European Legal History José Maria Sousa S.

Maia
Professor Bart Wauters BBA&LLB
Sapiens essay

Sapiens (2011), by Yuval Harari, is a book that examines history from a scientific
perspective in order to delimit the events that lead civilization to its current status. A book
that detaches social beliefs from reality to go back to the simple sciences such as biology
and accurately describe the developing of the world. The author, Harari, an acclaimed
Israeli historian, aims to decompose history, from the first animals to the overrule of
homo sapiens as the dominant species. He does it through a multi-perspective approach,
centered in the evolution of our species across times and its repercussion in the external
world. The book evolves around one main idea, that we the homo sapiens, among other
animals and “homo” species survived thanks to our unique social skills, through the highly
complex language we created that allowed a high social cooperation (Harari, p. 26). This
process is centered in three human-based revolutions, the cognitive and the agricultural
revolutions that led to the definitive human unification and ended with the scientific
revolution from which our modern society emanated. However, the accuracy of what is
supposed to be the pure scientific reality, in its apparent objectivity, is heavily under
questioning.
Overall, the book offers a set of ideas I fundamentally agree with. Harari defends
that the world functions through human communication, which constructs a variety of
abstract social mechanisms, that even imaginary, rule the world. This set of mechanisms
include every aspect ruling our civilization: human rights, law, justice, the idea of nations
or even religion (Harari, p. 31). This are all human ideas that do not actually exist. The
concept of nation has been created by us, so do human rights, but how do they prevail?
Because we believe in them, the common belief can bring the imagined into reality.
Concepts that even though are not tangible and have no back up can come to life if we the
homo sapiens that rule the world believe in them. This is due to the cognitive revolution
and the social skills arising from it. These capacities allow us to rationalize a concept we
can’t prove actually exists. The most important aspect of this revolution was the ability it
gave us to portray large amounts of information regardless of that information nature, the
ability to transmit things we invented. This capacity made us, the homo sapiens, superior;
since it allowed our species to create a rigid society with independent governmental
forces, religion and even geographic limits based on the imaginary. These communication
abilities are the ones that allow the homo sapiens to cooperate in a massive scale, millions
together. Here, we can find the main difference with other species and animals, the one
that makes us the most powerful habitants of the earth. This cooperation is the one that
allowed us to colonize the world’s biggest continents, fight against the autochthonous
inhabitants, such us the megafauna of Australia or the Neanderthals around the world.
This communication is the one that allowed us to create what Harari call the imaginary
orders, the social mechanisms that glue us together as a civilized society.
Harari, as a scientist who discusses the evolution of the human beings, feels the
necessity of neutralizing god from the influence in the history of humankind. This is
probably the biggest source of inexactitudes there is in the book. Through the whole book,
the author avoids the relationship between religion and knowledge. Harari sets religion as
a “knowledge-conservative” organization completely unlinked to investigation and
discoveries. The author presents religious institutions during Mediaeval Ages as
organizations that fully relied in the already known, separated from the will to discover.
He centers this critique in the Catholic Church, since it was the biggest institution during
the Medieval Ages, however, this is a completely irrational idea. The author entitles this
institution as one completely focused on its main book, the bible; as one for which any
external knowledge is irrelevant. This is a result of this author’s necessity to devalue the
church since, during that times Thomas Aquinas, arguably the most important thinker
there was, was also a friar and priest. When Harari describes the church as an ancient
tradition of knowledge, in which the only way to obtain greater understanding was to ask
a superior person in the institutions, such as a priest, he contradicts history. He states that
all knowledge was concentrated for the Catholics in the church and was all provided by
the bible (Harari, p. 280). However, it was during that time that Thomas Aquinas wrote the
Summa in which he discussed politics and legislation; mainly by creating the concept of
natural law. This was a completely innovative thinker and educator, whose works highly
conditioned the law and politics of our actual reality (Aquinas, 2002).
Harari determination to attack the church as an irrational organization biases him
against pure simple history in such a way he overpasses important events. James Hannam,
who holds a PhD at History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Oxford,
declares in his book “The Genesis of Science”, that actually during the middle ages the
Church was the main sponsor there was for scientific investigation. He claimed that priests
and clerics were paid to study and research this discipline at universities. Hannam even
states that during the Middle Ages precisely, the church imposed mathematics and
science in the educational syllabus. The attachment got to the point that the Jesuit order
became the leading Scientific Organization of Europe, with thousands of discoveries and
science papers (Hannam, 2011). Moreover, the book analyzes the reason behind the
irrationality of disconnecting Church from science. Studying nature and its functioning,
which was theoretically created by God, is after all admiring his greatness. This correlation
between faith and science explains why the Middle Ages, climax of the Catholicism, drove
the world into the biggest revolution of innovation and progress. Therefore, when Harari
states that during the Middle Ages for the church: “whatever the great gods… did not
bother to tell us was unimportant” (Harari, p.280) it is a completely wrong statement
since, actually, the scientific revolution he talks about was a result of the faith he attacks.
In Sapiens, Harari pursues his aim of reducing history to physics and biology so
intensely that he ends up overpassing a huge component of society’s history. This makes
him even contradictory. These paradoxes appear, for instance, when he describes
happiness. Harari portrays happiness as a bio-chemical reaction, he describes it as a
“pleasant sensation in the body” originated by “different hormones coursing through her
bloodstream, and… the storm of electric signals flashing between different parts of the
brain” (Harari, p. 432). Nonetheless, early on the book he says that the only thing
impossible to analyze in fossils is their imaginative being. He declares that it can be
discovered when these people lived, what activities did they practice and even their
lifestyle. That however, does not mean we could know what and how they thought. This
makes it highly contradictory. Even though he defends people are made by an imaginary
entity of commonly agreed concepts and ideas, which are impossible to track down
scientifically speaking; he tries to dehumanize the most human emotion there is:
happiness. The pursuit of this feeling, which is not the same as the pleasure our body
makes us experience, is exactly the reason why humans live. Reducing it to a bio-scientific
process, just contradict the whole idea of imaginary order he tries to defend; since at the
end this feeling is the one originating these orders.
Sapiens is an incredible journey in the development of our species. A book where
the learning process does not end, where the reader’s knowledge boundaries are
extended. Notwithstanding, a book that constructed against an idea: the pure scientific
truth behind our existence. This aim of simplification is constantly pursued by the author,
and is in my opinion the main originator of the limited inaccuracies of the text. Harari finds
a clash between the science of the evolution and religion, he cannot conceive that this
imaginary set of ideas can originate contents as tangible as science or math. This leads to
the omission of the repercussion of faith in this revolution he defends as the biggest
intellectual development of homo sapiens. He does so bypassing, among others, one of
the most important intellectuals of that time, Thomas Aquinas. Moreover, in the
rationalization of emotions he is not able to conceive that even though they conform by
themselves an independent abstract body, they may originate in this abstractism other
bodies with the purpose of getting to them. Are not human rights developed for people to
be happy among the other members of society? I personally think that yes. I personally
think that this is the case of justice or law, they are all “imaginary-orders” as Harari says
created by the humans. Altogether, nonetheless, serve the common purpose of creating a
working society for which the base is the personal satisfaction and happiness of its
members. We are humans, and the cognitive revolution permitted us to rationalize the
world, a unique skill among other animals. Moreover, I think that the rationalization
coexists with the possibility of irrationalizing towards ideas such as love or happiness, and
that is what makes it impossible to synthesize our history as bare scientific process of
development.
References

Hannam, J. (2009). God's Philosophers. How the medieval world laid the foundations of
modern science.

Harari, Y. (2014). Sapiens : A brief history of humankind. London: Vintage Books.

Thomas, S., Aquinas, T., & de Aquino, T. (2002). Aquinas: political writings. Cambridge
University Press.