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LitCharts | September 27 2024
Some scholars argue that the Agricultural Revolution enabled humankind to prosper and thrive. Others think it disconnected us from nature and made us greedy and unhappy. Harari thinks that either way, there’s no going back, because our populations increased so rapidly that foraging became unsustainable. Around 12,000 years ago, there were five to eight million foraging humans in the world. Just 2,000 years ago, there were 250 million farmers. Permanent settlements also changed humankind: we’ve grown used to claiming a portion of nature for ourselves, altering our natural environment to build small structures that we claim as our own, and fencing our habitats off from the wild (and others).
Harari argues that foragers focused on life in shorter interludes, thinking from season to season. Peasant farmers, in contrast, had to worry about the long-term longevity of their crops, triggering stress and anxiety about their future economic security. They toiled harder to collect surplus crops (in case of a bad season in the future). Subsequently, elite rulers began springing up and living off these surpluses, denying the peasant farmers the security they craved. Harari notes that the stories of the world’s few elites—and their achievements in art, philosophy, and culture—fill history books. Meanwhile, most human beings spent their lives endlessly laboring to plough fields
Surplus farming and transportation provided food pipelines that enabled increasingly urban settlements. Urbanization happened so quickly, however, that humans didn’t have time to evolve a biological capacity for mass cooperation. Harari thinks myths—circling around “great gods [and] motherlands”—played a crucial role, because they connected vast numbers of strangers on an unprecedented scale. In 8500 B.C.E., the largest settlements (like Jericho) contained a few hundred people. Just 1500 years later, parts of Turkey had populations of 10,000 people. By 1000 B.C.E. the Persian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires had millions of subjects. Harari warns against glorifying human cooperation, noting that a lot of it was—and still is—exploitative (for example, slavery, prisons, and concentration camps).
To Harari, historical “cooperation networks” aren’t rooted in biological instincts or personal familiarity. They’re rooted in “shared myths.” For example, 3500 years ago, the Mesopotamian emperor Hammurabi established Hammurabi’s Code. The Code argues that the “gods” decree a strict hierarchy in which some people are naturally better than others (the highest being a ruler, followed by aristocracy, commoners, and slaves). The Code promises that if people accept their place in the hierarchy, their society will flourish. Another example, the Declaration of Independence, argues that a “Creator” decrees basic human rights like equality, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. Harari argues that both sets of principles are fictions.
The Great Pyramid of Giza. The kind of thing rich people in ancient Egypt did with their money
The humanities and social sciences devote most of their energies to explaining exactly how the imagined order is woven into the tapestry of life. In the limited space at our disposal we can only scratch the surface. Three main factors prevent people from realising that the order organising their lives exists only in their imagination:
a. The imagined order is embedded in the material world. Though the imagined order exists only in our minds, it can be woven into the material reality around us, and even set in stone. Most Westerners today believe in individualism. They believe that every human is an individual, whose worth does not depend on what other people think of him or her. Each of us has within ourselves a brilliant ray of light that gives value and meaning to our lives. Only they themselves, not others, know their true worth.
b. The imagined order shapes our desires. Most people do not wish to accept that the order governing their lives is imaginary, but in fact every person is born into a pre-existing imagined order, and his or her desires are shaped from birth by its dominant myths. Our personal desires thereby become the imagined order’s most important defences.
c. The imagined order is inter-subjective. Even if by some superhuman effort I succeed in freeing my personal desires from the grip of the imagined order, I am just one person. In order to change the imagined order I must convince millions of strangers to cooperate with me. For the imagined order is not a subjective order existing in my own imagination – it is rather an inter-subjective order, existing in the shared imagination of thousands and millions of people.
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