If you are ‘in the market’ for a primer that lays out in compelling prose the path humans have taken in our evolution, showing longstanding motives and habits, causes and effects of civilizations, and possible directions for the near and far future, I enthusiastically recommend “Sapiens”, by Yuval Noah Harari.
My post is titled facetiously, because here we have an inspiring and impressive handbook that breaks molds rather than follows formula. My title makes reference to the uncanny clarity and concision in which the author tackles immense and charged subjects. Blending a historian’s purview, an anthropologist’s curiosity, and driven by a muckraker’s outrage, his examples, illustrations, and arguments compel throughout.
The work moves along a familiar timeline; from the soup of stars and galaxies, into upright hominid early living, then the run of revolutions from agriculture, science, industrial and modern political, monetary and militaristic routines. The take is unflinching, and the author paints the portrait of our species in chiaroscuro, skimping on neither light or shadow.
This is a fearless and ambitious work, which means, predictably, the author has been assailed for heresy. But I don’t see it that way. It read as a relentlessly stark summary of our amazing, conflicted, and brutal trek across the centuries. No small feat to weave biological, philosophical, technical, cultural, and personal frontiers into a seamless whole, yet that is exactly what this author has done.
I’d say the writing of this book was motivated by a man who knows full well there are important questions that have been bluffed at and bullied too long by so-called authorities, and at too great an expense. The sweep of history is indeed enormous, this book shows the grandeur of the tapestry yet also convinces it’s high time we clean out the dirt under the rug.
...overpowering of polytheisms by more or less toxic monotheisms
You know I’m going to like this book!
The Guardian – For the first half of our existence we potter along unremarkably; then we undergo a series of revolutions. First, the “cognitive” revolution: about 70,000 years ago, we start to behave in far more ingenious ways than before, for reasons that are still obscure, and we spread rapidly across the planet. About 11,000 years ago we enter on the agricultural revolution, converting in increasing numbers from foraging (hunting and gathering) to farming. The “scientific revolution” begins about 500 years ago. It triggers the industrial revolution, about 250 years ago, which triggers in turn the information revolution, about 50 years ago, which triggers the biotechnological revolution, which is still wet behind the ears. Harari suspects that the biotechnological revolution signals the end of sapiens: we will be replaced by bioengineered post-humans, “amortal” cyborgs, capable of living forever.
This is one way to lay things out. Harari embeds many other momentous events, most notably the development of language: we become able to think sharply about abstract matters, cooperate in ever larger numbers, and, perhaps most crucially, gossip. There is the rise of religion and the slow overpowering of polytheisms by more or less toxic monotheisms. Then there is the evolution of money and, more importantly, credit. There is, connectedly, the spread of empires and trade as well as the rise of capitalism.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/sapiens-brief-history-humankind-yuval-noah-harari-review
Online course
For those who aren’t inclined to read, but like watching things, it appears that he has this all available as an online course.