One Story

And it was very good

It seemed ironic to me that Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was first written and published in the Hebrew Language in Israel. Hebrew was also the first language in which creation narratives in the Bible were recorded. But what struck me with greater relevance was the uncanny feeling that the scribes who wrote out Genesis and Harari were grappling with the same story, and more importantly, were coming to similar conclusions.

Take what Harari and others have called the Cognitive Revolution. As an evolutionary biologist Harari sees the road from the primitive through stages to create Homo Erectus (man who walks on two legs) and finally Homo Sapiens (man who thinks). But where humans in Harari took millennia to evolve brains that had the capacity for logic, reason and the ability to analyze and predict along with a self-awareness not seen in other species, the creation narratives summarize this evolutionary milestone with the eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When living is guided by conscious thought rather than by instinct and intuition, a kind of peacefulness is lost, characterized in Genesis by the expulsion from Eden.

“Then the eyes of both of then were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.”

Another massive change in human history resulted from homo sapiens’ capacity for logic and reasoning, namely a transition called the Agricultural Revolution. Hunting and gathering had its advantages and disadvantages: the domestication of animals and plants for food eventually eliminated the need for nomadic living, but resulted in the clumping of populations into insular communities where homo sapiens laboured in fields and barns, competed for land, stole each others cattle, etc. In Genesis, the Agricultural Revolution is pictured as the beginning of “by the sweat of your brow” obligation and indeed, early agriculture was massively labour-intensive, subject to weather disasters and worrisome on many accounts.

God said to Adam: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken . . .”

In fact, there is only one story, although told in different ways. Harari approaches it using the scientific method of discovering, testing and recording the results. Genesis visualizes our origins allegorically. Strikes me there’s a common mythology that transcends both Harari and Genesis, and that commonality is bound up with the struggle first of all to live, and secondly to live happily and long on this tiny, amazing, miracle planet in a cold and impersonal universe. Cooperation—not triumphalism—has the better hope of making this possible . . . for everyone. Creation has, after all, given us brain capacity enough to figure this out.