A Book Recommendation

The Spanish/Christian mythology enforced militarily in Aztec country

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by historian Yuval Noah Harari will be good reading for anyone who longs to appreciate world events through the insights available from our history. Harari not only considers who and what we homo sapiens are today, but why we are what we are, do what we do. If reading Harari can’t be a complete picture of the development of nations, cultures, empires (it is, after all, brief), it can at least teach us that we routinely neglect masses of accumulated knowledge when trying to assess current trends and events.

For instance, I suspect that most of us are puzzled about why the USA would replace a mild, decent, respectful president with an anarchistic, aggressive, belligerent commander in chief. Harari shines a light on the consequences historically of similar phenomena when he discusses leadership in conflict—through the lens of history:

The ability to maintain peace at home, acquire allies abroad, and understand what goes through the minds of other people (particularly your enemies) is usually the key to victory. Hence an aggressive brute is often the worst choice to run a war. Much better is a cooperative person who knows how to appease, how to manipulate and how to see things from different perspectives. This is the stuff empire builders are made of. The militarily incompetent Augustus succeeded in establishing a stable imperial regime, achieving something that eluded both Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, who were much better generals. Both his admiring contemporaries and modern historians often attribute this feat to his virtue of clementia—mildness and clemency (p.157).

Although Harari is writing here about competencies leading to military success, the parallels to Trump’s economic warfare, his “make America great again” rhetoric echo both Caesar and previous presidents’ confusion about what constitutes greatness, and how greatness is arrived at. Exercising American “greatness” in the Middle East has cost many lives with no apparent, lasting benefit to anyone; the “shock and awe” of the 2003 invasion of Iraq predictably turned into more of a “bust and whimper.” (Further echoes of Vietnam and Korea; muscle can’t guarantee greatness, nor even success.)

The maxim that says we repeat and repeat our mistakes when we neglect our history comes easily to mind. Confusing the generation of fear with the cultivation of respect was Caesar’s mistake, was Alexander’s mistake, was Hitler’s mistake, was Stalin’s mistake, was Mussolini’s mistake, and is quite probably Trump’s big mistake. In a globalizing world, isolation and belligerence constitute a path to decline. We need only look to Putin and Kim Jong-un to recognize the futility of aggressive, fear-mongering leadership in a world dependent on cooperation in so much, including travel, communication, money exchange and trade. In a rapidly globalizing world—economically, socially, culturally—it becomes easier and easier to starve nations and peoples who choose defiant isolationism.

There’s much more in Harari, even though he’s titled it “a brief history.” His take on the differing mythologies that are able to bind enormously-large nations and confederacies together is especially revealing. A mass of people can’t become a stable, lasting culture or nation unless citizens share a basic mythology, whether that be democracy, religion, capitalism, socialism, multi-culturalism, etc. Even a corporation with thousands of workers is dependent on a mythology of purpose and rewards in order to be stable; loyalty to the common myth makes cooperation among large numbers of people possible.

Historically—according to Harari—imperialism has been a boon to our successful evolution as homo sapien species in that it absorbed any number of competing tribes into a more cooperative whole and facilitated the spread of science and peaceful governance. At the same time, imperialism’s forceful absorption of cultures and languages into a common, imposed mythology has cost millions of lives and extinguished cultural and linguistic variety. In this sense our nation, Canada, is a real-time study in the working of imperialism in that, for instance, Cree, Ojibwa, Inuit peoples who have been forcibly absorbed into the Western mythology . . . almost universally speak English now, as do Ukrainian, German, Chinese, Arab, etc. immigrants.

In short, Harari can add valuable insights into ourselves, who we are as 21^st Century homo sapiens, and why we are what we are. I recommend it. Thanks to Eric and Joan for recommending it to me.