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Chapter 8
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
Harari notes that large-scale cooperation happens when people in a society believe in the same myths and follow the same rules. This picture implies that societies remain relatively consistent and stable, but in fact, cultures often contain competing myths which conflict with each other. Medieval Europeans, for example, believed in both Christianity and chivalry. Harari thinks Christianity encourages people to avoid conflict, while chivalry encourages defending one’s honor when it’s threatened—which encourages conflict. Modern societies, too, privilege individual freedom, but they also want people to pay taxes (which, Harari says, technically limits individual freedom). Harari thinks such contradictions are inevitable, and they keep cultures in flux.
Until now, Harari has stressed that imagined orders have a lot of sticking power—they tend to become entrenched in societies and keep people acting in certain ways. Here, however, he highlights that the actual picture is more complicated, because people can believe in more than one set of rules (or one imagined order) at a time. He emphasizes this to show, again, that the stories, rules, and systems that people believe in seem true—and therefore seem fixed and permanent—but they’re actually not.
Themes
Even though cultures are complex, conflicting, and constantly in flux, Harari thinks they’re tending towards unity. Historical societies were far more isolated from each other. People in the Afro-Asian world, for example, didn’t even know that Mesoamerican societies (in the Americas) existed until somewhat recently. As distinct human societies merge, however, their cultures absorb different value systems and seek to eradicate conflict (to facilitate greater cooperation on a global scale), so Harari thinks humanity is tending towards unity by consolidating many different imagined orders into fewer ones. To Harari, the idea of separate, “authentic” cultures is a bit misleading. For example, tomatoes (which are now considered a part of “authentic” Italian cuisine) originated in the Americas.
Harari underscores that, despite differences between cultures, large-scale cooperation often relies on believing in the same ideas and following the same rules. Harari suggests that although there is a lot of cultural diversity in the world (including different sets of beliefs about how people should live in society), human society is actually already deeply globalized, and it already shares a lot of the same ideas and guiding principles. For example, the concept of a nation state is widely accepted around the globe, even if actual nation states disagree with each other.
Themes
Animals in nature don’t typically try to unite their entire species. Harari thinks the Cognitive Revolution enabled Homo sapiens to do so. He thinks three global ideas (or imagined orders) began to circulate among humans around 1,000 B.C.E.: money (enabling global trade), imperialism (fueling attempts to conquer and unite territories), and universal religions like Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam (which imagined the entire human race being governed by a “universal set of principles”). Harari thinks that of the three, money is the world’s most unifying concept today, and he wants to find out why.
Harari highlights three possible contenders for a unifying global idea or “universal set of principles” (that all of humanity understands, believes, and follows) to show that humanity’s current organizing principles are neither permanent nor necessary. Money happened to make people cooperate on an unprecedented global scale, but something else could do so in the future. Harari thus continues to stress that despite being deeply entrenched, universal concepts like money are entirely fictional, and therefore changeable.
Themes
