Gerson, Michael. 2015. “Myths, Meaning and Homo Sapiens.” Washington Post, June 11, 2015, sec. Opinions. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/myths-meaning-and-homo-sapiens/2015/06/11/28660902-106f-11e5-a0dc-2b6f404ff5cf_story.html.
This file picture shows a chimpanzee holding a lettuce at the zoo in Abidjan on June 12, 2014. (Sia Kambou/AFP/Getty Images)
By Michael Gerson [Michael Gerson is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Post. ]
June 11, 2015
About 2 million years ago, a genetic mutation resulted in the human species — social, restless but consigned to the middle of the food chain, breaking open the bones of carrion for marrow after the lions left. As a species, we were pretty slow starters. For most of those 2 million years, we used the same stone tools, entirely unconscious of the need for iPhone upgrades. Individually, no doubt, we could be the life of the party. Collectively, we migrated across the Earth without leaving much art or history. Several species of humans — Homo erectus, Homo soloensis, Homo neanderthalensis and the rest — lived the relatively healthy, relatively happy hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Then, perhaps 150,000 years ago, came Homo sapiens. They looked innocent at first, ambling on the East African savannah. But about 70,000 years ago something shifted or snapped in their ample brains. They began a campaign of expansion that resulted in the extermination or absorption of every other human species (1 percent to 4 percent of the DNA of modern Europeans can be traced to our supplanted Neanderthal cousins). About 45,000 years ago, sapiens undertook the colonization of Australia, exterminating most of the large animals (including 450-pound kangaroos) in the process. About 10,000 years ago, they invaded the Western Hemisphere, killing most of the large animals there as well (including woolly mammoths). Sapiens arrived, with blood on their hands, at the top of the food chain.
Then, to cut a long story short, came coinage, empires, monotheism, cathedrals, global capitalism, Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” the moon landing and Taylor Swift.
It is one hell of a story. And it has seldom been told better than Yuval Noah Harari has done in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.” The book is maddeningly opinionated and insanely ambitious. It is also compulsively readable and impossibly learned. It is one of the best accounts by a Homo sapiens of the unlikely story of our violent, accomplished species.
There is no agreed description of what made humankind so suddenly creative and dominant. Some anthropologists talk of a “cognitive revolution” that allowed sapiens to accumulate knowledge so they could make changes in their behavior without waiting for those changes to be encoded in their DNA. A lizard might learn to fly through millions of years of environmental and genetic changes. Homo sapiens can take flight through collected and applied information.
Harari’s account of the cognitive revolution puts particular emphasis on one unique capacity of our species: the ability to tell stories about ourselves. A group of sapiens that exists only because of personal ties — ties of gossip — is limited to about 125 members. It is only “imagined communities” that allow thousands or millions to be part of the same enterprise — a kingdom, an empire, a church or a corporation. “Much of history,” says Harari, “revolves around this question: How does one persuade millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work toward common goals.”
This “mythic glue,” argues Harari, is (to mix a metaphor) the secret sauce of humanity. Ten thousand chimpanzees in St. Peter’s Square would be utter chaos. Ten thousand sapiens is an outdoor Mass. The ability to create unifying myths (used here as powerful, defining stories, not fictions) is our most powerful, distinguishing characteristic as a species.
Harari consigns all those myths to the realm of fiction — not only religions but the whole enterprise of humanistic, rights-based liberalism: “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.” With a kind of courageous consistency, he argues that the life sciences reveal sapiens as nothing more than a bundle of neurons, blood and bile. And that, he concedes, destroys the whole basis for ethics, law and democracy.
Harari shrugs where he should shudder. It is not a minor thing to assert that the main evolutionary advantage of sapiens — their capacity to produce meaning — is a cruel and pointless joke. There is at least one other alternative: that the best of our stories are not frauds but hints, and that the whole unlikely story has led sapiens to a justified belief in their own dignity and purpose.
In this case, the myths produced by Homo sapiens would be not the lies we tell ourselves but the truths we dimly perceive.
Read more from Michael Gerson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook .
"people sometimes pass their entire
lives just within metaphors and fictions
and never getting a real glimpse of reality..."
- And you talk also about, you write about the
use of metaphor in religion compared to
meditative practice where you talk about breath is breath
as opposed to in religion the wafer is Christ's body
or the salt water and Passover for Jews
is the tears of slaves where there's so much metaphor.
Why do you feel that the sort of literalism
appreciating the thing for the thing it is
is more helpful for you in meditation
than its kind of comparison and religion?
- Well in the meditation practice,
at least the meditation I practice is really about
just being able to observe reality as it is
to really tell the difference, what is real
and what is just stories and fictions and metaphors
generated by my mind or by somebody else's mind,
but you know people sometimes pass their entire
lives just within metaphors and fictions
and never getting a real glimpse of reality,
and also I think leaving aside the meditation practice
as a story and I kind of developed a horror of metaphors
because what often happens to metaphors in history
they get solidified and rarefied and become a thing itself
and people forget where they came from.
To give an example like you know,
in religion so people talk about salvation and redemption
and eternity, but what is eternity?
What is salvation?
It's too difficult for most people to grasp
and certainly to attain so you have a metaphor,
you have say a building, a temple, a mosque,
the Wailing Wall, the Western Wall
which stands as a metaphor for eternity,
as a metaphor for salvation and people would go to
the temple and okay so you have a place standing in
for this abstract very difficult to grasp notion
of eternity or for salvation,
but what happens next?
People forget it's just a metaphor.
They rarefy the metaphor.
The temple really is salvation.
The temple really is eternity
and then what do you want to do?
You want to possess eternity.
Suddenly you can.
If I can just get hold or conquer this pile of stones
I have eternity.
I have salvation and then people start fighting
over these things, forgetting that hey
this was just a metaphor.
Don't take it so serious.
And it happened thousands of years ago.
It happens today, but you know the essence of holy places
like temples or synagogues or like the place we are here
right now, is in the end it's about the human experience.
It's the idea that you go to a place
and you experience peace like we have a lot of anger
in your life, you have a lot of irritation in your life
or hate or whatever and there is a place
that you can go and experience peace and feel better
about yourself and also be better to other people.
And this is like you know the essential idea
of a temple or a mosque or a synagogue,
but then what happens is that some of these places
become factories of hatred.
Instead of going there and experiencing peace
people start fighting over these places
you know which is very strange
because you know this is a dysfunctional temple.
Like you have a car factory that doesn't produce cars.
You don't want it.
So you have a peace factory which for some reason
produces wars and you don't want this factory.
It's broken.
Portman:
- There's there's a thing in psychology
that you probably have heard about where
people who are depressed are more realistic.
Like if you tell them a story,
they will recount it more accurately
and people who are not depressed tend to change the story
to make it more optimistic.
Make things better so there's kind of this thing
about how like being unrealistic actually
is a way to make yourself happier.
Do you find that taking reality as reality
what you're talking about seeing stones
as stones and breath is breath
is a bleaker vision of the world?
- It takes out some of the color yes,
but it brings back I think more than it takes away
because in the end you know the greatest mysteries
in the world we experience them every day.
Consciousness is probably the greatest
mystery in the universe.
And it's not some special experience
of place or whatever.
Comments