Let's Read: Sapiens (2011) by Yuval Noah Harari, Part 3

Part 3: The Unification of Humankind

Chap 9: The Arrow of History

Cultures are giant memeplexes, but since the memeplex could have memes that don't play well together, they could compete and struggle, and this causes a culture to change.

For example, in medieval Europe, Christianity advocated humility and meekness, but the nobles also valued glory and honour and fame and stuff. To reconcile these contradictions, they went on crusades and stuff trying to make a compromise, and culture changed as a result.

Western politics after the French Revolution is based on equality and freedom, but they don't play well together. To be equal, the better-off are forced to help the worse-off, that is, to infringe on the freedom of the better-off.

discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, reevaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.

The tendency of history is that cultures merge and memeplexes get more universal. There are three ways:

1. Economically, by universal use of money.
2. Politically, by imperialism.
3. Religiously, by universal religions.

Chap 10: The Scent of Money

Money is a powerful and universal memeplex because it only depends on the host to believe that other people believe in it. Compare this to religion, which asks yourself to believe in it too. It has been the most universal tool for human cooperation.

1. Universal convertibility: with money as an alchemist, you can turn land into loyalty, justice into health, and violence into knowledge.
2. Universal trust: with money as a go-between, any two people can cooperate on any project. 

People don't always trust money though, since some values they prefer to be not calculated in money.

Chap 11: Imperial Visions

An empire is a political order with two important characteristics:

Rule over a significant number of distinct peoples, each possessing a different cultural identity and a separate territory.

Flexible borders and a potentially unlimited appetite. They can swallow and digest more and more nations and territories without altering their basic structure or identity. The British state of today has fairly clear borders that cannot be exceeded without altering the fundamental structure and identity of the state. A century ago almost any place on earth could have become part of the British Empire.

Empires merged people throughout history into large homogeneous groups. Empires shaped human culture a lot. People claim they value autonomy and hate empires, but they still deeply identify with imperial culture.

About 10 million Zulus in South Africa hark back to the Zulu age of glory in the nineteenth century, even though most of them descend from tribes who fought against the Zulu Empire, and were incorporated into it only through bloody military campaigns.

An empire often collapses when the subjects adopt the imperial culture, then demand equal treatment. But even after that, the imperial culture survives and thrives. Example: Indian culture still has lots of British and Mughal elements.

Globalization is making states depend on each other more and more. A global empire with a common culture could arise.

Chap 12: The Law of Religion

Religion can thus be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.

1. Religions hold that there is a superhuman order, which is not the product of human whims or agreements. 

2. Based on this superhuman order, religion establishes norms and values that it considers binding.

The best-known religions of history, such as Islam and Buddhism, are universal and missionary. Consequently people tend to believe that all religions are like them. In fact, the majority of ancient religions were local and exclusive. Their followers believed in local deities and spirits, and had no interest in converting the entire human race. As far as we know, universal and missionary religions began to appear only in the first millennium BC . Their emergence was one of the most important revolutions in history

Animism 

Animism was based on the reality that hunter-gatherers had no power over the others. Farmers started valuing themselves over their enslaved creatures like sheeps and crops, and Animism went out of style. Farmers relied a lot on weather and such, and so they prayed to many gods for divine favors.

This turned into Polytheism, with humans firmly beneath the gods but above most others.

Polytheism

There were supreme gods in Polytheism, like Atman in Hinduism, but those were usually so impartial and equal that it was useless to pray to them. People wished to get favors, so they prayed to smaller gods who had biases and preferences.

... the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans. It’s pointless to ask this power for victory in war, for health or for rain, because from its all-encompassing vantage point, it makes no difference... The Greeks did not waste any sacrifices on Fate, and Hindus built no temples to Atman. The only reason to approach the supreme power of the universe would be to renounce all desires and embrace the bad along with the good – to embrace even defeat, poverty, sickness and death.

Polytheism was very tolerant, and could absorb local gods easily. This facilitated empire growth, for example, Mongols with Tengrism, and Romans with Roman polytheism. The Romans persecuted the Christians because they insisted on their one God and did not recognize the other gods in the Roman polytheism.

Monotheism

Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists. A religion that recognises the legitimacy of other faiths implies either that its god is not the supreme power of the universe, or that it received from God just part of the universal truth. Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions.

There was a problem in monotheism, still. The supreme God is still too universal, while humans divide between Us and Them.

Just as the god Jupiter defended Rome and Huitzilopochtli protected the Aztec Empire, so every Christian kingdom had its own patron saint who helped it overcome difficulties and win wars. England was protected by St George, Scotland by St Andrew, Hungary by St Stephen...

So polytheism sneaks back into monotheism.

Dualism

Dualism solves the problem of evil, but it has problem explaining why the world seems to have universal laws of nature. Dualism gave the ideas of good vs evil, soul vs body, heaven vs hell.

Syncretism

The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. Scholars of religion have a name for this simultaneous avowal of different and even contradictory ideas and the combination of rituals and practices taken from different sources. It’s called syncretism. Syncretism might, in fact, be the single great world religion.

Buddhism, a natural-law religion

[Buddha said,] suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is.

The first principle of monotheist religions is ‘God exists. What does He want from me?’ The first principle of Buddhism is ‘Suffering exists. How do I escape it?’ 

Buddhism does not deny the existence of gods – they are described as powerful beings who can bring rains and victories – but they have no influence on the law that suffering arises from craving.

Other natural-law religions

The last 300 years are often depicted as an age of growing secularism, in which religions have increasingly lost their importance. If we are talking about theist religions, this is largely correct. But... the modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism.

Those religions are called "humanist religions".

Humanism is a belief that Homo sapiens has a unique and sacred nature... the most important thing in the world, and it determines the meaning of everything that happens in the universe. The supreme good is the good of Homo sapiens. The rest of the world and all other beings exist solely for the benefit of this species.

Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things"

Liberal Humanism

Today, the most important humanist sect is liberal humanism, which believes that ‘humanity’ is a quality of individual humans... the sacred nature of humanity resides within each and every individual Homo sapiens. The inner core of individual humans gives meaning to the world, and is the source for all ethical and political authority. The chief commandments of liberal humanism are meant to protect the liberty of this inner voice against intrusion or harm. These commandments are collectively known as ‘human rights’. 

As an example,

In early modern Europe, murderers were thought to violate and destabilise the cosmic order. To bring the cosmos back to balance, it was necessary to torture and publicly execute the criminal, so that everyone could see the order re-established... In today’s Europe, murder is seen as a violation of the sacred nature of humanity... they punish a murderer in what they see as the most ‘humane’ way possible, thus safeguarding and even rebuilding his human sanctity. By honouring the human nature of the murderer, everyone is reminded of the sanctity of humanity, and order is restored.

Liberal humanism depends on monotheism:

The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls. Without recourse to eternal souls and a Creator God, it becomes embarrassingly difficult for liberals to explain what is so special about individual Sapiens.

 "All men are created equal" and all that...

Socialist Humanism

Socialists believe that ‘humanity’ is collective rather than individualistic. They hold as sacred not the inner voice of each individual, but the species Homo sapiens as a whole... According to socialists, inequality is the worst blasphemy against the sanctity of humanity, because it privileges peripheral qualities of humans over their universal essence... Like liberal humanism, socialist humanism is built on monotheist foundations. The idea that all humans are equal is a revamped version of the monotheist conviction that all souls are equal before God.

Evolutionary Humanism

Surprisingly, despite its terrible mistake of racism, Nazism is the most science-based humanism.

The only humanist sect that has actually broken loose from traditional monotheism is evolutionary humanism, whose most famous representatives are the Nazis... the Nazis believed that humankind is not something universal and eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate. Man can evolve into superman, or degenerate into a subhuman. The main ambition of the Nazis was to protect humankind from degeneration and encourage its progressive evolution.

Insert a funny comic here:

Der Bildhauer Deutschlands - The sculptor of Germany

Problems with Humanism

Evolutionary humanism has an unclear future:

... after the end of the war against Hitler it was taboo to link humanism with evolution and to advocate using biological methods to upgrade’ Homo sapiens. But today such projects [human enhancement] are back in vogue.

Liberal humanism is threatened by new science:

Our liberal political and judicial systems are founded on the belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature, indivisible and immutable, which gives meaning to the world, and which is the source of all ethical and political authority. This is a reincarnation of the traditional Christian belief in a free and eternal soul that resides within each individual. Yet over the last 200 years, the life sciences have thoroughly undermined this belief... how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political science?

There's no mention of social humanism, but presumably its foundations are also threatened like liberal humanism.

Taking stock of all these, it seems that evolutionary humanism might have the best chance of surviving out of all humanisms, at least in an updated form.

Chap 13: The Secret of Success

History is unpredictable, and any insight from history causes a feedback that somehow cancels itself out. A trading strategy loses its value once it becomes widely known. Memes, postmodernism, and game theory together give the insight that history is not kind.

No matter what you call it – game theory, postmodernism or memetics – the dynamics of history are not directed towards enhancing human well-being... Like evolution, history disregards the happiness of individual organisms. And individual humans, for their part, are usually far too ignorant and weak to influence the course of history to their own advantage.