Sounding The Alarm

Our free will is at stake as we merrily travel “the highway to digital dictatorship”, says the author of worldwide bestsellers Sapiens and Homo Deus, and now new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

- Andrew Anthony

Here’s a little party game to play at cultured gatherings. Ask your cleverest friend, who was it who wrote Renaissance Military Memoirs? If you get a blank look, try the same question with Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry. If the vacant expression turns into head-shaking bafflement, then add The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture. You can be confident it won’t help.

The answer in all the above cases is Yuval Noah Harari, a name that five years ago was known in the English-speaking world only to a handful of fellow academics. Then, in 2014, the English translation of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was published and quickly became an international bestseller that has been translated into 45 languages. The book emerged from a course on world history at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University that Harari helped teach as a junior academic because no senior professor wanted to take part. It was originally turned down by four publishers in Israel because, apparently, history doesn’t sell well in that most history-laden of lands.

Sapiens was one of those rare books that combined scholarly erudition with immense popular appeal. It outlined the distant history of early human life, and how much of what and who we are today is determined by the evolutionary demands of being hunter-gatherers on the African plains. In particular, it focused on our ability to disseminate fictions or unifying myths – like religion, tribalism, even money – that enabled humans to co-operate on a mass scale unmatched by any other animals.