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#JustFinished Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (dice.camp)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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#JustFinished Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

I feel like he spent too much time working at being cutesy and not enough at internal consistency. It was an amusing book, however. Taken as a light historical fiction about the run-up to modern life, it's good enough.

One example of the issues with the book follows:
He sets up the straw man of biological essentialism, then knocks it down with social consctructs.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (5 children)

He posits that rascism is a foolish social construct, but that sexism is clearly natural.

His argument is that since elephants and bonobos have matriarchal societies and since human societies are overwhelmingly (exclusively?) patriarchal, there must be a patriarchy genetic imperative. Interestingly, in his discussion of racism, he speaks for a while of the overwhelming prevalence of slavery as a custom...

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (4 children)

in all societies (even physically separated ones, the same argument he uses about sexism). However, his conclusion is the opposite: that rascism is not biologically rooted but rather is cultural. He does acknowledge that racism still abounds. So why are they different? He gives no good reason and, in fact, rebuts the popular arguments for a biological scaffold to support sexism.

And gods, he hates the modern world.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

@[email protected] @[email protected] check out David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything if you want a facinating book on this kind of thing that includes a little response to Sapiens (if you haven't come across it already).

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