Views from Crestmont Drive

This is, in effect, a sequel to SAPIENS.

Top level summary:

• It opens with a long prologue: now that humanity has largely overcome famine, plague, and war, what next? Three possibilities: immortality, happiness, divinity. However these are predictions; this book is not a manifesto. They are the ideals of humanism, but humanism has flaws: that’s what this book is about.
• He reviews human history from the agricultural revolution, emphasizes the idea of the algorithm, and wonders how humans are superior to animals: it’s our ability to connect, to use ‘imaged orders’ (money, law, gods, empires) to manage groups larger than 150 people. Meanings exists only within the networks of stories people tell each other. Science, meanwhile, has given rise to humanistic religions. [[ He still uses that word in a problematic sense, as noted for the first book. ]]
• Religion is a social function that confers superhuman legitimacy on human laws, norms, and values. Modern history is about forming a deal between science and one particular religion: humanism.
• Modern power comes from scientific progress and economic growth; free-market capitalism is virtually a religion. But it can’t go on forever: we’ll run out of resources, or risk collapsing the ecology.
• So humanism is about being true to oneself, prioritizing personal feelings over scriptures. There is now no serious alternative to the “liberal package of individualism, human rights, democracy, and a free market.” The old religions have nothing relevant to say about the world.
• And yet—some of liberal presumptions may not be true—e.g. free will. Brain studies show the complexities of our minds; there is no one authentic self. Thus one’s ‘true’ self is an imaginary story too, like nations, gods, and money. People live their lives as if living one type of story or another.
• The final chapters explore three possible futures, ways that liberalism might be made obsolete: humans will lose economic and military usefulness (e.g. by being replaced by robots); the system will value humans collectively, but not individually; or the system will find some individuals valuable, and they will constitute a new elite. Useless people, their lives supported by robots that rend them unemployable, take drugs and play computer games. Or income inequality might lead to gaps in physical and cognitive abilities, rendering ideas of equality and civil rights obsolete.
• Some in Silicon Valley want to upgrade humanity—e.g. by pursuing immortality. Alternatively, data might take over the world, an expanding internet of everything, with the new value of sharing everything, uploading experiences to the internet.
• Finally: so what should we pay attention to: In the short term, immigration, refugees. Over decades: global warming, inequality. And in the long term: examining the dogma that organisms are algorithms and life is a data process; whether intelligence is decoupling from consciousness; whether intelligent algorithms may come to know us better than we know ourselves. Are these valid?

General comments:

Again, note how frequently Harari rolls out concepts in groups of three. I’m still irritated of his use of the word religion to describe value systems that explicitly revoke traditional religion, e.g. secular humanism. He does so because he wants to identify those values with the analogous presumption about the world that religions make, so that he can challenge them and thus consider whether the western liberal project is doomed. There are lots of interesting ideas here, but I’m not as alarmed about the future as he seems to be. For example, does it matter if free will doesn’t exist in some fundamental sense? People still act as if they have free will. Perhaps it only matters if these intelligent algorithms he anticipates learn to manipulate us to what we think we are choosing freely is really chosen for us. But this already happens—we are guided in our tastes by culture; we are guided in our beliefs by our families and social groups.

He examines many of these same themes in this third big book, which I’ll cover next.

Detailed summary (with key points in bold and my comments [[ in brackets ]])

The book begins with a long, 70-page, prologue: “The New Human Agenda.” To some extent this recalls themes from SAPIENS, and to some extent it gives the impression that he forgot about another triad of ideas—or perhaps one cut for space—and is filling it in here. But no; reflecting on this book’s theme, instead what he’s doing is setting the stage, by explaining how several eternal trials of human existence have largely been overcome. Which leads to the book’s theme: what do we do now? But first, review those eternal trials.

• Humanity has largely overcome the three ancient problems—famine, plague, and war. Now that these have been addressed, what do we do now? Consider history.
• Famines—example of France in 1694. Ironically, now more people are obese than die from famine.
• Plagues—recalls the Black Death, about which people could do nothing by pray, or assign the problem to demons. Other examples: Europeans coming to the Americas, and spreading plagues, 1520; later Hawaii, 1778. In world war I, the Spanish flu.
• Now child mortality is down. Smallpox is gone. The recent plagues, SARS et al, even AIDS, have been relatively small by historical examples.
• And doctors are getting better at diagnosing new diseases. When something goes wrong now, we don’t blame god or demons, we demand responsibility and arrange investigations. [[ Well, some simple-minded evangelical types still blame God—or blame whatever social matter they personally don’t like, e.g. homosexuality or abortion, for having triggered God’s wrath. This egocentric bias will never go away. ]]
• Wars, p14. Statistics, 15t. We have overcome the ‘law of the jungle’, wherein people live their lives assuming that at any moment a neighboring country might invade them. No governments make plans with contingencies for war, anymore. There are exceptions – e.g. where the author lives (Israel).
• True, there is a potential for cyber warfare. Yet we have also broken Chekhov’s Law [i.e. by the 19^th century Russian playwright], the notion that if a gun appears [in a play], it must be used; that is, we’ve nuclear weapons for decades, and not used them.
• Terrorism? It has worked only by provoking its enemies to overreact, 18.7, then rage like a bull in a china shop, doing the terrorists’ work for them. [[ Every time I go through airport security, I can’t help but reflect, here at least the terrorists have won. ]]
• So—
• What will replace these threats in the human agenda? Well, we might take steps to protect the planet from our influence.
• What else? 21t – three things: immorality, happiness, divinity.
• About death – religions have depended on it. They don’t make much sense if death did not exist.
• Nowadays, death is viewed as a technical problem, with potential technical solutions. A few talk about defeating death entirely – like Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel. But by 2050? That’s optimistic. A-mortals would be cautious. [[ an idea already exploited by sf ]]
• If even human life-spans were only doubled, it would greatly change social arrangements – families; how long individuals would reign over corporations or religions. Ideas would linger. 26.
• Note that the *natural life span* has not been extended; people in the past sometimes did live until 70 or 80. We’ve just been eliminated causes of early death. Extending the life span will be more difficult.
• But science, and capitalism, seem to inevitably drive the search for extended life spans.
• P30, the right to happiness. Epicurus; Jeremy Bentham; nations provided education and health care as a means of making the nation stronger (not to make people happy). By now there is the idea that nations *should* make people happy. By GDP, Singapore must now be happiest. Is this true? It’s hard work to be happy; advanced nations aren’t necessarily ‘happier’ than less fortunate ones. Quality of life has increased, but not overall happiness. [[ A recurring theme; one of the closing ideas in SAPIENS. ]]
• Why? First, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. Second, happiness is a matter of pleasant sensations and lack of unpleasant ones. Beyond that, said John Stuart Mill, there’s no objective good and evil. And this is, in effect, current scientific orthodoxy. The problem is, pleasant sensations don’t last long; they must be constantly renewed.
• One answer might be drugs—pharmacology. We increasingly take drugs to mediate moods and behavior; to calm soldiers. This recalls the Buddhist view of the transience of existence.
• P43, the gods of planet earth. Upgrading into gods might happen in three ways: biological engineering; cyborg engineering; or through non-organic beings. We can’t grasp what new minds would think to do.
• Attaining divinity doesn’t mean becoming omnipotent—p47.5; it’s more like becoming Greek gods, with great powers but still with human foibles.
• Recall that ancient agricultural societies, their religions weren’t metaphysical, so much as about attaining superhuman powers.
• Is this moving too fast? It will happen bit by bit. It may take only decades. Recall the internet in 1993.
• But if it’s scary, can we hit the brakes? No; we don’t know what the brakes are; if we put a halt to such efforts, the economy would collapse; and we can’t even separate these three goals.
• Examples: Viagra; plastic surgery; in vitro testing. Three-person embryos. Upgrades are always first about healing, then about applying them for enhancements.
• P56, the paradox of knowledge—four points: 1, only a few people will be engaged in these activities [[ recalls Gibson comment about how the future is already here, just not evenly distributed ]]; 2, these comments are only predictions based on history, not a manifesto; 3, they may not succeed!, and 4, these are about choices. New knowledge changes behavior; e.g. Marx’s writings were read by capitalists, who accommodated his thinking, so his revolution never came. That’s the paradox.
• So why study history? To understand the choices we have. Example: lawns, a history of status symbols—then follow 7 pages beginning p59, with photos, about how lawns have been status symbols.
• These goals are the ideals of humanism, which has ruled for 300 years. But there are flaws in humanism—and that’s what this book is about; these plans are likely to cause its disintegration, 66b.

[[ He may be right to the extent that, in the sense that humanism endorses continued expansion of the species, we’ll destroy the planet and thus ourselves. That’s why I’ve never been entirely happy with the idea of ‘humanism’ – what’s really needed is an *understanding* of our place on earth and in the universe, and the goal should be long-term sustainability, not continued expansion. (Which might subvert the SF fantasy of exploring and colonizing the universe.) And certainly the commandments of religions to keep reproducing and fill up the globe. ]]

Part I, Homo sapiens conquers the world

1, The Anthropocene

• There are very few lions or wolves left; humans have impacted the world over the past 70k years, recently by mixing up all the previously separate (on various continents) ecologies.
• Early human were likely animists, believing in a network of beings.
• The story of the expulsion from Eden reflects the agriculture revolution, p77ff; changed the relationship between humans and animals; now animals were domesticated, subjected to humans. Today 90% of animal mass on earth is domesticated animals. And those animals live in misery; their evolutionary drives haven’t changed. Pig farms, etc.
• We understand that organisms are algorithms, collections of needs and survival strategies….  83.7: “’Algorithm’ is arguably the single most important concept in our world.”
• Example of recipes, and machines that follow algorithms; they work in humans through sensations, and emotions, and thoughts 85.3; humans are algorithms that produce copies of themselves, 85.1.
• Animals like baboons operate through feelings and sensations—but these are in fact algorithms, built into their instinctive thinking. 86.2. even in humans, 99% of our decisions are based on subconscious algorithms (sensations, emotions, and desires) 87.2, note 18, citations of books by Kahnemann and Ariely.
• In the early 20^th century experts denied the idea of human nature; theories were behaviorist. Harry Harlow demonstrated the instinctive mother-infant bond, among monkeys, in the ‘60s. The animal industry violates this, 90.4
• P90, The agricultural deal: Farmers justified their behavior toward domesticated animals through… theist religions, in which a parliament of beings was reduced to humans and their relationship with a god or gods, with only humans having souls, in which the gods played intermediary, 92b. “The gods safeguarded and multiplied farm production, and in exchange humans had to share the produce with the gods. This deal served both parties, at the expense of the rest of the ecosystem.”
• 92.3, “Much of theist mythology explains the subtle details of this deal.” Gilgamesh! Example even cites how the gods smelled the savor of sacrificed animals (!!) – because the animals weren’t for safekeeping, they were for sacrifice! [[ important point to relate back to biblical reading! ]] (a good example of, why these stories and not others?) 93.8: “Non-human organisms have no intrinsic value; they exist only for our sake.” And see 94t.
• Some religions are more animal-friendly; but all justify human exploitation of animals, and the subsequent classification of people into classes, 96b. “The farm thus became the prototype of new societies, complete with puffed-up masters, inferior races fit for exploitation, wild beasts ripe for extermination and a great God above that gives His blessing to the entire arrangement.”
• P97, Five Hundred Years of Solitude. Science silenced the gods. The new paradigm was curiosity leading to greater control, another step toward paradise on earth.
• Science gave rise to the humanistic religions. [[ He is still using the word religion in a problematic sense here. ]] But what makes humans special, that artificial intelligence wouldn’t be moreso? Is there some human spark?

Ch3, The Human Spark

• Why are human lives superior? The tradition is that only humans have souls; it’s a central pillar of society.
• Yet there’s no evidence of ‘souls’; in fact the idea of evolution contradicts it, which is why so many hate Darwin and evolution.
• Why no such anger about relativity etc? [[ I’ve long though this is a key point; fundamentalists hate evolution, but are indifferent to cosmology, even though the latter just as much contradicts the Bible. Why? Because evolution offends people’s sense of being special. ]] Because evolution contradicts prior beliefs. … or is it because we are conscious and animals aren’t?
• Yet we have no good idea about what consciousness is… what is the evolutionary advantage of subjective experience? What happens in the mind that doesn’t happen in the brain? No one knows.
• Can we discard the idea? … no; perhaps it is real but performs no useful function. Perhaps our analogies are wrong.
• 121, so do animals have minds? Examples of dogs, chimps, lab rats; legal acts, p123.
• So what gives our species an edge? Tools? Intelligence? No—it’s the ability to connect, 132.7. [[ 2018—yes, this echoes ideas about how human social cooperation has been more important than merely using tools, a key theme of EO Wilson. ]]
• Historical examples—communism, how it fell apart; example: the video of people booing Romanian leader Ceausescu, p135.
• Communists held power for three reason, 136b: they placed loyal apparatchiks in control of everything; they prevented the creation of rival organizations; third, they relied on support from parties in other countries.
• 138, So how is human life sacred? What makes humans able to cooperate so well? Our group size is limited, only up to about 150. And we are not ‘logical’… examples.
• Larger groups depend on ‘imagined orders’, 143b – 144: sets of rules that exist only in our imagination yet we believe to be as real as anything – these are ‘intersubjective’, p144. Examples are money, laws, gods, empires. It can happen, e.g. that some currency is defined to suddenly be without value.
• 146.4: Maybe hard to accept; “Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.” And following: “Meaning is created when many people weave together a common network of stories…” Why does anything mean anything? Because it did to our parents, etc, examples. [[ aligns with idea of understanding reality via narrative – and the stipulations that all such narratives, stories, are made up ]]  [[ again – the smart ones understand that these are just stories, that we tell ourselves to provide meaning, and that they could easily be entirely different stories. ]]
• Long historical example of how meaning at the time of the crusades changed over the centuries.
• The idea of human rights might be just as absurd in another century. 150.6.
• Only human understand these chimeras – intersubjective realities. That’s our advantage. This is what separate humanities from life sciences; the latter depend on complete understanding…
• So, 152 last lines, “If you want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.”

Part II: Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World

Ch4, The Storytellers, p155

• Animals are a dual reality – objective entities, and subjective experiences. Humans add a third reality – those intersubjective stories.
• We had the cognitive revolution 70kya, but fictional webs remained weak. With the agricultural revolution, 12kya, the Sumerians imagined gods like modern corporations. Only with the invention of writing, and money, were these enabled. The idea of pharaoh, a living god, became a personal brand. Society’s rules became written down, i.e. became algorithms, p160m. Now we have ‘the system’, e.g. hospitals, where everything is a matter of procedure and rules. These worked so well that the Egyptians could create pyramids and an enormous lake, even without iron or the wheel…
• P163, Living on Paper. Written texts became so important that, example of visas in Portugal, 164.5. Yet they could backfire: the Chinese effort to expand led to imaginary reports which led eventually to government actions that led to famine.
• Writing reshaped reality, 167t. –it could describe, and then it could reshape, reality, to the extent that reality had to give way to what was written.
• Examples: how African borders, drawn up by Europeans, ignored local circumstances. How school function to aim for high marks [grades] rather than knowledge or understanding.
• 170b: “In theory, if some holy book misrepresented reality, its disciples would sooner or later discover this, and the text’s authority would be undermined. Abraham Lincoln said you cannot deceive everybody all the time. Well, that’s wishful thinking. In practice, the power of human cooperation networks depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction. If you distort reality too much, it will weaken you, and you will not be able to compete against more clear-sighted rivals. On the other hand, you cannot organize masses of people effectively without relying on some fictional myths. So if you stick to unalloyed reality, without mixing any fiction with it, few people will follow you.” [[ nice summation of this current quandary ]]
• Thus the power of money; even of holy scriptures, which become self-fulfilling prophecies in the way they function in society. P172b, “Even when scriptures mislead people about the true nature of reality, they can nevertheless retain their authority for thousands of years. …”  A monotheistic view in which my good fortune or bad luck must be about my relationship with an all-powerful god. P173.4, “Such self-absorption characterizes all humans in childhood. Children of all religions and cultures think they are the centre of the world, and therefore show little genuine interest in the conditions and feelings of other people. … Most people grow out of this infantile delusion. Monotheists hold on to it till the day they die.”
• In contrast, ancient animist religions actually had a more accurate view of the world—as a playground of numerous different powers rather than a single god. Historians like Herodotus and Theucydides…
• And yet the Bible won—because “No matter how mistaken the biblical world view was, it provided a better basis for large-scale human cooperation” [[ –the essence of the human tragedy? To survive we must believe in what is not real? ]]
• 174, “Fictions enable us to cooperate better.” At least by the criteria of those fictions. Examples. Yet real entities suffer; gods don’t suffer; even nations don’t suffer, exactly. “That is exactly why we should strive to distinguish fiction from reality.” And last line p178: “Being able to distinguish fiction from reality and religion from science will therefore become more difficult but more vital than ever before.”

Ch5, The Odd Couple

• Has modern science replaced the importance of stories, of myths? No; in ways science has made some myths stronger. So what is the relationship between science and religion?
• 181, Germs and demons—there are many faulty definitions of religions; they’re not about superstition or belief in gods. Religion rather is a social function that confers superhuman legitimacy on human laws, norms, and values. 182.4; moral laws that exist and that we cannot change. Examples of boys asking questions of their fathers. Thus liberals and communists don’t like to be called religions, yet in fact they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, that humans must obey. And all societies have some version of this. All believers think theirs is the one true religion.
• 184, If you meet the buddha—distinction between religion and a spiritual journey. Religions are about cementing a worldly order; journeys are about escaping it. If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him – i.e., if you encounter a fixed law, free yourself from it, 186. Such ideas are threats to religions, thus Martin Luther; details.
• 188, Counterfeiting god—so what about the relationship between science and god? Sworn enemies? All scientific projects require religious insights, 189m. How to determine which projects to build?
• Or are they separate kingdoms? Yet this ignores the factual statements made by religions. Abortion; biological facts, about when life begins. Religious stories almost always involve ethical statement, factual statements, and the conflation of the two, p191. Science has a lot to say about factual statements. Example about the Donation of Constantine, in AD 315… which later historians agree was forged, in the 8^th century.
• 193, Uganda criminalized homosexual activities, inspired by the Bible; long example.
• 196, Holy dogma—it’s not easy to separate ethical judgements from factual statements. Philosophers like Sam Harris have argued that science can always resolve ethical dilemmas. And yet, what is happiness? We can’t measure it. And without the guidance of some religion [ in the broadest sense of course ], we can’t maintain large-scale social orders, 198.3.
• 198, The witch hunt—history. In theory, both religion and science are interested in truth. “In fact, neither science nor religion care much about the truth, hence they can easily compromise, coexist and even cooperate.” 199.4 Religion is interested in order; science is interested in power, over truth. [[ Really? At best this is a cynical take. ]]
• Thus modern history is about forming a deal between science and one particular religion: humanism.
• Next two chapters about this covenant; and the final part of the book about how this covenant is disintegrating, and what might replace it.

Ch6, The Modern Covenant, p200

• Modernity is a deal: “humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power” 200.7. This deal shapes our entire culture, and ourselves from the moment of birth. [[ it doesn’t seem to matter to Harari that the meaning given up is false – fictitious – and invented by humans; doesn’t reality matter? ]]
• Modern power comes as a result of scientific progress and economic growth. There was no such ‘growth’ for much of history; productivity was steady, etc. It was for lack of funding. The miracle of credit enables economic growth. (reference to zero-sum, p204b) Example vampire bats, who loan blood to each other, but without interest, unlike bankers.
• Modern economic growth is vital. We must produce more in order raise the standard of living, handle expanding population, and making any headway against poverty. And economic growth turns out to be the solution for everything, p207, e.g. to solve religious and political strife.
• And so free-market capitalism has become virtually a religion, 210.1; certainly it “helped global harmony far more than centuries of Christian preaching about loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek.” P201.5
• The first commandment of capitalism is: reinvest profits. Thus a typical conservation today is about how best to invest one’s gains. P211. Even games these days are oriented around capitalism, e.g. Civilization.
• 212, But can this go on forever? Only if we have a store of resources. We used to rely on the discovery of new lands. Now, despite talk of “new planets and even galaxies” (212.7 !? – perhaps the only allusion to space travel in this book?), we need other methods.
• That new resource, beyond raw materials and energy, is knowledge, provided by science. People used to believe the holy scriptures contained all knowledge worth knowing, 213.4.
• Now the danger is ecological collapse. Do we slow growth? Or expect that expanded knowledge, and more growth, will solve the problem? In some quarters people are taking measure to shut out the consequences of ecological collapse, e.g. in China, protection against the smog. Yet the poor, as always, will suffer the most. And despite understanding the danger, greenhouse gases haven’t slowed, despite international agreements.
• 218, The Rat Race. And so we’re always under pressure to produce more. We *need* upheavals; all that is solid melts into air. And it feeds on the natural human tendency toward greed. And it’s been a huge success, 220. Yet, how did we avoid the loss of meaning? By a new religion: humanism.

Ch7, The Humanist Revolution (60 pages)

• We’ve managed to find a new meaning. Ironically, the greatest danger these days come from those who cling to the old meaning of a grand cosmic plan, 222b: “Yet today, those who pose the greatest threat to global law and order are precisely those people who continue to believe in God and His all-encompassing plans.”
• So absent that, what keeps world order? Humanism. “The humanist religion worships humanity, and expects humanity to play the part of that God played in Christianity and Islam, and that the laws of nature played in Buddhist and Daoism.” [[ I still take great exception to use of the loaded term ‘worship’…..]]
• In past centuries no one trusted human thinking; we needed God for meaning, and authority. Compare 1300 to now.  [[ again, Harari sidesteps the obvious point that ideas of God and God’s meaning and authority *were invented by humans* ]]
• Today, the humanist theme is everywhere: be true to oneself. What do you feel? People marry for love. When conflicts arise, the resolution is about feelings, not scripture. Even zealots – e.g. religious zealots upset by gay pride parades – resort to their hurt feelings, 228t.
• And in politics: democracy, never remotely conceivable in the middle ages, when even art was attributed to superhuman inspiration—the Holy Spirit, represented by the dove.
• Now, anything can be art, e.g. Duchamp’s urinal. [[ again, saying “feelings” makes it sound wishy-washy; one could just as well talk about trust and accountability… ]]
• Again: the customer is always right; education is about thinking for oneself. The cosmos has changed—236m, the exterior universe became empty; the interior world became deep and rich with meaning. And so even belief in God is a *choice* about what one feels…
• The medieval formula for knowledge was Scriptures X Logic. (multiplied; just one won’t do). With the scientific method it became Empirical Data X Mathematics.
• Now the humanist formula is Experience X Sensitivity. Now understanding is about having a wide variety of experiences, and interest in what they mean, and being able to change one’s views 239.6. Thus author might cultivate fine teas. 240.7, “The highest aim of humanist life is to fully develop your knowledge through a wide variety of intellectual, emotional and physical experiences.”
• Thus we have a yin and yang, a balance between science and humanism, between power and meaning.
• In premodern narratives, there was no change—heroes killing monsters or villains. Modern narratives are all about inner lives, how people change, from Ulysses to Survivor, Oz to Trek etc. [[ Thus the standard definition of modern literature, which science fiction subverts, as being about someone’s inner life, typically about the most important events of that life. There was no such literature until about 150 years ago. ]]
• 243, War. Similarly, attitudes about war changed; used to be depicted as the results of fearless leaders; now about the experience of the common soldier, rather than about dying in battles ordained by God. Examples of paintings.
• 248, Yet the humanist movement split into three schisms: ‘liberalism’, 249.7; socialist humanist; and evolutionary humanism. They all deal differently with the contradictions that arise. E.g., what to do about refugees, Angela Merkel.
• Liberal humanism is about allowing each person to experience their own life fully, and not valuing any one over others. This can lead to nationalism, a mild sort where the shared values of an entire country must be protected from outside influence.
• Socialist humanism focuses on others’ feelings and how one’s actions influence others. These people might consider liberalism a capitalist trap, a self-absorption, a naivety about how the system really works and how it came to be. The goal of socialist humanism is to understand the system; thus an emphasis on political parties and trade unions.
• Evolutionary human keys off Darwin to emphasize that conflict is necessary, because only the fittest should win; the superior beings and cultures should prevail. Famous quote from the film The Third Man. This attitude is popularized by Nietzsche –what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger—and in the memories of soldiers who’ve gone to war, an experience that pales all others.
• Author cautions that the extremes of Hitler or Stalin don’t mean these approaches have no value – they are all sections of the ‘human horizon’, 259t.
• An extended example: consider four experiences, listening to Beethoven, to Chuck Berry, to a tribal chant, or to a wolf’s howling. Which is most valuable? The liberal might dismiss only the wolf – thus the Voyager record. The socialists look at context of each. The evolutionary humanists are eager to declare Beethoven as obviously best, there I said it., p262
• Are these distinctions frivolous? No—these schisms have widened. At the start of the 20^th century, liberalism thought history was on their side. Then they were assaulted on both the left and right. (Long brilliant sketch of 20^th century history p264-269). Liberalism eked through only by virtue of nuclear bombs, the MAD stalemate. And eventually prevailed, as the 21^st came around, as more and more countries became liberal democracies.
• There is now no serious alternative to “the liberal package of individualism, human rights, democracy and a free market”, 269.2
• Not the religious fundamentalists? No; they have nothing relevant to say about the world. Technology depends on a kind of ‘religion’ to give it purpose, but the ancient fundamentalist religions have nothing to say about new technologies. Hundreds of millions may go on believing, but numbers don’t count much in history – history is made by small groups of engineers and financiers who change the technological world.
• There’s never been a shortage of “priests, mystics, and gurus who argued that they alone held the solution to all of humanity’s woes…” 272.2
• Examples of religious reactionaries—a religious leader in Sudan, in 1881, who beheaded the local British commander and established an Islamic theocracy that lasted until 1898. A Hindu revival movement for Vedic knowledge; Pope Pius IX, who discovered the principle of papal infallibility; a Chinese scholar named Hong had visions of being Jesus’ younger brother that led to wars that killed 20 million people. While elsewhere factories and railroad and steamships filled the world.
• P275 Now, in the early 21^st century, the last train of progress is leaving the station – after which there may be no more homo sapiens. It’s about 21^st century technology to create bodies, brains, and minds.
• Traditional religions are reactive, not creative. Contraceptives, the internet, … religious leaders fret.
• Compare the most important influential inventions or discoveries of the 20^th century – there are so many to choose from – to the influential discoveries or inventions of traditional religions – of which there are virtually none? Except perhaps the industry of torture, via YouTube.
• New ideas come from new thinkers, not ancient religious texts, 277-278: when considering new ideas. “Yet Christian true-believers – however progressive – cannot admit to drawing their ethics from Foucault and Haraway. So they go back to the Bible, to St. Augustine and to Martin Luther, and make a very thorough search. They read page after page and story after story with the utmost attention, until they finally discover what they need: some maxim, parable or ruling that, if interpreted creatively enough means God blesses gay marriages and women can be ordained to the priesthood. They then pretend the idea originated in the Bible, when in fact it originated with Foucault. The Bible is kept as a source of authority, even though it is no longer a true source of inspiration.”
• Yet—liberalism may become obsolete.

Part III: Homo Sapiens Loses Control

Ch8, The time Bomb in the Laboratory, p283

• Some of Liberalism’s ‘factual statements’ don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny. In particular: free will, the elephant in the lab.
• Brain studies show that biological functions are either deterministic or random – but not free. Even though we ‘feel’ free. Studies show our minds make decisions a few hundred millisecond before we are consciously aware of them. We feel, but we don’t choose.
• [[ tempted to wonder why author doesn’t simply acknowledge soul and free will as ‘stories’ like his others… ]]
• Further, we can manipulate and control the mind, e.g. robo-rats, treatments for depression, and ‘transcranial stimulators’ that enable a person to play first-person shooter games without the ‘voices in the head’ causing doubts, 291.2.
• This undermines the belief in individualism; there is no one authentic self. Our minds have two hemispheres; experiments and accidents; our minds concoct explanations for things the other side has already perceived. Kahneman: we have a narrating self. We’re subject to the ‘peak-end rule’ as in childbirth, colonoscopies.
• We identify with our narrating self, as opposed to our experiencing self.
• 301, A Borges story. We cling to justification; ‘our boys didn’t die in vain’ – that causes us to pursue lost causes, send even more soldiers to die in battle. Priests know this too—by making people sacrifice, it cements their commitment to the cause they are sacrificing for. [[ this is the sunken cost fallacy, though he doesn’t use the term ]] Applies to economics, etc. Our ‘self’ is just another such story, 306m—
• “We see then that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money. Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and daydreams we’ve savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause me to sacrifice my life, if that’s what the plot requires. We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.”  [[ one gets used to such passages, but taken in isolation, such passages like this are quite extraordinary…
• Thus, 307.2: “Medieval crusaders believed that God and heaven provided their lives with meaning; modern liberals believe that individual free choices provide life with meaning. They are all equally delusional.”
• And yet even people like Dawkins and Pinker cling to liberal values…

Ch9, The Great Decoupling

• So what are the practical implications? There are three points about how 21^st century development might make liberalism obsolete:
  • 1, Humans will lose economic and military usefulness;
  • 2, The system will find value in humans collectively, but not in unique individuals;
  • 3, The system will find some value in particular unique individuals, and they will constitute a new elite
• Historical sketch that notes how conscription, beginning in the French revolution, came with civil rights… even women’s suffrage, since women were required to support America’s wars.
• Yet, with modern cyber warfare, individual warriors are no longer needed. Computers are as *intelligent* as us without being conscious. Autonomous cars; etc
• So unenhanced humans may become useless. We have algorithmic stock market trading; lawyer searching; digital teachers; even doctors; Watson. There are technical problems to be solved – but they only need to be solved once. Pharmacists.
• 322, So what to do with this useless class? Humans over history have specialized into various specialized professions – which make them *more* easily replaced by algorithms.
• Humans are algorithms; even things like facial recognition and chess have now been done better by machines. Baseball. Truck driving.
• Might algorithms become legal entities? Even art, and music. Examples. Poetry.
• So what to do with all the useless people? Estimates of various professions being taken over by computer algorithms, p330. What will they do all day? Take drugs and play computer games? Or would an advanced AI simply exterminate humanity? –note scenario 332t, in which a computer assigned to compute pi takes over the universe – is this an SF scenario?
• So, 332, summary. Algorithms may know us better than we know ourselves.
• 334.7, “People will no longer see themselves as autonomous beings running their lives…” [[ really? Why not? Most people today see themselves in the context of ancient religions… ]]
• Algorithms need not be perfect, only better. Medical devices; health monitors. Angelina Jolie and her genetic test. In theory, if Google monitored all emails, it could detect flu epidemics more quickly than ever. 23andm3; Google’s life advance 342.
• The system will know you better. Would elections become obsolete? [[ again, can’t imagine this actually happening ]]
• Through our interaction with google and Fb, we are giving away our lives for free.
• 346, Waze, and driving system. What if it goes from being an oracle, to a sovereign – that is, it *runs* all traffic to best efficiency?
• Similarly, Cortana, and Siri, and Amazon recommendations, and Kindle’s statistics.
• And yet, these devices are subject to attacks…
• 351, Third threat: that a group of elites might emerge. We already have huge income inequality; what if real gaps of physical and cognitive abilities emerge?
• The age of the masses may be over, and thus the idea of equality or civil rights for all.
• What new ideologies might emerge?

Ch10, the Ocean of Consciousness

• The new religions will emerge from labs, e.g. in Silicon Valley. Two alternatives: techno-humanism, or data religion.
• The first uses technology to upgrade humanity to achieve the humanist goals.
• 358, The gap between our perceptions and mental states, with all those possible – the spectrum; the “vast ocean of alien mental states”. Psychology has only closely studied sub-normatives and WEIRD (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) people, especially psychology students themselves. Yet many exotic mental states may be unique, as in primitive cultures. [[ really?? Never seen any suggestion why this might be so, only cf Haidt about cultural attitudes ]]
• Thus we can’t know how Neanderthals thought, let alone bats, or other animals.
• We’ve lost some of our earlier senses. ‘Positive psychology’ tries to explore not damaged minds but prosperous minds. Our sense of smell is no longer so important; we’re not so attentive as in the past; we dismiss insights from dreaming.
• Yet attempts to explore these senses might *downgrade* humans…
• 368, So do we listen to our inner voices, or control them? We can do that through chemicals – drugs that calm nerves and so on. Yet doesn’t this violate the humanist first commandment? 370t, to listen to oneself? That is, what is the authentic self? Where do we peg the nail of authentic self?
• It’s the humanist dilemma. And so what could replace desires and experience? Information.

Ch11, The Data Religion

• The idea of ‘dataism’ is the result of Darwin and Turing – biology and computer science. There’s no longer a chain from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. The idea that biology is about data is now scientific dogma, 373.8
• It’s seen in the dynamic between central vs distributed data-processing, i.e. communism vs capitalism. The former failed, e.g. Lysenko, because it couldn’t deal with change as well as the latter.
• 378, Where has all the power gone? Political systems can’t keep up with technology, e.g. the internet. Thus voters selected Brexit, etc.
• Thus, currently, no politicians have grand visions. As if they are leaving everything for the market to decide.
• And yet, of course, market forces cannot address global warming, or the threat of AI, 382t.
• So what might emerge? p383, history in a nutshell, as:
  • 1, increasing number of processors;
  • 2, increasing the variety or processors;
  • 3, increasing the number of connections between processes; and
  • 4, increasing the freedom of movement along existing connection.
• And then a sketch of history along these four methods. What is the output? The internet of all things.
• 386. Dataism becomes a religion through its values: the flow of information should be free; everything should be linked…
• This is the first new ‘value’ since 1789.
• About Aaron Schwartz, who felt information should be free, and hung himself before he was convicted.
• And so, we have communal cars, and Wikipedia, and how young people these days welcome the connectivity 391.8—“What’s the point of doing or experiencing anything if nobody knows about it, and if it doesn’t contribute something to the global exchange of information?” [[ brilliant, but – isn’t modern technology simply allowing a human tendency that has always existed? And here I am posting these notes on the web! ]]
• And so: share! Upload! Otherwise nothing has any value, 392b, “We must prove to ourselves and to the system that we still have value. And value lies not in having experiences, but in turning these experiences into free-flowing data.”
• 393, Know Thyself. So this trend is not humanist nor anti-humanist. Music is mathematical patterns.
• Hollywood pictures about how love defeats aliens; how simplistic; is that the best you can do?
• Whatever happens, it will take decades, or centuries.
• Feelings remain as encapsulating millions of years of evolution, 397t—“When you read the Bible you are getting advice from a few priests and rabbits who lived in ancient Jerusalem. In contrast, when you listen to your feelings, you follow and algorithm that evolution has developed for millions of years, and that withstood the harshest quality-control tests of natural selection.” …
• “Yet in the twenty-first century, feelings are no longer the best algorithms in the world….”
• And so what are our new guidelines: get a DNA sequence! Monitor your body! Put everything online! Allow Google and Fb to access all your email and posts!
• Where do these algorithms come from? Some are designed… some emerge.
• 399, There are critiques. We don’t know how ‘data flows’ produce consciousness; so maybe life is more than data flows. And maybe there’s more to life than decision making. A critical examination of this dogma is in order. But even if it’s wrong, it might still take over.
• If it does—initially it would promote health, happiness, and power. Eventually though individual humans would become less and less important than the internet-of-everything. Humans may just become another ripple in the data flow.
• All the ideas in this book are just possibilities, not prophecies. So what should we pay attention to? We need to decide what to pay attention to. In the short term, immigration, refugees. Decades: global warming, inequality.
• Long term:
  • 1, A scientific dogma that organisms are algorithms and life is data process;
  • 2, Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness;
  • 3, Non-conscious but intelligent algorithms may come to know us better than we know ourselves.
• Are these valid? What will happen if they are?

Yuval Noah Harari, SAPIENS: A Brief History of Humankind (2015)

This is a history of the human species in the context of “Big History” – the first page sketches the history of the entire universe as a backdrop – and is a history of trends, discoveries, concepts, and ideas, not of wars and conquests and politicians. It’s been a perennial bestseller since its English-language publication in 2015, and seems to have established itself as part of the cultural zeitgeist, much as Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel have. Harari has since published two further books, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow and 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century, which I’ll summarize here too.

The prime virtue of this book is that it covers an enormous amount of material about the growth and expansion of our species, using the widest possible perspective, and not getting bogged down by the names and dates of conventional history. Harari likes big ideas. Yet at times he’s overly reductionist in collapsing many ideas into those few big ideas.

Top-level summary:

• Harari demarks human history by three great revolutions: the cognitive, the agricultural, and the scientific.
• He echoes Diamond’s assessment of the agriculture revolution as a ‘fraud,’ i.e. not so much a great leap forward as the cause for many of our problems today.
• A principle theme is the notion of ‘imagined orders’ based on shared myths to build societies larger than small tribes in which everyone knew each other. These are ‘inter-subjective’ ideas like religion, nationalism, and legal system, that depend on the beliefs of many people in the society to sustain them. (E.g. without a shared belief about money, the coins and paper would be valueless.) And that modern society is impossible without them.
• Between the agricultural and scientific revolutions he traces the history and significant of…
  • Writing, numbers, and hierarchies;
  • Money, empire, and religion.
• (Opinion: In his discussion of religion his penchant for reductionism becomes problematic, by equating religion with ideologies, like communism, and considering secular philosophies to be ‘humanistic religions’! Thus a lack of worship of gods is, to him, a worship of humanity.)
• And then he relates:
• The idea of ignorance and how science admits ignorance and thus allows discovery and progress
• How science and empire supported each other to allow humanity to expand across the world
• How economic growth became the trend of history; how this depends on increased productivity, and the discovery of new kinds of energy, and the necessity of consumerism
• How this threatens the ecology of the planet; how modern life has replaced family and local community with the state and the market, with imagined communities, with the idea that we live with incessant change
• But how this threatens the ecology of the planet, and how it hasn’t necessarily led to an increase in human happiness.
• Finally he considers the end of the species, threatened by various kinds of engineered creatures, biological or cybernetic.
• He concludes: we are powerful as gods, but don’t know where we’re going.

\\\

Detailed summary, with key points bolded and [[ my comments in brackets ]]

Part One, The Cognitive Revolution

1, An Animal of No Significance

• Book begins with thumbnail recap of history—summarized in timeline, several pages earlier. In this history there are three revolutions: the cognitive revolution, 70Kya (i.e thousand years ago, my abbreviation), the agricultural, 12kya, and the scientific, 500ya.
• There were humanlike minds 2mya, but those creatures were insignificant on the world stage. Species come in families, and humans used to belong to a family too, i.e. other humans, including the Neanderthals and others, which have become extinct. At one time thousands of years ago there were several such species existing simultaneously; there was no linear progression from one to the next. He calls our species ‘Sapiens’ to emphasize that there were other ‘human’ species.
• Author doesn’t expect that our species will last another 1000 years, 6b [my abbrev. For page 6 bottom].
• Our success came from our large brains, and our ability to walk upright. Human babies are born relatively prematurely, 10m, and require years of care, requiring social ties (it takes a village).
• The earliest tools were likely used to extract marrow from bones of animals killed by other animals; humans were in the middle of the food chain. What changed was the use of fire, which enabled cooking, and reduced the amount of time needed to eat each day.
• About 70kya we emerged from Africa, to places other human species already resided. Did we interbreed, or replace them? Most favor the second theory, though recent evidence does show that modern humans have some Neanderthal DNA; this has implications for notions of racial equality, but that’s what the evidence shows.
• What drove those other species to extinction? Were we more resourceful, or simply more violent? Key observation about intolerance toward humans of even slightly different groups, 80.0: “Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group.”
• What if those other species had survived? How would religion and politics have been different?
• So why did we prevail? Perhaps language.

[[ Passing thought: is the rejection of evolution, by a large part of the modern population, in part due to distaste at being related to chimps and gorillas—which trigger the same disgust attitude that racists feel when encountering other colors of their own species…? ]]

2, The Tree of Knowledge

• We acquired our current intelligence by 30K years ago, presumably due to random mutations. This was the Cognitive Revolution.
• Language is supple, enables gossip, and enables the thinking of things that don’t exist—collective myths, that enabled cooperation.
• Chimps are highly hierarchical, with an alpha male ruling, and coalitions among members of groups, which typically have 20-50 members each.
• Our own threshold for groups is about 150 – beyond that, we cannot keep track of inter-relationships. [[ this is a commonly cited psychological limitation; e.g. you may have 500 Facebook friends but most of them you don’t know very well. ]]
• In order to manage larger groups, humans need common myths—religious, national, and legal.
• Example: the lion of Peugeot (the car maker), representing the legal fiction of an LLC or corporation.
• We tell stories and need others to believe them. These aren’t lies, but sincere beliefs. [[ as I’ve long thought, ‘rights’ are simply social agreements, not anything handed down from on high or pre-existing in nature. ]]
• These are ‘imagined realities’, 31b that come to override genetic dictates. Changing stories can lead to changed behavior. Thus the emergence of childless elites… trade between groups (Neanderthals didn’t trade), cooperative hunting… cultures… and history. It’s our mythical glue that makes all this possible.
• He summarizes, p39.

[[ This keys with ideas about how religion is *useful*, like nationalism, and perhaps why it should not be disabused? –issue to consider: if every person could recognize all these myths for what they are—would society collapse? What would hold society together? Well, the answer might be, how do freethinkers of various types keep on living? What makes them keep on going? ]]

3, A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

• We’ve spent almost our entire history as hunter-gatherers, and that has shaped our eating habits and much else; thus now we have obesity because we crave sweets, which used to be rare. There are also suggestions that primitive tribes were communities without monogamy, where children were imagined to have multiple fathers; a ‘commune’ theory, controversial [[ author footnotes the Sex at Dawn book I read some years ago, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, and reviewed here: http://www.markrkelly.com/Views/?p=732 ]]
• This was how humans lived from roughly 70,000 to 12,000 years ago. They left few artefacts. We can look at modern forager societies for clues – yet these are highly variable. There is/was no single ‘way of life’.
• Yet these societies generally consist of small bands, of only humans – except, at some point, dogs. Contact between them was rare, and only valuables were traded. Still, slow wandering or spreading of these tribes would have reached China in 10K years.
• These were the original ‘affluent society’. The earliest settlements were fishing villages along rivers, perhaps 45K ya. Most people had intimate knowledge of the natural world, and led more interesting lives, than people today, who exist in niches of specialty. They worked less. They had high infant mortality. They had a more varied diet, and fewer infectious diseases (which came with settlements).
• Animistic beliefs were common; these were not a religion, but rather assumptions about individual animals, rocks, etc. Not theism, 55t, which “is the view that the universal order is based on a hierarchical relationship between humans and a small groups of ethereal entities called gods.”
• We don’t know much about whether these people lived mostly at peace, or in war. They exist behind a ‘curtain of silence’.
• What they *did* do was reshape the ecology of the planet.

4, The Flood

• (Author uses term ‘flood’ to mean how Sapiens spread across the globe and killed off many other species)
• Early sapiens lived in the Afro-Asian region, while around the world were many independent eco-systems, with different animal species. Sapiens didn’t reach Australia until 45K ya, and quickly became the deadliest species. Soon most large marsupials became extinct. Life there had survived multiple ice ages, and humans didn’t affect sea life, so human cause is virtually certain. This happened around the world; New Zealand, reached only 800 years ago (!).
• Three reasons: those large mammals or marsupials were slow breeders; humans had fire, and could burn down forests (which is how eucalyptus, formerly rare, thrived and became dominant); and climate change at the time did contribute.
• The Americans, 16K ya, and the very southern tip of South America by 10K bc. Many species lost, p71.
• Again and again: Madagascar, 1500ya, Hawaii in 500, NZ in 1200. There were three waves of extinction: the first, by the foragers; the second, by the spread of farmers; the third, by industrial activity today. It may well reach sea life as well.

[[ all of this echoes the big extinctions in Kolbert’s book; in hers everything humans have done is part of her big Six. ]]

Part Two, The Agricultural Revolution

5, History’s Biggest Fraud

• The transition to agriculture began around 9500-8500 BC in Turkey, western Iran, and the Levant [middle east]. It developed independently elsewhere, but only certain areas, because so few plant and animals species were amenable to domestication. See map p79.
• The idea that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity—is a fantasy, p79. In fact, people weren’t more intelligent at the time, and the life of farmers was generally less satisfying than that of hunter-gatherers, and farmers worked harder; it led to population explosions and pampered elites. It was history’s biggest fraud, 79b.
• The culprits were the plants themselves, esp wheat, rice, and potatoes. The transition was slow; there was no planned series of steps. Wild wheat etc was part of the hunter-gatherer diet. The plants domesticated the humans. To maintain the plants, humans settled into communities, with rises in violence and spread of diseases. (Note violence rates, p82—compare Pinker?)
• The one benefit was the expansion of the human population, an evolutionary success only in that way, even if their conditions were worse.
• The luxury trap—as throughout history, people were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions, p86.7. People worked hard, had more children, then had to keep working hard. An iron law of history is that luxuries become necessities, 87b. Thus it was never practical to abandon the settlement and go back to foraging. This is an important lesson…88.
• P89, possibly there were cultural motivations: evidence has been found of monuments built in 9500 BC by foragers. For some religious purpose? Did building the temple require a village to support it? Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.
• Meanwhile the domestication of animals was underway, especially by breeding docile varieties of sheep etc, managing the young to keep the milk coming, slaughtering the males for food. Ironically, these few species—sheep, pigs, cattle, chickens—number in the billions in today’s world, but live miserable lives. A few other species—dogs, cats, horses—live pampered lives. But again, evolutionary ‘success’ for most came at the cost of misery, p97.

6, Building Pyramids

• There was no turning back from the agricultural revolution. By the 1^st century, there were 1 or 2 million foragers left, and 250 million farmers.
• With that came a shift in human sensibilities: an attachment to home and neighbors. As late as AD 1400, farmers occupied just 2% of the planet’s surface—the rest was too hot, dry, cold, wet, etc. Most people felt tied down.
• The farming life entailed concern about the future—seasons, preparing against bad years—with worry and stress.
• Growing communities brought rulers and elites, including soldiers, priests, artists, and thinkers – “History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.” 101b.
• Throughout history wars have more often been triggered by these elites, not by food shortages. The cooperation of large groups required myths to bind them. It turns out mythology was much stronger than fables about spirits and totems. Mighty empires were created when “people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links” 103.3.
• History: a few hundred people in Jericho, 8500 BC; Anatolia, a town of some 10,000 in 7000 BC; 3100 BC the first Egyptian kingdom in the Nile valley; 2250 BC Sargon’s empire of Akkadia, with a million subjects. By 1000 BC to 500 BC, the mega-empires of the middle east, 103.8. 221BC, the Qin dynasty in China; later the Roman Empire with 100 million subjects.
• These ‘cooperation networks’ were seldom benign, but they were ‘imagined orders’ based on shared myths.
• Two examples. In 1776 BC, the code of Hammurabi in Babylon laid out rules for various offenses, p106-7, with examples like “If a superior man should blind the eye of another superior man, they shall blind his eye.” The order entailed three classes of people, superior people, commoners, and slaves, and two genders, with different values placed on each combination. Families were hierarchical; children were property of their parents.
• In 1776 AD, the Declaration of Independence also claimed to be divinely inspired, but with much different tenants: that “all men are created equal” and so on. Both of these declarations were wrong; they reflect no objective reality; they were both imagined realities about universals that exist only in the minds of Sapiens. For example, we can replace the presumptions of the Declaration with what we know about the reality of biology and sociology, and come up with “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.” P110.4
• [[ Of course Harari is being cheeky; what the founders meant wasn’t that all men were literally equal, but they were intended to be treated equally before the law. Or as much as seemed feasible at the time, without the 14^th amendment. ]]
• The point is these imagined orders are *useful*:
• Quote:
  • We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large members of humans can cooperate effectively.

[[ and my personal theme is that it’s possible to, privately, understand that all these schemes are not objectively true, and that an objective truth about the nature of the universe can be found, is available to be found, and understood ]]

• At the same time, there needs to be ‘true believers’ in these orders for them to survive; Voltaire: “There is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night.” Natural orders are fragile, prone to collapse if people stop believing. A society can not survive merely by force. Those who lead cannot all be cynics, p112.

[[ this recalls a theme among atheist writers, that perhaps it’s not wise to disabuse people of their beliefs, for the maintenance of social order; and the counter-theme that this is condescending, to think that people are not able to handle the truth. Harari suggests that the social order depends on some kind of myth – if not a shared religious one, then a shared nationalist one, or similar. This is why my project only addressed the individual’s ability to step away from the myths and apprehend reality for what it has been found to be, not any attempt to revolutionize society. ]]

• So, how do make people believe? First, never admit that the order is imagined, 112b. Educate them from birth in this order. The humanities and social sciences are all about how the imagined order is woven into the tapestry of life, 113m. There are three factors that keep people from realizing that these orders exist only in their imagination:
• 1, The imagined order is embedded in the material world. Thus, modern belief in individuality is reflected in modern house’s divisions into individual bedrooms for each child, where they can maintain privacy; this was never true in medieval times.
• 2, The imagined order shapes our desires. Thus romantic ideals shape both our consumerism, and our desire to travel to exotic locations, a notion expressed in ancient societies by the building of pyramids, in times when travels abroad would have made no sense.
• 3, The imagined order is inter-subjective. Not objective, like radiation; not subjective, like imaginary friends; but subjective among the larger group, p117, shared by many people. “Inter-subjective phenomena are neither malevolent frauds nor insignificant charades. They exist in a different way from physical phenomena such as radioactivity, but their impact on the world may still be enormous. Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.” 117.
• To change these imagined orders is difficult, given they might require a change of consciousness of a billion people. “A change of such magnitude can be accomplished only with the help of a complex organization, such as a political party, an ideological movement, or a religious cult.” And to change the imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.
• There is no escape. When we break down the walls or a prison and run towards freedom, we are merely running into the more spacious yard of a bigger prison. 118b.

[[ again, you can escape the prison through science, but likely only privately ]]

Ch7, Memory Overload

• Rules for games allow even strangers to play. As societies grew the rules became too elaborate and complex to be remembered—laws, taxes, etc. Human brains are inadequate: their capacity is limited; they die; they are only adapted for certain kinds of information, p121, e.g. about flora and fauna, and about personal relations among the tribe.
• And so complex societies required—numbers. Growing societies collapsed if they could not manage the information to manage them.
• The earliest solution came from the Sumerians, in 3500bc – writing, on clay tablets. Those tablets show accounting records, about who sold what to whom.
• These early systems of writing were ‘partial scripts’, like math and music notation – systems to record only particular kinds of information. They didn’t capture poetry. The Andeans used knots tied on cords, the quipus, p125.
• Full scripts came by 2500 BC, in Sumeria, that became cuneiform. The issue then became, how to store and maintain huge amounts of information inscribed on clay tablets? P127. Some cultures did develop methods of storing and retrieving such records; they had catalogues; they had schools for scribes. This entailed developing ways of categorizing, of thinking about the world—free association and holistic thought gave way to compartmentalization and bureaucracy. 130.3.
• Then came numbers. The ‘Arabic’ numerals were invented by the Hindus. Mathematical notation has become the world’s dominant language (example of equations, p131). They are needed because “With rare exceptions, human brains are simply incapable of thinking through concepts like relativity and quantum mechanics.” 131.5
• Entire fields of knowledge require mathematics.
• And the extension – the binary script of computers.

Ch8, There is No Justice in History

• How did humans organize themselves into large mass-cooperation networks, without instincts to do so? They created imagined orders and devised scripts.
• But these imagined orders were neither neutral nor fair. Thus Hammurabi established classes of people; even the American order created a hierarchy between whites and others, between rich and poor.
• Ironically, every imagined hierarchy claims its order is natural and inevitable. Ordained by gods; Aristotle’s natures; white supremacist theories. Hindus cosmic forces. All of these are of human origin. Modern Americans are shocked by racial ideas—yet are OK with the hierarchy of the rich and poor, who both get what they deserve, 136m.
• And yet—complex societies seem to *need* some imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination; there are no known societies that have no discriminations. Hierarchies serve functions; they enable people to know how to interact with others, though social cues.
• The vicious circle, p138—all hierarchies arose through accidents of history, e.g. the Hindu caste system, from the invasion by the Indo-Aryan people 3000 years ago; thus outcasts == untouchables.
• 140, Purity in America—Europeans imported slaves from Africa because 1, Africa was closer than, say, Asia; 2, there was already a slave trade in Africa itself; and 3, Africans were partially immune to the malaria and yellow-fever that plagued the plantations. And then religious and scientific myths were created to justify it. These myths remained even after the slaveholders gave up, in a vicious circle of cause and effect; Jim Crow laws; see diagram p143.
• 144, He and She—every society has a hierarchy that divides men and women, and almost everywhere men prevail. Girls are thought unlucky; wives ‘belong’ to their husbands. Is this an imagined system, or why is it so widespread? Is there a biological basis? Similar concerns about homosexuality, p146, which has been perfectly fine in some societies. Rule is: biology enables, culture forbids. Whatever is possible, is by definition natural p147.2. The idea of the unnatural comes from Christian theology, with its ideas about the purpose of each limb and organ. In fact, organs have evolved to perform many functions; evolution has no purpose. Mouths, wings, sex organs.
• 148, Sex and Gender—are different things; diagram p149. Standards of masculinity have varied; compare Louis XIV to Obama, p150-1. Gender is serious business; men must prove themselves their whole lives.
• 152, What’s So Good About Men?—so why are men preferred? Many theories, none satisfactory. Because men are stronger? This is true only on average; and social power doesn’t depend on muscle power. Because men are more aggressive? But again, the lower classes are more often employed to fight, while the upper classes stay at home. Because of differing reproduction strategies? P157. Men are more ambitious; women more choosy. Yet other species are matriarchal, as in elephants and bonobos. Humans are a cooperative species; why then don’t more cooperative women lead the way? So we don’t know the answer to this. We do know that gender roles have changed greatly in recent decades: women can vote, hold high offices; homosexuality now taken for granted.

Part III: The Unification of Mankind

Ch9, The Arrow of History

• A century ago it was thought different cultures were unchanging, each with its own essence. Now it’s the opposite: cultures are in constant flux. All manmade orders are packed with internal contradictions, e.g. Christianity and chivalry in medieval Europe; freedom and equality now, with the battle between Democrats (more equality) and Republicans (more freedom). This cognitive dissonance drives cultural change; it’s an asset, 165.
• 166, the spy satellite—history does have a direction, when seen from on high: small simple cultures coalesce into bigger and more complex cultures. History is moving relentlessly towards unity, 166b. thousands of years ago there were many separate human worlds. By 1450, there were five: the whole Afro-Asia world; the Mesoamerican world; the Andean world; the Australian world; and the Oceanic world, map p169.
• Today we all follow the same geopolitical system, the same economic system, the same legal system, the same scientific system, 168b. The foods we think of as ethnic are really imported from elsewhere, 170t. Indians adopted horses from Europeans.
• 170 the global vision—homo sapiens evolved to distinguish between us and them. Now we are shifting to a universal order, driven by three universal orders: the monetary order; the imperial order; and the order of universal religions. These are the next three chapters.

Ch10, The Scent of Money

• When Cortes arrived in Mexico in 1519, the locals didn’t understand his interest in gold, to them a useless metal. When coins became common, they were exchanged with tolerance for the varieties of opposing sides.
• 174, how much is it?—small tribes bartered; as larger cultures allowed specialization, the barter system was impractical, e.g. p176. The largest barter experiment, the Soviet Union’s, failed miserably.
• 177, shells and cigarettes—money was created many times in many places. Money is anything to mark an exchange, not just coins and banknotes; cowry shells were used, cigarettes are used in modern prisons. And now money resides on computer servers. It’s a way to store wealth, where some kinds of wealth cannot be moved, e.g. real estate.
• 180, how does money work?—it works by trust, in the figments of collective imagination; money is the most universal and efficient system of mutual trust ever devised, 180.6. Early money had intrinsic value, e.g. barley. Later the shekel (mentioned in the Bible) is a standard 3 oz. weight of silver. Coins came in 640 BC, with ID marks and a stamp of authority. They didn’t have to be weighted. Roman denarius became the dinars of many cultures. Once one group believed in the value of gold, or any money, it spread automatically to other groups, based on common belief.
• 186, two universal principles: convertibility, and trust.
• Some things are ‘priceless’ like honor and loyalty, which is why certain things can’t be done, like selling one’s child. But money keeps working its way into everything. And it comes to be valued for itself, turning the world into a heartless marketplace. Money itself isn’t enough to explain the world….

Ch11, Imperial Visions

• An empire like Rome could be defeated in battle, if it kept winning the war. They responded to Numantia by starving them, a story that became enshrined in myth and Spanish culture—ironically.
• 190, what is an empire?—it rules over a significant number of distinct peoples, and it has flexible borders and an unlimited appetite, constantly acquiring new territories. Other factors, like its origin, form of government, etc., are not relevant.
• 191, evil empires? – we now regard empires as evil. But they work, and the argument that it’s somehow immoral for one group to rule over another is problematic, because history is constant stream of empires, one take over by another, lasting for centuries. And they exploit conquered peoples by enabling artists and other elites. Today’s world is a legacy of empires, 194t.
• 194, it’s for your own good—the first empire was the Akkadian Empire of Sargon, c2250 BC. It didn’t last long, and was subsumed by the Persian empire by 550 BC, whose attitude was that being part of an empire is for a nation’s own good. Other imperial visions, 196b, presumed legitimate authority from heaven, to rule over all for the good of all. The Quin of China.
• 197, When they became us—empires have brought together smaller diverse cultures, entailing standardization and legitimacy, and a sense of a large family of common people, sometimes including barbarians who needed to be converted to the one true faith in a moral imperative, 198b. Examples.
• 202, Chart of the ‘imperial cycle’—empire established; its culture adopted by subject peoples; they demand equal status in the name of those values; the empire’s founders lose their dominance; the culture continues to flourish and develop.
• 204, Good guys and bad guys in history—it’s tempting to label the emperors as bad, but we all derive from imperial legacies. There are no pure authentic cultures. Would the Indians want to abandon the legacy of British rule—democracy, English, the railways, etc.? There is no dividing the world into good and bad.
• 207, The new global empire—now, nationalism is losing ground; more people feel part of all humankind. Then why not a global government? The problems of the modern world cannot be solved by any one nation.

[[ ironically things have backslid a bit since he wrote this ]]

Ch12, The Law of Religion

• Description of the holy Ka’aba in Mecca. P210:
  • Today religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement and disunion. Yet, in fact, religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires. Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.
• So religion is “a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.” This entails both this superhuman order, and that this order establishes norms and values that are binding. Thus football is not a religion, and beliefs in ghosts and fairies are not a source of moral standards, and are not a religion.
• To unite peoples, a religion must espouse a *universal* superhuman order, and it must spread this belief: both universal and missionary. Many ancient religions were local and exclusive. The universal and missionary religions appeared in the first millennium BC.
• 211, Silencing the lambs—the earliest beliefs involved animism, the idea that every animal and rock represented some kind of spirit. [[ Author doesn’t address the psychological source of these beliefs, i.e. agency detection. ]] These were very locale-specific. The agricultural revolution made plants and animals into property, creating a problem. The answer: gods. Ancient mythology often involves a contract with these gods for mastery over plants and animals—see Genesis. Recall animal sacrifices. [[ recall Equus: a thousand ‘local gods’ ]]. This development raised the status of humans.
• 213, The benefits of idolatry—some of these polytheistic religions nevertheless identified a single power or law. Greeks had a head god. Hindus identified Atman. The principle here was that this supreme power has no interest in human wants and desires. Whereas the lower gods with partial powers can be dealt with. Polytheistic religions rarely persecute heretics, or tried to convert subjects. The local gods of conquered people were fine.
• Except for the Christians under Rome, who refused to pay respect to the divinity of the emperor, 215b. Thus the Romans treated them as a subversive faction, though in 300 years only a few thousand Christians were killed, compared to the millions killed by fellow Christians over the next 1500 years. Especially in wars between Catholics and Protestants, in disagreement about the nature of Christ’s love, p216, gruesome examples.
• 217, God is one—some followers of polytheistic gods came to believe that their own particular patron was the only god, the supreme power, but moreover that he did have interest in humans and could be bargained with. “Thus were born monotheist religions, whose followers beseech the supreme power of the universe to help them recover from illness, win the lottery and gain victory in war.”
• The first was that of Akhenaten, c 350 BC, whose worship of Aten was abandoned after his death.
• Others remained marginal, like Judaism, who believed the supreme power’s interest was only in their tiny Jewish nation.
• The breakthrough was Christianity, who believed Jesus of Nazareth was their messiah, and who leader Paul of Tarsus reasoned that this news should be spread to the entire world. “In one of history’s strangest twists, this esoteric Jewish sect took over the mighty Roman Empire.” 218t.
• This served as the model for Islam, in the 7^th century. “In an even stranger and swifter historical surprise it managed to break out of the desert of Arabia and conquer an immense empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to India.” [[ this would have to be because of the appeal of such a belief to human nature… obviously not because of any actual evidence from the real world. ]]
• Monotheists have been more fanatical and missionary than polytheists, part of their mission being to exterminate all rival religions. It worked. Monotheistic religions spread across the globe, by the end of the first millennium and by today, outside East Asia.
• And yet, the idea of monotheism doesn’t always settle well. Thus Christians have their patron saints, each one to watch over this country or that specialty—an analog to the polytheistic gods, sometimes the same old gods in disguise, 220.
• 220, The battle of good and evil—and there were dualistic religions, which claimed two opposing powers: good and evil, that the universe is a battlefield between two forces. This explained the famous Problem of Evil.
• Yet it begs the problem of order: if there are two forces, who created this set-up and what are the rules? 221m. Monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil; dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. One possible answer: there’s one single omnipotent God, but He’s evil.
• An early example of dualism was founded by Zoroaster (Zarathustra) by 1000 BC. Later, Gnosticism and Manichaeanism. The latter creed rivaled Christianity for dominance of the Roman Empire, but lost.
• Yet dualism survived; belief in the Devil or Satan are now commonplace, though such claims are not to be found in the Old Testament. Humans believe in logical contradictions. Another dualistic concept led to the distinction between body and soul, matter and spirit. Why, if all was created by God? Led to the belief in the dualist heaven and hell—again, though not in the OT.
• “The average Christian believes in the monotheistic God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. Scholars have a name for this simultaneous avowal of different and even contradictory ideas and the combination of rituals and practices taken from different sources. It’s called syncretism. Syncretism might, in fact, be the single great world religion.” 223m
• 223, The law of nature—there have been other religions, that do not focus on gods, creeds which think a superhuman order is a product of natural laws; if there were gods, they too were subject to those laws. The prime example is Buddhism, whose central figure was a young prince who, around 500 BC, reflected on suffering and realized that people are never content. He meditated for six years and realized the problem was in the human mind, and the solution is to simply understand things as they are, and avoid suffering through practices of meditation, achieve a state of contentment and serenity known as nirvana. “…the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is” 226b.
• Still, most Buddhists don’t attain nirvana and continue to worship various gods, 227.7… many Buddhas and bodhisattavas. [[ so the belief in gods has some root in human nature, the idea of deferring to authority perhaps? Parents? ]]
• 228, The worship of man—the last 300 years has seen growing secularism, but not if you consider ‘natural-law religions’. These are liberalism, communism, capitalism, nationalism, and Nazism. These are usually called ideologies, not religions, but they all entail belief in a superhuman order. [[ Here his conflation of religion with ideology, and calling a non-religion a religion, becomes annoying. ]]
• Thus communists believe the law of nature was discovered by Karl Marx, et al. It has its holy script, Das Kapital. It has its holidays.
• Author admits this line of reasoning is dicey, p229. [[ Yup. ]]
• These modern creeds are also syncretic: a typical American is a nationalist, a capitalist, and a liberal humanist, p230t. More on these later.
• Humanist religions worship humanity 230m (!???); the world and all other beings exist solely for our species. [[ Nope; humanists merely deny any supernatural order superseding human values, which isn’t the same thing at all. ]]
• There are three sects, depending on the definition of humanity.
• There is liberal humanism, in which the quality of individual humans is paramount; its priority is human rights; it reflects monotheist beliefs about eternal individual souls.
• Socialist humanism, that believes humanity is a collective, that equality is the priority; it also reflects monotheistic beliefs in the idea that all souls are equal before God.
• And evolutionary humanism, which believes humankind is a species that can evolve or degenerate. The most famous representatives are the Nazis, who prioritized the Aryan race as the finest, against degradation by other races or by the infirm. Their ideas have been debunked, but similar ideas survive; thus racist laws have persisted. They emphasized what they thought was the struggle for survival, 235-6.
• And now today ideas about projects to upgrade humans are back in vogue. Life sciences have undermined belief in eternal souls, but this recognition has not filtered down to our laws or political science, 236e.

[[ The end of this chapter is extremely problematic in that author thinks deference to human values is ‘worship’. No no no no no. It’s realism, the recognition that there are no gods to worship, that humans are able to establish their own values. At best his descriptions are analogies. Furthermore it’s increasingly recognized by ‘humanists’ of various shades (and not by folks who think that God is in charge) that it’s not true that “the world and all other beings exist solely for our species” because acting like they do will destroy the planet, and thereby humanity. ]]

[[ I note that conservatives in the US treat the constitution as a kind of holy script, and the founders as some kind of infallible gods. This is again a reflection of a certain kind of thinking; a psychological matter. ]]

[[ p236, might be worth exploring how natural selection, the ‘struggle for survival,’ isn’t about weeding out the weak; the process preserves almost everyone. The process is about responding to changes in the environment, mostly. ]]

Ch13, The Secret of Success

• What can we saw about why the world exists as it does, rather than some other way?
• First, the Hindsight Fallacy. Why did Rome choose Christianity, when there were so many other options? Some have come up with deterministic explanations – about geography, genetics, or economy [[ pretty sure he’s alluding to Jared Diamond here ]] – but in fact the future is always a fog; the iron rule of history is that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time, 239.2.
• And it’s easy to imagine alternate scenarios. But history cannot be predicted; it’s chaotic. And history is a Level Two chaotic system—it reacts to predictions about it. [[ well this is why Hari Seldon kept his predictions secret! ]]
• Then why study history? Precisely to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, 241m.
• Second, Blind Clio. History’s choices are not made for the benefit of humanity. There’s no reason to believe that the way things turned out was for the best. The victors always believe their definition of good is the correct one.
• But maybe cultures are ideas that spread at the *expense* of their hosts, an idea variously called memetics [[ after Richard Dawkins’ ‘memes’ ]] , or in post-modernism ‘discourses’, or game theory, e.g. arms races.

Part Four: The Scientific Revolution

Ch14, The Discovery of Ignorance

• Things have changed more in the past 500 years than over any comparable time before that; since then we’ve circumnavigated the earth, landed on the moon, become aware of micro-organisms, and become able to end history, with atomic bombs.
• This process, the scientific revolution, entailed the realization that life was not static, that new discoveries could be made that improved the human condition. The feedback loop involved resources to do research, research that provided new powers, and powers that provided new resources. P250 How did the bond between science, politics, and economics emerge?
• 250, Ignoramus. First by the willingness to admit ignorance; then the centrality of observation and mathematics; and then using new theories to acquire new powers.
• This is contrast to the scriptures, which were assumed to possess all-encompassing wisdom; anything they excluded (like details about how spiders built their webs) was irrelevant. Anyone who suspected that religious traditions were ignorant of important things… were treated as heretics. Modern science allows for collective ignorance on such issues. “The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge.” 253.4 But doesn’t this undermine the shared myths that enable society? There are two responses. First, simple declare some theory to be true—as the Nazis and communists did. Second, declare a non-scientific truth and live with that, as liberal humanism does.
• 254, The scientific dogma. There is no dogma; there is always the possibility of completely new knowledge. Traditional rules were told as stories. Science resorts to math, and when calculus didn’t work, statistics were developed, at first by life-insurance people, to identifies trends where uncertainties prevails in individual cases. P256, in 1744. These techniques were so useful they changed education, making math something no longer for elites.
• 259, Knowledge is power. Yet most people find math hard, because its finding often defy common sense. [[ key point ]] 259.4 Science and technology only became aligned only by World War I, with aircraft, poison gas, etc p261. In the past, military advantages were organization; it didn’t occur to general to search for new technology.
• 264, The ideal of progress. Yet most societies have thought the golden age was in the past; that progress was not possible. Stories taught about the dangers of human efforts; lightning; poverty. [[ p264, note how progress moves beyond the idea that human efforts are fruitless, or evil ]]
• 266, The Gilgamesh project. The most ancient problem is that of death: Gilgamesh follows his best friend into the underworld, and emerged persuaded that death was inescapable. But now death is a technical problem, to be solved, 268.2. Examples from the past, how common injuries led to death; child mortality; how many children of Queen Eleanor died before she produced a male heir. And modern religions have lost interest in understanding death. [[ well, that’s because author’s modern ‘religions’ aren’t really religions…. P271 ]]
• 271, The sugar daddy of science. Science is expensive, and it’s naïve to think that science is funded for any reason other than for some political, economic, or religious goal. Science can’t make such judgements itself, or decide what to do with the results.

Ch15, The Marriage of Science and Empire

• How far is the sun from the Earth? In the 18^th century it was realized this could be determined from transits of Venus, of which there would be two, in 1761 and 1769. So expeditions were sent to far places around the world, including one led by Captain Cook, who used citrus to avoid scurvy. The expedition had both a scientific and a naval mission; he ‘discovered’ Australia, and within a century, many of its natives died, and the Tasmanians were wiped out completely.
• 278 Why Europe?—Europe was relatively a backwater; the world was dominated by Asia until 1850 or so. But then Europe discovered technology, like railroads, that quickly spread around the world. Why Europe? Modern science, and capitalism.
• 283, The mentality of conquest—the key factor in the spread of Europe’s science was its imperial mentality. Europeans admitted ignorance; they sought out new knowledge, rather than merely spreading their own view of the world, 284.
• 286, Empty maps—earliest world maps were full of the known world; by 1525 the Salviati world map had lots of empty space, for lands yet to be explored. The discovery of America was key, because it was aa area unknown to scripture—new knowledge was possible. The European voyages to explore and conquer were unprecedented in world history, p289b. Compare Zheng He’s expedition, which did not try to conquer or colonize.
• 291, Invasion from outer space—The Aztecs knew of no other world; when they were invaded, it was as if from outer space. Cortes captured Montezuma. Pizzaro used the same strategy for the Inca. China and other nations weren’t interested in the new world. Only in the 20^th century did non-European nation adopt a global vision.
• 297, Rare spiders and forgotten scripts—when Britain conquered India, they studied it (unlike the Muslims before them); they deciphered the cuneiform script, and the languages; these conquerors knew their empires. They identified this as a progressive, altruistic project, thus the ‘white man’s burden’ p301. OTOH some discoveries led to racist theories that later became anathema. These days we don’t speak in terms of race; we talk in terms of cultural purity.
• Thus science and empire building supported each other, 304.

Ch16, The Capitalist Creed

• Modern economic history is all about growth—unlike most of history, when the size of the economy stayed the same. To grow, you needed the concept of credit, and the idea that the future would be better. Example about a baker, a banker, etc. The idea that the future would be better was new. The idea that life was a zero-sum game was the reason wealth was considered sinful (in the Bible); to be wealthy meant someone else was deprived, 308b.
• 310, A growing pie—the scientific revolution brought the idea of progress. Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that greater profits enable businessmen to hire more assistants; thus increase in profits is what drives collective wealth. Greed is good. But it depends on the rich using profits to open new factories, rather than counting their coins like Scrooge. Medieval noblemen gave way to today’s corporate elite, in dreary suits. Economic growth became the supreme good, and became possible through science’s new discoveries every few years. If that bubble bursts, we’d be in trouble.
• 315, Columbus searches for an investor—Asia was a powerhouse, but did not use much credit. Columbus tried several nations before resorting to Spain. Financial systems became more complex. The Dutch succeeded with credit, by repaying their loans and protecting property rights; while the Spanish fought wars. Example of two sons who invest differently. Famous Dutch joint-stock company was VOC, which drove the conquest of Indonesia, and the settlement of New Amsterdam—New York, when the Dutch lost it. France did the Mississippi Company, for the lower M valley, including New Orleans, but a stock bubble led to a huge crash, which triggered the French Revolution, p324. M/w the British settled North America, and India.
• 325, In the name of capital—eventually governments did the bidding of companies, as in the first opium war of China, 1840, in which free trade (to sell opium to the Chinese and create millions of addicts) was defended by war. Similarly the UK funded a Greek war with Turkey.
• 328, The cult of the free market—how much should capital and politics influence each other? Capitalists argue that politics should do nothing—reduce taxation and regulation; this is the most common creed today. Yet this belief is naïve; all markets have some political bias. The job of politics is to protect against cheats and enforce the law—if not, we get the Mississippi bubble, or the 2007 US housing bubble and recession.
• 329, The capitalist hell—another reason markets shouldn’t have free rein is that monopolies can grow and take over freedom of the employees. Thus the slave trade, driven by markets to supply workers for sugar plantations. The slave trade wasn’t a government operation; it was a free market enterprise, p331. Free markets don’t guarantee that profits are made in a fair way. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed, 331.6.
• Another example: Belgian Congo, exploited for its rubber, the natives exploited; 6 million died.
• Capitalism has two answers: first, only capitalists are capable of running the modern world. Second, we need patience for the pie to grow big enough for everyone to have a slice.
• But can the economy grow indefinitely? What will happen if we exhaust the raw materials and energy of the planet? [[ Still an important question, which is why some thinkers are exploring ideas for sustainability, how societies can thrive without growing indefinitely, like cancer. ]]

Ch17, The Wheels of Industry

• Answer: the amount of energy and raw materials to be exploited have *increased*. [[ But they can’t increase indefinitely; the planet is finite. ]] Before the Industrial Revolution, humans were unable to convert energy except by muscle power, from plants and from the sun.
• 336, The secret in the kitchen—one method was staring people in the face: steam. The first steam engines were invented to clear flooded coal mines – after Britain had cut down all their forests—and the coal powered those engines. By 1825 steam locomotives were invented, and people became obsessed by the idea that machines could convert one type of energy to another. Internal combustion engines converted petroleum into power. Then electricity.
• 339, An ocean of energy—so we keep discovering new sources of energy. This solved the scarcity of raw materials; cheap methods were found to refine aluminum for example.
• 341, Life on the conveyer belt—productivity swelled, especially in agriculture, with tractors and refrigerators. Even animals became machines, locked into pens or put down conveyer belts to be harvested. This led to the discovery of distress in animals. Now only 2% of the population is involved in agriculture. Increased production raised another problem: who would buy all that stuff?
• 347, The age of shopping—thus consumerism, a new kind of ethic, replacing the thrift of never throwing anything away, 347. Now we are all good consumers, and products are designed with short-term lifespans. Religious holidays have become shopping days. This holds true in the food market, where ironically obesity is now more of a problem than starvation. And now it’s the rich who invest, and the poor who buy all that stuff they don’t need. Capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin.

[[ of course SF anticipated this in the 1950s, in Pohl et al. ]]

Ch18, A Permanent Revolution

• And so the population has expanded, and there are few large animals left, part of the ecological degradation that threatens homo sapiens. It’s not that nature is being destroyed—only changed.
• 352, Modern time—daily life has become aligned with industry. We live by timetables and clocks now. The advent of trains required nationalized time. Which happened in 1880. Everything in our daily life… 355m.
• 356, The collapse of the family and the community– And this led to the collapse of the family and local community, to be replaced by the state and the market. Most of us no longer live with a nuclear family, an extended family, and a local intimate community. In the old days family was everything, and the community performed favors without payment; government intervention was limited. The Industrial Revolution gave the market immense powers—education, police, courts. With this came the notion of being individuals, to do whatever one wants without regard to family or community—the state will take care of you, 359m. [[ This is the state that conservatives want to dismantle. Problem is there’s no going back, without vastly reducing the population. ]]
• And women and children were recognized as individuals. The cost was weak families and communities, and diminishment of parental authority (to discipline children, etc).
• 362, Imagined communities—and so now markets provide ‘imagined communities’ of people with common interests, including national identities, and more recently fans of pop stars, or fans of sports teams.
• 364, Perpetuum mobile—once humans assumed the social order was stable; now it changes so quickly that every year is revolutionary, e.g. how the internet emerged only 20 some years ago, 365t. Now we live with incessant change, with a presumption that things will improve; even conservative politicians don’t strive to return to the past, but at best keep things as they are. [[ well arguably there is some reactionary movement currently. ]]
• And the past seven decades have been remarkably peaceful…
• 366, Peace in our time—we forget how violent the world used to be. Deaths from wars are far fewer than from car accidents, etc. [[ recalls Pinker ]]. This decline is due to the rise of the state [[ that conservatives want to dismantle ]].
• 368, Imperial retirement—and so the empires gradually retired—the British, the French, the Soviet. They went away peacefully.
• 370, Pax atomica—there are few international wars; countries don’t invade each other much anymore (examples 370). Humans have broken the law of the jungle, 371.5. The price of war is too high, with the threat of nuclear annihilation. And profits have declined from invading other countries. Intellectual wealth can flee. Peace is more profitable. The elites see war as evil. And there is positive feedback among these four forces. The result is most countries are no long truly independent—they are inter-dependent on each other, 374m.
• Thus we are witnessing the formation of a global empire, which effectively enforces world peace.
• But is this a genuine trend, or could we swing back toward war and destruction? We could go either way.

Ch19, And They Lived Happily Ever After

• Summary. But are we happier? Such questions are rarely studied. The assumption might be that as our capabilities increase, alleviating miseries, we become happier (the progressive account). Or, is it that evolution shaped us as hunter-gatherers, and the modern world takes us far away from that environment, away from Eden? P478. Both are oversimplifications.
• While it’s true that the last few decades have been a golden age, 379t, perhaps our timeframe is too narrow. And we are ignoring looming ecological havoc, and the harm we cause to other animals.
• 380, Counting happiness—what makes people happy? Surveys have been done. Money does buy happiness—but only to a point. And illness reduces happiness, but only to a point. Beyond these points people readjust. Family and community help. But the most important finding is that happiness is relative—it depends on subjective expectations of objective conditions. 382b. It’s about expectations.
• Mass media and advertising erode satisfaction (example of football star marketing underwear, p385). And this suggests that immortality would bring about rage among those who could not afford it.
• 385, Chemical happiness—we don’t stay happy for very long; there’s no evolutionary advantage in staying happy, and the pleasure of sex quickly subsides; if it did not, males would be uninterested in anything else, 386b.
• Different people do have different innate levels of contentment. And these can be adjusted with drugs—like Huxley’s soma. What would be wrong with that?
• 390, The meaning of life—people often say what makes them happy is doing something meaningful, e.g. raising a child, which is hard work. Kahnmann. Thus the faithful might be very happy, and a faithful person from the middle ages might have been just as happy. 391.6: “So our medieval ancestors were happy because they found meaning to life in collective delusions about the afterlife? Yes. As long as nobody punctured their fantasies, why shouldn’t they?” And yet as far as we can tell, there is not purpose or cosmic plan (that is, those beliefs are delusions). So does happiness depend on self-delusion?
• 392, Know thyself—they idea that people know their own happiness is a liberal idea, because liberalism sanctifies individuals. Whereas religions held that objective standards to be met, that individual desires were irrelevant or sinful. Modern geneticists point out that DNA is about promoting genes, and happiness is irrelevant.
• Buddhism has studied ideas of happiness and reached different conclusions: that the problem is suffering and wanting, and the solution is to understand these feelings and stop craving them. The ideal is serenity. Western cultures have turned these insights upside down: “Happiness Begins Within” 395b, what we feel inside. This is the opposite of Buddhism.
• So perhaps the issue isn’t whether people are fulfilled and enjoy pleasant feelings. Perhaps the question is whether people know the truth about themselves. Do people today understand this truth better than the ancients? Most history has ignored this theme.

[[ and of course the answer is YES, at least for some people – those who study reality and try to understand it, i.e. scientists and philosophers, and likely NO for the vast majority who live their lives in the ancient human roles. And this is perhaps my ultimate PvC: it’s all about understanding reality outside the bubble of merely being human. ]]

Ch20, The End of Homo Sapiens

• Now the in the 21^st century we are beginning to break the laws of natural selection, replacing them with the laws of intelligent design. Scientists are engineering creatures, like a green rabbit. This may be the most important biological revolution since the appearance of life on earth, 399.4. This process could happen three ways: biological engineering; cyborg engineering; engineering inorganic life.
• 399, Of mice and men—People have been doing this for millennia—castrating bulls. But now we can grow an ear on a mouse. We can transfer genes from one creature to another.
• 402, The return of the Neanderthals— we might revive extinct animals, or even Neanderthals. Or we could redesign sapiens, despite ethical concerns; the changed species might no longer be sapiens.
• 404, Bionic life—cyborgs from animals or humans. Replacement limbs. Brain computer interfaces. (lots of sf ideas here) again, the results might no longer be human.
• 408, Another life—computer viruses, that mutate on their own. Is this life? What if human brains were backed up to a hard drive?
• 409, The singularity—mapping DNA. The issue of rights arises—could companies discriminate based on DNA traits? Most SF [movies] depict humans like us in the far future with fast spaceships, 411t, but the real potential is changing the species itself.
• 411, The Frankenstein prophecy—Frankenstein created a monster; the lesson is that if we try to play god, we’ll be punished. But we are nearly able to do that now. We find comfort in that story because we like to think we are the best of all beings, that nothing can be better. But we may need to decide, what do we want to become? This will dwarf all current problems. The real question may be, what do we want to want? 414e

Afterword: The Animal that Became a God

• 415. summary. We remain unsure of goals; nobody knows where we’re going. Yet we are powerful as gods. “Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want”?

[[ The final chapter echoes Wilson, in THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, that humanity is on the verge of transforming itself. ]]