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This piece will essentially be a book review, except that rather than repeating a synopsis or rating its merits, I will be reporting what value I took out of these two books. At the time of writing, I have just recently read Sapiens for the second time and I am almost finished Homo Deus for the second time. I am reading these books again because I just recently bought Yuval Noah Harari’s third book ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’ and wanted a refresher on his previous work after having read it about a year ago.

One item of great value that I took from Sapiens was the timeline of history that he outlined.

First, we were effectively animals subject to biology. The cognitive revolution brought with it the ability for humans to communicate fictions to each other. This was the beginning of history, as opposed to simple biology.

Next, we were hunter gatherers who tended to have diverse animist beliefs in which all plants and animals seemed to have equal value to us. We saw ourselves as part of the environment rather than dominant over it. On some level, at this time we were far healthier. Our diets were as good as at any time in history and exploring the plains of whatever territory we inhabited meant we got plenty of exercise. We were, in effect, free. Then came the domestication.

The agricultural revolution is described in Sapiens in a really poignant way. Rather than humans domesticating animals and crops, the animals and crops domesticated humans. Now, rather than exploring the plains for exercise and eating a diverse diet, we were doing back-breaking work for exercise and eating an increasingly concentrated diet. The agricultural life wasn’t adopted because it was healthier and caused less suffering, but rather for purely evolutionary reasons. Agricultural societies provided the conditions for far more children than did hunter-gatherer societies, albeit less healthy children. And this was one part of the puzzle that I had never really thought about: evolution doesn’t care about the human condition, it only cares about the numbers.

With the agricultural revolution came a shift in thinking. Rather than seeing the world as one in which humans are part of the environment, we were now dominant over the plants and animals. We now focused on ourselves and on our futures. These beliefs also had to be strong and widely believed. Only a shared fiction amongst the whole community can be effective – this requires true belief. In modern times, we have plenty of these fictions; money, human rights, rule of law, etc. But the agricultural revolution was the start of these shared fictions which Harari calls “intersubjectivity”.

This then leads to the unification of humankind and the scientific revolution. Nowadays, we have built new religions around the human experience. We have political religions around ways of structuring society and these religions tend to relegate the lives of animals to an even lower form. We are now far more focused on the human condition, and this brings us to Homo Deus, where the term ‘humanism’ is explored.

Now, we are focused on humans more than anything else. In politics, we are told to vote for who we think is right rather than having God choose our ruler. In the market economy, we are told to buy what we want according to our own feelings. In art, we are told that beauty is in the eye of the beholder rather than in the eye of some ethereal force. If enough humans believe something to be art, it is considered art. There is something ideally democratic about this idea, but I do feel that we have a lot of work to making sure this humanism is not subverted into propaganda for the few.

Harari separates humanism into three categories; liberal, socialist and evolutionary. Liberal humanism is one which is focused on the individual and whatever the individual wants, most characterised by capitalism. Socialist humanism is one in which all of society should be considered and in which the party is in control, characterised by socialism or communism. Evolutionary humanism is the harshest of them all, spousing that whoever is stronger will win out, characterised by Nazism but also by some futuristic types.

I do have a problem with this characterisation, but it is not in the types themselves. They seem accurate for the kinds of philosophies that the vast majority of people believe in the present day. I just believe there to be an alternative in which the positive components of all three can be represented. Rather than separating them out and being given the option to choose one, I would argue that you could take the democratic aspects of liberalism, the long-term vision aspects of socialism and a side of evolutionary humanism that deals with the inevitability of human progress over the next century. But that might be a topic for a different video.

The final section of Homo Deus, which I have read before but have not yet finished this time around, is about the next step. Throughout history, we have gone through animistic religions, more tolerant polytheistic religions, less tolerant monotheistic religions and now humanism. What’s next, Harari argues, is the belief based on the concession that we humans do not have much free will, if any at all. The extension of this is that data essentially becomes the new religion. I remember this fascinating me on first reading, so I am keen to get into again.

These are the biggest takeaways I took from reading those two books. There are plenty of things I haven’t mentioned here, including some chapters on writing and money and how they have revolutionised the way that we interact with the world, and also a lot of incredible points about the animals and their place in this theatre. I shall report back once I have finished the third book in the effective Yuval Noah Harari trilogy.