Book read!

I mentioned in my preview on 2024 that are intended to read more books. And it is still the first half of February, but I have already managed! When I came to the Netherlands, I brought a book with me that I had been given by Roelof a year before. If you travel from Wales to the Netherlands by train, you have a bit of time to read. And I didn't stop when I got home.

I have taken up the habit again reading a bit in bed. I have to mind my timing; I drink an awful lot of tea in the evening, but if I do that too close to bedtime, then of course I will have to get out in the middle of the night and go to the loo. And if I want to read in bed for half an hour, while not affecting my sleeping time, I obviously have to go to bed half an hour earlier, which means I need to stop drinking half an hour earlier. And sometimes life just gets in the way!

Such practical issues notwithstanding, though, I have now finished that book! It was Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. I suppose I'm the last person in the entire world who has read it, and everyone knows what this is about, but just in case, I will briefly set out what this is about.

It's basically an entire history of humanity. It starts with the first humans, who are rather unremarkable primates in East Africa. He goes through some theories on how we ended up with such a good grasp of the use of tools. And from then on, basically everything goes downhill.

He argues, and he does it well, that humans were in the best possible situation when they were hunter-gatherers. When people had the brilliant idea to start agriculture, the effect was that humanity could become bigger, because agriculture is more efficient. But he argues that individual humans weren't actually positively impacted by this. Hunter-gatherers have a very varied diet, they have spare time they can use for socialising, and if the conditions aren't very good they just go somewhere else. Once you engage in agriculture you rely on the yield of that agriculture. You can't just leave your fields when there is a famine; you probably just die. And because you probably only grow a limited number of crops, your diet becomes less varied. And because you can sustain more people, there will invariably be more people, so you have to work hard to feed all of them.

He also deals with capitalism, and how it has impacted the world. He said it was behind colonialism. And it was! I don't think any explorer set out to bring diseases to unknown populations of other humans. They just wanted to go places to find resources on which they could get rich. Societies that we weren't capitalist never set out to sail around the world in order to see what was there. And he also explains how capitalism demands growth. And we see where that leads.

He also speaks of how humans seem to continuously find ways to harness new resources. If we run out of one type of fuel, we will just invent another one. If everyone has what they need, we will just invent new things and convince people they need those.

He ends with that it is a question of time before the next step is taken. Could we upload a human brain onto the computer? Could we connect human brains directly to each other? Could we bioengineer ourselves into something unrecognisable? Here we’ll have to live and see.

It is not a positive book! If you buy into his premise that everything went downhill from the Paleolithic onwards, we have been on the way down for an awfully long time. I find it easy to imagine he might be right. Whether this is something you could empirically test is an entirely different thing.

I suppose one thing that you could get from this book is a feeling of resignation. We are so far outside our natural habitat; any bit of satisfaction or contentment we can wring out of modern life is almost a miracle. And I'm sure we all experience them. So maybe we should just be happy for any of them, and not be too frustrated if there are not more of them. Given the circumstances, you really wouldn't expect that to be. 

Given that the book ploughs through tens of thousands of years of history, he has to stay on the surface at all times. I suppose the book would be completely unwieldy if he went into depth on everything. But I would warmly recommend it to any hypothetical other humans who haven't read this yet! But don't expect a happy ending…