Q&A: Yuval Noah Harari’s Book – A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari’s Book – A Brief History of Humankind
Question
Rabbi Michi,
What do you think about the arguments of the distinguished rabbi, nicknamed Professor Harari?
Answer
I haven’t read his entire book. From what I did read, I saw that it contains quite a few errors and a huge number of unfounded assumptions, question-begging assumptions, and the like.
I recall a review article by Tomer Persico that presents some of these points:
https://tomerpersico.com/2012/11/26/harari_brief_history
and also on the follow-up book:
https://tomerpersico.com/2015/05/10/harari_critique
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Young Rabbi:
There is an excellent review article by Nadav Shnerb: http://woland.ph.biu.ac.il/?download=1325
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Rabbi:
It really is excellent (and not only because we’re friends). There are a few minor inaccuracies there, but this isn’t the place.
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Yod:
I read the book in question carefully and even enjoyed it quite a bit, and I have to admit that I didn’t connect with Nadav Shnerb’s overt criticism of it. Noah Harari’s choice of words is indeed provocative, and his use of the word “imagined” certainly stirs antagonism, but as I understand it that is exactly what Noah Harari was trying to do. Beyond making the book interesting and readable, I think the main message behind his statements is that “there is no rational or moral social order whatsoever, only one that derives from myth and charisma.” That statement does not necessarily preach anarchism or some kind of nihilism, but rather points to the fragility of our social arrangements on the one hand, and to the critical stance we are required to take toward them on the other. An example that comes to mind is that even the money we use is based (since 1970–1971, when Nixon, in order to finance the fighting in Vietnam, canceled the dollar’s link to U.S. gold reserves) solely on people’s belief in its value, and is not anchored in anything material or physical. So too regarding fragility, and so too regarding the necessary critical stance: see the fascism that swept Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and gave birth to Nazism with not much internal criticism. Of course one can take this in the direction of anarchism and perhaps the supremacy of the self, as reflected in the teachings of Nietzsche and Weber, but I don’t recall finding that in the book, and as I understand it Nadav’s approach stems from that implied concern, as well as perhaps from the genuine criticism that emerges from it of “world orders” and the weight of tradition and custom in the way the world conducts itself. Personally, as an approach, I prefer expressing doubt, learning, and adopting things by choice and with critical reflection, over the assumption that whatever was valid and worked until now is indeed also true and relevant now. In matters of worldview, although at the level of philosophical ideal I connect with Nietzsche, as I understand it, a human society by definition requires compromises in order to make itself possible, and from this it follows that this ideal cannot be realized and must not even be an aspiration, because in coming into being it would spell the destruction of society as a society. And still, in itself, and from the standpoint of the optimum for the local individual, it does hold. In connection with Nadav’s criticism, I refer you to Michael Abraham’s recent publication on sacred lies, “sacred falsehoods,” as he calls them, which serve as a cloak for preventing discussion and genuine criticism of things. I very much liked his interpretation of the matter in Jewish law, in which ostensibly the fact that something is a sacred falsehood and an age-old myth requires us to approach it with honest and courageous criticism, and not necessarily with automatic internalization. To my mind, in A Brief History of Humankind, Harari conveyed exactly that same message, and elegantly.
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Rabbi:
I disagree. Harari’s outlook is not critical thinking or skepticism. It is the exact opposite of critical thinking and skepticism. Harari dogmatically determines positions (which are really not well founded) on a whole range of issues, and ties his normative assertions to historical facts. Some of his facts are speculative, but even if they were correct, the norms neither arise from them nor are derived from them (as Nadav wrote). Harari’s book suffers severely from the naturalistic fallacy (deriving norms from facts), and it seems he is not at all aware of that fallacy. His whole book is nothing but one big naturalistic fallacy. Moreover, he builds causal theses on factual correlations, and in this he falls into another well-known statistical fallacy; see my remarks here (what I mentioned with respect to another interesting post).
If indeed these are deterministic and materialistic processes, as he claims, and everything is the result of arbitrary constructs, then his own position is also such a construct, and therefore it is not worth responding to. And in general, if there is no advantage of the human over a cat or a stone, then what room is there for criticism and self-examination? Those concepts are empty of content in the picture he presents. They too are the product of blind and arbitrary mechanisms. In such a world there is also no morality, nor can there be morality. Therefore Harari’s moral critiques (for example against carnivores, among many others) seem meaningless to me within his picture. We do what our nature and various constructions cause us to do. True, Harari’s nature causes him to criticize, but my nature is such that his criticism does not really interest me. You understand that such discourse loses its meaning and turns into mechanical movement of the lips.
It seems to me that Harari’s book suffers from a great many fallacies and misunderstandings of this type and others. It is well written and very interesting, but in terms of content it is blatantly contradictory, and above all very, very unskilled philosophically. Persico too pointed out some of this, in the link I gave to him.
See my comments on another article by Harari here as well.
One must distinguish between provocations that come to awaken and present criticism in a vivid, thought-provoking way, and provocations for their own sake. His book is plainly of the second type. It seems to me that if it does provoke thought (and it indeed does), that is really not intentional.
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Rabbi:
Attached is an excellent article (though partial) on his follow-up book (The History of Tomorrow). There are some minor inaccuracies in the article, but it does point out quite a few important issues. It also connects to the post on intelligence. Which again teaches us that even being a hysterical bestseller is not necessarily any guarantee that it contains words of substance, and certainly not that all, or even most, of what it says is meaningful.
Discussion on Answer
The last thing I would want is to defend Harari. But your argument regarding the excluded middle should be directed at Spinoza himself. Pantheism identifies the totality of the universe with God, and the question is whether there is anything here beyond ordinary atheism except that the universe is now called God. If the rejection of pantheism stems from its emptiness, then we have no problem with the law of the excluded middle, since I assume Harari does not intend to deny the existence of the universe.
In principle, I accept your criticism. Nevertheless, the reason I still direct this criticism at him is that it seems the insistence of pantheists on the term “God” is not accidental, and that it serves some function for them, similar to the function it served for Einstein. True, from here one could return and refute pantheism, and say that it is nothing but verbal twisting in an attempt to escape a transcendent conception of God (Aristotle, for example, whose God, as Leibowitz used to emphasize, is merely a foundation for physical being, similar to Einstein’s, still saw it as a transcendent entity).
The discussion above already took place about two years ago, but I only came across it now, and I allow myself to add my response after such a long delay, because even today Harari’s words continue to provoke confusion and controversy, and this discussion is revisited and reread again and again. I read Harari’s book much earlier, and I feel obliged to justify myself by saying that I would never have sunk to reading such a poor book had my children not read it and left me the right of reply… It was not easy to read this infuriating book, so shallow and so impoverished, both in the author’s professional field and in regard to his views. What amazed me most was discovering that a person of this sort holds an honored position as a lecturer and researcher at the Hebrew University, something that would no doubt have horrified the generation of giants of that institution, to whom it never would have occurred to say such nonsense and to fail in such crude logical errors.
I find Harari’s book doubly embarrassing because I am a vegan like him, out of an understanding of the damage Harari causes to the penetration of veganism’s messages and insights among the religious public, to which I belong. I also remember the embarrassment I felt when I heard of the influence of Harari’s book on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the direction of adopting a more compassionate policy toward animals, as a result of which I did not know whether to rejoice or be saddened.
The reviews brought or mentioned by my predecessors here are, in my view, mostly correct, and there is of course no need to repeat them. I will therefore make do with adding one specific criticism, concerning one central insight of Harari’s, to which Nadav Shnerb already referred in the article mentioned above. Undermining this insight is significant in my eyes, particularly as a monotheist, and particularly when I repeatedly encounter responses published in the online press by ignoramuses who completed something like an elementary education, read Harari’s book, saw the light, and mock those for whom an “imaginary entity” stands at the center of their religious culture.
On the matter itself, and very briefly: out of his fondness for criticizing “imagined entities,” Harari lumps together under this heading several kinds of entities: demons, idols (from which a “great god” develops), and commercial companies. In this Harari exposes distilled poverty of thought, because whereas (1) demons are indeed creatures of the imagination, (2) idols (that is, not in the sense that Yehezkel Kaufmann once called “the idolatry of nobodies”) are nothing but personifications or animating conceptions of natural phenomena and the like, and not at all creatures of the imagination (yes, idolatry is a serious worldview, not mythical nonsense), and (3) companies too, needless to say, are not creatures of the imagination, but are of course legal entities created within the framework of the economic game. As for the “great monotheistic God,” the difference between an idol in an idolatrous pantheon and the monotheistic God is a qualitative difference, not a quantitative one.
By the way, in rejecting the one God, and assuming that he is engaging with monotheism itself and not with its popularized versions, Harari rejects both the God of Moses, the God of Plato, the God of Aristotle (I stress that although I am well aware of the differences among these conceptions of God, I group them together here because in my opinion those differences are not relevant to our issue), and the God of… Spinoza. For it is not only transcendent theology that speaks of one “great” God, but also its pantheistic alternative. Assuming Harari conceives of being as a single totality, what possibility does he leave for himself? Has he perhaps overcome the problem of the excluded middle?