The Imagined Humanism of Yuval Noah Harari

A review of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), by Yuval Noah Harari.

In the film 12 Monkeys, Bruce Willis plays a prisoner who travels back in time to gather information about the outbreak of a virus that has since decimated the human population. In doing so, however, he (spoiler alert!) inadvertently sets off the very chain of events that leads to that horrific outcome.

In his 2016 book Homo Deus, Israeli historian Yuval Harari finds himself on a similarly tragic quest.

While Harari’s first book Sapiens (2014) presented a sweeping and thrilling account of the history of the human species, Homo Deus promises nothing short of a brief history of our future. The sheer scope of his work across both books is impressive — he rides roughshod over traditional academic boundaries to draw out many genuine insights across the fields of biology, history, anthropology and psychology.

Permeating both books is Harari’s keen interest in the grand ideologies that have shaped human lives, with a particular focus on ‘liberal humanism,’ which he considers currently to be the most dominant in the developed world. Perhaps the most interesting and contentious claim in Homo Deus is that this philosophical outlook is doomed to collapse, as its key premises are being eroded by the findings of modern science.

The irony is that it is actually the fallacious arguments Harari puts forward themselves that, if taken seriously, fatally undermine the core…