Current Affairs: “The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari”

Harari is careful to fashion himself as an objective scribe. He takes pains to tell us he is presenting the worldview of the Dataists, and not his own. But then he does something very sneaky. The Dataist view may strike you as some eccentric fringe notion, he says, but in fact it has already conquered most of the scientific establishment. In presenting the Dataist worldview as conclusive (having conquered most of the scientific establishment), he tells us that it is “objectively” true that humans are algorithms, and our march to obsolescence—as the passive recipients of decisions made by better algorithms—is unavoidable, because it is integrally tied to our humanity. Turning to the footnote in support of this sweeping statement, we find that of the four books he cites, three have been written by non-scientists—a music publicist, a trendcaster, and a magazine publisher.⁴

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Harari has seduced us with his storytelling, but a close look at his record shows that he sacrifices science to sensationalism, often makes grave factual errors, and portrays what should be speculative as certain. The basis on which he makes his statements is obscure, as he rarely provides adequate footnotes or references and is remarkably stingy with acknowledging thinkers⁵ who formulated the ideas he presents as his own. And most dangerous of all, he reinforces the narratives of surveillance capitalists, giving them a free pass to manipulate our behaviors to suit their commercial interests. To save ourselves from this current crisis, and the ones ahead of us, we must forcefully reject the dangerous populist science of Yuval Noah Harari.

Darshana Narayanan

I have been skeptical of Harari’s writing and motives for a long time without reading his books – and, if the examples in this article are representative of his work, I’m glad I didn’t waste any time trying to. Good to see a well-researched piece debunking his simplistic, and often wrong, concepts. Unfortunately, people are too quick and eager to gobble up simplistic world views that comfort them instead of using the slightest amount of critical thinking.

Illustrations by John Biggs

Next, take the issue of language. Harari claims that [many] animals, including all ape and monkey species, have vocal languages.

I have spent a decade studying vocal communication in marmosets, a New World monkey. (Occasionally, their communication with me involved spraying their urine in my direction.) In the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, where I received my doctorate, we studied how vocal behavior emerges from the interaction of evolutionary, developmental, neuronal, and biomechanical phenomena. Our work succeeded in breaking the dogma that monkey communication (unlike human communication) is pre-programmed into neural or genetic codes. In fact, we discovered that monkey babies learn to “talk”, with the help of their parents, in a fashion similar to the way human babies learn.

Yet, in spite of all their similarities to humans, monkeys cannot be said to have a “language”. Language is a rule-bound symbolic system in which symbols (words, sentences, images, etc.) refer to people, places, events, and relations in the world—but also evoke and reference other symbols within the same system (e.g., words defining other words). The alarm calls of monkeys, and the songs of birds and whales, can transmit information; but we—as German philosopher Ernst Cassirer has said—live in a new dimension of reality made possible by the acquisition of a symbolic system.