Themes
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 thinks about how the world has changed since the Industrial Revolution. He thinks humans cut down forests, built skyscrapers, and changed the ecosystem into a “concrete and plastic” shopping mall. He also thinks Sapiens keep increasing in population, while wild animals dwindle. He imagines a future in which humans keep finding new energy sources while destroying the natural ecosystem and making “most other species” go extinct. He even wonders if the pollution, global warming, and ecological destruction that humans cause will end up endangering Homo sapiens survival, too. At the moment though, it seems like we just keep growing in numbers. In the last 300 years, the human population has grown from 700 million to almost 7 billion.
In this passage, Harari revisits the idea that humans are deadly creatures who wreak havoc on the ecosystem and destroy countless plant and animal species. He explains here that industrialization made humans radically alter the natural landscape, which upsets many living ecosystems and drives animals to extinction. He warns against continuing on this path of relentless population growth and industrial production because he thinks such behavior is reckless—it might even end up causing humanity to go extinct.
Themes
People in industrialized societies view time differently than people in agricultural societies did. Farmers thought about natural seasonal cycles, which Harari thinks are somewhat loose. Factory workers, in contrast, regulate every minute of their day with precision. To Harari, the industrialized world seems increasingly concerned with timetables on a global scale—to get people to work on time, or enable trades on the international stock exchange. Clocks are everywhere, and a typical person checks the time constantly throughout their day. Although the Industrial Revolution profoundly changed the way humans deal with time, Harari thinks its biggest impact is on the role of family and community in modern life.
Harari suggests that people in agricultural societies lived with a looser, more relaxed sense of time. Industrialized workers (and people in modern societies in general), in contrast, are constantly policed by time—every minute of a modern human being’s day is regulated or controlled by time. He thinks this makes people stressed and unhappy, and he suggests that earlier times in history caused people far less stress. He effectively thinks that as cultures develop and get more complex, people get unhappier, and they suffer more.
Themes
Harari pictures life before the Industrial Revolution. Daily life, he thinks, revolved around the family and the local community—they took care of each other’s work, health, education, disputes, and more. If somebody got sick and needed help, their neighbors would pitch in without demanding payment, and the sick person would return the favor down the line. Rulers didn’t intervene in the daily lives of peasants, and they even encouraged them to manage their own disputes. Harari also thinks some people must have suffered if they had mean family or community members, and they had no other support system if they lost all their family or were shunned by their community.
Harari argues that people lived in much more closely knit communities before industrialization. He weighs up the pros and cons of living in a tight community, and he ultimately decides that most people who lived in close communities had strong support systems, which made them feel nurtured. Harari raises these issues because he’s about to argue that modern societies fracture communities to privilege individual freedom. Then he’ll compare the two approaches to life, to see which makes people happier.
Themes
Life looks very different today. Harari thinks states encouraged people to “Become individuals,” in order to disrupt the power of family and community. States promised people the freedom to marry who they wanted, do the work they wanted, and have pensions, healthcare, and security without needing their communities. Some people, however, feel isolated by this newfound individual freedom. Harari thinks that in many cases, the state exploits and persecutes people instead of protecting them. He’s amazed that the “deal” works, considering we’ve spent millions of years evolving to favor communities.
Modern societies tend to celebrate the idea of “individuals” who are free to do whatever they want in life, and societies incentivize humans to abandon their community networks by promising them that the state (rather than their communities) will take care of their needs. But Harari is not sure that this shift from communities to individual freedom actually increases human happiness.
Themes
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Harari thinks the state and market took over many roles that families and communities would fulfil. People no longer court each other in their parents’ living rooms and exchange dowries, they court each other in bars and exchange money with waiters. The state can even take children away from their parents. They do this by creating “imagined communities” of people that don’t really know each other, but they imagine that they tied together by national bonds. National symbols and myths make people imagine that they’re tied together as one community. National borders—like those between Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon—are decided by diplomats, not community ties, which is why Kurdish people are dispersed across borders.
Harari suggests that nation states impose a new imagined order on individuals that replaces the model of community. The state encourages people abandon their local communities and increasingly see themselves as members of one national community. As before, Harari stresses that the idea (or imagined order) of a “nation state” is invented, and it tends to work because it makes people cooperate. Again, Harari notes that every imagined order posits a hierarchy (fractured communities and stateless people suffer the most under imagined orders that slice up the human populace into nation states).
Themes
People who don’t know each other also create imagined communities through consumerism—like being fans of a certain singer or sports team. Social structures like family units are far more rigid than such commercial tribes. Harari thinks today’s social orders are much more “malleable” in nature, and most people today assume that social orders are flexible, and that they can be changed for the better. Before, Harari says, people saw social orders as than rigid structures focused on preserving the past. Rigid social orders often collapse into violence when they’re threatened, but malleable social orders accommodate change. Harari thinks this makes modern society less violent than earlier societies.
Harari suggests that consumerism (buying things) is also an imagined order (a way of connecting disparate people under a common set of values). People who don’t know each other at all will tend to trust each other if they like the same singers or sports teams, which makes them more likely to cooperate. Although Harari has mostly argued that humans are generally unhappier than they were in the past, he admits here that modern societies are less violent than earlier societies, which might make life better off for some people. Despite this, Harari will ultimately decide that overall, humans are unhappier than they used to be.
Themes
Many people assume the world is more violent than it used to be, but Harari disagrees. He says that people no longer go to sleep feeling fearful that a neighboring tribe will burn down their village. The decline in violence, he says, is directly connected to the rise of the state. Kingdoms and empires rein in violence and stop local feuds. Harari acknowledges that state security forces do kill, imprison, and torture people, though. Nonetheless, he thinks only one or two percent of a population suffers like this.
Harari continues discussing violence in human societies to reinforce the idea that violence has actually decreased over time, and that human societies are far more peaceful than they used to be. Although he suggests here that some aspects of human society are indeed getting better as time progresses, he’ll eventually conclude that humanity is overall worse off than it used to be.
Themes
Harari even thinks that empires have been relinquishing global control without a fight since 1945. He thinks there was a lot violence in the British withdrawal from India, but he decides that overall, it was a relatively peaceful affair. The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989 also caused a lot of regional conflicts in the Balkans, but Harari thinks the Soviets retreated from power somewhat peacefully once they realized their Communist economy had collapsed. Harari thinks that nations also no longer seek to conquer territory or invade each other the way they used to. He can’t imagine Germany and France going to war in the foreseeable future, for example. Harari wonders why this is the case.
As before, Harari stresses that the world is less violent than it used to be. Harari believes that conflict between nation states is lower than in the past because the world is uniting under more common imagined orders (networks of connection through which people cooperate). People tend to cooperate by trade goods and services globally, for example, which them less inclined to instigate conflicts with other nations.
Themes
War, Harari explains, isn’t as profitable as it used to be. In the past, nations amassed wealth by invading other nations and physically stealing their gold. Today’s wealth, in contrast, is tied up in technological entities like Google. Harari finds it hard to imagine China invading California to steal Google. Global commerce, he thinks, makes people in different nations more connected, which makes them less inclined to wage wars on each other. Harari thinks a global empire is forming, and that means world peace is likely. Nonetheless, Harari acknowledges that the future could still go either way.
Harari suggests that capitalism (producing and selling goods and services to generate wealth) is uniting the world into one global community that cooperates by trading goods and services to generate wealth. This replaces the need for nations to attack each other and steal their wealth. Harari even speculates that capitalism might become so powerful as an imagined order that it makes the whole world cooperate to such an extent that wars will become a thing of the past.
Themes
