Book Report - "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari

A guest on the Carolina Code Cast recently recommended “Sapiens” while I was coincidentally looking for something about or auxiliary to anthropology. As such, it seemed like a pretty good idea to check out. Two birds, one stone, so to speak.

Listening through the audiobook of “Sapiens,” my opinion flipped between positive and negative multiple times. I couldn’t particularly identify why at first. Some chapters and segments were compelling and interesting, others were pretentious and annoying. The entire book was written by the same person, so surely it wasn’t some inconsistency on part of the author. What, then, would cause me to have such a varied opinion on the book, page to page?

Eventually, I deduced the trend that was directly correlating with whether I liked or disliked a given segment. Harari does a really good job of explaining historical events and anthropological terms in a clear and concise fashion. Those bits are very good. However, when he begins offering his own suggestions and fictionalizations of historical contexts, they assert with absolute confidence and pretentiously suggest that they are the only reasonable solution. It’s frankly terrible.

I don’t mean to suggest that Harari ever explicitly says, “I am right and you are stupid for ever believing otherwise.” Instead, he uses a lot of “clearly” and “obviously” phrases that suggest anyone with a brain should be able to arrive at the same conclusion. Even if there are other potential answers meeting the same criteria, Harari basically dismisses them.

For those familiar with reddit, the entire book feels like an extended post on the “I am very smart” subreddit. Harari has this pretentious approach of sharing his clearly superior understanding with us woefully uneducated and stupid commoners. My theory is that the kind of people who really enjoy this book are the same type of people that would hit the front page of /r/iamverysmart pretty easily.

Beyond Harari’s heavy-handed suggestions of his own obviously correct and superior theories, he makes up tons of terms and seems baffled that they aren’t already in the common vernacular. He suggests that technology could eventually allow humans to become “a-mortal,” meaning that we no longer die as a result of aging. As a philosophical evolution of racism, he coined “culturism” as a similar idea based on culture rather than race. I’m fine with the ideas, but his obnoxious delivery just makes it so annoying to listen to.

Another problem is that Harari seems to suggest that basically everything is imaginary. If they aren’t physical and tangible objects such as rivers and trees, they aren’t real. Government? Imaginary. Religion? Imaginary. Economy? Imaginary. Community? Imaginary. Perhaps there’s an argument to be made about these ideas truly being imaginary, but I think that something can truly exist without some corporal form. And whether you consider them imaginary or not, insisting over and over that they are imaginary is both unnecessary and redundant. He could’ve mentioned it once and left it alone, but he continues reiterating the same rhetoric over and over about many different concepts.

The one compliment that I will pay Harari is that he offers some really good one-liners and succinct explanations of otherwise difficult ideas. Again, these are mostly related to the straightforward explanations of history and concepts. When he isn’t asserting his own superiority, he does communicate those topics really well. It is for that reason that I can’t pan the book entirely. There are some glints of genuinely good writing amid all the chaff.

Harari is very opinionated, but the content isn’t bad. If you want a sort of crash course on anthropology, it’s an alright read. You’ll need to ignore a lot of the overconfident assertions, but it covers a lot of concepts and lays out many of the currently accepted theories (even if it suggests that those theories are clearly lacking in some higher brain activity). I won’t say I can recommend the book to all or even most readers, but it is a quick way to pick up some of the jargon and ideas about the history and development of humanity.