Homo Deus is a publishing phenomenon of a type which we should be careful not to judge the wrong way. It is not an academic work, but it is also not just a collection of colourful trivia. Undoubtedly for many readers, much of the value of the book comes from the numerous witty and learned asides, which have undoubtedly increased the general knowledge of many people. For the much smaller number of people who will not be constantly surprised by the information in the book, the interesting contrasts and perspectives are still genuinely thought-provoking, multi-disciplinary and original. The book can in short be considered successful and well-made without it containing any new underlying arguments, and if we can find flaws in the ambitiously broad collection of asides and examples, this would not invalidate it overall either. Indeed, the book ends by offering a website where people can post suggested factual corrections.
The book does however have a relatively clear underlying argument uniting the material, and this is surely worth looking at with a critical eye. If we do this however, we do find that some of the imperfections or weak points of the work are relevant to that core theme. It should be noted at the start for example that some of the key turning points of this argument concern philosophy and economics, and in terms of philosophy and economics some of Harari’s basic assumptions could be criticized as clichés. (Harari is himself an historian by trade.) He leans heavily for example on an awkward version the so-called “fact/value distinction” for some of the basic conceptual distinctions he makes between what he calls “religion” and “science”.
I put these terms in quotes because Harari does, quite correctly though arguably insufficiently, make it clear that he is giving his own definitions to some of his key terms. Although he does give definitions, it is not helpful that Harari’s technical terms include everyday words with many shades of meaning such as “religion”, and although he clearly does this to some extent for clever rhetorical effect, it often seems to me that this confuses Harari himself. It seems worthwhile to try to summarize some of them without the colourful asides and examples.
“Fictions”. This is a large and important category, although it has no index entry and it seems possibly that it has only turned into a technical term during the writing process. Normally if we say “fictions” we mean something untrue, but in what seems to be mainly a term chosen for its shock value, Harari uses this term for human conventions such as money and law, which exist because of the general agreements of peoples. These are real, and not the kind of thing which can be true or false, but he sometimes confusingly (but engagingly) writes as if they are unreal or untrue. The confusions which arise from conventions are a topic at least as old as Greek philosophy. Some sociologists and economists would refer to them with a dry term such as “institutions”, and various other academic terms surely exist. Harari himself occasionally calls them “intersubjective realities”, and describes them as a “third level of reality”, in contrast to the two types of reality which Harari says most people assume to exist, objective (things which exist independently of one perceiver) and subjective (things which only exist in the perception of one person). Intersubjective realities are things which are generally agreed to exist, such as money, and which thereby have real effects that their objective reality, such as coins, cannot account for.
Does Harari himself believe that there are three distinct types of reality? This can be doubted, and indeed breaking free of this distinction looks like part of the story he is building towards – yet another useful fiction – but the idea certainly seems to guide his own analysis sometimes.
An important conclusion which Harari does however get across is that “fictions”, widely shared conventions, are vital to humanity, and are essential to what makes humanity so successful in its endeavours which rely on large scale cooperation. (Surprisingly perhaps, he does not divert to discuss the tool-kit behind these conventions, and the first and most important case of large-scale cooperation caused by an ability to invent and share mental placeholders, language and symbolic thinking. Was this discussed in his first book?) Partly helped by his slightly confusing use of the term fiction, he also points to a common confusion: these conventions, even things like nations and human rights, can not suffer, and even if they are associated with physical things, like coins or flags, they are not the type of things we would fight for in themselves, at least if we believe human life and happiness is our highest aim. This of course draws our attention to the need to distinguish different types of “fictions”. If someone says they are not fighting for a nation, but for specific people who live in a nation, are they still fighting for something conventional?
“Religion”. Harari writes as if his definition of a religion is not a specific definition he has chosen as a technical term, but the one and only correct definition. In his terminology “religion” should not be used as a term for any belief in supernatural powers or gods. Instead a religion is a belief in any supernatural law and order that we should obey in the real natural “objective” world. According to Harari this definition (which is apparently not essential to his main argument, but another aside) is correct because religious people perceive the gods, spirits and other invisible powers as being part of nature, not outside of it. This, like the fact/value/fiction distinction, seems fundamentally problematic. Is the concept of nature an obvious one which exists for pre-scientific people?
It has traditionally been argued, by some philosophers at least, that nature itself was a concept (a fiction, we should perhaps say) that needed to be invented, leading to a new type of thinking called philosophy or classical science. Developing out of this, modern science, by such accounts, cannot entirely avoid proposing something beyond nature, because it still believes in natural laws which cannot logically be within nature themselves. But the other-worldliness is now more strictly kept to a minimum, and this makes a very big difference. In modern science these “laws” are now simply whatever the causes are of the regularities which are seen in the natural world. Saying there are natural laws is nothing more than saying there are repetitive patterns in nature which we can to some extent understand. Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, argued that further debate about “metaphysics” is one of the sources of bias that need to be methodically kept out of serious natural science. But Bacon is sadly missing from Harari’s wide-ranging narrative, which is another example of how his philosophical musings, though important, are not the most well-informed parts of his book.
How does Harari define science then? Once again, he assumes a simple distinction between facts and values, objective and subjective, and adds the distinction between “is” and “ought”. He leans heavily on the old cliché that no "ought" conclusion can derive from any amount of factual "is" information. Disappointingly he writes as if it is obvious how these things are distinguished. Science, he says, is about the objective, which means that it is about reality which can be confirmed as real independently of individual observers. How can this confirmation happen? Harari’s implied answer to this is remarkably shallow. He says that science can show things using experiments and mathematics together. But the example he then proceeds to give after one of his first announcements of this definition, historical study of the origins of the bible, involves no experiments or mathematics. Indeed, as he explains without apparently seeing the problem, this specific science started before modern science. And as anyone who has an interest in this subject will know, modern science is equally full of examples which show that it is not based on experiments and mathematics, but being methodical.
As a result of the definitions described so far, Harari concludes that many things people consider to be religious are not. For example, when people try to connect with the “spiritual” and disconnect from the material, a practice quite important to Harari himself it seems, they are not being religious because their spiritualism is, according to Harari, not necessarily connected to any belief that something spiritual informs our knowledge of how we should live in the “objective” real world. On the other hand he argues that many things considered not to be religious, such as capitalism and communism, are religions. Rhetorically, as with calling money a fiction, Harari is at least here reciting a useful though well-worn trope.
The awkwardness of the simplistic fact/value logic which Harari uses leads to problematic conclusions that affect his central argument. Science, he says, cannot ever tell us about what we should do. It always needs a “religion” (such as capitalism, communism or fascism) to define the agreed aims of human life, because the aims of human life are apparently not objective reality. Harari’s position here derives from a simplified textbook-style interpretation of David Hume, who like Bacon is not mentioned. Hume however saw himself as being the first to apply Baconian scientific method to ethics, and he insisted this was possible without religion. More specifically, and problematically for the dualism Harari allows himself to depend upon, Hume argued that this was true because human nature is what Harari would call “objective”, and indeed scientific, which means it is not impossible to look at humans and say what is good for them, independently of individual perspectives. Hume, to put it another way, was not a relativist, and in Harari's scheme he should be considered a scientist, not a priest.
As mentioned above, there are moments which even make me think that Harari uses this dualism only with the intention of breaking it down. He implies that in the future, science might be able to help define the final ends which human action should have. However, if the “Hume-lite” is/ought distinction is purely a placeholder for rhetorical effect then this has been done in a way which risks creating confusion.
A fourth concept which Harari uses is “humanism” which he uses for what I would prefer to call the classical economic view of politics and ethics. This, he says, is the dominant “religion” of our time, which encompasses successful “religions” such as capitalism and communism. For Harari, humanism is the religion which says we should aim at maximizing human pleasure, or the satisfaction of their desires, and avoiding human suffering and death. It is notable here that Harari does not say that the aim is what is good for humans, as a philosopher such as Hume might have preferred, but instead defers to the type of proxies of human good which we find in economics and the works of philosopher-economists such as Jeremy Bentham (who were on the whole highly influenced by Hume). Once again Harari has worked his way towards a well-worn trope. These proxies of human good, pleasure, preference and pain, as we all know, are hard to measure, compare or agree upon in every detail, and so in practice our societies defer to money, which is a proxy for these proxies. As has been noted since Bentham’s time and indeed since the invention of money, this leads to mistakes and confusion in every day politics. It requires complex discussion. The problem requires us to go back beyond the first proxies, pleasure and pain, but Harari does not appear to see them as proxies he can go beyond, because he only goes back to people like Bentham, not to the 18th century predecessors like Hume and Shaftesbury, nor even Adam Smith.
To have investigated the true complexity and sources of these ideas, and the way they have been converted into complex political policies, might have ruined Harari's extended asides about how, "for thousands of years", people were for example never interested in the perspectives of common soldiers, and only had stories with simplistic action heroes and great men, whereas today we apparently have no interest in generals and great leaders, and no interest in stories about simplistic action heroes.
“Humanism” is not such an everyday word as “religion” or “fiction” or even “science”. Instead it is normally a technical term with academic overtones. A distraction therefore also arises for anyone familiar with the term because Harari gives it a specific meaning and history without ever acknowledging the possible confusion. Many people will have heard of humanism in high school history courses. Humanism for Harari, at least in some parts of his book, is a movement which pushes god to the sidelines and starts after 1600, with people like Isaac Newton, and is thus the same as what might better be called modernism – an approach to things which is closely bound with modern science. According to Harari, humanism, by dumping god, was left with no standard to judge things apart from human feelings, and he sees this as something which had never existed before. In effect he is wrongly saying that humanism is a sort of extreme relativist dogmatism, and that relativism did not exist before modern science. The Greeks however were clearly already quite familiar with all the main arguments for and against relativism which we have today – more aware, we might argue, than Harari.
Humanism is in fact a term which is normally used for a movement which was for the most part a kind of compromise between Christianity, classicism and modernism, with most humanists being known believers. The economist-philosophers like Bentham are not normally associated with either religious belief or “humanism”. Despite being an historian, on this particular point Harari, like most well-read people today, is so influenced by the worldview of classical economics that it weakens his perspective. Classical economics originally knew it was making a simplification, and it is still possible for economics to reconsider some of the assumptions which became standard in the 19th century. Indeed, modern economics was founded by Adam Smith, a younger friend of Hume whose works make it clear that he was certainly not a Benthamite or relativist.
On the other hand, if Harari had simply said that today all politics and ethical thinking is influenced deeply by the worldview of 18th and 19th century economic science he might not only have communicated more quickly and easily, but he might also have lost his readers’ attention, as many would have recognized this as a common observation that we hear often if we are interested in such things.
Strangely though, despite the obvious importance of economic and political science to the way the discussion proceeds, they are not mentioned much, and when discussed it is done in a rather journalistic way. Instead, Harari constantly refers to the “religion” of “capitalism”, a term which is not much used in economics itself, and which by its very nature assumes that it is of little importance which form of government or legal system people live with, oligarchic, autocratic or parliamentary. Indeed “capitalism” would be a “religion” with no holy books or high priests who present themselves as defending capitalism. It is a term which was for the most part developed by critics of the oligarchic tendencies in modern liberal democracies.
Consistent with this lack of interest in government institutions, whenever Harari mentions modern democracy, he seems to mean referendums, and he insists that all liberal humanists, the dominant one of the three major types of humanists, believe plebiscites should be obeyed. In fact they are of course a very controversial and extremely rare method of making modern "democratic" political decisions, more associated with ancient city states than modern liberal government. We are informed that all socialists, on the other hand, defer to their party decisions and do not believe in democracy. The third major type of humanism is supposedly "evolutionary" humanism, under which he categorizes Nazism, thus perpetuating the controversial old cliché that Nazism can best be understood as a result of evolutionary theory and Nietzsche.
The silliness of this superficial approach is also visible when Harari says that as a religion, capitalism can at least claim that it achieved the good result of helping people see that economic cooperation is not a zero-sum game. Would it not be more conventional to say that this quite old idea was analysed and explained in an influential way by Adam Smith, who founded the science of economics, and influenced the development of political ideas around the world with this explanation of a pre-existing “objective” reality? Surely he was, according to Harari’s scheme, a scientist?
But Harari clearly does not want this to be the story, and goes further. According to his narrative, before modern science there would have been no possibility of the potential for the cooperative economic growth which “capitalism” promotes. Isolated and looked at carefully, this is a remarkably wrong statement. Capitalism-like economic growth has appeared in many periods of history, and indeed Smith originally used examples from history, including citations of classical authors who had already noted many aspects of how it worked, including the so-called “division of labour”. But Harari goes still further down his imaginary path claiming that even credit, large-scale financial lending could not exist before modern science made economic growth possible, making credit possible. This is a stunningly silly and important error. To explain it one way, as a historian, Harari often seems to have a blind spot in the middle ages, which is precisely the period in which the starting conditions for modern science and modern economics developed. Harari even repeats the old story that everyone in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat and that composers of beautiful art were given “no credit” because the source was universally understood as being “muses, angels and the Holy Spirit”.
It is surprising to see a professional historian not realize the importance of financial lending in the European middle ages, long before modern economics and modern science. Credit in the middle ages might have been directed to different kinds of projects than today, such as crusades, castles, and wars, but it was enormously important and drove a major part of economic activity. Credit, and all the institutions which made it possible, developed in important ways during the middle ages, and the various institutional innovations in medieval Europe, made many things including modern science possible. We can in fact describe medieval Europe as a hotbed of a kind of science, not religion, of institutional law and order, driven by the needs of a population who needed to work together with each other and with the church they shared. They were assisted by the fact that this church was full of innovative legal experts, who had the time and finances and motivation. Under their influence, organizations, such as the church itself, but also universities, banks, and guilds, could have a legal manifestation similar to that which human individuals have. This made modern science and modern forms of lending and risk-sharing possible. That people did not immediately see this possibility, or take it up, is also not surprising. A fear of social innovation is both natural (genetic) and logical, and had been a topic of much philosophical writing since classical times. Credit then, came first, and modern science and economics are (partly) effects, not causes.
Of course, it gets very awkward to try to think clearly about the science of institutions if we make a rhetorical decision to call all institutions “religions”. We can see this by trying to insert the word “religion” into the above paragraph wherever it currently says “institution”.
Do these mistakes concerning the historical sequences of causes and effects which brought us to the situation we have today affect the core argument of Harari in this book? It seems to me that in particular the over-simplification is very important to the whole narrative. If the “humanism religion” is not quite so pure and universally accepted, and not quite such a break with all previous human thinking, then the thread starts to unravel. This does not only affect Harari's description of the present, because his description of the challenges to come is based upon his understanding of how people think today.
To take an entirely different approach, the Harari's discussion is very much dependent upon how well he understands other people today. And like many pundits, his understanding of the greater population is looking a little worse-for-ware after only a few years, because of the sudden rise of types of populism which clearly are not consistent with his objective looking description. It is easy to explain Trump and Brexit in terms of ancient dilemmas, but trying to describe them as one of the three branches of humanism does not seem to achieve much.
Comments
Post a Comment