SAPIENS
Phil Diehn, one of the members of my old man’s group read a book titled Sapiens by Yuval Harari. When sending me the title he wrote, “One of the all time best books of my life.” Bill Gates on the title page recommended it. So I read it immediately, all 430 pages, in ebook form.
What Yuval Harari is attempting is trace a history of humans from the point when we separated from chimpanzees through the present with a guess what the future might be like. His assumption is that humans are essentially unchanged, have the same DNA, from our hunter gatherer days but that we have gone through one transition after another which have completely changed the way we relate to the wider world and to each other. At each stage he wonders whether the changes have improved the lives of most people or not, trying to look at the positive and negative at each stage without being judgmental. But in my mind he questions my assumptions about what it is to be human all the way through the book.
So what I am going to try and do in the next few days is to wonder about the questions he raises for me, for myself only, because writing down my response is a way to formulate my response to each of these issues.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 