On time travel
Or: the importance of fact-checking & the dangers of science populism
If you could go back in time (and return unscathed), would you do it? Not to an earlier chapter of your life, but some hundreds or maybe thousands of years ago if you’re feeling particularly adventurous.
As for me, I do wonder sometimes what speaking with a person from the distant past would feel like.
Some believe it would be just like talking to a modern human from the twenty-first century, minus all the factual knowledge and cultural references we’ve accumulated in the interim. So, a bit like having a chat with your illiterate rural great-great-grandmother.
Yuval Noah Harari’s history of humankind, the Cognitive Revolution and other flights of fancy
That seems to be the position of Yuval Noah Harari, the historian turned best-selling author, self-appointed futurist, expert on the human condition and constant presence in the international public speaking and podcast circuits — in short, a public intellectual (might I ask what, then, is a private intellectual, and am I one if I likewise pontificate on subjects in which I have zero expertise, as I do, only in the privacy of my own home?).
Nope, I’m not a fan of the man, as you may have gathered. But I did pay money for his book, and he must be a double-digit millionaire by now, so joke’s on me.
But to get back to the point, in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari claims that around 70,000 years ago our ancestors underwent what he dubs a Cognitive Revolution. This momentous event in human history, he writes, gave us more or less the same sort of minds we have now:
[T]he people who drove the Neanderthals to extinction, settled Australia, and carved the Stadel lion-man were as intelligent, creative and sensitive as we are. If we were to come across the artists of the Stadel Cave, we could learn their language and they ours. We’d be able to explain to them everything we know — from the adventures of Alice in Wonderland to the paradoxes of quantum physics — and they could teach us how their people view the world.
Twenty-ish pages on Harari reiterates that “the people who carved the Stadel lion-man some 30,000 years ago had the same physical, emotional, and intellectual abilities we have.”
The real experts weigh in
Christopher Robert Hallpike, an English-Canadian anthropologist (note: an actual anthropologist who spent years living with primitive tribes in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea) and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, strongly disagrees with our celebrity intellectual. In a brilliant and devastating response to Yuval Harari, he writes:
It’s a sweet idea, and something like this imagined meeting actually took place a few years ago between the linguist Daniel Everett and the Piraha foragers of the Amazon […]. But far from being able to discuss quantum theory with them, he found that the Piraha couldn’t even count, and had no numbers of any kind. They could teach Everett how they saw the world, which was entirely confined to the immediate experience of the here-and-now, with no interest in past or future, or really in anything that could not be seen or touched. They had no myths or stories, so Alice in Wonderland would have fallen rather flat as well.
According to Hallpike, Harari’s claim that the Cognitive Revolution gave us the modes of thought and reasoning of our modern minds simply isn’t true.
Anthropologists and developmental psychologists studying primitive societies have found that their language development and concepts of “space, time, classification, causality and the self” are much closer to those of the Piraha than to modern industrial societies:
The Piraha are an extreme case, but the Tauade of Papua New Guinea, […] with whom I lived only had the idea of single and pair, and no form of calendar or time-reckoning. Harari clearly has no knowledge at all of cross-cultural developmental psychology, and of how modes of thought develop in relation to the natural and socio-cultural environments. The people who carved the Stadel lion-man around 30,000 years ago and the Piraha had the same ability to learn as we do, which is why Piraha children can learn to count, but these cognitive skills have to be learnt: we are not born with them all ready to go. Cross-cultural developmental psychology has shown that the development of the cognitive skills of modern humans actually requires literacy and schooling, large-scale bureaucratic societies and complex urban life, the experience of cultural differences, and familiarity with modern technology, to name some of the more important requirements […].
I highly recommend reading Hallpike’s critique in its entirety if you’re curious to learn just how weak Harari’s other claims are and the degree to which Sapiens is chock-full of speculation, inconsistencies, wild extrapolations and downright flights of fancy with little to no factual basis or scientific evidence. Even if you aren’t familiar with Harari’s work, the article makes a fantastic standalone piece.
For a less academic but equally illuminating critique of Harari’s work, check out The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari by the evolutionary biologist Darshana Narayanan.
In addition to laying bare multiple factual errors in Sapiens and Harari’s more recent book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Narayanan warns of the very real dangers of science populism in the twenty-first century. The author also calls for “the need for professional fact-checking for book-length nonfiction, which I have learned — to my shock — is not the norm.” Yikes.
What say you?
So, now that you know you may encounter massive cognitive and civilisational rifts, would you still travel back in history?
Personally I’m not too keen on having close encounters even with people from the relatively recent past, what with the syphilis, smelly armpits, rampant violence and all. Also, I’m allergic to horses, donkeys (yes), mould and house dust, which would really limit my mobility and lodging options.
So I guess I wouldn’t go back in time unless it’s a Doctor Who type of situation where I can fly back to the future at will (read: I’m heading home on hair wash day at the latest). And if I can’t take my face wash, retinol serum, a good moisturiser and an SPF 50 with me, we’re not even doing a long weekend — I’m out by nightfall on day one. I feel the same about camping by the way.
On second thought, I think I’d rather not time travel quite like Doctor Who.
You could say I approach historical figures the way I approach rare predators. I’d only ever want to be face-to-face with a snow leopard if one of us is behind very secure bars. But that doesn’t sound quite right either, so I’d rather admire these magnificent creatures from afar and just be glad and in awe that they exist(ed).
And, whether I’m watching a video of a snow leopard chasing her prey down a near-vertical Himalayan slope, or reading the eventful biography of a prominent historical figure, I can’t help but marvel at their fast, violent and short lives.
(Yes, I’m fully aware I’m romanticising and this mostly only pertains to a tiny elite while the rest toiled, suffered and perished without much pomp; but this is a personal blog not an academic study, so I’ll make full use of the creative licence that affords me thank you very much).
Also, the fact that most people’s lives were undoubtedly tragic doesn’t mean they weren’t tragically beautiful.
Up next: A most dangerous woman
And that long and not-too-relevant segue brings me to the subject of my next post: a woman who lived and loved fast, died (relatively) young and left her mark on European history — all whilst being one of the most accomplished, educated, talked about and hated personalities of her time.
While I was reading up on her, this quote on living fast and dying young — an all-time favourite of mine — from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando immediately sprang to mind. Incidentally, my subject lived in the same time period, only across the Channel:
The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different. The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was, we may believe, of another temper altogether. The brilliant amorous day was divided as sheerly from the night as land from water. Sunsets were redder and more intense; dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular half-lights and lingering twilights they knew nothing. The rain fell vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness. Translating this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall. The moment is brief they sang; the moment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all. [...] The withered intricacies and ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age were unknown to them. Violence was all. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice. Girls were roses, and their seasons were short as the flowers’. Plucked they must be before nightfall; for the day was brief and the day was all.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
Watch this space to learn who our sixteenth-century femme fatale is. Hint: She had a killer sense of style. See you around!
