I’m reading the book Sapiens by Yuval Harari. I’d actually stopped reading it at one point, and he encouraged me to continue because he wanted to hear my criticism. (The reason I stopped previously was his fairly full-throated support for imperialism. Another part that almost broke me is when Harari said, “Can you think of a single piece of great art that isn’t about conflict?” I could, in fact, think of such art.  As could, I think, almost anyone who thought more than a moment about it, ranging from the Mona Lisa to heavy metal songs like “Cosmic” by Avenged Sevenfold. It was a comment so ridiculous that I had to take a week off of the book.) I’m doing it here because, hey, why not? How often does a friend say they WANT to hear your criticisms?!  While I could write a letter, but a blog post is more fun, right?

Ahem. The biggest problem in the book is that Harari is just fine making incredibly sweeping comments without support while also ignoring alternate hypotheses. So, what I just got done reading is that Harari said that the collapse of Spanish power in the 17th century was due to Dutch banking improvements. There is some truth to that, but it hardly tells the whole story. Another indelible factor in the collapse of the power of the Spanish Empire was the incredible power of Spain, merged with the Holy Roman Empire, created the possibility of a unitarian European state, causing the Thirty Year’s War, where France and Sweden fought the Germans and Spanish, mostly in Germany, and the Spanish defeat weakened the Holy Roman Empire and increased the power of France and freedom of the Netherlands, which had hitherto been a Spanish territory. But in Harari’s retelling, the sole factor of the Netherlands’ freedom from Spain was efficiencies in banking, totally ignoring both the Eighty Year’s War, of which the Thirty Year’s War was the final part for the Netherlands. While Dutch fiscal policy played a role, so did the help of France, Sweden, and other countries fighting the Spanish – and more than banking advances in Amsterdam.

Hand-in-hand with this is what I feel to be a rather… evolutionary psychological view of things. I’m not a fan of evo psych. I feel – as to many others – that it’s just after-the-fact defense of whatever happened as inevitable. Like, the rise of capitalism was inevitable because of science. That’s not much of a paraphrase, but I find it highly dubious because it isn’t like we have other planets to experiment on. But he lumps the idea that what distinguished science from previous epistemologies was a material improvement of the human condition, which resulted in modern credit instruments to further scientific development because they allowed people to believe that money spent now could be repaid in the future with far more confidence than in previous eras. So, research was funded in his view.  It is a tautological explanation and…

That’s not what happens in researching science.  It ignores that most basic research is government-funded, for instance. There is hardly a field out there where this isn’t true. Additionally, the basic research in publicly-funded universities is freely available, the very opposite of the capitalist ethos. Furthermore, even private research is funded mainly by governments, even if, in those cases, businesses reap the benefits. The speed with which COVID drugs were created wasn’t because biotech firms went down to the bank and got loans but because governments poured tax dollars into their coffers. Science is not, generally, funded by credit, even when the funding agency comes from private businesses or individuals. The economic backbone of science is far more like patronage than capitalism.

He also conflates science with engineering. Stuff like Space X taking out big loans to make new rockets isn’t scientific research. It’s engineering, which is a whole different kettle of fish economically. Engineers have always found it relatively easy to get funding, everywhere in the world, since the invention of engineering. He correctly identifies science as an epistemological methodology, not with”making things” but then dwells more on making things rather than what research scientists actually do, who funds them, and how they are funded to make a spurious connection with capitalist economics as part of his “just so” story about capitalism.

I’m also trying to think of good things to say about the book. It’s not, y’know, horrible. There are horrible parts – cheerleading empire and his bizarre statements about art near the top of the list – but pointing out that banking drives industrial economies… well, he’s not wrong, but I’m not sure it’s news, either. And insofar as that goes, I don’t think he goes far enough. I think that there are several other “technologies of power” that should be studied, like how propaganda is used to discipline populations or how the expansion of European empires was due to their Machiavellian ruthlessness.  But ignoring things that don’t support his thesis seems to be a recurring theme here.

Anyway, maybe I’ll be more positive about the book in my next post… though his take on religion is on deck next.