Sapiens- How to Recover Faith In Humanity After Reading It

Sapiens is powerful new book that explains human history by straddling the worlds of science and story. It dragged me through despair about human impact on the planet, and the potential weaknesses in my worldview. This blog is part of my process of recovering the ability to be optimistic and to integrate the core truth of Sapiens into my life in a way that guides more appropriate and powerful action towards the goal of catalyzing an enlightened civilization. I think it may be helpful for anyone a little bummed about humanity lately.

The idea that humans dominate the globe because we are the only animal to master storytelling is the core message Yuval Harari shares in Sapiens. It’s a book that I found deeply compelling and gut wrenchingly unsettling. Much of the arc of his narrative, from the human “cognitive revolution", through our current scientific revolution was somewhat familiar, but it was brought together in a very comprehensive and thoughtful way, in a way only an author who mediates for a solid month every year could do. It is simultaneously refreshing and terrifying to take a view of history so macro that the "realness" of our shared fictions such as corporations, nations, religions and wait for it.. money- these things that motivate 99% of human activity... are just as imagined as the prehistoric myths of the ethers that glued the world together. The fact is, these newer stories do hold the world together. Think what happens to societies when they wake up to find that their money no longer has the value it did the day before. Ask an Argentine or a Venezuelan about how monetary collapse is followed by societal upheaval... when people's stories don't hold, they don't know what sense to make of their worlds...

The flip side that I find refuge in, the beautiful and empowering side, is that even though we have ourselves in a real pickle (ecologically, economically and politically), if we use the same logic that depresses me in the opposite direction, then if a compelling enough story could be told... perhaps we could cooperate ourselves to a much more desirable civilization.

What kind of story could harness the will and the resources to coordinate humanity into cooperating enough to switch to regenerative energy, economic, transportation, and food systems? To peaceful, reasoned and compassionate politics? To technological wisdom, not just technological power?

I won't spiral off into that subject too deeply and I will defer to people who’ve already done some beautiful thought on the matter. But, I will assume until proven otherwise that the only way a new, more harmonious story could be born is if it gave people the opportunity to discard their destructive stories without being told they were stupid or "wrong" for believing what they'd inherited from their culture... People, in my experience, don't make quick friends with the person who just shoved their wrongness down their throat. In short, a heaping fucking dose of empathy would need to be the bedrock of this new story.

The new story would need to celebrate admitting we didn't know everything and are willing to change our minds. Empathy with humility.

Sapiens gave me several very depressed hours of thinking about humanity’s often tragically cruel and short term motivated actions, like how in is the author's view, we destroy the large fauna of almost every ecosystem we enter. Humans,

not even hunter gatherers,

don't play gently with ecosystems. This gave me an especially difficult reckoning. I’ve been influenced by thinkers I admire, like Rewild podcaster Daniel Vitalis and Ishmael author Daniel Quinn, to view the pre agricultural human as much more harmonious with nature. I therefore spent much of my last few years, politically, professionally, and personally, dedicated to the enlightening of agriculture on whatever scale I could manage. I figured if this “original sin” of agriculture could be corrected, much of the human relationship with nature would be healed as a matter of course. While I still feel strongly that better ways of growing food and balancing our needs with the regeneration of ecosystems is a must, Sapiens smacked me with the reality that our callousness and disrespect for the delicate balance goes way deeper than a mere technology, however foundational.

Daniel Vitalis- Thought Leader on Wild vs Domesticated Humans

I scurried for my internal sanctum of non-religious spirituality and cosmic oneness to sooth my harrowed faith in humans as fundamentally redeemable. Surely, I thought, all of my reading and observation about the wondrous mysteries that point convincingly to a transcendent fabric of eternal unity could give me haven from this very scary notion of humanity’s cruelty and oblivious short-sightedness. But that sanctum was not to be found in Sapien’s pages. It couldn’t even be thought of. Harari's treatment of spirituality is starkly dismissive as "just another story" that humans use to either delude themselves to justify their culture's "right" to dominate others or distract themselves from the harsh realities of nature. Sapiens view is so big picture, so macro history- There seemed no refuge from Sapiens cold logic- that I am just an animal participating in big stories beyond my control like- "markets" and “nation states." 

What helped me recover a sense of optimism was remembering one of the most formative books of my life, The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein. which also revolved around how stories guide our conscious and unconscious thinking, both on a personal and cultural level. Eisenstein's book left me chewing on the beautiful idea that the chaos we see in ecology, economy and culture is indeed a breaking down of an old story, but that within it's decaying bones grows the seeds of a new story of "interbeing". Interbeing is exemplified in some small way by the fact that your body is comprised more of other organisms than of “you.” YOU can’t BE without other beings. On another level, the story of interbeing explains why it hurts to fully confront the sadness when we read, see, or hear about some tragic destruction in nature. No, we don't feel bad because that coral reef won’t be as pretty to snorkel over when it is dead, we feel bad because it feels like we lose a part of ourselves. The interbeing story replaces the story of separation, that you are an isolated “rational economic actor, or set of genes, or lump of matter, or story of identity. Instead the world and you are symbolic, mysteriously connected reflections. You are the world, that’s why you feel its pain.

Yes, Sapiens is fundamentally convincing, story telling is our superpower. It is why we are the species in charge of this planet. Fictional stories can carry enormous power. These fictional stories can be useful and noble. It is why you get up in the morning and work all day at the idea of a company, so you can get paid an idea of money, so that you can pay taxes to the idea of your country. But not all the stories need be fictional to unite us and to coordinate our action, and this is the piece that, after reflection, I feel Sapiens misses. We can also use our power to discern and tell true stories, like our divine enmeshment in the fabric of the universe, the E=MC2 realities that can be told even in languages with no words- these stories are what we are. We don't just tell stories. We are stories. And when we're awake in our “interbeing” with all of the universe... we are true stories. We are co-writing ourselves into existence.

I am an ape with a story telling gene. Harari is right. Some stories I tell are useful fictions that I either won’t fight because it’s too big a fight, or because I am blind to the wholeness of reality. But other stories we can tell are pretty close approximations to the truth, and those feel fucking amazing to tell…. Or to be told. And when we tell true stories, we solve global challenges, we work together and achieve god-like power guided by our most benevolent wisdom, rooted in our most wholehearted love.

This begs the questions, how do we tell true stories? That will be the topic of another thought capturing venture. Frankly I don’t have the answer to that yet. But I will leave you with the clue I’ll follow. It starts with that heaping fucking does of empathy and humility we mentioned earlier. And I’d be surprised if it didn’t have something to do with sex, love, science and consciousness. It’s just a hunch, but it’s a place to start.