Sapiens, to The End: Fictions Based on Fictions, Eating Fictions Round and Round

We climaxed in the last post. So, this final post, in what started as a page-by-page review of Sapiens, is a sort of epilogue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros#/media/File:Serpiente_alquimica.jpg

Let’s cozy down, one more time, into his way of painting the evolved human condition (Chapter 10, page 196):

“Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they. We are people like you and me, who share our language, religion and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for them. We were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing. We don’t want to see any of them in our territory, and we don’t are an iota what happens in their territory. They are barely even human.“ 

Putting aside the problems that some scientists and scholars (both of human and nonhuman animals) have with the concept of “instinct” (see de Waal’s book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?), let’s consider the evidence that Harari provides to back up his assertion about Sapiens’ evolved psyches.

“In the language of the Dinka people of the Sudan, ‘Dinka’ simply means ‘people’. People who are not Dinka are not people.”

Does he provide evidence that the Dinka believe that non-Dinka are not people? No.

But aren’t you tempted to believe that second sentence given the first? 

Careful! Don’t! It’s a sneaky non-sequitur. I’m sure there’s an official philosophical term for that blundering fallacy/manipulative technique (can’t tell which it is but can’t help assuming it’s the first), but I don’t know it.

Does he provide evidence that calling oneself ‘people’ is necessarily separating your people-ness or humanity from members of other tribes or cultures? No.

Does he provide evidence that calling oneself ‘people” is necessarily dehumanizing others? No. 

We call our moon Moon. No one who knows of other moons believes that our moon is the only real or true moon in the solar system, do they? 

All this lack of actual evidence missing from the entire book seems bad for buying the assumption that dividing the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ is an evolved instinct. 

Harari’s example is terribly misleading for an additional reason: the Dinka were named by colonial Europeans who trafficked in the same myths about human nature that are modernized in Sapiens . 

In “The Dinka myth: How a South Sudanese ethnic group lost identity,” Mading Peter Angong explains that ‘Dinka’ is a “foreign imposed name that we cannot even define. We are Muonyjang!”

Source: http://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/09/sapiens-to-end-fictions-based-on.html