You might have heard this one recently: “I alone can fix it.” Trump isn’t the first to claim such it’s a hallmark of authoritarianism (and wannabe authoritarians). It is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable. While we can debate the validity of these arguments-city-states and, eventually, nations would not have bound together without food supplies that serviced the necessary scale-agriculture has changed our physical movements for the worse. He’s not alone: Jarred Diamond, James C Scott, Daniel Lieberman, and Colin Tudge have all been critical about the move from hunting and gathering to farming. Harari has serious misgivings about modern agriculture.
Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. Why humans run the world | Yuval Noah Harari Below are ten quotes from his first two books as I’ve recently ordered his latest, 21 Lessons for the 21 st Century (2018), I’ll check back in in a few weeks after I’ve finished what he calls his book “about the present.” An ardent practitioner of vipassana meditation and a hardcore animal rights activist, Harari is one of the most reflective and self-introspective historians in existence. Throughout his works Harari dissects capitalism, religion, and basic social mores that we’ve overlooked. He takes AI to task, not as a curmudgeonly opponent but more so in the role of a big brother that sees the track you’re heading on and wants to lead you in the right direction.
Whereas his debut traced how we got here, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016) is a cautionary tale about what “dataism” is doing to our societies and bodies.
His 2014 book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, is that rare history book that made a global impact the bestseller has been translated into twenty-six languages. Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari made his mark investigating the transition from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens.
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