Human Revolutions

Back in 2023, I happened to read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by Yuval Noah Harari. I ended up not impressed by the book [see Sapiens: The Book] but did find two aspects of it compelling and memorable: the idea of our facility with fiction, and the idea of game-changing human Revolutions.

It is said: ‘Once you have an X hammer, everything becomes an X nail.’ (For whatever value of ‘X’.) Our mental concepts frame our worldview, and I’ve been considering human culture through the lens of these Revolutions.

Here I take a stab at just listing them.

This post will make much more sense if you’ve read the first two of the three posts I wrote about the book. The third is the (negative) review of the book linked above, but Sapiens: Storytellers discusses our unique power of imagination (the Cognitive Revolution), and Sapiens: Revolutionaries discusses the impact of human Revolutions in general (focusing on the Agricultural and Scientific).

The TL;DR is that humanity undergoes major Revolutions in how it exists and goes about its business. A commonly cited one is the Agricultural Revolution that altered us from hunter/gathers to farmers and which enabled cities, property, ownership, and wealth (and hence theft). But the AR was not the first, and certainly not the last. There have been many important Revolutions since (for example, the Industrial and Electrical).

There are a number of criteria that characterize the kind of Revolution I mean:

• They forever change how humanity operates.
• They enable a broad range of new technologies.
• They are inevitable (because they’re based on physical reality).
• They are unstoppable (because humans can’t resist new toys).
• They are both an advance and an amputation; we gain and lose.

That last point is important. There is a Yin-Yang nature to these Revolutions. They were huge steps for humanity, game changers that opened new paths, but — unintended consequences — they also seriously screwed us over.

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Without further ado, here’s my (current) list:

The Cognitive Revolution (~70 kya): The first revolution for homo sapiens and the secret to our, pardon the archeology pun, jaw-dropping success. We’ve covered the planet with ourselves and filled every ecological niche. Bravo humanity? The central part of this Cognitive Revolution — and why homo sapiens took over from all our cousins — is our invention of fiction, of storytelling.

We invented fictions such as states, politics, stories, and religion. They enabled leaders to use politics and stories (and often religion) to control states (for good or ill). This creation of fictional states and politics allowed humanity to form much larger groups than our tribal hunter-gatherer past allowed. Groups tend to become unmanageable above a few hundreds of people or so without them.

Our ability with fiction gave us stories to pass on lore and identity but also gave us politics and political leaders. It gave us both good fictions (justice) and bad fictions (racism). Overall, I call fiction an upside; our imagination is the root of how we improve our tools. The downside, though, is that while it made us the most powerful unstoppable species on the planet, it also made us prone to running off too many fictional cliffs, to leaping without looking. Which far outstrips our ability to consider our next steps carefully. It’s only looking back we can see the costs.

[See Sapiens: Storytellers for more.]

The Religious Beliefs Revolution (~70 kya): Our apprehension of a universe with meaning and purpose led to our conceptions of gods and the spiritual. Our new facility with fiction led us to build stories — framed in the context of the time — around these apprehensions.

For now, I’ll mention only that every culture seems to have these apprehensions and stories. This suggests either a Kantian deep wiring to perceive the world this way or that these universal apprehensions might be founded on a reality. [For more on my metaphysical views, see all these posts.]

The upside (ignoring Pascal’s Wager) is the community and peace that can arise from the spiritual. Religions unify communities. The downside is apparent in the strife between what presumably are all believed to be God’s children by those in conflict. It’s appalling to me that those who follow the same God of Abraham wage war with each other. I doubt God is proud.

The Trade/Money Revolution (15-30+ kya): Another of our great fictions: money. Trade likely predates agriculture; even hunter/gather tribes can trade desirable items, either between themselves or between other tribes. Later, money formalized it.

The canonical example is the shoemaker trading shoes for loaves of bread from the bread maker. Straight trade works great, but what if the baker doesn’t want shoes but flour instead? And what if the farmer doesn’t need bread (can make their own) but does need meat. It becomes a sitcom episode where the shoemaker trades the hunter for meat, trades that to the farmer for flour, and finally trades that to the baker for bread.

Money makes it all much simpler; the shoemaker just pays the baker for bread.

The downside is that the very notion of wealth is morally corrupting. Most religions deem the excessive love of money a sin.

The Agricultural Revolution (~12 kya): Farming allowed us to feed much larger groups than hunter-gathers ever could. It allowed humanity to grow from small villages to large cities. Larger groups mean specialization, which leads to guilds and professions. City governance becomes a thing — infrastructure, mayors, administrators, bureaucrats, taxes, licenses…

The downside was huge. Humans had to adapt to a new diet, and many died in the process. Gluten allergies are just one hand-me-down of the Agricultural Revolution. Humans evolved to eat meat and fruit, not ground up over-developed grasses. And larger groups led to more and new diseases (rodents love cites). It also fostered our sense of wealth and ownership. Envy and greed grew in our hearts (recall our oldest murder story: Cain and Abel were farmers).

[See Sapiens: Revolutionaries for details.]

Note the inevitability of these revolutions. There was no way we wouldn’t discover farming. Given either our wiring or a perceived truth, and our love of storytelling, spirituality and religion were inevitable. Given our need for goods and trade, money was inevitable. Hard to block a revolution whose time has come.

The Imperialism Revolution (~5 kya): We grew from tribes to villages to cities to states and nations. Humanity spread throughout the world and settled on every continent (save Antarctica). It was inevitable that the stronger states would decide their future lay in expansion. Why settle for a nation? Why not the world?

The downside is clear in history, but the upside was the innovation required to pull off a campaign of conquest. Communications, navigation, transportation, and logistics became important. Since most don’t care to be conquered, imperialism also leads to war, a notorious innovator of technology.

The Scientific Thought Revolution (1500-1600): Galileo, Newton, and many other giants, issued in an era that saw the world as a mechanism that could be studied and understood. This game changer led to the technological world we live in today.

The downside was the death of dualism. Our Yin-Yang world became all Yin. Scientific thinkers began to stop believing in anything outside the mechanism. (And Pascal’s Wager became a bit more significant.)

The Industrial Revolution (1700-1800): We got really good at making goods. Assembly lines and factories became a thing. The 9-to-5 cog-in-a-machine job became a thing [see the 1936 Charlie Chaplin movie Modern Times for a well-known satire of this Revolution].

The obvious downsides may be the death of us. And lots of death is another characteristic of these game-changing revolutions. Many died when our diet changed; many have died, one way or another, for religion; many have died over money and wealth; many have died over expansion and war; many have died because science invents such excellent ways for us to kill each other; and many have died (and will die) because of our industrious industries.

But we have lots of stuff. Or is that a downside, too?

The Electrical Revolution (1800s): Fire was great for humanity but problematic. Especially in cities. Fire gave us protection, warmth, light, and cooked food. Electricity did all that much better and gave us radios, telephones, televisions, and a whole lot more. Electricity largely vanquished the night for humanity.

The downside is greater bondage to our gadgets and 24-hour global economy (hello night shift). And the way media can now invade our lives. We can instantly know what’s happening around the world.

Social media may turn out to be one of our worst inventions. To my eyes, it seems to have amputated our common sense and attachment to physical reality. It presents an endless landscape of fantasy bubbles and essentially imaginary people — people you never meet in Real Life™, never share a conversation with. I could be anybody (even an Ai), and who would ever know?.

And our ever-growing reliance on electronic technology may bite us if a Carrington (or worse) event occurs. Many of our infrastructures are a lot more fragile than people may realize.

The Atomic Revolution (1942): The largely untapped potential for relatively clean energy but also nuclear weapons waste. The Scientific Revolution made this one inevitable and the Electrical Revolution enabled the technology. Public fears set this one back and continues to suppress it. Which may end up biting us when solar, wind, and other green technologies turn out to not fulfill our ever-growing needs.

In fact, the power-hungry needs of Ai have some people considering the construction of new atomic power plants.

The real downside, of course, is atomic weapons. For the first time in our history, we have the power to utterly destroy our civilization.

The Digital (Computer) Revolution (1945): As with each of these revolutions, it’s hard to express briefly just how much they changed the game. The powers that digital computation gave us could fill many posts. Computers are woven deeply into the fabric of our lives today.

The downside is that, as with many of the previous revolutions, we got the power to do much more than ever before, but the result was making us busier and more preoccupied than ever before. Remember how computers were going to be great time savers? That never happened. Nor did they lead to a “paperless” world. Indeed, they tend to generate more paper. And don’t forget email spam and digital thieves.

You might think that (at least so far) computers haven’t killed anyone, but you’d be wrong. There was the notorious Therac-25 case, for one, and software issues have led to some plane crashes. Not to mention what may happen with self-driving cars.

Notice that these days the revolutions come faster and faster…

The Space Revolution (2020s): Shooting rockets into orbit has become a common thing now, just about everyone is doing it. I almost didn’t include this one because it’s so recent that it’s hard to see how much of a game changer it will be. It could be the beginning of humanity’s expansion into space, or it could just be commercial messing around in low-Earth orbit (LEO).

It’s also too soon to know what the downsides are. The death rate, while not zero, has certainly been extremely low. So far maybe the worst thing is that Earth-based astronomers aren’t happy about all the junk in orbit. A Carrington event could be catastrophic for the gear, but a Kessler event would be even worse (and both have pretty good odds of happening).

The Ai Revolution (2020s): We’re on the brink of this one, but it seems already to be another game changer for humanity. It’s much too early to say what the pros and cons will turn out to be. Some fear it will usher in our doom in some way. Some hope it will lead to a far better world.

Clearly, Ai is amazingly powerful (like electricity or atomic power). And clearly this revolution is inevitable. Will humanity reject it, or at least strongly regulate it, as they did atomic power or embrace and run with it as they did electricity, computers, and space?

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The Quantum Computing Revolution (?): Pending and impact unknown. One concern is that it will make current common encryption breakable (the dreaded Q-day). The upside is an unprecedented ability to calculate quantum systems (such as molecules). Also unknown is to what extent QC will actually be a game changer, because it’s only useful for certain types of problems.

The Fusion Power Revolution (?): Pending and impact unknown but probably huge if working fusion generators work out as hoped. Whether fusion changes the game or is just a better (or even just different) way to do what we’ve been doing remains to be seen.

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[This is a considerable rewrite of a Substack post of mine from May 2024.]

Stay revolutionary, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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