THE UNWISE SAPIENS OF YUVAL NOAH HARARI

Harper, 2014, 443 pages

I was on a long waiting list despite the many copies at the Austin Public Library. When I was done, I could not renew the checkout because other people were waiting. Gratefully, I did not pay for the book. Despite (or perhaps indicative of) its runway popularity, it is shallow and facile, drawn from second-hand sources and not well integrated in its presentations.

Harari failed to correctly explain the origin of writing, the origin of counting, the origin of money, and the origin of coinage.  They are all tightly bound. In every case, his supporting citations point to other popularizers, rather than validated peer-reviewed academic publications. So, he gets a lot of the details wrong. From those he builds his attractive and erroneous narrative. Finally, like me and other bloggers, he is a synthesizer, collecting and republishing ideas that he likes without actually challenging any of those claims for their want of proof. 

One such assertion is that the agricultural revolution was not worth the price. Domestication of wheat brought longer working hours and slavery. It actually brought malnutrition, and set the stage for periodic starvation never known to hunter-gatherers. I reviewed Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization by Richard Manning (North Point Press,  2004 ISBN: 0865476225) for the Objectivist discussion site, Rebirth of Reason, here  in 2006 and later in 2010 here.  I wrote: "Among Manning's many points is that the "surplus" usually went to a handful of unproductive people, priests and nobles."  

Moreover, as I pointed out in my original review, the nobles themselves hunted -- which they denied to those who were bound to the cultivating fields.  Nobles did not suffer a steady diet of grain.  When times were good, they ate well, a variety -- another point Jacobs made about city life -- with lots of fresh meat." It is an interesting fact to consider. But Harari just stops there. He does not see strawberries in January. Cutting off our food supply is integral to his thesis, which includes disdain for liberal humanism. Harari advocates for the postmodern anti-industrial revolution. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Not Conned by Seghal’s “Coined” 

Debt: the Seed of Civilization 

Accounting for Civilization 

Art as Ordered Narrative

Money as Speech 

Art as Ordered Narrative

Book Review: When Writing Met Art by Denise Schmandt-Besserat (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. $45.00.)

We accept it as given that a painting tells a story.  It was not always so. Before the invention of writing, representational art was not spatially oriented.  Moreover, we expect that writing conveys speech.  That, too, was a secondary development.  The civilizations of Mesopotamia 8000 to 2500 BCE slowly evolved literacy from numeracy: counting – actually, accounting – was the impetus for writing.  From tallying debts, writing eventually appeared on statues to announce the subject or object of devotion.  The neat lines of cuneiform served as a model for painting.  The unordered presentation of activities such as hunting, became the left-to-right, top-to-bottom mapping we now expect specifically because this is how temple records presented the quantities of wheat and counts of animals owed to them. 

“Schmandt-Besserat then demonstrates art's reciprocal impact on the development of writing. She shows how, beginning in 2700-2600 BC, the inclusion of inscriptions on funerary and votive art objects emancipated writing from its original accounting function. To fulfill its new role, writing evolved to replicate speech; this in turn made it possible to compile, organize, and synthesize unlimited amounts of information; and to preserve and disseminate information across time and space.” UT Press here. 

Preliterate art

Post literate art

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Accounting for Civilization

Debt: the Seed of Civilization

Money is Speech

What is Literacy?

Accounting for Civilization

The work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat demonstrates from empirical historical evidence that civilization began with accounting. The first writing began with records of promises and debts.

While not a circulating medium of indirect barter, the early artifacts of accounting nonetheless bear the essential elements of money, showing value and naming the guarantor. Moreover, in a long foreshadowing to the modern era, these earliest tokens functioned more like drafts and promissory notes. When the debt was paid, the recording instrument was discarded. Thus, archeologists found them in refuse pits and middens.

That was one reason that these intriguing evidences of commerce were overlooked. Archeologists brought with them an implicit mindset at once modern (of course), but also, more primitive than that of Jarmo c. 8000 BC: they thought that the media of commerce would be treated like gold treasure and silver coins.

These little clay objects were given scant attention by museums. When art history professor Denise Schmandt-Besserat queried and visited museums for their oldest ceramics, she was surprised to be shown these little bullets, pyramids, cones, and disks. Most were uncatalogued. After a few years of puzzling over them, the truth dawned on her: these were tokens. And they – not pictographs – were the true origin of writing.
Pictographs did, indeed, antedate cuneiform. However, the pictographs themselves show much epistemic development, representing abstractions such as “food” rather than only concretes such as “bread.” As many pictographs mimicked tokens, it was clear that the clay promises came first. The clay tokens show a long development of their own, from simple representations such as “sheep” and “wheat” to differentiations of kind and measure, as well as to manufactured goods such as beer and cloth.

She published her findings first in a large two-volume corpus, Before Writing (University of Texas Press, 1992). The core of that narrative and the essential illustrations were condensed into a popular paperback, How Writing Came About (University of Texas Press, 1996). Focusing even more narrowly on the power of these tokens to enable the creation of civilization, she produced a children’s book, The History of Counting (Morrow Jr., 1999).

Before these tokens, there were no large numbers such as 4, 5, 6, and 7. Today, we accept decimal tallying on our ten digits as “natural” but it surely was not. The first representations of “five” were "three passed one“ and "three one one.” Our modern languages still hint of that earlier time, as in French three is big (trois/tres) or in Hungarian big follows three (nagy/negy). Slavic languages still carry the old Indo-European singular-dual-plural grammar for 1-2-many. (Other languages have other divisions; none at root speaks distinctly of four, five, and six.)

Numeracy is not natural and was invented for commerce and from that came literacy.  What was counted was farm goods owed, i.e., debts – economic, financial, fiduciary, commercial, exchanges.

The barrier to understanding this is easy to show. The broad mainstream of intellectuals across all academic disciplines holds business in low regard. That is obvious by inspection. In the festschrift The Philosophy of Karl Popper (Open Court, 1974), Nobel laureate neurologist Sir John Carew Eccles outlined Popper’s theory of objective knowledge. We have sensora; and we have words for our perceptions. A third world also exists, the writings about our perceptions. This was before Schmandt-Besserat’s discoveries, of course, but resting on the earlier work of Sir Leonard Wooley, Eccles wrote:

“There is undoubtedly a feeling of bathos in the uses to which this marvellous discovery was put initially. Mostly it was used for business documents, contracts, inventories, deeds of sale! But also it was used for Royal inscriptions and at a later stage for recording religious texts.”

In this view only its use by the king (note the capital letter) and priests could elevate writing from the common clay of commerce.

But writing supersedes even this. In truth, as Denise Schmandt-Besserat shows most recently in When Writing Met Art (University of Texas Press, 2007), pre-literate art was illiterate. The ordered narratives which we accept as normal in art – Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault, or Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks – had their origins in the nicely ordered spatial vocabulary of cuneiform inventories and Sumerian contracts.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Money is Speech

Art as Ordered Narrative

Debt: The Seed of Civilization