Book Response: “Sapiens”, by Yuval Noah Harari (the takeaways)

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of Humankind” has been on my to-read list for a while, but when I skimmed the first few pages in the bookstore, its out-of-date account of human evolutionary history put me off for a book supposedly about the history of our species.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of topics outside his field of expertise is flippant and sometimes wrong; some of his sources seem about ten years out of date; and the second half of the book runs off the rails to become an unfortunate exercise in futurism.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.

Book Response: “Moral Tribes” by Joshua Greene

The central conceit of Politics for the New Dark Age is the rejection of a universal understanding of human nature. I posit that societies exist in evolutionary stable equilibria consisting of a mix of different personalities and preferences, and that politics can largely be understood as a social mechanism that generates dynamism and new knowledge from the conflict between them. The rejection of universal rationality makes some uncomfortable; nowadays, I tend to point people with concerns towards Joshua Greene’s “Moral Tribes”, and Johnathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind”, both of which do a great job of introducing these concepts to a general audience.

This particular blog entry will provide a brief overview and response to Greene’s “Moral Tribes”; my criticisms of Haidt will be interwoven into other blog entries. Most readers should be familiar with Garret Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons”, an economic parable that describes the dilemma facing hypothetical farmers trying to manage common land without being exploited by one another. The neoclassical economic response is to divide the land into private property, and thus causing the society of farmers to cease to exist. But Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 by showing that the tragedy was avoidable and that societies have opportunities to cooperatively manage public goods. This is the position taken in Politics, and it is one shared by Greene.

Greene, however, goes on to introduce a new tragedy: “The Tragedy of Common Sense Morality”. Different groups of people will arrive at different cultural and governmental solutions to the tragedy of the commons, either by chance, as a result of their particular history, or in response to their ecosystem. Either way, each group’s solution will appear as ‘common sense’ to members of that group, and irrational or even immoral to members of other groups. The Tragedy of Common Sense Morality arises when different groups are brought together to form a single society and therefore disagree among themselves about how public goods should be managed.

So far, so good. I endorse Greene’s analogy as a way to introduce people to these concepts. But I part ways with Greene when he devotes the second part of his book to setting out a philosophical solution to this second tragedy he has discovered. Greene is a utilitarian, and it’s thus unsurprising that his conclusion is that utilitarianism is the philosophical system best suited to provide a ‘metamorality’ for diverse societies. Anyone who reads Politics knows I am highly critical of utilitarianism, which I consider the philosophy of would-be autocrats. In fact, an early working title for the book was “Against Utilitarianism”.

Politics begins with an epigraph, attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, that ‘Justice is Strife’. What that means is that morality is generated though the dynamic conflict of opposites: diversity keeps extremes in check and also generates new thoughts, beliefs and practices. Greene criticises this Kantian strand of the Western philosophical tradition, which seeks progress as the result of the conflict of ideas, and much prefers the static hyper-rationality of Bentham and Mill. As a good socialist, my own outlook is closer to Marx and Kant, informed by the new fields of mathematical biology, game theory and evolutionary political science that are putting the cultural dialectical process on a firm scientific foundation. Societies are not unmoving, reason does not lead to utopia, and social circumstances change over time.

Greene describes himself first-and-foremost as a ‘trolleyologist’: a psychologist dedicated to studying, in experimental settings, people’s decision-making in the context of the Trolley Problem. Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes on Facebook over the last decade will be familiar with the Trolley Problem’s central conceit: a runaway tram is going to hit a certain number of innocent victims if it isn’t stopped. An agent (the experimental participant) has an option to take an action that may save those people, but will predictably have negative consequences, usually involving the deaths of other innocent people. By making a series of modifications to the problem, a ‘trolleyologist’ like Greene can probe the drivers of his subjects’ moral decision-making.

Greene concludes that utilitarian decision-making, predicated on the equal value of all human lives, is the correct or ‘moral’ solution to the Trolley Problem. Like many others working in the area, he draws on (another Nobel Prize in Economics winner) Daniel Kahneman’s work showing that humans have [at least] two modes of thinking: ‘System 1’, which is fast and instinctive, and ‘System 2’ which is slower, more energy intensive and deliberative. Again, this is uncontroversial. Evolutionary theory would expect that all human beings would come 'pre-loaded' with some neural machinery adapted or co-opted for rapid moral problem-solving in groups. My own book, Politics, is in fact predicated on other research showing that this moral machinery shows variation across individuals and that this neural diversity is the source of political conflict in society.

Greene errs, however, when he argues that since System 2 thinking represents a ‘higher’ or more evolved form of consciousness and, in his view, reproduces the key philosophical tenets of Bentham and Mill, utilitarianism is thus the superior moral system. But none of the logical precepts of utilitarianism are necessarily true for all people. Putting the good of the many above the good of the one may be the instinctive response for some, and evaluating the moral consequences of taking an individual’s life may require more deliberative thinking for others. You’d have to look at their reaction times to find out.

The serious flaw of the Trolley Problem, when employed as a utilitarian parable, is that the experimental design disguises a number of immense philosophical assumptions. Not least, that all human lives are instinctively valued equally by all people. How would people react in the real world to the Trolley Problem if the potential victims were of a different race or religion? What if the one potential victim was a member of an authority group, such as a police officer? How about sacrificing a friendly soldier for the soldiers of an enemy state? What would happen if people were given information (or just superficial signals) about the economic role of the victims?

Rather than judging moral behaviour by the standard of an abstract philosophical system, and finding our ‘System 1’ instincts lacking, the better view is to see instinctive emotional responses as ‘meta-rational’ in the context of human evolution. That is, they deliver decision-making that has been proven effective in the real, material context of thousands of human generations. System 2 thinking is adaptive too, of course: we clearly need to resolve conflicts between our moral instincts and those of other people in the context of complex, diverse societies. But it would be ahistorical to see our instincts as inherently maladaptive. Building bigger and better societies based on sometimes abstract and inscrutable norms is what we humans do.

Our mental machinery did not evolve by accident. All of us have innate moral and ideological beliefs because those beliefs provide efficient solutions to the sorts of complex social decision-making that we as a species are most likely to confront. Moreover, it’s highly likely that Darwinian selection would favour a mixed evolutionary strategy, where different moral machineries are maintained in equilibria proportions, to provide a society with behaviourial flexibility in response to unpredictable environmental circumstances. In other words, and contrary to Greene's parable, the natural variation within social and cultural groups is likely to be greater than the variation between them.

It is clear to me that such a dynamic system is potentially wiser and more just than utilitarian reasoning where the ends produced always justify the means. That belief, I would argue, has produced more injustice and tyranny in the world than democratic systems in which decision-making is contested and extreme outcomes are kept in check by countervailing forces. Overriding our base instincts can lead people to commit acts they would otherwise find monstrous: in fact many social constructs and rituals (not least modern military culture) exist for this very purpose. Even as applied to the Tragedy of Common Sense Morality, people’s [culturally conditioned] views on the legitimacy of a decision-making framework are more likely to influence their net happiness than measuring the outcomes in terms of some common currency. 

Greene is particularly critical of the role rights place in liberal philosophy, a position that readers will know is at odds with the position I take in Chapters 5-8 of Politics. Since rights serve to trump utilitarian arguments about the net consequences of decision-making, Greene sees their invocation as abhorrent to the purely rational solution to the tragedy of common sense morality. While he exults System 2 thinking when it leads to utilitarian outcomes, he dismisses reasoned arguments in support of rights as the mere ‘rationalisation’ of moral instincts (a view Haidt also shares).

Greene is correct when he states that rights are both a shield to defend individuals against oppression and a sword with which to oppress others. But if we see ourselves engaged in perpetual ideological conflict with competing and mutant beliefs, then why unilaterally disarm? Over the last several centuries and after much conflict, the liberal world has largely settled on a list of universal human rights with immense utility both for governing our own societies and converting other societies into ones that look more like ours. There’s still details to be worked out, political and judicial disputes about the proper scope of universal rights. But the liberal framework means that conflict takes place within set boundaries that are to the shared advantage of all the participants.

In summary, then, while I’d highly recommend Greene’s book, I would caution readers to approach his philosophical claims about utilitarianism with a note of scepticism. Greene is a scientist and an experimenter, and his research should be taken seriously. But he is also a human being, endowed with innate decision-making preferences, and no less seeking to rationalise than any other philosopher.