Subtitled: “How Enemies Become Friends”
(Bright Matter Books, February 2026, xxi + 181pp)
Here is the third of Harari’s world’s-history-for-children books, taking a 30,000-foot view of the big changes over the millennia of human history. Each book has four chapters. I’ll recall the first two volumes…
Volume 1: How Humans Took Over the World
- Humans are animals; there were once different kinds of humans, but only our branch, Sapiens, is still alive;
- The superpower of Sapiens is the ability to cooperate in large numbers, with the ability to tell imaginary stories and to invent stories about corporations, money, and religion, which work so long as everyone agrees to them;
- Early humans lived in tribes that grew and split into smaller tribes, were experts about their environment, believed in ghosts and spirits;
- Over the past 50,000 years humans spread across the globe and killed off all the big animals, especially in Australia and the Americas, without realizing what they were doing.
Volume 2: Why the World Isn’t Fair
- The agricultural revolution led hunter-gatherers to settle into villages and tend animals; problems of pests and droughts gave opportunities to chiefs and priests and sacrifices to appease the gods;
- As villages grew, diseases spread, people acquired more possessions, villages fought; farmers and gatherers learned to think differently;
- Larger communities led to problems, requiring leaders to make decisions, tax collectors, punishments for rule-breakers, and slavery; then writing, numbers, documents, and bureaucracy to keep track of all the documents.
- You get people to follow the rules by inventing stories about the gods who made the rules; stories weren’t about truth, but were necessary for society to function; and stories can change: part of growing up is learning which stories to keep, and which to change.
Here’s a summary of this third book on four points. (Though this book is a bit lop-sided, the early part consisting of stories about fictional characters discovering the world, the latter part being more substantive.)
Volume 3: How Enemies Become Friends
- Recalling the stories of Gilgamesh, Jason, Zeus, Jonah, Romulus and Remus; people in different cities worry about monsters, and strange ways in other cities;
- The secret that brought people together was the market. And that became possible with the invention of money. The most successful story ever told. Though it can be dangerous if people love it too much.
- History is full of wars, and empires. Empires are unfair, except when it’s your own. And conquered peoples forget their past; societies gradually become mixed. Author tells the story of the Romans, its playwrights, its emperors; its gods and the gods of others gave way to the Jewish god, called here Sky Father, who sent Jesus to tell stories of heaven and Hell. There were so many stories about Jesus a council met to decide which were true, and called that collection “the Bible.” Gradually stories about the old gods were forgotten. Still, people have multiple ancestors. History is complicated; we don’t belong to just one country, and we’re all descended from good guys and bad guys.
- Is there one true story? Everyone believes in their own. But they can’t all be right. What about those who don’t believe in the Sky Father? Christians gradually destroyed the temples of other gods, insisting those gods were just stories. Their Inquisition killed nonbelievers. Yet different versions of Sky Father said different things about wine and other things. Questions about Sky Father led to the idea of a second god: good and evil, God and the Devil. Questions remain: why do we suffer? A man in India, who came to be known as Buddha, decided instead of arguing about gods, we should look for ways to stop suffering. Sometimes we make ourselves miserable. So put these things out of your mind, said Buddha. Don’t worry about the gods; do your best to help others instead of harming them. Yet people still argue about how to live. Over thousands of years people came up with lots of different rules and stories. The biggest discovery in history helped people decide which stories to believe. That discovery was science.
(The subject of the next book.)
