Yuval Noah Harari is a brilliant historian teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His 2015 bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, was greeted with positive reviews by Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and other luminaries. Among other critics, the judgment was more nuanced. Peter Forbes in the Independent found Sapiens “eloquent and humane,” “brave and bracing,” while also noting that the book was as much philosophical meditation as historical research. Tom Payne in the Telegraph judged Sapiens “at once well informed and vatic.”
The 2017 sequel, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, also received generally positive if more qualified notices. In a Time review Bill Gates found Homo Deus “a deeply engaging book,” although he questioned Harari's bleak vision of the future. In the New York Times Jennifer Senior found Harari to be “a gifted thinker and a precocious mind” (whose writing, she added, is nonetheless filled with “blithe pronouncement[s]” of an extremely uninviting future). As Senior put it, the future Harari predicts “looks like Westworld, rather than Disney World.”
For his second “brief history,” Harari draws his title from the idea that in the twenty-first century, the “big project of humankind will be to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction,” including near-immortality and absolute happiness. Harari is not the first author to speculate on these themes. Among many such were William Morris in News from Nowhere (1890) and, in a dystopian vein, Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932) and After Many a Summer (1939) [published in the U.S. as After Many a Summer Dies the Swan]. More pertinent, perhaps, is Filippo Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto (1909). Harari shares with Marinetti a fascination with the exponential increase of technology and its transformative effect on human nature itself. Like Marinetti, Harari bases his vision of the future on speculation concerning the potential of a combination of social science and technology and, of course, the conviction that humanity has now arrived at dramatic turning point, an element in nearly all futurist writing. Marinetti's fascination with the superman is not unlike Harari's focus on the rapid evolution of homo sapiens as it merges with and then finds itself subjugated by artificial intelligence. It goes without saying that, according to this view, man's cultural and spiritual heritage is of little use to those in the future.
In his third book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari discards the persona of the historian altogether and becomes what he has trended toward all along: a speculative futurist and advocate of progressive ideas. Those twenty-one lessons are, for the most part, merely a summation of familiar liberal talking points updated to apply to what Harari views as a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence and the algorithms upon which it depends. If the book seems original, it is because it is filled with overblown claims and sweeping generalizations that make the work appear to be bold and insightful. In reality, like his earlier works, Harari's third book falls into a familiar tradition of antagonist thinking of the sort analyzed in great depth in the work of Roger Scruton.
Antagonist thought is inherently mischievous in nature, its “purpose” being épater la bourgeoisieand to draw attention to the self of the alienated rebel. At the core of this reflex is the adolescent's resentment of the authority of the wealthy and successful bourgeois father. Driven by this resentment, the intellectual youth discovers a sense of purpose in deconstructing the world that the hard-working father has built up. The resented authority of the father is then by association extended to include all authority, especially that of conservative institutions such as the church, the rule of law, heterogenous marriage and family life, business and finance, and constitutional democracy. In opposition to these institutions the antagonist deploys an array of ideas including atheism, anarchism, socialism, gender construction, and various forms of authoritarianism (communism, fascism, or, in the case of 21 Lessons, artificial intelligence).
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