I typically find @EzraKlein and the merry band of policy wonks at The Weeds to be insufferably smug. But listening to Ezra’s interview with historian Yuval Noah Harari (it’s the March 27 episode, for those interested), something tweaked my interest. Harari’s book, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” has been on my to-read list for a while, but when I skimmed the first few pages in the bookstore, its out-of-date account of human evolutionary history put me off for a book supposedly about the history of our species. 

Having finally read the book a few weeks back, I have to say I misjudged it. Harari has hit on some very powerful insights, insights shared with my own work, “Politics for the New Dark Age”. Now I also echo the critiques made by some of Harari’s reviewers that his treatment of topics outside his field of expertise is flippant and sometimes wrong; some of his sources seem about ten years out of date; and the second half of the book runs off the rails to become an unfortunate exercise in futurism. Based on Klein’s interview, Harari seems a genuinely weird dude, but (like the similarly strange Nassim Nicholas Taleb) madness seems to be required in project like this. So here are my takeaways: what’s worth knowing from “Sapiens”, by Yuval Noah Harari.

Myths and Stories

Chapter 3 of “Politics for the New Dark Age” constructs an argument that institutions allow large-scale human societies to overcome collective action problems. Institutions, norms, rules and laws allow individuals to trust in the predictability of the behaviour of strangers, provided their fellow citizens are also bound by the names rules and norms. Harari’s argument is fundamentally the same: he believes the ‘cognitive revolution’ which separated us from our Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins was our capacity to tell stories and myths which construct an imagined order. Harari goes on to argue that myths and stories are expressed not only in art and culture, but in norms and institutions. Philosophy, religion, and secular law emerge and evolve because they are more or less effective in generating and sustaining large-scale human cooperation.

Harari’s discussion of money (Chapter 10, in his book) makes this point powerfully. My own book discusses the essentially arbitrary value of money but does not connect that to the earlier discussion of trust in abstract rules and norms. That is an oversight. For as Harari points out, trust in the value of money (an essentially worthless commodity in its own right) is the quintessential example of how social institutions unlock human cooperation. Exchange based on money replaced the need for everyone to know the reputation of everyone else. Notably, this revolution took place thousands of years before Adam Smith and the Bank of England. Rather than an individual having to know the value of hundreds of potential exchange goods, and trust in their trading partner doing the same, they only need to know the value of a shared, arbitrary medium of exchange whose value is consistent across society and ultimately backed by the power of the state. Socialists and neoliberals can argue about whether the value of money reflects fair exchange or underlying social power, but the fact that the value of money is at its core abstract should inform both perspectives.

And how are these myths created and maintained? Harari is close to a description of cultural evolution: he identifies the mechanisms and the academic fields that are informing the emerging evolutionary paradigm in the social sciences, but I think his sources didn’t bring it all together for him. He correctly points out that cultures are never fixed, and he shares with Machiavelli, Heraclitus and myself the view that the ‘contradictions’ in a given culture are the engines of its progress (at pgs 181-184). He notes that the evolution of cultural norms does not necessarily have to lead to increases in human happiness, but is circumspect about what does drive it. He leaves the question hanging: one could argue, as some of his reviewers have, that Harari believes that our symbolic culture is unmoored from structural constraints and evolves arbitrarily in the drift of history or at the whims of the powerful. But near the end, he correctly identifies the elements of a wholistic theory: cultural evolution, social constructivism (anachronistically labelled post-modernism), and game theory.

Harari espouses Dawkins-esque views that cultural beliefs are merely parasites on our cognitive capabilities and that both modernism and post-modernism are a scourge on civilization. But a writer who was less pessimistic about the benefits of progress (like myself), could just as easily argue that stories and myths are what makes advanced, cooperative societies possible.

Evolutionary Philosophy

Harari describes modern liberalism as being functionally similar to a religion, in terms of its capacity to organise large-scale societies. This is controversial point, but one I agree with. He goes on to provide a typology of humanist (Western) philosophies: liberal, socialist and ‘evolutionary’. Harari is a little obsessed with the contradictions between liberty and equality, so it’s understandable that he would see liberalism and socialism as distinct. Whether one accepts that view, or as I do in “Politics for the New Dark Age”, argue that they are merely different strands of a shared Western liberal philosophical tradition, it matters little. What’s interesting to me is Harari’s identification of a distinct ‘evolutionary’ school of Western philosophy. His own treatment of the subject is unfortunately very poor. He essentially treats evolutionary philosophy as undifferentiated from social Darwinism and therefore Nazism.

While traditional liberalisms and democtratic socialisms are predicated on methodological individualism, an emerging evolutionary paradigm instead argues that both liberalism and socialism could be alternatively constructed in an evolutionary framework which treats society as a whole as the primary unit of analysis. Instead of the (imaginary) social contract, Darwinian evolution predicated on mutation, selection and reproduction would constitute society’s explanatory myth or story. But Harari’s caricature of evolution as ‘survival of the fittest’ (the idea that evolution rewards selfishness and punishes selfless altruists) is out of date with  current developments. During the 20th century, right-wing ideas permeated and legitimised such cynical arguments in the biological sciences just as biological analogies were in turn abused to justify right-wing claims in the social sphere. Fortunately, what we now know from mathematical biology and multilevel selection that altruism and cooperation can be evolutionarily successful strategies and even come to dominate cultural ecosystems. Harari’s own history of humanity's expanding circle of cooperation proves this point, even if he does not make the connection himself.

For those interested, the Evolution Institute has a series of papers available online which seeks to provide “Truth and Reconciliation” for Darwinism in the social sciences: they’re an interesting read even if some of the authors sometimes skirt a little too close to dangerous views for my tastes. But the point is not that evolutionary philosophy is immune to racism and sexism, but that neither are liberalism or socialism. Regardless of the types of stories we construct about our societies, we have to deal with those other aspects of our species’ mental toolkit that uses minor and superficial differences to legitimise social hierarchies.