A History of Futility

Let’s start with the positive. This is a fun book to read. A very fun book to read. It is the sort of book that makes you realize again that the world is littered with fascinating anecdotes and facts and factoids which are interesting, informative, and marvelous fun. Open up to a random page in this book and you have a very good chance of learning something like that.

Picking five pages a random—really I am just going to open the book to five different pages and relate what is there—this book has the following bits:

1. In looking through The Code of Hammurabi we discover that society has two genders and three classes, and that each gender-class combination can be described with a specific monetary value.

2. For the first time since the demise of Hitler, the idea of using biological methods to “upgrade” humans in back in vogue.

3. The development of linguistics was vital in allowing European countries to build empires

4. For all the talk of how humans are causing mass extinction these days, this is actually the third time humans have done this. The First Great Extinction happened as humans spread out to become foragers. The Second Great Extinction came when humans became farmers.

5. In 1450, the world could be divided into 5 distinct non-overlapping groupings of people: The Afro-Asian world, the Oceanic world, the Australian world, the MesoAmerican World, and the Andean World. Over the next three hundred years, the first group “swallowed up all the other worlds.”

Harari is a marvelous story-teller. Harari organizes this rollicking ride through the history of the species around three Great Moments:

1. The Cognitive Revolution, when homo sapiens suddenly became quite distinct from other animals;

2. The Agricultural Revolution, when the species radically changed not only the way they lived but the environment in which they lived;

3. The Scientific Revolution, in which modern science was born along with the industrial revolution and rapid technological advances.

At the end, Harari notes we are on the verge of the Fourth Great Revolution when either robots with AI take over the world or we genetically modify ourselves so that we are no longer really homo sapiens at all. Well, unless the climate changes so fast we just go extinct.

As I said, a marvelously fun book.

But…

Sapiens is an incredibly annoying book to read. Harari is a smart guy who has read a lot. But, a guy this smart and this well-read should really not make so many absolutely inane arguments. You see, mixed in with all this fascinating history is Harari’s constant penchant to go wandering off into editorial asides in which we learn one thing very clearly: Harari is a very opinionated guy who never actually talks with people with whom he disagrees.

We could take his constant refrain that modern science has proven there is no soul and thus all those religions out there have now been proven to be false. But, I just wrote about that error a week ago.

So, instead, take a pair of other examples.

1. In his argument that there is no such thing as an eternal or natural law or truth, he rewrites the famous sentence from the Declaration of Independence to show what it would say if it was written using what Harari knows to be accurate biological statements. So, for example, there is no Creator who endows us with anything, so that should just say “born.” This is what he derives:

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

Perhaps that is cute. (A couple of the students in my reading group which talked about this book thought it was funny.) But, it is absurd nonsense. Take it seriously for a second—which is exactly what Harari wants us to do. It says that one of our “mutable characteristics” is “life.” So, we all “evolve differently” but one of the mutable characteristics with which we are born is…life? Uh…if you think about all the differently evolved people reading this book, what exactly is the range mutations of “life” in that population? How is it even possible to be “born” with a mutated version of “life”? The sentence makes absolutely zero sense.

This is the sort of philosophical non sequitur into which Harari falls all too often in his attempt to be that kid in the back of the room trying to show off how clever he is.

2. In his discussion about the amazing fact of technological innovation and economic growth since the advent of the scientific revolution, he begins with the question, “What accounts for this stupendous growth?” Good question. He starts answering it by showing how the banking system creates money. I cannot even begin to convey my shock. The manner in which the banking system creates money is in every introduction to macroeconomics textbook out there. And Harari gets it wrong. The technical details are thoroughly botched.

Moreover, and even more seriously, money creation does not cause economic growth. At all. Ever. There are a zillion technological advances he could have used to illustrate his point and yet he picked one thing that every student who ever took a first year college course on economics should know is wrong.

Now what is particularly interesting about confusing money creation with economic growth is that it was terribly unnecessary. Much of the rest of the argument about growth is fine. It is thus one of many examples of how the good and the bad of this book are intricately intertwined.

This perfectly explains how the book is simultaneously immensely enjoyable and extremely annoying. It depends entirely on whether you are just taking the bad with the good or if you are seeing some good amongst the bad.

By the time I was nearing the end of the book, I was becoming increasingly fascinated with wondering how Harari could write a book which simultaneously has moments of clear insight and moments of absurdity. It was slowly dawning on me that while it looked like a history book, it wasn’t. In a history book, one expects the author to care a lot about getting the details right.

But, what if the book is really just a long argument for…something? Maybe all the asides and strange wandering attacks on Christianity and Islam and Communism and Liberalism and anyone who believes something is True…maybe all those asides were not really asides at all. Maybe they are the point of the book.

And then, in the penultimate chapter, Harari shows his cards.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is not a history book at all. It isn’t even intended to be a history book. It is an evangelistic tract for…Buddhism.

The chapter is entitled “And They Lived Happily Ever After.” It beings innocently enough by asking if people have become happier as they and the societies in which they lived have evolved. There is a long discussion about meaning of happiness and an argument that happiness probably has not increased.

So, what do we do? None of the absolutist creeds which Harari has been roundly mocking for 394 pages can give life any meaning at all. All of human history is full of futile attempts to provide meaning to life. But don’t despair. There is an answer: “The Buddhist position is particularly interesting.”

If we all just start Buddhist mediation techniques, then we can all be liberated from our suffering. And here is the kicker:

The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it.

That sentence would fit right into any book arguing how wonderful it is to be a Buddhist. A book like that could be well worth reading, and you would learn a lot even if you aren’t a Buddhist.

But, remember…that sentence comes as the conclusion to a book that is pretending to be a matter-of-fact history of the human race.

And suddenly the whole book makes sense. If you read this book as an argument for Buddhism, then the annoying asides and the absurd arguments all fade. Of course the details don’t really matter; it doesn’t even matter if Harari gets these things right. What matters is showing you how futile your life is. Harari shows you how futile your life is by showing you the record of human futility. But, don’t despair. Just become a Buddhist.

If I had the nonfiction section of my library organized by topic, I would now file this book in the religion section. That is where it belongs. In the religion section, it is a very good book; highly recommended.