Yuval Noah Harari: Humanity’s Storyteller

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which came out last year, is an account of the humble origins and incredible rise of our species, containing not just key moments of the development of homo sapiens, but bursting with the big ideas of human existence—religions, beliefs, cultures, stories we tell each other, and ultimately about why we are how we are. It is a work of philosophy in the garb of a history book. You expect the author of such an ambitious overview to be an aged academic daunting in demeanor but the person in front of me in a South Mumbai hotel is a young, nerdy man with a wiry frame. Just 39 years of age, as I later learn, Yuval Noah Harari is dressed casually in a dark untucked shirt. When he speaks, he does so in paragraphs. No ‘hmms’ and ‘aahs’ and fillers that invariably punctuate most conversations, but full and complete sentences in reams. There are explanations among them, ready analogies when necessary, and references to several new findings and developments when the opportunity provides itself.

We meet in the afternoon of the day when Sudheendra Kulkarni, the organiser of the launch of Pakistan’s former Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri’s book, was attacked by Shiv Sena goons. This is an interesting occurrence, since the idea of the nation state is one of the things Harari calls a fictional story that humans have invented, and come to believe in, just like we have come up with stories of religion and concepts like human rights. We begin talking about the incident, the recent right wing-initiated dialogue within the country to establish the primacy of ancient texts like the Vedas, and the issues that ail modern life. “When we look at the problems of 2015, there is the ISIS, the Middle East crisis and topics like the Christian revival movement. But these are just tiny blips or speed-bumps on the highway of history. Whenever the world gets a little shaky,” Harari says while holding the table to emphasise his point, “people look for answers in ancient texts. What we know for certain, from history, is that old answers are irrelevant. During the Industrial Revolution, you had huge sociopolitical problems all over the world. You got lots of people thinking that the answer is in the Bible or in the Qur’an. But you don’t remember any of them now. You instead remember people like Karl Marx or Engels, who came up with new original ideas. In terms of ideas, in terms of religions, the most interesting place today in the world is not the Middle East but Silicon Valley. This is where new religions will arise that will take over the world.”

Harari grew up in a secular Jewish family in Israel. As a child, he remembers being preoccupied by the concepts of life and truth, and what deep meaning these ideas could hold. “When we are teens, aren’t we all a bit like that—‘What’s the meaning of life? What are we doing here?’ All these big questions about life and existence. Then we go get married, get jobs, life sort of gets in the way. And we forget all about it. But for me these question always remained, always kept boiling.”

When he was pursuing PhD at Oxford, a friend introduced him to vipassana. This, Harari claims, was life-changing. Since 2001, Harari has been travelling to Mumbai every year to embark on a 10-day long vipassana retreat at the outskirts of the city. The practice of maintaining a silent vigil for days on end and uninterrupted meditation has provided him, he says, with a scientific tool to observe his mind, and to realise the fictional stories in his head and how often it has little to do with reality. Since last year, he has extended the duration of vipassana to 60 days. Two days later, he will again disappear for a two-month long retreat.

The idea of Sapiens as a book detailing the story of homo sapiens first occurred to Harari when he began to teach an introductory course on world history. Harari, a specialist in medieval military history, works as a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The course came to him because no senior professor wanted to touch it. The subject was too broad and unserious for them. “Historians love micro subjects. They like to delve deep into a small subject and specialise in it,” he says. “I’m the reverse. I like to go macro. To see the big sweeping arch. I’m not into dates and all.”

The students, Harari remembers, loved the course. “They told me they had never been taught history like this,” he recalls. So with his first year history students in mind, and with the clear intention of net getting bogged down with details and events, but using them to fashion a gripping narrative, Harari began the ambitious task of telling the story of humans.

The manuscript of the book was initially rejected by several publishers in Israel. “It’s all the same,” he says, “They all think it is history. So it must be boring.” But when it was eventually published, it became an instant bestseller, and it made its author an academic superstar. Just earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg selected Sapiens for his online book club. The book has so far been published in over 20 countries, translated into multiple languages, and Harari is forever travelling, holding seminars and talks, telling us who we are.

At the heart of Sapiens are two somewhat contradictory themes—how human are both ordinary and special. We emerged some 200,000 years ago in East Africa, insignificant and ordinary, like many other animals. We hunted and gathered, and sat somewhere in the middle of the food chain, using stone tools to dig out the marrow from the carcasses of animals left behind by predators and scavengers. Several similar species existed in other parts of the world. “We like to believe that Neanderthals, for instance, were big dumb creatures. But this is far from the truth. They weren’t any less unique than early homo sapiens. We aren’t so special or unique, like it is often claimed,” he says.

He points out recent research like the discovery of around four per cent of Neanderthal DNA in modern day people from Europe and the Middle East and around six per cent Denisovan DNA in modern Melanesian and Aboriginal Australians to point that homo sapiens were not a unique chosen specie but probably interbred with several species. Just last year, scientists also found that Tibetans carry a Denisovan gene that allows them to live in high altitude areas. “These findings should make us realise that the gap between us and other animals is not as big as we tend to think,” he says. This theory, of us modern day homo sapiens being the products of interbreeding with other human species also lends itself, as Harari reminds us, to explosive theories about race and its origins. “I am not a subscriber to this theory and in any case the amount of DNA from other human species so far discovered is small. But imagine if we were to learn that a certain race of people are stronger or have higher IQs than others because they are the products of interbreeding between certain human species,” he explains. “There were several racial theories at the first half of the 20th century, which scientists later debunked. Imagine how curious and uncomfortable some of these findings could now prove.”

To Harari, what makes us special is not our consciousness, ability to reason or make tools. “Humans are special,” he says, “because they inhabit an imagined world, created from their own ideas which they take as real.” Using their imagination, Harari argues, humans have created stories that help us unite and collaborate flexibly in huge groups unlike any other animal. “One-on-one or ten-on-ten, chimpanzees may be better than us,” he explains. “But pit 1,000 sapiens against 1,000 chimps, and the Sapiens will win easily, for 1,000 chimps will never cooperate effectively. Put 100,000 chimps in Wall Street or Yankee Stadium, and you’ll get chaos. Put 100,000 humans there, and you’ll get trade networks and sports contests.”

To Harari, organised religion, the concepts of nation states and patriotism, human rights and justice are all invented stories that have no objective reality. But they allow us to unify and achieve great things. To illustrate his point he talks about what he calls the most successful fictional story told— money. “Not everyone believes in God, or accepts the ideals of human rights or concepts like nationalism, but almost everybody believes in money. Osama bin Laden hated America, its politics, area and culture,” he explains. “But he was quite fond of American dollars. In fact he had no objection to that story.”

Sapiens zips from subject to subject, hurtling through hundreds of thousands of years, alighting on certain events and episodes, building the narrative to tell the story of the past and the present. He talks about the big moments of human history—the so-called Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution. He says that another revolution, the most radical of them all, is now almost underway and will lead to the creation of what he calls the intelligent design. It will allow some homo sapiens to break out from the organic world into the huge realm of the inorganic.

“The one thing that has remained constant in history is humans themselves. Homo sapiens have been the same for thousands of years. The next revolution will change all that,” he says. According to Harari, humans will use their imagination for the first time in history to create real changes in themselves—in their biology, physical and cognitive abilities. Humans will soon break the laws of natural selection, he says, and replace them with the laws of intelligent design. Work on some of these technologies, like direct brain- computer interfaces are already on their way. “This is not some science-fiction prediction. A lot of this is already underway.”

This is a theme he addresses in more detail in his next book, The History of Tomorrow, which is currently available in Hebrew, and whose English language edition will be out soon. Here, he speaks about the concept of a-mortals—people, who once doctors are able to defeat death, will live forever unless they die of some accident. In this futuristic world, he claims people will become increasingly redundant and unnecessary. “The 20th century was the era of the masses. Every human being had value, be it political, economic or military. You needed human beings in the trenches during wars and as a worker in the factory for economic production. But there’s a good chance in the 21st century, most humans will lose value. All you will need is a few specialists. They have already lost military value and are now gradually losing economic value too. The biggest question of 21st century will really be about what will all these unnecessary people do in 2050?”

Is a future of godlike humans where the majority will become unnecessary and the elite will have the resources to take charge of evolution itself a good or bad thing? Harari doesn’t quite have an answer. The power of the imagination that has brought humans to their current dominance, he says, is also pushing them into a future they cannot comprehend.

Sapiens: A Brief History of HumankindScientific RevolutionThe History of TomorrowYuval Noah Harari