The
next two books in my current reading list are bestsellers – by Yuval Harari
A
dislike of marketing hype makes me suspicious of best-sellers such as his earlier
Sapiens
– a brief history of mankind (2014) but “she who must be obeyed” persuaded
me to persevere - and I must confess that “Homo Deus” is very well written..
LRB
had a very useful
summary of it a few years ago
Once upon a
time, we accepted three score years and ten as our divinely allotted lifespan;
we reckoned there wasn’t much we could do to prevent or counter epidemic
disease; we looked on dearth and famine as bad hands dealt by fate or divine
judgment; we considered war to be in the nature of things; and we believed that
personal happiness was a matter of fortune. Now, Harari says, these problems
have all been reconfigured as managerial projects, subject to political will
but not limited by the insufficiencies of our knowledge or technique. We have
become the masters of our own fate – and ‘fate’ itself should be reconceived as
an agenda for further research and intervention. That is what it means to refer
to the world era in which we live as the Anthropocene: one biological species, Homo
sapiens, has become a major agent in shaping the natural circumstances of its
own existence. The gods once made sport of us; the future will ‘upgrade humans
into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus’.
The review then
usefully puts the book in context by looking at how histories have generally
been written…
Providential
history – invoking God’s plans for human affairs – had lost its academic
authority in the 18th century, displaced in the 19th and early 20th
centuries by secular schemas: progressivist Whig interpretations of history;
Auguste Comte’s law of three successive stages in human history (the
‘theological’ giving way to the ‘metaphysical’ and then to the ‘positive’ or
‘scientific’ stage); the narratives of the march of civilisation from myth to
science offered by such anthropologists as E.B. Tylor, L.H. Morgan
and J.G. Frazer; the determining force of class conflict in Marxism;
the environmental ‘challenge and response’ theories of writers from Montesquieu
and Malthus to Arnold Toynbee; the selection pressures identified by Social
Darwinisms.
The title of
Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) is
today commonly used as shorthand to warn against histories that presume
inevitable progress, but the book was, fundamentally, a freewheeling
condemnation of what Butterfield called ‘general history’ – any attempt to
reduce change to the workings of a definable ‘historical process’.
It is different
nowadays when science and technology – innovations emerging from the minds of a
visionary technical elite – write the script. No social history ‘from below’
for him: ‘History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators
rather than by the backward-looking masses.’
The revolutions
of the last two hundred years in the treatment of pathogenic bacteria and the
production of antiviral vaccines have made death from infectious disease far
less common, and Harari assures us that ‘medicine in 2050 will likely be able
to deal with’ new bugs ‘more efficiently’ than it does today.
If we fail to
cope with new strains of flu or with multiply resistant microbes, it won’t be
because the threat is insurmountable or our science inadequate but because of a
failure of political will or the proper mobilisation of resources. We can look
forward with confidence to continued increases in human longevity: ‘In the 20th century
we have almost doubled life expectancy from 40 to 70, so in the 21st century
we should at least be able to double it again to 150.’….
Climate change,
environmental collapse and the renewed threat of nuclear war do get a mention –
on global warming, ‘we shall have to do better’; on ecological disaster, ‘we
could lessen the danger by slowing the pace of progress and growth’; nuclear
weapons have compelled the superpowers ‘to find alternative and peaceful ways
to resolve conflicts’ – but Harari focuses fears for the future not so much on
species annihilation as on species transformation.
Here too
science and technology drive the future. Homo sapiens may cease to
be, not because Earth will become uninhabitable or because Donald Trump or Kim
Jong-un will push the button, but because we will become new kinds of beings:
our bodies, minds and relationships with the environment and with mechanical
devices will be altered in fundamental ways…..
Harari here
enthusiastically repeats the lessons taught by Victorian scientific
materialism. Religious legend notwithstanding, we are nothing special in the
animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul; there is no essential human ‘self’;
our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which
can, in principle, be modelled by the formal problem-solving rules we call
algorithms; our bodily frames and mental capacities have evolved over time and
there is nothing fixed in our ‘nature’. The only thing that can be predicted
with certainty about human nature is that it will change. Harari’s prediction
is that we will become more god-like as we become more machine-like and as
machines’ capacities become more god-like. Humanity’s future is in the hands of
technical experts – in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cognitive and
computer science…..
The current
version of Homo sapiens will become surplus to economic and military
requirements. War will be waged by drones and work will be done by robots:
‘Some economists predict that sooner or later, unenhanced humans will be
completely useless.’ Algorithms embedded in silicon and metal will replace
algorithms embedded in flesh, which, Harari reminds us, is what biology and
computer science tell us is all we really are anyway…..
We will no
longer be able to sustain belief in the unique, free-acting, free-judging
individual as the basis of liberal social order: ‘We – or our heirs – will
probably require a brand-new package of religious beliefs and political institutions.’
The new
religion will be called Dataism. The boundaries between animals, machines and
social systems will dissolve: all these will come to be seen as algorithmic
information-processing systems. The notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ will be
superseded by the unchallenged virtue of the flow of information….
Wealth will be
concentrated in the hands of the ‘tiny elite that owns the all-powerful
algorithms’. Some of us will then be as gods: members of a new species, Homo
deus, ‘a new elite of upgraded superhumans’ clever enough, and rich enough, to
control for a time the knowledge that controls the rest of humankind, and to
command the resources needed to transform themselves through intellectual tools
and biologic prostheses. ‘In the long run, we are all dead,’ Keynes said. If
some of the wilder ambitions of anti-ageing prophets are realised, the dictum
will need to be reformulated: ‘In the long run, most of us will be dead.’…
I had read the
first 50 pages of “Homo Deus” but, by this stage, I reckoned that this and a
couple of other reviews had told me all I needed to know about the book. I was
eager to see what his
”21 Lessons for the 21st
Century” (2018) held
for me….
From the
realisation that it consist of a lot of op-eds and answers to his fan-club
mail, I’m not holding my breath! A contrarian article and a "digested read" tend to confirm my prejudice....
Other Assessments of Harari
A recent profile of Harari in The New Yorker
revealed
that a team of eight people supports him in his various speaking and writing endeavours. Doesn’t
that risk “groupthink”???
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/24/homo-deus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review
from the David Runciman whose book my last post lavished praise on…..
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