Harari makes a simplifying assumption to help clarify his analysis: ideologies are religions. This enables him to tie the present and the future to the past with more narrative ease. Harari does not go so far as to mischaracterise science as religion but instead discusses how it is able to ally itself with different ideologies, including religion. Harari is able to claim ideologies as religions by viewing them both through the function that they serve in society. He also makes a clear distinction between religion and spirituality, and so divorced from its connection to the individual and viewed trough the lens of its societal impact, the parallels between religion and ideology are apparent. However religions are not generally so narrowly understood as Harari defines them, and calling ideologies religions implies a whole host of historical accoutrements that are simply not present. It might be more accurate to understand religions as ideologies, or rather more elaborate structures built on top of ideologies. It might also be an interesting topic to look at how the ideologies underneath various religions have changed throughout history while the structure remained (after all today many who are religious possess modern ideologies such as liberal humanism underlying their world views while still practising and adhering to various traditions), but that is an aside. Despite these issues, it is possible to accept Harari’s simplification given his qualifying statements. Doing so allows Harari to make some interesting connections.
One particularly insightful observation of Harari’s is the parallelism of intersubjective realities between past and present. Intersubjective reality refers to the world of shared fictions accepted by a society. Harari identifies money as the most widely believed of these such fictions. Money is of course a fiction, it has value only so far as we all agree it does, yet it is very real, its presence or absence is felt on our daily lives. For Harari, intersubjective realities are what make large-scale human cooperation possible, and are therefore responsible for the dominance of Homo sapiens over the planet. The presence or absence of intersubjective realities in analysis also serves to distinguish the humanities from the life sciences (Harari, 2015a).
The thrust of Harari's argument is that these intersubjective realities are responsible for the course of human history and that they will also shape our future. Harari maintains that most wars have been fought for religious/ideological reasons and not purely economic ones (Harari, 2017). Harari's position is that human history is defined by what people believe rather than by material circumstances (although doubtless these play a role in beliefs).
For ancient Egyptians gods and pharaohs occupied intersubjective reality. Harari explains how many fictional gods were in fact very real in their time as these gods became the brand names for the large-scale organisation that was concerned with massive building works, the assignment of roles and responsibilities and the collection and distribution of grain (Harari, 2015a). While we might object that this was not done by the gods but by the government of the time, all we do in so saying is substitute one term in intersubjective reality for another (a term that would not have been used by the Egyptians of the time at that). Governments don't exist in a real sense any more than gods do, it's the people who exist. For Harari, a key determinant of whether something exists in objective reality as opposed to intersubjective reality is whether it can truly suffer (Harari, 2015b) - sentience becomes the barrier to the real.
Harari draws a parallel between ancient gods and modern day brands and corporations and even nation states. We dismiss ancient gods as obvious fictions yet we talk about the USA, Google and Amazon as if they were independent agents. We can see how it is not so much that old gods were not real, they were very real, but they are quite definitively dead in our time, so that imagining them as ever having any power is quite difficult.
Such a description of the state of things should give us pause because despite intersubjective realities being fictions, we give them power and they in turn wield power over us. The future of the planet is overwhelmingly in the hands of intersubjective realities; governments and corporations which it seems no individuals are able to make large impacts upon.
Harari identifies humanism as the religion of the 20th century, which then split into three branches: liberal humanism, social humanism, and evolutionary humanism, most visibly embodied in the twentieth century by liberalism, communism, and Nazism. According to Harari, the core premise of humanism is that Homo sapiens has some unique and sacred essence that is the source of all meaning and authority in the universe. Whereas liberal humanism looks to the individual for that essence, social humanism sees it as existing only within the social group (Harari, 2015a).
Now advances in the life sciences and in computing have undercut the core premise of liberal humanism, and as it was early in the twentieth century, social and evolutionary humanism seem to be advancing on it (Harari, 2015b). As argued by N. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman, the decline of the liberal (male) subject is not so lamentable in and of itself, but the question turns to what is taking its place and whether important aspects are being lost in the process (Hayles, 1999). Liberal humanism is premised on the concept of a true self, yet developments in the life sciences make this assertion seem untenable (Harari, 2015a). But as Harari points out, this is not so much a conclusion reached by the life sciences as it is a premise that has been taken and subsequently met with much success (Harari, 2015b).
In the posthuman era Harari sees the emergence of two new religions challenging liberal humanism for supremacy which he terms techno-humanism and dataism. Harari dismisses the challenges posed by religious fundamentalists on all sides because he sees them as having nothing to say about the modern world. Harari notes that the future is not made by the majority, but by the coordinated actions of forward-thinking individuals, citing how the industrial revolution grew and remade the world (Harari, 2017). The same principle applies to the world's dominant religions in the past, but they no longer function in any innovative capacity (Harari, 2015b).
Techno-humanism is an updated evolutionary humanism that seeks to upgrade humans using the advances of genetics, computing and robotics (Harari, 2015a). I see techno-humanism as essentially trans-humanism, or as many of its advocates may prefer it to be known extropianism. Harari points out a danger of this approach being that more may be lost than gained, as we choose to value certain human qualities at the expense of others according to the values of a given social system. Just as our relationship with modern technology has dampened our abilities to pay attention and to dream, further techno-integration may be expected to come at the expense of many other human faculties. Harari also notes an inherent contradiction in techno-humanism; it values human will but also advocates for the ability to subvert that will (Harari, 2015a).
I share Harari's concerns about techno-humanism. In it there is all of the hubris exhibited by the early evolutionary humanists; that we know best what we should be and that we can adequately anticipate the consequences of changing ourselves. There is no heeding of Orgel's second rule, which states simply that "Evolution is cleverer than you are". Further techno-humanism would lead inevitably to massive stratification within human society, as the ideological emphasis on perfecting or bettering humans, in valuing certain human outcomes, also values certain individuals and groups much more than others. My own impressions are also that techno-humanist values tend to be nakedly self-interested, with calls for enhanced intelligence, physical ability, and prolonged or indefinite youth being common while talk of enhanced empathy or enhanced sentience - a deeper sense of feeling or connection to the material world - is completely absent. Techno-humanism seeks to "upgrade" humans in order to keep up with machines but fails to answer what is valuable about humans that is worth keeping around alongside such advanced machines.
For Harari, dataism is a religion which determines the value of any phenomenon or entity according to its contribution to data processing. Harari credits dataism with being the first movement since 1789 to create a novel value - the freedom of information (Harari, 2015a). "As the global data-processing system becomes all-knowing and all-powerful, so connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning... What's the point of doing or experiencing anything if nobody knows about it, and if it doesn't contribute something to the global exchange of information?" (Harari, 2015a, p. 286) For dataists, there is no barrier between animals and machines, and once humans become impediments to data flow, they should get out of the way and 'pass the torch'.
There is a certain implicit dataism in the behaviour of many social media addicts today, so that while its core values may only be vocalised by a minority, many more have already internalised its values. The obsession to share all experiences, the search for approval in the form of likes, and uncritical bandwagoning endemic to our time are all very dataist. Dataism is a deeply strange and deeply disturbing worldview. The reification of information is not a revelation of an objective truth but rather a shift in perspective arising out of historical circumstance (Hayles, 1999). We may well ask 'what is the value of the global exchange of information except as it exists in the minds of individuals?'. Dataism has no place for the human, as it views humans as merely instantiations of information that could well be instantiated elsewhere. It is very sad indeed that such an impoverished view of what it means to be human has so gripped the imaginations of so many.
Between dataism, techno-humanism, and outdated liberal humanism, Harari sees no alternatives on the horizon and offers no possible avenues to pursue. In so characterising our present course, I believe Harari hopes to spur others to begin envisioning alternative ideas, new narratives for humanity, even if he is at present unable to articulate one himself. I believe there are seeds for a better vision for humans in Hayle's writing (Hayles, 1999) with an emphasis on the importance of embodiment. Harari echoes this view himself in a subtle way with his own criteria for the real hinging on the property of sentience. As we extend our sense perceptions further and further with electric technology, projecting ourselves across dispassionate networks, algorithms and databases, we get out of touch with ourselves. We seem to have lost any idea of what is good about being human, something that is now desperately needed.
References
McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media. London: Routledge & K. Paul.
Harari, Y. N.
(2015a) Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Harvill Secker.
(2015b) Techno-Religions and Silicon Prophets [Lecture], Talks at Google. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6BK5Q_Dblo (Accessed: 27 August 2018).
(2017) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind [Lecture]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgeyUd_piiU&t=106s (Accessed: 27 August 2018).
Hayles, N. K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. London: The University of Chicago Press, Ltd.
