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LitCharts | October 9 2024
Humanity, says Harari, united because of “commerce, empires, and universal religions.” He wonders what different kinds of global societies there could have been. Harari thinks about the emperor Constantine, who converted the Roman empire from polytheism to Christianity, though he can’t say more about why, exactly Constantine chose Christianity above polytheism or other religions. Harari also thinks about what’s going to happen in the future. He wonders if China will become the world’s superpower, or if humanity will destroy its ecosystem. Harari thinks that scholars can make predictions, but there’s always room for surprises—because there are so many factors to consider.
One thing that’s certain to Harari is that historical choices “aren’t made for the benefit of humans.” He doesn’t think there’s any evidence that adopting Christianity was good for human kind, or that the Arab empire was better than the Persian empire. Harari thinks cultural ideas “emerge accidentally” and then “infect” the human population—almost like the way memes spread, but there’s no reason to assume those ideas are the best ones. The path of history could have easily been very different.
No matter what you call it – game theory, postmodernism or memetics – the dynamics of history are not directed towards enhancing human well-being. There is no basis for thinking that the most successful cultures in history are necessarily the best ones for Homo sapiens. Like evolution, history disregards the happiness of individual organisms. And individual humans, for their part, are usually far too ignorant and weak to influence the course of history to their own advantage. History proceeds from one junction to the next, choosing for some mysterious reason to follow first this path, then another. Around AD 1500, history made its most momentous choice, changing not only the fate of humankind, but arguably the fate of all life on earth. We call it the Scientific Revolution. It began in western Europe, a large peninsula on the western tip of Afro-Asia, which up till then played no important role in history. Why did the Scientific Revolution begin there of all places, and not in China or India? Why did it begin at the midpoint of the second millennium AD rather than two centuries before or three centuries later? We don’t know. Scholars have proposed dozens of theories, but none of them is particularly convincing. History has a very wide horizon of possibilities, and many possibilities are never realised. It is conceivable to imagine history going on for generations upon generations while bypassing the Scientific Revolution, just as it is conceivable to imagine history without Christianity, without a Roman Empire, and without gold coins.
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