In a continuation of my review on Sapiens from before, I can now finish the review, since I’ve finished the book.

There was only one additional part that just stopped me completely, which was when Harari said, “Why do people worry about us running out of energy?” He was talking about the inevitable collapse of the fossil fuel industry, but no one is worried that we wouldn’t have “enough energy.” The real concern is that there will be a sharp price increase when the oil-dependent energy system we now have crosses the threshold where competition for fossil fuels rises. Less “running out of energy” and more like an “energy crisis,” the likes of which we have had before when oil has undergone price spikes. We all know that solar, wind, and nuclear power can provide the power needed, but that system doesn’t yet exist fully.

So, he goes on about how much energy hits the earth from solar radiation, which is just utterly meaningless numbers, which is a microcosm of the book.  It reads like Harari is used to being the guy in the room who says something shocking and superficially interesting, and he uses his wit to rationalize it to the people around him. (1) So, he’ll say things like, “Have you ever thought that maybe empires weren’t so bad?” or, “All great art is based on conflict,” or, “Why do people worry about running out of energy?”

Much of the book’s last quarter are these rambling sections whose significance to his narrative is unclear. He dwells on the structure of the nuclear family and changing beauty standards. I suspect he thinks he’s proving his thesis by bringing disparate threads into the narrative, but I found he was shoving square pegs into round holes.

Then it just gets weird because he starts talking about the future. Okay. A guy who admits that we can’t even say with certainty why patriarchy rules the world thinks he can predict the future. Well. Okay!

It’s this wild techno-optimism stuff. He transitions from a weird history book into a posthumanist futurist. No, not even that. It becomes pure science fiction, and I say that as a sci-fi writer. There is so much we don’t know about technology! He even touches on it, mentioning that the world of jet packs and ray guns doesn’t exist, but we do have the Internet. None of the possible transhumanist scenarios he talks about have much of a basis in extant technology, not now, but less so in 2014.

Despite our ability to create as many virtual neurons as exist in a mouse’s brain, we have yet to have a computer exhibiting mouse-like behavior. The broad rollout of generative AI has demonstrated the extent to which AI doesn’t think like a human despite passing various benchmarks, and the social side of things has certainly been more complex than anticipated in sci-fi. As to the possibility of genetically engineered superhumans? It would be hard to see which barriers are greater: technical or social. Talking about the emotional lives of cyborgs connected in a brain Internet is just science fiction (and not even particularly original science fiction, but he’s got a Ph.D, so he gets published because that’s the way it works.)

Let me tell you, these techno-optimists love downplaying the climate crisis, too. Oh, he mentions, in passing, that the environment is in trouble and it might destroy us all but spends far more time on fantasies about uploading our consciousness to computers or becoming super-cyborgs or genetically engineered superhumans. It’s the Rapture of the Geeks!  It’s bullshit!

And, I guess, if your premise boils down to “capitalism is so cool,” the environmental crisis is hard to manage. It’s a holistic problem. You can’t commodity the climate. Someone is going to get a free lunch. The economic system he champions is so obviously incapable of helping – businesses are the reason governments are paralyzed in climate change – that it must be minimized. At the same time, fantasies of AIs being able to solve the problem painlessly abound. (2)

He also spends a lot of time on his personal beliefs. In the section he talks about religion, well, he really just talks about Buddhism and how it’s right and true. So strong was the pro-Buddhist stance that, when I was done, I looked it up and, yeah, Harari is a Buddhist. Which… I found it disingenuous and introduced a poison pill into what might have been the best part of the book. He says that humans don’t have much of an interest in creating a happy society. He talks at some length about what makes us happy and the mechanisms of happiness and then concludes that his personal spiritual beliefs are what we should all do. Without mentioning his Buddhism.

Could you imagine an atheist, Christian, or Muslim doing that? Writing what is supposed to be a history and ending it by saying, “Oh, by the way, all of this historical analysis proves Jesus is Lord, and we should all give ourselves to God.” And, even while saying that, not mentioning that he’s a Bible-believing, church-going Christian (or an equally committed atheist or Muslim.) They’d be torn apart. The reviews would all go, “The writer pretends to be objective and ends up dishonestly pitching their faith.”

On a personal level, that hurts because as a guy who quite openly wears his non-theism on his sleeve, who has written more than one downright anti-religious thing, I’ve been repeatedly rejected by publishers who have used my spiritual beliefs as rationalization to dismiss my works.  Seeing this guy get away with this kind of dishonesty? That stings.

But, ultimately, I’m reminded of the old saw that historians are frustrated authors. Or, perhaps, gamers. I know several table-top role-players who enjoy building settings far more than playing in them. Sapiens is a somewhat more academic version of that impulse. “Okay, guys, I wrote this long history that goes back to the CAVEMEN, and the linking theme is that, y’know, like, in the future, humans will be the new Neanderthals compared to the posthumans! Isn’t that cool? Like, they’ll be all mentally and spiritually superior to regular humans! But, okay, they’re also going to be really capitalist, too. It’s cyberpunk, man.”

So, like setting notes for an unplayable role-playing game, there are a lot of interesting ideas, but they’re all science fiction. While having some interesting sound bites, the ideas are either insufficiently developed or, sometimes, clearly in error. (3) And while on the one hand, I know that pop history books are often streamlined for non-academic audiences, so they often lack both the nuance of academic historical publications while also ignoring academic controversies (such as the drama over evolutionary psychology or big man history, both of which are better received by non-academic audiences,) this goes waaaaaay too far. A few parts are just wrong, not “controversial in academic circles” but “laugh out loud, how could anyone say this” kinds of wrong. It ends as both science fiction and an appeal to his spirituality without, not once, identifying himself as a practicing Buddhist! (4)

The good news? I have fulfilled my duty and finished the book!

Notes

(1) This is a constant problem that all very witty people have.  We’re SO GOOD at fast talking that when we spew utter garbage, it sounds convincing.  Worse, we’re so good at talking fast that we’re excellent at convincing ourselves we’re right, like thinking on your feet, and witty arguments means you’ve discovered a new truth. The first person witty people bamboozle are themselves.

(2) The AI-solving-the-climate fantasies also piss me the fuck off. Because we KNOW how to solve the climate crisis. We don’t do it because, gosh, capitalism would suffer! Does what an AI would say matter? We know it will say, “Stop burning fossil fuels and spend a lot of money to fix your mess.” We know that, and we won’t start doing it just because a computer tells us to do it. If anything, the computer would be reprogrammed to make it incapable of giving such an inconvenient answer.

(3) It makes me wonder about his historical work, not his pop history stuff. Since he’s an actual professor, I suppose it must meet academic standards, but I found Sapiens to be extremely lax, even for pop history.

(4) This feels to me like Orientalism. It is permitted because it’s Buddhism, it’s this exotic, “Eastern” faith that is beyond the rules of Western society, especially in the white intellectual class that decides what books get published. If Harari had ended with a call to Orthodox Judaism, his text would have read much differently, and the biases would have been easy to see. He would not be who he is today. But because it ends with Buddhism, well, that plays into the spiritual biases of the Western elite, who has elevated Buddhism to a special position different from other spiritual faiths. The Dalai Lama is probably the best example of this. It is simply not part of the narrative that the Dalai Lama was the monarch of Tibet, and Tibetian Buddhist monks ruled as an aristocratic class, keeping Tibet in deep poverty with oppressive theocratic rule and considerable violence. While I’m not saying the Chinese oppression of Tibet is justified, it is not, but the narrative that, on one side, you have these kind, wise Buddhist monks and that, on the other side, you have these cruel Chinese overlords is a wild oversimplification. And the current guy? The 14th Dalai Lama? The dude was a CIA pawn, with the Company funding his government-in-exile to support guerilla operations against the Chinese. You know, Buddhism! But he’s treated as a wise spiritual leader and not an exiled king because Westerners get weird around Asian religions.