What is one supposed to do with doomsday scenarios?
Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind charts our species' decline farther back than any big history book in recent memory. Our prolonged doom didn't begin in 1945, with the advent of earth-killing weapons technology. Homo sapiens, the wise person, was mastered by the simple grain 12,000 years ago, and we've been paying for it in disease, back-breaking labour, and inequality ever since.
It's a dire interpretation of something that eventually brought us medicine, religion, and every social revolution we can think of. And it's a sympathetic viewpoint: despite what humans have earned in the 70,000 years since the Cognitive Revolution, none of what we have now changes what it took for us to get here. Tell a dead, 19th-century child with a lung full of coal dust that his distant relatives would go to school instead of being forced to work in a mine. Harari doesn't stop there, though. The future has the potential for far worse scenarios, and this could include our extinction to the god-like beings we will become.
Harari has a very clinical imagination, following very scientific lines of thought in interpretation and prediction. It's an interesting display of the imagination Harari believes made us the dominant species. Homo sapiens has excelled because we have the ability to use our imaginations to create large systems of cooperation. From agrarian settlements to empires to religion to capitalism, all are collectives that rely on us to believe they exist.
Harari's thoughts make for a thrilling if bewildering read, and whether or not he is correct in all areas covered - not just anthropology, his specialty, but economics, sociology, science, and psychology - is for the reader to investigate. If anything, it's a book that motivates us to try and find the truth ourselves. It's a starting point, the beginning of a social conversation he wants us to have. We can't go back and alter our history, but maybe we can adjust it going forward.
Harari doesn't have faith in this, really. We advertently and inadvertently killed off every one of the species related to us - Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, homo hiedelbergensis, etc., etc. - so it's only fitting we end up killing ourselves. The advances we've made in science and medicine will only create more inequality between the classes, but it might also give us a better human. This better human will be our next step, a species created by our intelligent design.
Sapiens might leave the reader with more questions than answers. That's probably the point of Harari's doomsaying about the past and future. As he says, there is no justice in history. We might be able to stave off this aphorism for our future selves; it'll just kill the Sapiens in the process.
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