Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Page 24 Most likely, both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all.
Page 32 As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.
Page 32 The ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively. But it also did something more. Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths - the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths -- by telling different stories.
Page 32 In 1789 the French population switched almost overnight from believing in the myth of the divine right of kings to believing in the myth of the sovereignty of the people.
Page 33 [The ability to tell stories that organize behavior] opened a fast lane of cultural evolution, bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution.
Page 33 The behavior of other social animals is determined to a large extent by their genes. DNA is not an autocrat. Animal behavior is also influenced by environmental factors and individual quirks. Nevertheless, i a given environment, animals of the same species will tend to behave in a similar way.
Page 34 Neanderthals could share information about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably could not tell--and revise--stories about tribal spirits. Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behaviour to rapidly changing challenges.
Page 44 It stands to reason that the ethnic and cultural variety among ancient hunter-gatherers was equally impressive, and that the 5 million to 8 million foragers who populated the world on the eve of the Agricultural Revolution were divided into thousands of separate tribes with thousands of different languages and cultures. 3 This, after all, was one of the main legacies of the Cognitive Revolution. Thanks to the appearance of fiction, even people with the same genetic make-up who lived under similar
Page 45 Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn't been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.
Page 46 They exchanged members, hunted together, traded rare luxuries, celebrated religious festivals and joined forces against foreigners.
Page 46 Even if in times of crisis the tribe acted as one, and even if the tribe periodically gathered to hunt, fight or feast together, most people still spent most of their time in a small band. Trade was mostly limited to prestige items such as shells, amber and pigments.
Page 61 But these are all mere guesses. The curtain of silence is so thick that we cannot even be sure such things occured -- let alone describe them in detail.
Page 62 The next chapter explains how the foragers completely reshaped the ecology of our planet long before the first agricultural village was built. Part Two Histories Biggest Fraud: The Agricultural Revolution
Page 79 The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translasted into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than tha averate forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud.
Page 80 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rices and potatoes. The pants domesiticate Homo Sapiens, rather than vice versa.
Page 81 Moreover the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat, it domesticated us.
Page 83 If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. Yet why should individuals care about this evolutionary calculus? Why would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of the Homo Sapiens genome?
Page 86 Paradoxically, a series of 'improvements', each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers. Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People are unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions.
Page 88 The foragers could either run away, abandoning their hunting grounds to field and pasture, or take up the ploughshare themselves. Either way, the old life was doomed. The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson.
Page 91 It may well be that foragers switched from gathering wild wheat to intense wheat cultivation, not to increase the normal food supply, but rather to support the building and running of a temple. In the conventional picture, pioneers first built a village, and when it prospered, they set up a temple in the middle. But Gobkeli Tepe suggest that the temple may have been built first, and the village later grew up around it.
Page 97 Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience. In the following chapters we will see time and again hos a dramatics increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species when hand in hand with much individual suffering.
Page 100 And bad years were bound to come, sooner or later. A peasant living on the assumption that bad years would not come didn't live long.
Page 101 Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants' surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence. These forfeited food surpluses fuelled politics, wars, art and philosophy. They built palaces, forts, monuments and temples. Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced
Page 102 The problem at the root of such calamities is that humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals. The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.
Page 103 Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined. When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great foes, motherlands, and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links. While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail's pace, the human imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any other even see on earth.
Page 104 "Charters of Freedom." All these cooperation networks--from the cities of ancient Mesopotamia to the Qin and Roman empires--were 'imagined orders'. The social norms that sustained them were based on neither on ingrained instincts nor on personal acquaintances, but rather on belief in shared myths.
Page 110 But if we believe we are equal in essence, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society.' I have no argument with that. This is exactly what I mean by 'imagined order'. We believe in a particular order not it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.
Page 111 If people realise that human rights exist only in the imagination, isn't there a danger that our society will collapse? ... There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends on myths and myths vanish once people stop believing in them.
Page 111 When in 1860, a majority of American citizens concluded that African slaves are human beings and must therefore enjoy the right of liberty, it took a bloody civil war to make the southern states acquiesce.
Page 111 To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintain the military order? It is impossible to organize an army solely on coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be it God, honour, motherland, manhood or money. An even more interesting question concerns those standing at the top of the social pyramid. Why should they wish to enforce an imagined order if they themselves don't believe in it? It is quite common to argue that the elite may do so out of cynical greed. Yet a cynic who believes in nothing is unlikely to be greedy. It does not take much to provide the objective biological needs of Homo sapiens. After those needs are met, more money can be spent on building pyramids, taking holidays around the world, financing election campaigns, funding your favourite terrorist organization, or investing in the stock market and making yet more money -- all of which are activities that a true cynic would find utterly meaningless. ... This is why cynics don't build empires and why an imagined order can be maintained only if large segments of the population -- and in particular large segments of the elite and the security forces -- truly believe in it.
Page 112 The modern economic system would not have lasted a single day if the majority of investors and bankers failed to believe in capitalism. ... How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.
Page 113 Three main factors prevent people from realising that the order organising their lives exists only in their imagination: a. The imagined order is embedded in the material world. ... b. The imagined order shapes our desires. Most people do not wish to accept that the order governing their lives is imaginary, but in fact every person is born into a pre-existing imagine d order, and his or her desires are shaped from birth by its dominant myths. Our personal desires thereby become the imagined order's most important defenses. c. The imagined order is inter-subjective.
Page 119 Other animals that engage in strangers in ritualized aggression do so largely by instinct -- puppies throughout the world have the rules for rough-and-tumble play hard-wired into their genes. But American teenagers have no genes for pick-up basketball. They can nevertheless play the game with complete strangers because they have all learned an identical set of ideas about basketball... Each player can easily store them in his brain and still have room for songs, images, and shopping lists. But large systems of cooperation that involve not ten but thousands or even millions of humans require the handling and storage of huge amounts of information, much more than any single human brain can contain and process. ... The large societies found in some other species, such as ands and bees, are stable and resilient because most of the formation needed to sustain them in encoded in their genome. ... Its DNA programmes the necessary behaviours for whatever role it will fulfil in life. Hives can be very complex social structures, containing many different kinds of workers, such as harvesters, nurses and cleaners. But so far researchers have failed to locate lawyer bees. Bees don't need lawyers, because there is no danger that they might forget or violate the hive constitution.
Page 120 Beyond laws, empires have to keep accounts of transactions and taxes, inventories of military supplies and merchant vessels, and calendars of festivals and victories. For millions of years people stored information in a single place -- their brains. Unfortunately, the human brain is not a good storage divide for empire sized databases.
Page 134 All of the above mentioned distinctions -- between free persons and slaves, between whites and blacks, between rich and poor--are rooted in fictions. (The hierarchy of men and women will be discussed later.) Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagine hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.
Page 136 Most people claim that their social hierarchy is natural and just, while those of other societies are based on false and ridiculous criteria.
Page 137 Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted. Part Three: The Unification of Humankind
Highlight (yellow) -9. Page 163 Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of stranger to cooperate effectively. The network of artificial instincts are 'culture'. ... Every culture has its typical beliefs, norms and values, but these are in constant flux. The culture may transform itself in response to changes in its environment or through interaction with neighbouring cultures. But cultures also undergo transitions due to their own internal dynamics. Even a completely isolated culture existing in an ecologically stable environment cannot avoid change. Unlike the laws of physics, which are free of inconsistencies, every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions.