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Chapter 11
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Sapiens, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Foraging, Industry, and Human Happiness
Fiction, Cooperation, and Culture
Science, Wealth, and Empire
Human-Caused Ecological Devastation
Summary
Analysis
Harari imagines a medieval market in Syria, full of exotic wares from around the globe. Then he thinks about Mecca, Islam’s holy shrine, where strangers from all over the world gather to pray together. He decides that religion is the third great unifier in the world—like money and empires. Harari defines religion as a set of values based on “a belief in a superhuman order.” He also thinks religions unify people when they’re “universal” and “missionary,” like Islam and Buddhism. Before the first millennium B.C.E, however, most ancient religions, he argues, were “local and exclusive.”
Harari sees religions as “imagined orders” because they offer rules that tell people how to cooperate, and they’re based on a “belief” in something beyond the physical world. He thinks older religions are imagined orders that function on small, limited scales: they only try to make limited groups of people cooperate (they’re “local”), and they don’t seek to recruit new members and expand the group size (“exclusive”). Harari thinks such religions can’t be global unifiers, because they’re not oriented towards getting everybody in the world to believe in the same ideas. Many newer religions seek to include all humans (they’re “universal”) and attempt to spread to everyone in humanity (they’re “missionary”). In other words, such religions seek to make everybody in the world believe in the same imagined order, and therefore cooperate on an unprecedented scale.
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Before the Agricultural Revolution, Harari argues, foragers tended to believe in animism—they believed objects, plants, and animals had spirits, and an “equal status,” and they tried to cooperate with them, believing this would enable them to thrive in their local ecosystems. After the Agricultural Revolution, however, Harari says a “religions revolution” happened because human beings began treating animals and plants more like property. Harari thinks this prompted early farming societies to conceive of gods as supernatural beings that would help them keep their livestock and crops flourishing. Human beings, he says, began to see themselves as superior to animals under such early polytheistic religions.
Harari suggests that forager societies saw themselves as equals among animals and plants, and their spiritual lives were centered on maintaining equilibrium with their habitats. Subsequent farming-based societies (which emerged after the Agricultural Revolution, around 12,000 B.C.E) evolved new “imagined orders” (collective ideas, values, and beliefs) in which the gods were at the top of the hierarchy, followed by humans, and then animals. Harari thinks that this religious transition was instrumental in encouraging humans to abuse other animals on Earth—something that he finds deplorable. He’s already argued that humans generally lived happier lives before the advent of farming. Here he argues other animals did too.
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Polytheistic religions believe in one supreme force or energy governing all existence. For the Ancient Greeks, this overarching power was “Fate.” For Hindus, it’s “Atman.” The overarching principle or power isn’t concerned with the mundane aspects of human lives, so humans pray to supernatural beings (“gods”) with “partial powers” for day-to-day help in their lives. To Harari, this makes polytheism fundamentally open-minded, since it tolerates all sorts of gods, even gods in other cultures or religions. He thinks monotheistic religions, like Christianity, are much more rigid. Harari also thinks they’re more violent. He claims that the polytheistic Romans killed some Christians, but Christians killed far more Christians in subsequent disputes between Catholics and Protestants.
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According to Harari, monotheistic religions evolved when some polytheists drifted into believing their local deities were the only ones. This first happened in Ancient Egypt around 1350 B.C.E, when Pharaoh Akhenaten “declared” that a minor god named Aten was the supreme power ruling the universe. Harari thinks Christianity evolved in a similar way. He argues that a Jewish sect decided that Jesus of Nazareth was God, and they sought to make other people in the world believe that too. They were so successful, that they took over the Roman Empire. Harari also points out that Christianity still includes some aspects of polytheism, since Christians often pray to different saints (who also have “partial powers” relative to an all-encompassing power).
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Harari thinks about Siddhartha Gautama, a legendary prince who lived in 500 B.C.E. and founded Buddhism. Gautama noticed that people constantly crave things, which makes them suffer because they’re never satisfied. So, he developed a meditation technique to help detach himself from that feeling, achieved enlightenment (or, became the Buddha). Harari thinks Buddhism isn’t really focused on individual gods, but many people who practice it still pray to gods from other religions (like Shinto gods in Japan) or enlightened beings (like Buddha).
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The last 300 years have been more secular, but Harari thinks that worldviews like “liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism, and Nazism” are similar to religions. He calls them “natural-law religions.” Harari thinks Communism, for example, also has “holy scripts and prophetic texts,” like Das Kapital (written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels), holidays (celebrating important dates in its history), and attempts to “guide human actions”. Harari thinks some of his readers will find his claims uncomfortable, but he feels strongly about this. He thinks capitalism is the most successful of the “modern religions,” though he’s going to discuss humanism first.
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Humanism, to Harari, includes any belief system that claims Homo sapiens are special, unique, sacred, or different from other animals in nature. Liberal humanists think that being a free individual is humanity’s goal. Socialist humanists think that being an equal part of a community is humanity’s best expression. Harari also discusses evolutionary humanists like the Nazis. They believed that humans could evolve into better humans if they cleansed “inferior” populations from the gene pool. Harari thinks similar thinking existed among “elites” in the United States and Australia in the 1930s, many of whom published papers arguing that white people were more intelligent than Africans or Indians. Harari thinks that white supremacy remained popular in both countries until the 1960s.
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Harari thinks that people no longer talk about exterminating other races, but scientists today do talk about using science to enhance human bodies. From Harari’s perspective, this is also a form of evolutionary humanism. He also thinks that many scientists today think genes are responsible for many human behaviors. He thinks that such research “thoroughly undermine[s]” the emphasis on individual freedom in liberal humanism.
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