Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

When reading history, it's always instructive and insightful to step back and consider the “big picture”. Detail, though essential, indeed the very stuff of any understanding of history, can sometimes weave a web of obscurity and confusion around the obvious. The big picture, then, allows a reader to prioritize, to contextualize and to rationalize. What, then, might we make of a book which presents hardly any detail, but just a swift sketch of a big picture? Indeed, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari presents a picture of history so big it purports to be nothing less than a birth to death biography of homo sapiens, the current and dominant human species, in case you have yet to meet one.

From evolutionary beginnings through the establishment of our genetic identity, Yuval Noah Harari charts of the human tendency to form social groups, use tools and language, while sustaining ourselves by hunting and gathering. We exit Africa – somehow, probably thanks to assistance from contemporary climate change - and eventually become established across the planet. Via our Cognitive Revolution we developed our early skills and became rather good at most things we tried to do. Perhaps two good.

Success, perhaps, led to an Agricultural Revolution, where suddenly property became a concept. We domesticated animals, selectively bred yield into crops and docility into beasts of burden. We also succumbed to other new concepts such as epidemics. Note here that an unknown number of millennia intervened between stage one, the Cognitive, and stage two, the Agricultural. Writing also intervened at some point, but probably only after we invented property, for only then did we start to train accountants.

Agriculture, this new mode of production, effectively unified the human race, however. It was so successful that it spread to wherever humans ventured, and progressively this had become the entire planet. But this relatively sedentary lifestyles and the emerging possibility of control of economic resources led to the establishment of towns and villages, empires, armies, castles and probably soft furnishings.

And then there was Science and human kind’s increased ability to predict or control the physical world beyond the lifecycles of plants or docile servant beasts. Beginning barely 300 years ago, this latest, current and possibly last human revolution is still with us. It led to the invention of countless previously non-existent concepts, such as capitalism and socialism, mass consumption and ideological veganism, exponentially increased energy consumption, a Green Revolution that perhaps laid waste, genetic engineering, the internet, artificial intelligence and breakfast cereals.

Throughout, Yuval Noah Harari identifies identifies the human need to create myth. And this has real purpose in our race’s modus vivendi. Without myths called religion, human beings would never have been able to conquer the genetic necessity of individual competition. We would not have become urbanized or cooperated to solve the complex tasks that exploiting our planet requires. Harari’s grouping together of all such mythical motivation – and thereby his dismissal of its representing anything approaching the concept of truth – might have led to the book and the author falling foul of certain authorities across the globe, if past experience is anything to trust. Perhaps this also tells us something about what kinds of book the committed religious don’t read.

Thus through the 400 pages or so of Sapiens we can relive the entire history of the human race and travel centuries into its speculated future. Though it is easy to sound flippant about a book that presents itself almost as a biography of homo sapiens, there is hardly a page of the work that is not stimulating, informative or even surprising, all at the same time. Such broad pictures are perhaps easy to write, especially if they are in accurate or polemical. But that when they are well researched, lucidly written, accurate, insightful and thought-provoking, their construction of a big picture really does help us to understand and contextualize the details of history which otherwise may not constitute joined-up thinking. Sapiens is a thought-provoking and challenging work, claiming to be A Brief History of Mankind. By the end we are eager for more, but also not convinced there will be much more to write.

Development As Freedom by Amartya Sen

Perhaps not many people regularly read non-fiction, especially when it might appear to emanate from academic sources. Thus a title such as Development As Freedom by Amartya Sen, if encountered on a book browse, might suffer immediate and regrettable rejection. Subjects such as international politics, economic change and human development considered via the writings of a Nobel Prize winning economist might not suggest bedtime reading. But read again! And preferably read many times, for this book surely places the word ‘human’ at the heart of the development process and, because of that, is not only readable, it is an absolute joy.

Sen’s argument is simply encapsulated in the book’s title. As human beings change and as the societies in which they live transform, development can be measured, certainly perceived, and possibly achieved via greater life expectancy, access to education, improved gender and social equality, increasing population, technological progress, access to health care and a host of other life enhancing and enriching phenomena that all of us now seem to take for granted, bur, perhaps paradoxically, few societies actually achieve.

But for Sen, and this is the truly optimistic core of the book’s message, is that all of these identifiable and measurable phenomena are mere effects of a more fundamental cause. Development, for Amartya Sen, is about increasing human freedom. The concept includes freedom of choice, freedom to participate, freedom to express and in fact any freedom that might be exercised by an individual or community in the context of enhancing, not undermining, the wider social groups or societies in which the people live. There is undeniably something wider called society and it is thus society’s role to evaluate policy and practice to ensure that social and economic change enhance the sum of freedoms that people can claim.

But let it also be clear that this is no neo-liberal, individuality-is-God, markets-know-best diatribe. Development As Freedom is a concise, sometimes intense, but always sympathetic look at various aspects of economic and social change and the generality of development policy that can stimulate it. The point is that the human race and the societies in which it lives make progress for the common good when participation is widened, when inclusion rather than exclusion is the goal, when the whole range of human potential, rather than that of an elite in restricted roles, is allowed to blossom. And it is this overall message that makes the book such a positive and enriching experience.

Early on in the book, Sen sums up his approach by saying that “Poverty can be sensibly defined as capability deprivation…” and thus that the alleviation of poverty, in all its manifestations, allows human beings to develop whatever capabilities they might have, capabilities that would otherwise never be realised. Furthermore, greater social equality is more likely to provide opportunity for the development of this human potential than any other route.

In making his case, Amartya Sen deals the occasional body blow to a few nostrums. Reassessing Adam Smith from the original, Sen identifies that the original intellectual arguments on markets were at least partly aimed at countering the power and influence entrenched interests of the time. Now those would have certainly arisen out of the previous century’s tendency to grant and support monopolies. Sen thus casts Smith as least partly as a moderniser, who wanted to transform economic structures in order to transform society as he knew it. He also finds in Smith an admission that opportunity might have more to do with birthright than ability, or even availability of educational facilities. The champion of the market principle, as we now know him, is here not seen to claim that markets in themselves will always provide the most effective or efficient basis for economic interaction.

Sen also illustrates how so-called free markets might not work to the advantage of the majority. He cites an example of a Pareto-efficient system in which 1000 people each give up one dollar, without caring too much about the transaction. One person pockets the thousand dollars as profit and will clearly fight hard to retain such privileged status. When opinion about how the society transacts, it is likely that the individual who profits will speak loudly to maintain the status quo and, given the status of economic success, the person will also have access to the modes of expression needed. The thousand do, however, have the right to vote and so democracy is at the core of any approach to enhance freedom, but to be effective it has to function. Sen reminds us that there has never in human history been a famine in any democratic society with a free press.

Since development, in Sen’s vision, is about developing the capabilities of all people, it is clear that human development as a goal is first and foremost an ally of the poor, rather than the rich and powerful. Modernisation theory is thus merely a starting point for the process as Sen envisages it. But beyond this beginning it must continue until participation is increased and real democracy is achieved. Policy and practice should be continually evaluated to ensure the proper spread and effectiveness of their goals. Development As Freedom is much more than a description of what we are and from where we have come. It is nothing less than a far-sighted and clear prescription for political practice and provides a yardstick we might use to evaluate it.

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