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
Some scholars argue that the Agricultural Revolution enabled humankind to prosper and thrive. Others think it disconnected us from nature and made us greedy and unhappy. Harari thinks that either way, there’s no going back, because our populations increased so rapidly that foraging became unsustainable. Around 12,000 years ago, there were five to eight million foraging humans in the world. Just 2,000 years ago, there were 250 million farmers. Permanent settlements also changed humankind: we’ve grown used to claiming a portion of nature for ourselves, altering our natural environment to build small structures that we claim as our own, and fencing our habitats off from the wild (and others).
Harari doesn’t think humanity should attempt to go back in time and start foraging again, even if the shift to farming caused widespread unhappiness. The human population is so large that the natural environment won’t sustain us the way it did for ancient foragers living over 12,000 years ago. As before, Harari subtly questions humanity’s impulse to keep expanding as a population. He suggests that humanity already over-taxes the Earth’s resources, and the situation will only get worse as the human population expands.
Themes
Harari argues that foragers focused on life in shorter interludes, thinking from season to season. Peasant farmers, in contrast, had to worry about the long-term longevity of their crops, triggering stress and anxiety about their future economic security. They toiled harder to collect surplus crops (in case of a bad season in the future). Subsequently, elite rulers began springing up and living off these surpluses, denying the peasant farmers the security they craved. Harari notes that the stories of the world’s few elites—and their achievements in art, philosophy, and culture—fill history books. Meanwhile, most human beings spent their lives endlessly laboring to plough fields.
Harari suggests, once more, that early farm laborers dealt with more day-to-day anxiety about their ongoing food supply than their foraging ancestors did, meaning they were unhappier overall. He also wants to undermine the opposite view (that life improved for humanity after the Agricultural Revolution) by suggesting that life only got better for the world’s few elites. Harari thus concludes that the average human being lived a better life before the advent of farming.
Themes
Surplus farming and transportation provided food pipelines that enabled increasingly urban settlements. Urbanization happened so quickly, however, that humans didn’t have time to evolve a biological capacity for mass cooperation. Harari thinks myths—circling around “great gods [and] motherlands”—played a crucial role, because they connected vast numbers of strangers on an unprecedented scale. In 8500 B.C.E., the largest settlements (like Jericho) contained a few hundred people. Just 1500 years later, parts of Turkey had populations of 10,000 people. By 1000 B.C.E. the Persian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires had millions of subjects. Harari warns against glorifying human cooperation, noting that a lot of it was—and still is—exploitative (for example, slavery, prisons, and concentration camps).
Harari revisits his earlier claim that Homo sapiens jumped to the top of the food chain when they evolved the capacity to invent stories, myths, and ideas, enabling them to trust others who also believed those myths, and rally around the same causes, beliefs, and goals. He stresses that such myths work because they make people cooperate to achieve shared goals, but they’re not necessarily fair or good to everyone who believes in them.
Themes
To Harari, historical “cooperation networks” aren’t rooted in biological instincts or personal familiarity. They’re rooted in “shared myths.” For example, 3500 years ago, the Mesopotamian emperor Hammurabi established Hammurabi’s Code. The Code argues that the “gods” decree a strict hierarchy in which some people are naturally better than others (the highest being a ruler, followed by aristocracy, commoners, and slaves). The Code promises that if people accept their place in the hierarchy, their society will flourish. Another example, the Declaration of Independence, argues that a “Creator” decrees basic human rights like equality, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. Harari argues that both sets of principles are fictions.
Harari explains that “cooperation networks”—the myths that set out rules for how a society should function—work because people think they’re true, so they comply with the rules, even if the rules are unfair to them. Hammurabi’s Code, for example, makes people believe the gods chose their place in society and the gods will punish them if they deviate from their assigned role. This encourages the society’s citizens stay in their social place and cooperate, which keeps the society running smoothly—even if the individuals at the bottom of the hierarchy suffer. Harari stresses that such myths are always invented and never grounded in facts or reality, even though people need to treat them as if they are true for them to work.
Themes
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It’s easy to dismiss Hammurabi’s hierarchy as unnatural. Harari thinks it’s harder to say that equality and basic human rights are also fictions. Nonetheless, Harari thinks “rights” don’t exist in biology—birds don’t fly because they “have a right to fly.” They fly because “they have wings.” He also thinks, even though this sounds outrageous, that in biological terms, we simply aren’t born equal. Harari prefers to say that believing in a “myth” that we’re all equal helps us cooperate with each other. Admittedly, Hammurabi could just as easily argue that believing in his myth, that some people are better than others, helps them cooperate, too.
Harari emphasizes that all imagined hierarchies are made up—even the ones that seem appealing to modern readers, say, by positing that all human beings are born equal and have inalienable rights. To Harari, a myth works if it makes people cooperate, not if it’s true. He stresses, as before, that there’s no biological basis for the myths, stories, and hierarchies that humans invent, which reminds the reader that myths can be changed—and when they do change, societies change too.
Themes
Harari notes that myths are fragile, and they stop working if people don’t believe in them. Some aspects of an “imagined order” can be enforced by coercion (like laws and punishments). Overall, however, Harari thinks that myths have the most power when people believe they’re true. He argues that Christianity has lasted for 2,000 years because people really believe it’s true. He also thinks bankers and investors, similarly, believe in capitalism. Harari wonders how someone can make others believe in an “imagined order” like Christianity or capitalism.
Harari reminds the reader that even though “imagined orders” (myths or stories about how a society should be structured) are made up, they only work when people actually believe in them. Once again, he stresses that such fictions have no basis in physical or biological reality, but people tend to treat them as if they’re real and true—otherwise the myths won’t work, and social cooperation will break down.
Themes
To Harari, myths retain their power because people posit them as objective facts—and not fictions. The imagined order is also deeply entrenched in the material world. For example, architecture reinforces the belief in individual freedom through dwellings with discrete rooms, allowing people privacy to do what they want behind closed doors without being watched. Harari also thinks the imagined order controls our personal desires, shapes our individual dreams, and transcends our personal beliefs. For example, if I stop believing in money, it won’t make money cease to exist. To Harari, myths are like prisons—they’re hard to escape.
Harari thinks that because people really do believe in the myths around which they structure their lives, they can be hard (but not impossible) to change. Societies often shift when collective beliefs, myths, or “imagine orders” shift, but that’s no easy feat to accomplish. Harari uses the metaphor of prisons to emphasize how difficult it is to break out of beliefs, ideas, and myths that are entrenched in people’s minds.
Themes
