Previous
Chapter 6
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Sapiens, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Foraging, Industry, and Human Happiness
Fiction, Cooperation, and Culture
Science, Wealth, and Empire
Human-Caused Ecological Devastation
Summary
Analysis
Many animals that cooperate on a large scale in nature (like ants and bees) have “rules” embedded in their DNA. Humans don’t. Unlike social insects—which are genetically programmed to be worker bees or queen bees—Hammurabi’s hierarchy of aristocracy, commoners, and slaves isn’t embedded in the human genome: Social rules have to be learned, enforced, and passed on. Harari thinks it’s easy to remember rules on a small scale (say, in a local community), but in large societies, it’s much harder to know all the rules and make sure others are following them. Harari thinks the evolution of large societies demands a new skill that our brains aren’t hardwired for—retaining massive amounts of data.
Harari re-emphasizes that myths and stories (or imagined orders) about how a society should function aren’t innate, permanent, or real. They tend to invent rules that people need to follow in order to facilitate large-scale cooperation. In this chapter, he’ll stress that writing (or the invention of scripts) plays a large role in enabling that to happen. He’ll also bring up the invention of numbers—which he thinks play a large part in establishing science’s power as dominant myth (or imagined order) in the modern world.
Themes
To get around our limited capacity for retaining data in our minds, ancient societies invented ways of storing information outside the brain—like writing, which Sumerians invented in 3500 B.C.E. Early writing was limited to mathematical data, like tracking payments and taxes. Over the next thousand years, Sumerians added more symbols to their script (extending beyond data tracking symbols), which enabled more complex written communication—like royal decrees, personal correspondence, recipes, and poetry. In truth, Sapiens invented scripts all around the world, but to Harari, several stood out (notably Sumerian, Chinese, Egyptian, and Incan scripts) because their societies also created efficient methods of cataloguing, organizing, and retrieving the data they wrote down.
Harari thinks that writing is essential to establishing myths because it enables people to keep track of a society’s rules and log who’s following or breaking the rules. This is why Harari thinks the languages that were the most effective at logging and retrieving data fared the best. This also explains why mathematical scripts are so powerful in large societies: they efficiently document transactions between people, enabling cooperative practices like trade on an unprecedented scale.
Themes
Harari thinks the invention of writing made humans think in more compartmentalized ways, thereby changing how we see the world. In the 9th century, Hindu cultures invented a numeral script, which Arabic empires spread globally as the Arabic numeral system, and humans around the world still use it today. Harari thinks the language of numbers dominates the world today. An “even more revolutionary system” that evolved from the language of numbers is binary code, which is the language computing. Harari thinks as computers get more sophisticated, they’ll use binary code in ways that humans won’t understand, and become the new “ruler of the world.”
Harari warns the reader that although scripts—and numerical scripts in particular—seem like a huge success for humanity because they reinforce prevailing social orders and track people’s cooperation, they’re not necessarily always for the best. Harari anticipates that humanity’s newest script, binary code (the language of computers), might even end up subjugating humanity in the future. Harari thus reminds the reader that as entrenched, ongoing, and permanent our systems of communication feel, they change and evolve (just like myths do), and when this happens, societies change.
Themes
