Book Review: Homo Deus
Homo Deus is a book about the possible future of humanity by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. The book is divided into three sections and eleven chapters, each of which covers a different part of the history of Homo sapiens and our potential futures.
Harari begins with an introductory chapter in which he considers how the future will likely be fundamentally different from the past. He correctly credits modern agriculture, evidence-based medicine, and nuclear weapons for the relative lack of war, famine, and plague in the current era. He then predicts that improvements that raised the minimum standard for the least among us will also be used to upgrade those who are well-off, the logical conclusion of which is a serious push for immortality and designed happiness. Harari gives the resulting superhumans the binomial name Homo deus, due to their similarity to polytheistic gods of Greek and Hindu tradition. The chapter concludes by contemplating the implications of such a change in human nature.
Part I deals with human prehistory, explaining how Homo sapiens came to dominate life on Earth. Here, Harari takes a dim view of our changed relationship toward animals since the Agricultural Revolution, noting the cruelty of factory farming and the extinction of many wild animals. He discusses the corresponding changes in religions as people came to view themselves not as just another part of nature, but as having dominion over it. His description of humanism as a religious movement would certainly be disputed by secular humanists, but it is an insightful observation for certain meanings of the word ‘religious.’ The third chapter begins with a scientific case against the existence of souls, while considering why this case is unpopular with the masses. The difference in consciousness between animals, humans, and artificial intelligences is discussed at length. Harari makes the important observation that the ability to coordinate ever larger numbers of people is what sets Homo sapiens apart from animals and the other human species that are now extinct. This coordination and cooperation is then applied to several examples of political and economic exploitation and upheaval. Part I segues into Part II by introducing the concept of intersubjectivity, which is a level of meaning that is neither universal nor personal, but shared between people. The power of intersubjective beliefs is shown to explain many things, from societal customs to the rise and fall of social orders.
The second part begins by examining the effect that intersubjectivity had on the development of civilization. The comparison between ancient religions and modern corporations is an interesting analogy that can help one make sense of civilization in the second millennium BC. The roles of writing and money in facilitating the expansion of empires is discussed, but Harari skips over the natural development of money as commodities and moves on to fiat currency as though it were the origin of money. The positives and negatives of intersubjective beliefs overruling objective facts are explored through various examples, with the negative tending to outweigh the positive. After all, one cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality, even if doing so appears to work for a time. The fifth chapter deals with the development of science and how it coexists with religious beliefs. Here, Harari defines a religion as “anything that confers superhuman legitimacy on human social structures” and “legitimizes human norms and values by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws,” which produces some interesting results. He considers liberals and communists to be religious, even though some of them do not meet the aforementioned definition. He advises cooperation between religion and science so that ethical judgments from religion and factual statements from science can be synthesized into practical guidelines, but warns against the tendency of religions to blur the line between ethical judgments and factual statements. Harari compares the rivalry between religious establishments and spiritual ascetics to the struggle between collectivism and individualism. He comes to a conclusion that would please any reactionary: if individualists win, they inevitably form a collective to protect their individualism. He concludes the chapter with an important observation: religion and science care less about truth than about order and power, respectively. This sets the stage for the rest of the book, which explores this order-power collaboration between science and humanism, as well as what might replace it.
Chapter 6 begins by presenting modernity as a sort of social contract in which people give up meaning in exchange for power. Most of the rest of the chapter deals with economic matters. Harari is mostly on point here, noticing the mindless consumerism that modernity can foster when people come to believe that growth and more material wealth will solve all problems. However, he goes astray when discussing the development of credit and loans, in that these were not rare in earlier times due to economic hardship so much as religious and political prohibitions on usury. He presents a concept called Ark Syndrome, which is a belief among some elites that if they ruin the environment, it will not affect them because future scientists will be able to create a safe haven for them while leaving the masses to die. Though it is good for the masses to recommend that such elites be kept out of power, Harari presents no credible method for doing so. Although he understands well the price of the modern deal, it never occurs to him that people may someday decide en masse that the cost is not worthwhile. He also makes the bizarre claim that trust vanishes when essential functions such as courts and police are for sale, when the truth is that monopolies on such services cannot be trusted because they have no competition to incentivize them to serve the customer.
The seventh chapter explores the role of humanism in letting people have meaning along with power. Unfortunately, Harari seems unaware of rational secular ethical theories, which present objective morality without appeal to the supernatural. Unlike humanism, these take a dim view of extramarital affairs, homosexuality, and other deviances as affronts to natural law. He shows how modernity has turned art, economics, literature, and politics into degenerate forms by teaching people to trust in their own feelings, but of course he views this as progress. And though humanists have a more enlightened view of war, modernity has produced the most destructive wars in human history. Harari discusses the history of epistemology, but leaves out the entire category of rationalism and a priori truths. This becomes quite glaring in the ensuing section on political history, which details the splitting of humanism into liberalism, Marxism, and fascism. Even so, he comes to a correct conclusion that is all too rare in mainstream discussion:
“Auschwitz should serve as a blood-red warning sign rather than as a black curtain that hides entire sections of the human horizon. Evolutionary humanism played an important part in the shaping of modern culture, and it is likely to play an even greater role in the shaping of the twenty-first century.”
Harari’s telling of history from 1914 to present is mostly correct, though he views the transition from dictatorship to democracy and from mutual aid societies to welfare statism as an unqualified positive. While he sees the inadequacy of traditional religious thought and the ambiguity of modern Chinese political ideology, he again fails to contemplate either a secular reactionary or an anarcho-capitalist alternative to modern liberalism. That said, his advice to movements that would take power to familiarize themselves with the technology of the current age is well-heeded. The chapter concludes with an important question: what will happen to liberalism once technology can routinely outsmart the individual that liberalism venerates?
In the final part, Harari considers the implications of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. He makes a scientific case against free will and in favor of a combination of determinism and randomness, but this is an example of being empirical to the extent of anti-rationality. It does not occur to him that arguing for hard determinism ends in performative contradiction, and thus one must allow free will within a deterministic “bounding box,” so to speak. His argument against individuality fails because although the human essence can be divided into parts, they are still contained within a person’s physical body, which is what people generally mean by a self. However, the peak-end effect discussed here is an important observation in psychology. Harari then explores the meaning of life, along with the history of weaponizing the ability to give meaning to peoples’ lives for the purpose of political power.
The subtitle of the book is A Brief History of Tomorrow, and Harari finally gets to this in Chapter 9. He highlights three possibilities which may undo the status quo: that humans will no longer be of economic or military use, that humanity may retain value while individual humans lose it, and/or that upgraded superhumans will still have value but ordinary Homo sapiens will not. His predictions could have been lifted directly from Mencius Moldbug, though Harari never cites him. After showing at exhaustive length how computers and algorithms are systematically replacing human action and decisions, he posits what Moldbug calls the Dire Problem: that there will be masses of people with no function to fulfill but who drain resources by staying alive. Harari even considers a type of Virtual Option as a possible remedy. Democratic elections also fall by the wayside as algorithms come to know us better than we know ourselves, thus removing any need for the ballot box. Sufficiently powerful algorithms may become sovereign, just as neoreaction claims that good governance is self-legitimizing. Finally, the drastic inequality between Homo sapiens and Homo deus will reveal liberalism and modernity as aberrations rather than a Whiggish end stage. Harari writes,
“Unlike in the twentieth century, when the elite had a stake in fixing the problems of the poor because they were militarily and economically vital, in the twenty-first century the most efficient (albeit ruthless) strategy may be to let go of the useless third-class carriages, and dash forward with the first class only.”
The final two chapters consider two potential secular religions which may replace humanism as the dominant source of meaning in life: techno-humanism and data religion. Techno-humanism focuses on upgrading humans into a post-human form, while data religion (or dataism) calls for the replacement of humans with artificial beings. Harari contemplates the limited understanding of the human mind, in that we know about little other than a few subgroups of current humans, let alone former human species, let alone other animals. He also laments the lack of study on healthy minds rather than ill minds. He sees an important danger in techno-humanism: it may come to focus on downgrading the masses so that they lack the means to cause trouble for the elites. Harari then asks another interesting question:
“Techno-humanism expects our desires to choose which mental abilities to develop, and to thereby determine the shape of future minds. Yet what would happen once technological progress makes it possible to reshape and engineer our desires themselves?”
Thus techno-humanism either succumbs to dataism as Harari suggests, or as per George Zarkadakis, we rein in artificial intelligence so that it cannot overpower us. The former presents a novel method for interpreting the world, but the latter does not seem to cross Harari’s mind. For example, dataism views economic and political systems as different types of data processors, with the more efficient ones winning out over time. Dataists view this as the reason that capitalism defeats communism, rather than any human concerns. This also leads Harari to predict the disappearance of democracy once democracies become too inefficient at processing data. However, his view of market failure as the market doing what is good for itself rather than what is good for humanity or the world is confused because the market does not exist independently of humanity or the world. Next, Harari covers what he considers to be the tenants of Dataism, such as opposition to intellectual monopolies or any other barriers to the free flow of information, a strictly functional approach to humanity, and a need to turn human experiences into shareable data. He notices that ideologies and social systems tend to limit one’s ability to think of alternatives to those ideologies and social systems, but seems limited in doing the same for techno-humanism and dataism.
Though one must understand the past to predict the future, an overly large part of the book is devoted to the past. The narrow range of possibilities that Harari explores for humanity’s future keeps the book from being what it could have been, as does his lack of familiarity with secular reaction and neoreaction. Homo Deus is still an entertaining read with a great deal of useful information, but it showcases Harari’s intellectual weaknesses just as much as his strengths.
Rating: 3/5
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