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LitCharts | October 9 2024
The named locations within the Afro-Asian World were places visited by the fourteenth-century Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta. A native of Tangier, in Morocco, Zanzibar, southern Russia, Central Asia, India, China and Indonesia. His travels illustrate the unity of Afro-Asia on the eve of the modern era.
Harari notes that large-scale cooperation happens when people in a society believe in the same myths and follow the same rules. This picture implies that societies remain relatively consistent and stable, but in fact, cultures often contain competing myths which conflict with each other. Medieval Europeans, for example, believed in both Christianity and chivalry. Harari thinks Christianity encourages people to avoid conflict, while chivalry encourages defending one’s honor when it’s threatened—which encourages conflict. Modern societies, too, privilege individual freedom, but they also want people to pay taxes (which, Harari says, technically limits individual freedom). Harari thinks such contradictions are inevitable, and they keep cultures in flux.
Even though cultures are complex, conflicting, and constantly in flux, Harari thinks they’re tending towards unity. Historical societies were far more isolated from each other. People in the Afro-Asian world, for example, didn’t even know that Mesoamerican societies (in the Americas) existed until somewhat recently. As distinct human societies merge, however, their cultures absorb different value systems and seek to eradicate conflict (to facilitate greater cooperation on a global scale), so Harari thinks humanity is tending towards unity by consolidating many different imagined orders into fewer ones. To Harari, the idea of separate, “authentic” cultures is a bit misleading. For example, tomatoes (which are now considered a part of “authentic” Italian cuisine) originated in the Americas.
Animals in nature don’t typically try to unite their entire species. Harari thinks the Cognitive Revolution enabled Homo sapiens to do so. He thinks three global ideas (or imagined orders) began to circulate among humans around 1,000 B.C.E.: money (enabling global trade), imperialism (fueling attempts to conquer and unite territories), and universal religions like Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam (which imagined the entire human race being governed by a “universal set of principles”). Harari thinks that of the three, money is the world’s most unifying concept today, and he wants to find out why.
Sioux chiefs (1905). Neither the Sioux nor any other Great Plains tribe had horses prior to 1492.
During the last three millennia, people made more and more ambitious attempts to realise that global vision. The next three chapters discuss how money, empires and universal religions spread, and how they laid the foundation of the united world of today. We begin with the story of the greatest conqueror in history, a conqueror possessed of extreme tolerance and adaptability, thereby turning people into ardent disciples. This conqueror is money. People who do not believe in the same god or obey the same king are more than willing to use the same money. Osama Bin Laden, for all his hatred of American culture, American religion and American politics, was very fond of American dollars. How did money succeed where gods and kings failed?
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