Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli medievalist, military historian, public intellectual, and popular science writer. He is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His first bestselling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is based on his lectures to an undergraduate world history class. His other works include the bestsellers Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. His published work examines themes of free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, suffering and the role of storytelling in human evolution.
In Sapiens, Harari writes about a "cognitive revolution" that supposedly occurred roughly 70,000 years ago when Homo sapiens supplanted the rival Neanderthals and other species of the genus Homo, developed language skills and structured societies, and ascended as apex predators, aided by the First Agricultural Revolution and accelerated by the Scientific Revolution, which have allowed humans to approach near mastery over their environment. Furthermore, he examines the possible consequences of a futuristic biotechnological world in which intelligent biological organisms are surpassed by their own creations; he has said, "Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so". Although Harari's books have received considerable commercial success since the publication of Sapiens, his work has been more negatively received in academic circles.
In 2019, Yuval Noah Harari and his husband, Itzik Yahav, founded Sapienship, a social impact company that advocates for global responsibility. Their mission is to tell and retell the shared story of humanity in order to promote trust and cooperation between all people. The company focuses on research, content development, education, and the publication of position papers on global challenges in the fields of technology and the future world order. Sapienship has also launched an official educational Instagram page.
Early life and education
Yuval Noah Harari was born and raised in Kiryat Ata, Israel, as one of three children born to Shlomo and Pnina Harari and raised in a secular Jewish family of Bucovinian and Polish Jewish descent. His father, Shlomo Harari, born Blajberg, was a state-employed armaments engineer, and his mother, Pnina, born Luttinger, was an office administrator. Harari taught himself to read at age three. He studied in a class for intellectually gifted children at the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa from the age of eight. He deferred mandatory military service in the Israel Defense Forces to pursue university studies as part of the Atuda program but was later exempted from completing his military service following his studies due to health issues. He began studying history and international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at age 17.Harari studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1993 to 1998, where he received a B.A. degree and specialised in medieval history and military history. He completed his D.Phil. degree at the University of Oxford in 2002 where he was a postgraduate student of Jesus College, Oxford supervised by Steven J. Gunn. From 2003 to 2005, he pursued postdoctoral studies in history as a Yad Hanadiv Fellow. While at Oxford, Harari first encountered the work of Jared Diamond, whom he has acknowledged as an influence on his own writing. At a Berggruen Institute salon, Harari said that Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel "was kind of an epiphany in my academic career. I realised that I could actually write such books."
Career
Harari has published multiple books and articles, including Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100–1550; The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000; The Concept of 'Decisive Battles' in World History; and Armchairs, Coffee and Authority: Eye-witnesses and Flesh-witnesses Speak about War, 1100–2000.His book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was originally published in Hebrew in 2011 based on the 20 lectures of an undergraduate world history class he was teaching. It was then released in English in 2014 and has since been translated into some 45 languages. The book surveys the entire length of human history, starting from the evolution of Homo sapiens in the Stone Age. Harari compares indigenous peoples to apes in his fall of man narrative, leading up to the political and technological revolutions of the 21st century. The Hebrew edition became a bestseller in Israel, and generated much interest among the general public. Joseph Drew wrote that "Sapiens provides a wide-ranging and thought-provoking introduction for students of comparative civilization," considering it as a work that "highlights the importance and wide expanse of the social sciences."
In 2016 at the Davos Forum, Harari was the originator of the idea that, as a result of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, "humanity will be divided between a superelite of improved humans and a mass of 'useless people and that "power is in the hands of those who control the algorithms". He returned to the theme in an October 2017 interview with People's Daily Online to which he said:
Harari's follow-up book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, was published in 2016 and examines the possibilities for the future of Homo sapiens. The book's premise outlines that, in the future, humanity is likely to make a significant attempt to gain happiness, immortality and God-like powers. The book goes on to openly speculate various ways this ambition might be realised for Homo sapiens in the future based on the past and present. Among several possibilities for the future, Harari develops the term dataism for a philosophy or mindset that worships big data. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Siddhartha Mukherjee stated that although the book "fails to convince me entirely," he considers it "essential reading for those who think about the future."
Harari's book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century,, focused more on present-day concerns. A review in the New Statesman commented on what it called "risible moral dictums littered throughout the text", criticised Harari's writing style and stated that he was "trafficking in pointless asides and excruciating banalities." Kirkus Reviews praised the book as a "tour de force" and described it as a "highly instructive exploration of current affairs and the immediate future of human societies."
In 2019, Harari was criticised for allowing several omissions and amendments in the Russian edition of his third book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, using a softer tone when speaking about Russian authorities. Leonid Bershidsky in The Moscow Times called it "caution—or, to call it by its proper name, cowardice", and Nettanel Slyomovics in Haaretz claimed that "he is sacrificing those same liberal ideas that he presumes to represent". In a response, Harari stated that he "was warned that due to these few examples Russian censorship will not allow distribution of a Russian translation of the book" and that he "therefore faced a dilemma," namely to "replace these few examples with other examples, and publish the book in Russia," or "change nothing, and publish nothing," and that he "preferred publishing, because Russia is a leading global power and it seemed important that the book's ideas should reach readers in Russia, especially as the book is still very critical of the Putin regime—just without naming names."
In 2020 the first volume of his graphic adaptation of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Sapiens: A Graphic History – The Birth of Humankind, co-authored with David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave, was published and launched at a livestream event organised by How to Academy and Penguin Books.
In 2022, Harari's book, Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World, illustrated by Ricard Zaplana Ruiz, was published and is a "Story of Human History — for Kids." In fewer than 200 pages of child-friendly language, Harari covers the same content as his best-selling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, but "he has simplified the presentation for this younger audience without dumbing it down." This book is "the first of four planned volumes."
Critical reception
Harari's popular publications are considered to belong to the Big History genre, with Ian Parker writing in 2020 in The New Yorker that "Harari did not invent Big History, but updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering."His work has been more negatively received in academic circles, with Christopher Robert Hallpike stating in a 2020 review of Sapiens that "one has often had to point out how surprisingly little he seems to have read on quite a number of essential topics. It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously." Hallpike further states that "we should not judge Sapiens as a serious contribution to knowledge but as 'infotainment', a publishing event to titillate its readers by a wild intellectual ride across the landscape of history, dotted with sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions about human destiny. By these criteria, it is a most successful book."
In 2020, philosopher Mike W. Martin criticised Harari's view in a journal article, stating that " misunderstands human rights, inflates the role of science in moral matters, and fails to reconcile his moral passion with his moral skepticism."
In July 2022, the American magazine Current Affairs published an article titled "The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari" by neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan, which pointed to the lack of scientific rigour in his books. "The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker," she wrote. "But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors."
In 2022, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called Harari a historian and a brand. It pointed out that the Yahav Harari Group, built by his partner Yahav, was a "booming product cosmos" selling comics and children's books, and soon films and documentaries. It observed an "icy deterministic touch" in his books, which made them so popular in Silicon Valley. It stated that his listeners celebrated him like a pop star, although he only had the sad message that people are "bad algorithms", soon to be redundant, to be replaced because machines could do it better.
Russian far-right political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin has singled out Harari's "inclination towards a post-human existence" as evidence that the modern Western world is "the civilisation of the Antichrist", which the Russian world and the Islamic world are therefore justified in opposing.