A Critique of Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus

Fr Dr Sooraj George Pittappillil

“What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so.” Thus expresses Hamlet his melancholy, seeing the divide between the human aspirations and human behaviour. Such narratives include mythical, religious, philosophical and scientific ones. Most of them contain convincing and impressive descriptions about the origin, development, glory and destiny of human beings. 21st century, along with the exponential scientific growth it witnesses to, is becoming a breeding ground of ever new narratives. Many of them are packed with predictions, based on data analysis by the Silicon Valley prophets. Nevertheless, before rejecting them, branding as hoax or bogus science, we need to listen patiently to their new universal narratives and creeds. Yuval Noah Harari encourages us;

“I encourage all of us, whatever our beliefs, to question the basic narratives of our world, to past developments with present concerns, and not to be afraid of controversial issues.”

‘Big Data’ (Dataism) and ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ top the chart of such creeds. Do they really revolutionize the traditional understanding of humans and their destiny on this planet?

1. Homo sapiens:   Traditional Narratives
The whole history of philosophy could be, to a certain extent, viewed as the history of the battle between mind and matter for superiority. Accordingly, human beings, in the history of philosophy, came to be defined either as spiritual/rational substances or as material substances. Galvanized by this great tradition of rationalism behind him, Hegel, with a grotesque grin, declared; ‘real is rational and rational is real! Protagoras’ Man is the Measure (homo mensura) principle evolved into ratio mensura principle.

But things turned upside down in favour of the materialist camp, in 1859, with Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Accordingly, life on earth is a development out of chance, governed by the law of natural selection. In other words, nature selects those organisms which have got the fittest characteristics that make them best suitable to nature (adaptability). In a 13.8 billion years old universe and a 4.5 billion years old earth, Homo Sapiens- the modern Man-literally meaning wise man- can claim only an age of 300,000 to 200,000 years.

However, still more disturbing facts were waylaying man in the disguise of scientific disclosures! Within the 3.5 billion years’ total span, life on earth has endured at least five mass extinction events. Scientists opine that we are currently undergoing the 6th mass extinction event that is still more menacing than its forerunners because of its accelerated rate due to human activity.

2. Homo Sapiens:  A Triumphant Odyssey of Reason
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” Wrote Shakespeare, in Macbeth

If life on earth, its development and survival are merely chancy and fortuitous, Macbeth’s lament can be warranted prima facie. Still, with the emergence of human beings upon this planet, the whole evolution process became hominized. Soviet scientist Vladimir Vernadsky proposed, in the first half of the 20th century, that the emergence of cognition (with the emergence of humans) marked a leap in the evolution of life, just as the emergence of life thoroughly transformed this planet. He used the term noosphere (sphere of mind/cognition) to indicate the hominization of earth. Along with life, cognition is also a powerful element, capable of altering the destiny of this planet. In other words, evolution has finally given birth to a ‘being of destiny’ through humans! They are capable of both accelerating and decelerating the evolutionary process by their intervention. Distinct from the Darwinian way of looking at the speciation process at individual level, Vernadsky tried a systemic and geological analysis of living systems with reference to their relationship to an overarching principle. Thus, cognition, like life, came to be considered as a physical force capable of reshaping our planet.

These developments sealed the triumphant re-entry of reason to the evolutionary scenario. Recently, it became a burning topic of academic discussion with the publication of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiensand its sequel Homo Deus. Sapiens surveys the speciation and developmental history of Homo Sapiens from beginning until now. This book can be categorized as one of evolutionary anthropology, enriched with insights from natural sciences. Accordingly, the whole human activity is situated within the possibilities allowed by biology whereas culture is seen as the force shaping what happens within these bounds.

“About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form particularly large and structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.

Harari emphasizes that the cognitive capacity of humans played the pivotal role in transforming them from mere ‘animals of no significance’ to the ‘chieftain species’ of this planet. What differentiates humans from other species and their own cousin hominids is the capacity for fiction and gossiping which brought society, money, nation, law, religion, language, etc, into existence. Towards the end of his narration, Harari heralds the termination of Sapiens as a species, as we know it today, and its metamorphosis into a creator species, Homo Deus. Sapiens would also confidently engage in a Gilgamesh project seeking immortality.

“We would have a hard time swallowing the fact that scientists could engineer spirits as well as bodies, and that future Dr Frankensteins could therefore create something truly superior to us, something that will look at us as condescendingly as we look at the Neanderthals…If the curtain is indeed about to drop on Sapiens history, we members of one of its final generations should devote some time to answering one last question: what do we want to become? Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”

3. Deus: The Mammoth Runs Amok
Thus, the superman envisaged by Nietzsche would make a surprise visit to this world at any time in the near future, in the attire of Homo Deus. Harari, in Homo Deus, sequel to Sapiens, adds that humans will be inevitably reduced to the status of algorithms. It is here, he warns us of the development of a ‘Big Data,’ capable of engulfing and abbreviating the rational capacities of humans.

“We are already becoming tiny chips inside a giant system that nobody really understands. Authority will shift from humans to computer algorithms. Big Data could then empower Big Brother.”

By becoming mere information pieces within the gigantic network of information flux, humans would be left naked to the surveillance machineries set up by the hi-tech Big Brothers. This would definitely raise serious questions about the long-established concepts of autonomous/free will and feelings.

Dataism would become the new cosmopolitan religion with the cults of additive manufacturing, cloud computing, augmented reality, autonomous robots and system integration. Harari concludes Homo Deus by poking his readers with a question;

“What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?”

Accordingly, Harari shares serious concerns about the human cognitive capacity that could run amok if not bridled effectively. Is it suggestive of the hegemony that matter reclaims over mind?

4. Homo Miseratur: A way out of Labyrinth?
How long can we entertain the view that man is destined to be a captive of the binding laws of nature? Is there any specific human dimension that enables him to surpass them? I strongly believe that man can still undergo a further evolution, namely the evolution from Homo Sapiens to Merciful man (Homo Miseratur).As Stephen R Covey suggests, we are heading towards an era where interdependence does better than independence. It is nothing short of finding one’s own voice and inspiring others to find theirs. To develop a sensible philosophical platform suitable for Homo Miseratur, we need to engage in a surgical assault on the attempts to apotheosize the brutal dimension of humans.

“Christianity as sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as grown upon this soil, represents the counter movement against that morality of breeding, of race and of privilege: it is essentially an anti-Aryan religion: Christianity is the transvaluation of all Aryan values, the triumph of Chandala values, the proclaimed gospel of the poor and of the low, the general insurrection of all the down-trodden, the wretched, the bungled and the botched, against the ‘race’- the immortal revenge of the Chandala as the religion of love.” Thus portrayed Nietzsche Christian God as an enemy of life and morality as an enemy of nature. But what excites Nietzsche is the “Care for the Unfit” – the kernel of Christian Morality- which is the very reversal of the biological law of the Survival of the Fittest.

5. Mercy as a Relationship and Responsibility
Care for the unfit is the point of disagreement for both Stoics and Nietzsche. We must see mercy as a relationship. One cannot be merciful to himself. Therefore, mercy demands an existential framework that exceeds the singularity of a person. We must find out a philosophical platform that enables us turning the traditional Vacuum- Plenum structure of mercy upside down. In other words, the beneficiary of mercy must be credited with plenum (who is found with vacuum in the traditional philosophy). The philosopher who offers a helping hand here is Emmanuel Levinas. His philosophy is an obvious departure from the apathetic/neutral ontology, seeking a vis à vis ethics. According to Levinas, Ethics occurs at the very moment when the Ego is placed at the point blank of philosophical questioning. Levinas blames that the whole history of philosophy offers us unmistakable evidences of philosophizing from the point of view of Ego.

Ego has always a tendency to capture anything through the process of knowing and it ‘owns’ the object thus. The whole horizon of Ego’s knowledge is called Totality. Totality is nothing other than the domesticating chamber of Ego wherein everything other than Ego is translated into an egological language. Ego comprehends and engulfs all possible realities; Philosophy as ontology is the reduction of other to the same, alterity is digested like food or drink. This is the reason why Sartre called it “digestive philosophy.” Nevertheless, there is an interiority within the other, the proper element that constitutes the alterity, which escapes and challenges all my attempts of domestication. Being has got the characteristic of super fluidity which makes it flow out of the container of totality. Therefore, this super fluidity must be accounted for within a new platform: a platform without frontiers! That’s Infinity!

The trace of the infinity is found on the face of the other. Therefore, the ‘naked face of the other’ always reminds me of the unyielding infinity. This is the epiphany of the face. Therefore, the very confrontation with the other reminds me of my existential incapacity to domesticate him. He solemnly and emphatically reminds me of my vacuum! He reminds me of his plenum! It turns the table of philosophy upside down and places ethics at first. The confrontation with the other is a pre-metaphysical, pre-epistemological moment. Thus ethics becomes the first philosophy. It places a sweeping demand before me; “Respect the alterity”. Thus the other becomes master. The first “vision” of eschatology reveals the very possibility of eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without a context. “The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision-it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics”