Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The idea of creating money for use as currency developed as societies grew larger and more intricate and thus the barter system no longer sufficed. The Spaniards valued gold, and when they arrived in Mexico and found the Aztecs and their gold stores—though the Aztecs thought gold quite useless for anything other than decoration and instead used cloth and beans as currency—the value of gold increased as the Spaniards spread the use of it across Afro-Asia.

Money for use as currency is a purely intellectual idea, and this money has very little, if any, actual value itself. While historically money existed as shells, beads, or gold and silver coinage, today most money is just electronic data and does not have any physical reality. It has value only because we believe it has value, and we trust that everyone else believes it has value. We want money because everyone one else wants money.

For the past 2,500 years, the most common form of political government has been the empire. Empires have come and gone not generally based on uprisings from repressed citizens but because of schisms in the ruling class or from outside invaders.

Empires spread culture, and most of what we espouse as our cultural heritage was forced on our ancestors by a conquering empire. This heritage is a blending of the art, history, and political systems of the conquered with the conquerors to become a new culture. As the world moves inexorably toward a global empire, complexities such as global warming and human rights become concerns of the collective empire, not for single countries to handle individually.

After money and empire, religion is the third great unifier. With the Agricultural Revolution and the formation of communities and common goals came a Religious Revolution. The first religions were polytheistic, which means they are characterized by acceptance of multiple beliefs, though in modern times we look at polytheism as religion from barbarous times. Modern religions are generally monotheistic, though they retain polytheistic aspects with the acceptance of patron saints as alternates who can be appealed to in prayer. The main contradiction in monotheism is the problem of evil and suffering in the presence of an omnipotent, good, and loving God.

Other religions, Buddhism for instance, take a different approach and try to calm the mind and relieve suffering by dismissing craving, which is viewed as the source of suffering. “Natural law” religions—more commonly referred to as ideologies and including capitalism, communism, Nazism, and liberalism—are, like the traditional interpretation of religion, also systems of human norms. The past 200 years of science have revealed that we are subject to our behavior as revealed by hormones and genes, and this does not agree with the religious concept of free will.

Hindsight makes things appear clear and inevitable, but to those living during a certain period in history, the outcome is impossible to foresee. Describing how something happened by recounting the events that led from one point to the next is always easier that describing why something happened; finding the causal connections between events that led to a particular outcome is often impossible. Determining these connections becomes even more challenging when one is alive during the period in question.

Chaos is an inevitable part of history, and there are two types of chaotic systems. Level one systems do not react to predictions, while level two systems do respond to predictions and can be prepared for based on these predictions. An example of a level one system would be weather forecasts: Any prediction or model we make about the weather does not affect the actual weather outcome. Rising oil prices are an example of a level two system: When we make a prediction or calculation about rising oil prices, we can see it played out in the global oil market.

Despite our knowing or predicting, there is no proof that history is propelling humans to any kind of beneficial outcome; there is no guarantee or model that human well-being increases with time. Whatever is good in the short term or for some group of people may or may not be good or eventually beneficial for us all.