When Douglas Adams described a being so bored by life it decided to "insult the Universe... Individually, personally, one by one" he might have been describing Yuval Harari [1]. This book is a crucible of misanthropy impatient for humanity to reduce itself to blocks of silicon.

His opening salvo that "the Agricultural Revolution...did not translate into a better diet or more leisure [but] population explosions and pampered elites, [it] was history’s biggest fraud" isn't a primitivist emote but a running theme [2]. The "egalitarian ideal" "produced brutal tyrannies" he later complains, a statement no less true of inegalitarian ideals. You wouldn't believe the Iroquois League or Nordic social democracies could exist if Sapiens was all you read about human nature. He composes an idyll about hunter-gatherers and repeatedly harkens back to them as a lost paradise despite their collective action problem of hunting game to extinction. So much, by his own argument, for paradise. In the process he ignores evidence that farming both offered non-existential trade-offs [3] and produced egalitarian societies without "pampered elites" [4]. Farmers that didn't have god-kings to leave behind monuments are erased. It's a historiography from when the Pyramid of Giza was still the tallest structure humanity had ever constructed, chagrined to the past [5]. That might explain why Harari is unable to distinguish what was unique about European thought at the launch of their age of empire and well into the modern era: they believed they were rediscovering knowledge lost in the Fall. That Biblicism was slowly undermined by the exegesis of the higher criticism -- that they were discovering new knowledge at all only took root by the 19th century -- until the only remnant left of the old corruption-recovery hypothesis is found in fantasy novel tropes where the old magic always supersedes the new. "Every new invention just puts another mile between us and the Garden of Eden," Harari complains like a 21st century pulp fantasy writer, in a retrograde version of Newton's prisca theologia from the 18th [6].

After a wishy-washy digression on religion that never takes its own side in an argument, Harari leapfrogs millennia to spend a third of the book on Needham's old question [7], still overwrought half a century later. "Why Europe?" he asks, but why not? After all Greece and Rome had previously created sprawling empires over three continents. The dominant nation by this or that measure is changing all the time, as it did between European nations themselves before they became junior partners to one of their former colonies, whose dominance will inevitably sunset if it hasn't by the time you've read these words.

Harari chooses essentialist answers, ascribing Europe's ascendance to some inexplicably unique personality trait. "European imperialists set out to distant shores in the hope of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories", he claims about men who hoped to obtain old knowledge, when every school child knows they set off looking for shorter routes to the East. This was not some fleeting interest that merely sparked their curiosity but a persistent concern into the 18th century: Johann Friedrich Bottger replicated 15th century Ming ceramics while imprisoned in Germany for illegally transmuting lead into gold. Two centuries after stumbling over America and rounding the horn of Africa in their quest to cut out the middle-men of inter-hemispheric trade Europeans were still working to reverse engineer Chinese technology [8].

The continents they stumbled into were so unexpected some European intellectuals thought their inhabitants must spontaneously generate from the earth like insects [9]. The Americans were wiped out by Old World pathogens and slavery, creating the "empty spaces" on the maps Harari waxes so poetic about. Europeans filled those empty spaces in with African slaves because they themselves had no resistance to malaria until they learned about effective remedies -- the amargo in your Manhattan, the cinchona in your gin and tonic -- from the survivors of the New World apocalypse [10]. When Harari talks about how colonialism and science fed off one another it is entirely lost on him that the Europeans were doing what pretty much every new multi-ethnic empire attempted to do: integrate and reconcile the worlds of indigenous knowledge that fell under their new purview. When Islam poured out of the sands of Arabia and spread their religion and literacy from France to India in the space of a century they also integrated the worlds of knowledge they encountered [11], itself the scaffolding for European thought across myriad fields. All Harari's talk about technology and capitalism -- we could talk about algebra and the abacus and the zero and the qirad and the astrolabe and list off refinements to Greek natural philosophy and medicine that Europe inherited [12] -- tends to slight the humanities, but one of the most influential books in the European Enlightenment was Ibn Tufail's Philosophus Autodidactus, a 12th century work that radically influenced 18th century European thought [13].

At no point "between 1500 and 1950" did non-Europeans cease contributing to "Newtonian physics or Darwinian biology." The engine of European discovery relied on indigenous knowledge, not just for charting their maps but exploiting their environments for the trade and taxes that Harari otherwise correctly argues funded the sciences. Jesuits taught their Aztec students to write with what is still basically the Phoenician alphabet, recording indigenous knowledge in Latin about the Americas and producing the Florentine Codex, which was exploited back in Europe as a catalog of American economic resources and contributed to the fortunes of the House of Medici (of Florence, hence its name). The proceeds helped fund Galileo, who named the Medicean stars after his fabulously wealthy patrons. Darwin himself was taught taxidermy by the freed slave John Edmonstone, whose own expeditions to South America with Charles Waterton served as inspiration for Darwin's trip on board the HMS Beagle. At the other end of Harari's timeframe Ernest Rutherford credited Hantaro Nagaoka with priors for his model of the atom; Satyendra Bose's name comes first in "Bose-Einstein statistics"; August Weismann published half a dozen papers with Ishikawa Chiyomatsu, whose contributions were critical to the germ plasm theory that discredited Lamarckism. One could trivially go on, better authors have [14].

He spends a third of the book anachronistically lauding mercantile slave states and their trade monopolies with the 19th century neologism "capitalism," apparently because Europeans divvied up the spoils of long distance trade by the same kind of joint stock arrangements common in 12th century Song Dynasty China [15] and much earlier in the Muslim world, where the arrangement had established precedents [16] in the Indian ocean trade that connected the markets of the Far East to Europe. For some reason Harari also brings in the late 19th century innovation -- when European colonialism was already near its apex -- of limited liability to explain European conquest since the Portuguese started funding expeditions to discover shorter routes to the Gold Coast and then Asia in 1420, rounding the horn 60 years later, initiating a centuries long campaign of piracy and terrorism (capitalism!) that ruined the aforementioned joint stock partnerships trading across the Indian Ocean (not capitalism!) [17]. A petty anachronism to distract the reader from the prodigious one [18].

Plenty of reviewers have nitpicked the contradictory arguments and infuriating inaccuracies that do not drive the narrative. I could tiresomely add more (

Spoiler

nomadic pastoralists -- the original transhumans -- were important actors in human history [19], frequently imposing taxes on farmers to settle down as their pampered elites [20], and like them the Late Bronze Age collapse is inexplicably omitted; he never provides any reason behind his flippant assertion that Neanderthals couldn't understand a story about the son of a murdered patriarch seeking revenge so much as the opposite; Harari echoes Niall Ferguson in lauding the British for bringing tea and rail to India, but China was marketing tea in India when the British arrived, who imposed a monopoly to bailout the EIC, learned they could grow tea in India from Maniram Dewan's tea garden in Assam, had him executed, then imported Chinese workers to run their tea plantations because they still didn't know how to cultivate a proper cup of it themselves [21]; colonial administrations disrupted the indigenous systems that guarded against periodic famines and then designed their imperial railways to serve export markets, compounding the first problem, manufacturing mass famines that killed tens of millions even as they exported food to Europe [22]; computer viruses do not evolve over time due to copy errors; orgo is about 26 times more "vast" than inorganic chemistry; "nobody foresaw the Internet," he asserts, but 1946's "A Logic Named Joe" was hilariously on the mark; the Nazis did in fact loath most of humanity, but perhaps not as deeply as the author;

) and many negative reviews here are cheerful romps through the fields of error, but Harari cast a "curtain of silence" over the past some 300 pages ago, letting himself off the hook, as if to say "we can't know anything, why are you reading this book?"

What is Harari's thesis, then? From what I can make of it, "eternally young cyborgs" with "inexhaustible energy resources" will continue "wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem" but that's fine because "after 4 billion years of milling around inside the small world of organic compounds, life will suddenly break out into the vastness [sic] of the inorganic realm, ready to take up shapes beyond our wildest dreams." No need to worry about the threat of climate change when we're all going to join the singularity in a few decades! "This is not science fiction," he says about a narrow assortment of science fiction's least plausible ideas, before concluding they are "impossible to stop."

If it takes a little longer than a generation to upload our minds without a dramatic reversal of our carbon emissions a proliferation of irreversible tipping points threaten sufficient economic damage that there won't be any further investment in the singularity. After nearly 500 pages of boundless primitivist pessimism with hardly an endnote [23] Harari starts taking bong rips and blathering with misanthropic optimism about the machines taking over [24]. Humanity's journey ends in a fanciful orgasm of transhumanist gibberish.

Notes:

1. Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything, 1982, p.5.

2. Harari cites Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel here -- a book that tried to explain how farmers got it so good -- without elaboration. Re-reading the chapter on the neolithic revolution in China, Diamond makes it sound positively amazing. Anybody who takes this paleo-romanticism very seriously should revisit Jacob Bronowski's "The Harvest of the Seasons".

3. David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021. A thorough review of the literature on early farmers and their foraging neighbors, with a critical re-analysis of the written records of first contacts by literate civilization.

4. Ibid, the focus is on farmers that did not produce elites. They explicitly omit discussion of an egalitarian Mandé iron age culture on the Inner Niger Delta -- a network of cities around Jenne-Jeno -- that is the oldest known urbanized civilization in sub-Saharan Africa, for which see Kevin Shillington, History of Africa, 4th edition, 2021. It flourished for some 1,500 years, 400BC-1100CE.

5. The Eiffel Tower was finished in 1889.

6. Richard Henry Popkin, Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought, 1991, p.37-39. Responding to Spinoza's heretically pantheist explanation for the polytheisms reported in 16th century travel literature, European intellectuals argued that they were degenerate forms of Judeo-Christianity, and so, the theory went, all human knowledge was corrupted from its perfect revelation in the Garden (and Moses, their Last Man Who Knew Everything). See also Cornelius de Pater's "An Ocean of Truth" in Mathematics and the Divine, Koetsier & Bergmans, p.470-473, on Newton's prisca sapienta.

7. "Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo?" Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration, 1969, p.16

8. Lawrence Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, 2013, p.167.

9. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, 1987. An extensive discussion of the baffling debates in Europe about the nature of the Americans.

10. On the American apocalypse: Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange, 1972; Charles C. Mann, 1491 & 1493, 2006 & 2012. On cinchona: Matthew James Crawford, The Andean Wonder Drug, 2016 or Stefanie Gänger, A Singular Remedy, 2020. On amargo, the quassia in angostura bitters: Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 2004, pp. 212-215.

11. George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, 2011. On how the famous Abassid translation movement had its early beginnings under the bureaucratic reforms of the Umayyad caliphate, and how it survived beyond the 1258 sack of Baghdad because Hulegu Khan's new multi-ethnic empire also integrated the knowledge of people in its new purview.

12. Nancy Brown, The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages, 2010. A detailed look at Sylvester II's 10th c. work at the start of a larger Catalonian translation movement introducing innovations from the Arabic world to the Latin, work that continued from the Crusades to the Enlightenment.

13. G. A. Russell, The 'Arabick' Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, 1994. On how the early-modern European leaders of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment continued seeking out new Arabic texts looking for more 'lost' knowledge, and the influence of Ibn Tufail's Philosophus Autodidactus.

14. James Poskett, Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science, 2022. A catalog of anecdotes documenting non-European contributions to the scientific project before and after Europeans took the torch and ran with it

15.

"in the seagoing ventures of merchants along the southeast coast large numbers of relatively poor people made investments, sometimes of just small sums of money.... many lower and middle-incomes households...handed ten to a hundred strings of cash apiece over to maritime traders to invest in their overseas ventures."
    --Chaffee & Twitchett, ed. (2015). The Cambridge History of China: Volume 5, Sung China, 960–1279 AD, Part 2.

16. Muhammad, peace be upon him, was a caravan trader who participated in the Indian Ocean trade before he became a prophet. Perhaps his most important contribution to modern secular civilization was in corporate law:

"The Islamic form of this contract (qirad) which is the earliest example of a commercial arrangement identical with that economic and legal instutition which became known in Europe as the commenda... The agent's complete freedom...from any liability for the capital in the event of...loss and the disjunction between the owners of the capital and the third parties are novel and distinctive features of the commenda which made it particularly suitable instrument for long-distance trade. Its introduction, probably from the Islamic world, in the Italian seaports of the late tenth and eleventh centuries..."
    --Abraham L. Udovitch, Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam, 1970.

Udovitch explains just what was so innovative about the institution, but it can't explain the success of European piracy when the merchants who had a 300 year head start with it couldn't square up to a Portuguese caravel.

17. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 1986, opens with an account of the Portugeuse advance to the horn of Africa starting with the 14th century conquest of the Canary Islands. For their terrorism along the Swahili coast see Shillington's History of Africa. Giancarlo Casale's The Ottoman Age of Exploration, 2011, explores the later stages of the campaign.

18. Modern limited liability was introduced by the 1855 Limited Liability Act. English courts were handling liability claims rather arbitrarily prior to that, e.g. they held an EIC agent responsible for the actions of one of the crown's Indian puppets in the case of Rafael v Verelst, 1775: B. P. Sahni, "A Legal Analysis of the British East India Company", 2013.

19. For instance transhumans improved the lives of farmers by facilitating the Eurasian exchange of novel domesticated crops by 2300 BC. See: R. Spengler, et. al. "Early agriculture and crop transmission among Bronze Age mobile pastoralists of Central Eurasia." Proc Biol Sci. 2014 Apr 2.

20. Eurasian transhumans chose sedentary life dozens of times as they swept out of the steppe to rule over farmers. Shillington and Graeber & Wengrow contain example after example of the same behavior the world over.

21. For all the tea in India see: Poskett, p.153-165, and Jayeeta Sharma, Empire's Garden: Assam and the Making of India, 2011.

22. The pattern of manmade famines described by Mike Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts, 2000, also happened in Africa after the late 19th century scramble, see, again, Shillington. 'A Brief History of Humanity' is repeatedly contradicted by a standard textbook introduction to the birthplace of humanity.

23. For all the sweeping claims made in them no chapter in Sapiens has more than a dozen endnotes.

24. James Burke observed half a century ago that the machines claimed victory half a millennium earlier when clock towers turned work to clockwork.