sudanese ethnic group lost identity,” Mading Peter Angong explains that ‘Dinka’ is a “foreign imposed name that we cannot even define. We are Muonyjang!”

Sapiens, Ch. 8: "unfounded myths rather than biological facts" about race, sexuality, sex, and gender

This is my penultimate post about the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. 

For some reason, the previous post felt like rock bottom. Is that because it really was? (If so, please don't tell me.) 

Is that because I knew I was about to tie this thing up, and so it's just natural to have faced the biggest challenge just before mustering my last drop of gumption and getting my shit together for the triumphant finale, and so in hindsight I only see it as rock bottom? (Only Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung know.) 

Regardless of what came before or why, today we are at Chapter 8: There is No Justice in History. 

We're not bothering with the opening paragraph, there. I've yammered on plenty already (in prior posts) about these purported "biological instincts necessary" for large-scale cooperation. 

And we're not going to dwell on the race and class discussion that starts the chapter. It's good. He writes, "these hierarchies are all the product of human imagination."  

I cannot speak to the quality of the caste discussion that follows, but it is interesting that he touches on concepts of purity, here, and then focuses on racial purity for a section, given how he wields purity in his human evolutionary scenario. Remember "pure Sapiens"? If you're reading along in the book, do you see parallels between the American anti-Black, white supremacist racial narrative he carefully describes and picks apart, and the one he provided in earlier chapters of Sapiens? I do. And that's a problem. 

Now's a good time to drop some links that speak to that problem:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/neanderthals-and-scientific-racism

https://www.popsci.com/excerpt-superior-race-science/

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720130

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/738230

https://www.science.org/content/article/anthropologists-take-arms-against-race-science

https://www.jstor.org/stable/45380543

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/please-stop-using-neanderthal-as-an-insult-say-neanderthal-experts

The rest of the chapter is dedicated to sex, sexuality, and gender. And it's a doozy. 

He asks, "How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths?" Yes! And, again, I can't help but wonder why this reflexivity is not applied during his treatment of human evolution up until this point, with evolved psychologies out the wazoo being stated as if fact. But let's just celebrate that it's happening here and proceed. 

Okay, then, why is it a doozy? I've seen readers takeaway wildly different interpretations of this half-ish of the chapter. And I think I know why. It really helped to hear someone's perspective from outside the classroom. 

A few years ago, a documentarian called me up to talk about patriarchy. I figured it was because of my ideas about childbirth, men's height, or sexual selection. She wasn't interested in those things.  Not directly. She was interested in my ideas about Harari's, in Sapiens, specifically in Chapter 8. 

The filmmaker on the phone with me presumed that, in it, Harari argued that patriarchy is just evolved biology. She wanted to hear my counter-argument. I had just met this person, but I had to tell her that she was mistaken.

Harari spends several pages of this chapter on sex and gender and focuses especially on male muscles, innate male aggression, and male genes. Then, just before going onto the next chapter, he ends his discussion with a question: “If, as is being demonstrated today so clearly, the patriarchal system has been based on unfounded myths rather than on biological facts, what accounts for the universality and stability of this system?” 

See? He concludes that patriarchy is “based unfounded myths rather than on biological facts.”

The style, here is not exactly helping a reader out. He offers his conclusion on patriarchy about “unfounded myths rather than biological facts” in the form of a question??? 

And then he fails to follow it up with an answer???

By dangling, “what accounts for the universality and stability of this system?” Harari is pointing to the next chapters: Money, Religion, and Empires. He is implying that those three phenomena explain patriarchy. 

But Harari never actually says so in any of those chapters. Patriarchy disappears from his narrative, so his question functions only rhetorically and is then forgotten. 

I think that's how the question can be misinterpreted, defensively, as a pointed challenge--like those one might see or receive on-line--to anyone who does not believe that patriarchy is a biological fact of life. After all, the Internet seems to have been built, first and foremost, to cement the belief that patriarchy is just how humans evolved. 

And, why not feel defensive? By the time a reader gets to Harari’s question-as-conclusion on patriarchy, they have already read through his evidence-free speculation about male muscles, innate male aggression and violence, and male genes without so much as a single citation. 

You know what? I'm gonna do it. I can't believe I'm gonna do it but I'm gonna do it!!!!

A woman could NEVER get away with this:

A fully imaginary take-down of the biology of patriarchy in a blockbuster best-seller could only be in a man's.

Ahem. Where were we? Right. Before that rhetorically challenging question-as-conclusion end to the chapter, a reader may have noted how he kicks off the topic, in the pages prior: 

“even though the precise definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ varies between cultures, there is [likely] some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood.” 

Some universal biological reason? Some. Universal. Biological. Reason. Like something psychological that’s evolved inside of our species? Like… this faith-based evolutionary phenomenon everyone calls “tribalism” and believes is a 100% evolutionary fact about Sapiens which is laced throughout this book under other names to do with evolved "xenophobia" and evolved "us vs. them"? 

Yes. That kind of universal biological reason, one can only suppose. Whether they are acutely aware of it or not, by this point readers are immersed in an evolutionary psycho-drama. 

Because he doesn’t ever answer the question he poses at the end of the chapter, and because he never returns to patriarchy, it is purely rhetorical. 

And, it resonates as more of a mic-drop rhetorical question than it is because it’s very similar to the question someone who believes patriarchy is in our bones might drop on us. So Harari's words can read like,

If patriarchy’s not in our biology, as “so clearly” demonstrated [which we can take sarcastically because the ideas are ambiguously discussed with zero evolutionary or biological citations], then “what accounts for the universality and stability of this system”? 

This kind of question is so often posed on-line or in real life to mean, ultimately:

We must be idiot feminists to believe anything other than universal evolved biology, which is universal human nature, explains patriarchy. 

The tech bros love this book. Gates put it on his must-read list. Musk did too. It’s too easy to hear their voices as we read Sapiens.  

In this world, it is easy to assume that a wildly successful author, touted by so many in the science and tech world, must be just the next avatar for the dominant brand of pop human evolution, which is still so masculine so very  MANKIND THE DOMINATOR AND DESTROYER. It's what Ursula K. Le Guin called "the killer story." 

And it's easy to assume that's who he is because ...he is? In the eight years since it was published, Sapiens has sold more than 21 million copies in 65 languages. And the book rests on the evolutionary psychological assumption that we are tribal in our bones. Harari pushes that story of evolved "xenophobia" and prehistoric "genocide" even though it amounts to science-sounding Original Sin, never considering it may be like the fictions about biologically evolved patriarchy, sexuality, and race that he exposes. 

Sapiens is just the latest on the overwhelmingly tall pile of books perpetuating evolutionary fictions. As such, it is easy to mistake it for pushing adaptively evolved gender differences that result, naturally, in patriarchy. This goes back at least as far as Darwin.

I co-taught with Sapiens in a Grand Challenge course at the University of Rhode Island. Fifty students per year, for several years, mostly aged between 19-21. I know that many readers, not just the documentarian, miss Harari’s stated point about patriarchy’s “unfounded myths rather than biological facts” because they tell me all about it.

Whether they agree or not, readers like the documentarian who called me up, and like my students sometimes, think Harari is arguing for a biological basis for men’s disproportionate power.  And maybe if you’re telling any stories, like Harari has clearly been doing since page 1, then people assume you’re perpetuating them all, the canon. Maybe they jump to that conclusion because that’s been the status quo for so long. Mankind's evolutionary triumph boils down to profound male vs. female differences which, when established/ believed/ internalized/ enacted, then bubble back up to support notions of an evolved patriarchy justified by an evolved tribalism. We just can't help it that we colonize, enslave, and genocide. We evolved to compete for women, after all...

Perhaps the most positive contribution of Sapiens is Harari’s absorbing presentation of “fictions” and “imagined orders” and their immense power, which anthropologists, artists, philosophers, and activists have long appreciated as "myth" and "culture." 

But he never uses "fiction" or "imagined order" for gender and patriarchy (and those frameworks he champions never touch his writing about our evolved tribalism either). Again, no wonder this chapter is misinterpreted.

He seems nice, even really really nice. And it’s a shame to see someone so committed to evolutionary fictions without realizing it. It’s a pity that the only hope readers can take away from this narrative about our evolved awfulness is that humankind will rise above their evolved awfulness. 

What a dire outlook if that's what the millions of Sapiens readers actually take away. And what a terrifying thing, if they do and are. Are we really up against Mother Nature if we want to ... save Mother Nature from ourselves? 

Good lord! The nihilism based on a ginormous pile of complete and total bullshit.

It's got the aura of science, and with that comes authority. But you can’t see that it's just more fiction if you only know the narrow, “Darwinian” simplistic, overly-deterministic, often completely and fully imaginary view of evolution and believe the preferred theories and narratives that come out of it are scientific fact. 

From that under-informed or nicely-biased perspective it seems impossible to see that while evolution is true, so much of the meaning people have made of it, including scientists, is fiction, pure fiction. Truly. 

There’s nothing but theorized human nature to have to overcome or to rise above. That's literally nothing. It's a ghost. It's not real unless we believe it is. It's as real as we want it to be.

Knowing that, knowing that we aren't fighting evolution, then doesn't it seem easier to make progress? Sure, the world and life are still daunting, but at least goodness is not so epically nigh-impossible, right?

When we update our evolutionary perspective away from the 150 years old fictions that so many have been selling and are still selling to the world, well, get ready, because when that day comes we will be free.

And the people who want to go on believing that we evolved to be tribal and racist, and that men and women evolved to have distinct essences that built them for this natural patriarchal order of things, which peaked back when there was no opportunity for women to learn to read and to write and to complain on a blog about men's myths, well in a future without a whiff of science attached to those myths, then those believers will have no choice but to call it religion or anything other than the science of evolution. 

The final post is next.

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 psychology-themed 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, there, 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, given all that completely made-up prehistory explained by completely made-up ancestral biology, we don't have the biological equipment, now, to do any better than the world as we know it. And, no, 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, they sure can take away more bad than good from Chapter 8! That's next. To be continued...