From family to individuals Harari-part 3

Harari spends chapter 18 discussing homo sapiens transition away from focus on family and local community.  In much of human history, sapiens would rely on their family or local community for everything. If a farmer needed help with his livestock, generally his neighbors would be eager to help should he need it.  They do this not anticipating to be reimbursed directly, instead they could expect the farmer to be eager to help should they need it some time in the near future. Today the reliance on local communities is almost out of the norm.  Harari emphasises the contemporary shift toward the focus on the individual in society. Because of the lack of support from the community, today the support homo sapiens need comes from the state and market. The state protects rights and freedoms of each individual.  Through the institution of laws and a police to enforce them, the state can attempt to guarantee security. The market provides homo sapiens with an opportunity to acquire all of the goods and services they require with the monetary compensation they recieve. These shared imagined realities create a society in which the state and market have great importance in the lives of homo sapiens.

Harari discusses the end of homo sapiens as well in the conclusion of sapiens. Because humans have such a history of using new technologies to solve problems, it is inevitable they will create future technologies that will have increasing negative impact on the planet.  Historians, like people of many other professions have potential to act like philosophers. Like philosophers historians can act as flies biting at the large mammal that is society; pushing it along toward progress.  The power of historians is to approach the subject of our inevitable demise by looking a what has caused societies to fail in history. I believe there are many roles that historians can play in progressing our society.  The lens through which historians analyze the future of homo sapiens may differ from other disciplines, but their role is not defined.