Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

After finishing reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, I started reading this book. I heard that the author was motivated to write this book by Guns, Germs, and Steel, so I thought that it might be a similar book. Many religious people may feel uncomfortable with the author’s viewpoint, and I heard that the author was criticized for glorifying the history of modern colonial empires. This book is about human history but it encompasses more than that. It is more like a philosophy book to me. While reading this book, I was very pleased and consoled, and impressed by the author’s brave and novel viewpoint. He is the same age as me, and how can he have such deep insight about humankind and the surrounding world?

If Guns, Germ, and Steel was felt like a warm and kind storybook by old grandpa, this book was like a very straight and sharp intelligent reasoning by a youthful genius. Ironically, I felt a kind of pleasure and liberation through this book, as intangible things (e.g., religion, nation, money, morality and so on) that humankind has given almost absolute values were just considered as an “imagined order” and newly developed during the long history of Sapiens. We are just one of the animal species from a biological perspective, but we are also different from other animal species from a cognitive and cultural perspective. As we humans are contradictory in ourselves, we cannot avoid conflict and confusion in our life.

After reading two famous history books, I became to realize that I was very ignorant about world history and related academic fields. In ‘Sapiens’ book, the author is very critical about the industrialized animal farm and humans’ indifference or neglect about the suffering of animals in the factory-like farm. I did not think that even milk and egg consumption is not irrelevant to the animals’ suffering. At this point, I do not know how we can solve this difficult problem. This book made scientific advances and subsequent human population growth look a lot like a natural evolutional process whose meaning is not exactly clear.

This book will be remembered as one of the best books for me for a while.

 

written by Shim G.