Tag: Yuval Noah Harari

  • The constraints on freedom

    The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow was in my long list of favourite reads in 2021. It would have been in the top 10 if it weren’t for my Arundhati Roy bias, because it gave me at least a couple of fundamental perspective shifts.

    The first is at an information level. The book is primarily a rebuttal of what now looks like a simplistic and linear way of looking at human history. The two Davids go up against the Goliath of the contemporary civilisation narrative that comes out in practically every book that even briefly touches upon the evolution of our species. This popular narrative can be (simplistically) summarised by three of my favourite books – Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and the two-part Political Order series by Francis Fukuyama. We were foragers until wheat domesticated us (as Harari would say), which led to societal hierarchies as we now see it. To massively paraphrase Fukuyama’s books, from various kinds of states (governance styles), we then evolved into preferring liberal democracy through the interplay of the state, rule of law, accountable government and social mobilisation, idea legitimacy, and economic development. Both Harari and Fukuyama have been instrumental in helping me understand what we could call ‘the system of the world’. (borrowed from a Neal Stephenson trilogy).

    But in this book, Graeber and Wengrow use archaeological evidence to show how these broad strokes don’t do justice to the experiments and trade-offs that many societies played with in farming, property, democracy and thus civilisation as we know it. It is far more nuanced, and in doing that, bring up the freedom that our ancestors had.

    Which brings me to the second shift. This insight, while was stated in a broad human context, also hit close to home. Has civilisation, they ask, caused us to lose what they see as our three basic freedoms – the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements? It’s something to ponder over at a personal level. Liberal democracies might tom-tom freedom as a non-negotiable and enshrine it in their constitution, but ‘civil society’ and its economics would probably crumble if we actually had these freedoms. As I tweeted, The book made me realise even more that the freedom the individual needs and the structure that society wants will always be at odds. The differences are of degree not of kind.

    It’s when I think about it that I realise how much we have normalised the loss of these freedoms at a societal and an individual level. Why is anyone obliged to obey anyone else? I realise I’d be ok with an answer that has some emotion as the primary reason, but the most likely answer is power – physical or monetary. Between state and corporations, a duopoly exists on this. But the tyranny is rampant in daily lives too. House help, people being turned away from public parks, expectations of service staff everywhere. The list can go on.

    Why can’t we simply go anywhere else? Beyond money, the lines that we have drawn on paper get translated into checkposts and immigration counters, and crossing them is now a privilege. The lines aren’t natural, but try crossing them without the necessary paperwork. And even if you manage somehow, you will live in constant fear of being thrown out. It’s not that easy to go someplace else.

    Between these two losses, the freedom to change one’s social arrangements is pretty much taken out of play. Who one is (identity) and what one does and where, are very difficult to change. Wake up, go to work, get paid, use the money to add to cart, travel, entertainment. Rinse, repeat. Yes, we all have choices, but society’s choice architecture also bias our decision-making.

    How the hell did basic freedoms become a privilege? How did the ‘civil society’ we traded it for go rogue and become tyrannical? I hope to get a better understanding through the books I read this year. How does this manifest in my own life, and what can I do to help myself and at least a few others become a little more free? That’s a life’s work, and a different post!

  • Homo Deus

    Yuval Noah Harari

    The follow up to Sapiens, and therefore it arrived with huge expectations. To begin with, while this is a progression from the earlier work, it is also a standalone work. The book has three parts which I would broadly classify as past, present and future. The author spends the first third of the book summarising what he wrote in Sapiens, and if you have read that book, especially recently, you might find yourself muttering “Why doesn’t he get on with it?” 🙂
    To be fair, he outlines his broad premise right at the beginning – having (relatively) conquered hunger, disease and war, humanity’s next agenda would be to master happiness, immortality and divinity. The path to that is what Yuval Noah Harari slowly but surely proceeds to elaborate on.

    The second part of the book is where Harari sets the premise and context for the future by analysing the present. As is his wont, he goes about dissecting the origins of our current belief systems and the occurrences that have led us to what he calls humanism, and our collective belief in man’s central role in the scheme of things. (more…)

  • Empathy & Extinction

    In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari explains how we’re the most dominant species on the planet because we’re the only ones able to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. The ‘funny’ part is that the things we cooperate on usually exist only in our collective imagination – religion, nation, money. Intersubjective realities.

    But it gets funnier. When I look around now, I see these intersubjective realities actually causing more divisiveness between groups than unity. Offended because Spiegel allegedly called it a poor nation. Offended because Katy Perry used a Hindu goddess to describe her mood. New day, new reason to be offended.  (more…)

  • Sapiens : A Brief History of Humankind

    Yuval Noah Harari

    “Just six million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.” That appears on page 5, and somehow it convinced me that I was going to enjoy this book. Actually, even before that, the framing of the massive exercise of universe creation, and evolution, neatly into physics, then chemistry, and biology is itself a fantastic beginning. This elegance in framing, which extends to the analogies used as well, played a huge role in me recommending this book to pretty much everyone I met, even while I was still reading it.

    To continue, after biology, which is the study of organisms, we come to the study of something developed by humans – culture, and that study is history. From as many as six other human species that existed until 100,000 years ago, we were the chosen ones. How did that happen, and how did we get here, that is what the book explores. (more…)