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.
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, 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, usually 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.
Because he doesn’t ever answer the question he poses at the end of the chapter, 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 Ursulua 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 "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.
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 sold and are still selling 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.
1 comment:
I meant to include something I think is important!
If you’re wondering why I didn’t take on the details of his argument against biological patriarchy (muscles, aggression, genes), it’s not because I agree! It’s because I use those pages for an activity in APG 399: Sex and Reproduction in Our Species. Some things are up to students to work out.
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