“Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives are chimpanzees, gorillas, and orang-utans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just six million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.” –Yuval Noah Harari, from Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
I guess I had seen the book on Amazon, but didn’t make the effort to tackle it until this past week, after a recent interview Stephen Colbert did with the author. It was published in 2015. It is heavy—both literally and as a work of literature, science, history, anthropology, and sociology. It would make for an interesting, i.e. challenging read in a book-of-the-month club at your average house of worship, since Harari posits that myth-making plays such a huge role in our civic structures and governance, that agreed-upon myths are basically the glue that holds everything together, extending to religious beliefs many hold near and dear.
A bit further along (the above quote is on page 5), Harari focuses on the species Sapiens of the genus Homo, and how they emerged as the alpha among all other human species living on the planet—because they had developed the capacity for myth-making, and living and communicating in very large groups. He covers this in a section entitled The Cognitive Revolution. Somehow– and it’s not clear how– Homo Sapiens gained the ability to, as Harari puts it, cooperate successfully by believing in common myths, myths that only exist in peoples’ collective imagination. Myths that include things like the principles and ideals in the Declaration of Independence, or the tenets of Christianity or Buddhism, or the provisions of LLCs, or the existence of nation states.
One more passage from the book: “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees, and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations, and corporations. 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.” (pg. 32)
OK, one 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.” (pg. 32)
Might we ponder the implications?
I’m on page 33. I don’t know where this book is going to take me, but I fully expect to enjoy the ride.
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