Book Summaries Online

I thought this book was amazing. I listened to it on Audible, twice. I don’t do that ever. The book is about a Jewish (doesn’t believe in God), gay, vegetarian author (he mentions it a couple of times) who is a historian, and he takes some pretty mind-blowing things about the history of humankind to explain how the world is today and gives a forecast for the future which, spoiler alert, he thinks will implode from technology or something. He admits that he is a technophobe, and I agree that he is pretty much just pessimistic about technology and the future.

If you were religious before this book, you probably will have a couple of questions for yourself after reading it. Yuval brings up a lot of things in history that don’t seem to jive with what the Bible (haven’t read it myself) or other religious texts say about how we all came to be. Below are a handful of the specific items that Yuval talks about that were enlightening to me about how we came to be here, along with some of the items he brings up about modern history.

There were multiple human species. In the Bible, there is the story of Adam and Eve and that is how humans were created. I think most people probably don’t think that’s how it really went down, especially since we’ve found cavemen and whatnot. But Yuval goes into great detail that it’s been pretty clearly discovered that there were multiple sapien (it means human) species around the world, and the Homo sapiens that you see today were the winners. There were Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and a couple of other ones that I can’t remember right now. And the crazy part is that we can take DNA tests now and see how much Neanderthal DNA we have. How come we haven’t heard about all the other humans in the Bible? You’ve got some explaining to do, Jesus!

There were multiple men across the world who swore off sex to organize communities/countries. I thought priests were not able to have sex with women because they love to have sex with children. Just kidding, I thought it was just a rule and I never thought about why it was. Yuval points out that not only priests swore off sex, but so did the eunuchs in China, as well as monks, nuns, yogis, and medieval Perfecti. These men, at their time, were also leaders in their communities attempting to further or advance their groups of people. Yuval says this is why humans were able to advance so much faster than other animals like monkeys. In a flock of chimps, the alpha male has sex with all the women and all the other dudes are pissed, and they have a pecking order. This makes it very, very slow for chimps to do anything organized together, like make a language or houses. Yuval says that even politicians today kind of mimic this effort, where they all tend to be men who are married with kids and a dog and a white picket fence. That person is in power and poses no threat to your women.

God must either not exist or be evil. I don’t particularly agree 100% with this logic, but Yuval takes a moment to basically say if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-present, then why are there so many terrible things in the world, like murder, hernias, and the New York Jets? So Yuval basically says either God is all-powerful, seeing, and knowing and is evil—that is why there are so many Jets fans—or that God does not exist. I think this is merely an interesting thought on the whole “God is everywhere” idea, but I think some people will say, “Well, we can’t really know what God’s intentions are.”

We think we know what God wants, and then say we can’t know what God wants. And to continue on from the last point, Yuval says he sees it everywhere: that people constantly live and act on conflicting and opposing ideas. Religious people will say that God wants us to not be gay, or God wants us to be a good neighbor, but then when really bad things happen, the same people say no one can really know God’s desires. Now I try to find these hypocrisies in our everyday lives. Like Republicans like the death penalty but not abortion, and vice versa for Democrats. Or that really religious people who worship Jesus will join the military and shoot someone in another country, even though Jesus would have never done that. Even as really smart human beings, we have a really hard time realizing that we are completely out of our minds.

Human rights don’t exist. A tree exists physically in the world, but human rights are an idea that people came up with, and sometimes people are super serious that they are very, very real. Yuval points out, I think in a convincing way, that humans have imagination and we create things like human rights, countries, religions, money, etc. They don’t really exist; humans made those things up and we choose to believe in how those things work.

The Agricultural Revolution was not a good idea. It’s pretty agreed upon that humans used to be nomads, traveling in a band and hunting. But then one day, we decided to plant food and farm. That is the Agricultural Revolution. But Yuval says that we really, really messed up by everyone doing that. As nomads, we just had to work like 6 hours a week to get some food, and then we could chill for a long time. But when we did farming, we had to work like every day almost and had to bend over at the waist and get slipped discs (Yuval actually brings that point up). But in exchange for our freedom and time, we get peace of mind knowing that we will have food to eat and not be all panicked about food like the nomads likely were.

I think that is long enough of a review. There are more very interesting ideas in the book. I think this is Yuval’s best book, and honestly, I didn’t really like the other books.