So, I’ve started reading again: Sapiens

Everyone must have heard or seen of this book because it is so popular, so who could resist the urge to pick “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari for a read? There is just something so attractive about people with deep expertise and passion in their subject matter writing clearly that this type of books need its own genre and is quickly becoming my favourite. If anyone asks me how to do better for GP, I really think that reading this book will grant a wealth of general knowledge very useful for writing informed opinions about the world. Below is a rather long list of things I took away from the book.

Cute facts:

1. Human’s evolution to stand upright came with the price of premature pregnancy because the reduced weight distribution narrowed the female’s birth canals. Which is why human babies remain a warble of incompetent mess unlike the other mammal babies.
2. The idea of being a-mortal is within grasp, where humans can still die from injuries but our bodies no longer age and cause our deaths. Death is actually, if you think about it, a technical problem that we can work towards solving through curing diseases and every step that leads to natural death. The scientists have genetically modified C. Elegans worm with double the life expectancy.
3. Ignoramus, and admission of our ignorance, is the key ingredient in Science. Only through accepting what we don’t know will we be motivated to find out.
4. The evolution of maps: from the ancient maps with every nook and crevice filled (with imaginary dragons and creatures if a place is uncharted), the Europeans started leaving blank spaces to be filled in through exploration. This is compared to Columbus who discovered Indonesia but didn’t realise it was a new continent because there just wasn’t space on the map that could stomach something new. Maybe that is why it is a good thing we drew outer space as empty literal darkness, leaving room for us to fill in more knowledge and discoveries.
   
   

Thinking about our history:

1. Our propensity for destruction: Before we were Homo Sapiens, we had quite a few brothers and sisters, Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalensis, and it is a mystery how we replaced them as a species. The tamer idea is that our genes reigned superior over theirs and gradually replaced them, but the more likely explanation is that we could have killed them off just as we do for foreign invaders. This, coupled with the idea of “First wave extinction” – the drastic loss of biodiversity upon human’s first contact with new land (since we all spanned out from African region) – points to a history where violence and genocide is written in our very base. There is no coincidence in the plummeting of giant mammoths or sloths in America or Australia the moment the first humans arrived on the new continent.
2. Being domesticated by plants: we would like to think that the Agricultural Revolution made us advance as a society since we can now control the crops and a steady food source. However, this advancement was only measured in increasing food per unit to be able to support rapid population growth, while more individuals started living in substandard conditions. Compared to Hunter-Gatherer society, the Agrarian man was more prone to injuries and illnesses because we were not made to stoop all day ploughing fields and carrying weights. As a species we also became less free as the yoke our demanding fields have cast on our shoulders tighten with a threat to keep them healthier and more abundant. This is a sad illustration of evolution at the expense of an individual, and also one of the earliest examples of mistakenly recognising who has the upper hand in a relationship.
3. Agriculture and our anxiety: our species’ penchant for worrying about the future came from the fact that we started storing grains for the future, in case of a bad harvest, in case of population boom and so on. Why wouldn’t we worry about forward planning now that we know how to control our food security? As a result, we start creating religion as a way to rid ourselves of the anxiety, to hope that things such as bountiful harvest and kind weather are beyond our control. Blame our fear of uncertainty of the future on the fact that we started planting and harvesting.
4. We study history: history is a type of chaos called second order chaos. Unlike first order chaos, where it doesn’t change or respond to predictions (like the weather), second order chaos reacts and tries to avoid predictions (like stocks). In such a system like that, it might seem pointless to study history because predictions are essentially useless and we do not have a hypothesis. However, it is also enlightening to find out that we know nothing is as clear or natural or inevitable in historical progression as it seems in hindsight. Our actions can change the wheel of history and that is why we must study it, to take ownership over the destiny of our species.
5. Aztec and Inca’s invasion: the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca followed the exact same strategy – feign peace with an ambassador and take the emperor hostage, then manipulate local dissatisfaction and garner military support in the name of overthrowing the empire. These two places are literal neighbours to each other, and had they communicated they will not have fallen for the same trick of losing to the numerically inferior Spaniards. Not only does it display the urgent need for information sharing and cooperation, it also highlights how easy one becomes to manipulate by a third party when they are overly engrossed in their own agendas.

Thinking about our society:

1. Binding power of fiction: some sociologists have researched and discovered that the maximum capacity of our personal influence is capped at 150 people. Which is why a platoon commander or officer commanding can still simply rely on being a good superior to be a good leader to rally soldiers to give up their lives. Beyond that, fiction is needed to hold people together in a common identity. The Egyptian’s Hammurabi Code and American’s Declaration of Independence are pieces of writing that build a fictitious set of rules everyone in the same “identity” abides by.
2. Imagination is human’s greatest asset: the reason why humans are able to, unlike other animals, bypass the genome and the long time it takes to evolve into a culturally superior species is because we are able to tap into imagined reality, using fiction to bring about cultural revolution. It is how we are able to work together with strangers, unlike a group of chimpanzees from different sides of a mountain, and that ability for mass cooperation propels us towards progress.
3. Patriarchy cannot be justified by muscle power: there were a few hypotheses as to why most of human civilisations were patriarchy – aggression, muscle power, ability to defend and fight for a tribe. However, most of these masculine traits do not correlate to males having more time and tact to build the connections and rapport needed for political power, in fact is seems to suggest that females are better suited to wield power in a society. It is indicative that perhaps our patriarchal society isn’t sustained by an inevitable law of nature, but by a cultural mindset we create and perpetuate to keep the status quo.
4. Arms race as a recent invention: in the past, militaries won their conquest by making organisational changes that maximised their militaristic might. They won by either being more disciplined, more capable of bringing logistical support, more streamlined … Only recently did the technological obsession surrounding militaristic power begin. What weaponised war even more was hoe advanced platforms and supremacy of systems start to become a determining factor in wars (think Europeans’ Boxers War against China), and this is the nature of conflict in a world after the scientific revolution.
5. Industrial-military-scientific complex: speaking of war-making, it is quite a paradox how European powers came to rise. In 1775, 2/3 of global production is dominated by China and India, but Europe took over in 1850. The regional rise was explained by how they could organise themselves to a similar thought (imperialism), and that conquest for land is tied intrinsically to the search for knowledge. This led the Europeans to modern science that could challenge the Chinese. Taking a look at Europe’s rise implied a few things about the current world order. Just as how the rapid advancement of a country started from buying into the same fiction, the opposite is true, where America’s unravelling and decline is brought about by internal splintering and deeply irreconcilable political divide. At the same time, there isn’t any real breakthrough in China’s collective fiction since the PRC’s founding, and one might even argue that the legitimacy of its ideology is increasingly being corroded and challenged. This spells bad news as there isn’t one particularly strong powerhouse, where both its cultural and economic (soft and hard powers) are able to rise in tandem. Perhaps until we are able to find another common fiction for a cognitive breakthrough, the international order is bound for a power vacuum.
6. Science is imperialist: Setting up scientific discipline is an imperialist’s endeavour as the expansion of land allowed them to discover new language and subjects to study. For example, the Europeans studied linguistics, cuneiform script, archaeology, with the bizarre new world of possibilities opened up to them on their voyages. This also created a paradox where the imperialists know more than the locals and they often use their knowledge to justify why they are more progressive and deserve to help the locals and “civilise” them – the roots of a saviour complex.
7. Science cannot set its own priorities: a very different point from what I gathered from the previous book “The Gene”, it suggests that scientific discoveries are implicated in social political or religious reasonings and cannot be done in isolation of these outside biases. Science doesn’t exist just for science’s sake because it needs to be funded, and the only reason why it can garner funding is that there is value in its research to the society. In the same way, government funding can guide the direction to scientific research because that is where the sunrise industries are, which is all the more important that we choose where to spend frugally, not just for resources sake but for the message we send out too.
8. Money is a collective trust: money doesn’t exist, only scraps of paper do, and neither does the credit and value it comes with hold tangible objective reality, unlike say the nutritional value of a banana. It originated as a way to standardise trade across different communities, within a civilisation, and even across culture such as along the silk road. The reason why our capitalist society can function is because everybody collective believes in the fiction of money’s value, that it can be traded in for tangible goods. To me, it makes money talks, seem even more insidious, because for all of human’s proclivity to disagreements, we are able to unanimously believe in the idea of credit, and it seems that we would rather trust the intangible value of money than one another’s humanity.

International trusts matters: our modern economy is run on credit, not just money, but the trust that is founded on credit that is not on hand. Destroying trust that investors place in the country is disastrous, repeated countlessly in history when Spain became the leading European economy, then the Dutch (because Dutch businesses returned loans on time compared to unreasonable Spanish kings), then the British when they proved more trustworthy after France’s Mississippi bubble burst. Our international order is built on trust because credit is built on trust and development is built on credit. I don’t think Singapore will ever forget that international reputation and trust is what lent us the competitive edge, but for great powers, who are entitled to be ruthless and unreasonable, their trustworthiness is something that will make them superpowers, and when a time comes when no one commands international trust, no one stands to benefit in the long term with the trust deficit.