“There is no justice in History” is an important chapter of the book “Sapiens” written by Yuval Noah Harari. This book is one of the most significant and important texts in the field of revolutionary studies that deals with a lot of controversial and problematic issues related to the development of mankind in the simplest way possible.
In the beginning of the chapter the author raises a very important question: how did humans organize in mass cooperation networks when they lacked the biological instincts since the very beginning.
He goes on discussing the different boundaries caused by several socio-psychological binaries that exist in our social system. For instance, when the Americans created the hierarchy in 1776, it mostly came up in a generalised form that seemed to decide and divide soci0-cutural norms and societal positions according to that. The upper section of the society enjoyed unlimited entitled privilege and power while the poor kept on suffering. According to them the rights of “men” had very little to do with the rights of Negroes. Similarly, the Hindus always believed and imposed the ideology that some supreme spiritual force made them placed at the top of the cast system. Hammurabi saw it as an order prescribed by God, similar to how Aristotle believed slaves tend to have a “slavish” nature while free people have a free nature.
These social distinctions, however, came to existence only from human imagination. Imagined make-believe hierarchies were believed and imposed upon everyone by those holding power since the beginning and those who dared to come up with questions against those imposed notions were simply thrown out of the system by the upper class.
He goes on with a parallel discussion describing how the Africans were transported to America as slaves by the Europeans and how the invasion of India by the Aryan conquerors took place in a very similar manner and he also mentioned how these major historical events eventually helped these social binaries to develop further. Many people think these make-believe imaginary distinctions might fade out with the passage of time, but nothing but the opposite happened. These binaries gradually became firmer and static in the system with the help of people for ages.
The violation against women’s rights rather basic human rights, has also been highlighted further by the author. In many societies women were treated simply as the man’s property due to which if she happens to get raped, it eventually reflects the insult toward the Man who “owns” her. The Bible decrees if a man rapes a woman, he has to marry her, and this, seemed like a reasonable and logical solution to the problem to many ancients Hebrews since the man who happens to insult another man by raping his “property”, ends up being the one who marries that violated i.e degraded woman which eventually lessens the burden and compensates for the insult to the “property owner”.
He moves on to discuss the cultural and social binaries between the two genders prescribed by the society. Scholars see “sex” as a biological and “gender” as a cultural category. Both these genders suffer prove their respective “masculinity” and “femininity” according to the prescribed societal standards. He also highlights the problems that each society faced since the agricultural revolutions due to their fragile patriarchal mind-sets. Men, in any form have been always placed higher than women. Very few women have had the opportunity and courage to break thorough what is already given i.e the preconceived societal conventions. Patriarchy has not limited itself into being a mere fragile mind-set, but it has gone to the extent of weathering several political upheavals, social revolutions and economic transformations. The fact that physical power has been considered to be one of the major factors in creating the sphere of discrimination between the genders , has also been highlighted further. Considering these aforementioned points I would like to recommend it to all the bibliophiles out there who have a passion for discovering a parallel universe with the help of reading books.
-Suvasree Bandyopadhyay
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