Stop Reading Harari!

Essays

Among the odder phenomena of the last decade is the anointing of Yuval Harari as the world’s public intellectual.

Why has this happened? A few different possible explanations:

1.     Sapiens is the ideal book for “people who read only one book a year.” This, actually, was the verdict of Harari’s agent about it – according to a puzzled New Yorker profile of Harari – and, probably, that’s the bulk of the explanation for Sapiens’ absurd success. A semi-literate culture needs simple, digestible stories to explain itself – and Sapiens has the great virtue of presenting itself as the only book you need to read to understand human history other than, you know, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the book’s sequels, which cover the present and future after Sapiens had knocked off the past.

2.     Harder to understand, though, is the enthusiasm of elites for the book and why people like Bill Gates, Barack Obama, David Rubinstein, Marc Zuckerberg – broadly speaking, the Davos crowd – think it’s telling them something they haven’t already heard many times before. The most straightforward explanation is that these are all people who appreciate a crisply distilled bullet-point memo, and Harari’s work is kind of the ultimate memo: history reduced to a few very simple ideas.

3.     Harari’s writing found its real home in the tech community, and it’s worth trying to understand why an apparently generic one-size-fits-all approach to history would particularly resonate with Silicon Valley – sort of in the way that the tech industry’s infatuation with, of all things, Greco-Roman Stoicism seems random at first blush but is evocative of a deeper tech belief system. The point is that Harari’s narrative, apparently all-encompassing, starts with a few base assumptions: that history moves forward; that ideas triumph over other ideas; that human welfare can be assessed in rational and, ultimately, quantifiable terms (average lifespan, population, GDP, etc); and that technological advances are, essentially, synonymous with progress. In other words, it’s a very familiar historicist account of inexorable scientific progress. That sort of narrative – a staple of European thought in its Enlightenment-era, imperialistic phase – ran into some unfortunate counter-information in the 20th century, the use of cutting-edge technological marvels as killing machines in World War I, the proximity to nuclear annihilation again as the product of really top-notch scientific research, a recognition that modernity did not dissipate poverty, and a gradually-emerging guilty conscience about imperialism. For all of these excellent reasons, the pollyannaish European consensus that prevailed particularly around the turn of the 20th century was retired, but with Harari these ideas come roaring back, simply by extending the scale of history. History is seen as a series of quantum leaps – cognition, agriculture, political organization, science – each creating massive devastation but each leading inexorably the one to the other, and all of it, the smooth linear line starting from the Big Bang and the origins of life culminating in the artificial intelligence and data management experiments of techs in Silicon Valley (“which may well end history and start something completely different” is how Harari puts it). From the perspective of the rather amoral and reductionist-minded techs, it’s hard to think of any worldview that could be more flattering.

4.     Harari is most famously associated with the idea of collective ‘fictions’ – that all of society is a kind of cooperative exercise of the imagination, with physical realities (armies and prisons) lending credence to fictional constructs (money, community, religion, etc). And there’s nothing wrong with this point about fiction – it’s accurate and Harari expresses it pithily – but as Harari himself notes, it’s a completely standard idea, “one of the most basic things I learned during my first year doing a bachelor’s degree in history,” as he told The New York Times, and he is as surprised as anybody that so many people have found “this banal thing that I thought everybody knows” to be so profound.

Resist this charming man!

5.     The popularity of this idea and of Sapiens in general points to the great irrelevance of academia to which Sapiens, to give it some credit, is a nice corrective. Partly as a result of the shocks of the 20th century, academics lost their nerve, their ability to write both clearly and on the large scale. Big History has almost completely disappeared as a genre – which means that there was a vast empty space that Harari dexterously filled. Some of the success of Sapiens simply is that history itself is more interesting than people realize and several decades-worth of academic study into ‘pre-history’ hasn’t been very well distilled for a general public – and Harari, like the survey lecturer that he is, puts together a range of academic thinking into concise form. People think that they like Harari, but, really, what they’re discovering is that they actually like history – when it’s presented lucidly and in the form of a story.

6.     In terms of academic forbearers, Harari follows directly on Jared Diamond. Harari’s origin story is of reading Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and being mesmerized by the reach of it – stretching across millennia and, pivotally, across academic disciplines. “You could actually write such books!” Harari recalls thinking to himself, as quoted in The New Yorker – and, in the acknowledgments of Sapiens, he thanks Diamond “who taught me to see the big picture.” Harari is a better writer than Diamond and the early wildly-popular chapters of Sapiens (which Harari describes again as “so banal!”) basically serve to disseminate some of Diamond’s ideas about ‘pre-history’ to an even wider audience than Guns, Germs, and Steel. More crucially, Harari manages to smooth out some of the messier implications of Diamond’s theories through the usual trick – zooming out far enough so that contradictory pieces of data appear to take on a coherent shape. Diamond is famous for arguing that the Agricultural Revolution was actually a setback by virtually any form of measurement – which opens the door, even when using the quantitative, scientifically-determinist assessments of human happiness that Diamond takes for granted, for a revision to the standard model of inexorable, technology-driven human progress. The most thought-provoking sections in Diamond have to do with societies ‘stagnating’ or ‘regressing’ – Tasmania, Easter Island, or, most provocatively, the Fertile Crescent in the period of adopting agriculture. What starts to emerge is a very patchwork depiction of the evolution of societies: staggering breakthroughs occur coincidentally in utterly different parts of the world and then are not shared with near-neighbors; societies develop advanced technologies and then inexplicably abandon them. The throughline starts to look very muddy, and the implication, which Diamond wasn’t quite ready for but is made explicitly in David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, is that there just may not be such a thing as progress at all: societies can come up with certain ‘advanced’ technologies or modes of social organization and decide, for their own reasons, that they don’t like them very much and turn back to something else. This is the heresy of heresies – maybe the Mayans simply weren’t into their cities, maybe the hunter-gatherer civilization that we spot in Gobeke Tepli was just more advanced than the agricultural societies that followed it thousands of years later, maybe the Tasmanians just decided that fishing wasn’t for them and gave it up. In other words, we don’t actually have to walk in lockstep with ‘progress’ – as the Silicon Valley crowd, like the turn-of-the-20th-century pollyannas would assume: history swerves all over the place and moves in all kinds of directions, not just ‘forwards’ and ‘backwards.’ These are peculiar, hippieish, anarchist thoughts, and into that breach steps Harari, ersatz disciple of Diamond, stroking his chin and waxing pontifical on such a vast scale that the quirks Diamond noticed fade out of focus and history resumes its familiar shape, first cognition, then agriculture, then advanced politics, then advanced religion, then science, and then, following inexorably on its heels – and no reason even to think about getting off the moving train – whatever it is that the A.I. engineers, ‘techno-humanists,’ and ‘Dataists’ cook up next.

7.     I keep mentioning The New Yorker profile of Harari, which is, maybe unintentionally, a very funny read – because everybody in the article, the New Yorker writer, Harari’s boyfriend, Harari’s longtime friends, Harari himself, Steven Pinker, seem equally mystified by what it is exactly that has given Harari such an outsize place in the culture. Various non-starters are considered and then the article concludes by quoting a Ukrainian super-fan who “can’t stop smiling” when she meets Harari and explains that Sapiens give her a kind of advanced sense of resignation, that she was one of “the billions and billions of people that lived and didn’t make any impact and didn’t leave any trace….and that it’s ok to be insignificant.” This line got to me and unsettled me since it connects with a Buddhistic way of thinking that I take very seriously and which, to a great extent, underpins Harari’s worldview. I’ve done vipassana meditation – also under the posthumous guidance of S.N. Goenka, to whom Harari dedicates Homo Deus – and found it to be overwhelmingly powerful and one of the most important experiences of my life. Sapiens does remind me of the cast of thought you have during the long, long days of sitting and trying to concentrate on your breath, during which it becomes possible to think on a very wide scale, with great detachment – and Harari’s simple, lucid prose style reminds me of the exhilarating part of vipassana in which you start to really see the world around you with fresh eyes. So, good stuff – which makes me really ask myself why, lucid as it is, I find Harari’s work to be simpe-minded, sometimes inane, and occasionally actually very dangerous. And I think at a root level – as Goenka would put it – it has to do with a mismatch between an ‘Eastern’ technique of detachment and acceptance, of seeing everything as maya and seeing a single lifetime (if you really get into it) as not being a particular big deal, with a ‘Western’ historicist view of history in which everything has to line up in precisely the way it did in order for ‘progress’ to take place. The long view of Buddhism is about detachment but not about fatalism. In a universe that’s all just shifting energies, with ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ deeply interwoven, there is an understanding that everything is the way it is but it could also be different. History starts to seem a bit funny, haphazard, contingent – and, crucially (and this, I think, is what Harari misses), apparent organizing mechanisms like technological ‘progress’ or linearity itself start to lose their force.

S.N. Goenka - a very happy man

8.     Much of Harari’s writing is platitudinous (he would agree with this completely), remedial, just kind of buoyed along by its vipassana-like clarity, exerts an influence out of all proportion to what Harari is actually saying, but there is one idea in Harari – apart from making the A.I. engineers ‘gods,’ the summa of human history – that has a trenchancy to it. That’s the ‘viral’ theory of ideas. “Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite with humans as its unwitting host,” writes Harari in Sapiens. This theory dovetails neatly with the philosophers and neurologists’ assault on free will. Individual agency turns out to be close to meaningless, and, off in some other realm, whether ideological or algorithmic, ideas are dueling each other with the ‘fittest,’ most adaptable ideas then sweeping through societies as “mental parasites that emerge accidentally and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them.” Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros would seem to be a decent depiction of what Harari is talking about. In this view ideas have a life of their own – they develop a sort of internal cogency and then, irresistibly, take over societies without much regard for whether the societies are bettered or not by them. Almost any dominant movement – agriculture, the market economy, Christianity, science, Nazism, the data revolution – is understood as this sort of mutation (or ‘fiction,’ in Harari’s usual language). Obviously, I recognize the power of what Harari is describing – conformity as the strongest social force – but this idea should be the tip-off of why Harari is both very dangerous and very popular. It is not true that conformity is inevitable, it just feels that way. Ionesco – a more perceptive observer of social dynamics than Harari – is not saying that once people start turning into rhinoceroses, then everybody has to turn into rhinoceroses; he’s saying that if there are rhinoceros running around, people start to wonder if they should become rhinoceroses too and it takes a great deal of willpower – extremely difficult but doable – to not turn into a rhinoceros oneself. This is the great lesson of totalitarianism – that it seemed unbeatable but it was not: German voters actually could have rejected Hitler in 1933 just as Britain managed to withstand in Hitler in 1941 by the skin of their teeth and Russia withstood Hitler by sacrificing millions of Russians. A ‘mutation’ like Nazism didn’t end, as in the viral theory, because it finally ran its ideological course; it ended because a lot of people fucking fought it to the death. And Harari, as a military historian, should know this better than anyone – military history is all about contingency, blind luck, small inexplicable events having vast consequences. Harari is so popular at the moment because A.I., Big Data, what Harari calls the new religion of ‘Dataism,’ appear to be absolutely inevitable and a confirmation of the viral theory of history. But they are not inevitable. As Jaron Lanier puts it in the excoriating Social Dilemma, “Do it. Delete. Get off the stupid stuff.” Dataism looks dominating – it’s very difficult to fight the machine or the machine’s factotums – and Dataism may well win, but it’s very important not to confuse its triumph with inevitability. We do have choices. Don’t trust anyone who tells you differently.