Yuval Noah Harari and the materialistic mindset

Harari, who needs to break out of the prison of his postivistic worldview

Historian Yuval Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says something in a video conversation with Harvard’s Michael Sandel that is surprisingly feeble, given it comesfrom someone who has written three non-fiction bestsellers. In these he offers the world a list of declarations about how humans have got to be at the homo deus stage of history, and how a dramatically different future awaits us. What he says is this:

I think that many of the big events of history we still don't have a good explanation for them. Why did Christianity rise to become the dominant religion in the Roman Empire and then spread from there? I've never read a convincing argument why it was Christianity and not any of the other many religions that were on offer in the supermarket of ideas of the Roman Empire.

It's praiseworthy that a high-flying academic should be so humble, but this could be a case where there is an explanation that is not limited to the materialistic view that Harari embraces in his major writing, as we shall see later in this post. Someone who is open to the real world might say that, yes, the spread of Christianity is inexplicable, unless we at least posit the possibility that the power of the Holy Spirit turned a small group of frightened Galileans into a band of emboldened apostles who urgently went into the world telling everyone how much God loves them.

This is not nitpicking, as Harari, for all the success of his published works, is among the group of academic writers who are so beholden to the materialism common among academics that “they fail to do justice to the complex, multi-layered human organisms” of which they treat. 

Harari views humans as “an animal of no consequence” and a state of contingency is the nature of our existence – “It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now.” Therefore, for Harari, “it is pointless to waste time searching for purpose or meaning”, as Nick Spencer writes in his critique of the Harari mindset exposed in his books.

Just how significantly the chains of Harari’s materialistic outlook restrict the depth of his work is revealed in such statements as “As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has no meaning” (Sapiens); “to the best of our scientific understanding”, he states in Homo Deus, it is clear that Christians through the centuries and modern liberals are “all equally delusional” in identifying any kind of meaning in life. 

Spencer responds:

How exactly a scientific “viewpoint” or “understanding” – whatever Harari means by that – could detect “meaning” and “purpose”, and what it would look like, is far from clear.  

In a deeper dive into nihilism, Harari states that “universal and immutable principles of justice” like equality, liberty and human solidarity, are merely the product of our imaginations, and that they are not real but exist only because they are useful: “We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate and forge a better society.” And again: “There are no such things as rights in biology.”

Spencer objects: 

For Harari, only biology is “real”. Living things are real. Human organisms are real. But the stuff that comes out of their heads – like rights, liberty and dignity – is not.

…In essence, if you adopt a thoroughgoing materialistic and positivistic approach to reality, insisting that only the material and measurable is real, then – amazingly – you will discover that reality is ultimately material and measurable.

All this naturally breeds a determined reductionist attitude to humans themselves. If only material stuff is real – and, importantly, if only physical sciences are able to detect what is real – it follows, as he says in Homo Deus, that “according to the life sciences, happiness and suffering are nothing but different balances of bodily sensations.” Notice the opening qualification: “according to the life sciences.” Similarly, a few pages later, “If science is right and our happiness is determined by our bio-chemical system, then the only way to ensure lasting contentment is by rigging this system.” Or, once again, according to neuroscience, the “deeper parts of your mind know nothing about football or about jobs. They know only sensations.” Harari waves the word “scientific” around like a trigger-happy guerrilla, brandishing the barrel at any moral or metaphysical truth claims that peak out from the undergrowth. Happiness? Goodness? Freedom? Beauty? Holiness? Science cannot find them. 

After a while of this, the reader is naturally tempted to ask why science is the only legitimate tool for understanding reality or human life? After all, if you’ve only got a hammer in your toolbox, everything will be a nail. Harari’s answer lies in the material/imaginative divide on which he bases everything. The imaginative — the category into which he conveniently put most of what makes human life meaningful — doesn’t exist. It isn’t real. It is merely parasitic on what is real: our bodies, or our biology, or neurochemistry, or bodily sensations, or whatever. That being so, only those things that can detect, measure and alter biology, neurochemistry, and so on need to be considered. Human life is biology. Biology comprises knowable facts. Debates can be resolved and futures decided by recognition of said facts and manipulation of said biology.

…Thus, when writing about abortion in Homo Deus, Harari reasons that although devout Christians oppose abortion and many liberals support it, “the main bone of contention is factual rather than ethical.” Christians and liberals “believe that human life is sacred” and that murder is a crime. They simply disagree “about certain biological facts: such as whether human life begins at the moment of conception, at the moment of birth or at some intermediate point?” No matter. Biologists are here to help, for they are “more qualified than priests to answer factual questions such as ‘Do human fetuses have a nervous system one week after conception? Can they feel pain?’”

This is so muddle-headed that it’s hard to know where to begin. “Devout Christians” and “liberals” (at least the thoughtful ones; we can leave the head-bangers of both sides out of any serious debate) agree about the “biological facts.” They both accept, broadly speaking, when foetuses develop a brain, a central nervous system, a beating heart, and so on. They both agree, broadly speaking, when a foetus may start to experience sensations or feel pain. They disagree on the existential and ethical significance of all of the above. The “biological facts” are not in dispute. It is what they mean in terms of ultimately contested concepts — such as “life,” “rights” or “dignity” — that is hotly disputed. But if you have systematically dismantled any sense of objective “meaning,” this avenue is necessarily closed to you. 

The fact that Harari apparently honestly believes that “biological facts” will resolve such disagreement over abortion points to nothing more than the inadequacy of the positivist approach he adopts when discussing our species. More cynically, it is an example of what happens when you banish concepts like “meaning” from a debate — because science can’t find it in your neurochemistry.

Apart from all else, Harari’s work declares his ignorance about Christian beliefs, whether he is discussing the soul, Genesis, or our eternal destiny. Similarly, he confuses happiness with pleasure; and he is simply fails to appreciate how limiting his dichotomy is between the “real” and the product of the “imagination” such as mathematics, ethics and aesthetics. For instance, given findings in the social sciences we know that, with regard “goodness” and “beauty”, human universals do exist. Further, as Spencer notes: “Aardvarks, livers, and chromosomes will cease to exist. [The number] 17, π, and i will not. Which has a greater claim to being real?”

Fundamentally, this post has shown that Harari is writing as a member of that strand of science – and it is just one strand – that serves as a straitjacket on the depth and extent of members’ vision. The weaknesses in Harari’s argument as to the remaking of the human into a complete “experience machine” firstly highlight, as Spencer concludes, “how that which is real cannot simply be reduced to what biologists (or even Harari’s frequent, catch-all ‘scientists’), can measure", and secondly, it “underestimates the extent to which humans are quite attached to the more holistic, humanistic, emergent understanding of themselves”.

One might add that people know that they possess a deeper reality than that of being a purely - purely - biological organism, and so any attempt to manipulate one person as "an indeterminate blob", to use Robert Nozick's words, is an attack on everyone. Human dignity is something that has to be recognized and defended, as history has made clear.

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