The Rise of the Sapiens
About 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, humans left Africa the second time. The first wave of humans, such as Neanderthals, Erectus, and Homo Denisova, left about 200,000 years ago. They didn't do much aside from spreading into Europe and the Middle East. They left no sophisticated tools, evidence of agriculture, or domesticated animals. Weather was different, then. Northern Europe, including England, Scandinavia, and points east were covered with an ice sheet. The second wave of humans had undergone, in East Africa, what Harari first called the Fictive Revolution. It was the ability to imagine. After that descriptive term, Harari uses the more common term Cognitive Revolution (not to be confused with an intellectual movement of the same name that occurred in the 1950's).I liked the term Fictive Revolution because it is descriptive of what Harari believes happened: the ability to imagine. He posits that a genetic change in the brain of a prehistoric Eve led to this. Such a change would have happened without any changes to bone structure. So outwardly, Eve would have appeared to be the same as her peers. One possibility for this is a change in the distribution of long neurons in the brain. These long neurons occur in humans, zebrafish, and other species. Thus, by themselves, they cannot have caused the Fictive Revolution. However, the distribution, of these long neurons may have connected disparate parts of the brains allowing our ancestors to connect ideas from multiple sources leading to ideas that would not have otherwise occurred. Perhaps. But it doesn't matter how it happened. It just did.
The Fictive Revolution Creates Religion
Harari attributes the rise of religions to this revolution. Certainly, this is as good an explanation as any. He mentions all of the world's major religions and many of those nearly extinct. Anyone for Zoroastrianism? He points out that classical Buddhism is a mental discipline (rather than a religion) in which you accept joy and sorrow and move on. However, he points out that in most places a pantheon of Buddhas have arisen which are the Buddhist gods, similar to other polytheistic religions such as Christianity, Islam, those of ancient Rome and Greece, and a large host of others.Religion is the source of powerful myths. Joseph Campbell describes myth as the cohesive force in a society. Myths are taught from early childhood. Some are intended to be believed as fact. Others are stories with a point. All serve to bring the child's and young adult's mind into conformance with the others. Those that are told as fact are beliefs shared by the others which makes them yet more powerful. Having to defend these beliefs further increases the cohesion of the group. This is well known by televangelists and other charlatans - they will claim the group is under attack which serves to further draw in the participants. Beliefs are so strong that physical evidence of their falsity is ignored.
Such tactics have been used by many others to further their goals (usually profits). The cigarette companies, the Salt Institute which promotes the use of salt and refuting the many studies documenting its harm when heavily used, the Koch Brothers and their denial of climate change which was adopted by the GOP, and others - oh so many others.
I watched Bill Moyers' ground-breaking series of interviews with Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth). This was my first introduction to Campbell - and I found his ideas fascinating. Others did not. I should not have been surprised at the vehemence of the reaction by many. Those with a firm belief in the myths of Christianity were offended by labeling them as "myths" - as if they weren't the literal truth.
- …the first function of mythology [is] to evoke in the individual a sense of grateful, affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence
- The second function of mythology is to present an image of the cosmos, an image of the universe round about, that will maintain and elicit this experience of awe. [or] …to present an image of the cosmos that will maintain your sense of mystical awe and explain everything that you come into contact with in the universe around you.
- The third function of a mythological order is to validate and maintain a certain sociological system: a shared set of rights and wrongs, proprieties or improprieties, on which your particular social unit depends for its existence.
- …the fourth function of myth is psychological. That myth must carry the individual through the stages of his life, from birth through maturity through senility to death. The mythology must do so in accords with the social order of his group, the cosmos as understood by his group, and the monstrous mystery.
Humanism
Harari includes humanistic movements in the list of beliefs. Do human rights exist? Only in our minds. Science? It is our faith in science that it is the path to the explanation of the universe - and that the universe is explainable at all. He includes capitalism as one of the great beliefs. Why is it necessary to accumulate wealth?I think he may have missed something in this treatment. As to humanism, we have built in a sense of empathy. We apply this to those who we see as being like us. So our tribe, our neighbors, those of our social caste, all may evoke our empathetic feelings. We care about people like us. Thus middle age warriors and kings may slaughter and starve the people because they are beneath their notice - in a humanistic sense. In modern times, xenophobic feelings (another built-in, possibly genetic, capability) overcome empathetic feelings leading to fear of immigrants. Terroristic bombings are conceivable because the innocents killed are not like the bombers.
Empathy is a spectrum. There are those who are highly empathetic. They care very much about other humans. There are sociopaths and even psychopaths who have no feelings for others. These see others as merely fixtures in their environment who they must learn to control to survive. Many of our politicians, CEOs, and religious leaders are sociopaths. They can be charming people, but they don't care about you.
So we care, to a lesser or greater extent, about one another. Such feelings no doubt have survival value. When the lion attacks, we may jump to help our friend. From these feelings the religion of humanism arose.
Science
So what about Science? We have no innate scientific ability. If we had, we would have discovered much of what we know today millennia ago. We do want to know about our environment. Our curiosity does have survival value. The more we know about what's going on, the better opportunity we have for survival. The Homo Neanderthals probably had a similar curiosity instinct. Their ability to imagine things about the environment was probably more limited than Homo Sapiens. So Homo Sapiens can imagine what might be happening. But curiosity does not necessarily lead to scientific discipline.In the early 17th century, Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei started science. There were earlier people who asked similar questions. Even Aristotle. But Newton and Galileo pushed their curiosity further than anyone else. They lived in an environment of scientific inquiry. There were Boyle, Hooke, Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Snell, Huygens, Wallis, Cabeus, Roemer, and others. There were engineers who developed instruments for investigation: Lippershey, von Guerkicke, Gregory, and many others. There were mathematicians who made science rigorous: Newton, Pascal, Oughtred, Descartes, Leibniz, and many others. These were all men of the 17th century. They had been schooled in religion. Newton, for example, believed that the world had been created in 4004 B.C. Yet these men were willing to look beyond religion for answers.
So why science? Francis Bacon's empiricism, the idea that knowledge can come only or primarily by direct sensory experience, was simple enough and had been proposed by others. This idea seemed rational - thus the Age of Rationality or Age of Reason began. It preceded the Age of Enlightenment.
Why was it so popular an idea? I think it was because it worked. It gave answers and revealed new things, previously unknown. It was an empirical technique. When one man looked and got startling results others looked as well and found the same things - and new things.
So Science, like Humanism, has a basis in the way Homo Sapiens works. Religions probably also have the same basis in the way humans work, but don't have the cachet of rationality. It's hard to say whether the overall impact of religion has been positive or negative.
Capitalism
What about Capitalism? Harari points out that humans were probably happier, overall, as hunters and gatherers. But once the population ballooned with the development of agriculture and animal domestication, it was too late to go back. Capitalism is attractive in most cultures in which it is "installed." Individuals can survive and thrive on their own initiative. They can be independent of governments. In China and the USSR, capitalism was suppressed for years, but internal pressure by those hopeful of starting their own businesses caused the governments to relent slightly. And then when the money and related taxes rolled in, governments were much more open to limited capitalism.So capitalism is not a belief, as is religion, it returns exactly what is promised: money. Science is not a belief - except to the extent that scientists believe the universe is rational and knowledge of the universe can be gotten through empirical investigation. Empirical investigation of the universe has been working: it returns exactly what is promised - knowledge about the universe. Capitalism and humanism are in conflict. Pure raw capitalism puts workers in a bad position, so humanism has tempered capitalism. Science and religion are in conflict. Like it or not the impact of science is tempered by people's beliefs. In many cases, people want some things to be true - and this desire is sufficient. The Theory of Evolution is an early example: evidence is ignored because it conflicts with held beliefs. Climate change and, especially anthropogenic climate change, conflicts with desired beliefs (in particular the Koch Brothers desire to make money on oil and coal). So anthropogenic climate change is disputed and disbelieved.
Religion has utility for some humans. It relieves, in a small way, the fear of death and sadness about those who have died. So religion, humanism, science, and capitalism have utility. Science and capitalism are inventions like agriculture, animal domestication, the wheel, and steel. They exist because they are useful. But all four are powerful drivers in human destiny.
How We Are Organized
The organization of a society is a driver as well. If you are in a society in which you are expected to do what is expected of you, to live in the caste in which you were born, nothing much will change. The rulers of such a society value constancy, lack of change. This guarantees their own position on top. For this reason, little changed in Asia for centuries. For example, in the early fifteenth century, the Ming emperor sent large fleets commanded by Zheng He across the Indian ocean. When that emperor died and the bureaucracy was usurped by the the Confucian bureaucracy, the court eunuchs, it eventually became a capital offence to build a seagoing junk with more than two masts.I remember a Joseph Campbell lecture in which he described the line between individualism and collectivism as a physical line, the longitude that went through the Middle East. The Bible reflects this in the story of Job and his slavish devotion to a self-obsessed God despite the evils this God visited upon him. In other Biblical stories, each person must make individual decisions.
So east of this longitude, the Asian philosophy places the individual at the bottom of the stack and nothing much changes over the centuries. West of this longitude, it is up to the individual to fend his or her way throughout life. Change happens. Perhaps it was the Viking excursions throughout Europe and even the Mediterranean. Perhaps it was the Grail Myth as described by Joseph Campbell in which the individual seeks the Grail. Perhaps it was an early myth, the Sumerian Gilgamesh, an individual who sought immortality. Perhaps it was all these stories and others unrecorded.
Religion is the force that keeps a society organized. The myths we tell are key, according to Joseph Campbell. If you believe one set of myths and encounter someone who believes a different set, you distrust and, perhaps, hate them.
Religion is the force that keeps a society organized. The myths we tell are key, according to Joseph Campbell. If you believe one set of myths and encounter someone who believes a different set, you distrust and, perhaps, hate them.
The Drivers
Where does the ability to imagine take us? Religion gave us comfort in the face of death and hard times, explanations for things not seen and not understood, and the requirement to obey the priests and kings. Religion's myths unify a society. Where do Science, Mathematics, and Engineering take us? Initially we gained knowledge of the universe: how light behaves, what steam does, how heat works, the existence of microbes and how disease works, and what electricity is. But then, Engineering arose driven by Capitalism. For example, in 1698 Thomas Slavery invented the first commercial steam engine and received a patent for it. He built and sold steam engines for fighting fires and lifting water out of shallow mines until Thomas Newcomen created a better design - based on the piston concept invented by the Frenchman Denis Papin. This illustrates the Standing on Shoulders process. The synergy between Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Capitalism created a firestorm of New Things. This will, according to some, result in a Singularity as soon as 2030 (according to Vernor Vinge) or as late as 2045 (according to Ray Kurzweil). Other estimates put it out to 100 years from now.
According to Wikipedia the technological singularity is a hypothetical event in which an upgradable intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) enters a 'runaway reaction' of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an intelligence explosion and resulting in a powerful superintelligence whose cognitive abilities could be, qualitatively, as far above humans' as human intelligence is above ape intelligence.
Well, maybe. But certainly things are happening fast. Capitalism has an over-riding effect on where Science and Engineering (not so much Mathematics) go. Can this thing make me money? Can it save me money making my profits bigger? We have already seen the kind of slavery Capitalism creates. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there have been strikes and other conflicts from works dissatisfied with their condition. Wikipedia lists strikes starting in 1619. Owners and managers held a deep contempt for their workers. For example, on March 25, 1911, a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan, New York City, killed 146 garment workers, most of them women and children. The owners of the factory had locked the doors to the stairwells and exists, a common practice keeping workers from taking unauthorized breaks. Many of the workers could not escape and jumped from windows on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors.
Because of the depredations by the owners and management of businesses, Humanistic drivers made life better for the workers. Because this increased cost, this accelerated the use of automation. Robots are expensive, but their upkeep is cheaper and more reliable than humans.
As we approach the singularity and artificial intelligence gains capability, robots increasingly fill human jobs. Jobs are disappearing. Only McJobs that are awaiting robot workers and others that no one has figured out how to do with a robot still exist. The company from which I retired a few years ago (Northrop Grumman, 120,000 employees) eliminated a whole layer of management as unnecessary - management and support jobs disappeared, hundreds of jobs. Only top management and bottom line management was left. Jobs are disappearing.
So we come full circle. The easy days of hunting and gathering when life was easy gave way to days of endless toil where we worked from dawn to dusk every day in the fields and then in the factories. Now if we do not have to work at all, we are back to living a simple life of ease. It won't be a luxurious life, but our basic needs such as food, shelter, and medical attention will be provided.
What will you do with your time?
According to Wikipedia the technological singularity is a hypothetical event in which an upgradable intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) enters a 'runaway reaction' of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an intelligence explosion and resulting in a powerful superintelligence whose cognitive abilities could be, qualitatively, as far above humans' as human intelligence is above ape intelligence.
Well, maybe. But certainly things are happening fast. Capitalism has an over-riding effect on where Science and Engineering (not so much Mathematics) go. Can this thing make me money? Can it save me money making my profits bigger? We have already seen the kind of slavery Capitalism creates. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there have been strikes and other conflicts from works dissatisfied with their condition. Wikipedia lists strikes starting in 1619. Owners and managers held a deep contempt for their workers. For example, on March 25, 1911, a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan, New York City, killed 146 garment workers, most of them women and children. The owners of the factory had locked the doors to the stairwells and exists, a common practice keeping workers from taking unauthorized breaks. Many of the workers could not escape and jumped from windows on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors.
Because of the depredations by the owners and management of businesses, Humanistic drivers made life better for the workers. Because this increased cost, this accelerated the use of automation. Robots are expensive, but their upkeep is cheaper and more reliable than humans.
As we approach the singularity and artificial intelligence gains capability, robots increasingly fill human jobs. Jobs are disappearing. Only McJobs that are awaiting robot workers and others that no one has figured out how to do with a robot still exist. The company from which I retired a few years ago (Northrop Grumman, 120,000 employees) eliminated a whole layer of management as unnecessary - management and support jobs disappeared, hundreds of jobs. Only top management and bottom line management was left. Jobs are disappearing.
Universal Basic Income
So what will we do with all the unemployed? Will we let them starve and live on the street? No, our Humanistic tendencies will prompt us to provide a minimal level of support. Recently (2016) Switzerland voted on a universal basic income plan. If it had passed, adults would have been paid an unconditional monthly income, whether they worked or not and would have received an additional stipend for their children. The proposal was soundly defeated, but it is remarkable for having appeared on the ballot at all. This is just the first round in the battle, just as early strikes started the labor movement. Finland has plans to introduce a pilot program in 2017. The Alaska Permanent Fund has been providing a partial basic income since 1976. As it becomes impossible to get a job no matter your qualifications, these proposals will become more frequent and will eventually replace other forms of government welfare.So we come full circle. The easy days of hunting and gathering when life was easy gave way to days of endless toil where we worked from dawn to dusk every day in the fields and then in the factories. Now if we do not have to work at all, we are back to living a simple life of ease. It won't be a luxurious life, but our basic needs such as food, shelter, and medical attention will be provided.
What will you do with your time?
