When he talks in his Books about the difficulty of anticipating the major technological innovations to come, Yuval Noah Harari regularly uses the same example: in the 1950s, we dreamed of colonies on Mars, nuclear-powered cars, teleportation, etc. None of this happened. On the other hand, no one had predicted that from the connection between several computers – an engineering hack – this technology would be born which is today fundamentally changing our societies: the Internet.
As almost always with Harari, the parable is perfect; and we can wonder if it does not have autobiographical resonances. Because who could have predicted, twenty years ago, his current status as global guru of the biodigital future? In 2005, at age 29, he was a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in medieval military history. Not enough to stir up the crowds. But when the management of the establishment decided to create an undergraduate course on “An Introduction to World History”faced with the lack of enthusiasm of the other teachers to take it on, it was he who stuck to it. His course pleased the students, he added a very popular handout, then had the idea of making a book from it, which all the major Israeli publishers refused: subject too broad, author unknown… It is probable that they would not didn’t even open it. Then there was one who agreed to play the game, and A Brief History of Humanity – the work was not yet called Sapiens – became a bestseller in Israel in 2011. The international expansion being complicated, Harari was reduced to publishing the first English translation of his book, which he had produced himself, through an online on-demand service offered by Amazon. 2,000 copies were sold! Until a famous Israeli literary agent resolved the situation.
Snubbed by critics
Released in 2014 in the United Kingdom and the United States, Sapiens became the best-seller that we know, but not immediately, as legend has it. When it was published, the book was not reviewed by any of the major opinion-forming newspapers, New York Times, New York Review of Books, etc. In fact, it was word of mouth that worked. With some prestigious support, it is true: Bill Gates advertised it, Mark Zuckerberg – “Mr Facebook” – included it in the list of recommendations of his book club and, last but not least, Barack Obama said on CNN of this “history of humanity seen from the sky” that it had given him the same emotion as his visit to the pyramids of Giza, in Egypt!
How to explain this craze? The established critics had snubbed Sapiens because they had assimilated it to this kind of “products” what those who only read one book a year buy: heavy popularization that stains, to be obtained in airport shops to enhance a long-haul flight. In fact, they hadn’t read it either. Because, if Sapiens has all the stigmata of a blockbuster, with its 500 large format pages on puffy paper, it immediately seduces with its narrative qualities. And this, from the first chapter, where Harari tells how, 100,000 years ago, Homos sapiens, who were then only “insignificant animals, with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish” and one species among several others of the genus Homo, ousted the Neanderthals and colonized the planet. A saga worthy of a thriller with a style inspired by that of the American geographer and biologist Jared Diamond, of whom Harari has often said that reading his Pulitzer Prize, On Inequality Among Societies, in 1998, had been for him a “revelation” : we can therefore present ideas without being boring, and even set the bar quite high, while entertaining the reader!
Because Sapiens is a book of ideas, and one in particular, which returns like a leitmotif in all his works: the “cognitive revolution”according to which the strength of Homo sapiens comes from the fact that, unlike other animals, it can represent through language things that do not exist in reality – God, the nation, human rights , the dollar, etc. This ability to create « fictions intersubjectives » would explain, according to Harari, that Homo sapiens was able to organize vast cooperation between individuals who do not know each other. Hence the “agricultural revolution” then, over the last five hundred years, the “scientific revolution” – the book ending with a dramatic question: what if, with genetic engineering and the rise of these entities “inorganic” what are artificial intelligences, we are witnessing the twilight of Homo sapiens and its imminent replacement by a new species of the genus Homo?
We understand, in light of this summary, that Silicon Valley has made Sapiens its totem. This also resulted in a suspicion: is Harari just the speaker of a tech sector claiming hegemony? It was not knowing him well. Because, if he has turned, since Homo Deus in 2016, towards a reflection on the future, he has done so in his own grating way, sometimes warning about the establishment of a two-speed society with, ‘one side, a narrow elite that is rich, active and “a-mortelle” (became, thanks to the new medicine, immortal, except by accident) and, on the other, a mass of “supernumeraries” rendered useless by artificial intelligence; sometimes announcing the appearance of AI based on sophisticated algorithms that manage to know us better than we do ourselves and therefore control all sectors of our lives.
Adept at provocation
Harari does not like being presented as a pessimist. But it is true that, unlike Steven Pinker, the author of The Triumph of Enlightenment (2018), he avoids any naivety about the benefits of progress. Who else could have called the agricultural revolution “biggest scam in history” ? Or write that “we have absolutely no evidence that human well-being inevitably improves throughout history” ? There is even a cynical side to him. He is a convinced atheist, not a fan of Judaism nor, even less, of the Jewish State of the 2018 law, which the Israelis accuse him of. He is also an anti-nationalist, rejecting the idea of nation, too narrow in his eyes in a world where all major questions are global. And he never hesitates to provoke. His comments on terrorism, which he said, in his 21 lessons for the 21st century in 2018, kill a thousand times less than the sugar added to our industrial foods, have scandalized more than one. Same thing for his denunciation of the role of“meat object” – that he does not consume, being vegan – to which we confine animals, or for his rejection of anti-homosexual mentalities. Because Harari is gay, and married to his manager. Not only does he not hide it, but he often says that this status as an outsider in his society (he had to marry in Cyprus, union between men not being recognized in Israel) gave him the ability of “challenge preconceived ideas”. Finally, he has nothing to do with a dull compiler, as most popularizers are. Harari has an author’s approach. He has a tone, a real personality. And, if he repeats himself, he never rambles, because he constantly advances in his thinking, as shown in his new opus, Nexus, on the question of information.
Read also: Why absolutely read “Silicon Valley” by Alain Damasio
Like all successful authors, Harari has been confronted with many criticisms, not always relevant. Academics have pointed out errors in his works. This is undoubtedly true in detail, but is it so serious? Harari can respond to this by saying that his aim is not so much to describe new technologies as to think about their human impact. He is more of a historian-philosopher than a scientist, and what does it matter, in this light, some marginal breaches of scientific truth strictly speaking! Since then, however, he has rectified his situation. While he was criticized for not citing his sources in Sapiens – his gimmick of the motor myths created by Man had great precursors that he pretends to ignore, Nietzsche and Georges Sorel –, in Homo Deus and in Nexus, extended its footnotes.
A “at the same time” side
In fact, the greatest criticism that can be leveled at him lies elsewhere: it concerns the vagueness, or the softness, of his conclusions. Even his fans often complain that they are no further ahead once they have finished his books. It comes from his side ” at the same time “ : Harari tempers his theses with adjacent notations so much that we end up no longer seeing where he is coming from. The British weekly The New Statesman even compared its conclusions to those simplistic maxims found in fortune cookies. That’s true, but quite unfair. Harari is certainly not the most important thinker of the 21st century that some praise, but he has an informed universal discourse that is always worth reading. Same sound “Buddhism” – he practices vipassana meditation daily –, which makes him say that “the only constant in the world is change”participates in his message. More than a guru, he would rather be the prototype of the honest man of the new millennium, guide for troubled times which will perhaps not give birth to our genetic mutation, but certainly to a radical transformation of our societies . And isn’t it already a lot that, including with his doubts, Yuval Noah Harari prepares us for it?
Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, Albin Michel, 576 P., €24.90
This article was originally published in Read Magazine in September 2024. Find the full issue on the store Read Magazine .
