Harari sapiens short history of mankind read. Sapiens

Professor Harari’s ambitious work “Sapiens. A Brief History of Humanity" became a bestseller all over the world and received rave reviews from Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. 👌 There were also numerous critics who accused the author of superficiality, factual errors and vegan propaganda. And yes, he's gay! Who is right? Let's find out in our review today. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Bombshell effect

“ 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space appeared: the Big Bang occurred. Physics deals with the history of these fundamental phenomena of the Universe. After 300 thousand years from the beginning of their existence, matter and energy began to form complex complexes with each other - atoms, and they began to be combined into molecules. Chemistry deals with the history of atoms, molecules and their interactions. Approximately 3.8 billion years ago on planet Earth, certain molecules combined into large and complex structures - organisms. Biology studies the history of organic life. About 70 thousand years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens gave rise to something even more sophisticated - we call it culture. And the science of history itself is interested in the further fate of human cultures.”

Actually, this is what the author talks about for hundreds of pages. You definitely need to read them: the book is written in unusually vivid, figurative language. It is not for nothing that the lectures of the author, Professor Yuval Noah Harari, were listened to by more than one hundred thousand people. And he himself is a two-time winner of the Polonsky Prize for original thinking and creativity in humanities research. In his works he combines historical and natural scientific approaches. And this explosive mixture, this anthropological Molotov cocktail produces the effect of a bomb exploding. The book leaves no one indifferent: it is either admired or fiercely hated, there is no third option.

An inconspicuous animal

From the very title of the first chapter, the author makes one half of the readers howl with delight, and the other half with indignation. How dare he, critics write, compare Man - the crown of creation - with other animals?! It's very simple, guys.

The author talks about three revolutions that the human race had to go through: cognitive (man became intelligent), agrarian (man became dependent on agriculture) and scientific, which is still ongoing.

Thus, chapter by chapter, line by line throughout the entire book, from an unremarkable mammal, a narrow-minded lover of digging sticks, a kind of monster grows - Homo Sapiens, who has crushed other species under himself and is twisting Mother Nature in one place. Of course, we all went through this in history books. But, firstly, it is never too late to refresh your acquired knowledge. And secondly, they definitely won’t write THIS in textbooks! The author plays with theories, deftly juggles opinions, draws cause-and-effect relationships and forces you to endlessly think, analyze, reason.

Pros of the book

1. An amazing mix of history, anthropology, anatomy and philosophy - that’s what “Sapiens” is. Let's walk around the Earth starting from ancient times, remember the main historical milestones and events (the emergence of money, the formation of religions, the underbelly of famous wars), step over antiquity, the Middle Ages, get closer to modern times and, most importantly, evaluate the role of man in all these periods of time. Interesting? Exciting!

2. Interesting Facts. Did you know that the development of the Homo species did not proceed linearly, as they tried to present to us in biology lessons? Harari, on the contrary, believes that several species of “humans” existed on Earth at the same time. Or, for example, why do we love high-calorie foods so much? The theory of evolution says that our ancestors knew only one type of dessert - sweet fruits. It is logical that if people-gatherers found them, they would try to eat them without leaving a trace until someone else did. Now there are desserts for every taste, but the instinct to eat something tasty remains in our genes.

3. Global philosophical questions that the author invites you to reflect on. If you often think about what drives human behavior, how different he is from animals, how he reached the top of the hierarchy in the animal world, and most importantly, whether he deserves it, you will definitely like this book. In the final pages, Harari asks, “What could be more dangerous than frustrated, irresponsible gods who never know what they want?” What do we want, hmm?

Cons of the book

1. A clearly expressed position of the author, sometimes turning into categoricalness. Yes, Harari is an avowed socialist, the whole book is saturated with his beliefs. Critics criticized him for this, but is it really that bad? Textbooks and heroes of “Game of Thrones” can be faceless, but the personality of the author, especially if it is bright, always runs like a red thread through his creations.

2. Inconsistency with some facts. Sometimes the author gets so carried away that he cites controversial and even untrue facts as dogmas. The newspaper “Culture,” for example, in its devastating review, was not too lazy to find errors (completely, however, forgetting about the obvious merits of the book). Thus, the author writes that economic growth began when loans were invented, while this financial instrument was created thousands of years ago. Yes, sometimes Harari is wrong, but this does not negate the main value of the book - to encourage the reader to think about the place of man in the world, about what each of us will leave on our planet. Little things should not overshadow the main thing. Big things can be seen from a distance.

Should I read this book? Definitely yes! At least so that you can form your own opinion and not be the one who “hasn’t read but condemns.” The book draws you in and invites you to follow it, so pleasant evenings are guaranteed. Support our magazine - tell your friends about this article!

One hundred thousand years ago, it was one of at least six species of humans that lived on this planet - an unremarkable animal that played no more role in the ecosystem than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish. But about seventy thousand years ago, a mysterious change in cognitive abilities turned him into a master of the planet and an ecosystem nightmare. How did Homo sapiens manage to conquer the world? What happened to other human species? When and why did money, states and religion appear? How did empires rise and fall? Why did almost all societies place women lower than men? How did science and capitalism become the dominant beliefs of the modern era? Have people become happier over time? What future awaits us? Yuval Harari shows how the course of history has shaped human society and the reality around it. His book traces the connection between the events of the past and the problems of our time and forces the reader to reconsider all established ideas about the world around him.

The composition of Yuval Noah Harari “Sapiens. A Brief History of Humanity" literally fills the shelves of Moscow bookstores. The circulation of 7,000 copies, which is serious for popular science literature in the humanities, seems to confirm that this is not so much a commercial project as propaganda, another opus designated as “fashionable.” Indeed, it is highly recommended by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Will he give bad advice?

Harari is a true hero of our time. Israeli professor, lives in a homosexual marriage, practices meditation, vegan, animal rights activist. His most powerful pages are devoted, in fact, to how chickens, called to explore the world, and pigs, the most curious creatures in the world, suffer in narrow pens created by meat-eaters. At some point, you become imbued with the desire to release the living creatures into freedom, where, of course, they will be immediately eaten by predators and killed by diseases, but your conscience will be clear.

Harari treats the mammal called “man” much worse. The species is harmful and destructive - it destroys nature, destroys its own kind, killed all large animals in Australia and pre-Columbian America. This thesis, borrowed from the book “The Third Chimpanzee” by the American biologist Jared Diamond, is supplemented by another from the same source: with the invention of agriculture and animal husbandry, people became much more unhappy. Primitive hunters, healthy, almost without belongings, walked through the forests with songs, beat animals and rejoiced, and farmers were forced to work, without straightening their backs, on a cunning weed - wheat or corn, which managed to turn a stupid person into a manager of its reproduction. It’s even worse with livestock: Homo sapiens even torments lambs, and has contracted most of the harmful infections from them.

The author himself does not notice the contradiction between the two theses: if the hunters were so destructive that they killed off all the large fauna, then by switching to agriculture and cattle breeding, they simply saved the planet’s ecosystem, creating an entire artificial world for their food.

However, Harari generally does not care much about compliance with the facts. He sprinkles erroneous information, approximate judgments and blunders, and the few truly interesting data are drowned in a sea of ​​errors and therefore also seem like fiction. So, in his opinion, “in 1860, the majority of Americans came to the conclusion that blacks are people too and should be free,” this is about the election of Lincoln. In fact, "Big Abe" was a minority president - only 40 percent of voters voted for him, he won because the votes of his rivals were divided. At the same time, Lincoln never considered blacks “too people,” being a convinced racist. Having freed blacks to strike at the southerners, he always believed that Africans needed to be resettled on the Dark Continent.

Harari discusses the dependence of human societies on the solar cycle. Like, when there is little light and heat, the wheat only turns green, the barns are empty, people are hungry. If the sun is hot, then the harvest is harvested, the granaries are full, and the tax collectors are happy, and the kings are eager to fight. It is immediately clear that the professor had nothing to do with practical agriculture. The hungriest time of the year is between the spring equinox and the solstice, when old supplies have run out and the new harvest has not ripened, and the most well-fed time is from the autumn equinox to the winter solstice - that is, at the peak of darkness: the harvest has been harvested and you can take a break. Nature, of course, is launched by solar energy, but it does so with a hitch, as any peasant knows, but not a vegan historian.

Separately, it should be noted the purely liberal concept of economic change. According to Harari, economic growth in our era began because they came up with such a thing as a loan, which made it possible to start an enterprise. This is completely untrue. Credit was invented thousands of years ago. However, all these millennia, credit was not used to create enterprises, but for trade and wars. As a result, the loan had catastrophic problems with repayment. Let us remember how the Siena bankers went bankrupt because Edward III was unable to conquer France. Only the Pereire brothers came up with the idea of ​​lending to businesses for future sales and profits when they founded the Credit Mobile bank in the mid-19th century. By that time, the industrial revolution had been going on and bringing profit for a hundred years. So it was based on industry and increasing returns, not credit.

The author argues that France lost the competition for economic hegemony to England because French credit was discredited by the Mississippi Company and Law's machinations. He tells this story in detail, but not a word does not mention that a similar bubble of the South Sea Company in London burst at the same time. In both cases there were great losses, many politicians were involved, and corruption was revealed. Thus, the reason for France's loss in the epoch-making competition was anything but absolutism and the “bubbles” it caused.

And then when after that they tell you this story: “In 1860, Emperor Napoleon III ordered aluminum cutlery to be served only to the most honored guests, the rest had to make do with gold,” or this: “during the war, every BBC broadcast to occupied Europe began with the ringing of the Big Chimes Ben. German physicists managed to determine the weather in London by the slightest changes in the tone of the bells - invaluable information for the Luftwaffe. The British, having learned this, replaced live sound with recording,” then you simply don’t know whether these stories are true, or the same cheerful lies as in previous cases.

Much worse than superficiality is the self-confidence, if not the arrogance, with which Harari teaches his readers about morality and religion, or rather, the lack thereof. For him, let me remind you, man is an animal, one of tens of thousands of vertebrate species inhabiting the planet. Homo sapiens has no special place in the world, no calling from God, since God, like the family, the people, the state, are all fictions, useful ones, the author does not argue, but fictions. Before us is the one hundred and first retelling of the famous treatise by the atheist Dawkins, “The God Delusion.”

The fact that each of us can imagine something more than a person is a problem for the modern “evolutionary theory”, based on the idea of ​​the “blind watchmaker”: they say that mutations arise randomly, and some are grafted, others are not. A dog does not dream of a superdog, a person dreams of a superman and tries to consciously improve himself. Accordingly, it is completely incomprehensible how blind evolution could create a being of entire philosophy, the whole essence of which is in the denial of the idea of ​​blind evolution, in the desire to affirm one’s personality, to expand the boundaries of the possible. Evolutionists get around this issue by simply twisting the cards—by declaring that genetic evolution has given way to social evolution. But there is nothing in common between social reality and DNA codes. This means that either biological evolution is something other than the random rearrangement of DNA codes, or social evolution is not evolution.

Harari sidesteps this central theoretical problem by simply declaring the difficulty of evolutionary theory to be its “achievement”—the evolutionary peculiarity of homo sapiens is supposedly that it imagines what is not there and then takes its imaginings too seriously. Pure cheating.

The author insists that all differences between races, religions, and genders are fictitious and relative. He makes an exception for nations - they, of course, are also made up, but it is still impossible to prove that there is no cultural distance between a Swede and a Somali, and Harari grits his teeth at Marine Le Pen, who “speculates” on these differences.

The creator of “A Brief History...” sees a cure against nationalities in a planetary power, whose ideology will be absolute tolerance, erasing borders and universal consent: “We talked about the formation of a world empire. And this empire, like all previous ones, establishes peace within its borders. And since its borders contain the entire globe, the world empire will truly be an empire of peace.” From our time, it’s funny to read these speeches, written in 2012 with the endless Obama and Clinton in mind.

The author plays out his militant tolerance on Christianity, for which he has a pronounced hostility: “Some religions, for example, Christianity and Nazism, destroyed millions of people out of “righteous” hatred.” However, he is even condescending towards the Nazis, saying that Hitler was an “evolutionary humanist”, cared about the improvement of humanity, but the biological science of his time gave him the false idea that it was a matter of race, not genes. It turns out that if the Fuhrer acted now, he would work smarter: instead of persecuting Jews, he would amputate people’s genes for aggression and meat-eating. Does a vegan see a vegan from afar?

One way or another, the main subject of Harari's antipathy is the idea of ​​human freedom and individual individuality. He literally zombifies readers with the idea that a person submits primarily to the power of genes and hormones, that his actions are explained solely by the search for pleasure or by the influence of fictions such as religion, nation or morality, which are all relative.

As an example of such a purely human fiction, Harari cites the modern cult of “romantic consumerism.” It would never have occurred to an ancient Egyptian to go to Babylon for a sale. An Egyptian built his wife a tomb that she had dreamed about all her life... And today, romanticism teaches maximum self-disclosure and gaining new experience through the unusual, which is facilitated by foreign travel and the consumption of ever new goods and services. The marriage of romanticism and consumerism has created a whole market of experiences. See Paris, kiss at the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre, buy perfume and handbags, and die...

Here, as in many other cases, the author is telling an outright lie. Yes. The Egyptians did not go shopping to Babylon. They preferred importing experiences. This is what the inscriptions tell about the journey to the country of Punt, from where typical romantic curiosities and rarities were brought. That is, there was also a market for impressions in Egypt, but it was imported, not tourist.

Tourism originated in Ancient Greece. The first famous tourist to leave notes was Herodotus. Although a century before him, Solon became a tourist after establishing his laws. The Greeks developed the principles of experience hunting. They created a supporting canon of 7 miracles, including those same Egyptian tombs. They created extensive tourist guides, such as Pausanias’s “Description of Hellas,” which in some places is still practical to this day. Let's count how many centuries passed between Herodotus and romanticism? So the claim that our culture is a collection of “fictions” not rooted in human nature is false. It is false both when we talk about religion or nation, and when we talk about the perfume of Dolce and Gabbana.

From the point of view of the consistent biological evolutionism that Harari claims, the thought of a species whose members live forever should be terrifying. From the standpoint of human common sense - even more so. Imagine a world where the old live the lives of the young, each generation starts from scratch because there is no inheritance, there is an eternal prima donna on TV and all areas are controlled by mafias of immortals. In such a society, births will stop altogether, since there will simply be nowhere to put the children - the places are occupied. Here it’s time to write dystopias, not rejoice.

The horror is that a superficial book, filled with factual errors, ideological cheating and banal gay-vegan propaganda, is presented as an intellectual bestseller. People deprived of a systematic education and worldview, especially urban office plankton, assimilate it as higher knowledge and spread this tolerant neo-Nazism like a virus.

However, there is hope. Harari’s opus was written in 2011 at the peak of Obamaism, amid the roar of the “Arab Spring.” Today we already know where that revolutionary pandemonium led, and we see that the world has gone in the direction directly opposite to that indicated by the author. No global vegan-feminist empire - strengthening borders, defending identity, reviving national powers. Fortunately, man turned out to be not as “intelligent” as the author of “Sapiens” predicted. Sometimes it is useful to be simpler, not to seek good from good and to love simple things - family, people, Motherland, beauty and freedom.

One hundred thousand years ago, it was one of at least six species of humans that lived on this planet - an unremarkable animal that played no more role in the ecosystem than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish. But about seventy thousand years ago, a mysterious change in cognitive abilities turned him into a master of the planet and an ecosystem nightmare. How did Homo sapiens manage to conquer the world? What happened to other human species? When and why did money, states and religion appear? How did empires rise and fall? Why did almost all societies place women lower than men? How did science and capitalism become the dominant beliefs of the modern era? Have people become happier over time? What future awaits us? Yuval Harari shows how the course of history has shaped human society and the reality around it. His book traces the connection between the events of the past and the problems of our time and forces the reader to reconsider all established ideas about the world around him.

Homo sapiens, One hundred thousand years ago, was one of at least six human species that lived on this planet - an unremarkable animal that played no more role in the ecosystem than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish. But about seventy thousand years ago, a mysterious change in cognitive abilities turned him into a master of the planet and an ecosystem nightmare. How did Homo sapiens manage to conquer the world? What happened to other human species? When and why did money, states and religion appear? How did empires rise and fall? Why did almost all societies place women lower than men? How did science and capitalism become the dominant beliefs of the modern era? Have people become happier over time? What future awaits us? Yuval Harari shows how the course of history has shaped human society and the reality around it. His book traces the connection between the events of the past and the problems of our time and forces the reader to reconsider all established ideas about the world around him....

Homo sapiens, One hundred thousand years ago, was one of at least six human species that lived on this planet - an unremarkable animal that played no more role in the ecosystem than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish. But about seventy thousand years ago, a mysterious change in cognitive abilities turned him into a master of the planet and an ecosystem nightmare. How did Homo sapiens manage to conquer the world? What happened to other human species? When and why did money, states and religion appear? How did empires rise and fall? Why did almost all societies place women lower than men? How did science and capitalism become the dominant beliefs of the modern era? Have people become happier over time? What future awaits us? Yuval Harari shows how the course of history has shaped human society and the reality around it. His book traces the connection between the events of the past and the problems of our time and forces the reader to reconsider all established ideas about the world around him.

One hundred thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was one of at least six human species living on this planet—an unremarkable animal that played no more role in the ecosystem than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish. But about seventy thousand years ago, a mysterious change in the cognitive abilities of Homo sapiens turned him into a master of the planet and an ecosystem nightmare. How did Homo sapiens manage to conquer the world? What happened to other human species? When and why did money, states and religion appear? How did empires rise and fall? Why did almost all societies place women lower than men? How did science and capitalism become the dominant beliefs of the modern era? Have people become happier over time? What future awaits us?

Yuval Harari shows how the course of history has shaped human society and the reality around it. His book traces the connection between the events of the past and the problems of our time and forces the reader to reconsider all established ideas about the world around him. In addition, in the “Notes” the author refers to articles, numbering more than a hundred, both special and popular science, devoted to even more specific things. Many of the facts and guesses reproduced by the author are very interesting. But let us note that the above list of subjects, although not short, is far from complete, i.e. does not include much that is no less significant. In addition, there is a spectrum of views on any issue, whether or not the author addresses it, so no one source should be relied upon.

Why is it worth reading the book?

• A digest of human existence from the beginning of time to the projected future;
• The book is undoubtedly worth giving to older schoolchildren to read in order to understand the meaning of the processes taking place in the world.;
• The book raises many questions related to ethics and encourages us to think about what we are dooming the planet to.;
• The author simply, clearly and at an acceptable speed talks about who we are, how we came to be and what we had to endure.