All Powerful and Destructive Humans
We’re bad dudes but our children will save the animals because they’ve read Harari ?
Way back in the ‘before days’, circa 2019, I still trusted and admired certain public intellectuals. Yuvah Noah Harari was one of them; mostly because he consistently warned against the onslaught of algorithms and AI and appeared to be able to hold competing views on important issues like climate change in his mind. I used to read—and admire—this Israeli ‘historian of the present’ as he likes to call himself. His three books, all of them global bestsellers translated into numerous languages, are on my shelf. I bought Sapiens (2014) first, then Homo Deus (2015), and finally, 21 Lessons for the 21stCentury, (2018). I remember that I found Sapiens interesting, Homo Deus troubling, and I don’t recall how I reacted to the last book. But I was paying attention and was kind of mesmerized by his clipped speech patterns and his look of a Rabbinical scholar, or perhaps, a Mystic. I knew that he had some of the earmarks, such as daily morning and evening meditation, veganism, and yes, he also has a ‘husband’. In other words, he is perfectly aligned with the so called left ‘progressives’. But as we have discovered to our sorrow, they have gone off piste, into the Woke Wilderness, where I imagine them howling in perfect unison at the Moon. Okay. That was then.
Since the catastrophic Covid event, I have become a tad more suspicious in general and a whole lot more so of YNH. Because he has now committed the ultimate act of subtle propaganda by writing a children’s book.
That ‘sliver of ice at its heart’ the Guardian mentions in an otherwise glowing review of Homo Deus, his 2015 book about tomorrow, is now a whole iceberg of the mind, heading for us in the shape of the faux friendly Unstoppable Us How Humans Took Over The World. Help me figure out why one of world’s most successful public intellectuals whose books have been translated into 46 languages and sell in the millions would suddenly write two children’s books with a ton of free educational material available on a platform aimed at teachers to help disseminate what’s in those books.
This odd straying into children’s books reminded me that it was the Catholic Church who supposedly said this: give me a child before the age of six, and it is mine forever. So again, I am asking you, why would YNH, a serious self-described ‘historian of the present’ stray into writing for children? Is he perhaps taking a page out the Church’s playbook?
The only way to answer that burning question is to go and buy the book. Which I did. At Amazon, already discounting it. And this is my reaction.
If you want your kid to grow up disliking religion though well informed on something called animism, convinced that people are bad but powerful in groups, that farming is poor way to stay alive and that stone age people were mainly gatherers, not hunters, and that furthermore, the only way to save the animals today from extinction is to become an animal activist, then you should buy it and read it with your kids. It’s actually two books, but after plowing through the first volume, I have lost my appetite for the second one entirely. Don’t get me wrong: it’s well written and has cozy illustrations galore. Oh, and it’s full of ham fisted as well as subtle messages, with handy highlighting of important sentences, such as this:
Eagles fly because they have wings. Humans fly because they know how to cooperate in large numbers. This is what makes us so powerful.
That is so fascinating; according to this version of history, it wasn’t a few brilliant individuals that figured out how give humanity wings; no, it was ‘large groups cooperating’. Sounds suspiciously Marxist to me, but then I am someone who believes in the power of creative individuals, who may or may not, be part of ‘large groups’, to advance humanity. I am, alas, biased in this regard. But wait, there’s more!
Here is a passage that explains the human family, YNH style:
What did family mean? Did it man a man and a woman living together their entire lives and raising only their own children? The truth is, we don’t know for sure. Today there are many kinds of families in the world—just look at your class. Does everybody live with their mother and father? Probably not. Nowadays, some people have one partner for their entire life, some have many partners, and some remain single. In a few countries, one man can be married to several women at the same time. In other countries, two women can get married to each other, and so can two men.
This is a subtle nudge towards a world where there are no norms at all; every type of family organization is equal to any other, and the ‘family’ could be anything, as indeed he concludes at the end: There are so many options!
Harari then shows us the various family ‘options’ that exist among our closest relatives, the apes and chimps, and oddly, there is a bit of a nudge towards living in a commune where everyone takes care of the kids and teaches them. It seems like a lovely way to live as the chimpanzees do though you could argue that the mother does most of the hard work of raising the baby. The implied superiority of the ‘commune’ might make you wonder if Mr H is a bit pink, maybe a communist light. That the family as we have understood it for most of human evolution is somehow suspect and maybe not the best way to raise children. I would never entertain such subversive thoughts, of course not. LOL.
Even an adult might be taken in by this type of subtle propaganda, and certainly, children will be. That it is a highly distorted mirror of reality is hard to see because YNH gets most of the historical facts right. So, it gets trickly to spot where, in his friendly, almost folksy manner, he leads the reader into the propaganda weeds. One of the purchase reviews from a Canadian mentions that the book is full of strange assertions but still, pretty good!
Here is another one, about our other ‘superpower’ which is, telling stories. According to YNH, the French Revolution happened because the people stopped believing in the story of the holy oil used to anoint the King. They saw that it was just a ‘story’, and that was the end of the monarchy. Hmm. I would have to re-read the history of that revolution and do a quick fact check, but it seems to me that there was a bit more going on. But YNH is the historian here, so maybe I am just misinformed. Misinformation is such a serious issue in our time!
Though I am sure that listening and reading YNH isn’t aiding in my recovery from the flu, I recently found myself watching a YouTube interview conducted by a Mr Brenner with Y N Harari, he’s making the rounds, promoting the book as he should.
He is truly a zealot for ‘good’. One of those people who are convinced that they have the answers—the solutions--we are all desperate for in a world that appears to be sliding towards chaos. We have been warned by Mr H and his fellow doomsayers for some time now, and it’s sinking in. We’re in danger; we must change our lives.
Thomas Sewell’s memorable comment that ‘there are no solutions; only tradeoffs’ is not getting the attention it deserves. It’s perhaps more difficult to put into a children’s book. Mr H has clearly done his research on when education begins. Among the reviews of the book, there were plenty of entranced parents reading to their children who were too young yet to read it for themselves. Kind of like reading the Bible to kids at bedtime, right? Except that the Bible doesn’t tell us we’re supermen; it tells us to be humble and love our neighbours. Whereas YNH tells our children to be arrogant, full of hubris and to save the animals from us, the powerful, but not very nice, humans, via aggressive activism. Maybe it’s time to return to The Book. And leave that other one at an Amazon warehouse.
Again a great commentary, dear Monika! It seems that animal activists are pretty dangerous; there is, e.g., the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who votes for extinction of handcapped children even if they have been already been born, but fights for the unrestricted life of animals to exist. Orwell has foreseen all this totalitarian way of thinking, but being still an optimist, I am convinced that such a dystopian world willl not be able to exist for long.