Sapiens Book Club Part 3: The Unification of Humankind
In part one and part two of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari floated the idea of imagined orders, constructs that, while they do not exist concretely in the world, do exist in our reality because we agree collectively that they do. Examples of these imagined orders include - among other things - money, God, and businesses like the Peugot automobile company.
In Sapiens part three, Harari explains how three of these imagined orders united the globe during and beyond the first century B.C., elevating them to “universal orders.” These universal orders were money, empires, and religion.
Money: Shells, Shekels, Coins, and Cash
Before there was money, there was the barter system. I sell apples; you make tunics. What say I trade a bushel of apples for one of your fine tunics? This system worked just fine for our hunter-gatherer forbears; however, it became unrealistic during the Agricultural Revolution, during which our settlements evolved into mega-cities and empires. This was when barter gave way to the notion of money.
Barley, the first money which appeared in Sumer around 3000 B.C., obviously had actual material value as food, but as a form of money, it was difficult to store and transport. What’s more, just imagine, as a Sumerian farmer attempting to purchase a donkey cart, just how much barley you’d need to show up with to buy said donkey cart which, by the way, you’d need in advance to cart all that barley to the transaction. It was unrealistic.
Cowry shells were used as money throughout Africa, Asia, and Oceania for centuries, and while it’s hard to imagine anyone today finding much inherent value in these shells, particularly when exchanging other items for a handful of shells, their usage may have been rooted in an inherent value they held as ornamental objects.
The real breakthrough occurred in our collective imaginations when we started trusting money that lacked any value whatsoever, the first of which was the silver shekel. The silver shekel wasn’t a coin, as many imagine, but a weight — specifically, 8.33 grams of silver. It was the first money that, despite the value we currently place on silver (another collective myth), had no inherent value at the time.
Silver coins came later – around 640 B.C. – and had two advantages over weight systems like the shekel. First, each coin was a standard weight, which meant that the seller didn’t have to weigh the shekels received, and second, coins were backed by the authority of the ruler who minted them, which meant they weren’t counterfeit. A coin would bear the mark of a king, for instance, guaranteeing the coin’s value.
Today our collectively imagined belief in money goes well beyond accepting the value of coins and banknotes, and the vast majority of the world’s money – more than 90% – exists solely on computer servers.
Empires: Dinka, Nuer, and Cyrus the Great
Up next on Harari’s list of universal orders that, during the past 2.5 centuries, have unified distinct cultures across the globe – empires, which by their very nature unite diverse groups of people. This is the very definition of an empire, to which Harari adds the notion of flexible borders and an insatiable appetite — an anthropomorphic turn of phrase which for me conjures a cartoony image of the empire as a giant blob wolfing more and more territory into its insatiable maw, but Harari goes to some lengths in this chapter to be clear that, though the word “evil” frequently precedes the word “empire” in collective imaginations, empires have often brought civil, legal, and societal benefits to the cultures they have conquered, and they, in turn, become hybrids of these cultures.
Rome was as much Greek as Roman, Harari tells us, and “in the imperial United States, an American president of Kenyan blood can munch on Italian pizza while watching his favorite film, Lawrence of Arabia, a British epic, about the Arab rebellion against the Turks”
For me, the most interesting part of this chapter is Harari’s discussion of “us versus them.” Homo sapiens, he tells us, are by our very nature xenophobic; we divide people into two groups – us and them.
“ ‘Us’ is people like you and me, who share our language, religion, and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for ‘them’. We were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing. We don’t want to see any of them in our territory, and we don’t care an iota what happens in their territory. They are barely even human.” page 219
He illustrates this point with examples from the languages of two southern Sudanese people, the Dinka and the Nuer, and that of the Yupik in Alaska.
“In the language of the Dinka people of the Sudan, ‘Dinka’ simply means ‘people’. People who are not Dinka are not people. The Dinka’s bitter enemies are the Nuer. What does the word Nuer mean in Nuer language? It means ‘original people’. Thousands of miles from the Sudan deserts, in the frozen ice-lands of Alaska and north-eastern Siberia, live the Yupiks. What does Yupik mean in Yupik language? It means ‘real people’.”
And yet, ancient emperors audaciously sought to unify distinct cultures and people. One of the most audacious of these emperors was Cyrus the Great in Persia who not only, in classic emperor fashion, sought to rule the world (which, in his view, consisted of a fair slice of the Middle East), he sought to do so for the benefit of all people. Harari uses the example of Cyrus helping Jewish exiles to return home and rebuild their temple, as an example.
Many empires since – Roman, Muslim, Indian, Soviet, and American – have been beneficiaries of Cyrus the Great’s beneficent imperial vision, which is perhaps why the empire has, for 2500 years, been the world’s most common form of government.
Religions: Polytheism, Monotheism, and the Natural Law Religions
As hunter-gatherers, Sapiens were largely animistic in their spiritual bent. Animals, humans, rocks, trees, tree spirits, tree demons – we all existed on or around the same wavelength and were available to commune and communicate with one another on roughly similar footing. But the Agricultural Revolution changed all that, ejecting plants and animals from the spiritual community and relegating them to the status of property. Gods and goddesses filled the void as mediators between humans and plants and animals. We made all sorts of offerings, prayers, and sacrifices to pantheons of deities – earth goddesses, sun gods, goddesses of the harvest, rain gods –to ensure bountiful harvests and healthy flocks.
This phenomenon, combined with the inadequacies of local gods – the spirit of this or that tree or mountain wasn’t of much use when our scope broadened to mega-cities and empires – gave rise to polytheism.
Polytheists however would occasionally become so enamored with a favorite god or goddess that they would start to view that particular deity as supreme, which is how monotheistic religions started to emerge.
In other cases, the supreme power of the universe was something altogether outside of the pantheon of gods and goddesses — something that was unconcerned with the affairs and prayers of humans. An example of this is the Hindu notion of Atman, the essence of the universe that stands out above and beyond the doings of human beings and even that of the pantheon of Hindu deities. In some instances, worshippers began to pay more attention to such supreme powers than to the other deities. Hindu sadhus, for instance, worship Atman.
Some monotheistic religions, such as Judaism, actually began to believe that the supreme power did indeed have interests and biases in the affairs of humans, and a particularly esoteric Jewish sect took this a step further when they claimed that the supreme power of the universe had incarnated in human form for the salvation of all human beings and that it was necessary to spread this great news. Thus was born the heretofore most successful missionary monotheistic religion, Christianity, with Islam hot on its heels (600 years later - a bat of the evolutionary eye) to replicate the Christian model.
Finally, in addition to polytheism and monotheism, there arose many natural law religions – “Jainism and Buddhism in India, Daoism and Confucianism in China, and Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism in the Mediterranean basin” – which disregarded the notion of gods, maintaining instead that natural laws were the source of the universal order that governed the universe and all within it. By way of example, Harari explores one of these natural law religions that came to us via Siddhartha Gautama, an ancient Indian prince turned ascetic whose teachings, which became known as dharma, maintained that all suffering arises from craving, and that liberation from craving can be achieved by training the mind to experience reality as it is. This religion became known as Buddhism.
Today, just four of the religions mentioned above – two monotheistic, one polytheistic, and one natural law religion – comprise a full three-quarters of the world’s religious adherents. Unification achieved.
And that, friends, wraps up part three of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, in which Harari discusses three universal orders – money, empires, and religion – that led to the unification of humankind. How will the story of Sapiens end? Find out in the fourth and final installment of Sapiens Book Club: Part Four, The Scientific Revolution.
Previous installments: