Sapiens – belief in made up things

One of the books I’m working through on my Kindle right now is called Sapiens, A brief History of Humankind, by Yuvai Noah Harari.  This book made a big splash a few years back among the cognoscenti for its big thoughts.

It’s a bit of a Trojan horse.  On the surface it looks like one of those targeted history or anthropology books that goes deep into one particular fold of human attribute for exploratory and entertainment purposes.

There are authors that make a good living going super deep on one person or era or animal or behavior.  Sort of the ‘everything you ever wanted to know about XYZ’ genre.  On the surface this looked to be one of those, a deep dove into the evolution of Sapiens – the thinking ape.

But, like I said, that’s a Trojan horse.  It’s actually a deep philosophical treatise in the mode of ‘Walden’ or ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’.  It’s not preachy or declarative like many of our current thought pieces.  It’s well written, thoughtful and thought provoking.

I’m still reading it.  What I found, like most books of this type, I can’t read straight through.  I need to read a bit, sit back and scratch myself and let that bit digest.

It also gets ‘thicker’ as it progresses.  The narrative peters out and it becomes more deep.  You lose the path.  Or, more appropriately the path goes away and leaves you exploring islands of thoughts from this man’s mind.

Let me pull out a few thoughts that I think you’ll be interested in.

The first one is the crazy and unjustified egoism we Sapiens have as a subspecies.  We are not are were never that special or even unique.

Homo Sapiens was one of a family of thinking apes.  Our cousins like the Neanderthals weren’t that different from us.  In fact, the DNA shows that we interbred with these other sub-species.  We carry part of their lineage with us.  Archeology is showing more and more that our cousins were not the dumb brutes we like to picture them as.  They buried their dead, made art and had fire.

Even our living relatives today, the chimps, bonobos and others are much more like us. They think, they feel they mourn.  They share 98% of our DNA.

The ridiculous thought that something as insignificant genetically as skin makes us different is thrown into stark relief by comparison.

That leaves us with a big question: “Why are we here and they are not?”  What makes homo sapiens ‘special’?  Not in a religious sense but in a practical sense? What made this weak, hairless, thinking ape able to take over the world from top to bottom and muscle out everything that got in our way?

And if we play that thread out, what will stop us from burning out our world in our egotism?

Here we come to an incredible insight.  It wasn’t our ability to think.  It wasn’t our ability to make fire or throwing sticks.  It was our ability to make things up and believe in them that moved us to the top pf the food chain.

Our ability to believe in made up things allowed us to organize into larger groups and get things done.

If you look at other apes you’ll find they organize into small family troops of 50 or less.  Once a troop gets bigger than a certain size it has to split.  You see it in organizations all around you.  Without some sort of driving structure groups of more than 100 are impossible to stay cohesive.

But, once we make up a driving, unifying thought or purpose, we can have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of sapiens willing to sacrifice their blood and treasure in the name of that thing.

This is the joy of this book. He walks through the long list of these innovations of made up things that allowed we sapiens to take over.  This first revolution, the cognitive revolution, the ability to imagine things and then believe in them as a group was the keystone.

This leads to the made-up concepts of city-states, and nations and empires.  This leads to a series of made up gods and religions to work with empire as justification.

Then there is the great cognitive leap of being able to externalize our memories.  There is the unifying concept of language.  The ability to write things down.  We were able to imagine a series of marks to represent stored knowledge.

Once we got going, we were able to imagine even bigger concepts to unify mankind.  After religion, we made up money, and science.  All these unifying myths became intertwined in the inevitable march.

Inevitably family groups organize into tribes, tribes organize into nations, nations into empires.  Religion works with empire, empire works with science to muscle out all in the way.  The arrow of history has marched towards unification.

The author fits it all into the context of history and the cognitive evolution of homo sapiens.  It’s a bit frightening because it leaves the same questions.  The same questions that our forefathers must have had as they climbed out of a muddy hole, picked the ticks from their fur and stretched to face the new day.

The unanswered question is why?  Where are we heading?  Is this all a prelude to some sort of singularity event where we become gods?  Or, is it an inevitable march towards self-immolation?

We don’t know the answers.  But, we have shown that we can imagine them.

This is the message, my friends, we are the thinking ape.  Our species is limited only by what we can imagine.  Don’t get stuck in what has been built up around you.  Everything in your life is made up and you have chosen to believe in the things you believe.

But, it’s all made up.  As strongly as you feel about your religion, your politics and your nationalism, realize that these are all myths.  They are useful myths, but sometimes they lose their usefulness and evolve.

It’s ok.  You have the ability as sapiens to imagine more, to imagine better, to imagine change or not.  Until you imagine it, it can’t be true. When you imagine it, you give it life.

That is your duty as the thinking ape.