Book Review. "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari

The book "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari is a must-read for any person regardless of age: for a child studying at school, for students, adults, and retirees. The author really should spent a lot of effort and time to write this book, because you need to be not only a good historian, but also a philosopher, a religious and a cultural scholar to collect everything in one work.

This is an excursion into the history of mankind. The Big Bang 13.5 billion years ago, ancient dinosaurs and other animals that disappeared from the Earth, plants that we will never see again; Neanderthals and the true origin of Aryans, ancient civilizations, great empires and colonies; world wars and major religions; capitalism, socialism and communism; slaves and slave owners; drugs and drug lords; the cult of the free market, modern and pre-modern economy; discovery, conquest and enslavement of the world.

And the main thing is about human evolution. About how we, the intelligent ones, displaced many animals and plants and ancient civilizations from the Earth by our actions, how we became hunters and gatherers and began to live in groups and like nomads, how we learned to cultivate the lands and settled on these lands; how we learned to write, count and read, build palaces and empires, made such enormous progress in science and technology that we are already creating robots and cyborgs that may in the future supplant us in the same way that we once supplanted the dinosaurs and Neanderthals.

But did we become happy from this? Do we feel happier than our ancestors during the agricultural revolution? Has today's consumerism, which has turned us into slaves of shopping, made us happier? These are the author's rhetorical questions that everyone needs to think about.

Author’s afterword:

"The Animal that Became a God. Seventy thousand years ago Homo Sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction. Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals. In the last few decades we have at last made some real progress as far as the human condition is concerned, with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating more rapidly than ever before, and the improvement in the lot of humanity is too recent and fragile to be certain of. Moreover, despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles – but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?"

October 22, 2022.