Book review: Ian Parker on Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever
NB: Harari uses the sentence 'The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago'. This is problematic. Kick-started history? 'History' is just a name for human experience. Here's another view on the origins of that experience: Henry Plotkin's lecture
Cognition and History: The Evolution of Intelligence and Culture. The lecture is little less than Harari's God's Eye View. With YNH's stratospheric detachment, indeed, nothing seems to matter that much. But if our ancestors - as much as us today - were so detached, there would have been no history. Beauty, goodness, justice and truth mattered millenia ago, and they matter now. DS
see also
Noam Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1966) // Apoorvanand - This false dawn: Modi regime’s obsession with the ‘new’ and ‘historic’
Beginnings and endings
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Industrialization of the Mind (1982)
Cognition and History: The Evolution of Intelligence and Culture. The lecture is little less than Harari's God's Eye View. With YNH's stratospheric detachment, indeed, nothing seems to matter that much. But if our ancestors - as much as us today - were so detached, there would have been no history. Beauty, goodness, justice and truth mattered millenia ago, and they matter now. DS
In 2008, Yuval Noah
Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write
a book derived from an undergraduate world-history class that he was teaching.
Twenty lectures became twenty chapters. Harari, who had previously written about
aspects of medieval and early-modern warfare - but whose intellectual appetite,
since childhood, had been for all-encompassing accounts of the world - wrote in
plain, short sentences that displayed no anxiety about the academic decorum of
a study spanning hundreds of thousands of years. It was a history of everyone,
ever.
The book, published in Hebrew as “A Brief History of Humankind,” became
an Israeli best-seller; then, as “Sapiens,” it became an international one. Readers were
offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human
affairs - evolution, agriculture, economics - while watching their personal
narratives, even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility.
President Barack Obama, speaking to CNN in 2016, compared the book to a visit
he’d made to the pyramids of Giza.
“Sapiens” has sold
more than twelve million copies. “Three important revolutions shaped the course
of history,” the book proposes. “The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history
about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000
years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago,
may well end history and start something completely different.” Harari’s
account, though broadly chronological, is built out of assured generalization
and comparison rather than dense historical detail.
“Sapiens” feels like a study-guide summary of an immense, unwritten text - or like a ride on a tour bus that never stops for a poke around the ruins....read more:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/yuval-noah-harari-gives-the-really-big-picture“Sapiens” feels like a study-guide summary of an immense, unwritten text - or like a ride on a tour bus that never stops for a poke around the ruins....read more:
NB: This is the first bit of YNH's writing that I've read... it is good, but I must add that if humans were indeed essentially given to deception at all times, then Yuval would not have been able to make this observation. As Stanley Rosen wisely observes: 'If there is no human nature that remains constant within historical change, and so defines the perspectives of individual readers as perspectives upon a common humanity, then reading is impossible.... If the contingent is intelligible, that is, if it is amenable to judgement, then the basis of intelligibility or judgement cannot itself be contingent. It is true that the wise decision under present circumstances may be foolish under other circumstances, but the wisdom of the decision under present circumstances is not arbitrary. To judge is to understand, not to create ex-nihilo..' - Hermeneutics as Politics (1987), p 146, 149. DS
see also
Noam Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1966) // Apoorvanand - This false dawn: Modi regime’s obsession with the ‘new’ and ‘historic’
Susan
Neiman - Evil in Modern Thought / 'Hannah Arendt's Disruptive Truth
Telling'
Kwame Appiah's review of Moral Clarity
Gandhi-related articles and postsKwame Appiah's review of Moral Clarity
Beginnings and endings
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Industrialization of the Mind (1982)
Henry Plotkin: Cognition and History: The Evolution of Intelligence and Culture (1996)
Richard P. Tucker on War and the Environment
Hannah Arendt, Truth and Politics (1967)
Hannah Arendt, Truth and Politics (1967)
Simon Leys: Aspects of Culture. Lectures on Learning, Reading, Writing and Going Abroad and Staying Home (1996)
