{"id":14333,"date":"2017-10-12T11:08:08","date_gmt":"2017-10-12T18:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=14333"},"modified":"2017-10-12T11:12:48","modified_gmt":"2017-10-12T18:12:48","slug":"who-tells-your-story-part-2-hararis-sapiens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/who-tells-your-story-part-2-hararis-sapiens\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Tells Your Story, part 2: Harari\u2019s Sapiens"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cRaise 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\u2019ll be more of us, telling the story of tonight.\u201d <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So sing four idealistic founders of America.<\/p>\n

Who is it that gets to tell our story? In many ways, I\u2019m afraid much of my blog this week will be a repeat from last week\u2014wrestling with who the \u201cgatekeepers\u201d 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?<\/p>\n

A historian has the ability to provide understanding for where we\u2019ve 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]<\/a><\/p>\n

For Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind<\/em>, the \u201creal\u201d 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, \u201cimagined reality.\u201d Imagined reality \u201cis something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force on the world.\u201d[2]<\/a> This includes not only stories, but religion, money, companies and institutions, governments and nations, and ideas. For instance, regarding the principles of America\u2019s founders, they \u201cimagined 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,\u201d[3]<\/a> contra such truth as the Law of Gravity, which can be proven. Harari suggests these \u201cimagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

Throughout the text, Harari himself tells his own \u201cimagined reality,\u201d a tale where biology is king, or rather, his \u201cprison of choice.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

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]<\/a> Israeli non-practicing Jew practicing Buddhist vegan historian from Oxford who lives in a small commune community in Israel.[7]<\/a> We are both approaching our humanness from very different perspectives. What does it mean to be \u201chuman\u201d? For Harari, our humanity begins and ends with biology\u2014our physical selves\u2014and anything beyond that is simply neural connections and social biology of large groups of animals figuring out how to work together. But I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201csee beyond the veil\u201d to recognize a reality of ideas, emotions, connections, and even faith in a supreme being\u2014a transcendent reality that is just as real as the physical realm.<\/p>\n

What we identify that perhaps makes us uncomfortable with Harari\u2019s work is a completely different paradigm from our own, as different as ancestralism was from Christianity, for our Advance speaker, Winston Mashua.[8]<\/a> How do we reconcile Harari\u2019s physically-grounded, \u201cimagined reality\u201d-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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> 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\u2019s, and he makes little attempt to be prescriptive of the future. Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything<\/em> (New York: Broadway Books, 2003).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind<\/em> (London: Penguin Random House, 2011), 35.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid., 122.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid., 124.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid., 127.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> His identity as a gay man seems to suggest that his description of gender is somewhat autobiographical (cf. 164 ff., and\u00a0https:\/\/www.haaretz.com\/israel-news\/fast-talk-the-road-to-happiness-1.426554<\/a>).<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/lifeandstyle\/2016\/aug\/27\/yuval-noah-harari-we-are-quickly-acquiring-powers-that-were-always-thought-to-be-divine<\/a><\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Winston Mashua, lecture, Cape Town, South Africa (Portland Seminary, Leadership and Global Perspectives, September 23, 2017).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cRaise 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\u2019ll be more of us, telling the story of tonight.\u201d So sing four idealistic founders of America. Who is it that gets to tell our story? In many ways, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":85,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1040,762,1026,760],"class_list":["post-14333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bryson","tag-frankopan","tag-hamilton","tag-harari","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/85"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14333"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14336,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14333\/revisions\/14336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}