Miguel’s Reviews > Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind > Status Update

Capitalism gradually became far more than just an economic doctrine. It now encompasses an ethic – a set of teachings about how people should behave, educate their children and even think. Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth.

Smith denied the traditional contradiction between wealth and morality, and threw open the gates of heaven for the rich. Being rich meant being moral. In Smiths story, people become rich not by despoiling their neighbours, but by increasing the overall size of the pie. And when the pie grows, everyone benefits. The rich are accordingly the most useful and benevolent people in society

Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. Beginning in the eighteenth
century, religions and ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and
feminism lost all interest in the afterlife. What, exactly, happens to a
communist after he or she dies? What happens to a capitalist? What
happens to a feminist?

Our current assumption that we do not know
everything, and that even the knowledge we possess is tentative, extends to the shared myths that enable millions of strangers to cooperate
effectively. If the evidence shows that many of those myths are doubtful,
how can we hold society together? How can our communities, countries
and international system function?

We study history not to know
the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present
situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently
have many more possibilities before us than we imagine. For example,
studying how Europeans came to dominate Africans enables us to realise
that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the racial hierarchy

If a religion is a system of human norms and
values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet
Communism was no less a religion than Islam.

Humanity's search for an easier life released immense forces of change that nobody envisioned or wanted. Nobody plotted the Agricultural Revolution or such dependence on cereal cultivation. A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying water buckets under a scorching sun.

Here and there a luddite holdout refuses to open an email account, just as thousands of years ago some human bands refused to take up farming and so escaped the luxury trap. But the Agricultural Revolution didn't need every band in a given region to join up. It only took one.

"The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites."