The extraordinary success of Yuval Noah Harari, whose volumes Sapiens and Homo Deus have sold millions of copies worldwide and been lauded by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and other technology leaders, is due in part to his vigorous demolition of that old way of seeing things.
Of the three great extinctions that have afflicted our planet, Harari tells us, humans are responsible for two: one that destroyed the larger mammals; and one, currently ongoing, that threatens to destroy everything else.
Among religions at work today, Harari includes Communism, nationalism, and other systems of belief that have emerged as European civilization loses its faith in the Judeo-Christian God and comes around to worshiping man instead. Having taken this path, Harari must distinguish the collective stories that we know to be false from those on which we depend in our daily dealings.
Harari is aware of this, and he indicates the way in which the limitless outpouring of human trust can be crystallized in a coin or even held in an electronic bottle.
Describing the rise of the credit economy, Harari shows how these institutional entities are not merely the result of human decision but also real and lasting discoveries, like the truths of higher mathematics.
"What will happen," Harari asks, "Once we realise that customers and voters never make free choices, and once we have the technology to calculate, design or outsmart their feelings? If the whole universe is pegged to the human experience, what will happen once the human experience becomes just another designable product, no different in essence from any other item in the supermarket?".
Like Stephen Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and others who have defended the biological view of the human condition, Harari is troubled by the first-person case, which seems to deliver a different world from the world of scientific inquiry.
https://www.city-journal.org/yuval-noah-harari
Of the three great extinctions that have afflicted our planet, Harari tells us, humans are responsible for two: one that destroyed the larger mammals; and one, currently ongoing, that threatens to destroy everything else.
Among religions at work today, Harari includes Communism, nationalism, and other systems of belief that have emerged as European civilization loses its faith in the Judeo-Christian God and comes around to worshiping man instead. Having taken this path, Harari must distinguish the collective stories that we know to be false from those on which we depend in our daily dealings.
Harari is aware of this, and he indicates the way in which the limitless outpouring of human trust can be crystallized in a coin or even held in an electronic bottle.
Describing the rise of the credit economy, Harari shows how these institutional entities are not merely the result of human decision but also real and lasting discoveries, like the truths of higher mathematics.
"What will happen," Harari asks, "Once we realise that customers and voters never make free choices, and once we have the technology to calculate, design or outsmart their feelings? If the whole universe is pegged to the human experience, what will happen once the human experience becomes just another designable product, no different in essence from any other item in the supermarket?".
Like Stephen Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and others who have defended the biological view of the human condition, Harari is troubled by the first-person case, which seems to deliver a different world from the world of scientific inquiry.
https://www.city-journal.org/yuval-noah-harari
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