Sapiens
A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
(London: Vintage, 2011)
Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.
Page 3.
The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.
Page 4.
Animals are said to belong ot the same species if they tend to mate with each other, giving birth to fertile offspring.
Page 4.
Homo sapiens long preferred to view itself as set apart form animals, an orphan bereft of family, lacking sibling or cousins, and, most importantly, without parents. But that’s just mot the case. Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes.
Page 5.
The real meaning of the word human is ‘an animal belonging to the genus Homo’, and there used to be many other species of this genus besides Homo sapiens.
Pages 5-6.
It’s a common fallacy to envision these species as arranged in a straight line of descent. … This linear model gives the mistaken impression that at any particular moment only one type of human inhabited the earth, and that all earlier species were merely older models of ourselves. The truth is that form about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species.
Page 8.
Despite their many differences, all human species share several defining characteristics. Most notably, humans have extraordinarily large brains compared to other animals.
Page 9.
Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways. Firstly, they spent more time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied.
Page 9.
The manufacture and use of tools are the criteria by which archaeologists recognise ancient humans.
Page 10.
Compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely, when many of their vital systems are still underdeveloped. … Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders for sustenance, protection and education.
Page 11.
Raising children required constant help from other family members and neighbours. It takes a tribe to raise a human. Evolution thus favoured those capable of forming strong social ties.
Page 11.
It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years - with the rise of Homo sapiens - that man jumped to the top of the food chain.
Page 12.
Humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust.
Page 12.
Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.
Page 13.
Every two species that evolved from a common ancestor, such as horses and donkeys, were at one time just two populations of the same species.
Page 18.
It is unsettling - and perhaps thrilling - to think that we Sapiens could at one time have sex with an animal from a different species, and produce children together.
Page 19.
Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group.
Page 19.
Over the past 100,000 years Homo sapiens has so accustomed to being the only human species that it’s hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome of creation, and that a chasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Page 20.
Homo sapiens conquered the world thinks above all to its unique language.
Page 21.
The period from about 70,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago witnessed the invention of boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows and needles (essential for sewing warm clothing). The first objects that can reliably be called art date from this era … as does the first clear evidence for religion, commerce and social stratification.
Page 23.
The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. … The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language.
Page 23.
Our language is amazingly supple. We can connect a limited number of sounds and signs to produce an infinite number of sentences, each with a distinct meaning. We can thereby ingest, store and communicate a prodigious amount of information about the surrounding world.
Page 24.
Today the vast majority of human communication - whether in the form of emails, phone calls or newspaper columns - is gossip. It comes so naturally to us that it seems as if our language evolved for this very purpose.
Page 26.
The truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. … This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.
Page 27.
Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world.
Page 28.
In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands.
Page 29.
The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.
Page 30.
There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.
Page 31.
Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. … Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.
Page 35.
Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.
Page 35.
The ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively.
Page 36.
Ever since the Cognitive Revolution Homo sapiens has been able to revise its behaviour rapidly in accordance with changing needs. This opened a fast lane of cultural evolution, bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution.
Page 36.
Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behaviour to rapidly changing challenges.
Page 38.
Trade cannot exist without trust, and it is very difficult to trust strangers.
Page 39.
Neanderthals usually hunted along or in small groups. Sapiens, on the other hand, developed techniques that relied on cooperation between many dozens of individuals, and perhaps even between different bands.
Page 40.
The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call ‘cultures’. Once cultures appeared, they never ceased to change and develop, and these unstoppable alterations are what we call ‘history’.
Page 41.
The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation.
Page 42.
Tool-making is of little consequence unless it is coupled with the ability to cooperate with many others.
Pages 42-43.
Psychologically, there has been on significant improvement in our tool-making capacity over the last 30,000 years.
Page 43.
The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah.
Page 46.
Artifacts made of more perishable materials - such as wood, bamboo or leather - survive only under unique conditions. The common impression that pre-agricultural humans lived in an age of stone is a misconception based on this archaeological bias. The Stone Age should more accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used by ancient hunter-gatherers were made of wood.
Page 48.
The heated debates about Homo sapiens’ ‘natural way of life’ miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.
Page 51.
The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution.
Page 51.
The Sapiens population was thinly spread over vast territories. Before the Agricultural Revolution, the human population of the entire planet was smaller than tat of today’s Cairo.
Page 53.
Notwithstanding the popular image of ‘man the hunter’, gathering was Sapiens’ main activity, and it provided most of their calories, as well as raw materials such as flint, wood and bamboo.
Page 54.
The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.
Page 55.
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.
Page 55.
The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do.
Page 56.
The forager’s secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet. … ancient foragers regularly ate dozens of different foodstuffs.
Page 57.
Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution.
Page 58.
Animism (from ‘anima’, ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ in Latin) is the belief that almost every place, every animal, every plant and every natural phenomenon has awareness and feelings, and can communicate directly with humans.
Page 60.
In the animist world, objects and living things are not the only animated beings. There are also immaterial entities - the spirits of the dead, and friendly and malevolent beings, the kind that we today call demons, fairies and angels.
Page 61.
Animists believe that there is no barrier between humans and other beings. They can all communicate directly through speech, song, dance and ceremony.
Page 61.
Animism is not a specific religion. It is a generic name for thousands of very different religions, cults and beliefs. What makes all of them ‘animist’ is the common approach to the world and to man’s place in it.
Pages 61.
Theism (from ‘theos’, ‘god’ in Greek) is the view that the universal order is based on a hierarchical relationship between humans and a small group of ethereal entities called gods.
Page 62.
The theories of scholars who claim to know what the foragers felt shed much more light on the prejudices of their authors than on Stone Age religions.
Page 62.
Some scholars imagine ancient hunter-gatherer societies as peaceful paradises, and argue that war and violence began only with the Agricultural Revolution, when people started to accumulate private property. Other scholars maintain that the world of the ancient foragers was exceptionally cruel and violent.
Pages 65-66.
During pre-industrial warfare more than 90 percent of war dead were killed by starvation, cold and disease rather than by weapons.
Page 68.
During the twentieth century, only 5 percent of human deaths resulted from human violence - and this in a century that saw the bloodiest wars and most massive genocides in history.
Page 69.
The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history, at least as important as Columbus’ journey to America or the Apollo 11 expedition to the moon.
Page 71.
The moment the first hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that Homo sapiens climbed to the top rung in the food chain on a particular landmass and thereafter became the deadliest species in the annals of planet Earth.
Page 72.
It’s common today to explain anything and everything as the result of climate change, but the truth is that earth’s climate never rests. It is in constant flux. Every event in history occurred against the background of some climate change.
Page 73.
The historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.
Page 74.
Humans don’t come across as particularly dangerous. They don’t have long, sharp teeth or muscular, lithe bodies.
Page 75.
The inevitable conclusion is that the first wave of Sapiens colonization was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom. Hardest hit were the large furry creatures.
Page 80.
Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beast long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools.
Page 80.
Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinction. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.
Page 82.
The transition to agriculture began around 9500 - 8500 BC int eh hill country of south-eastern Turkey, western Iran and the Levant.
Page 87.
Even today, with all our advances technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC - wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years.
Page 88.
By the first century AD the vast majority of people throughout most of the world were agriculturalists.
Page 88.
Most species of plants and animals can’t be domesticated. … Of the thousands of species that our ancestors hunted and gathered, only a few were suitable candidates for farming and herding. Those few species lived in particular places, and those are the places where agricultural revolutions occurred.
Pages 88-89.
There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time.
Page 89.
The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.
Page 90.
The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.
Page 90.
Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernia. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin ‘domus’, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.
Page 91.
A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums.
Page 91.
Cultivating wheat provided much more food per until of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.
Page 93.
This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
Page 94.
Humans, like many mammals, have hormonal and genetic mechanisms that help control procreation. In good times females reach puberty earlier, and their chances of getting pregnant are a bit higher. In bad times puberty is late and fertility decreases.
Page 95.
Abut 18,000 years ago, the last ice age gave way to a period of global warming. As temperatures rose, so did rainfall. The new climate was ideal for Middle Eastern wheat and other cereals, which multiplied and spread. People began eating more wheat, and in exchange they inadvertently spread its growth.
Page 95.
In most agricultural societies at least one out of ever three children died before reaching twenty. Yet the increase in births still outpaced the increase in deaths; humans kept having larger numbers of children.
Page 97.
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted.
Page 98.
Since farming created the conditions for swift demographic growth, farmers could usually overcome foragers by sheer weight of numbers. The foragers could either run away, abandoning their hunting grounds to field and pasture, or take up the ploughshare themselves. Either way, the old life was doomed.
Page 99.
Transportation, ploughing, grinding and other tasks, hitherto performed by human sinew, were increasingly carried out by animals. In most farming societies people focused on plant cultivation; raising animals was a secondary activity. But a new kind of society also appeared in some places, based primarily on the exploitation of animals: tribes of pastoralist herders.
Page 104.
As humans spread around the world, so did their domesticated animals. … Following Homo sapiens, domesticate cattle, pigs and sheep ar the second, third and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world.
Page 104.
For the vast majority of domesticated animals, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe. … The numerical success of the calf’s species is little consolation for the suffering the individual endures.
Page 109.
The Agricultural Revolution is one of the most controversial events in history. Some partisans proclaim that it set humankind on the road to prosperity and progress. Others insist that it led to perdition.
Page 110.
Farming enabled populations to increase so radically and rapidly that no complex agricultural society could ever again sustain itself if it returned to hunting and gathering.
Page 110.
Settling down caused most people’s turf to shrink dramatically. Ancient hunter-gatherers usually lived in territories covering many dozens and even hundreds of square kilometers. ‘Home’ was the entire territory, with its hills, steams, woods and open sky. Peasants, on the other hand, spent most of their days working a small field or orchard, and their domestic lives centred on a cramped structure of wood, stone or mud, measuring no more than a few dozen meters - the house.
Page 110.
Henceforth, attachment to ‘my house’ and separation from the neighbours became the psychological hallmark of a much more self-centred creature.
Page 111.
As time went on they accumulated more and more things - objects, not easily transportable, that tied them down.
Page 112.
The Agricultural Revolution made the future far more important than it had ever been before. Farmers must always keep the future in mind and must work in its service.
Page 112.
Peasants were obliged to produce more than they consumed so that they could build up reserves. … A peasant living on the assup5ion t5hat5 bad years would not come didn’t live long.
Page 113.
From the very advent of agriculture, worries about the future became major players in the theatre of the human mind.
Page 113.
Diligent peasants almost never achieved the future economic security they so craved through their hard work in the present. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.
Page 114.
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
Page 114.
Humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals. The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution form the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.
Page 115.
We mustn’t harbour rosy illusions about ‘mass cooperation networks’ operating in pharaonic Egypt or the Roman Empire. ‘Cooperation’ sounds very altruistic, but is not always voluntary and seldom egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks e been geared towards oppression and exploitation.
Page 116.
Hammurabi’s Code was based on the premise that if the king’s subjects all accepted their positions in the hierarchy and acted accordingly, the empire’s million inhabitants would be able to cooperate effectively. Their society could then produce enough food for its members, distribute it efficiently, protect itself against its enemies, and expand its territory so as to acquire more wealth and better security.
Pages 120-121.
Like the Code of Hammurabi, the American Declaration of Independence was not just a document of its time and place - it was accepted by future generations as well.
Page 121.
We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.
Page 124.
Of all human collective activities, the one most difficult to organize is violence.
Page 125.
You never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature.
Page 126.
Today people believe in equality, so it’s fashionable for rich kids to wear jeans, which were originally working-class attire.
Page 127.
People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism.
Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can.. …
Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible.
Page 129.
Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded.
Page 130.
In order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.
Page 133.
When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.
Page 133.
The large societies found in some other species, such as ants and bees, are stable and resilient because most of the information needed to sustain them is encoded in the genome.
Page 135.
Because the Sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny. A conscious effort has to be made to sustain laws, customs, procedures and manners, otherwise the social order would quickly collapse.
Page 135.
Humans die, and their brains die with them. Any information stored in a brain will be erased in less than a century.
Page 136.
Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires.
Page 137.
Writing was limited to facts and figures. The great Sumerian novel, if there ever was one, was never committed to clay tablets. Writing was time-consuming and the reading public tiny, so no one saw any reason to use it for anything other than essential record-keeping.
Page 138.
With the appearance of writing, we are beginning to hear history through the ears of its protagonists.
Page 139.
The Hebrew Bible, the Greek Iliad, the Hindu Mahabhatata and the Buddhist Tipitka all began as oral works. For many generations they were transmitted orally and would have lived on even had writing never been invented.
Page 142.
What set apart Sumer, as well as pharaonic Egypt, ancient China and the Inca Empire, is that these cultures developed good techniques of archiving, cataloguing and retrieving written records.
Page 144.
The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.
Page 146.
Bureaucratic methods of data processing grew ever more different form the way humans naturally think - and ever more important.
Page 146.
Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master.
Page 148.
How did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.
Page 149.
It is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.
Page 150.
Most people claim that their social hierarchy is natural and just, while those of other societies are based on false and ridiculous criteria.
Page 152.
Complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination. … Time and again people have created order in their societies by classifying the population into imagined categories.
Page 153.
Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.
Page 153.
Of course, differences in natural abilities also play a role in the formation of social distinctions. But such diversities of aptitudes and character are usually mediated through imagined hierarchies.
Pages 153-154.
All societies are based on imagined hierarchies, but not necessarily on the same hierarchies. … In most cases the hierarchy originated as the result of a set of accidental historical circumstances and was then perpetuated and refined over many generations as different groups developed vested interests in it.
Page 154.
If you want to keep any human group isolated - women, Jews, Roma, gays, blacks - the best way to do it is convince everyone that these people are a source of pollution.
Page 155.
Even though the slaves were freed, the racist myths that justified slavery persisted. Separation of the races was maintained by racist legislation and social custom.
Page 158.
Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not getter, with time. Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.
Page 161.
Societies associate a host of attributes with masculinity and femininity that, for the most part, lack a firm biological basis.
Page 163.
Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others.
Page 164.
Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural.
Page 164.
In truth, our concepts ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but form Christian theology. The theological meaning of ‘natural’ is ‘in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature’. Christian theologians argued that God created the human body, intending each limb and organ to serve a particular purpose.
Page 165.
Evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Organs evolve to perform a particular function, but once they exist, they can be adapted for other as well.
Page 165.
‘Man’ and ‘woman’ name social, not biological categories.
Page 166.
Since myths, rather than biology, define the roles, rights and duties of men and women, the meaning of ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ have varied immensely from one society to another.
Page 167.
Scholars usually distinguish between ‘sex’, which is a biological category, and ‘gender’, a cultural category.
Page 170.
Males in particular live in constant dread of losing their claim to manhood.
Page 170.
At least since the Agricultural Revolution, most human societies have been patriarchal societies that valued men more highly than women.
Pages 170-171.
It is far more likely that seven though the precise definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ varies between cultures, there is some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood. We do not know what this reason is.
Page 172.
The statement that ‘men are stronger than women’ is true only on average, and only with regard to certain types of strength.
Page 172.
The ability to maintain peace at home, acquire allies abroad, and understand what goes through the mind of other people (particularly your enemies) is usually the key to victory. Hence an aggressive brute is often the worst choice to run a war.
Page 175.
Sapiens are relatively weak animals, whose advantage rests in their ability to cooperate in large numbers.
Page 177.
Discord in our thoughts, ideas and values open us to think, re-evaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.
Page 184.
Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture.
Page 184.
Human cultures are in constant flux.
Page 184.
The sectioning of Christianity and the collapse of the Mongol Empire are just speed bumps on history’s highway.
Page 185.
All the imagined orders people created tended to ignore a substantial part of humankind.
Page 191.
The first universal order to appear was economic: the monetary order. The second universal order was political: the imperial order. The third universal order was religious: the order of universal religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.
Page 191.
Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the first people who managed to transcend the binary evolutionary division, ‘us vs them’, and to foresee the potential unity of humankind. For the merchants, the entire world was a single market and all humans were potential customers. They tried to establish an economic order that would apply to all, everywhere. For the conqueror, the entire wold was a single empire and all humans were potential subjects, and for the prophets, the entire world held a single truth and all humans were potential believers.
Page 191.
People who do not believe in the same god or obey the same king are more than willing to use the same money.
Page 191.
When an Aztec wanted to buy something, he generally paid in cocoa beans or bolts of cloth. The Spanish obsession with gold thus seemed inexplicable.
Page 193.
Barter is effective only when exchanging a limited range of products. It cannot form the basis for a complex economy.
Pages 195-196.
Barter is not always possible. After all, a trade requires that each side want what the other has to offer.
Page 197.
Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services.
Page 197.
Even today coins and banknotes are a rare form of money. The sum total of money in the world is about $68 trillion, yet the sum total of coins and banknotes is less than $6 trillion. More than 90 per cent of all money - more than $50 trillion appearing in our accounts - exists only on computer servers.
Page 199.
Money is thus a universal medium of exchange that enables people to convert almost everything into almost anything else.
Page 199.
In order to use wealth it is not enough just to store it. It often needs to be transported from place to place.
Page 200.
Because money can convert, store and transport wealth easily and cheaply, it made a vital contribution to the appearance of complex commercial netwo4rks and dynamic markets. Without money, commercial networks and markets would have been doomed to remain very limited in their size, complexity and dynamism.
Page 200.
Money isn’t a material reality - it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind.
Page 201.
Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. … money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
Page 201.
The real breakthrough in monetary history occurred when people gained trust in money that lacked inherent value, but was easier to store and transport. Such money appeared in ancient Mesopotamia in the middle of the third millennium BC. This was the silver shekel.
Page 202.
Most monetary terms in the Old Testament are given in terms of silver rather than coins.
Page 203.
Counterfeiting is not just cheating - it’s a breach of sovereignty, an act of subversion against the power, privileges and person of the king.
Page 204.
The trust in Rome’s coins was so strong that even outside the empi4re’s borders, people were happy to receive payment in denarii.
Page 205.
The name ‘denarius’ became a generic name for coins.
Page 205.
Money is … the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other can don’t’ trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively.
Page 207.
Human communities and families have always ben based on belief in ‘priceless’ things, such as honour, loyalty, morality and love. These things lie outside the domain of the market, and they shouldn’t be bought or sold for money.
Page 208.
In the past there were many more distinct peoples in the world, each of which had a smaller population and occupied less territory than today’s typical people.
Page 213.
Empire has been the world’s most common form of political organisation for the last 2,500 years
Page 214.
The destruction of one empire hardly meant independence for subject people. Instead, a new empire stepped into the vacuum created when the old one collapsed. Or retreated.
Page 215.
The political, economic and social practices of modern Jews, for example, owe far more to the empires under which they lived during the past two millennia than to the traditions of the ancient kingdom of Judea.
Page 215.
To colour all empires black and to disavow all imperial legacies is to reject most of human culture. Imperial elites used the profits of conquest to finance not only armies and forts but also philosophy, art, justice and charity.
Page 216.
In Chinese political thinking as well as Chinese historical memory, imperial periods were … seen as golden ages of order and justice. In contradiction to the modern Western view that a just world is composed of separate nation states, in China periods of political fragmentation were seen as dark grs of chaos and injustice.
Page 220.
The Mandate of Heave n was bestowed upon the emperor not in order to exploit the world, but in order to educate humanity. The Romans, too, justified their dominion by arguing that they were endowing the barbarians with peace, justice and refinement.
Page 221.
Most of today’s cultures are based on imperial legacies. If empires are by definition bad, what does that say about us?
Page 227.
Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.
Page 234.
The majority of ancient religions were local and exclusive. Their followers believed in local deities and spirits, and had no interest in converting the entire human race.
Page 235.
The Agricultural Revolutions seems to have been accompanied by a religious revolution. … The first religious effect of the Agricultural Revolution was to turn plants and animals from equal members of a spiritual round table into property.
Page 236.
As long as people lived their entire lives within limited territories of a few hundred square kilometers, most of their needs could be met by local spirits. But once kingdoms and trade networks expanded, people needed to contact entities whose power and authority encompassed a whole kingdom or an entire trade basin.
Page 237.
Animists thought that humans were just one of many creatures inhabiting the world. Polytheists, on the other hand, increasingly saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans.
Page 237.
Polytheism … exalted not only the status of the gods, but also that of humankind.
Page 238.
The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it form monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans.
Page 138.
The Roman Empire did not require the Christians to give up their beliefs and rituals, but it did expect them to pay respect to the empire’s protector gods and to the divinity of the emperor. This was seen as a declaration of political loyalty. When the Christians vehemently refused to do so, and went on to reject all attempts at compromise, the Romans reacted by persecuting what they understood to be a politically subversive faction.
Page 240.
The big breakthrough came with Christianity. This faith began as an esoteric Jewish sect that sought to convince Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was their long-awaited messiah. However, one of the sect’s first leaders, Paul of Tarsus, reasoned that if the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases, and if \he had bothered to incarnate Himself in the flesh and to die on the cross for the salvation of humankind, then this is something everyone should hear about, not just Jews. |it was thus necessary to spread the good word - the gospel - about Jesus throughout the world.
Page 242.
Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists. A religion that recognises the legitimacy of other faiths implies either that its god is not the supreme power of the universe, or that it received from God just part of the universal truth. Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition.
Page 243.
Monotheist theology tends to deny the existence of all gods except the supreme God, and to pour hellfire and brimstone over anyone who dares worship them.
Page 244.
Dualism is a very attractive world view because it has a short and simple answer to the famous Problem of Evil, one of the fundamental concerns of human thought. … Monotheists have to practice intellectual gymnastics to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God allows so much suffering in the world.
Page2 245-246.
Monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order.
Page 246.
Humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions.
Page 247.
The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts.
Page 248.
The first principle of monotheist religions is ‘God exists. What does He want form me?’ The first principle of Buddhism is ‘Suffering exists. How do I escape it?’
Page 253.
Buddhism does not deny the existence of gods - they are described as powerful beings who can bring rains and victories - but they have no influence on the law that suffering arises from craving. If the mind of a person is free of all craving, no god can make him miserable.
Page 253.
If religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in superhuman order, the Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.
Page 254.
Theist religions focus on the worship of gods. Humanist religions worship humanity, or more correctly, Homo sapiens. Humanism is a belief that Homo sapiens has a unique and sacred nature, which is fundamentally different from the nature of all other animals and of all other phenomena. Humanists believe that the unique nature of Homo sapiens is the most important thing in the world, and it determines the meaning of everything that happens I the universe.
Page 256.
The most important humanist sect is liberal humanism, which believes that ‘humanity’ is a quality of individual humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct.
Page 257.
The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls.
Page 257.
Another important sect is socialist humanism. Socialists believe that ‘humanity’ is collective rather than individualistic. They hold as sacred not the inner voice of each individual, but the special Homo sapiens as a whole. Whereas liberal humanism seeks as much freedom as possible for individual humans, socialist humanism seeks equality between all humans. According to socialists, inequality is the worst blasphemy against the sanctity of humanity, because it privileges peripheral qualities of humans over their universal essence.
Page 258.
The only humanist sect that has actually broken loose from traditional monotheism is evolutionary humanism, whose most famous representatives are the Nazis. What distinguished the Nazis from other humanist sects was a different definition of ‘humanity’, one deeply influenced by the theory of evolution. In contrast to other humanists, the Nazis believed that humankind is not something universal and eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate. Man can evolve into superman, or degenerate into a subhuman.
Page 258.
The main ambition of the Nazis was to protect humankind from degeneration and encourage its progressive evolution. This is why the Nazis said that the Aryan race, the most advanced form of humanity, had to be protected and fostered, while degenerate kinds of Homo sapiens like Jews, Roma, homosexuals and the mentally ill had to be quarantined and even exterminated.
Page 258.
Given the state of scientific knowledge in 1933, Nazi beliefs were hardly outside the pale. The existence of different human races, the superiority of the white race, and the need to protect and cultivate this superior race were widely held beliefs among most Western elites.
Page 259.
Precisely because Nazi ideology was so racist, racism became discredited in the West.
Page 260.
The Nazis did not loathe humanity. They fought liberal humanism, human rights and communism precisely because they admired humanity and believed in the great potential of the human species.
Page 261.
Our liberal political and judicial systems are founded on the belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature, indivisible and immutable, which gives meaning to the world, and which is the source of all ethical and political authority. This is a reincarnation of the traditional Christian belief in a free and eternal soul that resides within each individual.
Page 263.
Saying that a global society is inevitable is not the same as saying that the end result had to be the particular kind of global society we now have.
Page 264.
What is the difference between describing ‘how’ and explaining ‘why’? To describe ‘how’ means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another. To explain ‘why’ means to find causal connections that account for the occurrence of this particular series of events to the exclusion of all others.
Page 265.
This is one of the distinguishing marks of history as an academic discipline - the better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another. Those who have only a superficial knowledge of a certain period tend to focus only on the possibility that was eventually realised. They offer a just-so story to explain with hindsight why that outcome was inevitable. Those more deeply informed about the period are much more cognisant of the roads not taken.
Page 266.
It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.
Page 266.
Not that everything is possible. Geographical, biological and economic forces create constraints. Yet these constraints leave ample room for surprising developments.
Page 267.
Determinism is appealing because it implies that our world and our beliefs are a natural and inevitable product of history. … To acknowledge that history is not deterministic is to acknowledge that it is just a coincidence that most people today believe in nationalism, capitalism and human rights.
History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic.
Page 267.
Why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizon, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than ewe imagine.
Page 269.
History’s choices are not made for the benefit of humans. There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along. …
There is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humans because we lack an objective scale on which to measure such benefit.
Page 269.
The dynamics of history are not directed towards enhancing human well-being. There is no basis for thinking that the most successful cultures in history are necessarily the best ones for Homo sapiens.
Page 271.
In the year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the entire world.
Page 275.
Any large bank today holds more money than all the world’s premodern kingdoms put together.
Page 276.
The typical premodern ruler gave money to priests, philosophers and poets in the hope that they would legitimise his rule and maintain the social order. He did not expect them to discover new medications, invent new weapons or stimulate economic growth.
Page 277.
The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.
Page 279.
Modern-day science is a unique tradition of knowledge, inasmuch as it openly admits collective ignorance regarding the most important questions.
Page 281.
The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern culture more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge.
Page 282.
Our current assumption that we do not know everything, and that even the knowledge we possess is tentative, extends to the shared myths that enable millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. If the evidence shows that many of those myths are doubtful, how can we hold society together?
Page 282.
Modern culture has nevertheless been willing to embrace ignorance to a much greater degree than has any previous culture.
Page 282.
As modern people came to admit that they did not know the answers to some very important questions, they found it necessary to look for completely new knowledge.
Page 283.
In order to understand the universe, we need to connect observations into comprehensive theories. Earlier traditions usually formulated their theories in terms of stories,. Modern science uses mathematics.
Page 283.
Newton showed that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.
Page 285.
Most people have a hard time digesting modern science because its mathematical language is difficult for our minds to grasp, and its findings often contradict common sense.
Page 288.
Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 per cent correct. Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge.
Page 289.
The connection forged between science and technology is so strong that today people tend to confuse the two.
Page 289.
Generally speaking, most premodern rulers and business people did not finance research about the nature of the universe in order to develop new technologies, and most thinkers did not try to translate their findings into technological gadgets. Rulers financed educational institutions whose mandate was to spread traditional knowledge for the purpose of buttressing the existing order.
Page 289.
The world’s military forces initiate, fund and steer a large part of humanity’s scientific research and technological development.
Page 290.
Up until the nineteenth century, the vast majority of military revolutions were the product of organisational rather than technological changes.
Page 292.
Science, industry and military technology intertwined only with the advent of the capitalist system and the Industrial Revolution.
Page 294.
Until the Scientific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress. They thought the golden age was in the past, and that the world was stagnant, if not deteriorating.
Page 294.
For men of science, death is not an inevitable destiny, but merely a technical problem.
Page 298.
The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role ins nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will for ever live in its collective memory.
Page 302.
Science is unable to set its own priorities. It is also incapable of determining what to do with its discoveries.
Page 305.
Scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology. The ideology justifies the costs of the research. In exchange, the ideology influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries.
Page 305.
The feedback loop between science, empire and capital has arguably been history’s chief engine for the past 500 years.
Page 306.
The Scientific Revolution and modern imperialism were inseparable.
Page 311.
Only at the end of the fifteenth century did Europe become a hothouse of important military, political, economic and cultural developments. Between 1500 and 1750, western Europe gained momentum and became master of the ‘Outer World’, meaning the two American continents and the oceans.
Page 311.
Europeans managed to conquer America and gain supremacy at sea mainly because the Asiatic powers showed little interest in them.
Page 311.
In 1775 Asia accounted for 80 per cent of the world economy.
Page 312.
The global centre of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans humiliated the Asian powers in a series of wars and conquered large parts of Asia.
Page 312.
It’s unquestionable that from 1850 onward European domination rested to a large extent on the military-industrial-scientific complex and technological wizardry.
Page 313.
What potential did Europe develop in the early modern period that enabled it to dominate the late modern world? There are two complementary answers to this question: modern science and capitalism.
Page 315.
Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world. Conquest merely utilised and spread their view of the world. … European imperialists set out to distant shores in the hope of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories.
Page 317.
As time went by, the conquest of knowledge and the conquest of territory became ever more tightly intertwined. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, almost every important military expedition that left Europe for distant lands had on board scientists who set out not to fight but to make scientific discoveries.
Page 317.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans began to draw world maps with lots of empty spaces - one indication of the development of the scientific mindset, as well as of the European imperial drive.
Page 319.
The European imperial expeditions transformed the history of the world: from being a series of histories of isolated peoples and cultures, it became the history of a single integrated human society.
Page 322.
Europe did not enjoy an outstanding technological edge. What made Europeans exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer.
Page 324.
The oddity is that early modern Europeans caught a fever that drove them to sail to distant and completely unknown lands full of alien cultures.
Page 325.
The previous rulers of Central America - the Aztecs, the Toltecs, the Maya - barely knew south America existed, and never made any attempt to subjugate it, over the course of 2,000 years.
Page 326.
Within twenty years, almost the entire native Caribbean population as wiped out. The Spanish colonists began importing African slaves to fill the vacuum.
Page 326.
Native hygiene was far better than Spanish hygiene. When the Spaniards first arrived in Mexico, natives bearing incense burners were assigned to accompany them wherever they went. The Spaniards thought it was a mark of divine honour. We know from native sources that they found the newcomers’ smell unbearable.
Page 327.
The European conquerors knew their empires very well. Far better, indeed, than any previous conquerors, or even than the native population itself.
Page 335.
Science gave the empires ideological justification. Modern Europeans came to believe that acquiring new knowledge was always good. The fact that the empires produced a constant stream of new knowledge branded them as progressive and positive enterprises.
Page 336.
Neither the narrative of oppression and exploitation nor that of ‘the White Man’s burden’ completely matches the facts. The European empires did so many different things on such a large scale, that you can find plenty of examples to support whatever you want to say about them.… They created the world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them.
Page 337.
Without imperial support, it is doubtful whether modern science would have progressed very far.
Page 339.
Behind the meteoric rise of both science and empire lurks one particularly important force: capitalism. Were it not for businessmen seeking to make money, Columbus would not have reached America, James Cook would not have reached Australia, and Neil Armstrong ,would never have taken that small step on the surface of the moon.
Page 340.
To understand modern economic history, you really need to understand just a single word. The word is growth.
Page 341.
Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every dollar they actually possess, which means that 90 per cent of all the money in our bank accounts is not covered by actual coins and notes.
Page 343.
What enables banks - and the entire economy - to survive and flourish is our trust in the future. This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world.
Page 343.
Credit enables us to build the present at the expense of the future. It’s founded on the assumption that our future resources are sure to be far more abundant than our present resources.
Page 344.
Credit arrangements of one kind or another have existed in all known human cultures, going back at least to ancient Sumer. The problem in previous eras was not that no one had the idea of knew how to use it. It was that people seldom wanted to extend much credit because they didn’t trust that the future would be better than the present. They generally believed that times past had been better than their own times and that the future would be worse, or at least much the same. To put that in economic terms, they believed that the total amount of wealth was limited, if not dwindling. … Business looked like a zero-sum game.
That’s why many cultures concluded that making bundles of money was sinful.
Pages 344-345.
Then came the Scientific Revolution and the idea of progress. The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve.
Pages 346-347.
Over the last 500 years the idea of progress convinced people to put more and more trust in the future. This trust created credit; credit brought real economic growth; and growth strengthened the trust in the future and opened the way for even more credit.
Page 347.
Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history - revolutionary not just form an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.
Page 348.
A crucial part of the modern capitalist economy was the emergence of a new ethic, according to which profits ought to be reinvested in production.
Page 349.
Capitalism distinguishes ‘capital’ from mere ‘wealth’. Capital consists of money, goods and resources that are invested in production. Wealth, on the other hand, is buried in the ground or wasted on unproductive activities.
Page 349.
Capitalism gradually became far more than just an economic doctrine. It now encompasses an ethic - a set of teachings about how people should behave, educate their children and even think. Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth.
Page 351.
The human economy has nevertheless managed to keep on growing throughout the modern era, thanks only to the fact that scientists come up with another discovery or gadget every few years - such as the continent of America, the internal combustion engine, or genetically engineered sheep.
Page 352.
Until the eighteenth century, Asia was the world’s economic powerhouse, meaning that Europeans had far less capital at their disposal than the Chinese, Muslims or Indians.
Page 353.
In Europe … kings and general gradually adopted the mercantile way of thinking, until merchants and bankers became the ruling elite.
Page 353.
Capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail to defend private individuals and their property.
Page 356.
It was the Dutch merchants - not the Dutch state - who built the Dutch Empire.
Page 358.
The amount of credit in an economy is determined not only by purely economic factors such as the discovery of a new oil field or the invention of a new machine, but also by political events such as regime changes or more ambitious foreign policies.
Page 366.
Ardent capitalists trend to argue that capital should be free to influence politics, but politics should not be allowed to influence capital.
Page 367.
In its extreme form, belief in the free market is as naïve as belief in Sanga Claus. … Markets by themselves offer no protection against fraud, theft and violence. It is the job of political systems to ensure trust by legislating sanctions against cheats and to establish and support police forces, courts and jails which will enforce the law.
Page 367.
During the early modern period, the rise of European capitalism went hand in hand with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Unrestrained market forces, rather than tyrannical kings or racist ideologues, were responsible for this calamity.
Pages 368-369.
From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, about 10 million African slaves were imported to America. About 70 per cent of them worked on the sugar plantations.
Page 369.
This is the fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism. It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner.
Page 370.
When growth becomes a supreme good, unrestricted by any other ethical considerations, it can easily lead to catastrophe.
Page 370.
The Atlantic slave trade did not stem from racist hated towards Africans.
Page 370.
The modern economy grows thanks to our trust in the future and to the willingness of capitalists to reinvest their profits in production.
Page 374.
Almost everything people did throughout history was fuelled by solar energy that was captured by plants and converted into muscle power.
Page 376.
At heart, the Industrial Revolution has been a revolution in energy conversion.
Page 379.
Why are so many people afraid that we are funning out of energy? … The world does not lack energy. All we lack is the knowledge necessary to harness and convert it to our needs.
Page 379.
The Industrial Revolution was above all else the Second Agricultural Revolution.
Page 382.
Just as the Atlantic slave trade did not stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not motivated by animosity. Again, it is fuelled by indifference.
Page 384.
Playing is the mammalian way of learning social behaviour.
Page 385.
This is the basic lesson of evolutionary psychology: a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction. The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of animals, while neglecting their subjective needs.
Page 385.
Without the industrialization of agriculture the urban Industrial Revolution could never have happened.
Pages 387-388.
For the first time in human history, supply began to outstrip demand. And an entirely new problem was born: who is going to buy all this stuff?
Page 388.
To make sure that people will always buy whatever new stuff industry produces, a new kind of ethic appeared: consumerism.
Page 388.
Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a positive thing. It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption. Frugality is a disease to be cured.
Pages 388-389.
Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology (‘Just do it’) to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression.
Page 389.
Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products - contributing to economic growth twice over.
Page 390.
Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed.
Page 393.
The Industrial Revolution turned the timetable and the assembly line into a template for almost all human activities. Shortly after factories imposed their time frames on human behaviour, schools too adopted precise timetables, followed by hospitals, government offices and grocery stores.
Page 395.
Back then, each British city and town had its own local tine.
Page 396.
In 1847, British train companies put their heads together and agreed that henceforth all train timetables would be calibrated to Greenwich Observatory time, rather than the local times of Liverpool, Manchester or Glasgow. More and more institutions followed the lead of the train companies. Finally, in 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich.
Page 396.
In order to run the timetable network, cheap but precise portable clocks became ubiquitous.
Page 397.
Today, a single affluent family generally has more timepieces at home than an entire medieval country.
Page 397.
You need to make a conscious effort not to know what time it is.
Page 397.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the daily life of most humans ran its course within three ancient frames: the nuclear family, the extended family and the local intimate community.
Pages 398-399.
Many kingdoms and empires were in truth little more than large protection rackets. The king was the capo di tutti capi who collected protection money, and in return made sure that neighbouring crime syndicates and local small fry did not harm those under his protection.
Page 401.
Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying economic and legal rights independently of their family and community. They may hold their own bank accounts, decide whom to marry, and even choose to divorce or live on their own.
Page 403.
Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals.
Pages 403-404.
Markets and states today provide most of the material needs once provided by communities, but they must also supply tribal bonds.
Markets and states do so by fostering ‘imagined communities’ that contain millions of strangers, and which are tailored to national and commercial needs. An imagined community is a community of people who don’t really know each other, but imagine that they do.
Page 405.
The nation does its best to hide its imagined character.
Page 407.
Nations existed in the distant past, but their importance was much smaller than today because the importance of the state was much smaller. … whatever importance ancient nations may have had, few of them survived. Most existing nations evolved only after the Industrial Revolution.
Page 407.
In recent decades, national communities have been increasingly eclipsed by tribes of customers who do not know one another intimately but share the same consumption habits and interests, and therefore feel part of the same consumer tribe - and define themselves as such.
Pages 407-408.
Any attempt to define the characteristics of modern society is akin to defining the colour of a chameleon. The only characteristic of which we can be certain is the incessant change.
Page 409.
Most people don’t appreciate just how peaceful an era we live in. None of us was alive a thousand years ago, so we easily forget how much more violent the world used to be. And as wars become more rare they attract more attention.
Page 410.
The decline of violence is due largely to the rise of the state. Throughout history, most violence resulted from local feuds between families and communities.
Page 411.
From a macro perspective, state-run courts and police forces have probably increased the level of security worldwide. Even in oppressive dictatorships, the average modern person is far less likely to die at the hands of another person than in premodern societies.
Page 412.
What nobody can deny is that international violence has dropped to an all-time low.
Page 412.
With very few exceptions, since 1945 states no longer invade other states in order to conquer and swallow them up.
Page 414.
Campaigns of conquest like those of the Romans, Mongols and Ottomans cannot take place today anywhere in the world. Since 1945, no independent country recognized by the UN has been conquered and wiped off the map. Limited international wars still occur from time to time, and millions die in wars, but wars are no longer the norm.
Pages 414-415.
Real peace is not the mere absence of war. Real peace is the implausibility of war.
Page 415.
In modern capitalist economies, foreign trade and investments have become all-important. Peace therefore brings unique dividends.
Page 417.
Ours is the first time in history that the world is dominated by a peace-loving elite - politicians business people, intellectuals and artists who genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable.
Page 418.
The threat of nuclear holocaust fosters pacifism; when pacifism spreads, war recedes and trade flourishes; and trade increases both the profits of peace and the costs of war. Over time, this feedback loop creates another obstacle to war, which may ultimately prove the most important of all. The tightening web of international connections erodes the independence of most countries, lessening the chance that any one of them might single-handedly let slip the dogs of war.
Page 418.
We are on the threshold of both heaven and hell, moving nervously between the gateway of the one and the anteroom of the other.
Page 420.
Given the proven human propensity for misusing power, it seems naïve to believe that the more clout people have, the happier they will be.
Page 423.
The majority of humans began to enjoy the fruits of modern medicine no earlier than 1850, and the drastic drop in child mortality is a twentieth-century phenomenon.
Page 424.
Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health. People with strong families who live in tight-knit and supportive communities are significantly happier than people whose families are dysfunctional and who have never found (or never sought) a community to be part of.
Page 427.
Happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.
Page 428.
When things improve, expectations balloon, and consequently even dramatic improvements in objective conditions can leave us dissatisfied.
Page 428.
When we try to guess or imagine how happy other people are now, or how people in the past were, we inevitably imagine ourselves in their shoes. But that won’t work because it pastes our expectations on to the material conditions of others.
Page 429.
Happiness and misery play a role in evolution only to the extent that they encourage or discourage survival and reproduction.
Page 432.
It is true that married people are happier than singles and divorcees, but that does not necessarily mean that marriage produces happiness. It could be that happiness cause marriage.
Page 434.
Happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments. Rather, happiness consists in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile. … A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.
Page 437.
The dominant religion of our age is liberalism. |Liberalism sanctifies the subjective feelings of individuals. It views these feelings as the supreme source of authority.
Page 439.
Students in liberal schools and universities are taught to think for themselves.
Page 439.
From a Christian viewpoint, the vast majority of people are in more or less the same situation as heroin addicts.
Page 440.
No matter what their efforts and achievements, Sapiens are incapable of breaking free of their biologically determined limits.
Page 445.
The replacement of natural selection by intelligent design could happen in any of three ways: through biological engineering, cyborg engineering (cyborgs are beings that combine organic with non-organic parts) or the engineering of in-organic life.
Page 448.
We stand poised on the brink of becoming true cyborgs, of having inorganic features that are inseparable from our bodies, features that modify our abilities, desires, personalities and identities.
Page 453.
Mapping the first human genome required fifteen years and $3 billion. Today you can map a person’s DNA within a few weeks and at the cost of a few hundred dollars. The era of personalised medicine - medicine that matches treatment to DNA - has begun.
Page 459.
Throughout history, the upper classes always claimed to be smarter, stronger and generally better than the underclass. They were usually deluding themselves. A baby born to a poor peasant family was likely to be as intelligent as the crown prince. With the help of new medical capabilities, the pretensions of the upper classes might soon become an objective reality.
Page 460.
The future masters of the world will probably be more different form us than we are form Neanderthals. Whereas we and the Neanderthals are at least human, our inheritors will be godlike.
Page 461.
We seek comfort in the fantasy that Dr. Frankenstein can create only terrible monsters, whom we would have to destroy in order to save the world. We like to tell the story that way because it implies that we are the best of all beings, that there never was and never will be something better than us.
Page 462.
History teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise due to unforeseen barriers, and that other unimagined scenarios will in fact come to pass.
Page 462.
Today’s debate between today’s religions, ideologies, nations and classes will in all likelihood disappear along with Homo Sapiens.
Page 463.