Sapiens: Chapter 17–Afterword

Around 1700, a strange noise began reverberating around British mineshafts. That noise—harbinger of the Industrial Revolution—was subtle at first, but it grew louder and louder with each passing decade until it enveloped the entire world in a deafening cacophony.

Two centuries ago electricity played no role in the economy, and was used at most for arcane scientific experiments and cheap magic tricks.

Usually, when we think of the Industrial Revolution, we think of an urban landscape of smoking chimneys, or the plight of exploited coal miners sweating in the bowels of the earth.

What happens if farmers now take a young calf, separate her from her mother, put her in a closed cage, give her food, water and inoculations against diseases, and then, when she is old enough, inseminate her with bull sperm?

Together with the mechanisation of plant cultivation, industrial animal husbandry is the basis for the entire modern socio-economic order.

Most people throughout history lived under conditions of scarcity. Frugality was thus their watchword.

The austere ethics of the Puritans and Spartans are but two famous examples. A good person avoided luxuries, never threw food away, and patched up torn trousers instead of buying a new pair.

They would have branded it as selfish, decadent and morally corrupt.

While all these Sapiens have grown increasingly impervious to the whims of nature, they have become ever more subject to the dictates of modern industry and government.

People knew where the sun was, and watched anxiously for portents of the rainy season and harvest time, but they did not know the hour and hardly cared about the year.

At the same time, the local potentate might have drafted all of us villagers to construct his castle without paying us a penny. In exchange, we counted on him to defend us against brigands and barbarians.

Often enough, transportation and communication difficulties made it so difficult to intervene in the affairs of remote communities that many kingdoms preferred to cede even the most basic royal prerogatives—such as taxation and violence—to communities.

The sultan in Istanbul or even the provincial pasha did not intervene in such clashes, as long as violence remained within acceptable limits.

There were no policemen, no social workers and no compulsory education.

Respect of and obedience to one’s parents were among the most hallowed values, and parents could do almost anything they wanted...

Saddam Hussein and Hafez el-Asad tried their best to promote and reinforce their Anglo-French-manufactured national consciousnesses, but their bombastic speeches about the allegedly eternal Iraqi and Syrian nations had a hollow ring.

Students brook no canings from their teachers, children need not fear that they will be sold into slavery when their parents can’t pay their bills, and women know that the law forbids their husbands from beating them and forcing them to stay at home.

Between 1871 and 1914, a European war remained a plausible eventuality, and the expectation of war dominated the thinking of armies, politicians and ordinary citizens alike. This foreboding was true for all other peaceful periods in history.

Consider California. Its wealth was initially built on gold mines. But today it is built on silicon and celluloid—Silicon Valley and the celluloid hills of Hollywood.

So, is the modern era one of mindless slaughter, war and oppression, typified by the trenches of World War One, the nuclear mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and the gory manias of Hitler and Stalin? Or is it an era of peace, epitomised by the trenches never dug in South America, the mushroom clouds that never appeared over Moscow and New York, and the serene visages of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King?

Given the proven human propensity for misusing power, it seems naïve to believe that the more clout people have, the happier they will be.

Hence, though the last few decades have been an unprecedented golden age for humanity, it is too early to know whether this represents a fundamental shift in the currents of history or an ephemeral eddy of good fortune.

Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can startle it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to its set point.

Somebody born with an average of level five happiness would never dance wildly in the streets. But a good marriage should enable her to enjoy level seven from time to time, and to avoid the despondency of level three.

Today, when we finally realise that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry.

Kahneman found that when counting moments of joy and moments of drudgery, bringing up a child turns out to be a rather unpleasant affair.

New Age cults frequently argue: ‘Happiness does not depend on external conditions. It depends only on what we feel inside. People should stop pursuing external achievements such as wealth and status, and connect instead with their inner feelings.’ Or more succinctly, ‘Happiness Begins Within.’

They have much to tell about the weaving and unravelling of social structures, about the rise and fall of empires, about the discovery and spread of technologies. Yet they say nothing about how all this influenced the happiness and suffering of individuals. This is the biggest lacuna in our understanding of history. We had better start filling it.

She is the product of intelligent design. She is also a harbinger of things to come. If the potential Alba signifies is realised in full—and if humankind doesn’t annihilate itself meanwhile—the Scientific Revolution might prove itself far greater than a mere historical revolution. It may turn out to be the most important biological revolution since the appearance of life on earth.

Biological engineering is deliberate human intervention on the biological level (e.g. implanting a gene) aimed at modifying an organism’s shape, capabilities, needs or desires, in order to realise some preconceived cultural idea, such as the artistic predilections of Eduardo Kac.

There is nothing new about biological engineering, per se. People have been using it for millennia in order to reshape themselves and other organisms.

Consider the surprise, disgust and consternation that ensued when, in 1996, the following photograph appeared in newspapers and on television: A mouse on whose back scientists grew an ‘ear’ made of cattle cartilage cells.

Thirty thousand years ago, humans were already fantasising about combining different species. Today, they can actually produce such chimeras.

Human-rights activists are afraid that genetic engineering might be used to create supermen who will make serfs of the rest of us.

Lots of industrialists would be glad to pay one Neanderthal to do the menial work of two Sapiens.

She can sit in her North Carolina lab, scratch her back with one hand, scratch her head with a second hand, and simultaneously steal a banana in New York (although the ability to eat a purloined fruit at a distance remains a dream).

Not all scholars agree that the mind works in a manner analogous to today’s digital computers—and if it doesn’t, present-day computers would not be able to simulate it. Yet it would be foolish to categorically dismiss the possibility before giving it a try.

The road to near-perfect medicine stands before us. However, with improvements in medical knowledge will come new ethical conundrums. Ethicists and legal experts are already wrestling with the thorny issue of privacy as it relates to DNA.

So don’t go out just yet to buy liability insurance to indemnify you against lawsuits filed by digital beings.

And yet the great debates of history are important because at least the first generation of these gods would be shaped by the cultural ideas of their human designers. Would they be created in the image of capitalism, of Islam, or of feminism? The answer to this question might send them careening in entirely different directions.