Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

The
Ring of the Nibelungen
, and suddenly, before I know it, there I am humming the
Siegfried leitmotif to a puzzled bank clerk. In bureaucracy, things must be kept
apart. There is one drawer for home mortgages, another for marriage certi cates,
a third for tax registers, and a fourth for lawsuits. Otherwise, how can you nd
anything? Things that belong in more than one drawer, like Wagnerian music
dramas (do I le them under ‘music’, ‘theatre’, or perhaps invent a new category
altogether?), are a terrible headache. So one is forever adding, deleting and
rearranging drawers.
In order to function, the people who operate such a system of drawers must be
reprogrammed to stop thinking as humans and to start thinking as clerks and
accountants. As everyone from ancient times till today knows, clerks and
accountants think in a non-human fashion. They think like ling cabinets. This is
not their fault. If they don’t think that way their drawers will all get mixed up and

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they won’t be able to provide the services their government, company or
organisation requires. The most important impact of script on human history is
precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world.
Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and
bureaucracy.
The Language of Numbers
As the centuries passed, bureaucratic methods of data processing grew ever more
di erent from the way humans naturally think – and ever more important. A
critical step was made sometime before the ninth century 
AD
, when a new partial
script was invented, one that could store and process mathematical data with
unprecedented e ciency. This partial script was composed of ten signs,
representing the numbers from 0 to 9. Confusingly, these signs are known as
Arabic numerals even though they were rst invented by the Hindus (even more
confusingly, modern Arabs use a set of digits that look quite di erent from
Western ones). But the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they
encountered the system, understood its usefulness, re ned it, and spread it
through the Middle East and then to Europe. When several other signs were later
added to the Arab numerals (such as the signs for addition, subtraction and
multiplication), the basis of modern mathematical notation came into being.
Although this system of writing remains a partial script, it has become the
world’s dominant language. Almost all states, companies, organisations and
institutions – whether they speak Arabic, Hindi, English or Norwegian – use
mathematical script to record and process data. Every piece of information that
can be translated into mathematical script is stored, spread and processed with
mind-boggling speed and efficiency.
A person who wishes to in uence the decisions of governments, organisations
and companies must therefore learn to speak in numbers. Experts do their best to
translate even ideas such as ‘poverty’, ‘happiness’ and ‘honesty’ into numbers (‘the
poverty line’, ‘subjective well-being levels’, ‘credit rating’). Entire elds of
knowledge, such as physics and engineering, have already lost almost all touch
with the spoken human language, and are maintained solely by mathematical
script.

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