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Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, book review: Eloquent history of what makes us human

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It is an impediment to understanding the human story that the innovations that made us human – a long list including the control of fire, articulate language, the development of agriculture and herding, the working of metals, glass and other materials, abstract reasoning – took place over periods out of kilter with the time span of human generations.

Each generation saw itself as living a similar life to its predecessors, with the occasional addition of a slightly better way of accomplishing one thing or another. The true course of events is only now being uncovered by the sophisticated forensic techniques developed by science, not least the sequencing of ancient DNA and the mapping of human migrations through the DNA profiles of people living today.

As a historian, Yuval Harari (who teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) belongs to the school founded by Jared Diamond (who endorses the book on the cover), in applying scientific research to every aspect of human history, not just the parts for which no written accounts exist. In truth, Harari uses less science than Diamond. He emphasizes the difficulty of knowing in detail the lives of our remote forebears and is often content to say – of topics that are being urgently investigated by the more forensically inclined – "frankly, we don't know". His ideas are mostly not new, being derived from Diamond, but he has a very trenchant way of putting them over.

Typical is a bravura passage on the domestication of wheat, in which he floats the conceit that wheat domesticated us. What was once an undistinguished grass in a small part of the Middle East now covers a global area eight times the size of England. Humans have to slave to serve the wheat god: " Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space..." and so on.

Harari proposes three big revolutions around which his story revolves: the Cognitive Revolution of around 70,000 years ago (articulate language); the Agricultural Revolution of 10,000 years ago; and the Scientific Revolution of 500 years ago. The last is part of history, the second is increasingly well understood, but the first is still shrouded in a mystery that DNA research will probably one day clear up.

Although the book is billed as a short history, it is just as much a philosophical meditation on the human condition. One great overriding argument runs through it: that all human culture is an invention. The rules of football; the concept of a limited liability company; the laws relating to property and marriage; the character, actions and notional edicts of deities – all are examples of what Harari calls Imagined Order. He develops this idea into a magnificent, humane polemic, particularly highlighting the sorrows that accrue from society's justification of its cruel practices as either natural or ordained by God (they are neither).

Not only is Harari eloquent and humane, he is often wonderfully, mordantly funny. Much of what we take to be inherent cultural traditions are of recent adoption: "William Tell never tasted chocolate, and Buddha never spiced up his food with chilli".

Towards the end of the book, the influence of thinkers other than Diamond emerges. He rehearses Steven Pinker's argument that objectively (to judge by mortality statistics) the world is, despite appearances, becoming less violent; passages on individual happiness and how it can be assessed alongside more conventional historical topics smack of Theodore Zeldin, both in style and content.

Inevitably, in a "big picture" account such as this, some portions of the canvas are less hatched in than others. For this reader, these later sections seemed weaker, but in the last chapter the brio returns as Harari considers what humankind – who developed culture to escape the constraints of biology – will became now that it is also a biological creator. Sapiens is a brave and bracing look at a species that is mostly in denial about the long road to now and the crossroads it is rapidly approaching.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

by Yuval Noah Harari ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 10, 2015

The great debates of history aired out with satisfying vigor.

Harari (History/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) provides an immersion into the important revolutions that shaped world history: cognitive, agricultural and scientific. The book was originally published in Israel in 2011 and became a best-seller.

There is enormous gratification in reading books of this nature, an encyclopedic approach from a well-versed scholar who is concise but eloquent, both skeptical and opinionated, and open enough to entertain competing points of view. As Harari firmly believes, history hinges on stories: some stories for understanding, others prompting people to act cooperatively toward common goals. Of course, these stories—“ ‘fictions,’ ‘social constructs’ or ‘imagined realities’ ”—can be humble or evil, inclusive or self-serving, but they hold the power of belief. Harari doesn’t avoid the distant past, when humans “were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish,” but he is a skeptic and rightfully relies on specific source material to support his arguments—though he is happy to offer conjectures. Harari launches fully into his story with the cognitive revolution, when our brains were rewired, now more intelligent and creative, with language, gossip and myths to fashion the stories that, from politicians to priests to sorcerers, serve to convince people of certain ideas and beliefs. The agricultural revolution (“lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers”) comes next and firmly establishes the intersubjectivity of imagined orders: hierarchies, money, religion, gender issues, “communication network[s] linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals.” Throughout, the author revels in the chaos of history. He discusses the good and bad of empires and science, suggests that modern economic history comes down to a single word (“growth”), rues the loss of familial and societal safety nets, and continues to find wonder in the concept that “the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system.”

Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0062316097

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Yuval Noah Harari ; illustrated by Ricard Zaplana Ruiz

by Yuval Noah Harari ; adapted by Yuval Noah Harari , David Vandermeulen & Daniel Casanave ; illustrated by Daniel Casanave

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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3 mind-blowing facts about humans that I learned from reading 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind'

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• " Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind " is a bestseller praised by Barack Obama and Bill Gates.
• The nonfiction book explores the history and evolution of humans and the modern world.
• Here's a summary of 3 facts I learned and how they helped expand my understanding of humanity.

As an avid reader, my understanding of the world has greatly expanded through novels. I'm accustomed to looking at people through the emotional and psychological lens of relationships and community, always exploring how different social factors and personal histories make us so unique. 

And while I've mostly preferred learning through fictional stories and characters, the non-fiction bestseller "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind " not only amplified my understanding of the human condition but also deepened my understanding of human s. The book, a biological, intellectual, and economic account of humankind, explained the biological "why" behind everything I've ever known about people, including myself.

Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, an internationally recognized historian and philosopher, introduced me to concepts that explore the very foundation of how humans evolved from nomadic apes to philosophical beings who ponder the meaning of life. I've been spouting quotes and information from this book ever since I finished reading it, so here are the three most fascinating concepts I learned from "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind."

3 amazing facts I learned from "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind":

Self-preservation is a biological instinct that greatly impacted the course of humankind — and explains some of our problems today..

The early developments of Homo sapiens were entirely biological, centered around sustaining and creating life. Yet some of our evolution's disadvantages heavily outweighed the advantages.

For instance, in the development of the agricultural revolution, humans found that wheat was incredibly difficult to farm, not economically secure, and not even that nutritious. So why did we invest time and energy into farming anyway? According to Harari, farming fulfilled our biological needs by helping communities settle down, give birth to more babies in a shorter amount of time, and feed a larger number of people on a smaller space of land. 

To put it into today's terms, the pursuit of an easier life often generates greater hardships. It's called the luxury trap: As Harari puts it, "luxuries tend to become necessities and spawn new obligations." For example, we used to mails letter when we had something to say. Now, we send and receive dozens of emails every day, many of us considering it a necessity to have email access on our phones for even quicker responses. Immediate email correspondence was a luxury that has become a 21st-century necessity, spawning new obligations to be attached to our phones. 

It's nearly impossible to break the luxury trap cycle: It's spawned by our biological desire to make life easier so we can conserve time, energy, or money.  But humankind's instinct to cater to ourselves also has some positives. It's helped us evolve from farming wheat to generating significant technological advances and boosting our cognitive capacity for empathy, to name a few things. 

Because we create societal values, we can determine which values hold the most meaning.

When humans began to trade nomadic life for settlements, we created values to help govern societies. Our societal agreements are based on inter-subjective beliefs — the foundations of society are agreed-upon concepts of law, money, religion, and nations that link billions of humans to an imagined order that does not exist outside of our consciousness. Even the idea of "rights" is not something that exists in biology: It's an imagined order that controls the population because enough people believe in it.

The idea that we fabricated the social concepts that tie us to our political views and institutions might spur an existential crisis, but learning this was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. While fully abandoning the greatest societal contracts would create planet-wide chaos, it can be helpful to remember individual (and often invisible) pressures that we feel to be constantly achieving or fitting into a particular mold don't have as much control over us as we think. If we question some of these imagined constructs, we might find ourselves closer to intellectual freedom.

Happiness is a relatively recent focus for humankind.

As Harari points out, happiness is an incalculable abstraction. The closest measurable figure is pleasure, a chemical sensation that keeps humans alive by rewarding us when we eat or reproduce — not exactly what most of us think when we imagine self-fulfillment.

Yet, as the cognitive revolution carried humankind through advances that would shape all of planet Earth, the importance of happiness emerged. Happiness is subjective, the scale of which has dramatically changed from the Middle Ages to now. But it is also the unit many of us use to determine if our lives feel worthwhile. 

In much of the history of humankind, we ignored the idea that happiness drove any kind of evolution. But as we grew through rapid technological evolutions, our motivation has focused more on our subjective well-being. Humankind's search for a meaningful life is how we've managed to survive a history's worth of hardships, such as defending a country's values in a war or exploring new hobbies during a pandemic.

The biological rules that dictated the survival of Homo sapiens for hundreds of thousands of years have changed in only the past few decades. With our advances in medicine, agriculture, and technology, humans have been able to shift our focus from survival and reproduction to happiness and meaning. With this realization that humanity's sole purpose is no longer to survive but thrive , we can prioritize self-actualization. 

The bottom line

I learned so many profound theories from this book, and it broadened my understanding of humanity. While we evolved through our survivalist need for self-preservation, the cognitive revolution spawned societies founded on rules and values, some of which now create new barriers to our happiness and wellbeing.

More importantly, learning about our evolutionary history deepened my empathy for humankind and even towards myself. Thanks to this book, my view of my place in the world has shifted, as I remember that I wouldn't be here, typing this, if not for the billions of decisions my ancestors made. It's a borderline magical (and ok, a little overwhelming) realization. It makes me want to pursue a more meaningful life, and extend grace towards others and myself whenever I can. Gaining this perspective is one of the best takeaways a book could possibly give.

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Hardcover – Illustrated, February 10, 2015

Purchase options and add-ons.

Official U.S. edition with full color illustrations throughout.

New York Times Bestseller

A Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg

From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.”

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?

Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.

Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?

Featuring 27 photographs, 6 maps, and 25 illustrations/diagrams, this provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential reading for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.

• Part of series A Brief History Series
• Print length 464 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date February 10, 2015
• Dimensions 6 x 1.37 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0062316095
• ISBN-13 978-0062316097
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

An Amazon Best Book of the Month for February 2015: Yuval Noah Harari has some questions. Among the biggest: How did Homo sapiens (or Homo sapiens sapiens , if you’re feeling especially wise today) evolve from an unexceptional savannah-dwelling primate to become the dominant force on the planet, emerging as the lone survivor out of six distinct, competing hominid species? He also has some answers, and they’re not what you’d expect. Tackling evolutionary concepts from a historian’s perspective, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , describes human development through a framework of three not-necessarily-orthodox “Revolutions”: the Cognitive, the Agricultural, and the Scientific. His ideas are interesting and often amusing: Why have humans managed to build astonishingly large populations when other primate groups top out at 150 individuals? Because our talent for gossip allows us to build networks in societies too large for personal relationships between everyone, and our universally accepted “imagined realities”--such as money, religion, and Limited Liability Corporations—keep us in line. Who cultivated whom, humans or wheat? . Wheat. Though the concepts are unusual and sometimes heavy (as is the book, literally) Harari’s deft prose and wry, subversive humor make quick work of material prone to academic tedium. He’s written a book of popular nonfiction (it was a bestseller overseas, no doubt in part because his conclusions draw controversy) landing somewhere in the middle of a Venn diagram of genetics, sociology, and history. Throughout, Harari returns frequently to another question: Does all this progress make us happier, our lives easier? The answer might disappoint you. -- Jon Foro

“ Sapiens tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language.” — Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel , Collapse , and The World until Yesterday

“ Sapiens is learned, thought-provoking and crisply written…. Fascinating.” — Wall Street Journal

“In Sapiens , Harari delves deep into our history as a species to help us understand who we are and what made us this way. An engrossing read.” — Dan Ariely, New York Times Bestselling author of Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“Yuval Noah Harari’s celebrated Sapiens does for human evolution what Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time did for physics.… He does a superb job of outlining our slow emergence and eventual domination of the planet.” — Forbes

“Ambitious and illuminating …the wonderful and terrifying saga of the human species on earth.” — Christian Science Monitor

“[I]nteresting and provocative…It gives you a sense of perspective on how briefly we’ve been on this earth, how short things like agriculture and science have been around, and why it makes sense for us to not take them for granted.” — President Barack Obama

“I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a fun, engaging look at early human history…you’ll have a hard time putting it down.” — Bill Gates

“Thank God someone finally wrote [this] exact book.” — Sebastian Junger

“Yuval Noah Harari is an emerging rock-star lecturer at the nexus of history and science…. Sapiens takes readers on a sweeping tour of the history of our species…. Harari’s formidable intellect sheds light on the biggest breakthroughs in the human story…important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens.” — Washington Post

“It is one of the best accounts by a Homo sapiens of the unlikely story of our violent, accomplished species.…It is one hell of a story. And it has seldom been told better…. Compulsively readable and impossibly learned.” — Michael Gerson, Washington Post

“This was the most surprising and thought-provoking book I read this year.” — Atlantic.com

“Yuval Noah Harari’s full-throated review of our species may have been blurbed by Jared Diamond, but Harari’s conclusions are at once balder and less tendentious than that of his famous colleague.” — New York magazine

“This title is one of the exceptional works of nonfiction that is both highly intellectual and compulsively readable… a fascinating, hearty read.” — Library Journal  (starred review)

“An encyclopedic approach from a well-versed scholar who is concise but eloquent, both skeptical and opinionated, and open enough to entertain competing points of view.…The great debates of history aired out with satisfying vigor.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Writing with wit and verve, Harari…attempts to explain how Homo sapiens came to be the dominant species on Earth as well as the sole representative of the human genus.… Provocative and entertaining.” — Publishers Weekly

“The most idea-packed work of non-fiction I’ve read in years.” — Dick Meyer, www.abcactionnews.com

“In this sweeping look at the history of humans, Harari offers readers the chance to reconsider, well, everything, from a look at why Homo sapiens endured to a compelling discussion of how society organizes itself through fictions.” — Booklist Best Books of the Year

“It’s not often that a book offers readers the possibility to reconsider, well, everything. But that’s what Harari does in this sweeping look at the history of humans.… Readers of every stripe should put this at the top of their reading lists. Thinking has never been so enjoyable.” — Booklist (starred review)

“The sort of book that sweeps the cobwebs out of your brain…. Harari…is an intellectual acrobat whose logical leaps will have you gasping with admiration.” — John Carey, Sunday Times (London)

“Harari’s account of how we conquered the Earth astonishes with its scope and imagination…. One of those rare books that lives up to the publisher’s blurb...brilliantly clear, witty and erudite.” — Ben Shepard, the Observer (London)

“An absorbing, provocative history of civilization…packed with heretical thinking and surprising facts. This riveting, myth-busting book cannot be summarised…you will simply have to read it.” — John Gray, Financial Times (London)

“Full of…high-perspective, shocking and wondrous stories, as well as strange theories and startling insights.” — Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

“Not only is Harari eloquent and humane, he is often wonderfully, mordantly funny” — The Independent (London)

“Engaging and informative…. Extremely interesting.” — Guardian (London)

“Harari can write…really, really write, with wit, clarity, elegance, and a wonderful eye for metaphor.” — The Times (Ireland)

From the Back Cover

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens . How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?

In Sapiens , Professor Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical—and sometimes devastating—breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology, and economics, and incorporating full-color illustrations throughout the text, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behavior from the legacy of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?

Bold, wide-ranging, and provocative, Sapiens integrates history and science to challenge everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our heritage...and our future.

About the Author

Prof. Yuval Noah Harari , bestselling historian and philosopher, is considered one of the world’s most influential intellectuals today. His popular books—including Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind; Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow; 21 Lessons for the 21st Century; and the series  Sapiens: A Graphic History  and  Unstoppable Us— have sold more than 45 million copies in 65 languages. Harari co-founded Sapienship, a social impact company with projects in the fields of education and storytelling, whose main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important global challenges facing the world today. Harari has a PhD in history from the University of Oxford and currently lectures in the department of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper; Illustrated edition (February 10, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062316095
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062316097
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.66 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.37 x 9 inches
• #14 in Evolution (Books)
• #20 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
• #20 in History of Civilization & Culture

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Yuval noah harari.

Prof. Yuval Noah Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in world history. His books have been translated into 65 languages, with 45 million copies sold worldwide. 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' (2014) looked deep into our past, 'Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow' (2016) considered far-future scenarios, and '21 Lessons for the 21st Century' (2018) zoomed in on the biggest questions of the present moment. 'Sapiens: A Graphic History' (launched in 2020) is a radical adaptation of 'Sapiens' into a four-part graphic novel series, which Harari created and co-wrote in collaboration with comics artists David Vandermeulen (co-writer) and Daniel Casanave (illustrator). 'Unstoppable Us' (launched in 2022) is Harari's first book series for children, telling the epic true story of humans and our superpower in four volumes, and featuring illustrations by Ricard Zaplana Ruiz.

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A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari | 4.47 | 962,485 ratings and reviews

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Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Sapiens from the world's leading experts.

Reid Hoffman CEO/LinkedIn A grand theory of humanity. (Source)

Richard Branson Founder/Virgin Group One example of a book that has helped me to #ReadToLead this year is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. While the book came out a few years ago now, I got around to it this year, and am very glad I did. I’ve always been fascinated in what makes humans human, and how people are constantly evolving, changing and growing. The genius of Sapiens is that it takes some daunting, complex themes and breaks them down into a fascinating, simple narrative. (Source)

Bill Gates CEO/Microsoft Both Melinda and I read this one, and it has sparked lots of great conversations at our dinner table. Harari takes on a daunting challenge: to tell the entire history of the human race in just 400 pages. He also writes about our species today and how artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and other technologies will change us in the future. Although I found things to disagree with—especially Harari’s claim that humans were better off before we started farming—I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who’s interested in the history and future of our species. (Source)

Barack Obama Former USA President eval(ez_write_tag([[250,250],'theceolibrary_com-leader-2','ezslot_7',164,'0','1'])); Fact or fiction, the president knows that reading keeps the mind sharp. He also delved into these non-fiction reads. (Source)

Naval Ravikant CEO & Co-Founder/AngelList I’m rereading Sapiens again, because I love that book so much. (Source)

James Cameron It explains human behavior and why we are the way we are in human civilization from soup to nuts. And I’ve read it now a couple of times. It’s a pretty astonishing book. (Source)

Daniel Ek Both sobering and conservatively optimistic in equal measure, it seems even more relevant for us at the moment to learn from our socio-anthropological history. (Source)

Marvin Liao Partner/500 Startups The Joy of Not Working (Zelinkski), Flash Foresight (Burrus), The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Gracian), Sapiens (Yuval), The End of Jobs (Pearson), Deep Work (Newport), Sovereign Individual (Davidson), The Fourth Economy (Davison) & The Monk & the Riddle (Komisar). Every single one of these books completely changed how I looked at everything in the world & literally pushed my life in a new direction. They were Paradigm Shifting as they say. (hate that word but it really was a Paradigm Shift for me). (Source)

Whitney Cummings A great book about [how] we’ve evolved and why we have anxiety. (Source)

Bryan Callen Everybody should read it, it’s an amazing book. A brief history of humankind but it brings us to the present day. (Source)

David Allemann He changed my perspective on what is a true fact and what is human fiction. He also left me wondering: Are we the most aggressive species on earth that will destroy the planet? Or are we programmed for survival and will rise to the challenge? The answer might play out in our lifetimes. (Source)

Katie Keith This is a fascinating account of human history, told from a brand new perspective. It has made me think about what it makes to be human and what makes us different from all other species. It has also helped me to understand our place in history. (Source)

Yaro Starak And then, the best recommendation for me this year was “Sapiens” which was recommended I think 2 years ago by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and that was really enjoyable, I loved “Sapiens” by Yuval Harari. (Source)

Louis Grenier You need to read “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus” by the same author, about the story of humankind and why we are who we are, which is a fantastic read. I think as a marketer, if you don’t understand people and if you don’t understand where we’re coming from, it’s going to be very difficult for you to break away from the crowd, (Source)

Dean Roller Changed my perspective on what it means to be a human being through a detailed history of our human species. I felt it gave me a broader awareness of why I do what I do. (Source)

Cory Zue Sapiens takes a ridiculously high-level view of human fiction/story and does an amazing job reframing how we perceive humanity and culture in a way that makes current-day society feel a bit silly. It’s also a phenomenal history book and chalk-full of really interesting information. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys musing on their/our place in the universe. (Source)

Nicky Cullen Just learning all about our past and our evolution. I'm only 150 pages in but it really is mind-blowing. (Source)

Emi Gal Currently reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and I’m hoping to gain a better understanding of how humans became conscious beings. (Source)

Fabrice Grinda I don’t have an absolute favorite book. There are books that are meaningful to me at a given point in time. Right now that book is Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. The book is incredibly ambitious. It covers the history of humanity starting with modern cognition. It covers everything from why Sapiens ended up on top relative to other hominids, to gender roles, the agricultural revolution, the history of currency, empire and capitalism. It analyses recent developments and speculates as to where we might be heading. (Source)

Sergey Sapelnyk Noah Harari’s Sapiens is a book I enjoyed recently. As someone who reads a significant amount of business books, I feel like it’s easy to disproportionately read books that have a direct impact on your career/job/company etc. Reading Sapiens was interesting and different from what I typically read, and it was a thought-evoking book. Harari tries to explain all of humanity in 400 pages, and how humans have come to thrive throughout history. Although Harari has some disagreeable assumptions, it was overall a reading experience that expanded my perspective on the world. (Source)

Mehdi Kajbaf I think that every career path begins with an understanding of who you are and what matters to you. In that light I will suggest some self discovery books. And of course some great business books. (Source)

Bill Liao The human world occurs in language so best get good at it! (Source)

Dennis Fong Sapiens was awesome. I thought it was... Just fundamentally you learn so much about human history and even like the politics and the situation that we're in today, from it. I thought that was really good. (Source)

Ola Olusoga Selecting one non-business book is also tough. I recently finished Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and it was "wow". Always interesting to dive into human behavior and history for clarity on how we got here and why we are the way we are (culture, society, e.t.c) (Source)

Gunhee Park Some other books I’ve really enjoyed: Sapiens. [...] (Source)

Deepak Chhugani I absolutely prioritize books recommended by friends or certain people. I started Sapiens a few days ago, but will have to see how much time I can actually give it. (Source)

Fabio Schvartsman is the CEO of the Brazilian multinational corporation Vale, which is in the business of mining and metals. He will be reading about some of the more remarkable figures in business and psychology this summer. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind—Yuval Noah Harari Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike—Phil Knight Sigmund Freud en son temps et dans le nôtre—Élisabeth Roudinesco (Source)

Simon Mayo Love this book still https://t.co/0J3ZtEg29R (Source)

Marcellus Wiley “Sapiens” by Yuval Harari Great book! https://t.co/i3iTUoBLUY (Source)

Ryan Shea [Ryan Shea said this is one of his most-recommended books.] (Source)

Lex Fridman Basically one of the things we've created here is we've imagined ideas that we all share. (Source)

Kishore Biyani Fascinating because of its multi-disciplinary approach towards understanding human society, our behaviour and our future. (Source)

Ashton Kutcher The brainy book I seem to be sharing or talking about the most lately. (Source)

Anurag Ramdasan A quitintessential book on the origin of Sapiens. Yuval makes history appealing with his amazing narrative. (Source)

Robert Jones What he’s saying is that the essence of humanity is to build our lives around fictions, and that, I think, is what branding is. It’s creating fictions around ordinary tangible objects—like a can of fizzy drink—or sometimes around things that are themselves fictions like a corporation. So that made me feel that although branding has become a big thing that we all talk about only in the last 30 years or so, it is actually a very human thing. (Source)

Aidan Connolly Many books have changed my view of the world, even when I don’t agree with everything an author says. I have enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari’s books Sapiens & Homo Deus and how humanity might evolve in the presence of AI, Robots and super humans. (Source)

Chris Goward Here are some of the books that have been very impactful for me, or taught me a new way of thinking: [...] Sapiens. (Source)

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• #5 in Linkedin
• #3 in Meaning Of Life
• #2 in Modern History
• #1 in Molecular Biology
• #3 in Morality
• #7 in Must-Read
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• #2 in New York Times Bestseller
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Sapiens ? a critical review.

I much enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind . It is a brilliant, thought-provoking odyssey through human history with its huge confident brush strokes painting enormous scenarios across time. It is massively engaging and continuously interesting. The book covers a mind-boggling 13.5 billion years of pre-history and history.

Fascinating but flawed

Harari’s pictures of the earliest men and then the foragers and agrarians are fascinating; but he breathlessly rushes on to take us past the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago, to the arrival of religion, the scientific revolution, industrialisation, the advent of artificial intelligence and the possible end of humankind. His contention is that Homo sapiens , originally an insignificant animal foraging in Africa has become ‘the terror of the ecosystem’ (p465). There is truth in this, of course, but his picture is very particular. He is best, in my view, on the modern world and his far-sighted analysis of what we are doing to ourselves struck many chords with me.

Harari is a better social scientist than philosopher, logician or historian

Nevertheless, in my opinion the book is also deeply flawed in places and Harari is a much better social scientist than he is philosopher, logician or historian. His critique of modern social ills is very refreshing and objective, his piecing together of the shards of pre-history imaginative and appear to the non-specialist convincing, but his understanding of some historical periods and documents is much less impressive – demonstrably so, in my view.

Misunderstanding the medieval world

Harari is not good on the medieval world, or at least the medieval church. He suggests that ‘premodern’ religion asserted that everything important to know about the world ‘was already known’ (p279) so there was no curiosity or expansion of learning. When does he think this view ceased? He makes it much too late. He gives the (imagined) example of a thirteenth-century peasant asking a priest about spiders and being rebuffed because such knowledge was not in the Bible. It’s hard to know where to begin in saying how wrong a concept this is.

For example, in the thirteenth century the friars, so often depicted as lazy and corrupt, were central to the learning of the universities. Moreover they were, at that time, able to teach independently of diktats from the Church. As a result, there was an exchange of scholarship between national boundaries and demanding standards were set. The Church also set up schools throughout much of Europe, so as more people became literate there was a corresponding increase in debate among the laity as well as among clerics. Huge library collections were amassed by monks who studied both religious and classical texts. Their scriptoria effectively became the research institutes of their day. One surviving example of this is the fascinating library of the Benedictines at San Marco in Florence. Commissioned in 1437, it became the first public library in Europe. This was a huge conceptual breakthrough in the dissemination of knowledge: the ordinary citizens of that great city now had access to the profoundest ideas from the classical period onwards.

And there is Thomas Aquinas. Usually considered to be the most brilliant mind of the thirteenth century, he wrote on ethics, natural law, political theory, Aristotle – the list goes on. Harari forgets to mention him – today, as all know, designated a saint in the Roman Catholic church.   

Harari tends to draw too firm a dividing line between the medieval and modern eras

In fact, it was the Church – through Peter Abelard in the twelfth century– that initiated the idea that a single authority was not sufficient for the establishment of knowledge, but that disputation was required to train the mind as well as the lecture for information. This was a breakthrough in thinking that set the pattern of university life for the centuries ahead.

Or what about John of Salisbury (twelfth-century bishop), the greatest social thinker since Augustine, who bequeathed to us the function of the rule of law and the concept that even the monarch is subject to law and may be removed by the people if he breaks it. Following Cicero he rejected dogmatic claims to certainty and asserted instead that ‘probable truth’ was the best we could aim for, which had to be constantly re-evaluated and revised. Harari is wrong therefore, to state that Vespucci (1504) was the first to say ‘we don’t know’ (p321).

So, historically Harari tends to draw too firm a dividing line between the medieval and modern eras (p285). He is good on the more modern period but the divide is manifest enough without overstating the case as he does.

Short-sighted reductionism

His passage about human rights not existing in nature is exactly right, but his treatment of the US Declaration of Independence is surely completely mistaken (p123). To ‘translate’ it as he does into a statement about evolution is like ‘translating’ a rainbow into a mere geometric arc, or better, ‘translating’ a landscape into a map. Of course, neither process is a translation for to do so is an impossibility. They are what they are. The one is an inspiration, the other an analysis. It is not a matter of one being untrue, the other true – for both landscapes and maps are capable of conveying truths of different kinds.

The Declaration is an aspirational statement about the rights that ought to be accorded to each individual under the rule of law in a post-Enlightenment nation predicated upon Christian principles. Harari’s ‘translation’ is a statement about what our era (currently) believes in a post-Darwinian culture about humanity’s evolutionary drives and our ‘selfish’ genes. ‘Biology’ may tell us those things but human experience and history tell a different story: there is altruism as well as egoism; there is love as well as fear and hatred; there is morality as well as amorality. The sword is not the only way in which events and epochs have been made. Indeed, to make biology/biochemistry the final irreducible way of perceiving human behaviour, as Harari seems to do, seems tragically short-sighted.

Religious illiteracy

I’m not surprised that the book is a bestseller in a (by and large) religiously illiterate society; and though it has a lot of merit in other areas, its critique of Judaism and Christianity is not historically respectable. A mere six lines of conjecture (p242) on the emergence of monotheism from polytheism – stated as fact – is indefensible. It lacks objectivity. The great world-transforming Abrahamic religion emerging from the deserts in the early Bronze Age period (as it evidently did) with an utterly new understanding of the sole Creator God is such an enormous change. It simply can’t be ignored in this way if the educated reader is to be convinced by his reconstructions.

Harari is demonstrably very shaky in his representation of what Christians believe

Harari is also demonstrably very shaky in his representation of what Christians believe. For example, his contention that belief in the Devil makes Christianity dualistic (equal independent good and evil gods) is simply untenable. One of the very earliest biblical texts (Book of Job) shows God allowing Satan to attack Job but irresistibly restricting his methods (Job 1:12). Later, Jesus banishes Satan from individuals (Mark 1:25 et al .) and the final book of the Bible shows God destroying Satan (Revelation 20:10). Not much dualism there! It’s all, of course, a profound mystery – but it’s quite certainly not caused by dualism according to the Bible. Harari either does not know his Bible or is choosing to misrepresent it. He also doesn’t know his Thomas Hardy who believed (some of the time!) precisely what Harari says ‘nobody in history’ believed, namely that God is evil – as evidenced in a novel like Tess of the d’Urbervilles or his poem The Convergence of the Twain .

Fumbling the problem of evil

We see another instance of Harari’s lack of objectivity in the way he deals with the problem of evil (p246). He states the well-worn idea that if we posit free will as the solution, that raises the further question: if God ‘knew in advance’ (Harari’s words) that the evil would be done why did he create the doer?

I would expect a scholar to present both sides of the argument, not a populist one-sided account as Harari does

But to be objective the author would need to raise the counter-question that if there is no free will, how can there be love and how can there be truth? Automatons without free will are coerced and love cannot exist between them – by definition. Again, if everything is predetermined then so is the opinion I have just expressed. In that case it has no validity as a measure of truth – it was predetermined either by chance forces at the Big Bang or by e.g. what I ate for breakfast which dictated my mood. These are age-old problems without easy solutions but I would expect a scholar to present both sides of the argument, not a populist one-sided account as Harari does.

Moreover, in Christian theology God created both time and space, but exists outside them. So the Christian God does not know anything ‘in advance’ which is a term applicable only to those who live inside the time–space continuum i.e. humanity. The Christian philosopher Boethius saw this first in the sixth century; theologians know it – but apparently Harari doesn’t, and he should.

Ignoring the resurrection

In common with so many, Harari is unable to explain why Christianity ‘took over the mighty Roman Empire' (p243) but calls it ‘one of history’s strangest twists’. So it is, but one explanation that should be considered is the resurrection of Christ which of course would fully account for it – if people would give the idea moment’s thought. But to the best of my knowledge there is no mention of it (even as an influential belief) anywhere in the book.

Harari is unable to explain why Christianity ‘took over the mighty Roman Empire' 

The standard reason given for such an absence is that ‘such things don’t happen in history: dead men don’t rise.’ But that, I fear, is logically a hopeless answer. The speaker believes it didn’t happen because they have already presupposed that God is not there to do it. Drop the presupposition, and suddenly the whole situation changes: in the light of that thought it now becomes perfectly feasible that this ‘strange twist’ was part of the divine purpose. And the funny thing is that unlike other religions, this is precisely where Christianity is most insistent on its historicity . Peter, Paul, the early church in general were convinced that Jesus was alive and they knew as well as we do that dead men are dead – and they knew better than us that us that crucified men are especially dead! The very first Christian sermons (about AD 33) were about the facts of their experience – the resurrection of Jesus – not about morals or religion or the future.

A one-sided view of the Church

Harari is right to highlight the appalling record of human warfare and there is no point trying to excuse the Church from its part in this. I have written at length about this elsewhere, as have far more able people. But do we really think that because everyone in Europe was labelled Catholic or Protestant (‘ cuius regio, eius religio ’) that the wars they fought were about religion ?

If the Church is cited as a negative influence, why, in a scholarly book, is its positive influence not also cited?

As the Cambridge Modern History points out about the appalling Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572 (which event Harari cites on p241) – the Paris mob would as soon kill Catholics as Protestants – and did. It was the result of political intrigue, sexual jealousy, human barbarism and feud. Oxford Professor Keith Ward points out ‘religious wars are a tiny minority of human conflicts’ in his book Is Religion Dangerous? If the Church is being cited as a negative influence, why, in a scholarly book, is its undeniably unrivalled positive influence over the last 300 years (not to mention all the previous years) not also cited? It’s simply not good history to ignore the good educational and social impact of the Church. Both sides need to feature. [1]

Philosophical fault-lines

I wonder too about Harari’s seeming complacency on occasion, for instance about where economic progress has brought us to. Is it acceptable for him to write (on p296): ‘When calamity strikes an entire region, worldwide relief efforts are usually successful in preventing the worst. People still suffer from numerous depredations, humiliations and poverty-related illnesses but in most countries nobody is starving to death’? Tell that to the people of Haiti seven years after the earthquake with two and a half million still, according to the UN, needing humanitarian aid. Or the people of South Sudan dying of thirst and starvation as they try to reach refugee camps. There are sixty million refugees living in appalling poverty and distress at this moment . In the light of those facts, I think Harari’s comment is rather unsatisfactory.

But there is a larger philosophical fault-line running through the whole book which constantly threatens to break its conclusions in pieces. His whole contention is predicated on the idea that humankind is merely the product of accidental evolutionary forces and this means he is blind to seeing any real intentionality in history. It has direction certainly, but he believes it is the direction of an iceberg, not a ship.

Many of his opening remarks are just unwarranted assumptions 

This would be all right if he were straightforward in stating that all his arguments are predicated on the assumption that, as Bertrand Russell said, ‘Man is…but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms’ and utterly without significance. But instead, he does what a philosopher would call ‘begging the question’. That is, he assumes from the start what his contention requires him to prove – namely that mankind is on its own and without any sort of divine direction. Harari ought to have stated his assumed position at the start, but signally failed to do so. The result is that many of his opening remarks are just unwarranted assumptions based on that grandest of all assumptions: that humanity is cut adrift on a lonely planet, itself adrift in a drifting galaxy in a dying universe. Evidence please! – that humanity is ‘nothing but’ a biological entity and that human consciousness is not a pale (and fundamentally damaged) reflection of the divine mind.

The fact that (he says) Sapiens has been around for a long time, emerged by conquest of the Neanderthals and has a bloody and violent history has no logical connection to whether or not God made him (‘her’ for Harari) into a being capable of knowing right from wrong, perceiving God in the world and developing into Michelangelo, Mozart and Mother Teresa as well as into Nero and Hitler. To insist that such sublime or devilish beings are ‘no more than’ glorified apes is to ignore the elephant in the room: the small differences in our genetic codes are the very differences that may reasonably point to divine intervention – because the result is so shockingly disproportionate between ourselves and our nearest relatives. I’ve watched chimpanzees and the great apes; I love to do so (and especially adore gorillas!) but…so near, yet so so far.

Arguable assumptions

Here are a few short-hand examples of the author’s many assumptions to check out in context:

• ‘accidental genetic mutations…it was pure chance’ (p23)
• ‘no justice outside the common imagination of human beings’ (p31)
• ‘things that really exist’ (p35)

This last is such a huge leap of unwarranted faith. His concept of what ‘really exists’ seems to be ‘anything material’ but, in his opinion, nothing beyond this does ‘exist’ (his word). Actually, humans are mostly sure that immaterial things certainly exist: love, jealousy, rage, poverty, wealth, for starters. Dark matter also may make up most of the universe – it exists, we are told, but we can’t measure it.

His rendition of how biologists see the human condition is as one-sided as his treatment of earlier topics.

Harari’s final chapters are quite brilliant in their range and depth and hugely interesting about the possible future with the advent of AI – with or without Sapiens. His rendition, however, of how biologists see the human condition is as one-sided as his treatment of earlier topics. To say that our ‘subjective well-being is not determined by external parameters’ (p432) but by ‘serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin’ is to take the behaviourist view to the exclusion of all other biochemical/psychiatric science. Recent studies have concluded that human behaviour and well-being are the result not just of the amount of serotonin etc that we have in our bodies, but that our response to external events actually alters the amount of serotonin, dopamine etc which our bodies produce. It is two-way traffic. Our choices therefore are central. The way we behave actually affects our body chemistry, as well as vice versa. Harari is averse to using the word ‘mind’ and prefers ‘brain’ but the jury is out about whethe/how these two co-exist. There is one glance at this idea on page 458: without dismissing it he allows it precisely four lines, which for such a major ‘game-changer’ to the whole argument is a deeply worrying omission.

I liked his bold discussion about the questions of human happiness that historians and others are not asking, but was surprised by his two pages on ‘The Meaning of Life’ which I thought slightly disingenuous. ‘From a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning…Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan.’ (p438, my italics). The first sentence is fine – of course , that is true! How could it be otherwise? Science deals with how things happen, not why in terms of meaning or metaphysics . To look for meta physical answers in the physical sciences is ridiculous – they can’t be found there. It’s like looking for a sandpit in a swimming pool. Distinguished scientists like Sir Martin Rees and John Polkinghorne, at the very forefront of their profession, understand this and have written about the separation of the two ‘magisteria’. Science is about physical facts not meaning; we look to philosophy, history, religion and ethics for that. Harari’s second sentence is a non-sequitur – an inference that does not follow from the premise. God’s ‘cosmic plan’ may well be to use the universe he has set up to create beings both on earth and beyond (in time and eternity) which are glorious beyond our wildest dreams. I rather think he has already – when I consider what Sapiens has achieved.

A curiously encouraging end

I found the very last page of the book curiously encouraging:

We are more powerful than ever before…Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. (p466)

Exactly! Time then for a change. Better to live in a world where we are accountable – to a just and loving God.

Harari is a brilliant writer, but one with a very decided agenda. He is excellent within his field but spreads his net too wide till some of the mesh breaks – allowing all sorts of confusing foreign bodies to pass in and out – and muddies the water. His failure to think clearly and objectively in areas outside his field will leave educated Christians unimpressed.

[1] See my book The Evil That Men Do . (Sacristy Press, 2016)

Marcus Paul

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Book Review: Prof. Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens: A Graphic History’

Posted on: January 2, 2021

Consider the phenomenon known as “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”

First written in Hebrew and self-published in Israel in 2011, the book by Yuval Noah Harari found an American publisher in 2014, quickly became an international best-seller in 60 languages, and then morphed into a kind of multi-media empire called Sapienship. Its visionary author, a history professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is now a much sought-after public intellectual, and his career is managed by his husband, Itzik Yahav. When Fareed Zakaria asked Barack Obama what he was reading during an interview on CNN, the President sang the praises of “Sapiens.”

Harari is a gifted writer, and he is not afraid to traffic in the biggest of Big Ideas. He starts by reminding us that Homo sapiens , the last surviving species in the genus known as Homo, started out as unremarkable animals “with no more impact on their environment than baboons, fireflies or jellyfish.” Our unique gift among the other fauna, which emerged about 70,000 years ago, is our ability to imagine things that cannot be detected by the five senses, including God, religion, corporations, and currency, all of which he characterizes as fictions. He points out that we have risen to the top of the food chain only by exploiting and often exterminating other animals, but he predicts that humans, too, are not long for the world. All of these intriguing ideas – and many more — are explored in depth and with wit and acuity in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind.”

The latest manifestation of the “Sapiens” publishing enterprise is “ Sapiens: A Graphic History ” (Harper Perennial), a series that tells much (if not all) of the same sweeping saga in comic-book format. The first volume in the series, co-written by David Vandermeulen and inventively illustrated by Daniel Casanave, is “The Birth of Mankind.”

The first lines of the graphic novel version of “ Sapiens ” echo the original book, which starts with an alternate version of Genesis: “About 14 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang.” The cartoon character who is shown to speak these lines is a caricature of Harari himself, comfortably seated in an armchair while floating in space at the moment of creation. And he continues to play the role of kindly schoolmaster throughout the rest of the book, peering into or entering the comic-book frame and sharing the story-line with his young niece, Zoe, an endearing Indian scientist named Arya Saraswati, and Professor Saraswati’s mischievous pet dog.

It is beyond argument nowadays that the comic book can be enjoyed by adult readers, and some of them are literally so graphic that their intended readers are adults only. “Sapiens: A Graphic History,” however, is child-friendly. For example, when explaining the principle that animals from different species may mate but cannot produce fertile offspring, Harari shows us a horse and a donkey and comments that “they don’t seem to be that into each other.” While many of the illustrations and dialogue bubbles are quite frank, the book serves as a useful primer of history and science for readers of all ages.

The illustrations, too, enliven the story-telling. Casanave wittily alludes to iconic artwork ranging from “American Gothic” and “Guernica” to the Flintstones and “Planet of the Apes.” To illustrate how the discovery of fire resulted in a diet that made human beings healthier, he depicts an idealized male couple standing together over a cooking pot: “Beautiful brain! Perfect smile! Six pack abs! Flat tummy!” The imagery is always cheerful and often funny, which is sometimes at odds with the dialogue bubbles, where the brutality and bloodlust of Homo sapiens over the course of history are described with candor.

Indeed, the graphic novel version of “Sapiens” lacks none of the edginess of the original. “Tolerance isn’t a sapiens trademark,” we are reminded. “In modern times, just a small difference in skin color, dialect or religion can prompt one group of sapiens to exterminate another. Why should ancient sapiens have been any more tolerant? It may well be that when sapiens encountered Neanderthals, history saw its first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign.”

The single most subversive idea in “Sapiens” is the notion that Homo sapiens achieved a great leap forward in evolution because of our unique ability to use language to “invent stuff.” Among the examples that Harari uses is religion: “You could never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him unlimited bananas in ape heaven” is my single favorite line from “Sapiens,” and it’s in the graphic version, too, along with an illustration of a chimp descending Mount Sinai with a pair of tablets in his arms. The story is told, suitably enough, by an imaginary superhero called Doctor Fiction.

THE SINGLE MOST SUBVERSIVE IDEA IN “SAPIENS” IS THE NOTION THAT HOMO SAPIENS ACHIEVED A GREAT LEAP FORWARD IN EVOLUTION BECAUSE OF OUR UNIQUE ABILITY TO USE LANGUAGE TO “INVENT STUFF.”

“All large scale human cooperation depends on common myths that exist only in peoples’ collective imagination,” Doctor Fiction sums up. “Much of history revolves around one big question…how do you convince millions of people to believe a particular story about a god, a nation, or a limited liability company?” History proves that human beings have been perfectly willing to embrace the stories that other human being made up, and “now the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depend on the good grace of imaginary entities, almighty gods, or Google,” as Harari’s comic-book avatar puts it.

The graphic novel ends on a gloomy note. A tough cop named Lopez enlists Harari and Professor Saraswati to assist in the investigation of what she calls “the world’s worst ecological serial killers.” Says the cop: “Wherever these guys go, a whole bunch of bodies always show up.” By now, of course, we know the prime suspect is, as one character says, “all of us.”

Some of my favorite stuff in “Sapiens” is necessarily left out of the first graphic novel, but the author promises to tell the whole story in future titles in the series. In the meantime, of course, there’s always the original book to read, and I’ve gone back to my copy countless times already.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal.

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A Scientifically Weak and Ethically Uninspiring Vision of Human Origins: Review of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens

When traveling through airports I love to browse bookstores, because it gives a sense of what ideas are tickling the public’s ears. For the last few years I’ve seen in airport bookstores a book,  Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (HarperPerennial, 2015), stocked in large piles and prominently displayed. In fact it’s still being sold in airport bookstores, despite the fact that the book is now some six years old.

As I’m interested in human origins, I assumed this was a book that I should read — but try reading a 450-page book for fun while doing a PhD. It doesn’t happen. Somewhere along the way I bought the book and saved it for later. 

Then earlier this year an ID-friendly scientist contacted me to ask my opinion of the book. He mentioned a former Christian who had lost his faith after reading  Sapiens , and then  told the story  on Justin Brierley’s excellent show  Unbelievable?  My friend asked if I would address  Sapiens  in my talk at the  Dallas Conference on Science and Faith , which I ended up doing. What could be so powerful in this book that it would cause someone to lose his faith? 

The author, Yuval Noah Harari, is an Israeli who holds a PhD from Oxford (where he studied world history), an  atheist , and a darling of the intelligentsia who have given him and his book many reviews and profiles over the past few years. A big reason for his popularity is that  Sapiens  is exceptionally well-written, accessible, and even enjoyable to read. But the main reason for the book’s influence is that it purports to explain, as  The New Yorker   put it , the “History of Everyone, Ever.” Who wouldn’t want to read such a book? 

I offer this praise even though I disagreed with a lot of what Harari says in the book. Much of it involves uncontroversial accounts of humanity that you learned about in your eighth-grade history class — i.e., the transition from small hunter-gatherer foraging tribes, to agriculture-based civilizations, to the modern day global industrial society. 

No big deal there. But the book goes much further. 

Harsh Words from Academics

Sapiens  purports to explain the origin of virtually all major aspects of humanity — religion, human social groups, and civilization — in evolutionary terms. Along the way it offers the reader a hefty dose of evolutionary psychology. While reading it I consistently thought to myself, “This book is light on science and data, and heavy on fact-free story-telling — and no wonder since many of his arguments are steeped in  data-free evolutionary psychology !” So I decided to look up the book’s Wikipedia page to see if other people felt the same way. Turns out they did — and the reviews from academics have been devastating. From  Wikipedia :

Anthropologist Christopher Robert Hallpike reviewed the book [ Sapiens ] and did not find any “serious contribution to knowledge”. Hallpike suggested that “…whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously”. He considered it an infotainment publishing event offering a “wild intellectual ride across the landscape of history, dotted with sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions about human destiny.” Science journalist Charles C. Mann concluded in  The Wall Street Journal , “There’s a whiff of dorm-room bull sessions about the author’s stimulating but often unsourced assertions.” Reviewing the book in  The Washington Post , evolutionary anthropologist Avi Tuschman points out problems stemming from the contradiction between Harari’s “freethinking scientific mind” and his “fuzzier worldview hobbled by political correctness”, but nonetheless wrote that “Harari’s book is important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens.” Reviewing the book in  The Guardian , philosopher Galen Strawson concluded that among several other problems, “Much of  Sapiens  is extremely interesting, and it is often well expressed. As one reads on, however, the attractive features of the book are overwhelmed by carelessness, exaggeration and sensationalism.”

Those are some harsh words, but they don’t necessarily mean that Harari’s claims in  Sapiens  are wrong. I will be reviewing the book here in a series of posts. It’s worth taking a closer look to evaluate what is compelling and what is controversial about it. At the end of this series I’ll address the precise claims in the book that apparently led one person to lose his faith.

Admissions and Overstatements about Human Evolutionary Origins

Sapiens makes intriguing admissions about our lack of knowledge of human evolutionary origins. For example, Harari admits, “We don’t know exactly where and when animals that can be classified as  Homo sapiens  first evolved from some earlier type of humans, but most scientists agree that by 150,000 years ago, East Africa was populated by  Sapiens  that looked just like us.” (p. 14) Harari is right, and this lack of evidence for the evolutionary origin of modern humans is  consistent with  the admissions of many mainstream evolutionary paleoanthropologists.

Another candid admission in the book (which I also agree with) is that it’s not easy to account for humanity’s special cognitive abilities — our big, smart, energetically expensive brain. This is especially difficult to explain if the main imperatives that drove our evolution were merely that we survive and reproduce on the African savannah. Here’s Harari’s account of how our brains got bigger:

That evolution should select for larger brains may seem to us like, well, a no-brainer. We are so enamoured of our high intelligence that we assume that when it comes to cerebral power, more must be better. But if that were the case, the feline family would also have produced cats who could do calculus, and frogs would by now have launched their own space program. Why are giant brains so rare in the animal kingdom? The fact is that a jumbo brain is a jumbo drain on the body. It’s not easy to carry around, especially when encased inside a massive skull. It’s even harder to fuel. In  Homo sapiens , the brain accounts for about 2-3 per cent of total body weight, but it consumes 25 per cent of the body’s energy when the body is at rest. By comparison, the brains of other apes require only 8 per cent of rest-time energy. Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways. Firstly, they spent more time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a government diverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons. It’s hardly a foregone conclusion that this is a good strategy for survival on the savannah. A chimpanzee can’t win an argument with a  Homo sapiens , but the ape can rip the man apart like a rag doll. Today our big brains pay off nicely, because we can produce cars and guns that enable us to move much faster than chimps, and shoot them from a safe distance instead of wrestling. But cars and guns are a recent phenomenon. For more than 2 million years, human neural networks kept growing and growing, but apart from some flint knives and pointed sticks, humans had precious little to show for it. What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years? Frankly, we don’t know.  Sapiens , p. 9

Again, this is exactly right: If our brains are largely the result of selection pressures on the African savannah — as he puts it “Evolution moulded our minds and bodies to the life of hunter-gatherers” (p. 378) — then there’s no reason to expect that we should need to evolve the ability to build cathedrals, compose symphonies, ponder the deep physics mysteries of the universe, or write entertaining (or even imaginative) books about human history. Why should these things evolve? He said it, not me: “Frankly, we don’t know.”

Here’s something else we don’t know: the genetic pathway by which all of these cognitive abilities evolved (supposedly). Now you probably won’t appreciate this fact if you read  Sapiens , because Harari gives a veneer of evolutionary explanation which really amounts to no explanation at all. Here’s what he says:

The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We’re not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language. We might call it the Tree of Knowledge mutation. Why did it occur in Sapiens DNA rather than in that of Neanderthals? It was a matter of pure chance, as far as we can tell. But it’s more important to understand the consequences of the Tree of Knowledge mutation than its causes. What was so special about the new Sapiens language that it enabled us to conquer the world?  Sapiens , p. 21

True, Harari admits that “We’re not sure” how all this happened. But he then proceeds to confidently assert that human cognitive abilities arose via “accidental genetic mutations” that “changed the inner wiring of the brains of  Sapiens .” No discussion is attempted and no citation is given for exactly what these mutations were, what exactly they did, how many mutations were necessary, and whether they would be likely to arise via the neo-Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and natural selection in the available time periods. 

If we don’t know the answers to any of those questions, then how do we know that his next statement is true: “It was a matter of pure chance, as far as we can tell”? Of course the answer is clear: We can’t know that his claim is true. He doesn’t know the claim is true. He’s overstating what we really know. After all, evolutionary biologists have  admitted  that the origin of human language is very difficult to explain since we lack adequate analogues or evolutionary precursors among animals.

Yet for Harari and so many others, the unquestioned answer is that human cognitive abilities arose due to “pure chance.” This is an extremely important claim that he confidently asserts and it sets the stage for the rest of the book, which purports to give an entirely materialistic account of human history. For example, a few pages later he lets slip his anti-religious ideological bias. This is revealed in a claim he asserts as factually true, but for which no justification whatsoever is provided:

There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.  Sapiens , p. 28

Did Religion Evolve, or Was It Designed, to Foster Cooperation?

Harari’s conjecture — “There are no gods” — is not just a piece of inconsequential trivia about his worldview — it forms the basis of many other crucial claims in the book. This naturalistic assumption permeates Harari’s thinking.

For example, Harari assumes that religion evolved by natural processes and in no way reflects some kind of design or revelation from a God. In fact, one of his central arguments is that religion evolved when humanity produced “myths” which fostered group cooperation and survival. Harari spends a lot of time developing this argument. Here are some key excerpts from the book:

Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution,  Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language. …  [F]iction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. …  How did  Homo sapiens  manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation — whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe — is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. …  Despite the lack of such biological instincts, during the foraging era, hundreds of strangers were able to cooperate thanks to their shared myths. …  Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined. When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links. While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail’s pace, the human imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any other ever seen on earth. Sapiens , pp. 24, 25, 27, 102, 103

Thus if Harari is correct, then religion was not designed, but is a behavior which evolved naturally because it fostered shared “myths” which allowed societies to better cooperate, increasing their chances of survival. This view grows out of his “no gods in the universe” perspective because it implies that religion was not revealed to humanity, but rather evolved.

Harari is undoubtedly correct that shared beliefs — or “myths,” as he pejoratively calls them — facilitate group cooperation, and this fosters survival. But this is an  observation  about shared beliefs, myths, and religion, not an  explanation  for them. And it is quite easy for a design-based model to account for these observations in a manner that requires no unguided evolution. Here’s what it might look like:

Perhaps shared “myths” that foster friendship, fellowship, and cooperation among human beings were not the result of random evolution or “pure chance” (as Harari describes our cognitive evolution), but rather reflect the intended state of human society as it was designed by a benevolent creator. If this is the case, then “large-scale human cooperation,” as Harari puts it, might be the intentional result of large-scale shared religious beliefs in a society — a useful emergent property that was intended by a designer for a society that doesn’t lose its religious cohesion. In other words, these benefits may be viewed  not  as the accidental byproduct of evolution but as intended for a society that pursues shared spirituality. 

Failing to Account for the Complexity of Religion

Harari is by no means the first to propose cooperation and group selection as an explanation for the origin of religion. But do these evolutionary accounts really account for the phenomenon? Not so much.

Religion is much more than group cooperation. For many religions it’s all about prayer, sacrifice, and total personal devotion to a deity. How do you explain that in evolutionary terms? How many followers of a religion have died — i.e., became evolutionary dead ends — for their beliefs? Which “selfish genes” drive young males into monasteries to avoid sexual relationships and pray? How does it help society put food on the table if your religion demands sacrificing large numbers of field animals to a deity? What about requiring that the rich and the poor donate wealth to build temples rather than grain houses — does that foster the growth of large societies? And what about that commandment about taking a weekly day off, with no fire or work, to worship God? That was never very good for cooperation and productivity. How about the religious ascetic who taught his followers to sell their possessions, give to the poor, and then chose to die at the hands of his worst enemies, believing that his own death would save them? How did he get such a big following? 

I’m asking these questions in evolutionary terms: how do these behaviors help believers survive and reproduce? Sure you can find tangential benefits that are unexpected byproducts, but generally speaking, for the evolutionist these things are difficult to explain. That is why Harari’s repeated assurances about how religion exists to build group cohesion is simplistic and woefully insufficient to account for many of the most common characteristics of religion.

Getting the Origin of Religion Backwards

When it comes to the origin of religion, Harari tells the standard evolutionary story. According to this story, religion began as a form of animism among small bands of hunters and gatherers and then proceeded to polytheism and finally monotheism as group size grew with the first agricultural civilizations. At each stage, he argues, religion evolved in order to provide the glue that gave the group the cohesive unity it needed (at its given size) to cooperate and survive.

Here’s Harari claiming that religion starts off with animism among ancient foragers — a claim for which he admits there is very little direct evidence:

Most scholars agree that animistic beliefs were common among ancient foragers. … In the animist world, objects and living things are not the only animated beings. There are also immaterial entities — the spirits of the dead, and friendly and malevolent beings, the kind that we today call demons, fairies and angels. … Animism is not a specific religion. It is a generic name for thousands of very different religions, cults and beliefs. What makes all of them ‘animist’ is this common approach to the world and to man’s place in it. … [I]t is better to be frank and admit that we have only the haziest notions about the religions of ancient foragers. We assume that they were animists, but that’s not very informative. We don’t know which spirits they prayed to, which festivals they celebrated, or which taboos they observed. Most importantly, we don’t know what stories they told. It’s one of the biggest holes in our understanding of human history.  Sapiens , pp. 55-56

Then Harari says the next step in humanity’s religious evolution was polytheism:

The Agricultural Revolution initially had a far smaller impact on the status of other members of the animist system, such as rocks, springs, ghosts and demons. However, these too gradually lost status in favour of the new gods. As long as people lived their entire lives within limited territories of a few hundred square miles, most of their needs could be met by local spirits. But once kingdoms and trade networks expanded, people needed to contact entities whose power and authority encompassed a whole kingdom or an entire trade basin. The attempt to answer these needs led to the appearance of polytheistic religions (from the Greek:  poly  = many,  theos  = god). These religions understood the world to be controlled by a group of powerful gods, such as the fertility goddess, the rain god and the war god. Humans could appeal to these gods and the gods might, if they received devotions and sacrifices, deign to bring rain, victory and health.  Sapiens , pp. 212-213

With little explanation, he finally asserts that humanity’s polytheistic religious culture at last evolved into monotheism:

With time some followers of polytheist gods became so fond of their particular patron that they … began to believe that their god was the only god, and that He was in fact the supreme power of the universe. Yet at the same time they continued to view Him as possessing interests and biases, and believed that they could strike deals with Him. 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. … Today most people outside East Asia adhere to one monotheist religion or another, and the global political order is built on monotheistic foundations.  Sapiens, pp. 217-218

His main argument for the initial origin of religion is that it fostered cooperation. At each step of humanity’s religious evolution, he more or less argues that the new form of religion helped us cooperate in new and larger types of groups.

As noted above, there is undoubtedly much truth that religion fosters cooperation, but Harari’s overall story ignores the possibility that humanity was designed to cooperate via shared religious beliefs. His evolutionary story about religious evolution also assumes the naturalistic viewpoint that religion evolved through various stages and was not revealed from above. No wonder Harari feels this way, since he admits his worldview that “There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.” As a monotheist, I’m skeptical of these accounts of religious evolution, especially since I’m accustomed to evolutionary arguments often leaving out important data points.

Recently there was a spat over a 2019 article in  Nature . The article, titled “ Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history ,” was just retracted. It proposed that societies produce beliefs in “moralizing gods” in order to “facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies.” The article purported to survey 414 societies, and claimed to find an “association between moralizing gods and social complexity” where “moralizing gods follow — rather than precede — large increases in social complexity.” As lead author Harvey Whitehouse put it in  New Scientist , the study assessed “whether religion has helped societies grow and flourish,” and basically found the answer was no: “Instead of helping foster cooperation as societies expanded, Big Gods appeared only after a society had passed a threshold in complexity corresponding to a population of around a million people.” Their study was retracted after  a new paper  found that their dataset was too limited. When a proper dataset was used, “the reported finding is reversed: moralizing gods precede increases in social complexity.” It seems, therefore, that belief in a just and moral God helps drive success and growth in a society. 

Inadequate Datasets and Harari’s Claims

This problem of inadequate datasets undoubtedly plagues many of Harari’s claims about the evolutionary stages of religion. Perhaps there are some societies that progressed from animism to polytheism to monotheism. But anthropologists and missionaries have also reported finding the opposite — that some groups that practice animism today remember an earlier time when their people worshipped something closer to a monotheistic God. Though anecdotal, consider this striking account from the book  Eternity in Their Hearts  by missionary Don Richardson:

In 1867, a bearded Norwegian missionary named Lars Skrefsrud and his Danish colleague, a layman named Hans Børreson, found two-and-a-half million people called the Santal living in a region north of Calcutta, India. Skrefsrud soon proved himself an amazing linguist. He quickly became so fluent in Santal that people came from miles around just to hear a foreigner speak their language so well! As soon as possible, Skrefsrud began proclaiming the gospel to the Santal. Naturally he wondered how many years it would take before Santal people, until then so far removed from Jewish or Christian influences, would even show interest in the gospel, let alone open their hearts to it. To Skrefsrud’s utter amazement, the Santal were electrified almost at once by the gospel message. At length he heard Santal sages, including one named Kolean, exclaim, “What this stranger is saying must mean that Thakur Jiu has not forgotten us after all this time!” Skrefsrud caught his breath in astonishment.  Thakur  was a Santal word meaning “genuine.”  Jiu  meant “god.” The Genuine God? Clearly, Skrefsrud was not introducing a new concept by talking about one supreme God. Santal sages politely brushed aside the terminology he had been using for God and insisted that  Thakur Jiu  was the right name to use. That name, obviously, had been on Santal lips for a very long time! “How do you know about Thakur Jiu?” Skrefsrud asked (a little disappointed, perhaps). “Our forefathers knew Him long ago,” the Santal replied, beaming. “Very well,” Skrefsrud continued, “I have a second question. Since you know about  Thakur Jiu , why don’t you worship Him instead of the sun, or worse yet, demons?” Santal faces around him grew wistful. “That,” they responded, “is the bad news.” Then the Santal sage named Kolean stepped forward and said, “Let me tell you our story from the very beginning.” Not only Skrefsrud, but the entire gathering of younger Santal, fell silent as Kolean, an esteemed elder, spun out a story that stirred the dust on aeons of Santal oral tradition…  Eternity in Their Hearts , pp. 41-43

Richardson then recounts the Santal’s own history of its religious evolution: starting with devotion to a monotheistic God who created humanity, followed by a rebellion against that God after which they felt “ashamed,” and eventually leading to the division of humanity and the migration of their tribe to India. During that migration:

In those days, Kolean explained, the proto-Santal, as descendants of the holy pair, still acknowledged Thakur Jiu as the genuine God. Facing this crisis, however, they lost their faith in Him and took their first step into spiritism. “The spirits of these great mountains have blocked our way,” they decided. “Come, let us bind ourselves to them by an oath, so that they will let us pass.” Then they covenanted with the “Maran Buru” (spirits of the great mountains), saying, “O, Maran Buru, if you release the pathways for us, we will practice spirit appeasement when we reach the other side.” Skrefsrud no doubt had thought it strange that the Santal name for wicked spirits meant literally “spirits of the great mountains,” especially since there were no great mountains in the present Santal homeland. Now he understood. “Very shortly,” Kolean continued, “they came upon a passage [the Khyber Pass?] in the direction of the rising sun.” They named that passage Bain, which means “day gate.” Thus the proto-Santal burst through onto the plains of what is now called Pakistan and India. Subsequent migrations brought them still further east to the border regions between India and the present Bangladesh, where they became the modern Santal people.  Under bondage to their oath, and not out of love for the Maran Buru, the Santal began to practice spirit appeasement, sorcery, and even sun worship. Kolean added: “In the beginning, we did not have gods. The ancient ancestors obeyed Thakur only. After finding other gods, day by day we forgot Thakur more and more until only His name remained.” Eternity in Their Hearts , pp. 43-44

The traditions of the Santal people thus entail an account of their own religious history that directly contradicts Harari’s evolutionary view: they started as monotheists who worshipped the one “true” God ( Thakur ), and only later descended into animism and spiritism. There are similar accounts of other groups in  Eternity in Their Hearts : peoples that started as monotheists and later turned to other forms of religion. This also directly counters the standard materialistic narrative about the origin of religion. While far from conclusive, it shows that questions about the origin of religion are far more complex than the story that Harari presents. Religion is a highly complicated human behavior, and simplistic evolutionary narratives like those presented in  Sapiens  hardly do justice to the diversity and complexity of religion throughout human societies.

An Evolutionary Deconstruction of Human Rights

As we saw, Harari assumes, “There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.” (p. 28) We discussed how the book’s scheme for the evolution of religion — animism to polytheism to monotheism — is contradicted by certain anthropological data. Harari would likely dismiss such anthropological evidence as “myths.” But when we dismiss religious ideas as mere “myths,” we risk losing many of the philosophical foundations that religion has provided for human rights and ethics in our civilization.

Thus Harari explores the implications of his materialistic evolutionary view for ethics, morality, and human value. The results are disturbing. David Klinghoffer  wrote about this  two years ago, noting that Harari deconstructs the most famous line from the Declaration of Independence. Harari highlights in bold the ideas that become difficult to sustain in a materialist framework:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are  created equal , that they are  endowed  by their  Creator with certain  unalienable rights , that among these are life,  liberty , and the pursuit of  happiness . (emphases in original)

Harari divides beliefs into those that are “objective” — things that exist “independently of human consciousness and human beliefs” — “subjective” — things that exist only in “the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual” — and “inter-subjective” — things that exist “within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals.” (p. 117) In Harari’s evolutionary view, beliefs about the rights of man fall into the “subjective” categories. It all depends on humanity having been “not ‘created’.” Let’s just let Harari speak for himself:

According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’. The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. ‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently’. Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals. ‘Endowed by their creator’ should be translated simply into ‘born’. Equally, there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities and characteristics. Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, bur because they have wings. And it’s not true that these organs, abilities and characteristics are ‘unalienable’. Many of them undergo constant mutations, and may well be completely lost over time. The ostrich is a bird that lost its ability to fly. So ‘unalienable rights’ should be translated into ‘mutable characteristics’.  And what are the characteristics that evolved in humans? ‘Life’, certainly. But ‘liberty’? There is no such thing in biology. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree….  Advocates of equality and human rights may be outraged by this line of reasoning. Their response is likely to be, ‘We know that people are not equal biologically! But if we believe that we are all equal in essence, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society.’ I have no argument with that. This is exactly what I mean by ‘imagined order’. 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.  Sapiens , pp. 109-110

If you didn’t read that passage carefully, go back and read it again. What Harari just articulated is that under an evolutionary mindset there is no objective basis for equality, freedom, or human rights — and in order to accept such things we must believe in principles that are effectively falsehoods. 

Thus, in Harari’s view, under an evolutionary perspective there is no basis for objectively asserting human equality and human rights. He should be commended for providing such an unfiltered exploration of the evolutionary view. David Klinghoffer  commented  on the troubling implications of that outlook:

Harari concedes that it’s possible to imagine a system of thought including equal rights. A society could be founded on an “imagined order,” that is, where “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.” [p. 110] Or to put it differently, as I did, “You could imagine a meaning to life. But inevitably it would be a fictional rather than objective meaning.” Similarly, you could imagine ideals like those in the Declaration. But inevitably they would be fictional rather than based in objective reality. That’s the difference between trying to ground our civilization in evolutionary versus design premises. It should be obvious that a society whose roots are widely acknowledged as fictions is bound to be less successful and enduring than one where they are recognized as real.

Harari is remarkably self-aware about the implications of his reasoning, immediately writing:

It’s likely that more than a few readers squirmed in their chairs while reading the preceding paragraphs. … If people realise that human rights exist only in the imagination, isn’t there a danger that our society will collapse? Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights.  Homo sapiens  has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.  Such fears are well justified.  Sapiens , pp. 110-111

But there’s a reason why Harari isn’t too worried that servants will rise up and kill their masters: most people believe in God and this keeps society in check. He writes that it’s these beliefs that create society:

This is why cynics don’t build empires and why an imagined order can be maintained only if large segments of the population — and in particular large segments of the elite and the security forces — truly believe in it.  Sapiens , p. 112

Privileged Access to the Truth?

But what if the world as a whole begins to follow Harari’s view as it’s being spread through  Sapiens  — the ideas that God isn’t real, or that human rights and the “imagined order” have no basis? If Harari is right, it sounds like some bad things are going to follow once the truth leaks out. But he’s convinced they won’t because the “elite,” in order to preserve the order in society, will “never admit that the order is imagined” (p. 112). 

But what makes the elite so sure that the “imagined order exists only in our minds” (p. 113), as he puts it? What gives them privileged access to the truth that the rest of us don’t have? Harari never says. 

As we saw  earlier in this series , perhaps the “order” of society is an intended consequence of a design for human beings, where shared beliefs and even a shared religious narrative are meant to bring people into greater harmony that hold society together. Again, Harari gets it backwards: he assumes there are no gods, and he assumes that any good that flows from believing in religion is an incidental evolutionary byproduct that helps maintain religion in society. But why can’t those benefits — a universal basis for equality and human rights, a shared narrative that allows us to cooperate and work together — be the intended and designed benefits for a society that maintains its religious fabric?

Clearly Harari considers himself part of the “elite” who know the truth about the lack of a rational basis for maintaining social order. So why is he exempt from higher levels of control? Harari never considers that perhaps the view that the order is “imagined” is a view being imposed upon him to control his own behavior. Why must we religious peons be the ones whose entire lives are manipulated by lies? Why can’t atheist academics like Harari be the victims of similar kind of falsehoods? 

In any case, Harari never considers these possibilities because his starting point won’t let him: “There are no gods in the universe.” This belief seems to form the basis for everything else in the book, for no other options are seriously considered. 

Back to the Guy Who Lost His Faith Over Sapiens

At the beginning of this review, I mentioned a person who reported losing his faith after reading the book. On a January 2021 episode of Justin Brierley’s  Unbelievable? podcast , guest and podcaster Sam Devis told Brierley that what did it for him was reading Harari’s idea in  Sapiens  that “humanity is a weaver of stories.” Devis notes that these stories “bring us together and give us a joint narrative that we to adhere to and then do more because of.” He gives the example of the pyramids being successfully built because the ancient Egyptian civilization believed that the Pharaohs were gods, and belief in this myth “enabled a group of people to do an amazing feat.” Of course Devis recognizes that these ancient Egyptian religious beliefs were false, and thus people did great things because of “awe and worship of something that wasn’t necessarily true.” He explains that he was then forced to ask himself: “Could this be true of belief systems we hold in the 21st century?” 

Devis also states that what Harari did was deconstruct his notions that humans are special. He said that  Sapiens  “enabled me to see that actually it isn’t just a big jump from ape to man. There have been many, many steps in between,” where humans “might be better [than animals] in certain areas but not necessarily better in other areas.” Devis asks, “What is it specifically about people — humans today,  Homo sapiens  — that gives us the right or the ability to say that we are special?” For him, all of this opened up the possibility of “naturalism or materialism” being true. 

In the end, for Devis,  Sapiens  offered an “understanding of where we’ve come from and the evolutionary journey we’ve had.” All this suggested to him that God might not be objectively real. Devis needed some external way to “prove” that God was real, and he could see no way to do that.

Different people find different arguments persuasive. What convinces one person to come to faith may be quite uncompelling to another. And what dissuades one person from belief in God may seem entirely weak and unconvincing to someone else. This doesn’t mean that one person is smart and the other foolish, and we cannot judge another for thinking differently. It just highlights differences in how we think — a diversity that, as a Christian myself, I think is part of the beauty that God built into the human species. 

I say all of this because I have to confess that I found Sam Devis’s self-stated reasons for rejecting faith to be highly unconvincing. He seems to be a thoughtful person who is well-informed and genuinely trying to seek the truth. I was impressed by his showing on the  Unbelievable?  podcast. However, the fact that I respect him doesn’t mean that I have to find his arguments compelling. After all, consider what we’ve seen in this series:

• In  Sapiens , Harari recognizes that evolutionary science has failed to uncover where or when humanity evolved: “We don’t know exactly where and when animals that can be classified as  Homo sapiens  first evolved from some earlier type of humans.” This is consistent with  evidence from the fossil record which shows that there is a distinct break between human-like members of the genus  Homo  and the apelike australopithecines .
• Harari  admits  that under evolution it’s not easy to account for humanity’s special cognitive abilities — our big, smart, energetically expensive brain. He writes: “What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years? Frankly, we don’t know.” This is consistent with the fact that evolutionary biologists have  struggled to explain the origin of human language, and to find analogues or evolutionary precursors of human language among animals .
• Harari proposes an  essentially vacuous explanation  for how human cognition evolved, vaguely attributing it to “accidental genetic mutations” and “pure chance,” while attempting no discussion or explanation of what these mutations were, what they did, how many mutations were necessary, and most important, whether they would be likely to arise via the neo-Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and natural selection in the available time periods.
• Harari relies heavily upon the idea that religion evolved because it inspired shared “myths” which fostered friendship, fellowship, and cooperation — massively aiding in survival. But he  fails to recognize  that this is an observation about beneficial effects of religion, not an explanation of the origin of religion. He further fails to consider the possibility that “large-scale human cooperation” may have been an intended result of widely shared religious beliefs that an intelligent designer built into humanity as a reward to benefit societies that don’t lose their religious cohesion (more on that below).
• Harari advocates a standard scheme for the evolution of religion, where it begins with animism and transitions into polytheism, and finally monotheism. But he ignores  evidence  from some animistic and polytheistic groups who recall that they originated as monotheists and only later forgot about their “true creator God,” and descended into other forms of religion.
• Harari’s simplistic model for the evolution of religion  fails to account  for the complexity of the phenomenon — which in many cases would yield few apparent evolutionary benefits. This is not intended as a criticism of religion, for many of these aspects of religion are ones we highly esteem. For example, what survival benefits are there in people devoting their lives to prayer, sacrifice, and total personal devotion to a deity? How many followers of a religion have died — i.e., became evolutionary dead ends — because they held steadfastly to their religious beliefs in the face of persecution? Or how many religious persons have entered monasteries or convents and gave up the option to reproduce, in order to live lives of prayer and service to others? Why do billions of people follow a religious ascetic who taught to sell your possessions, give to the poor, and then chose to die at the hands of his worst enemies, believing that his own death would save them? It’s certainly true that religion provides advantageous cohesion in a society, but all of these praiseworthy behaviors represent “dead ends” from an evolutionary perspective. If anything, the complexity of religion demonstrates that human life is about much more than mere survival and reproduction. This directly counters the narrative of evolutionary psychology, which claims all behaviors must be reducible to benefits conferred towards survival and reproduction.
• Harari simply  asserts  without any justification that, “There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.” Later he admits that this fact fully deconstructs any objective basis for human rights and equality. Harari explains that under this vision of humanity, “the science of biology” indicates “people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’.” Paralleling the Declaration of Independence, which says that we were “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights,” Harari admits that in his view, “Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything.” Harari admits the impotence of his worldview, saying we should believe in human rights “not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.” But he further admits that his evolution-based ideology makes it “well justified” to fear “a danger that our society will collapse.” In other words, Harari’s worldview is so destructive that he wants his readers to believe in fictions for the sake of holding society together.

Harari’s dark vision of humanity — one that lacks explanations for humanity itself, including many of our core behaviors and defining intellectual or expressive features, and one that destroys any objective basis for human rights — is very difficult for me to find attractive. I much prefer the Judeo-Christian vision, where all humans were created in the image of God and have fundamental worth and value — loved equally in the sight of God and deserving of just and fair treatment under human rights and the law — regardless of race, creed, culture, intelligence, nationality, or any other characteristic.

If “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”  as John Keats wrote , then this beautiful vision of humanity must be true, and Harari’s must be false.

An Evolutionary Argument Against Evolution

On top of those problems, Harari’s evolutionary vision seems self-refuting: If we adopt his view and reject religion, then we lose all the social benefits that religion provides — benefits that provide a basis for the equality and human rights that hold society together. This, he admits, could lead to the collapse of society. But if we live in a world produced by evolution — where all that matters is survival and reproduction — then why would evolution produce a species that would adopt an ideology that leads to its own destruction? 

Moreover, how could we know such an ideology is true? If evolution produced our minds, how can we trust our beliefs about evolution? This point has been recognized by many thinkers over the years as a self-defeating aspect of the evolutionary worldview. 

Darwin himself wrote:

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? Charles Darwin, letter to William Graham, July 3, 1881

Likewise C. S. Lewis:

All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. … Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true. It follows therefore that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by our thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument that proved no argument was sound — a proof that there are no such things as proofs — which is nonsense.  C. S. Lewis,  Miracles , p. 26

Lewis quoted the influential evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane who acknowledged this problem: 

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. Quoted in  Miracles , p. 28

Even materialist thinkers such as Patricia Churchland admit that under an evolutionary view of the human mind, belief in truth “takes the hindmost” with regard to other needs of an organism:

Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing. The principle chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. Insofar as representations serve that function, representations are a good thing. … [A representation] is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost. Patricia Churchland, “Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience,”  Journal of Philosophy , 84:544-553 (1987)

Another famous expositor of this argument is Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who writes:

Even if you think Darwinian selection would make it probable that certain belief-producing mechanisms — those involved in the production of beliefs relevant to survival — are reliable, that would not hold for the mechanisms involved in the production of the theoretical claims of science — such beliefs, for example as E, the evolutionary story itself. And of course the same would be true for N [belief in naturalism]. Alvin Plantinga, “An Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism,” in  Faith in Theory and Practice , eds. Carol White and Elizabeth Radcliffe (Open Court, 1993)

For all of Harari’s assumptions that Darwinian evolution explains the origin of the human mind, it’s difficult to see how he can justify the veracity of that belief. A Darwinian explanation of human cognition seems to defeat itself.

Restoring the Credibility of Human Exceptionalism

Sam Devis also said that Harari’s deconstruction of human exceptionalism was a major factor in his losing faith. But considering the bullet points listed above, there are still strong reasons to retain a belief in human exceptionalism. As noted in the first two bullets, there are distinct breaks between humanlike forms in the fossil record and their supposed apelike precursors, and the evolution of human language is extremely difficult to explain given the lack of analogues or precursors among forms of animal communication. This alone suggests humans are unique, but there are many other reasons to view human exceptionalism as valid.

It should be obvious that there are significant differences between humans and apes. For one, humans are the only primates that always walk upright, have relatively hairless bodies, and wear clothing. But the differences go far beyond physical traits and appearances.

Humans are the only species that uses fire and technology. Humans are the only species that composes music, writes poetry, and practices religion. When it comes to morality, bioethicist Wesley J. Smith observes: “[W]e are unquestionably a unique species — the only species capable of even contemplating ethical issues and assuming responsibilities — we uniquely are capable of apprehending the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, proper and improper conduct…” Humans are also the only species that seeks to investigate the natural world through science. Additionally, humans are distinguished by their use of complex language. As MIT linguist Noam Chomsky observes:

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.… There is no reason to suppose that the ‘gaps’ are bridgeable.

Other linguists have suggested that this finding would imply “a cognitive equivalent of the Big Bang.”

The human race has unique and unparalleled moral, intellectual, and creative abilities. In view of all this evidence, many scholars have argued that humans are indeed exceptional.

Independent Basis for Belief in a Designer

As noted, Sam Devis said that after reading Harari’s book he sought some independent way to “prove” that God was real, but he saw no way to do that. As I explained  here , intelligent design does not “prove” that “God” exists, but much evidence from nature does provide us with substantial scientific reasons to believe that life and the universe are the result of an intelligent cause. This provides us with strong epistemic reasons to consider theism — the existence of a personal Creator God — to be true. Here are some key lines of evidence evidence from nature which supports intelligent design, and provide what Sam Devis requested when he sought some kind of “independent” evidence pointing to the existence of God:

• The fact that the universe exists, and had a beginning, which calls out for a First Cause.
• The exquisite “global” fine-tuning of the laws and constants of the universe to allow for advanced life to exist.
• Additional “local” fine-tuning parameters make Earth a “privileged planet,” which is well-suited not just for life but also for scientific discovery.
• The presence of language-based code in our DNA which contains commands and codes very similar to what we find in computer information processing.
• The result of this information processing of language-based code is innumerable molecular machines carrying out vital tasks inside our cells. Combined with this observation is the fact that many of these machines are irreducibly complex (i.e., they require a certain minimum core of parts to work and can’t be built via a step-wise Darwinian pathway). And many are actually involved in constructing the very components that compose them — a case of causal circularity that stymies a stepwise evolutionary explanation. 
• The abrupt appearance of new types of organisms throughout the history of life, witnessed in the fossil record as “explosions” where fundamentally new types of life appear without direct evolutionary precursors. 
• The exceptional traits of humans and the origin of higher human behaviors such as art, religion, mathematics, science, and heroic moral acts of self-sacrifice, which point to our having a higher purpose beyond mere survival and reproduction.

If Sam Devis or others seek independent evidence that life didn’t evolve by Harari’s blind evolutionary scheme, but rather was designed, there is an abundance. 

Harari’s Uncompelling Vision in Sapiens

Materialists often oppose human exceptionalism because it challenges their belief that we are little more than just another animal. But no matter what gradations people claim to find between ape behavior and human behavior, we can’t escape one undeniable fact: it’s humans who write scientific papers studying apes, not the other way around. Apes don’t do anything like what we do. It’s not even close. The world we live in shows unbridgeable chasms between human and animal behavior. If you don’t see that, then go to the chimp or gorilla exhibit at your local zoo, and bring a bucket of cold water with you. Take a look at the apes, then dump the water over your head, wake up, and take a second look. If that doesn’t work, I can’t help you. 

Having come to the end of this review, I think there are strong bases for rejecting Harari’s evolutionary vision. It fails to explain too many crucial aspects of the human experience, contradicts too much data, and is too dark and hopeless as regards human rights and equality. On top of that, if it is true, then neither you nor I could ever know. Nor, for that matter, could Sam Devis or Yuval Noah Harari.

• human evolution
• Review of Sapiens
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
• Yuval Noah Harari

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Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poetry

By Amanda Petrusich

In the past several months, Taylor Swift has become culturally ubiquitous in a way that feels nearly terrifying. Superstardom tends to turn normal people into cartoons, projections, gods, monsters. Swift has been inching toward some sort of tipping point for a while. The most recent catalyst was, in part, love: in the midst of her record-breaking Eras Tour , Swift, who is thirty-four, began dating Travis Kelce , a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. Whenever Swift appeared at one of Kelce’s games, the broadcasters whipped their extra-high-definition cameras toward her, sending legions of amateur lip-readers scrambling for their phones. I’m paid to give legibility to such things, and even I couldn’t help but think that we were crossing some sort of Rubicon with regard to our collective sanity. Swift was everywhere, beheld by everyone. She is one of the most streamed artists of all time on Spotify; Billboard reported that, at one point, she accounted for seven per cent of all vinyl sales in the U.S. Swift is a capable and hugely savvy businesswoman (a billionaire, in fact), yet I began to worry about her in a nearly maternal way: How could anyone survive that sort of scrutiny and retain her humanity? Detaching from reality can be lethal for a pop star, particularly one known for her Everygirl candor. I thought of the oft-memed bit from “Arrested Development,” in which Lucille Bluth, the oblivious matriarch, asks, “I mean, it’s one banana, Michael—what could it cost? Ten dollars?”

This month, Swift released “The Tortured Poets Department,” her eleventh studio album. She has now reached a level of virtuosity within her genre that feels nearly immutable—she’s too practiced, too masterly, to swing and really miss. But “The Tortured Poets Department” suffers from being too long (two hours after it was released, Swift announced a second disk, bringing the total number of tracks to thirty-one) and too familiar. Swift co-wrote most of the record with Jack Antonoff and with Aaron Dessner. (The two producers have oppositional melodic sensibilities: Antonoff sharpens Swift; Dessner softens her.) The new songs suggest that, after a decade, her partnership with Antonoff has perhaps run its course. The tracks written with Dessner are gentler, more tender, and more surprising. The raw and stirring “Robin” seems to address a child—either a very young Swift (the album contains several references to her hijacked youth, including “The Manuscript,” a sombre song about a relationship with an older man), or maybe a future son or daughter.

“The Tortured Poets Department” was released following the end of Swift’s six-year relationship with the actor Joe Alwyn, and the album is mostly about the utter unreliability of love—how bonkers it is that we build our entire lives around a feeling that can simply dissipate. “You said I’m the love of your life / About a million times,” Swift sings on “Loml,” a wrenching piano ballad. “You shit-talked me under the table, talking rings and talking cradles.” Shortly after Swift and Alwyn split, she reportedly had a fling with Matty Healy , the front man for the British rock band the 1975. (“I took the miracle move-on drug / The effects were temporary,” she sings on “Fortnight.”) Healy is a provocateur, prone to making loutish jokes; onstage, he smokes, eats raw steak, and makes out with strangers. The rumored relationship sent Swifties into spasms of outrage, and revealed the unusual extent to which Swift is beholden to her fans. She has encouraged and nurtured a parasocial affection (at times she nearly demanded it: inviting fans to her home, baking them cookies), and she now has to contend with their sense of ownership over her life. On “But Daddy I Love Him,” she scornfully chastises the “judgmental creeps” who relentlessly hounded her about her love life: “I’d rather burn my whole life down / Than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning.” (She saves the nastiest barb for the final verse: “All the wine moms are still holding out.”) Regardless, things with Healy ended fast, and, a few months later, she did the most wholesome thing possible: she started dating a football player whose team would go on to win the Super Bowl.

Quite a few of the album’s lyrics seem to evoke Healy: “You’re not Dylan Thomas / I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel / We’re modern idiots,” Swift sings on the title track, a shimmering song about broken people clinging to each other. I like that line—it suggests self-awareness—but it’s followed by one of the weirdest verses of Swift’s career: “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist / I scratch your head, you fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever.” Other lyrics lack Swift’s signature precision: “At dinner you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one people put wedding rings on,” she sings. Even the greatest poets whiff a phrase now and then, but a lot of the language on the record is either incoherent (“I was a functioning alcoholic till nobody noticed my new aesthetic”) or just generally bewildering (“Florida is one hell of a drug”). My favorite lyrics are the simplest, and are delivered with a kind of exhausted calm. On “Down Bad,” a woozy song about feeling like shit, Swift admits defeat: “Now I’m down bad, crying at the gym / Everything comes out teen-age petulance / Fuck it if I can’t have him.” Feel you, dude.

Each of Swift’s records has a distinct visual component—this is more or less the premise of the Eras Tour . “The Tortured Poets Department” is preoccupied with writerly accoutrements, but the vibe is ultimately more high-end stationery store than musty rare-books room. Initially, the title seemed as if it might be a smirking reference to Joe Alwyn (he once joked about being part of a WhatsApp group called the Tortured Man Club). But I find that the phrase works well as a summation of Swift’s entire self-conception. She has always made a big deal about her pain being generative. “This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on the page,” she wrote on Instagram. She has talked about this album as if the songs were mere monuments to her suffering: “Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.”

An unusual number of Swift’s songs portray love as combative, perhaps because she is so prone to working from a place of wounded longing. On “Better Than Revenge,” a song she wrote at eighteen, Swift sings about art as a useful weapon, a way to punish anyone who does her dirty: “She thinks I’m psycho / ’Cause I like to rhyme her name with things.” It’s a funny lyric, but, by Swift’s current age, most people understand that love isn’t about winning. (Art isn’t, either.) Yet, in Swift’s universe, love is often a battlefield. On “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” she catalogues the ways in which fame can pervert and destroy a person: “I was tame, I was gentle, till the circus life made me mean,” she sings. She is paranoid, wild-eyed: “Tell me everything is not about me / But what if it is ?” (After the year Swift has had, she’s not wrong to ask.) The song itself is so tightly produced that it doesn’t sound dangerous. But, midway through, her voice briefly goes feral. I found the moment thrilling, which is maybe part of the problem.

In the weeks before “The Tortured Poets Department” was released, it seemed as though a backlash was inevitable. Swift’s lyrics are often focussed on her perseverance against all odds, but, these days, she is too omnipresent and powerful to make a very convincing underdog. Still, interest in Swift has yet to diminish or fully sour. She announced the album at the Grammys, in February, as she was accepting the award for Best Pop Vocal Album, for her previous record, “Midnights.” I found her speech so profoundly mercenary it was sort of funny. “I want to say thank you to the fans by telling you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you for the last two years, which is that my brand-new album comes out April 19th,” Swift said. “I’m gonna go and post the cover.”

As I’ve grown older, I’ve mostly stopped thinking about art and commerce as being fundamentally at odds. But there are times when the rapaciousness of our current pop stars seems grasping and ugly. I’m not saying that pop music needs to be ideologically pure—it wouldn’t be much fun if it were—but maybe it’s time to cool it a little with the commercials? A couple of days before the album’s release, Swift unveiled a library-esque display at the Grove, a shopping mall in Los Angeles. It included several pages of typewritten lyrics on faux aged paper, arranged as though they had recently been tugged from the platen of a Smith Corona. (The word “talisman” was misspelled on one, to the delight of the haters.) The Spotify logo was featured prominently at the bottom of each page. Once again, I laughed. What is the point of all that money if it doesn’t buy you freedom from corporate branding? For a million reasons—her adoption of the “poet” persona; her already unprecedented streaming numbers—such an egregious display of sponsorship was worse than just incongruous. It was, as they say, cringe.

Among the other clues Swift doled out were five exclusive playlists for Apple Music (sorry, Spotify!), comprising her own songs and organized according to the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. At first, I thought the playlists were just another bit of overwrought marketing, but the more I listened to “The Tortured Poets Department” the more germane the concept felt. Anyone who has grieved knows that these categories are not a ladder you climb toward peace: it is possible, instead, to feel all of them at once, briefly or forever. Each stage is evident on “The Tortured Poets Department.” Sometimes they oppose one another: Swift is cocky and self-loathing, tough and vulnerable, totally fine and completely destroyed. She is free, but trapped. Dominant, powerless. She wants this, but she doesn’t. Those sorts of contradictions can be dizzying, but, in the end, they’re also the last things keeping her human. ♦

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New Cold Wars review: China, Russia and Biden’s daunting task

David Sanger of the New York Times delivers a must-read on the foreign policy challenges now facing US leaders

R ussia bombards Ukraine. Israel and Hamas are locked in a danse macabre. The threat of outright war between Jerusalem and Tehran grows daily. Beijing and Washington snarl. In a moment like this, David Sanger’s latest book, subtitled China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West , is a must-read. Painstakingly researched, New Cold Wars brims with on-record interviews and observations by thinly veiled sources.

Officials closest to the president talk with an eye on posterity. The words of the CIA director, Bill Burns, repeatedly appear on the page. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, surface throughout the book. Sanger, White House and national security correspondent for the New York Times, fuses access, authority and curiosity to deliver an alarming message: US dominance is no longer axiomatic.

In the third decade of the 21st century, China and Russia defy Washington, endeavoring to shatter the status quo while reaching for past glories. Vladimir Putin sees himself as the second coming of Peter the Great, “a dictator … consumed by restoring the old Russian empire and addressing old grievances”, in Sanger’s words.

The possibility of nuclear war is no longer purely theoretical. “In 2021 Biden, [Gen Mark] Milley, and the new White House national security team discovered that America’s nuclear holiday was over,” Sanger writes. “They were plunging into a new era that was far more complicated than the cold war had ever been.”

As Russia’s war on Ukraine faltered, Putin and the Kremlin raised the specter of nuclear deployment against Kyiv.

“The threat that Russia might use a nuclear weapon against its non-nuclear-armed foe surfaced and resurfaced every few months,” Sanger recalls.

The world was no longer “flat”. Rather, “the other side began to look more like a security threat and less like a lucrative market”. Unfettered free trade and interdependence had yielded prosperity and growth for some but birthed anger and displacement among many. Nafta – the North American Free Trade Agreement – became a figurative four-letter word. In the US, counties that lost jobs to China and Mexico went for Trump in 2016 .

Biden and the Democrats realized China never was and never would be America’s friend. “‘I think it’s fair to say that just about every assumption across different administrations was wrong,” one of Biden’s “closest advisers” tells Sanger.

“‘The internet would bring political liberty. Trade would liberalize the regime’ while creating high-skill jobs for Americans. The list went on. A lot of it was just wishful thinking.”

Sanger also captures the despondency that surrounded the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan. A suicide bombing at the Kabul airport left 13 US soldiers and 170 civilians dead. The event still haunts.

“The president came into the room shortly thereafter, and at that point Gen [Kenneth] McKenzie informed him of the attack and also the fact that there had been at least several American military casualties, fatalities in the attack,” Burns recalls. “I remember the president just paused for at least 30 seconds or so and put his head down because he was absorbing the sadness of the moment and the sense of loss as well.”

Almost three years later, Biden’s political standing has not recovered. “The bitter American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to underscore the dangers of imperial overreach,” Sanger writes. With Iran on the front burner and the Middle East mired in turmoil, what comes next is unclear.

A coda: a recent supplemental review conducted by the Pentagon determined that a sole Isis member carried out the Kabul bombing. The review also found that the attack was tactically unpreventable.

Sanger also summarizes a tense exchange between Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel , over the Gaza war.

“Hadn’t the US firebombed Tokyo during world war two? Netanyahu demanded. “Hadn’t it unleashed two atom bombs? What about the thousands who died in Mosul, as the US sought to wipe out Isis?”

On Thursday, the US vetoed a resolution to confer full UN membership on the “State of Palestine”. Hours later, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Israel’s credit rating and Israel retaliated against Iran.

N ew Cold Wars does contain lighter notes. For example, Sanger catches Donald Trump whining to Randall Stephenson, then CEO of AT&T , about his (self-inflicted) problems with women. The 45th president invited Stephenson to the Oval Office, to discuss China and telecommunications. Things did not quite work out that way.

“Trump burned up the first 45 minutes of the meeting by riffing on how men got into trouble,” Sanger writes. “It was all about women. Then he went into a long diatribe about Stormy Daniels.”

Stephenson later recalled: “It was ‘all part of the same stand-up comedy act’ … and ‘we were left with 15 minutes to talk about Chinese infrastructure’.”

Trump wasn’t interested. Stephenson “could see that the president’s mind was elsewhere. ‘This is really boring,’ Trump finally said.”

On Thursday, in Trump’s hush-money case in New York, the parties picked a jury. Daniels is slated to be a prosecution witness.

Sanger ends his book on a note of nostalgia – and trepidation.

“For all the present risks, it is worth remembering that one of the most remarkable and little-discussed accomplishments of the old cold war was that the great powers never escalated their differences into a direct conflict. That is an eight-decade-long streak we cannot afford to break.”

New Cold Wars is published in the US by Penguin Random House

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Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' is written in blood

On Taylor Swift's 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department , her artistry is tangled up in the details of her private life and her deployment of celebrity. But Swift's lack of concern about whether these songs speak to and for anyone but herself is audible throughout the album. Beth Garrabrant /Courtesy of the artist hide caption

On Taylor Swift's 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department , her artistry is tangled up in the details of her private life and her deployment of celebrity. But Swift's lack of concern about whether these songs speak to and for anyone but herself is audible throughout the album.

For all of its fetishization of new sounds and stances, pop music was born and still thrives by asking fundamental questions. For example, what do you do with a broken heart? That's an awfully familiar one. Yet romantic failure does feel different every time. Its isolating sting produces a kind of obliterating possessiveness: my pain, my broken delusions, my hope for healing. A broken heart is a screaming baby demanding to be held and coddled and nurtured until it grows up and learns how to function properly. This is as true in the era of the one-percent glitz goddess as it was when blues queens and torch singers organized society's crying sessions. It's true of Taylor Swift , who's equated songwriting with the heart's recovery since she released " Teardrops on my Guitar " 18 years ago, and whose 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department , is as messy and confrontational as a good girl's work can get, blood on her pages in a classic shade of red.

Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and 50 more albums coming out this spring

Turning the Tables

Taylor swift is the 21st century's most disorienting pop star.

Back in her Lemonade days, when her broken heart turned her into a bearer of revolutionary spirit, Swift's counterpart and friendly rival, Beyoncé , got practical, advising her listeners that while feelings do need tending, a secured bank account is what counts. "Your best revenge is your paper," she sang .

For Swift, the best revenge is her pen. One of the first Tortured Poets songs revealed back in February (one of the album's many bonus tracks, it turns out, but a crucial framing device) is called " The Manuscript "; in it, a woman re-reads her own scripted account of a "torrid love affair." Screenwriting is one of a few literary ambitions Swift aligns with this project. At The Grove mall in Los Angeles, Swift partnered with Spotify to create a mini-library where new lyrics were inscribed in weathered books and on sheets of parchment in the days leading up to its release. The scene was a fans' photo op invoking high art and even scripture. In the photographs of the installation that I saw, every bound volume in the library bears Swift's name. The message is clear: When Taylor Swift makes music, she authors everything around her.

For years, Swift has been pop's leading writer of autofiction , her work exploring new dimensions of confessional songwriting, making it the foundation of a highly mediated public-private life. The standard line about her teasing lyrical disclosures (and it's correct on one level) is that they're all about fueling fan interest. But on Tortured Poets , she taps into a much more established and respected tradition. Using autobiography as a sword of justice is a move as ancient as the women saints who smote abusive fathers and priests in the name of an early Christian Jesus; in our own time, just among women, it's been made by confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, memoirists from Maya Angelou to Joyce Maynard and literary stars like the Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux. And, of course, Swift's reluctant spiritual mother, Joni Mitchell .

Even in today's blather-saturated cultural environment, a woman speaking out after silence can feel revolutionary; that this is an honorable act is a fundamental principle within many writers' circles. "I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay, how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only home I ever have," Natalie Goldberg declares in Writing Down the Bones , the most popular writing manual of the 20th century. When on this album's title track, Swift sings, "I think some things I never say," she's making an offhand joke; but this is the album where she does say all the things she thinks, about love at least, going deeper into the personal zone that is her métier than ever before. Sharing her darkest impulses and most mortifying delusions, she fills in the blank spaces in the story of several much-mediated affairs and declares this an act of liberation that has changed and ultimately strengthened her. She spares no one, including herself; often in these songs, she considers her naiveté and wishfulness through a grown woman's lens and admits she's made a fool of herself. But she owns her heartbreak now. She alone will have the last word on its shape and its effects.

This includes other people's sides of her stories. The songs on Tortured Poets , most of which are mid- or up-tempo ballads spun out in the gossamer style that's defined Swift's confessional mode since Folklore , build a closed universe of private and even stolen moments, inhabited by only two people: Swift and a man. With a few illuminating exceptions that stray from the album's plot, she rarely looks beyond their interactions. The point is not to observe the world, but to disclose the details of one sometimes-shared life, to lay bare what others haven't seen. Tortured Poets is the culmination of a catalog full of songs in which Swift has taken us into the bedrooms where men pleasured or misled her, the bars where they charmed her, the empty playgrounds where they sat on swings with her and promised something they couldn't give. When she sings repeatedly that one of the most suspect characters on the album told her she was the love of her life, she's sharing something nobody else heard. That's the point. She's testifying under her own oath.

Swift's musical approach has always been enthusiastic and absorbent. She's created her own sounds by blending country's sturdy song structures with R&B's vibes, rap's cadences and pop's glitz; as a personality and a performer, she's all arms, hugging the world. The sound of Tortured Poets offers that familiar embrace, with pop tracks that sparkle with intelligence, and meditative ones that wrap tons of comforting aura around Swift's ruminations. Beyond a virtually undetectable Post Malone appearance and a Florence Welch duet that also serves as an homage to Swift's current exemplar/best friendly rival, Lana Del Rey , the album alternates between co-writes with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, the producers who have helped Swift find her mature sound, which blends all of her previous approaches without favoring any prevailing trend. There are the rap-like, conversational verses, the reaching choruses, the delicate piano meditations, the swooning synth beats. Antonoff's songs come closest to her post- 1989 chart toppers; Dessner's fulfill her plans to remain an album artist. Swift has also written two songs on her own, a rarity for her; both come as close to ferocity as she gets. As a sustained listen, Tortured Poets harkens back to high points throughout Swift's career, creating a comforting environment that both supports and balances the intensity of her storytelling.

It's with her pen that Swift executes her battle plans. As always, especially when she dwells on the work and play of emotional intimacy, her lyrics are hyper-focused, spilling over with detail, editing the mess of desire, projection, communion and pain that constitutes romance into one sharp perspective: her own. She renders this view so intensely that it goes beyond confession and becomes a form of writing that can't be disputed. Remember that parchment and her quill pen; her songs are her new testaments. It's a power play, but for many fans, especially women, this ambition to be definitive feels like a necessary corrective to the misrepresentations or silence they face from ill-intentioned or cluelessly entitled men.

"A great writer can be a dangerous creature, however gentle and nice in person," the biographer Hermione Lee once wrote . Swift has occasionally taken this idea to heart before, especially on her once-scorned, now revered hip-hop experiment, Reputation . But now she's screaming from the hilltop, sparing no one, including herself as she tries to prop up one man's flagging interest and then falls for others' duplicity. "I know my pain is such an imposition," Swift sang in last year's " You're Losing Me ," a prequel to the explosive confessional mode of Tortured Poets , where that pain grows nearly suicidal, feeds romantic obsession, and drives her to become a "functional alcoholic" and a madwoman who finds strength in chaos in a way that recalls her friend Emma Stone's cathartic performance as Bella in Poor Things . (Bella, remember, comes into self-possession by learning to read and write.) " Who's afraid of little old me? " Swift wails in the album's window-smashing centerpiece bearing that title; in " But Daddy I Love Him ," she runs around screaming with her dress unbuttoned and threatens to burn down her whole world. These accounts of unhinged behavior reinforce the message that everybody had better be scared of this album — especially her exes, but also her business associates, the media and, yes, her fans, who are not spared in her dissection of just who's made her miserable over the past few years.

Listen to the album

I'm not getting into the dirty details; those who crave them can listen to Tortured Poets themselves and easily uncover them. They're laid out so clearly that anyone who's followed Swift's overly documented life will instantly comprehend who's who: the depressive on the heath, the tattooed golden retriever in her dressing room. Here's my reading of her album-as-novel — others' interpretations may vary: Swift's first-person protagonist (let's call her "Taylor") begins in a memory of a long-ago love affair that left her melancholy but on civil terms, then has an early meeting with a tempting rogue, who declares he's the Dylan Thomas to her Patti Smith; no, she says, though she's sorely tempted, we're "modern idiots," and she leaves him behind for a while. Then we get scenes from a stifling marriage to a despondent and distracted child-man. "So long, London," she declares, fleeing that dead end. From then on, it's the rogue on all cylinders. They connect, defy the daddy figures who think they're bad for each other, speak of rings and baby carriages. Those daddies continue to meddle in this newfound freedom.

In this main story arc, Swift writes about erotic desire as she never has before: She's "fresh out the slammer" (ouch, the rhetoric) and her bedsheets are on fire. She cannot stop rhapsodizing about this new love object and her commitment to their outlaw hunger for each other. It's " Love Story ," updated and supersized, with a proper Romeo at its center — a forbidden, tragic soulmate, a perfect match who's also a disastrous one. Swift peppers this section of Tortured Poets with name-drops ("Jack" we know, " Lucy " might be a tricky slap at Romeo, hard to tell) and instantly searchable references; he sends her a song by The Blue Nile and traces hearts on her face but tells revolting jokes in the bar and eventually reveals himself as a cad, a liar, a coward. She recovers, but not really. In the end, she does move on but still dreams of him hearing one of their songs on a jukebox and dolefully realizing the young girl he's now with has never heard it before.

Insert the names yourself. They do matter, because her backstories are key to Swift's appeal; they both keep her human-sized and amplify her fame. Swift's artistry is tied up in her deployment of celebrity, a slippery state in which a real life becomes emblematic. Like no one before, she's turned her spotlit day-to-day into a conceptual project commenting on women's freedom, artistic ambition and the place of the personal in the public sphere. As a celebrity, Swift partners with others: her model and musician friends, her actor/musician/athlete consorts, brands, even (warily) political causes. And with her fans, the co-creators of her stardom.

Her songs stand apart, though. They remain the main vehicle through which, negotiating unimaginable levels of renown, Swift continually insists on speaking only for herself. A listener has to work to find the "we" in her soliloquies. There are plenty of songs on Tortured Poets in which others will find their own experiences, from the sultry blue eroticism of " Down Bad " to the click of recognition in " I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) ." But Swift's lack of concern about whether these songs speak for and to anyone besides herself is audible throughout the album. It's the sound of her freedom.

Taylor Swift: Tiny Desk Concert

She also confronts the way fame has cost her, fully exploring questions she raised on Reputation and in " Anti-Hero ." There are hints, more than hints, that her romance with the rogue was derailed partly because her business associates found it problematic, a danger to her precious reputation. And when she steps away from the man-woman predicament, Swift ponders the ephemeral reality of the success that has made private decisions nearly impossible. A lovely minuet co-written with Dessner, " Clara Bow " stages a time-lapsed conversation between Swift and the power players who've helped orchestrate her rise even as she knows they won't be concerned with her eventual obsolescence. "You look like Clara Bow ," they say, and later, "You look like Stevie Nicks in '75." Then, a turn: "You look like Taylor Swift," the suits (or is it the public, the audience?) declare. "You've got edge she never did." The song ends abruptly — lights out. This scene, redolent of All About Eve , reveals anxieties that all of Swift's love songs rarely touch upon.

One reason Swift went from being a normal-level pop star to sharing space with Beyoncé as the era's defining spirit is because she is so good at making the personal huge, without fussing over its translation into universals. In two decades of talking back to heartbreakers, Swift has called out gaslighting, belittling, neglect, false promises — all the hidden injuries that lovers inflict on each other, and that a sexist society often overlooks or forgives more easily from men. In "The Manuscript," which calls back to a romantic trauma outside the Tortured Poets frame, she sings of being a young woman with an older man making "coffee in a French press" and then "only eating kids cereal" and sleeping in her mother's bed when he dumps her; any informed Swift fan's mind will race to songs and headlines about cads she's previously called out in fan favorites like "Dear John" and "All Too Well" — the beginnings of the mission Tortured Poets fulfills.

Reviews of more Taylor Swift albums on NPR

In the haze of 'Midnights,' Taylor Swift softens into an expanded sound

Let's Talk About Taylor Swift's 'Folklore'

Show And Tell: On 'Lover,' Taylor Swift Lets Listeners In On Her Own Terms

The Old Taylor's Not Dead

The Many New Voices Of Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift Leaps Into Pop With 'Red'

Swift's pop side (and perhaps her co-writers' influence) shows in the way she balances the claustrophobic referentiality of her writing with sparkly wordplay and well-crafted sentimental gestures. On Tortured Poets , she's less strategic than usual. She lets the details fall the way they would in a confession session among besties, not trying to change them from painful memories into points of connection. She's just sharing. Swift bares every crack in her broken heart as a way of challenging power structures, of arguing that emotional work that men can sidestep is still expected from women who seem to own the world.

Throughout Tortured Poets, Swift is trying to work out how emotional violence occurs: how men inflict it on women and women cultivate it within themselves. It's worth asking how useful such a brutal evisceration of one privileged private life can be in a larger social or political sense; critics, including NPR's Leah Donnella in an excellent 2018 essay on the limits of the songwriter's reach, have posed that question about Swift's work for years. But we should ask why Swift's work feels so powerful to so many — why she has become, in the eyes of millions, a standard-bearer and a freedom fighter. Unlike Beyoncé, who loves a good emblem and is always thinking about history and serving the culture and communities she claims, Swift is making an ongoing argument about smaller stories still making a difference. Her callouts can be viewed as petty, reflecting entitlement or even narcissism. But they're also part of her wrestling with the very notion of significance and challenging hierarchies that have proven to be so stubborn they can feel intractable. That Swift has reached such a peak of influence in the wake of the #MeToo movement isn't an accident; even as that chapter in feminism's history can seem to be closing, she insists on saying, "believe me." That isn't the same as saying "believe all women," but by laying claim to disputed storylines and fighting against silence, she at the very least reminds listeners that such actions matter.

Listening to Tortured Poets , I often thought of "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance," a song that Sinéad O'Connor recorded when she was in her young prime, not yet banished from the mainstream for her insistence on speaking politically. Like Swift's best work, its lyrics are very specific — allegedly about a former manager and lover — yet her directness and conviction expand their reach. In 1990, that a woman in her mid-20s would address a belittling man in this way felt startling and new. Taylor Swift came to prominence in a culture already changing to make room for such testimonies, if not — still — fully able to honor them. She has made it more possible for them to be heard. "I talk and you won't listen to me," O'Connor wailed . "I know your answer already." Swift doesn't have to worry about whether people will listen. But she knows that this could change. That's why she is writing it all down.

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Searching for the Real ‘Anna O.’

As described by Gabriel Brownstein, the basis for one of Freud’s most famous cases posed as many questions as it answered.

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By Susannah Cahalan

Susannah Cahalan is the author of “The Great Pretender” and “Brain on Fire.”

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THE SECRET MIND OF BERTHA PAPPENHEIM: The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure, by Gabriel Brownstein

Bertha Pappenheim stopped eating and sleeping. She lost her language and ability to move. Her eyes crossed and her muscles spasmed.

She suffered, her doctors said, from the prevailing diagnosis afflicting primarily well-to-do women in fin de siècle Vienna: hysteria.

What this meant was and is a source of debate: Did her facial paralysis emerge from a biological condition? Was her intermittent deafness psychological — or something more metaphysical?

Her physician, Josef Breuer, taken with the engaging and beautiful young woman, began visiting her daily. Sometimes Pappenheim made up fairy tales, sometimes she spoke of her hallucinations. Together they traced the source of her trauma to her father’s sickroom and with the repressed unearthed, Pappenheim began to improve.

There was catharsis in this exchange. Pappenheim herself described the process, which came to be known as “the talking cure,” as “chimney sweeping.”

More than a decade later, Sigmund Freud included Pappenheim’s story under the name “Fraulein Anna O.” — a case in “Studies On Hysteria.” Later, Freud added apocryphal details to the case, including a pseudo-pregnancy that illustrated his theory of transference. Embellishments aside, Anna O. — psychiatry’s most famous inconvenient woman — entered the annals of history as a success story that helped birth psychoanalysis.

The trouble is, as Gabriel Brownstein writes in his fascinating “The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim,” it was all a lie. Pappenheim was not cured. She continued to suffer long after Breuer gave up her case and ended up in a sanitarium, subjected to untold horrors, and addicted to the drugs that Breuer had prescribed her.

Her true triumph came long after she quit analysis. She emerged from this crucible in middle age, reinvented herself as an advocate and philanthropist and never again spoke of her time under Breuer’s care. She advocated on behalf of Jewish girls exploited by the sex trade, and opened institutions to house and educate them.

But “The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim” isn’t just about one woman — not entirely. This is a memoir nestled in an investigation, hidden inside a mythology. And it’s really about the limits of knowledge: not just about what we know about Pappenheim, but about medicine specifically and about nonfiction in general.

Fittingly, Brownstein’s interest in Pappenheim began with his father, Dr. Shale Brownstein, a respected psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with a longstanding grudge against Freud. The night before he died, Dr. Brownstein gave his son an essay he had written about Pappenheim. And despite Freud’s warnings about burdening ourselves with our parents’ desires, the father’s obsession became the son’s.

Brownstein could have written a much easier book than the one he did. I haven’t even mentioned his third layer: examining Pappenheim’s case through new research on the diagnosis of functional neurological disorder — the modern equivalent, he argues, of hysteria.

F.N.D. is a controversial diagnosis, despite being taken more seriously in recent years. This is not a rare condition; it is the second most common reason for outpatient neurology visits. Yet for some doctors it’s a scarlet letter, a signifier that the patient may be difficult or malingering.

Brownstein argues persuasively that F.N.D. is as “real” as the defect that necessitated open-heart surgery in his childhood, an experience he chronicled in his lovely “The Open Heart Club.”

Like hysteria, this diagnosis predominantly affects women; Brownstein profiles several. One loses her ability to walk; another shakes uncontrollably. Each seems to struggle with profound traumas — incest; years of grooming by a teacher; the horror of a mother who watched her baby get crushed under the wheels of a truck.

Tests are clean; there are no lesions. No M.R.I. scan can pinpoint the cause. But emerging studies show that F.N.D. seems to be a breakdown in the systems of the brain. “Brain networks have become tangled, messages are not getting through,” Brownstein writes.

Brownstein’s passages about F.N.D. are the book’s strongest. “In cases of F.N.D., the distinctions between ‘mind,’ ‘brain’ and ‘body’ seem imprecise,” he writes. “They have lost their ability to perform. They are violating the script the rest of us follow, a script that says consciousness is separate from the flesh.”

I feel it’s important — and so does he — to relay the context surrounding the “horrible three years” in which the author wrote this book. After his father died, Brownstein’s wife, Marcia, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He wrote the book in hospital hallways, in the moments between tending to their children.

When she died, he found himself writing the book for her. “Her death revealed my life as unstable, and her loss made the world seem unreal.” He related to the way the feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter defines hysteria as a “narrative incoherence.”

Of course, this incoherence is present within the book, too. We are left with so many questions: Did Pappenheim have F.N.D.? What would it mean if she did? Does the talking cure actually have a place in medicine?

Brownstein is allergic to answers. He likens himself to a “conscientious archaeologist” and leaves it to his readers to draw their conclusions based on the specimens he places before us.

“I do not claim to have solved any great mysteries here,” he writes, “to have discovered what Anna O. really suffered, or to be able to tell you what F.N.D. really is.”

As frustrating as this can feel to the reader, perhaps the impossibility is the point. Real life, after all, is rarely clear-cut.

THE SECRET MIND OF BERTHA PAPPENHEIM : The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure | By Gabriel Brownstein | PublicAffairs | 326 pp. | $32

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