Contra Harari: Analyzing "Sapiens" on Religion

There's a women's book club book out there, recommended by Bill Gates and others, that gives us the human story so far.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind by Israeli prof Yuval Noah Harari is, as you might expect if Gates likes it, carefully located within the Overton Window of acceptable thought. As in: science good, Nazis bad, European imperialism bad, capitalism questionable.

The book was published in 2015 before wokiness became a global problem, so it doesn't really deal with the critical theory problem and the current ferocious ideological campaign that represents the ordinary middle class as the worst racist sexist homophobes ever.

To introduce the agricultural age Harari presents the colorful idea  that humans did not domesticate wheat; wheat domesticated humans. In the good old days of hunter-gathering humans didn't work much. They hunted, they gathered, and everyone lived happily ever after. But wheat is a demanding master. 

The ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, human in various parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants.

Wheat takes a lot of looking after, including clearing rocks and pebbles, weeding other plants, keeping the rabbits off: you name it. And, of course, you needed warrior lords to protect your grain stores and they don't come cheap. But the Earth could support a lot more human farmers than human hunter-gatherers.

But the larger communities of the agricultural age needed a change in religion. 

Stories about ancestral spirits and tribal totems were strong enough to enable 500 people to trade seashells, celebrate the odd festival, and join forces to wipe out a Neanderthal band, but no more than that.

So what humans came up with is an "imagined order," a religion or ideology, a shared belief system so "large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively." In other words, religions like "Christianity, democracy, or capitalism" are an imagined order imposed on the human community and insist "that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature." And "you also educate people thoroughly" in the imagined order.

But suppose you want to change things: revolution baby! Then you have a big task.

In order to change the imagined order I must convince millions of strangers to cooperate with me. For the imagined order is not a subjective order existing in my own imagination -- it is rather an inter-subjective order, existing in the shared imagination of thousands and millions of people.

You can see what our wokie friends are up to. They want to change the imagined order. They want to change the shared imagination of America. Of course, they do not want to do it by persuasion. Canceling and struggle sessions are more their style.

In fact this has always been the agenda of the left. They don't like our current imagined order of Christianity and the market economy. They want to change it, and they will turn the world upside down trying.

But Harari sees a different religious landscape. He sees three versions of "humanism" competing to create an imagined order in which "the supreme good is the good of humanity," thus:

Liberal humanism. "Humanity" is individualistic and resides within each individual Homo sapiens.

Socialist humanism. "Humanity"is collective and resides within the species Homo sapiens as a whole.

Evolutionary humanism. "Humanity is a mutable species.Humans might degenerate into subhumans or evolve into superhumans.

The "evolutionary humanism" is the Nazi one. Just so you knew.

Yes, but I'd say that that what unites these three humanisms is that they presume that humans have the ability and the opportunity to create a new man. And this fits into my reductive Three Peoples notion that the Subordinates have a god that orders them around, the Responsibles have a god that sets out a divine law for them to follow as responsible humans, and that the Creatives get to create their own world and law.

So, while the humans in the world come in three flavors (which Harari admits in his analysis of Hammurabi's code, with its superiors, commoners, and slaves) the only religion that counts for him is a religion that appeals to the creative types.

And that, in my opinion, is humanity's Big Problem right now. Its educated gentry cannot conceive of anything outside its own walled garden of creativity, cannot understand that other people don't want creative types creating wonderful new worlds for them that look to the outsider like oppressive hells.

See, I think that the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that there is a world outside your own little walled garden and that what works for you may not work for others.