Harari tends to draw too firm a dividing line between the medieval and modern eras Harari forgets to mention him – today, as all know, designated a saint in the Roman Catholic church. 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. 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.Īnd there is Thomas Aquinas. Commissioned in 1437, it became the first public library in Europe. One surviving example of this is the fascinating library of the Benedictines at San Marco in Florence. Their scriptoria effectively became the research institutes of their day. Huge library collections were amassed by monks who studied both religious and classical texts. 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. As a result, there was an exchange of scholarship between national boundaries and demanding standards were set. Moreover they were, at that time, able to teach independently of diktats from the Church. It’s hard to know where to begin in saying how wrong a concept this is.įor example, in the thirteenth century the friars, so often depicted as lazy and corrupt, were central to the learning of the universities. 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. When does he think this view ceased? He makes it much too late. 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. Harari is not good on the medieval world, or at least the medieval church. 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. 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. Harari is a better social scientist than philosopher, logician or historian 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. There is truth in this, of course, but his picture is very particular. His contention is that Homo sapiens, originally an insignificant animal foraging in Africa has become ‘the terror of the ecosystem’ (p465). 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. ‘Tolerance’ he says, ‘is not a Sapiens trademark’ (p19), setting the scene for the sort of animal he will depict us to be. He brings the picture up to date by drawing conclusions from mapping the Neanderthal genome, which he thinks indicates that Sapiens did not merge with Neanderthals but pretty much wiped them out. The book covers a mind-boggling 13.5 billion years of pre-history and history.įrom the outset, Harari seeks to establish the multifold forces that made Homo (‘man’) into Homo sapiens (‘wise man’) – exploring the impact of a large brain, tool use, complex social structures and more. It is massively engaging and continuously interesting. It is a brilliant, thought-provoking odyssey through human history with its huge confident brush strokes painting enormous scenarios across time. I much enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.