Who Tells Your Story, part 2: Harari’s Sapiens
“Raise a glass to freedom, something they can never take away, no matter what they tell you. Raise a glass to the four of us, tomorrow they’ll be more of us, telling the story of tonight.”
So sing four idealistic founders of America.
Who is it that gets to tell our story? In many ways, I’m afraid much of my blog this week will be a repeat from last week—wrestling with who the “gatekeepers” are who interpret our past, present an understanding of our present, and project our future. The reality is that, to some extent or another, we each attempt to do just that for ourselves, our community, and our world. How do you tell your story?
A historian has the ability to provide understanding for where we’ve been and what that means for the present. Discerning the future based on those two though, is much more challenging; a challenge that both Peter Frankopan and Yuval Harari attempt. Similarly, Harari the historian attempts to write on biological anthropology, a subject outside of his specialty as a historian.[1]
For Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the “real” story lies solely in our biology, what can be seen, measured, and interpreted through biological science. All else, anything that moves us beyond the animal realm, is for him, “imagined reality.” Imagined reality “is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force on the world.”[2] This includes not only stories, but religion, money, companies and institutions, governments and nations, and ideas. For instance, regarding the principles of America’s founders, they “imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity,”[3] contra such truth as the Law of Gravity, which can be proven. Harari suggests these “imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.”[4]
Throughout the text, Harari himself tells his own “imagined reality,” a tale where biology is king, or rather, his “prison of choice.”[5]
This, of course, should not be easily dismissed. Harari sees the world from a much different starting place than I do. Harari is a married gay male[6] Israeli non-practicing Jew practicing Buddhist vegan historian from Oxford who lives in a small commune community in Israel.[7] We are both approaching our humanness from very different perspectives. What does it mean to be “human”? For Harari, our humanity begins and ends with biology—our physical selves—and anything beyond that is simply neural connections and social biology of large groups of animals figuring out how to work together. But I don’t see why the subjective principles of religion, human rights and institutions are any less valid than the reality of biological personhood, other than that he chooses to dismiss them.
Here is my blind spot to his thesis: I am unable to imagine that our physical, neural-connected biological selves are all that we are. And I believe his blind spot might be this: that perhaps humankind surpasses our physical selves and we have the ability to “see beyond the veil” to recognize a reality of ideas, emotions, connections, and even faith in a supreme being—a transcendent reality that is just as real as the physical realm.
What we identify that perhaps makes us uncomfortable with Harari’s work is a completely different paradigm from our own, as different as ancestralism was from Christianity, for our Advance speaker, Winston Mashua.[8] How do we reconcile Harari’s physically-grounded, “imagined reality”-absent worldview with the good gospel news of Jesus? Perhaps Jesus, the people of God, and the Kingdom itself are that ephemeral reality like a thin onion-skin that lies so close to the physical realm as to be invisible; invisible but not illusionary.
[1] Likewise, Bill Bryson the journalist also pens a popular scientific history of the world, although his take is much more positive on the role of humans than is Harari’s, and he makes little attempt to be prescriptive of the future. Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (New York: Broadway Books, 2003).
[2] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Penguin Random House, 2011), 35.
[3] Ibid., 122.
[4] Ibid., 124.
[5] Ibid., 127.
[6] His identity as a gay man seems to suggest that his description of gender is somewhat autobiographical (cf. 164 ff., and https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/fast-talk-the-road-to-happiness-1.426554).
[7] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/27/yuval-noah-harari-we-are-quickly-acquiring-powers-that-were-always-thought-to-be-divine
[8] Winston Mashua, lecture, Cape Town, South Africa (Portland Seminary, Leadership and Global Perspectives, September 23, 2017).
About the Author
Katy Drage Lines
In God’s good Kingdom, some minister like trees, long-standing, rooted in a community. They embody words of Wendell Berry, “stay years if you would know the genius of the place.” Others, however, are called to go. Katy is one of those pilgrims. A global nomad, Katy grew up as a fifth generation Colorado native, attended college & seminary and was ordained in Tennessee, married a guy from Pennsylvania, ministered for ten years in Kenya, worked as a children’s pastor in a small church in Kentucky, and served college students in a university library in Orange County, California. She recently moved to the heart of America, Indianapolis, and has joined the Englewood Christian Church community, serving with them as Pastor of Spiritual Formation. She & her husband Kip, have two delightful boys, a college junior and high school junior.4 responses to “Who Tells Your Story, part 2: Harari’s Sapiens”
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“And I believe his blind spot might be this: that perhaps humankind surpasses our physical selves and we have the ability to “see beyond the veil” to recognize a reality of ideas, emotions, connections, and even faith in a supreme being—a transcendent reality that is just as real as the physical realm.”
I wonder how Harari would deal with this:
“Panic flooded me. Forsan was dying. She had defied the spirits and now they were killing her.” Missionaries like Joanne Shetler dealt with the very real demon world.
I have noticed that in a lot of books like Harari’s they don’t talk about those kind of things.
“I am unable to imagine that our physical, neural-connected biological selves are all that we are.”
Every author has a agenda. SAPIENS is by no means an objective work of science. In Taoist Buddhism, certain people can attain godhood. In SAPIENS, all of humanity are gods. Our ability to control nature, and even annihilate ourselves make up Harari’s definition of what it means to be a god.
I think we can agree that the Christian God is much more than this.
Katy, you mentioned Harari and his imagined realities. He seemed preoccupied with imagined realities and myths that held people groups together. This concept does not resonate with me. I suppose because I find truth to be more grounding and bonding with people. He suggests the opposite. Certainly, people develop the culture around myths, stories, and imagined realities, but I believe when they come together over truth, there is more longevity in the relationships. What’s your thoughts?
Katy,
His education from Oxford seems to qualify his a someone knowledgeable as a scholar. His take on history and our being could be taken as evidence as others.
Would you say that he does not work through faith?
Katy,