Godlessness is Not a Virtue

Part II

A few years ago I read a popular “New York Times Bestseller” book called Sapiens, written by an Israeli historian named Yuval Noah Harari.  He is usually referred to today as not only a historian, but also a philosopher and something called a transhumanist. The latter two might be overly generous.  The first one, too.  The book purports to be “A Brief History of Humankind.”  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad book.  It’s definitely an interesting book and a fast read.  But it nonetheless enraged me. 

The book starts off fine.  About 2.5 million years ago, a species called Homo sapiens was just an insignificant ape, just another mammal.  Then, about 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens experienced a sharp and sudden break from the past with respect to their cognitive ability, which vaulted Homo sapiens to the top of the food chain.  What exactly happened?  Per Harari:

The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language.  We might call it the Tree of Knowledge mutation.   

Skipping over the cause—admitting that no one really knows for sure—Harari jumps right to what he believes is the key implication of this “Cognitive Revolution” [his caps], which he believes is the ability of Homo sapiens to “transmit information about things that do not exist at all.”

That was on page 24.  For the next 400 or so additional pages, and 70,000 years of human history, Harari describes how “fiction” of various sorts enables Homo sapiens, and no other animal, to unite and do things collectively, at a scale that goes far beyond what a normal tribal community could ever achieve (Harari suggests that the non-fiction limit is about 150 people).  To Harari, this collective thinking in fake things is the key to the rise of Homo sapiens as the dominant species on the planet.  

The book then takes us through the author’s telling of the “Agricultural Revolution,” when the formerly foraging Homo sapiens started to cultivate certain plants and animals allowing (forcing?) them to stay in one place and create stable societies.  This was a very bad thing, apparently. Then Harari provides his version of the “Scientific Revolution,” when Homo sapiens learned that they could use the laws of nature to amass great power over the natural world and each other.   But the core theme of the book, and the one that Harari returns to again and again as a matter of historical fact, is that it is the collective “fictions” that serve as the foundation for all of human exceptionalism.  These “fictions” in Harari’s retelling are not just the common culprits—myths and religion, that’s just shooting fish in a barrel—but pretty much any idea that is held by any group of people, including capitalism, liberalism, democracy, Marxism, money, freedom and free will, every single nation’s shared history, any moral philosophy, laws, human dignity, any noble truth.  They’re all make-believe. 

Did you know that?  Because I didn’t.    

For Harari, these ideas, while incredibly consequential, are objectively false.  And no, I didn’t miss the part when Harari systematically disproved each of these ideas as just make-believe. At least I don’t think so, as I probably would have remembered.  In fact, the truth or falseness of each of these unifying human ideas isn’t even particularly relevant to his point, but he seemingly cannot resist unequivocally siding with their falseness. I also didn’t miss the part where Harari said: “Let’s all engage in a mental exercise where we assume all ideas, principals, and stories are objectively false and then tell the story of humans from the beginning.” Nope.  He doesn’t call it a mental exercise, even though it would be a pretty cool experiment for mescaline-addled scholars to indulge in.  He instead calls it “A Brief History of Humankind,” by Yuval Noah Harari.

You son of a bitch.   

He’s a son of a bitch first of all because it seems as if he does not see the irony embedded in his particular retelling of human history.  As far as I can tell, there’s only one story that Harari believes is not a myth.  His own book.  His “Brief History of Humankind,” which describes with breathtaking authority how early Homo sapien mothers were cuddling their babies in East Africa, and how we were all infinitely happier as foragers as opposed to farmers.  How the fuck does he know?  He constructs a grand, encompassing history of humanity, piecing together loose fragments of evidence for the first millions of years, but he nonetheless calls his book “history,” and calls everything else “fiction.”    

Since I read his book, I’ve seen Mr. Harari show up in TED-esque lectures all over the YouTube, even 60 Minutes, always as the wise expert with respect to the implications of technology on the future of humankind.  His expertise on the future is apparently based on some combination of his 400 page rendition of the past as well as the delusional hubris necessary to predict the future in writing.           

Normally I would call someone like Harari a nihilist, but such a term suggests a more confident and self-aware absence of belief than perhaps is warranted, or deserving.  “We believe in NOTSSING, Lebowski!” Now that’s a nihilist.  The better word for Harari is godless.  It’s the type of person, even a well-meaning and smart person, who has resolved—as a principal of one’s world view and as a precondition to engagement—that there is nothing outside of material observable reality, and that it is therefore appropriate and even necessary to reject out of hand anything that is not material or otherwise capable of empirical measurement.  For the godless, these are fundamental preconditions to truth-seeking as well as ethical reasoning.   

What I’m about to say is sometimes hard for people to process and accept, but I’ll at least introduce the concept.  The belief that there is nothing outside of what is material and observable is predicated on a leap of faith.  It is no less a leap of faith than the belief that the Universe and the life within it were created and designed by an intelligent being.  There is actually compelling evidence for both.  Evidence for a creator?!  Yes, there’s something rather than nothing, isn’t there? Not a bad start in my opinion.  Evidence of a designer?!  Yes, the world appears to be infinitely complex with a lot of things that seem like they’re fully formed and almost unknowable in their intricacy, like humans, for example.  But Darwin proved once and for all that humans evolved from a single life form through a process of random mutations over billions of years, with each successive incremental advantage allowing the holder of such advantage to propagate the advantageous mutation through an inconceivable number of generations, until eventually Homo sapiens appeared.  Sure, maybe. Or maybe it’s not so completely random, but rather evolution seems to know where it is going and we just haven’t figured it out yet.  This is a debate for a later time.  However, as we saw earlier, under the cover of modern sensibilities Harari is comfortable enough to state his “history” with the authority of fact. Based on scattered archaeological evidence that Homo sapiens underwent a sudden, dramatic, and mysterious transformation in their cognitive ability about 70,000 years ago, a “random genetic mutation” was likely the cause.   Except, for Harari, one version of history is true and the other is make believe.  

Here’s the thing about Harari, and the reason I’m picking on him.  I’m singling him out as much for his popularity as for his underlying ideas.  Anyone who wears one of those metallic headpiece microphones is fair game.  Silicon Valley apparently loves him.  He is assigned reading.  Because of his background as a historian and philosopher, he is regarded as a wise sage on issues involving what it means to be human and where humans are going.  He apparently wrote a second book about the next iteration of humans, even though the Sapiens book I read already ends with him stating as a matter of fact that soon humans will just be computer programs and that that itself will allow us to transcend death.  “A human being like all other organisms is just an information-processing system.”  From my recollection, the words “moral monstrosity” or “sin against God” never appear.  And I’m not going to read it again to double-check.   

You can also bet that the words “human beings trying to be like God was the precise reason that human beings were separated from God in the first place, so we’d better keep that in mind when we start talking about putting artificial intelligence into dead grandmas to see what happens” also don’t appear.  Because for Harari, those types of stories, to the extent they bear any meaning, it is solely to the extent they are useful in inspiring collective action in a species called Homo sapiens, but because they are just stories, they are fiction and we should have no need for them.   

“I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a fun, engaging look at early human history . . . You’ll have a hard time putting it down.” 

– Bill Gates

Silicon Valley loves Harari first because he speaks their language.  I’m somewhat skeptical as to whether he is much of an expert in science or technology, although he does like repeating the word “algorithm” a lot, so I guess that’s good enough for a lot of people.  He uses it synonymously with “thinking like a computer,” which may or may not be accurate. The larger reasons Silicon Valley and its deferential intellectual fans love him is, first, because he gives them air cover to not give a second thought to any idea, any religion, any moral tenet, any “ought,” any philosophy, because remember, they’re all bullshit anyway.  It’s a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for every moral and ethical issue under the sun.  As if powerful human beings needed more ammunition to rationalize their self-interest.  Second, they love him because in his vision of the future it is Silicon Valley that will largely determine the destiny of the species, which I have to admit would make me feel pretty important if someone said that all the time about me and my job.      

In his work and lectures, Harari talks about how humanity will need to find new religions to help make sense of the rapid technological change being brought upon by all these all-powerful algorithms.  This change may well be upon us, but Harari has already given away the game by saying not only that the old religions are ill-equipped to guide us, but that all religions and ideas are make-believe by definition, even presumably the new ones.  The language of the godless is insufficient to handle questions of true moral import, especially when the only thing they believe in—that Science is true and unassailable—is the thing causing the problem in the first place.  

In addition to Silicon Valley, do you know who else seems to be a fan of Harari’s work?  Obama.

“Interesting and provocative . . . It gives you a sense of perspective on how briefly we’ve been on this earth, how short things like agriculture and science have been around, and why it makes sense for us to not take them for granted.”

– Barack Obama

I will admit that the above quote does not make Obama a disciple of Yuval Harari.  He read Sapiens on vacation and liked his book.  However, it is an example of how Harari’s world view has had an impact on some important and consequential people.  The Obama example is significant to me because one of the things I always appreciated about Obama was that he has a sophisticated religious and spiritual sensibility and has never been shy about bringing those ideas into the context of meaningful world events. 

One such instance that stood out to me was in 2015 when he performed the eulogy of the pastor who was killed, along with eight other parishioners, in a mass murder in a church in Charleston.  Obama did not use the moment to focus only on political issues, but was deeply impressed with the fact that a number of the other parishioners said that they had forgiven the murderer.  His speech is something to behold, thoughtful and profound, tying masterfully concepts of personal sin, human history, and divine grace, mysterious and unearned.   

(Yes, there is some politics in there, too, but watch the 14:00-21:00 section in particular. Good stuff.) 

If you read Harari and feel a brief sense of meaninglessness, just watch Obama.  The former has made the conscious decision to go into the World Series of Poker playing with only half the deck.  The latter knows that the “fictions”—so called—are anything but.  In fact, they provide the language and framework necessary to make sense of a cruel existence, which is not the result of a biological accident or a mere peculiar mutation, but a gift that allows only us and no other creature on earth to get closer to Truth.            

So don’t be fooled.  If Yuval Noah Harari is really the person, by virtue of the sheer hubris to deign to predict where mankind is going; by virtue of himself and others calling him a philosopher (even though he’s not); by virtue of not being a scientist but apparently believing every bold and ambitious claim that any scientist ever told him; if this is what makes one the wise sage who can best guide and inspire the vanguard of humanity to utilize wisdom as they experiment with unspeakable and unknowable powers; if this is the guy… I hate to say it, but I’m pretty sure we’re fucked.   

“Sapiens is . . . definitely an interesting book and a fast read.”

– Brian Howard

“Are these the Nazis, Walter?”

“No, Donnie, these are nihilists.  Nothing to be afraid of.”

– Walter Sobchak