Sapiens

Well, I finally finished it, but before I talk about it, I want to not that from now on I will not be updating previous blog post reading lists, but I will keep the one on the main page, the blog post hub, yearly reading list and the current blog posts upto date. Now, with that out of the way, onto the book.

Firstly, as I noted in a previous post it has been a refreshing step back from everything I read previously, which focused on a very narrow portion of the modern world. Starting at the beginning of human history and ending with 2014, the year before the book was published, Harari atempts to encapsulate the entirety of human existence up to present day in this book, and overall I'd say he did a pretty good job, though there were certainly things that I disagreed with, for example, his assesment of the USSR, though I honestly need to do more research on the subject to have a fully formed opinion.
Harari does his best to view the world through an anthropological lense in this book, though he is certainly not without his biases, and the main one we clash on is capitaism, though he attempts to presnt it as a matter of fact 'this is just the way things are, and I'm just observing' kind of way, he does tend to generally view capitalism as beneficial. Though he also has his criticisms, specifically about a free market, its nothing new or groundbreaking, simply a restatement of the facts that we cannot have a truly free market, and that a truly free market would likely lead to worse conditions for everyone with the exception of the upper class.

Also, Harari referred to Communism and Capitalism as religions, and it nearly broke my brain

"The last 300 years are often depicted as an age of growing secularism, in which religions have increasingly lost their importance. If we are talking about theist religions, this is largely correct. But if we take into consideration natural-law religions, then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervour, unparalleled missionary efforts, and the bloodiest wars of religion in history. The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam."

He then goes on to explain the differences and similarities and how they affect categorization, and makes a point of saying that if we are to separate religion from ideology purely based on the presence of a supernatural presence, certain religions would become ideologies, and certain ideologies, namely liberalism, would become religions, due to its reliance upon the existence of a supernatural being to uphold its systems of belief, which is explained in furthur detail in the book. Later in the book Yuval also makes the claim that racism, as we define it, no longer exists, and its place has been taken by "culturalism," a term he coined, saying that:

"Among today’s elites, assertions about the contrasting merits of diverse human groups are almost always couched in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between races. We no longer say, ‘It’s in their blood.’ We say, ‘It’s in their culture.’"

I think this idea is too focused on a rigid definition of racism, it doesn't account for the change in culture, the root source of racism has not changed, only the language around it. The only reason we no longer say 'It's in their blood' is because it has become culturally unacceptable to do so, so racists have found new ways of articulating the same ideas. I think Harari's proposal to change the term we use to define the phenomenon does nothing to benefit the parties affected by racism, and in fact benefits the racists by absolving them of their racism.

Aside from those critiques, I genuinely enjoyed this book. Towards the end hes talking about human happiness, and all the different factors that go into determining happiness, a lot of it wasn't new information to me, but it was presented in a way that helped me to get a better understanding of the concept and what it could mean for myself. He also ends the book in a very interesting way, which I'm assuming leads into Homos Deus, another book he wrote, and generally considered to be the sequel to Sapiens. (Which is on my reading list somewhere, I think :/ )

I was intending to continue in a numbered order down the list, to Che Guevara, but unfortunately my library hold hasn't come in yet, so I'll be skipping that one for now, and reading, or rather finishing, Unlearning Shame, but I will start reading Che Guevara as soon as it's available, possibly concurrently, since it is a lorge book, for reference, the Sapiens audiobook was about 15 hrs long, Che is 34 hours. So yeah, I'll probably read that alongside other books, alternating, and any books I don't finish by the end of the month will be rolled over to next month (hence the 3 open spaces at the end of each month's reading list).

Meanwhile, in the land of coding, I've come across a difficult issue. I can't get the overflow confuguration right on my yearly reading lists, so unless you zoom the page out the bottom half is cut off. I'll have to work on this later tonight.