75 pages • 2 hours read
Yuval Noah HarariSapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Shared Fictions
“Shared fictions” are beliefs and ideas that facilitate the formation of community and society. The ability to communicate ideas about things that do not exist is one of the reasons humans are so successful in an evolutionary sense, Harari argues. These shared fictions allow our societies to function and cooperate as large units. Humans rule the world because they are the only animals who can believe and share ideas from their collective imagination.
The ability to create and believe fiction is an attribute unique to humans. While other animals communicate to share realities such as the location of food sources, humans imagine new realities. These realities vary by nation, culture, city, and even family. Over time, our shared beliefs have changed. While our societies used to share ideas of polytheistic gods, now they are often built around pieces of paper, or even just digital records of this paper—money. Money has no real value except in our imaginations, and it is one reality that virtually everyone believes in.
Evolution Has No Purpose
There is some false belief that evolution is working towards humans as the perfect outcome. From a scientific perspective, humans are not biologically singled out. Homo sapiens are but one out of many species coexisting with others on a similar timescale of evolutionary history. Evolution does not strive to achieve a goal or move in some particular direction; it seeks only to reproduce genetic material. Any genetic material beneficial for successful reproduction will become prevalent, and any disadvantageous mutation will be weeded out given random opportunity. This all happens in very small steps that give an advantage to fitness. A change that increases fitness survives, and one that does not disappears. Evolution has tendencies but no purpose or plan.
People have not evolved to be equal. The idea of equality comes from Christianity and is a shared fiction, albeit a powerful one. Evolution is based on difference; it is a blind process with no purpose. It does not endow any rights; it only favors abilities and characteristics. Because evolution has no purpose, everything is natural. Every behavior we have comes from nature, so nothing is unnatural. The idea of natural and unnatural behaviors stem from religion.
Happiness and Meaning
Discussions on the distinction and the relationship between happiness and meaning are woven throughout Sapiens. Modern humans look to history and wonder how people could have been happy in earlier times, but as shared fictions have changed, meaningfulness has evolved, and people and societies have been happy in their own way. This meaning has allowed humans to progress through history, but none of our revolutions have made us happy. We are not better off than we were before the Agricultural Revolution. Our diet is limited, we have more diseases, and we live in cramped cities weighed down by withering social classes.
Happiness does not depend on what we have, where we come from, or who surrounds us, but on our expectations, Harari argues; as such, we will never be fully content as long as we compare ourselves to others. Many disciplines and traditions believe that happiness comes from within, and a biological approach supports this view, suggesting that happiness comes from processes in one’s body rather than external conditions. Furthermore, we can change our environments, but doing so doesn’t make us happier, as we retain our destructive behaviors. If there is a way to reconcile capitalism and human values, then we can be on our way to happiness as a society.
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