Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

I wish I read Sapiens before I did The Dawn of Everything, for the latter book refers to and criticises the Yuval’s work. So every now and then I was catching myself agreeing with Graeber and Wengrow’s critique and musing if I would read Sapiens with different eyes, say, ten years ago. Of course I would.

The book is very well written — you can’t take that away from Harari.

There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up.

Closer to our times, the book grows less interesting (for me) and more erratic. It looks as if the author was in a hurry to finish it. This is what Harari writes about the end of Soviet Union (which happened not in 1989 but in 1991):

The Soviet collapse in 1989 was even more peaceful, despite the eruption of ethnic conflict in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Never before has such a mighty empire disappeared so swiftly and so quietly. The Soviet Empire of 1989 had suffered no military defeat except in Afghanistan, no external invasions, no rebellions, nor even large-scale Martin Luther King-style campaigns of civil disobedience. The Soviets still had millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of tanks and aeroplanes, and enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the whole of humankind several times over. The Red Army and the other Warsaw Pact armies remained loyal. Had the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, given the order, the Red Army would have opened fire on the subjugated masses.
Yet the Soviet elite, and the Communist regimes through most of eastern Europe (Romania and Serbia were the exceptions), chose not to use even a tiny fraction of this military power. When its members realised that Communism was bankrupt, they renounced force, admitted their failure, packed their suitcases and went home. Gorbachev and his colleagues gave up without a struggle not only the Soviet conquests of World War Two, but also the much older tsarist conquests in the Baltic, the Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia. It is chilling to contemplate what might have happened if Gorbachev had behaved like the Serbian leadership — or like the French in Algeria.

And a bit later:

Today humankind has broken the law of the jungle. There is at last real peace, and not just absence of war. For most polities, there is no plausible scenario leading to full-scale conflict within one year.

The book was originally published in Hebrew in 2011; this English translation appeared in 2014. There was no way for the author to know what’s coming for Crimea, but he should have been aware of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria.