What distinguishes humans from other animals? Having souls, their discovery of fire, or their invention of tools? There is now another bold thesis. In his new book, Yuval Harari argues that what distinguishes us is our ability to cooperate with very large numbers of other humans, and in very flexible and diverse modes. If he is right, we may need to rethink some of our central assumptions.
At face value, Harari’s is a counter intuitive thesis. It has become impossible to leaf through a daily newspaper without encountering stories of genocide, corruption, rape, and multiple other manifestations of humanity’s beastly nature. We are all fascinated by House of Cards, from which we infer that only suckers play by the book and uphold standards of decency. Many of us stumbled across the political theory of Thomas Hobbes in school; he told us that man is a wolf to other men and that the only way to reign in the beast is to resign to a larger beast, the Leviathan. We also recall that Adam Smith advised us not to rely on the charity of the butcher and the grocer for our meal, but on their self-interest. So, how can cooperation really be our signature trait?
To make his point, Harari asks us to compare what would happen if we put one human and one ape on an island, or if we were to put a thousand humans, and a thousand apes. He argues that when left alone and to his own devices, a single human is fairly meek and possesses no natural physical advantage over an ape. Yet, when a thousand of us cooperate, we can out-organize apes or any other rival. Harari argues this is the key factor that explains our unfettered domination of the planet.
