fiction makes us human

Yuval Noah Harari is less parsimonious about who gets to be human than most. I wrote yesterday about a particular kind of tool use supposedly being the ultimate definition of what it means to be human. Harari’s definition appears to be less restrictive.

Harari starts his history of humanity by talking about other human species, and Harari is willing to include not only Neanderthals among the humans but our likely common ancestor, Homo erectus. Another species or two. And concede that there may be some we haven’t yet discovered. From a few human species, however, we are presently down to one, our own, Homo sapiens. 

Harari speculates about what distinguishes Homo sapiens (or, “Sapiens,” as he sometimes puts it) from the other human species, but he feels pretty solid that what probably differentiated us from other human species is what currently makes us unique among the animals: an ability to live in fiction.

Th[e] ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language. It’s relatively  easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. [In contrast, y]ou could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

Religion, according to Harari, is a subset of the fictions humans live. We also live the fictions of limited liability companies, human rights, nations. 

Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world. … Sapiens … liv[e] in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees, and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations, and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees, and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.

source:

Sapiens: a brief history of humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

2015. HarperCollins, New York