Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

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3 Sentence Summary

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited the earth. This is a scientific exploration of what traits led to the dominance of Homo sapiens and how we have evolved to evade the laws of natural selection and now design the world around us. Sapiens is a book that explores what it means to be “human,” by investigating the past, observing the present, and looking to the future.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Storytelling and shared beliefs make large scale cooperation possible.
2. The Agricultural Revolution was a luxury trap. Population growth exploded, but people lived under far worse conditions.
3. Money, imperialism, and religion are the forces that unified humankind into a global society.
4. The Scientific Revolution was built upon man’s willingness to admit his ignorance.
5. There is no proof that human wellbeing inevitably improves as history rolls along.

Sapiens Summary

The Cognitive Revolution

1) An Animal of No Significance

• Animals much like modern humans first appeared ~2.5 million years ago.
• Prehistoric humans were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.
• Homo sapiens—the species sapiens (wise) of the genus Homo (man).
• The rise of sapiens kickstarted the Cognitive Revolution about 70,000 years ago.
• Until about 10,000 years ago, many different human species coexisted.

Skeletons in the Closet

Homo sapiens are just one of many different species of humans that once lived.

1. Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals) lived in Europe and western Asia.
2. Homo erectus (Upright Man) populated eastern regions of Asia and survived there for 2 million years making it the most durable human species ever.
3. Homo soloensis (Man from the Solo Valley) occupied the island of Java in Indonesia.
4. Homo floresiensis were dwarf humans, reaching a max height of only 3.5 feet and weighing no more than fifty-five pounds. They lived on the Indonesian island of Flores.
5. Homo denisova lived in Siberia.
6. Homo rudolfensis (Man from Lake Rudolf) evolved in East Africa.
7. Homo ergaster (Working Man) evolved in East Africa as well.

There may be many more lost relatives of ours still waiting to be discovered.

The Cost of Thinking

• All humans have extraordinary large brains compared to other animals.
• Big brains are a huge energy drain.
• We paid for our large brains by spending more time searching for food and muscle atrophy.
• Upright walking on two legs is another singular human trait.
• Our hands evolved to perform intricate tasks and produce sophisticated tools.
• 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens jumped to the top of the food chain so quickly that the ecosystem did not have time to adjust.

Having 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. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.

A Race of Cooks

• 300,000 years ago, humans were using fire on a daily basis.
• Fire allowed humans to cook, which made many more foods digestible.
• Chimpanzees spend five hours a day chewing raw food. Humans spend one hour eating cooked food.
• By shortening the intestinal track and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.

Our Brother’s Keepers

• 70,000 years ago, Sapiens from East Africa spread from the Arabian peninsula, and from there they quickly overran the entire Eurasian landmass.
• The ‘Interbreeding Theory’ suggests that Sapiens bred with other human populations and people today are the outcome of this interbreeding.
• The ‘Replacement Theory’ suggests that Sapiens could not breed with other humans and killed them off either directly by force or indirectly through competition of resources.
• 1-4% of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA.
• Whether Sapiens are to blame or not, no sooner had they arrived at a new location than the native population became extinct.

2) The Tree of Knowledge

• 70,000-30,000 years ago witnessed the invention of boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows, and needles. The first objects that can reliably called art date from this era, as does the first clear evidence for religion, commerce and social stratification.
• This time period is referred to as the Cognitive Revolution.
• We don’t know what caused it. The best guess is a random genetic mutation.

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.

• Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks to our unique language.
• Gossip is essential for cooperation in large numbers.
• A truly unique feature of our language is the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist.
• Fiction allows us to imagine things collectively. A common belief helps us cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

The Legend of Peugeot

• The maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals.
• Larger numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis.

• Corporations are modern day figments of our collective imagination.
• Limited liability companies are legally independent from the people who set them up, or invested money in them, or managed them.

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.

Bypassing the Genome

• Archaic humans only changed their behavior, invented new tools, or settled new territory as a result of genetic mutations or environmental pressures.
• Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have been able to change their behavior quickly, transmitting new behaviors to future generations without any need of genetic or environmental change.

History and Biology

• The Cognitive Revolution is the point when history declared its independence from biology.
• Historical narratives replace biological theories to explain our development.

3) A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

• It’s hard to guess how the ancients lived because there are so few artifacts.
• It’s also problematic to extrapolate the lives of modern forager societies to ancient ones.
• Today’s forager societies have been influenced by neighboring agricultural and industrial societies.
• Modern forager societies have survived mainly in areas with difficult climate conditions and inhospitable terrain. This may provide a very misleading model for understanding ancient societies that roamed fertile areas.
• Lastly, the most notable characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies is how different they are from one another.

The Original Affluent Society

• Dogs were the first domesticated animal. About 15,000 years ago.
• The human collective knows far more today than the ancients. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.
• The ancients were as fit as marathon runners and had the physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve even after years of practicing yoga or t’ai chi.
• They worked just 35-45 hours a week.
• They enjoyed more diverse experiences throughout their days.
• Ancients ate a varied and nutritious diet.
• Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases.
• The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies’.
• Their world could still be harsh and unforgiving. High child mortality, minor accidents by today’s standards could be a death sentence, and confrontations with other foraging bands could be extremely violent.

4) The Flood

• 45,000 years ago Sapiens crossed the sea to Australia. Experts are hard-pressed to explain this amazing feat.
• The moment the first hunter-gatherers 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.
• The settlers of Australia transformed the ecosystem beyond recognition.
• Within a few thousand years, of the 24 Australian animal species weighing 100 pounds or more, 23 became extinct.

Guilty as Charged

• Change in weather patterns 45,000 years ago is weak evidence to support such a massive extinction.
• When climate change causes mass extinctions, sea creatures are usually hit equally hard. Yet there is no evidence of any significant disappearance of oceanic fauna 45,000 years ago.
• Mass extinctions, like the one seen in Australia, occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia whenever people settled another part of the Outer World.
• Large animals breed slowly. Plus, Australian giants had no time to learn to run away. They would have been surprised to find themselves in danger to punitive humans.
• Sapiens may have also used fire to intentionally burn large areas to create open grasslands.

The End of Sloth

• Within 2,000 years of Sapiens’ blitzkrieg across America, North America lost 34 out of its 47 genera of large mammals. South America lost 50 out of 60.

Noah’s Ark

• Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools.
• Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of now.

If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion. Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark.

The Agricultural Revolution

5) History’s Biggest Fraud

• Sapiens ceased being foragers 10,000 years ago when they began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species.
• No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years.
• Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers.
• A handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes were responsible for domesticating Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.
• Wheat did not offer a better diet. It did not give people economic security. Nor could wheat offer security against human violence.
• Wheat offered nothing for people as individuals. Yet it did bestow something on Homo sapiens as a species. Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and thereby enable Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.

The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA.

• This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

The Luxury Trap

• Wheat began to thrive as temperatures warmed at the end of the Ice Age.
• When humans burned down forests and thickets, this also helped wheat.
• Where wheat became abundant, the game and other food sources were also plentiful. Nomadic bands could gradually give up their foraging lifestyle and settle down into permanent camps.
• They quickly learned more advanced cultivation techniques until they became farmers.
• With the move to permanent villages and the increase in food supply, the population began to grow.
• But disease riddled settlements combined with malnourishment led to soaring child mortality. In most agricultural societies at least one out of every three children died before reaching twenty.
• Population growth burned humanities boats. There was no going back to foraging.

The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? but by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.

• One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
• We invent countless time saving devices that promise to make our lives more relaxed, yet do just the opposite. Email is a great example.

Victims of the Revolution

• Domesticated animals—sheep, chickens, donkeys, and others—supplied food, raw materials, and muscle power.
• Today the world contains about a billion sheep, a billion pigs, more than a billion cattle, and more than 25 billion chickens.
• Despite massive growth in population around the world, most domesticated animals live short and cruel lives. This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.

6) Building Pyramids

• Ancient farmers might seem dirt poor to us, but a typical family possessed more artifacts than an entire forager tribe.

The Coming to the Future

• Foragers discounted the future because they lived hand to mouth. This saved them a lot of anxieties. There was no sense in worrying about thing that they could not influence.
• But farmers must always keep the future in mind and must work in its service.
• From the very advent of agriculture, worries about the future became major players in the theatre of the human mind.
• The stress of farming was the foundation of large-scale political and social systems.

An Imagined Order

• 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.

Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective reality.

Prison Walls

• How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You insist that it’s an objective reality created by the gods or laws of nature.
• You also educate people thoroughly by constantly reminding them of the principles of the imagined order.
• E.g. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experience as we can.
• E.g. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible.

Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. But few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.

7) Memory Overload

• The human brain is not well adapted to storing and processing numbers.
• Between 3500 and 3000 BC, the Sumerians were in southern Mesopotamia invented the first written language—cuneiform.

Signed, Kushim

• The first texts of history contain no philosophical insight, poetry, legends, or laws. They are economic documents, recording the payment of taxes, accumulation of debt, and the ownership of property.
• Quipus were colorful cords made of wool or cotton with knots tied in different places. By combining different knots on different cords with different colors, it was possible to record large amounts of mathematical data.

The Wonders of Bureaucracy

• Written records require a good cataloging and retrieval system. Pharaonic Egypt, ancient China, and the Inca Empire all created special schools in which professional scribes, clerks, librarians and accountants were rigorously trained in the secrets of data-processing.

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 compartmentalization and bureaucracy.

The Language of Numbers

• Arabic numerals were first invented by the Hindus, but the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe.
• Anyone who wishes to influence the decisions of governments, organizations, and companies must learn to speak in numbers.
• Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master.

8) There is No Justice in History

• Humans organized themselves in mass-cooperation networks by creating imagined orders and devising scripts.
• Scholars know of no large society that has been able to dispense with discrimination altogether.
• 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.
• Even if somebody is born with a particular talent, that talent will usually remain latent if it is not fostered, honed and exercised. Not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities. Whether or not they have such an opportunity will usually depend on their place within their society’s imagined hierarchy.

The Vicious Circle

• Those once victimized by history are likely to be victimized yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.

He and She

• Culture tends to argue that it forbid only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.
• Your sex (male or female) are biological categories with objective qualities that have remained constant throughout history. Meanwhile, gender (man or woman) is a cultural category with qualities that are inter-subjective and undergo constant changes.

What’s So Good About Men?

• Not their physical strength. Human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power.
• Not their natural aggression. Empire-builders are cooperative. They know how to appease, manipulate and see things from different perspectives.
• Not their competitive drive to reproduce. The theory that women needed men to protect them while they were pregnant ignores that they could have easily relied on other women.

How did it happen that in the one species whose success depends above all on cooperation, individuals who are supposedly less cooperative (men) control individuals who are supposedly more cooperative (women)? At present, we have no good answer.

The Unification of Humankind

9) The Arrow of History

• Every culture has its typical beliefs, norms, and values, but these are in constant flux.
• Freedom and equality are seen as fundamental values in Western cultures. But they contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short changes equality.
• Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programs.
• Republicans want to maximize individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider.
• Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset.

[Contradictions] are culture’s engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species. Just as when two clashing musical notes played together force a piece of music forward, so discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, re-evaluate and criticize. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.

The Spy Satellite

• Over the millennia, small, simple cultures gradually coalesce into bigger and more complex civilizations.
• Over the last few centuries, all cultures were changed almost beyond recognition by a flood of global influences.

The Global Vision

• 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.
• Money is the greatest global conqueror of all.

10) The Scent of Money

• Hunter-gatherers had no money. They shared their goods and services through an economy of favors and obligations.
• The rise of cities and kingdoms and the improvement in transport infrastructure brought about new opportunities for specialization.
• Complex societies gave rise to the need for money.

Shells and Cigarettes

• Money was not a technological breakthrough. It was a purely mental revolution.
• 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.
• Cowry shells were used as money for about 4,000 years all over Africa, South Asia, East Asia and Oceania. Taxes could still be paid in cowry shells in British Uganda in the early twentieth century.
• In modern prisons and POW camps, cigarettes have often served as money.
• Coins and banknotes are a rare form of money today. The sum total of money in the world is about $60 trillion, yet the sum total of coins and banknotes is less than $6 trillion. More than 90% of all money exists only on computer servers.

How Does Money Work?

Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

• Dollars have value only in our common imagination. In other words, money isn’t a material reality—it’s a psychological construct.
• Barley was the first type of money because people could trust in its inherent biological value—you could eat it. But it was difficult to transport.
• The real breakthrough in monetary history occurred when people gained trust in money that lacked inherent value, but was easier to store and transport.
• The first coins were struck around 640 BC by King Alyattes of Lydia, in western Anatolia.

The Gospel of Gold

• The invisible forces of supply and demand made it such that different cultures all around the world came to value gold in the same way.

The Price of Money

• Money can corrode local traditions, intimate relations, and human values.
• Although money builds universal trust between strangers, this trust is invested not in humans, communities or sacred values, but in money itself and the impersonal systems that back it.
• Money alone did not unify humankind. We cannot disregard the equally crucial role of steel.

11) Imperial Visions

• All empires eventually fall, but they tend to leave behind rich and enduring legacies. Almost all people in the twenty-first century are the offspring of one empire or another.

What is an Empire?

• Empires rule over a significant number of distinct peoples, each possessing a different cultural identity and a separate territory.
• Empires have flexible borders and a potentially unlimited appetite to conquer more nations and territories.
• Empires were one of the main reasons for the drastic reduction in human diversity.

Evil Empires?

• Empires have been the world’s most common form of political organization for the last 2,500 years. It’s also a very stable form of government.
• Building and maintaining an empire usually requires the vicious slaughter of large populations and the brutal oppression of everyone who was left.
• This does not mean, however, that empires leave nothing of value in their wake. A significant proportion of humanity’s cultural achievements owe their existence to the exploitation of conquered populations.
• Today most of us speak, think and dream in imperial languages that were forced upon our ancestors by the sword.

Good Guys and Bad Guys in History

• Even if we were to completely disavow the legacy of a brutal empire in the hope of reconstructing and safeguarding the “authentic”cultures that preceded it, in all probability what we will be defending is nothing but the legacy of an older an no less brutal empire.
• If an extreme Hindu nationalist were to destroy all the buildings left by the British conquerors, such as Mumbai’s main train station, what about the structures left by India’s Muslim conquerors, such as the Taj Mahal?
• The thorny question of cultural inheritance is complex. Simplistically dividing the past into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere.

The New Global Empire

• Today’s states are fast losing their independence. Not one of them is really able to execute independent economic policies, to declare war as they please, or even run its own internal affairs as it sees fits.
• The global empire is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group. It is ruled by a multi-ethnic elite, and is held together by a common culture and common interests.

12) The Law of Religion

• Today religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement and disunion. Yet, in fact, religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires.
• Religion can be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.
• The majority of ancient religions were local and exclusive. Universal and missionary religions began to appear only in the first millennium BC.

Silencing the Lambs

• The first religious effect of the Agricultural Revolution was to turn plants and animals from equal members of a spiritual round table into property.
• Much of ancient mythology is in fact a legal contract in which humans promise everlasting devotion to the gods in exchange for mastery over plants and animals—the first chapters of the book of Genesis are a prime example.

The Benefits of Idolatry

• Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’.
• The polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.

The Battle of Good and Evil

• The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts.

The Law of Nature

• During the first millennium BC, new religions spread that were characterized by their disregard of gods. Examples are Jainism and Buddhism in India, Daoism and Confucianism in China, and Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism in the Mediterranean basin.

Buddhism

• The central figure is a human being, Siddhartha Gautama.
• Siddhartha saw that people suffered not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague, but also from anxiety, frustration and discontent.
• When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless.
• The only way to end the vicious cycle is to simply understand things as they are. Then there will be no suffering.
• To accept sadness as sadness, joy as joy, pain as pain, Siddhartha developed a set of meditation techniques that train the mind to experience reality as it is, without craving. These practices train the mind to focus all its attention on the question, “What am I experiencing now?” rather than on “What would I rather be experiencing?”

Suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is.

Buddha

The Worship of Man

• The last 300 years has seen the rise of secularism.
• People believe in ideologies like Capitalism, Communism, Nationalism, or Liberalism with as much zeal as they believe in theist religions.
• Ideologies and religions are essentially the same thing.
• Humanist religions worship Homo sapiens and believe that we have a unique and sacred nature fundamentally different from all other animals and phenomena.
• Liberal humanism believes that “humanity” is a quality of individual humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct. “Human rights” are their commandments.
• Socialist humanism believes that “humanity” is collective rather than individualistic. Whereas liberal humanism seeks as much freedom as possible for individual humans, socialist humanism seeks equality between all humans.
• Evolutionary humanism believes that humankind is not something universal and eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate. Nazis are the most famous representatives of this way of thinking.

13) The Secret of Success

• Saying that a global society was inevitable is not the same as saying that the end result had to be the particular kind of global society we now have.

The Hindsight Fallacy

• The better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another.
• Possibilities which seem very unlikely to contemporaries often get realized. When Constantine assumed the throne in 306, Christianity was little more than an esoteric Eastern sect. If you were to suggest then that it was about to become the Roman state religion, you’d have been laughed at.
• History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic.

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 horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.

Blind Clio

• History is not made for the benefits of humans.
• There is no proof that human wellbeing inevitably improves as history rolls along.

The Scientific Revolution

14) The Discovery of Ignorance

• The last 500 years have witnessed a phenomenal and unprecedented growth in human power.
• Population has grown 14X, production has grown 240X, and energy consumption has grown 115X.
• Development of the atomic bomb in 1945 not only changed the course of history, but also gave humankind the capability to end it.
• Humans have increasingly come to believe that they can increase their capabilities by investing in scientific research.

Ignoramus

• Modern science is built upon a willingness to admit that we do not know, the centrality of observation and mathematics, and the acquisition of new powers.
• Ancient traditions of knowledge only admitted two kinds of ignorance: An individual may be ignorant to something important, or an entire tradition might be ignorant of unimportant things.
• Modern-day science is a unique tradition of knowledge, inasmuch as it openly admits collective ignorance regarding the most important questions.

The Scientific Dogma

• Knowledge is connecting observations with mathematical theories.
• In medieval Europe, logic, grammar and rhetoric formed the educational core. Today’s students study mathematics and other exact sciences.

Knowledge is Power

• Not everybody understands quantum mechanics, cell biology, or macroeconomics. Nevertheless, we all benefit from the power science gives us.
• Utility is the best test for truth. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge.
• Napoleon’s troops, led by all his tactical genius, still wouldn’t stand a chance against an inept general with modern weaponry.
• Gunpowder was invented in China 600 years before cannons became a decisive factor in battle. The Chinese used the new compound for firecrackers.
• Science, industry and military technology intertwined only with the advent of the capitalist system and the Industrial Revolution.

The Ideal of Progress

• Until the Scientific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress. They thought the golden age was in the past.
• Admitting our ignorance, combined with new power from scientific discoveries, led people to suspect that real progress was possible after all.
• E.g. poverty. Many cultures have viewed poverty as an inescapable part of an imperfect world. In many countries around the world today, biological poverty is a thing of the past. Individuals are protected from personal misfortune by insurance, state-sponsored social security and NGOs.

The Gilgamesh Project

• For men of science, death is not an inevitable destiny, but merely a technical problem.
• Our best minds are not wasting their time trying to give meaning to death. Instead, they are busy investigating the physiological, hormonal and genetic systems responsible for disease and old age.
• Pills, injections and sophisticated operations save us from a spate of illnesses and injuries that once dealt an inescapable death sentence.
• A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal.

The Sugar Daddy of Science

• Science is a very expensive affair.
• Most scientific studies are funded because somebody believes they can help attain some political, economic or religious goal.
• Science is unable to set its own priorities. It is also incapable of determining what to do with its discoveries.
• 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.
• The feedback loop between science, empire and capital has arguably been history’s chief engine for the past 500 years.

15) The Marriage of Science and Empire

• The Scientific Revolution and modern imperialism were inseparable.

Why Europe?

• Between 1500 and 1750, western Europe gained momentum and became master of the “Outer World,” meaning the two American continents and the oceans. But only because the great powers of Asia showed little interest in them.
• The global center 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.
• Today all humans are, to a much greater extent than they usually want to admit, European in dress, thought and taste.
• European influence and dominance from 1850 onward was due to a large extent on their military-industrial-scientific complex and technological wizardry.
• The Chinese and Persians did not lack technological inventions such as steam engines (which could be freely copied or bought). They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalized rapidly.
• Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way even before they enjoyed any significant technological advantages.

The Mentality of Conquest

• Modern science flourished in and thanks to European empires.
• The plant-seeking botanist and the colony-seeking naval officer shared a similar mindset that began by admitting ignorance and compelled them to go out and make new discoveries.

Empty Maps

• During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans began to draw world maps with lots of empty spaces. The empty maps were a psychological and ideological breakthrough, a clear admission that Europeans were ignorant of large parts of the world.
• Europe did not enjoy an outstanding technological edge to the rest of the world. What made Europeans exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer.

Rare Spiders and Forgotten Scripts

• Linguistics received enthusiastic imperial support. The European empires believed that in order to govern effectively they must know the languages and cultures of their subjects.
• Without such knowledge, it is unlikely that a ridiculously small number of Britons could have succeeded in governing, oppressing and exploiting millions of subjects.
• Modern Europeans came to believe that acquiring new knowledge was always good.
• Imperialists claimed that their empires were not vast enterprises of exploitation but rather altruistic projects conducted for the sake of the non-European races.
• Due to their close cooperation with science, these empires wielded so much power and changed the world to such an extent that perhaps they cannot be simply labelled as good or evil. They created the world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them.

16) The Capitalist Creed

• To understand modern economic history, you really need to understand a single word: Growth.
• For most of history the economy stayed much the same size.
• 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.

A Growing Pie

• 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 futures and opened the way for even more credit.

Adam 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 from 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.

• In the new capitalist creed, the first and most sacred commandment is: “The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.”
• Capitalism has gradually become 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.
• Ask a capitalist how to bring justice and political freedom to a place like Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, and you are likely to get a lecture on how economic affluence and a thriving middle class are essential for stable democratic institutions.
• Capitalism’s belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of almost everything we know about the universe.
• Banks and governments print, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill.

Columbus Searches for an Investor

• Napoleon made fun of the British, calling them a nation of shopkeepers. Yet theses shopkeepers defeated Napoleon himself, and their empire was the largest the world has ever seen.

In the Name of Capital

• The amount of credit in an economy is determined not only by purely economic factors, but also by political events such as regime changes or more ambitious foreign policies.

The Cult of the Free Market

• At the end of the Middle Ages, slavery was almost unknown in Christian Europe. 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.
• Free-market capitalism cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner.
• After 1908, and especially after 1945, capitalist greed was somewhat reined in, not least due to the fear of Communism. Yet inequities are still rampant.

17) The Wheels of Industry

• Counterintuitively, while humankind’s use of energy and raw materials has mushroomed in the last few centuries, the amounts available for our exploitation have actually increased.

The Secret in the Kitchen

• The steam engine was the first invention to convert heat into movement.
• The internal combustion engine revolutionized human transportation and turned petroleum into liquid political power.

An Ocean of Energy

• Every few decades we discover a new energy source, so that the sum total of energy at our disposal just keeps growing.
• All human activities and industries put together consume about 500 exajoules annually, equivalent to the amount of energy earth receives from the sun in just ninety minutes.

Life on the Conveyor Belt

• Today in the United States, only 2% of the population makes a living from agriculture, yet this 2% produces enough not only to feed the entire US population, but also to export surpluses to the rest of the world.
• Without the industrialization of agriculture the urban Industrial Revolution could never have taken place—there would not have been enough hands and brains to staff factories and offices.

The Age of Shopping

• The modern capitalist economy must constantly increase production in order to survive. Who is supposed to buy all this stuff?
• Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a positive thing.
• Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression.
• Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.
• The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need.
• The rich invest while the poor buy.

18) A Permanent Revolution

• The future is unlikely to yield a lack of resources, but very likely to destroy what remains of the natural habitat and drive most other species to extinction.
• Destruction of the ecosystem may increase the frequency of human-induced natural disasters.

Modern Time

• The Industrial Revolution turned the timetable and the assembly line into a template for almost all human activities.
• Public transportation solidified our dependence on strict time-keeping.
• Cheap but precise portable clocks became ubiquitous.
• Today, a single affluent family generally has more timepieces at home than an entire medieval country.
• The role of family and the local community has been replaced by the state and the market.

The Collapse of the Family and the Community

• A person who lost her family and community around 1750 was as good as dead. She had no job, no education and no support in times of sickness and distress.
• Over time, states and markets used their growing power to weaken the traditional bonds of family and community. Policemen were sent to stop family vendettas and replace them with court decisions. The market sent its hawkers to wipe out long-standing local traditions and replace them with ever-changing commercial fashions.
• “Be your own individual.” You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead.
• But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power of the impersonal state and market wield over our lives.

Until not long ago, the suggestion that the state ought to prevent parents from beating or humiliating their children would have been rejected out of hand as ludicrous and unworkable. In most societies parental authority was sacred. Respect of and obedience to one’s parents were among the most hallowed values, and parents could do almost anything they wanted, including killing newborn babies, selling children into slavery and marrying off daughters to men more than twice their age. Today, parental authority is in full retreat. Youngsters are increasingly excused from obeying their elders, whereas parents are blamed for anything that goes wrong in the life of their child.

Imagined Communities

• The consumer tribe is the imagined community of the market because it is impossible for all customers in a market to know one another the way villagers knew one another in the past.
• 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.

Perpetuum Mobile

• Over the last two centuries, the pace of change became so quick that the social order acquired a dynamic and malleable nature. It now exists in a state of permanent flux.
• Today, even a thirty-year-old can honestly tell disbelieving teenagers, “When I was young, the world was completely different.”
• The only characteristic of modern society of which we can be certain is the incessant change.
• The seven decades that have elapsed since the end of WWII have been the most peaceful era in human history—and by a wide margin. This is surprising because these very same decades experienced more economic, social and political change than any previous era.

Peace in Our Time

• Most people don’t appreciate just how peaceful an era we live in. We easily forget how much more violent the world used to be.
• In the year following the 9/11 attacks, despite all the talk of terrorism and war, the average person was more likely to kill himself than to be killed by a terrorist, a soldier or a drug dealer.
• 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.

Pax Atomica

• The price of war has gone up dramatically.
• The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb.
• Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms.
• The profits of war have declined.
• Wealth today is less in material things and more concentrated in human capital and organizational know-how. Both are difficult to conquer by military force.
• Peace has become more lucrative than ever.
• For the first time in history the world is dominated by a peace-loving elite—politicians, business people, intellectuals and artists who genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable.
• 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.

19) And They Lived Happily Ever After

• Historians avoid raising the question: Does “progress” make people happier?
• New aptitudes, behaviors and skills do not necessarily make for a better life.
• Some argue an inverse correlation between human capabilities and happiness. Power corrupts.
• When judging modernity, it is all too tempting to take the viewpoint of a twenty-first-century middle-class Westerner. We must not forget the viewpoints of a nineteenth-century Welsh coal miner, Chinese opium addict or Tasmanian Aborigine. Truganini is no less important than Homer Simpson.
• We can’t judge this era too quickly. Even the brief golden age of the last half-century may turn out to have sown the seeds of future catastrophe.
• We can congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern Sapiens only if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals.

Counting Happiness

• Social, ethical and spiritual factors have as great an impact on our happiness as material conditions.
• Perhaps people in modern affluent societies suffer greatly from alienation and meaninglessness despite their prosperity. And perhaps our less well-to-do ancestors found much contentment in community, religion and a bond with nature.
• Money brings happiness only up to a point, and beyond that it has little significance.
• Illness is only a source of long-term distress if the condition continues to deteriorate or causes ongoing pain.
• Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health.
• Improvement in material conditions over the past two centuries may have been offset by the collapse of family and community. If so, the average person may well be no happier today than in 1800.
• Happiness = Expectations – Reality

We moderns have an arsenal of tranquilizers and painkillers at our disposal, but our expectations of ease and pleasure , and our intolerance of inconvenience and discomfort, have increased to such an extent that we may well suffer from pain more than our ancestors ever did.

Chemical Happiness

• People are made happy by pleasant sensations in their bodies.
• We are predisposed to maintain a certain threshold of happiness. Some people are naturally more cheerful than others.
• If we accept the biological approach to happiness, then history turns out to be of minor importance, since most historical events have had no impact on our biochemistry.
• When we finally realize that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry.

The Meaning of Life

• According to a study by Daniel Kahneman, happiness may consist in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile.
• Perhaps happiness is synchronizing one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions.

20) The End of Homo Sapiens

• The replacement of natural selection by intelligent design could happen in any of three ways: through biological engineering, cyborg engineering, or the engineering of inorganic life.
• Geneticists hope to revive extinct animals.
• Prosthetics have been engineered to be controlled by the electrical signals from the brain.
• The next stage of history will include not only technological and organizational transformations, but also fundamental transformations in human consciousness and identity.

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