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Yuval Noah Harari tells stories about stories. It tells these stories with conviction, in a nice loud voice. Like most religions, Mormonism tells simple, seductive stories to make sense of our messy world. Parents could be sealed to their children, and dead relatives could even be posthumously sealed to their living descendants.
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But Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of the LDS church, received a revelation that husbands could be ‘sealed’ for all eternity to their wives, ensuring cohabitation in the afterlife. For other Christians, marriage lasts ‘until death do us part’.
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This is the unique selling point of Mormonism. ‘So how would you feel if I told you there was a way for you to be together forever, for eternity, with the people you love most?’ Well, we said, obviously that doesn’t feel great. ‘And how does it make you feel to think that when your loved ones die, you’ll never see them again?’ ‘Family,’ we both answered, without hesitation. ‘What’s the most important thing in the world to you?’ Two pretty, eager young women duly appeared, and the more voluble one began to rhapsodise about the delights of the Temple. My mother and I were in the visitor centre, looking at a scale model of the inside of the Temple, where only LDS members ‘in good standing’ can enter. One conversion attempt stands out in my memory. Cannily, He fills Salt Lake City, home to the headquarters of the Mormon Church, with good-looking, smartly-dressed young women from all over the world, so no matter what language you speak, a beautiful 19-year-old can explain the Mormon faith to you in your mother tongue. But the destination for each pair of proselytisers is decided by a surprisingly bureaucratic God with a talent for PR. Many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints volunteer to spend eighteen months (women) or two years (men) on a self-funded, full-time Mission. During our holiday, several young Mormons attempted to convert us. In 2016, I visited Salt Lake City with my mother. Shouldn’t we be applauding the sheer scale and daring of the project? And even when you feel dissent rise up – at some over-confident assertion unsupported by evidence – it feels churlish and nit-picking to object.
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Sapiens is full of exhilarating leaps and breezy swoops and gloriously eclectic statistics and anecdotes. All that compressed into 500 pages makes for compelling reading. It’s true that his canvas is about as broad as they come, covering 6 million years of human history and finishing up with a squint at the future. Sapiens has a Diamond-esque, humblebrag subtitle – ‘A Brief History of Humankind’ – and sure enough, Harari thanks Diamond in his acknowledgements for teaching him ‘to see the big picture’. Homo Deus followed, published in English in 2016 its sales figures were approaching the 1 million mark when Harari’s latest offering, 21 Lessons for the 21 st Century, appeared in August last year. According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks book sales across the book market, it sold over 300,000 copies in 2018 and ranked twelfth in the year’s bestsellers. Five years on, it’s still a best-seller: Number 23 in Amazon’s overall books ranking, and Number 1 in several smaller categories such as ‘Civilisation and Culture’. Sapiens has sold over a million copies and garnered praise from big hitters as diverse as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Chris Evans and Lily Cole. That’s part of the appeal of big, bold, transdisciplinary books like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (subtitle: ‘A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years’), and, most recently, of Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s blockbusting Sapiens, published in Hebrew in 2011 and in English in 2014. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was someone in charge, someone who understood how it all fitted together? Even though we know that it isn’t possible, perhaps some part of us still longs for a real-life omniscient narrator.