Sapiens, pages 25-32: The Legends of Peugeot, What's For Dinner, Baby Foreskin Removal, and Human Evolution

Harari stays above this level of discourse on these pages, but the consequences of fictions will come up in subsequent chapters. 

The consequences of fictions are big and small. Denying yourself beloved pancakes and your mother an easy time of it in the kitchen, for starters. 

My kid was five years old, but no matter how mature we become, we’ve all obeyed and enforced arbitrary rules in spite of ourselves. We’re swimming in fictions and it’s not just the food-related that are oppressive. 

We’ve rejected comfortable footwear in favor of miserable, feminine high heels or in favor of miserable professional high heels. We’ve rejected fulfilling, hourly work in favor of full-time salaried misery, which we say is for greater pay or health insurance, but it’s at least as much for class and masculinity. Fictions touch, if not rule, everything around us.

How about the powerful fiction people enact over three thousand times a day in the USA each time they cut the tip off a baby’s penis? [1]  

Just as soon as a person enters the world, into a life that needs great care, people cause them great pain that will become embedded in who they are. People withhold love and freedom and, instead, forcibly remove a part of a baby’s body that would have brought them pleasure. 

Why do people do it? Because. That’s it. People carve off newborn foreskin because. [2]  

There I was harping on my kid for rejecting pancakes that one time, when thousands of times a day all over this earth people are rejecting natural-born bodies. 

We may grow up into dinner rule-breakers who get to eat pancakes or cereal or snacks or nothing or whatever we want for dinner, but we keep on rejecting what’s good, or simply what is, in favor of what’s invented. 

That’s because some fictions, like circumcision, are stronger than the pancakes thing. They’re so strong that they convince us that they are inescapable, natural, just how it is, for good reason.

Some fictions are so strong that they’re not even always visible, at least not in the “fiction” framework, at least not in the sense that they might be entirely made up abstractions of our imaginations that exist only because we say they do, and could change if we say they should. 

One of the strongest fictions right now, perhaps, the strongest, and one that’s even too strong for the book Sapiens to take on, is, instead, a fiction that the book Sapiens buys and sells back to us: the story about our species’ evolved tribal, us-vs.-them, and genocidal inborn psychological nature being the science of human evolution, as if it’s the only legitimate intellectual manifestation of evolution’s truth over creationism.  

(Which, as we’ve seen, is ironically Biblical, with Harari taking it to the conspicuous extreme, but that has been tradition… see Creatures of Cain by Erika Milam, for example.)

Harari’s version of (what seems to be the mainstream view of) human nature (among those who believe it is the science) is no mere pancake or, even, foreskin story. Humans evolved to destroy each other and the planet is sold to us as what’s natural about human beings, what’s right, and what’s been evolutionarily good for our lineage, while its function is violence and oppression, withholding freedom and love for absolutely no objectively, scientifically, naturally true reason whatsoever. 

Effectively infinite times a day we’re rejecting humanity when we enact fictions about evolved human nature. We’re rejecting humanity by, instead, pretending so hard that we are what we imagine, what we merely believe about our inborn, evolved, natural ourselves, making it damn near impossible to know what humanity truly is.

Notes