History against Harari

Schiphol, sometime in 2022. Strolling the airport from one bookstore to the next; seeking the comfort of paperback aromas and, if I'm lucky, the jolt of a juicy title.

There is nothing like the pleasure of discovery — or unfolding a hitherto undisclosed portion of the existential fabric. Scattered before me are the occasional gems, arresting magazine covers and headlines, and the mandatory “bestsellers”.

Peterson, King, Coelho, Brown, Fry, Harari. The usual suspects.

Some of the above markets itself as history, or is (mis)taken as such. I remember friends reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code in the mid-2000s and subscribing to the whole affair. Even Neil deGrasse Tyson dabbles in historical questions, now and then, because physics can only take him so far. This is understandable: the past is just too seductive to be ignored, and physics is ultimately about matter — not what matters (physics can't teach you to be a good husband, father, or neighbor, to list a few important life skills). History, it is said, promises explanations of all sorts, a fruitful search for the exotic, and a healthy supply of moral, political, and civilizational lessons.?

Wandering souls transiting between flights, traveling thousands of kilometers, may find themselves in a uniquely introspective position to flirt with meaning-of-life inquiry. At their disposal, then, is airport literature. The question is: What will they find in there?

The non-fiction genre that populates high-traffic places is risky business. History is one of these ‘forces’ that silently influence human thought. Our image of the past more or less informs our identity and worldview. It tacitly participates in our thinking as parents, friends, teachers, professionals. Get it wrong and you inadvertently step closer to ignorance, when you sincerely intended the opposite effect.

Back to Schiphol. My sleep-deprived eyes fixate on Sapiens, a tome that’s been consistently on display at airports for the last eight years. I’ve seen it here in Amsterdam, in London, Madrid, maybe even Paris. Istanbul. You may miss your flights at these international hubs, but not Yuval Noah Harari’s popular hit. One wonders why, for instance, Harold J. Cook’s Matters of Exchange, a far richer history that explores the rise of modern science in relation to Dutch commerce, is not a feature of Schiphol bookstores. Surely a scholarly text with a local flavor is better than a sweeping narrative that relies on smoke and mirrors.

Sapiens came out when I was knee-deep in stuff ranging from art history to metaphysics; entranced by the mindscapes of Annemarie Schimmel, Titus Burckhardt, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, and Wolfgang Smith. Not exactly an airport stand collection. I only read Harari after my first year as a graduate student in history and philosophy of science and technology. That is, in 2019. Harari’s name had come up in several conversations with friends and colleagues and, since some of his questions supposedly overlapped with my own academic interests, I felt obliged to learn what his ruminations were all about — what he was bringing to the marketplace of ideas.

If there is one thing I despise, however, it is wasting time. Reading is rarely unrewarding and I'm always up for an intellectual challenge (it would be awkward for a historian-philosopher in training not to be). But a few sentences into Sapiens and I wanted out. Not because it was challenging or radical or anything like that. Conversations with acquaintances (admittedly, non-specialists) left me with heightened expectations — made it sound like I'd be facing the conceptual equivalent of a Muhammad Ali (the boxer, not the pasha). To my disappointment, I was staring at Ali age 7, maybe 9 tops — and not even the boxer. Is this some sort of prank? Do I have the wrong book?, I thought to myself, because I can't think to someone else, Ew, what a slipshod sentence. Where'd he get this data from? What kind of logic is this? Did anyone peer-review the book? Get me out of here! My hand fumbled for an imagined ‘Undo’ — or ‘Unsee’ — button I hoped would holographically turn up next to me for immediate relief.

Call it snobbery, theatrics, whatever. A few moments in and Sapiens was already quite the anti-treat: thoughtless, artless, useless. No comforting paper aromas here, none to come. This was so unlike the focused, intelligent treatments I’d become used to in graduate school. Nothing like a Pamela H. Smith or a James Delbourgo. Peter Galison. Lorraine Daston. Natalie Zemon Davis. Michael Adas. Jessica Riskin. Ulrike Freitag. Iain Chambers. Alan Mikhail. Page after page, Sapiens was either too general and simplistic, or else crass and filled with mistakes. What a superficial and ill-informed stack of paper. How were people reading and “liking” it? Why wasn’t anyone keeping count of all the blunders and inconsistencies? Or the anemic sourcing in the endnotes?

Given all the hype around Sapiens (even Barack Obama and Bill Gates recommended it) and the cultish reverence that surrounds its author, you can't just keep quiet. Not when you know something about what's being said. And so I write this short article because it is the duty of those specializing in an area of study to point out false claims and correct at least some of the damage done by trespassers. (Plus, it’s unspeakably cool to begin an article with a cosmopolitan word like “Schiphol”; it puts me right up there with people who sound like other people should listen to. Maybe Obama will endorse me too.) Harari has been highly influential despite the erroneous and nonsensical content of his work. While a smattering of scholars from other intellectual galaxies did comment on the book, specialists in my sphere of study — history and philosophy of science and technology — have not given Sapiens the time of day. Yet philosophical assumptions drawn from the history of science and epistemology form the crux of Hararian arguments about knowledge, self, the flow of history, questions of meaning, and the place of science in human knowing.

My aim, here, is not to provide a full refutation of Sapiens. I’ll poke a few concrete holes in the book, pose a few questions, and share further reading that takes care of pretty much the rest. I'm primarily concerned with raising critical awareness about the serious flaws in popular literature and Harari's approach. Throughout this article you'll find a decent selection of readings that serve as excellent rebuttals to different parts of Harari's framework and content. In fact, if you've come this far then you've already met a dozen scholarly names. These weren't just randomly sprinkled in for looks. Scroll back, look them up — they're absolutely worth reading. The hard work is on you, reader. I'm just here to get you started.

Take chapter 14, “The Discovery of Ignorance,” as an example, where Harari purports to discuss the birth of the so-called scientific revolution. A reader familiar with the literature has to essentially decide between believing professional historians of science, on the one hand, who cite verifiable evidence, examine it in depth, and are often trained in the sciences; or Harari, on the other, whose PhD dissertation on Renaissance military memoirs is of marginal relevance to the science saga he tackles, and who shows no sign of knowledge in the topic either by way of citation, work experience, or analysis.?

Harari fans are invited to see for themselves. Read chapter 14 alongside Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution, and note the dramatic differences in scholarly rigor, style, and the conclusions. The two authors disagree on fundamentals, not just the details. And one of them is a subject-matter expert, the other an outsider. Here's a glimpse: Shapin negates the presumed radical break between pre-Rev beliefs and post-Rev methods, thus pulling the rug out from under Harari’s core premise on the evolution of knowledge. Did you know that the celebrated European “fathers” of the “scientific revolution” were highly religious persons? That they had no intention of subverting religious belief or scriptural authority? Yes, this includes Galileo. Check out Ronald Numbers’s edited volume, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion; Richard Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible; and, for good measure, Mario Biagioli’s Galileo, Courtier.?You can also read Jessica Riskin's The Restless Clock on how a principal modern scientific tenet for how to study living things was explicitly devised for religious intent.

Harari also botches his philosophy of science when he identifies “observation” as a differentiator between what he calls “premodern traditions of knowledge” and modern science. Skim through Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening, for a quick appreciation of how much Harari overlooks when it comes to empirical knowledge. Observation has always been a central epistemic activity, not least in astronomy and medicine, both of which were considered standard practices in the “premodern” traditions that our author casually dismisses. I also recommend Hasok Chang's Is Water H2O? and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's Objectivity for a deeper dive into the complex, multifaceted nature of “observation” in scientific practice.

In just two paragraphs of a short article, I've listed 8 academic books in history and philosophy of science. I have a dozen more coming up for your intellectual enjoyment. How many (relevant) references do you think Harari lists in his chapter on the same topic? You would not believe me if I simply told you, so I invite you to open up his endnotes and answer the question yourself. Again: this is not his field of specialization. As readers, we are owed at least some solid, subject-pertinent references.

Then there are all these weird ideas about religion. Like this: “Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known.” Of course, this sloppy statement is false. It contradicts explicit teachings, established scripture, the cultural and epistemic landscapes of past societies. I am most acquainted with the case of Islam: Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, anyone? George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges? Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Science among the Ottomans? Bradley J. Cook, Richard W. Bulliet, Ahmed Ragab, Ahmad Dallal, George Saliba.

To stress the point, we are not given a single reference to support many of these absurd claims. Harari gets away with it because he concocts near-maxims that seem to make sense in the rush of his punch-forward-fast tale. He doesn’t give readers a moment to catch their breath or the mental space to question his assumptions. Instead, impressionable readers are relentlessly bombarded with negative and totally unfounded opinions of their fellow human beings (past and present) and their cosmic vistas.

Harari even gets his contemporary science wrong, apparently. “Harari’s storytelling is vivid and gripping,” writes evolutionary biologist Darshana Narayanan in an important critique of Sapiens, “but it is empty of science.” Her article, “The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari,” in Current Affairs is a definite must-read.

This is barely scratching the surface. The book is full of factual errors sandwiched in strange, unreferenced proclamations that drift somewhere between fortune-cookie logic and spur-of-the-moment philosophy. The result is historical fabrication, science fiction, and sophistry.?The question we must ask ourselves is this: Why do we bother with — and celebrate! — a book whose author is not trained in many of the topics he embarks on; relies on no primary or secondary evidence for key assumptions and claims; and spews out so many lies? It is like trusting and encouraging a family doctor to perform advanced surgeries with neither the appropriate tools nor the requisite knowledge — it is irresponsible and dangerous.

Meanwhile, Sapiens and other poorly researched texts prevail as morning reading on public transport, as air-transit purchase options, as something that someone’s friend or colleague has “just finished reading” and “really liked”.

And so the nonsense is perpetuated.

The good news is, there are quality alternatives, both accessible in tone and reliable in content. In addition to the abovementioned works and authors, here are a few more of the global history genre.

James Poskett recently published a global history of science for a general readership that still manages to convey many of the nuances characteristic of fine academic works. Unlike Sapiens, Horizons: A Global History of Science cites specialists and takes seriously premodern and non-Western epistemologies that Harari knows so little about.

Juan Pimentel has authored a creative, accessible, and incredibly thought-provoking science history in The Rhinoceros and The Megatherium. Pimentel’s subjects and analytical style are eccentric. Readers will find useful pointers concerning the production of knowledge, be it historical or scientific.

Four fantastic reads in historiography (philosophy of history) are: Lynn Hunt’s short and sweet History: Why it Matters; Sarah Maza, Thinking About History; Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s seminal Silencing the Past; and Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft. These serve to challenge Harari's simplistic approach to historical writing and analysis. They highlight some of the problems with global histories, especially when told from a Eurocentric-xenophobic point of view.

Peter Adamson hosts a podcast on the history of philosophy “without any gaps,” categorized by period and geography, and supplemented with further reading. It explains old traditions and schools of thought far better than Harari's book does (Harari explains them away, if anything).

In lieu of the jet-lagged epistemology that plagues texts like Sapiens, you’ll find decent introductions to the philosophy of science in Hakob Barseghyan’s University of Toronto lectures (on YouTube) and Steven L. Goldman’s “Science Wars” course.?

The Ottoman History Podcast contains valuable interviews in which various scholars of the Islamic world and the Middle East discuss their works. As for Islamic theology, the Cambridge Muslim College, Zaytuna College, and Blogging Theology channels on YouTube will expose readers to authoritative sources.

These resources can help counter a lot of the ignorance promoted by works like Sapiens.

History is, in the end, about how we see ourselves and the world. It subtly permeates most of our activities and, told inaccurately, can incur significant intellectual and social damage. We have a responsibility to select and circulate the finest servings out there.

Finally, I wish Harari all the best. I really do. This was a quick critique of his work and the genre it belongs to.?