I finally finished the slog through Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.
Perhaps I should say thankfully, as it was easily one of the worst books I have ever subjected myself to in fifty-odd years of being able to read.
Why is this? Let me recount some of the ways (some of which I have already touched on here and here):
- Harari is among the smartest of Very Smart Boys – and as happens with Very Smart Boys, he has to demonstrate frequently how clever he is. Again and again, he will state something that appears to be either factually incorrect or an unwarranted extrapolation or conclusion, and then set it aside – until a paragraph or three later when he will come back to it and explain he was right on some specious technicality or very special interpretation. “Oh, you didn’t think I would akshully say something so wrong, did you?” It’s a gimmick that gets old very quickly.
- Similarly, he goes off on tangents – almost rants, at times – on some subject, using language which in context implies that these are his actual personal opinions. These digressions are typically controversial or outré, and often presented with the passion of a true believer…before being casually attributed to someone else or passed off as mere noodling: ‘That’s what some people think, anyway’, ‘That’s a depressing line of thought, if true‘, ‘Imagine if people really believed that’, etc. The funny thing is, these digressions seem like his own opinions because they are in almost every case congruent with what you’d expect his own opinions to be, based on his reputation. Where the habit in the first bullet is apparently meant to show how clever he is, this habit can be read as a contrived edginess – a cowardly edginess dulled by plausible deniability.
- A running theme throughout the book, and especially in the last two chapters, is that humans are nothing special, have nothing to be proud of (and a great deal to be ashamed of), and in fact live in a world of delusion about their abilities, importance, value, and the very nature of their existence. Everything we think we know is delusion, in fact, and everything we value is imaginary and arbitrary. All of which would grate on its own, but it’s especially repulsive when presented in a breezy, matter-of-fact tone – nihilism with a smile, or maybe just a puerile smirk. Which made me wonder why, when he thinks so little of humanity (or rather, “Sapiens”, since in making it clear we’re nothing special, he repeatedly makes the point that we’re not the only “humans”), that he chose to write “The” book about us?
- The answer may lie in one of the later chapters, where he goes off on a long tangent about Buddhism, one which is unsurprisingly uncritical given his own personal experience with elements of it (Vipassana). If one accepts the premise that nothing in the human world – indeed the world as a whole – is real, or meaningful, or important, or known, indeed is just an impediment to happiness and a fuller understanding of reality, then consistent application of this premise would produce exactly this kind of nihilism. (The answer might also just be a naughty schoolboy glee in stomping on the beliefs and certainties and values of others, the way capital-A Atheists do, with no more purpose than that.)
- The book’s structure and organization are terrible. His chapters seem to follow a corrupted “five paragraph essay” format, in this case: “Follow an oh-so-clever ‘hook’ with a thesis statement kinda related to the oh-so-clever chapter heading in some way, proceed to ramble through a bunch of anecdotes or stories or study findings somewhat related to this thesis statement without really connecting them to it or each other, and conclude with assertions about the thesis that all the rambling didn’t really set up or support”. Whatever their other flaws, the professors at JMC would never have accepted such shoddy work on a bluebook test.
- Did I mention he’s an especially obnoxious Very Smart Boy?
I could go on, and probably will at some point in the future. But…bleh. Suffice to say it was a terrible read, and not even close to being worth the time spent on the chore.