Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

21.
 A sign on a South African beach from the period of apartheid, restricting its usage to whites’ only.
People with lighter skin colour are typically more in danger of sunburn than people with darker skin. Yet

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there was no biological logic behind the division of South African beaches. Beaches reserved for people
with lighter skin were not characterised by lower levels of ultraviolet radiation
.
Hindus who adhere to the caste system believe that cosmic forces have made
one caste superior to another. According to a famous Hindu creation myth, the
gods fashioned the world out of the body of a primeval being, the Purusa. The sun
was created from the Purusa’s eye, the moon from the Purusa’s brain, the
Brahmins (priests) from its mouth, the Kshatriyas (warriors) from its arms, the
Vaishyas (peasants and merchants) from its thighs, and the Shudras (servants)
from its legs. Accept this explanation and the sociopolitical di erences between
Brahmins and Shudras are as natural and eternal as the di erences between the
sun and the moon.
1
 The ancient Chinese believed that when the goddess Nü Wa
created humans from earth, she kneaded aristocrats from ne yellow soil, whereas
commoners were formed from brown mud.
2
Yet, to the best of our understanding, these hierarchies are all the product of
human imagination. Brahmins and Shudras were not really created by the gods
from different body parts of a primeval being. Instead, the distinction between the
two castes was created by laws and norms invented by humans in northern India
about 3,000 years ago. Contrary to Aristotle, there is no known biological
di erence between slaves and free people. Human laws and norms have turned
some people into slaves and others into masters. Between blacks and whites there
are some objective biological di erences, such as skin colour and hair type, but
there is no evidence that the differences extend to intelligence or morality.
Most people claim that their social hierarchy is natural and just, while those of
other societies are based on false and ridiculous criteria. Modern Westerners are
taught to sco at the idea of racial hierarchy. They are shocked by laws
prohibiting blacks to live in white neighbourhoods, or to study in white schools, or
to be treated in white hospitals. But the hierarchy of rich and poor – which
mandates that rich people live in separate and more luxurious neighbourhoods,
study in separate and more prestigious schools, and receive medical treatment in
separate and better-equipped facilities – seems perfectly sensible to many
Americans and Europeans. Yet it’s a proven fact that most rich people are rich for
the simple reason that they were born into a rich family, while most poor people
will remain poor throughout their lives simply because they were born into a poor
family.
Unfortunately, complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and
unjust discrimination. Of course not all hierarchies are morally identical, and
some societies su ered from more extreme types of discrimination than others, yet
scholars know of no large society that has been able to dispense with

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discrimination altogether. Time and again people have created order in their
societies by classifying the population into imagined categories, such as superiors,
commoners and slaves; whites and blacks; patricians and plebeians; Brahmins and
Shudras; or rich and poor. These categories have regulated relations between
millions of humans by making some people legally, politically or socially superior
to others.
Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to
know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to
become personally acquainted. In George Bernard Shaw’s