THE STATE OF THE ART.
The modern study of world history has gone through three stages.
The first stage began during the era of WWI. Roughly a century ago scholars began to produce histories of world civilizations. These studies focused on the independent development of disparate culture/civilizations, searching for their unifying principles and life-cycles. The two most influential practitioners were Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler. They drew a very broad readership because they combined their scholarship with a concern among the western readers for the future of their own culture/civilization, a future that many perceived to be in doubt. Spengler’s Decline of the West first published in 1918, second volume 1923) was a pessimistic cri de coeur from a German intellectual that diagnosed a dying civilization and attributed cultural weariness, creative bankruptcy and self-destructive politics not just to Germany but in the West as a whole.
Toynbee’s massive twelve volume A Study of History, (1934 to 1961) treated world historical civilizations as independent organisms that follow a universal pattern of “life” from genesis to disintegration. He argued that in every civilization, a “creative minority” enabled their civilization to respond to the challenges posed by environment, geography and outsider peoples. The rise, efflorescence, and ossification of these “creative minorities” contained within them the fate of their civilizations. Both Spengler and Toynbee were the spokesmen for historically traumatized peoples whose cultures had been battered by the mutual suicide pact of the World Wars. These world historians were especially influential among mid twentieth century Europeans because they addressed the anxiety about the future, the crisis of confidence and the spiritual malaise that resulted from the irredeemable self-immolation of the World Wars.
In the second half of the twentieth-century a new generation of scholars re-engaged with the study of world history. Unlike the first wave, these authors defocalized individual civilizations or culture zones, and instead examined how large scale natural or interactive patterns worked across time and space to change the human condition, sometimes in ways that had little or nothing to do with nations and kingdoms or civilizations. The French Annales school pioneered in examination of history during the “longue duree” a period of time covering centuries rather than years and large geographical areas that combined various political or cultural domains rather than discrete civilizations. The initiator of this school, Fernand Braudel, showed in his book The Mediterranean (1949) how regardless of religion or political community, the Mediterranean basin formed a single zone of exchange and culture over an extended run of centuries from the late medieval through the early modern period. His Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800 (1967) examined the change in wealth during the transition of feudalism to capitalism and how this gradually modified everyday life. The Annales school focused on long term processes rather than political events, whole populations rather than individuals. They led to a new level of abstraction in historical writing. Braudel’s History of Civilizations (1995), focused on the almost imperceptible effect of how large scale elements like technology, climate and environment shaped daily life as well as precipitating prominent historical events.
Philip Curtin showed in Cross Cultural Trade in World History (1984) how trade created a mutually beneficial commerce in ideas that was far more influential than the mere commerce in goods. Carrying his analysis from the ancient river valley civilizations to modernity, he shows how portable human ingenuity is and how advantageous it is for every culture not to have to re-invent the wheel. Intercultural exchange is shown to be a positive sum game. In the Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, (1990) Curtin showed how a vastly extended period of cross-cultural trade effectively created an “Atlantic Sphere” uniting Africa, the America’s, and the Western European littoral over a period of centuries. Curtin’s final work, The World and the West (2000) covers the trajectory of Western expansion dominance and decline over the last 500 years, with examples drawn from not just from the west but from Siam, Ghana, Japan, Buganda, Indonesia and the Ottoman Empire as well.
William McNeill’s The Rise of the West (1963) was a result of a ten year project: a comprehensive history of the origins of Western civilization. Once a civilizational backwater, McNeill traced in great detail the world historical connections that eventually made the West the dominant power that it has been for the last five centuries. Explicitly intended as a response to Spengler’s Decline, McNeill offers a far more optimistic account of the convergence of the disparate strands of world history into a global narrative. McNeill also wrote what is arguably the most important history book of the twentieth century. In Plagues and Peoples (1976) he created a groundbreaking, comprehensive account of all the major epidemic diseases globally from the beginning of recorded history to the present. He managed to plot the European Black Death (usually treated in isolation by specialists) from its initial outbreak in India through its transmission along trade routes to China, Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and finally Europe. He also did the same for other epidemic diseases, which was an immense project. This analysis gave him a powerful tool to explain the European destruction of the Mesoamerican civilizations: Old World microbes that the inhabitants of the Americas had no resistance to created mass death far beyond what Conquistadors could have done with mere gunpowder. McNeill’s breakthrough was to decisively connect natural science with social science by bringing biology and history together.
McNeill was my teacher in college at the University of Chicago, Curtin was the department chairman who hired me for my first job out of graduate school at Johns Hopkins. This second wave of works have received immense academic acclaim, but have not had much impact beyond the scholarly community. This is largely because they are rather erudite and “academic” in their orientation and, unlike the first wave, they do not try to directly respond to ongoing concerns in the broader culture.
The third wave of world history addresses concerns prominent in early twenty-first century civilization: environment, technology and the acceleration of historical change in a globalized world. This third wave draws on the second by assessing natural and “material” influences or readings of history, but does so in a way that directly, if narrowly, connects to contemporary anxieties. Jared Diamond has argued in Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) that Spain was able to colonize and conquer New World civilizations because the east-west axial alignment of Eurasia gave its Civilizations a vast advantage in terms of biological and epidemiological diversity. The explicit purpose of Diamond’s intervention was, of course, to show that it was NOT racial superiority that led to Europe’s advantage, and that the imperialist pretensions of the West that were based on that presumed superiority are indefensible. In Diamond’s work Collapse (2005), Diamond examined a varied collection of historical peoples, from Greenland to Easter Island, whose culture drove them to an avoidable extinction caused by environmental collapse. Cultural dysfunction combined with a failure to meet the challenges of environmental degradation on small scales portended a global environmental catastrophe in the twenty-first century.
Even more recently the work of Yuval Harari, Sapiens (2011), has embedded world history within a vastly larger natural history of the universe. Drawing on current science and technology, he argues that human history develops as Homo Sapiens learn to master their environment through science and cooperate through the “imaginary” solidarities elicited by an socially constructed cultural fictions. By harnessing energy, humans replicate their kind throughout the planet. In his subsequent volume, Homo Deus (2016) Harari speculates about the technological transformation of human beings, or at least some human beings, into immortal, unimaginably powerful gods. Calling upon work by “transhumanists” and “posthumanists” connected with cybernetics and genetic engineering, Harari describes a possible future state where humanism is superseded by a “techno-humanism” and culture is subsumed by the worship of Data. The terminus of history is described as the emergence, within the forseeable future, of a technologically enhanced race of superhumans who are elements in a universal flow of divinized data.
This work will draw on all three of these traditions. The second and third wave are critically important for showing how natural and social processes and interactions have conditioned the development of human history on a global scale, and how such processes form a sort of matrix within which humans must operate. Central to this has been an appreciation of the importance of science and scientific knowledge in the realm of historical development. This book shares this orientation, but argues that it does not go far enough in so far as science itself is part of human culture, and is subject to the same changes over time and place as all things human. Inevitably a dialectic emerges between natural science and social science. As human communities learn more about the world around them, they inevitably learn more about themselves: the knower and the known cannot be fully disentangled. Self is created by circumstance and vice versa. New understandings of the natural create new understandings of the human. The humanities are not abolished but transformed. The knower and the known are locked in a cycle of question and answer. New answers to the question “Where am I?” (embedded in Nature) always modifies and refines the question “Who am I?” (a conscious human being) which in turn provokes new questions about Nature in a endless cycle of reciprocal development. Natural Science and Social Science are conceptual Siamese Twins that cannot be separated. The modification and persistence of the human might be called (in Plato’s sense) “the law of conservation of music”.
By treating culture as part of the human “ecology” it hopes to reintegrate the symbolic structures dealt with in the first wave with the purportedly more “material” elements in the second and third. Indeed, this project works on the assumption that as sentient beings humans cannot exist as fully human, much less “civilized,” historical beings without a cultural environment that produces shared meanings, purposes, and values that allow for large scale human sociability, cooperation, and flourishing. The apogee of every culture distinguishes the sacred from the profane. Consciousness is neither an illusion nor is it less real than Nature. This is not to deny the importance of scientific knowledge and interpretation, but rather to historicize it. In fact, the central conceit of this book will be that world history is largely conditioned by changes in our civilized understanding of nature and its processes, and that this understanding is part and parcel of our larger cultural horizons.
INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT
A heightened deployment of irony is always a sign that a cultural trend is dying. Socrates and Euripides, ironists par excellence, are symptomatic of the fact that the Athenian golden age was ending. These two ironists are alien to the outlook of Pericles and Aeschylus. The end of the Middle Ages was also marked by a conspicuous efflorescence of irony. William of Ockham’s nominalism ironically implied that Aquinas’ scholastic synthesis was a waste of time. Chaucer highlighted the ironic moral bankruptcy of medieval Christianity in among other things, the Pardoner’s Tale. Finally, Cervantes was the Sancho Panza of Spain’s belated end to the Middle Ages. The waning of the Enlightenment was also marked with an ironic acknowledgement that Reason had been oversold. It did not solve the all the problems of human life, as optimists like Leibniz hoped it would. Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences indicts the Age of Reason as an age of corrupt self-deception. At roughly the same time, Voltaire’s Candide marks the pessimistic rejection of reason as insufficient to justify the stubborn persistence of suffering in the world. He waves the white flag with “We must live without philosophizing, it is the only way that makes life bearable”.
Both our high and low culture are saturated in irony, which means the vultures have begin circling our dying postmodernism. My favorite idiot savants, the Sex Pistols, are the demotic prophets of postmodernism. “Pretty Vacant” is the final end of the Nietzschean astheticism touted by Joyce in Prortrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The bridge between them is the Horst Wessel Lied. Wittgenstein once made the apt observation that “most philosophical diseases are caused by an unbalanced diet of examples.” So it is with us. Consider a book like Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The examples he chooses, largely drawn from marginal institutions like prisons and madhouses, are intended to afflict the reader with the same misanthropic delirium that characterized his life and death. In his melodramatic cultural pessimism, the abnormal is normalized and the prosaic rhythms of everyday life are reimagined as a Hieronymous Bosch painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. The stances he took, such as reducing justice to the advantage of the stronger and the lust for power as an end in itself may seem new but in fact are ancient temptations. For all of their cleverness, the irony embraced by the postmodernism of Rorty and Derrida and Foucault worships its own mortality. Universities have become what Sloterdjik called “rage banks”, where professors of the hard sciences who churn out world historical technological advances coexist uneasily among professors of the soft sciences who are permanently outraged, allegedly about “oppression” and “marginalization” but in fact about their own irrelevance. Universities have become the Jurassic Park of dead ideas, where failed 19th century like ideologies like Marxism still walk the earth. The impish pomo paradox that all ideas are paradoxical grows stale and boring, impotent and increasingly sterile. This trahison de clercs amounts to a collective death wish, a cultural masochism which Houellebecq so aptly satirized in his novel Submission. The Nietzschean aestheticism implicit in the antinomian moral nihilism of postmodernism was especially evident in the remarks of the Nietzschean composer Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, when he enthusiastically described the 9/11 attacks as “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos”.
The rise of Big History is a decisive signal that postmodernism is dying. Big History is, after all a series of the “totalizing metadiscourses” that postmodern writers like Lyotard declare to be impossible. Postmodernism never had an affirmative program, it was always negation without responsibility, an aesthetic of repudiation. It was an intellectual fungus growing on the fallen redwoods of the Enlightenment. Now this intellectual parasite has consumed its host it is starving to death because it is running out of things to negate. It moves along currently with a kind of intellectual inertia, propelled by the momentum of intellectual second and third stringers oblivious to the fact that the Zeitgeist has abandoned them.
Harari’s two most recent books are a bellwether of this cultural change. Harari’s “Big History” called Species, starts at the origin of the universe with the Big Bang and ends peering into the near future. Harari’s sequel, Homo Deus is a paean to humanity’s self- deification which plots a trajectory for the future, where Data will become a religion and mere humanity will be rendered obsolete and then eliminated. To call these books ambitious does not do them proper credit, they are in fact, prophetic. They are counterfeit theology. These books have had immense commercial success, making the New York Times’ bestseller lists, and they have been particularly influential among the transhumanists and posthumanists of Silicon Valley, who are intent on going beyond the boundaries of the merely human. Harari’s appeal to the techno-elite is as much to their vanity as to their aspirations: it is twenty-first century scientistic hybris on steroids. These are intrepid books, replete with sharp insights informed by an intellectual toughmindedness that does not recoil from danger or disappointment.
Harari’s books are also deeply flawed. His attempt at naturalistic reduction fails because it is solipsistic. It is incoherent because it implicitly contradicts the politics and ethics that animate so much of his work.
Everyone has gaps in their reading. In addition to reading history, Harari also seems to have read much science fiction, futurist speculation like that of Nick Bostrom and transhumanist writers like Ray Kurzweil. I am fortunate in that my gaps do not overlap Harari’s. Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, Plato and Descartes, Collingwood and Rawls, literature and religious texts have influenced my thinking but are noticeably missing in Harari.
Harari’s work revolves around a reductive account of reality which breaks the universe into three domains: permutations of matter in spacetime, which are objectively real, intersubjective constructs like money or law or ethics which are ephemeral, socially sustained illusions, and subjective experience, the least real of all, which is slated to be abolished eventually by being absorbed into physics, and until then is grudgingly acknowledged as reality’s poorest relative. In his first volume, Sapiens, Harari has chosen to be humanity’s Sancho Panza, relieving us of our many numinous illusions and inviting us to inhabit an all too dispiriting and unflattering new reality. He informs us, for example, “Human equality” is a myth and later we will find out that human value is too. Harari often paints with a roller rather than a fine camel’s hair brush. We are informed in Species for example, that “…laws, justice, human rights…” are all too human illusions, and that “…none of these things exists outside the stories people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.” Given humanity’s predeliction for cruel self-deception, in some ways, Harari’s eventual abolition of humanity is a relief.
Harari’s naturalism articulates the great prejudice of our age. It seems not to need justification, but this is not so because it is reflexively incoherent. The science worshipping claim that only nature is real is not itself derived from natural science, it is the ontology and metaphysics of a faux religion. Inevitably the Epicurean intellectual tradition represented by Harari is forced to reduce good and evil into pleasure and pain. This inevitably leads to Huxley’s Brave New World as an ideal type of society, which Harari uneasily admits. If on the other hand, there exists anything worth suffering for, then Brave New World is a dystopia and Mr. Savage’s choice to hang himself while pathetic, is understandable.
The dubious elements of Harari’s work are as large as the topics he chooses.
There is a pervasive, Rousseauian “Noble Savagism”, as where Harari argues that paleolithic hunter gatherers were better off than various sedentary, civilized alternatives. His account of mathematics as an imaginary construction cannot account for the very suspicious uniformity of allegedly “imaginary” entities like the theorem of Pythagoras among societies completely separated in space and time. Cultures that do not independently “imagine” identical funeral ceremonies or creation myths or seafood recipes do “imagine” identical arithmetic. These flaws, while important, are far less important that some others. Harari’s Big History has big problems. Only the most ambitious work can have problems on this scale. Bracketing these smaller difficulties, which are large enough to constitute fatal flaws in any ordinary sized history, it is worth considering some of the big problems in these two books.
The first is his differential deployment of skepticism and dogmatism.
Harari is mostly a naturalistic eliminative materialist in his claims about the world, except when his enthusiasms get the better of him, in which case he is alternatively oracular and dogmatic. At some times, Harari takes the posture of a gnostic archon disclosing prophetic insights unknown to the uninitiated. For example, we are informed about the true nature of human felicity “…people are made happy by one thing and one thing only-pleasant sensations in their bodies.” We are never informed what set of “objective” sense data could be provided for such intellectual desk pounding. Is it descriptive? Has he conducted a survey of our species? Is it normative? Is this what we ought to be made happy by? And this despite his claim that all “ought” claims are socially constructed figments of our collective imagination? Are those who deny that happiness is coextensive with pleasure doing happiness wrong? What might that mean? Harari’s dogma about happiness is not, by his own standards, a claim about the “real” world. It is in fact a declaration of the metaphysics that informs his hedonism, exactly the kind of claim that he scoffs at in others.
Is human sacrifice immoral? The Aztecs and Carthaginians didn’t feel that way. The Romans decorated the Appian Way with thousands of crucified slaves after crushing the rebellion of Spartacus. Is this in bad taste? The Romans didn’t think so. I am at a loss to understand how biology or any other natural science can contribute in any way to resolving the disagreement between Spartacus’ slaves and the Roman legionaries. Most people in most places during most of the historical past had no qualms about slavery. If Rousseau, who Harari quotes with approval, is right that “What I feel good-is good. What I feel to be bad- is bad” then it is hard to understand, given the plurality of human feeling, how ethics could ever be anything but an individual or collective whimsicality. What is there to talk about? Some people would like to diminish the aggregate amount of suffering in the world, others would not, still others are indifferent. Neither the firing of pain synapses nor the firing of pleasure synapses has any moral valence if his claims about “reality” are true. In his own terms, this is merely electricity that Harari feels sentimental about, which of course is itself just more electricity, improbably elevated to the status of a new Golden Calf.
Harari moves briskly. The illusion of human freedom is eliminated and then five pages later, so is the illusion of determinism. Lesser explorers would find an impasse. One might think that the nonexistence of both freedom and determination would leave no excluded middle. Harari, invoking chaos, holds up for our contemplation the modal verbs and their ethereal domain, the subjunctive mood; what could of, would of, or should have happened, what might have been but wasn’t. History he tells us, is chaotic, which means, “so many forces are at work and their interactions are so complex that extremely small variations in the strength of forces and the way they interact produce huge differences in outcomes” This is a very interesting fact, and no doubt in the mind of God an infinite number of very interesting simulations can be run, indicating just how catastrophic the flapping of butterfly wings can be. But it is worth remembering, however ruefully, that we inhabit exactly one universe and however many multiverses may otherwise exist for minds that are utterly unlike our own, all we have is this one noncounterfactual reality. Harari seems to think that invoking chaos solves the old historical problem of freedom and determinism. In fact it does not even address the problem, much less does it solve it. Potentials are not actual. Imagining what would or could or might have happened in any or every hypothetical modality, does not make any of these imaginary modalities real. Nor does it release humanity from the causal mechanism intrinsic to our conceptualization of nature and Harari’s denial of freedom. Nor do these potentials alter in any way this one universe that we do have. Harari is forced into this improbable series of mental gyrations for the same reason his intellectual predecessor, Lucretius, was forced to introduce the idea of the “Swerve” into his account of the world. Only the most overt and dubious kind of special pleading can save a purely naturalistic account of history from collapsing into deterministic fatalism.
Harari informs us of the purpose of studying history, which is metaphorically, to “widen our horizons” is literally “to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable”. Since Harari claims that the physical world is the only reality, it is hard to understand how he could claim that “our present situation” or anything else could be anything other than natural. According to Harari we make no free choices and nothing is real except the one nature we happen to be trapped in. It is hard to follow why we should be heartened by the subjunctive tautological fact about chaos that if things were different, they would not be the same. Any skepticism sufficiently robust to eliminate metaphysics inevitably eliminates mind in the process, but the “I” that affirms or denies such skepticism refuses to disappear. Even the strident fulminations and dogged naturalism of Daniel Dennett is addressed to readers who are conscious and able to change their minds on the basis of reasoned argument.
The second is Harari’s elimination of the human.
The current state of our culture is a mess because we do not know who we are. We have lost sight of the human. As Nietzsche wrote in the Use and Abuse of History “…eventually the universal historian finds himself in the living slime.” This is the hidden reason why Harari and others do not distinguish between prehistory and history. It will no doubt come as a great surprise to anthropologists that they are practitioners of a science that has no subject matter. Moreover, it may be that some of his readers believe themselves to be human beings, and they may be daunted by the intimation that they are ontologically indistinguishable from plankton or moon dust. This abolition of the human is symptomatic of a larger problem. Like Odysseus’ son Telemachus, we don’t know who we are and we are searching for ourselves.
In history graduate school, way back in the twentieth century, we were taught that history is not merely the past, rather it is human actions in past time. A universal history that is genuinely historical is the resume of our species, not a book about everything that has ever happened. Harari has lost the human in nature, so he begins his history at the Big Bang. However, the rise of pterodactyls and trilobites and the Cretaceous die off of the dinosaurs are not historical, they are simply past events. In history, unlike natural science, we still explain events teleologically, attributing purpose and reason to human decisions, as Collingwood pointed out. Caesar had his reasons for crossing the Rubicon and because he had a particular set of purposes in mind, which are essential to understanding his actions, historians try to explain those reasons. We eliminated teleology from our account of natural science centuries ago, and nobody asks anymore what purpose the moon has for orbiting the earth or speculates about the intentions that ancient fishes may have had when the left the water and wriggled onto dry land. Harari and some others seem to think that there is nothing specific to human beings that distinguishes them separately from nature, but we explain human action very differently from the way we explain physical events, because people make choices and do things for reasons and are responsible for their conduct, which is why the Nuremberg Trials did not accept the Nazis’ excuse that they were only following orders. Doubtless, in explaining the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, no credible historian will deny that the equation f=ma describes the motion of the bullet from the assassin’s pistol, but nobody would inquire as to the intentions that the bullet had for killing the president nor would they describe the slug as good or evil, justified or not. Yet, we do ask exactly those questions and make exactly those judgments about the intentions of John Wilkes Booth, and we cannot help but deploy different kinds of explanations for the assassin and his bullet. Harari’s intellectual stance has serious weaknesses, many of which are related to his reductively naturalistic understanding of human nature.
Harari is unflinching in his appraisals of maligned historical actors and tendencies. He makes apologies for socialism despite the continued unpopularity of Stalin and for evolutionary humanism, despite the fact that he finds Hitler distasteful. He is fairminded toward the Nazis, when he observes, approvingly, that their “evolutionary humanism” is ‘”the only humanist sect that has broken free of traditional monotheism”. He is correct and he is brave to say so in print. He states that Auschwitz is a “blood red warning sign rather than as a black curtain that hides entire sections of the human horizon.” Harari affirms the assumptions of the Nazis ”evolutionary humanism” but at the same time has inexplicable moral reservations. But why so squeamish? If he is right and there are no moral facts, just perspectives derived from equally imaginary “religions” and “moralities”, what are we being warned about? Why should anyone care whether imaginary entities like justice, (however defined, either by the Nazis or their victims) prevail in history if all such social constructions are equally unreal? Why should we prefer mermaids to unicorns or vice versa if both are equally imaginary things, sustained only arbitrary social conventions? If Nazis take one stance toward Auschwitz and Liberals another and there is no objective arbiter between their disagreements about these imaginary things, then there is no good or evil, just winners and losers. If Harari’s claims about “reality” are right, Auschwitz is to be disparaged because the Nazis lost, not because there is anything immoral there that requires a warning. Despite all the ubermenschlich posturing, he never convinces himself of his moral nihilism, much less his readers. He is torn on the rock of contradictory intellectual impulses that he cannot explain or control. He affirms the cultural assumptions of these evolutionary humanists, but never explains why it might be improper to impose a final solution on problem of wasting scarce resources on enemies, inferiors and defectives. Harari says that the triumph of “evolutionary humanism” is splitting humans into biological castes but is curiously reluctant to speculate what the coming triumph of the Eloi over the Morlocks will look like.
One of the most attractive qualities of Harari is that he personally is in fact a far better human being than his theories would suggest. He states “religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey”. It requires no great insight to see that Harari is on that spiritual journey, is lost, and cannot find home. He movingly writes of his travels, “Academic studies might be transformed into a spiritual journey if the big questions you encounter deflect you towards unexpected destinations, of which you could hardly even conceive at first”. Yet his disappointment is palpable. He is a despairing Odysseus, unable to find home, who settles for the island of the Lotus Eaters as a poor second best substitute for Ithaca.
He takes intersubjective “imaginary” things that are socially constructed, cultural artifacts such as religion and money and moral rules, to be arbitrary, existing only in the minds of those who believe in them, otherwise not real. Yet inexplicably, his book is everywhere larded with Harari’s moral enthusiasms. He repeatedly inveighs in favor of animal rights, treating factory farming as morally abhorrent without ever explaining why he or his reader or anyone else should prefer the firing of some neurons rather than others. Harari also editorializes against the oppression of socially stigmatized individuals, for example homosexuals, without explaining why the oppression of marginalized individuals “ought” to be anything but a matter of the greatest conceivable indifference to his readers, like any other empirical fact, say the number of craters on the moon. He clearly believes at some level that oppressing humans and mistreating animals is wrong, and that we should stop such practices. I think he is correct. However he is a divided man: he is attempting to claim at the same time that the moral obligations he invokes are unreal. As Kierkegaard said, Either/Or.
Harari’s irrepressible editorializing and his ubiquitous and otherwise inexplicable moral dicta can only be embarrassed about their purportedly imaginary ontological status. At some level, he does not believe the skeptical, reductive materialistic claims that make his history appear so shiny and contemporary and new. If he really believed what he claims to believe, the repeated moral non sequiturs would have fallen before the editors’ blue pencil very early on. The posture of getting beyond the “illusion” of moral obligation is a bluff. Nobody does because nobody can. The Enlightenment mirage of perfect clarity is the most seductive myth of all. Harari advocates sympathy for no reason he can explain, and persists in condemning the oppression of people and the ill treatment of animals and yet simultaneously pretends that he thinks it makes no difference in the face of meaningless cosmic indifference. Nor will some kind of a sentimental Existentialist “authentic” “commitment” help him. This self indulgent river of treacle is left over Romanticism still being sold long after its expiration date. I cannot think of any reason to believe Pol Pot inauthentic and I am confident that Adolph Eichman was committed to his particular project, but I am at a loss to understand why I should care, much less approve. This problem of simultaneously affirming and denying moral reality is everywhere in these two volumes. We are informed that “there is no justice in history” and then four pages later we are told that “Unfortunately, complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination”. I cannot tell what meaning could possibly be attached to a term like “unjust” in light of the alleged nonexistence of justice, and the claim that it is “unfortunate” would seem to summon with the left hand the spectres he so recently banished with the right. Harari, to his credit, seems to think sympathy a virtue, despite all the nihilistic tough guy posturing.
What Harari takes, he often restores. He notes that “…we must answer questions such as What is more important? And What is good? And these are not scientific questions. Science can explain what exists in the world, how things work, and what might be in the future. By definition, it has no pretentions to knowing what should be in the future. Only religions and ideologies seek to answer such questions.” Of course, because Harari insists that neither religions nor ideologies describe reality, it is not clear how to proceed. Happiness, which we have already been told is the firing of certain synapses and neurons, is redescribed by Harari as “seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile”. But regrettably, on the same page, we find that “any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion.” Harari is a new Prometheus broken on the rock of an adamantine theory.
The third problem is his failed account of subjective consciousness, or mind.
Harari concedes that there exists no robust reductive account of the existence of subjectivity, but he promises one soon, which eliminative materialists have been promising for centuries. Unfortunately, behaviorism is all we have left after psychology gets a shave from Ockham’s Razor. The reductive naturalistic empiricism sometimes called “Scientism” which averts its eyes or dismisses thought that does not resolve itself into empirical questions of physics or deductive questions of logic, such as ethics, aesthetics or the philosophy of mind, pretty much died out with the Vienna Circle in the mid 20th century, undone by its own hybris. Except for a few later rearguard actions by the disinherited children of Carnap, like the Churchlands, or the New Atheists, or Harari, this scientism could not live up to its own hype. The more strident the scientism, the clearer it becomes that they are smuggling in ontological dogmas that are neither self evident nor scientifically warranted.
Consciousness refuses to go away, and this is an unresolved, in fact unresolvable, problem for Harari. He notes that “…there is zero scientific evidence that in contrast to pigs, Sapiens have souls”. This is true, but there is also zero scientific evidence that there exist “other minds”, yet people have found this archaic belief a hard habit to break, perhaps because universe gets somewhat lonely without them. The belief in other minds is no less an archaic, unscientific myth than the belief in souls, as any behaviorist psychologist will tell you. Yes, both people and animals cry out if struck, but there is no need to attribute this to any residual ghost in the machine. As Descartes noted, all of animal behavior can be simply and exhaustively explained as a mechanical response to outside stimuli. He interpreted animals as automata, which they clearly enough are. Amoebas move away from light because that is what they do, not because their “mental state” is averse to light. Descartes saw that he had no need to posit any anima animating any animals, such assumptions are shorn away by Ockham’s Razor because there is no need to propagate a special hypothesis like mind when a simpler and equally effective stimulus/response account exists. Of course, Descartes tried mightily to establish a Sonderstellung for human beings, by attributing to them, freedom and rationality, which amounted to a soul, but this too was a scientific failure. There is zero scientific evidence that either animals or humans have either minds or souls. What scientific grounds can there be for abolishing souls but keeping minds? None. Harari is arguing for a distinction without a difference because he feels sentimental about his quadruped friends, and wants people to stop being mean to them. There is much to say for this proposal, cruelty to animals is an evil, but this is an extremely improbable way to justify such a claim, and alas, it does not adequately address my sentimental attachments to other, human, bipeds.
Harari claims that mind is very different from soul, because it is a “flow of subjective experiences”, but he never explains how he, or anyone else, could ever get scientific access to the alleged “flow of subjective experiences” going on in pigs or for that matter, other people. Proxies like electrical brain activity will not serve as satisfactory stand ins, because of course we then have only the objective experiences of the behavior resulting from the alleged experiences of others, no observation at all of their hypothetical “subjective flows”. Nor do we have any need to hypothesize any subjective component in either human or animal behavior, as Hobbes pointed out centuries ago. I believe that people have minds, and I also believe that other people are conscious in roughly the same way I am, but I cannot claim any scientific warrant for these beliefs. Behavioral psychologists are correct, and a reductive scientific materialism will eliminate not merely the soul but the mind as well. Lucky for me, I think science isn’t everything. Unluckily for Harari, he claims to believe that it is.
Harari acknowledges that “science knows surprisingly little about mind and consciousness.” The “hard problem” of consciousness remains unbreakable because qualia resist external observation. I suspect that this is connected to the fact that no one has yet had anyone else’s experiences. Still worse, there is no prospect of anyone having anyone else’s experiences in the future, however distant. Then “why not just discard mind?” as has been done with the soul, Harari asks. He seems to think mind ineliminable, not just his mind but all minds. He argues that “when I step on a nail I can be 100% certain that I feel pain” but here Wittgenstein’s objection to the “certainty” of private experiences on the ground of non vacuous contrast is relevant. We can be certain of the theorem of Pythagoras because it is possible to doubt it. Certainty and doubt are correlative concepts, like north and south or odd and even. Certainty can exist only where doubt can exist, and if it is impossible to doubt that one has a particular sensation, such as pain, the claim of “certainty” about this pain being indubitable is both vacuous and otiose.
Even worse, there is no ground for any claim about anyone else’s sensations. If in fact there are such things, as I and most other people believe, science cannot tell us about them. Harari laments that “few ethical dilemmas can be solved by referring strictly to brain activities.” but is not forthcoming as to what those few ethical dilemmas might be. Harari wants very much to avoid solipsism and credit human claims that they are conscious, which is understandable, but this requires the selective withholding of the corrosive skepticism he deploys so readily on things he doesn’t like.
It is clear that he is getting desperate when he proposes to correlate the claims about other minds with certain patterns of electrical discharge in the brain, and thus to justify the claims that humans are conscious, by pointing to these electrical discharges, but the vacuity and circularity of this presupposing of what is being proved is absolutely hopeless, and he knows it. All patterns of electrical discharge are evidence for is patterns of electrical discharge. They tell us no more about “mental states” than about the activities of the Holy Spirit. Harari notes that it might be possible to delete mind, consciousness and subjective experience altogether, but notes that this destroys ethics and politics. However, it is not clear why we need to hold onto what he claims are ephemeral socially constructed myths. After all, he claims that acknowledging the existence of other minds is merely a “social and legal convention”.
Eventually he just gives up and rhetorically waves the white flag. Unable to make any progress on a reductive physical account of consciousness, the best he can do is an appeal to authority telling us that eminent scientists at Cambridge have recently declared that animals are conscious. Alas, he neglects to explain how any collection of scientists could legislate the allegedly “objective” fact of animals’ “subjective” experiences into existence any more effectively or with any more authority than say, the Council of Trent could.
Harari informs us that “In essence, we humans are not that different from rats, dogs, dolphins and chimpanzees.” (Homo Deus p.128) but he has spent quite of bit of space explaining that humans do not have an essence, and he goes on to state that we must not be prevented from “…understanding and valuing other animals on their terms”. I value dogs, I like them and don’t approve of being cruel to them, but I have no idea what “terms” dogs use to “value themselves”, whatever that means. I am equally baffled by his inclination to take the self “valuations” of dogs, whatever these may turn out to be, seriously, when Harari has gone at such lengths to render unsustainable the valuations that the vast majority of humans deploy about themselves.
Harari states that there is no reason to believe in the sacredness of human beings but this is only a specific application of his more general abolition of the sacredness of everything else. How does “value” survive but “sacredness” succumb? It is rather like the persistence of mind and the abolition of soul. He likes the former and dislikes the latter. He states “All large scale human cooperation is based on imagined orders.” But he gives no indication why he is so much harder on some imagined orders, say God, but much easier on others, like the “minds” of rats. The differential deployment of his eliminative skepticism is one of the most curious aspects of his book. Reality emerges in Homo Deus as a kind of topiary, which has been trimmed extravagantly to suit the author’s enthusiasms. The value of dolphins is vindicated, but the value of human beings is an imaginary construction, doomed to disappear. He allows that the humanities “…emphasize the crucial importance of intersubjective entities, which cannot be reduced to hormones and neurons”, yet he simultaneously insists that “intersubjective entities” are not real but imaginary, which reflexively entails the implication that his ontological division of reality into the objective, subjective and intersubjective, is not “real” either. Despite the fact that he implies that these categories are not real entities, Harari is simultaneously very keen to insist upon the reality of intersubjective items like his tripartite ontological distinctions, without which his argument collapses.
Fourth, Harari does a poor job of integrating human culture, particularly myth, religion and literature into his techno-centric vision of the world.
Everywhere from the equator to the poles, every human society has a set of stories with which they categorize their experiences, soothe their all too human premonitions of death, and manipulate nature. Narrative starts out explaining small scale local phenomena, but over time these stories accumulate and they are revised and connected. These larger stories eventually become the particular province of the aged, who become the transmitters of collective memory through oral traditions. The original stratification of society emerges in the distinction between the wisdom of age and the longing for intelligibility among the youth. The gods and the ancestors, the pains of the present and the fears of the future are all rendered coherent and less threatening in the stories of a divinized past, which define the lives of both the individuals who hear them and the groups of people that tell them.
Even the folktales of primitive hunter gathering bands are pregnant with an entire cosmology that is elaborated over time in response to the inquiries of the rising generation. What is the world? Who am I? Who are we? These are the permanent questions of the human condition. Every mythic tradition creates the meaning of human life, which makes the human predicament, poised on the knife’s edge of ephemeral existence, bearable because it is valuable. Pain is assuaged, the changeable is fixed, the uncertain rendered comprehensible, and our destiny is foretold in every cultural narrative, no matter how simple or complex. Myth is cognitive and ineliminable.This thin fabric of ideas is our only insulation against the immensity of nature and the terror of history.
An eminent theologian, Schliermacher, once wrote, “God is Man’s Idea of himself”. This is a powerful truth: at the very minimum, the religion of a people is, if nothing else, the collective self-understanding of that people coded into stories. All polytheism, like all politics, is local. In every human society, nature cults were constituted featuring spooks and spirits and polytheistic pantheons, unique to their localities and to the peoples that created them. These religions were also the locus of art and knowledge. They were the cult in culture. Other peoples, in other places were understood to have their own gods. Simultaneously, these peoples were constituting the collective self conception of their local band or tribe or nation in creating their particular religion. Religion articulates the social self, a collective identity in distinction to all other tribes and their deities. Indeed, the persistence of these gods is a placeholder for the persistence of these peoples.
The emergence of a universal God signals the birth of a unified humanity. No longer local but universal, no longer one among many, no longer anthropomorphic and fallible, capricious and flawed, the one God is a covert constitution of the unity of the human race, beyond the accidents of time and space. The Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten’s stroke of genius in creating the first monotheism lies in the implicit acknowledgement of one human species which was beholden to Ra, the unique, benevolent, indispensible Sun. One unitary God entails one unitary humanity. The Egyptian priests destroyed Akhenaten’s contribution to world history, but the monotheistic insight was taken up and elaborated by renegade Egyptian slaves, the Hebrews. In welding themselves, individually and collectively to the One, the only God, the Hebrews contributed a permanent legacy to the cultural patrimony of the world. One God means one human species with a shared destiny, a shared providence, bound together by one set of universal moral rules.
These universal moral rules are understood to be accessible to all, on account of reason, independent of revelation. In Genesis, Cain is presumed guilty of murder when he killed his brother Abel, despite the fact that God does not reveal the Fifth Commandment until Exodus, the next book. When the prophet Nathan indicts King David with the accusation, “You are the man” the universality of YHWH’s moral law in insisted upon. By the time of the Babylonian Captivity and the rebuilding of the temple, the prophets, despite the fact that they are chosen men within a chosen people, begin to sound uncompromisingly Kantian in their universalism. The early condemnation of the Canaanites and Philistines in the book of Joshua morphs into a blessing upon all nations, as YHWH reveals Himself in time. “Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance.” (Isaiah 2:4,19:25). Universal moral rules are the precondition for the words that the gospel attributed to the angels at the Nativity, “Peace on earth, good will to men”. The universal peace heralded by Isaiah when he anticipates that swords shall be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks is a signal contribution to the moral vision of the world, unthinkable in the Greco-Roman tradition. As a prophet is to the Chosen People, the Chosen People are to humanity. One universal God means one universal humanity means one universal moral law, means one universal providence. The Old Testament is in fact an epic poem with a collective subject: the Chosen People.
Plato, the greatest and most versatile intellect in the Western tradition, is best understood as more a poet than a philosopher and perhaps more a prophet than either. In the Republic Plato resurrects the imagery of the ancient river valley solar cults and fuses it with Greek rationalism. Plato is the Akhenaten of reason, a Moses who eschews revelation from Burning Bushes or anything else because he takes dictation from the Logos. Plato invented rational monotheism. The Form of the Good, which is an improvement on YHWH in that it is never angry or jealous or anthropomorphized in any way, is the Logos, the God of Reason. The Form of the Good is an immobile crystal of perfection, changeless and eternal, that somehow generates intelligibility, truth and value in the human world. Plato intends to replace the worship of Homer’s capricious, immoral and irrational Olympians with the worship of the Form of the Good: a monotheism beyond revelation. His Philosopher/King is a high priest and his Guardians are a priesthood. Even later when Plato’s thought changes, the symbolism of the sun as perfect goodness does not. This is why in Plato’s last dialogue, the Laws, Plato’s ideal city turns out to be an immense solar calendar, where every inhabitant and every action is referenced to the cycles of the sun.
Christianity continued the Greek/Hebrew monotheistic universalization of moral rules for humanity, bringing the sun’s fire down to earth in the Pentecost. Each disciple was gifted with the ability to understand and be understood in every language. This monotheistic gift of the Logos, symbolized by tongues of fire over the disciples heads’, means that there exists a substratum of moral reality, identical in every language, applicable equally to all people, which is to be spread to all. The New Testament is also an epic that is written not for or about some particular people but for and about our entire species. In the New Testament, as in all other epics, various hero stories (Jesus, but also Paul, Stephen, John the Baptist, Peter etc.) are connected by the evangelists and epistle writers to create a unified narrative; the collective story of universal redemption. When Jesus preached repentance of and forgiveness for sin, he assumed that hearers would respond to his call because they knew, not by revelation, but by natural reason, that they were morally guilty. As Justin Martyr argued very early in the history of Christianity, the Christian message assumes rather than contradicts the recognition of rationally discovered moral rules, applicable to all, prior to and independent of revelation.
Harari is capable of extremely acute readings of important texts and he does not hesitate to draw very incisive inferences from big ideas. His is a very sharp intellect with great aspirations. This is what makes his misunderstanding of epic so surprising. He states, “Greco-Roman epics and medieval chivalric romances were catalogues of heroic deeds, not feelings”… “Crucially, the heroes did not undergo any significant process of inner changes” (Homo Deus 239). This is a weak misreading. The Greek epics tell us exactly the opposite. As the first line tells us, the Iliad is about the “wrath of Achilles”, the poem ends, not with the Trojan Horse and the destruction of the city (which is a flashback reserved for the Odyssey), but with Achilles’ unanticipated pity for Priam, the bereaved father of Hector. Moreover, in the Odyssey, when Odysseus goes to the underworld, he encounters the shade of Achilles, who ruefully regrets the heroic pursuit of fame. Odysseus takes both a physical and a spiritual journey, from the vainglorious boast to Cyclops, to the improved self-understanding he bestows upon his son Telemachus after the killing of the suitors, “It is unholy to vaunt over the bodies of the dead.” Odysseus reestablishes the sacred, purifying his city and himself and his son. Plato’s ironic epic, (the Dialogues taken collectively), is replete with psychological insights and closes with laughter and tears which reveal the psychic states of his new, improved Homeric hero as well as the spiritual desolation of Socrates’ lesser companions. A further revelation of the psyche is evident in the Aeneas’ affirmation of pietas in Virgil’s literate Roman epic. Harari not only misunderstands epic, he also fails to see the ubiquity of the living epic tradition and never seems to suspect that it is lurking in monotheist scripture or historical writing or in the new artistic forms of modernity, the novel and film.
Thus Harari does not recognize that epic is both archaic and contemporary, the permanently reinvented ur form of literary expression. He lacks the Delphic self-knowledge to see that he is both an epic hero and an epic poet. Like Telemachus as the beginning of the Odyssey, he does not know who he is. All of today’s epic poets, the historical deifiers of humanity, are singing the same old song. Harari seems to believe that he is doing something new and unprecedented with his self-divinizing, technology worshipping speculations, as all the apocalyptic transhumanists do. In fact he is recapitulating something archaic, the foundational myths of Athens and Jerusalem. Prometheus stole the fire of the gods and took solace in the fact that the Olympians were doomed. In Genesis the snake tempts Eve with the prospect of “becoming like God” by eating the forbidden fruit. This Abolition of God/Human Self Divinization schtick has been done before and done better. Comte eliminated God and elected himself Pope of the new “Religion of Humanity”. Marx cut off at the source the “opium of the masses” and then, like the Old Testament prophet he was, announced that he, a pseudo-secular Moses, could lead the “Species Being” of Humanity to the Promised Land of an apocalyptic abolition of all injustice. Nietzsche pointed out that God was dead and shortly thereafter wrote a new scripture, Thus Spake Zarathustra. After his literary Deicide, Nietzsche raised God from the dead, as everybody else who has ever killed God does. Nietzsche became the John the Baptist of a new immanence worshipping religion, to be realized with the arrival of an earthly God, the Ubermensch.
According to Harari, Liberalism is morphing into a brave new world of “immortality, bliss and divinity”: an optimistic redescription of Aldous Huxley’s description of the future. Yet Harari has not counted on the reappearance of that tendency in human nature represented by Huxley’s Mr. Savage, (Homo Deus p. 276). Mr. Savage may hang himself and wish to destroy the culture that caused his anomie. Harari is insouciant about the loss of meaning in human life, but this is catastrophic because it removes the last reason to exist. Ubermenschlich “Homo Deus” would succumb to what the ancients called taedium vitae, a comprehensive ennui. Harari has not adequately considered the Buddha’s insight that existence itself is painful. Nor has he digested Kierkegaard’s desperate insight that a life of Epicurean pleasure is both vacuous and most importantly, terminally boring. As Kierkegaard insists in Either/Or, those Epicureans with two digit IQs live a bovine existence chewing the cud endlessly until they die. They are minimally human. The late Hugh Hefner was a good example, an octogenarian who never tired of bedding twenty year old women, yet did not have the wit to find himself or his hobby tedious. Our current deal making, skirt chasing President is another prime example. In contrast to such spiritual plebians, creative artists have a heightened need for transcendence. If they fail to find it they gravitate toward dangerous second best substitutes like narcotics. This is why very creative people are so often very self destructive people. Without access to religious transcendence, those Epicureans with three digit IQs, inevitably descend into an intolerable state of terminal boredom (as people as various as Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Amy Winehouse, Sylvia Plath or Ernest Hemingway could testify). As the front man for Nirvana, Curt Cobain, wrote in “All Apologies”, prior to blowing his brains out, “I wish I was like you, easily amused…”. Curt Cobain died of boredom.
Comte, Marx, Nietzsche and the rest of humanity’s divinizers just couldn’t help themselves. Neither can Harari. The pattern never varies. It is grimly predictable. As soon as God gets demoted from His primary position, whatever had been second in importance, (human beings in most cases), gets an unexpected and risibly incongruous promotion. Humanity as God is amusing at best, like watching children playing dress up in their parents clothing. However, Harari’s ubermenschlich project of self-divinization is extremely dangerous. There are unanticipated monsters within. This Nietzschean project is the apotheosis of Athenian rationalism, an explicitly inegalitarian, rationalistic tradition that nonetheless directs strong passions for its ends. Like the Nazis’ derivative “evolutionary humanism” (which also dismisses Jerusalem as alien to Aryan warriors) it is derived from the Athenian tradition and harnesses naturalistic assumptions to powerful emotions. If it is pursued in the contemporary world, it will result in an ocean of innocent blood. I must confess that I have some sympathy for humanity’s immense self-imposed misery that Nietzsche and his admirers would distain. Monotheistic pessimism about human nature is validated on every page of every history and on every day’s evening news. Five hundred years ago human beings were fully capable of enslaving and exterminating whole continents, as the European conquest of the New World shows. We are right now perfectly capable of doing the same on a planetary scale. If you think that people are naturally good and that human depravity has improved in the last five centuries, you are in the grip of the most absolute and dangerous kind of self-deception. What Kant called the “crooked timber of humanity” will not become straight anytime soon. As always, the poets see what is coming before the scholars. Consider the late, great, Leonard Cohen’s prescient song, “The Future”. http://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-the-future-lyrics. The last shred of the Enlightenment died at Auschwitz. Man as God will end even worse.
I believe that Harari is wrong. Meaning cannot to be dispensed with. Nor is it unreal. He is operating under its spell when he makes moral judgments he cannot justify but feels compelled to make anyway. People need meaning more than air. If they do not find it they twist themselves into astonishing spiritual contortions and intellectual paradoxes. Their frustrated instincts inevitably seek some distant second best satisfaction. Moral order cannot be avoided or dismissed because it is built into thinking and speaking itself. As Habermas has argued, rationality itself contains moral imperatives. Being reasonable is not simply one option among many, it is a rational, moral obligation. Yet the apogee of reason, as Euripides pointed out, is for reason to encounter and recognize its own limits.
In every world historical civilization, folktales get grouped together and heterogeneous stories are twisted together like fibers in a rope to form an epic. Heroes whose actions represent the collective that spins these yarns get named, customs and rituals are validated and the inevitable anguish of human life is rendered bearable. Prior to the separation of art, religion and philosophy into separate activities, a tale of tales emerges which is a cultural encyclopedia and the high point of science 1.0. This is epic poetry. Epic is the ur literature, spontaneously generated in all of the largest and most temporally expansive of the world cultures. Various poems such as the Hindu epic of India, the Mahabarata; the Christian epic of Western Europe, the Song of the Cid; the Islamic epic of West Africa, the Sundiata and technological epic of contemporary America, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, all tell the same story.
All of epic literature is actually only one story, which is what Joyce was gesturing at in Finnegan’s Wake with HCE. Without ever becoming trite, it is always the same story with the same hero: the personification of “us”. The structure does not vary: 1) Dissatisfaction with life, 2) Search for the valuable, 3) A journey with initiatory ordeals, 4) An ending with a homecoming that reveals the triumph of the sacred. This is true of all the epics from Gilgamesh through Star Wars. Even when epic is apparently dispensed with as a dead form, it continues to erupt back into human consciousness, changing only the externals, that which is bigger paradoxically emerging from something smaller, like a snake shedding its skin.
Plato toils mightily to kill off the Homeric epic in the Republic. However, he simultaneously writes a new ironic Iliad and a new ironic Odyssey, an immense parody of the Homeric poems which taken together are called the “Platonic Dialogues”. Plato, the greatest of the Greek poets, couldn’t help himself. Ironically, Socrates is simultaneously a new, improved Achilles and a new improved Odysseus. Athens is the new Troy and Heaven his new Ithaca. Homer’s story of Greeks destroying a great city is retold, except that in Plato’s retelling, the Greeks fighting to destroy the city are ironically working from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Socrates is a new, improved Achilles, an invincible warrior of the mind rather than the body. Socrates is the intellectual slayer of men.
Odysseus, the wily sojourner impeded by monsters which must be overcome in order to reach home, eventually restores moral order by killing the suitors and restoring Ithaca. Socrates, who never leaves Athens except when compelled by military obligation, is, ironically, always on a journey. The same Homeric journey motif holds the frame scenes of the greatest dialogues together thematically (Republic, Protagoras, Symposium, Phaedrus, etc.) all of which begin with Socrates in motion. He is on a spiritual, rather than a physical journey and he never swerves off course, even at the price of his life, which is the underlying meaning of the Crito with its discussion of escape from prison as taking the wrong path. He will fight monsters as Odysseus did, but ironically these are spiritual rather than physical monsters and ironically he can do his fighting at home. Always on his way somewhere yet never going anywhere, Socrates waits patiently in Athens, ironically affirming that the spiritual monsters will come to him. The new Cyclops, the new Circe, the new version of the tempting Sirens are sophists and politicians and poets. Socrates’ homecoming is not to Ithaca but to Heaven to commune with the gods, as is says in his death dialogue, the Phaedo. Just before the hemlock kills him, Socrates walks around in circles while preparing for death because walking in circles getting ready to die is the emblem of the philosophical life. He completes his journey by going home to the gods rather than Penelope.
It is not controversial that archaic and medieval societies produced epics, but the form did not die quietly. The last great epic in English is usually regarded as Paradise Lost. Because of the devastation caused by the Wars of Religion, German speaking countries got to the Enlightenment late, so last great epic in Western tradition is in German, generally agreed to be Goethe’s Faust. Epic seems to become a dead form after the advent of science 3.n. But epic hibernates, and emerges transformed in the novel and in film and in Big History.
The novel form sooner or later reverts back into epic as the greatest writers realize the potential latent within it, as Lukacs noted. Sooner, in the case of the first great novel in English, Robinson Crusoe, which is an allegory of world history. Crusoe is the Enlightenment Everyman who goes through all the phases of human history sequentially until he at last freed of the Island, which is Nature. The Enlightenment Hero, Robinson Crusoe, is the personification of the Cartesian Cogito in Nature (the Island) with Lockean politics added (Natural Rights plus Labor Theory Of Value). Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The whole history of humanity is represented in Crusoe’s life, from the earliest attempts to control nature to the Enlightenment encounter with brown skinned natives, most of whom are represented as cannibals who are righteously killed. The one surviving good native gratefully expresses a spontaneous wish to become Crusoe’s servant. Friday asks about natural theodicy, Crusoe cannot answer, but extends religious toleration to the Catholic Spaniard that eventually is marooned on the island. Robinson Crusoe is the Enlightenment’s fictive world history in microcosm.
Eventually, the epic potential of the novel is realized in the omniscient narrator of War and Peace, who is God, and the novel comes to an end but not to a conclusion because the ongoing story is the open ended yet providential tale of all human experience. Tolstoy was an ill-disguised epic poet, as were Joyce and Mann. Stephen Daedelus informs us at the end of Portrait, “I go on to encounter reality for the millionth time, and to forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” It is no accident that Ulysses is homage to Homer. Buck Mulligan, like HCE in Finnegan’s Wake, is every human being and has every human experience. Thomas Mann’s rewriting of the Faust story in Doktor Faustus is simultaneously and indictment of the Nazis and homage to Goethe but it is also a reaffirmation of the living epic tradition.
Contemporary practitioners of “Big History” are also epic poets, disguised as history professors, pretending to be above antique holdovers like moral judgment and voluntarily restricting themselves to “real” rather than invented people and events. They are telling the story of how human beings got into their current predicament, and the pattern is the same as in all other epics. Dissatisfaction with life, search for the valuable, a journey with initiatory ordeals, ending with a homecoming which signals the triumph of the sacred. Their dissatisfaction varies with the writer, Diamond is dissatisfied with the triumphalism of Western modernity, Harari is dissatisfied with cruelty and mortality. I am dissatisfied with the violation of the Delphic injunctions by these epic accounts of the human experience: these writers are excessive and they do not know themselves. They are on a search for the valuable: a victory of humility and fraternity for Diamond, the Ithaca of painless immortality for Harari, Delphic self-knowledge and a sense of proportion for me. For all Big Historians, history is the journey through time and space with initiatory ordeals. For Diamond, the homecoming is the recognition that our vaunted superiority is a series of accidents and the sacred is the equalizing recognition that Western Civilization was lucky, not good. For Harari, the homecoming is the recognition that God is dead and meaning died with Him, but, amusingly, the sacred triumphs when Harari divinizes Big Data and promotes posthumanity to the status of immortal god. For me, we come home and re-cognize ourselves with an affirmation of a global humanity, both individual and collective, that shares a common reason and universal moral constraints, a common value, a common planet and a common destiny.
Finally, Harari seems committed to an individualistic account of history until the very end of his second volume, when he transmutes humanity into a divine data flow, a pleroma of silicon.
Scientists often treat social animals as collective superorganisms. Bees are not solitary, they form hives with a complex division of labor. The same is true of ants. Humans are social animals like bees or ants but we distinctively have minds and make choices. We are capable of doing things for reasons, not simply on account of instinct. English has no direct analog of the German idea of collective subject. Our consciousness is social and constituted in the process of communication. As Wittgenstein points out, there can be no private language. One of Heidegger’s oracular musings is apt, “we – mankind – are a conversation”. The nebulous, spooky thing that Emerson called “the Oversoul” is realized concretely in what Habermas called “the pragmatics of communicative action.” It is the unity of what Saussure called langue and parole. There is no meaning without community. The current American political conflict between Alt-Right Populism and Alt-Left Identity Politics are two plants with the same root: a frustrated longing for the community that is the precondition of meaning. What if the emergence of a collective human subject continues unabated despite these clashes? What if the internet is the emerging central nervous system of a new kind of collective human animal?
Harari does not deploy the German idea of collective subjectivity until the very end of his second book, Homo Deus. He is constrained by the fragmentary and ephemeral life of the individual. Hegel gets it right. There is one immense human subject, a superorganism in biological terms: the human species. (See biologist E.O. Wilson’s groundbreaking work on ants to see how profitable this superorganism idea can be in natural science. William McNeill, in his groundbreaking work, The Pursuit of Power, described ruling elites who extracted tribute from subordinate populations using the threat of military force, as “macroparasites” that feed off a collective host. This was a half step in the direction of viewing history as a domain of collective subjects.
This idea will seem very farfetched to some readers, and in fact there are many conceptual difficulties with the idea of consciousness, subjectivity and mind. There are many problems associated with the belief in a psyche, as behaviorist psychologists in the tradition of Pavlov, Watson and Skinner have argued at great length. The list of conceptual difficulties associated with subjective mental life would fill a small library. Philosophers have strongly criticized mind/body dualism as well. Yet despite the fact that there are a profusion of problems with the idea of individual human subjectivity, nearly everyone gravitates towards the idea that there is “somebody home” in their bodies and the bodies of others, human and animal. Let us bracket these problems of individual subjectivity for the time being. However many problems may be urged on the attribution of collective mentality and agency to our entire species and even to other species, these problems are no more daunting than attributing them to individual humans, which we do habitually.
The motion of schools of baitfish avoiding predators and flocks of migrating birds and other social animals in herds create complex, dynamic patterns that are not observable by any organisms in the group. These patterns are the byproduct of the individual specimens’ reacting to local stimuli without any one of the specimens choosing the general pattern that the collective manifests. Human history is similar in that there exist patterns that are observable in the behavior of human societies over historical time that are neither intended nor understood by the individual historical agents. Hegel called this, “the cunning of history”. Hegel and Marx were the first to identify the patterns of social transformation that emerge in history and attribute them to something like a “hive mind” that is more than the sum if it’s constituent human individuals. The idea of a collective subjectivity is no more intrinsically problematic that the attribution of consciousness to individuals. If you find the one plausible, there are no added conceptual difficulties in affirming the other. This idea may strike many Anglophone readers, whose cultural traditions are committed on so many levels to individualism, as extravagant, but in the German intellectual tradition the idea of collective subjectivity is neither new nor outlandish. Kant’s famous Categorical Imperative, a universal moral rule binding upon every rational agent, was understood by Kant to apply to all individual persons (including God and the Angels), but it also applied equally to collective subjects, like nations. This is why Kant’s legalistic admirer, Woodrow Wilson, took Kant’s idea of a League of Nations, a rationally obligatory moral norm, as binding absolutely upon all nations, including the United States. The League of Nations was to be to the global community of collective subjects what the social contract was to lawless individuals in the state of nature, an absolute moral obligation demanded by rationality itself.
Hegel viewed the history of the world as a stage where collective subjects, nations, sequentially played their parts in the development of a universal collective subject. He went beyond the state as rational agent to a universal swide collective subject composed of smaller collective subjects, nations. This lies behind his philosophy of history and the Phenomenology of Geist. Nor does the development of this concept end with Hegel.
Marx had a problem within his determinate laws of historical development. He needed some kind of voluntarism to make revolutionary practice possible. After all, if the global proletarian revolution is inevitable, why should I or anybody else bother? In the absence of an afterlife, why would anyone give his life for the Revolution that was coming anyway that they would not live to see? Marx addressed these problems by positing a “Species Being”, a universal collective subject in which all individual humanity participated. This was an attempt to create a material rather a spiritual version of the Hegelian Geist. In the twentieth century some German speaking thinkers working on the philosophy of mind introduced some dramatic new ideas, as in the case of Freud’s positing of the formerly unknown “unconscious” mind. It was unavoidable that sooner or later this idea of a subconscious in the individual psyche would be expanded to fit a collective rather than an individual mind. Explaining the evidence for and operations of this posited “collective unconscious” was the life work of C.G. Jung.
I have no idea whether there exists a “collective” unconscious, but I suspect the Germans have contributed something important in positing a collective subjectivity. The individual human being is an integral entity but is also a homunculus contained within an immensely larger being. The history of the world is the Bildungsroman of this collective psyche’s coming of age, an epic journey toward knowledge of self and circumstance, consciousness and nature. A global history of the changing understanding of the natural world is in fact a disguised history of human self-understanding. As we come to know that which is Other, which is one unified thing, Nature, we cannot avoid coming to know the Knower, ourselves, better. History is this ongoing reciprocal dialectic. We ask two unavoidable questions, “Where am I?” and “Who am I?”. The answers to these questions necessarily provokes new questions, about both the knower and the known.
As the self conception of humanity changes, inevitably this provokes us to ask new questions about nature, which produces new human self understanding, in an ongoing dialectical back and forth. This is the core meaning of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Geist, after all the impenetrable metaphysical lingo and ponderous, barely intelligible 19th century German philosophical verbiage is removed. This idea is disconcerting, to say the least. However, he thing I find most disconcerting about Hegel, is that he is right. Recently I was rereading Nietzsche’s Gay Science, a book I had translated from German for my own edification when I was twenty-two, fresh out of college. I noticed a line I had previously disregarded in section 357. Acute and brilliant as he so often is, Nietzsche says “…without Hegel, there could have been no Darwin.” This is a powerful insight.
All of the greatest twentieth century world historians, like Curtin and McNeill, were neo-Darwinians, which is perfectly understandable. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples is arguably the greatest history book of the twentieth century, because he conclusively connects social and natural science, history and biology. Twenty-first century “Big Historians” are the children of Darwin also. However, in the community of historians, Hegel’s insights generally are ignored and distained as nebulous Germanic mumbo-jumbo, the nineteenth century’s analog of Pangloss’ “metaphysico-theologico-cosmononology”. Anyone who has read Hegel will sympathize with this impatience.
Yet, at the very end of Homo Deus, Harari goes full Hegelian. This is initially surprising but on reflection makes sense. Our species’ goal is described through a cybernetic lens: “…we may interpret the entire human species as a single data processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. If so, we can understand the whole of history as a process of improving the efficiency of this system…” Harari speculates that we are evolving into a “cosmic data-processing system [that] would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything and humans are destined to merge into it.” “As the global data-processing system becomes all-knowing and all-powerful, so connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning.” This is nothing new. It is Teilhard’s de Chardin’s Omega Point with a Silicon Jesus. It is literally the world’s greatest deus ex machina.
What new adventures await the human collective self? What will our next interrogation of nature reveal about the questioner? Harari’s eschatology is moving. He tells us that the myth of human equality is coming to an end, and the reality of technologically enhanced inequality is upon us. Harari also claims that nothing so flimsy as love will save us. We are for better or worse presiding over the end of our species. Harari describes homo sapiens as “the animal that became a god”. Like Oscar Wilde, who quipped that America had moved from barbarism to decadence with no intervening period of civilization, it seems that animals are now about become gods, with hardly any intervening period of humanity.
Ancient Taoist alchemists looking for the elixir of immortality stumbled upon gunpowder. Harari, in his quest for painless immortality, is likewise playing with dynamite. He asks at the very end of Species, “What is more dangerous and irresponsible than gods who don’t know what they want?” The true answer might surprise him. Those who are dangerous and irresponsible are not gods: no matter how much they flatter themselves, they are human, all too human. And there is in fact something far more dangerous and irresponsible than gods who don’t know what they want: would be divinities that don’t know who they are.