Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah HarariMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Humankind seems so selfish. Can it redeem itself?
"Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?" This last line haunts me. It was timely to be reading this during the COVID-19 quarantine. Yuval Noah Harari is a master storyteller, able to sweep through the scale of two hundred thousand years of history (and well, billions of years of scientific data) and ask important questions. My mind was blown several times because of the insights I gained from this book. I've had laugh-out-loud moments too. Harari makes some audacious comments like: liberalism is the new religion of modern man. The sheer breadth of this book is overwhelming...comparable to the scale of Thomas Friedman's Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations (well not even, since this books covers the birth of the species up to today). It's an achievement.
One thing I couldn't shake off was: Homo erectus lasted 2 million years... and yet, Homo Sapiens has only been around 200,000 years and we have wrought so much damage to the planet we inhabit. We are both brilliant and tragically stupid. After two hundred thousand years of existence, we don't know what we want. It's amazing! And sad. But like Friedman, I choose optimism. Not out of blindness but to ease my suffering (Harari's description of Buddhism is very compelling). I'll take this for what it is. We are capable of great good (subjectively to ourselves as a species) and great destruction (proof positive: the Anthropocene and climate change). Today, we are at a crossroads. We stand before a new age. A singularity, as Harari describes. How will we emerge? For now, I won't worry about that yet. Maybe it's better to just live in the present and enjoy a measure of serenity.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment