Editorial : 28th Issue March 1st 2020

Blog: http://michaelrdjames.org/

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The first lecture is about essay number 3 in Harari’s work Homo

Deus”. It is claimed in this essay, “Stories, Sceince and Religion”,
that animals live in a dual layered reality (whatever that means) and
we humans live in a triple lyered reality(a position that Harari
questions:

Our species is defined not just by a host of powers that animals do not possess such as the
power of language, but we are defined by these powers being what P M S Hacker called two-
way powers: powers to do things or refrain from doing them at will. This is a philosophical
position arrived at on the basis of a tradition of philosophising stretching back to Aristotle and
forward to Kant and Wittgenstein.

Harari then wishes to claim that we humans can be said to live in a triple layered reality
because above and beyond what animals experience in their stream of consciousness we
experience stories about gods, nations, corporations, and money. In connection with the third
layer or reality, it is somewhat controversially suggested in this context, we believe that we
make history with our actions and decisions. Harari, however, questions this layer on the
grounds that history is some kind of epiphenomenon of the stories that have woven
themselves into our form of life.

The denial of this third layer which Hacker questions with his reference to two-
way powers above is then further linked with another questionable claimed that
humans as a species have not changed much since the Stone Age. A “Cognitive
Revolution 70,000 yers ago is appealed to on questionable grounds: the
hylomorphic theory of language presented by Julian Jaynes suggests that
language had not reached a sufficient level of complexity 70,000 years ago:
Reaching back into the mists of history as Harari does is nevertheless an interesting
adventure. He suggests that a Cognitive revolution occurred 70,000 years ago that allowed
Homo Sapiens an evolutionary advantage over the Neanderthals. The former, it is claimed
began talking about the things in their imagination. There is no direct or indirect evidence for
this claim as was pointed out earlier but there is certainly an interesting hypothesis to be
formed relating to the ability to tell and understand stories and its relation to later supervening
cultural activities of telling the truth and reasoning about the foundations of knowledge. The
activity of storytelling involving the imagination of things that did not exist may have
occurred later than Harari suggests but the hypothesis that our storytelling power pre-dated
our more developed cognitive powers is very interesting. Kant certainly thought that our
imagination was involved in the schematisation of our concepts but this was an imagination
that was working with the materials of perception and intuition in the service of the
conceptualisation of our experiences (in accordance with the cognitive attitude of truth). That
is, consciousness when it is operating at the conceptual level is asserting that something is the
case: e.g. the lightning struck the tree. Now the imagination may well be brought into play
when the mind seeks an answer to the Aristotelian question "Why did this change occur?" and
a god is thought to be the cause of the lightning but we know that Aristotle himself postulated
physical processes to be the cause of physical events such as this, i.e. he himself was
postulating the pre-eminence of material and efficient causes for the explanation of events in
the inorganic world.

Harari’s reflections on the structure of our cuture liken the role of religion to
modern corporations:

Harari's cultural portrait, however, may be appropriate for the historical period prior to the
advent of philosophical reasoning about our experience. It is undoubtedly true that we once
believed in stories about gods doing great things and our temples were the centre of our social
existence. It is not certain, however, as Harari claims, that the gods fulfilled a function which
is today provided by modern corporations. They were indeed legal entities but it can also be
argued that they functioned more like a government than a corporation.

The Philosophical response to this follows:

The problem with regarding gods or corporations as fictional entities (as Harari recommends)
is that it fails to understand the philosophical and ontological character of action that has a
beginning, intermediate stages, and an end (and is related to other actions and objects) which
themselves are embedded in larger environments. Stanley Cavell, in the spirit of Wittgenstein,
once said that naming actions was a difficult and sensitive business because these actions are
related to the agents thought about both the ends to be pursued and the means to achieve these
ends.

Actions, in other words, are intentional and just as it is almost impossible to capture the
philosophical idea of God or gods in a story. so it is difficult to capture the world-creating
intention of action in an ancient narrative. If this is true then it is possible that biblical
narratives were not very good attempts to express the knowledge of "knowers" who had
thought deeply about the principles of existence and the intentions of men. The audiences of
these narratives at the time of their creation might then, not have been as ignorant as we might
like to believe. If men 6000 years ago could be working for a God in the way we work for
corporations they might have had more "knowledge" than our modern reconstructions give
them credit for. We should remember here that it takes a considerable amount of organisation
and cooperation to build a city and create laws that will govern the actions and intentions of
men. Laws are actions of government but no less real for that.

Harari believes that legal entities are fictions, possibly because of their
normative character. This would seem to be an example of a category mistake, a
case of mistaking normative expectational language with the language if fact
and observation. Harari then concludes with a further confusion between
religions and politics in the following:
The section ends with an ominous prediction that the twenty-first century will create a greater
number of totalitarian "religions"(does he mean "regimes?" that emerged in the twentieth
century(totalitarianism was a twentieth-century phenomenon) and these movements will be
assisted by scientific biotechnology and computer algorithms that are no longer able to
distinguish between what is real and what is fictional. Virtual heavens and hells will emerge
and it will become important to distinguish science from religion.This, from the same author
that claims that Humanism and Nazism are "religions".
The second lecture is entitled “Stories and Science. It opens thus:
"Stories serve as the foundations and pillars of human societies. As history unfolded, stories
about gods, nations, and corporations grew so powerful that they began to dominate objective
reality."

For Harari, the decisive contents in a narrative are the elements in it that may happen to be
false or fictional as he puts it. It was suggested in the previous lecture that the belief in the
fictional elements of biblical narratives are not actually the components which facilitate
Harari systematically cooperation between men but rather that function of cooperation is
produced by the element of the following of the ethical rules which are suggested in these
narratives. It is not clear whether Harari would agree with the ancient Greek belief that the
reason why men follow these rules are teleological: they hope that their actions will lead to a
flourishing life for themselves and the people they care for.

Corporations and nations are not "fictional entities" as Harari maintains, but rather entities
that scientific theory cannot adequately describe given its ignorance of what consciousness is
and its ignorance of how to characterise action in general and ethical action in particular.
Nations and corporations are not objects of belief but objects of action brought about by the
activities of men. Action is as real as the suffering that causes it, or it causes. Philosophical
theory has been concerned with action theory for over two thousand years not through the
activity of storytelling but through the activity of theorising and arguing about it. The kind of
action that avoids the consequences of suffering is the kind of action which builds not upon a
shaky belief about something fictional but about knowledge of what is real, e.g. suffering.

Voodoo, Harari claims, is not a significantly different activity when compared

with science. They are merely different:
Science is defended on the grounds that it has in fact relieved suffering by overcoming famine
plague and war via its substitution of intersubjective myths with objective scientific
knowledge. This is a confident claim that is immediately mitigated by a sceptical self-doubt
that verges on science fiction. It is again insisted that it will be difficult to tell the difference
between fiction and reality but on this occasion, science will somehow dedicate itself to
strengthening intersubjective myths and help people to live in their mythical virtual worlds.

The implication of the above is that people will be able to live out their virtual realities
whatever they are, whether they lead ultimately to flourishing lives or not. Science will,
Harari claims,, be able to provide an elite with eternal youth!

There then follows a bewildering discussion about the supernatural in which it is maintained
that there is a resemblance between the voodoo belief in invisible spirits and pseudo causal
connections (sticking a pin in a doll causes a man in the next village to develop a headache) .
Apparently, Harari claims, there is nothing supernatural about the claims of voodoo

The Agricultural Revolution that began when man settled in communities and
followed laws symbolised by the Ten Commandments was not a progressive
step in mans development, Harari, argues:
The Ten Commandments were obviously written by Moses in an awe-inspiring environment
and in a state of mind seeking help after a long period of homelessness and hunting and
gathering in the wilderness. The commandments were what was needed to form a permanent
settlement. Men cannot live together without principles or laws. The narrative of Moses is
written in symbolic terms by inspired scribes. Where is the science here? Well, it is in the
facts that the life of hunting and gathering created a problem for which a trial solution was
needed which in turn would require further error elimination until a state was achieved which
in turn could be conceptualised as problematic. We are talking here about the transition from
the hunter-gathering phase of human existence to the agricultural phase. Harari is critical of
the Agricultural revolution because he argues that for many people it did not symbolise a
better life. On the contrary, Harari argues that there was a deterioration of our form of
life(longer hours at work, disease etc.). The question is whether, although problematic, this
was not the necessary step needed to raise the level of man's awareness or consciousness of
himself and his life. The dating of the so called "Cognitive Revolution" prior to the
Agricultural Revolution suggests that man was sufficiently conscious to speak of imagined
entities 70,000 years ago: this is highly controversial. Many commentators including the
Psychologist/Anthropologist Julian Jaynes produces considerable amounts of evidence which
indicates that the kind of self-awareness Harari is talking about probably only occurred ca. 3-
4000 years ago. Jaynes concedes that certain individuals may have reached the levels of
consciousness being talked about earlier than this and they may have been regarded as "gods".
Like Moses, they may have been the lawmakers of the communities they were part of. The
Agricultural Revolution produced the conditions necessary for this heightened level of
awareness and in accordance with scientific method we may, with Harari, see many things to
be problematic and the subjects of the Agricultural Revolution certainly sought new trial
solutions to their problems. The industrial Revolution could have been such a trial solution
seeking to eliminate the errors of a revolution that bound us to the soil. Greek Culture taught
us that we needed freedom if we are to lead the kind of contemplative life necessary to solve
the problems of existence. The Industrial Revolution seems to have given many of us this
freedom in spite of some of its more problematic characteristics that almost destroyed
civilisation, e.g. its invention and mass production of weapons of mass destruction. There
seems, in spite of the above problem, to exist a thread of progress that means that in spite of
the process of error elimination leading to a new problem, this problem bore with it a slightly
better life than was the case previously.

Harari systematically ignores all evidence of the thread of continuity in our

History, ignoring both the progress of Science and Philosophy. Since Science is
not essentially concerned with the truth it has no objection to seeking help from
religious thought, Harari, argues thus conflating areas of discourse that have
been separated throughout the History of Philosophy:
Harari claims that science must be assisted by religion because of its ethical concerns. Ethics
as a search for the principles of a flourishing life and the good character who does the right
thing in the right way at the right time has been a focus of Philosophical thinking for over
2000 years but Harari ignores this presumably because he believes logical argumentation is
something that only the dwellers in ivory towers are concerned with. Logic was discovered by
Aristotle, in accordance with the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason and
many Greeks saw this as a means to clarify the dialectical structure of Philosophical dialogues
which in their turn were intended by Plato and other poets to use writing to dispel the
limitations of stories and narratives. We see, even here, a thread of progression that Harari
ignores. Religion is neither generally philosophical nor logical in its approach to ethical
problems and exactly because of that fact will always remain perspectival in the face of other
religions. There is one principle of non-contradiction and one principle of sufficient reason
and both are universal. You can question both if you wish but only at the expense of
contradicting yourself or denying the role of reason in man's life. You can replace reason with
imagination but only at the expense of taking a step back in our cultural evolution and helping
the modernists and post modernists to turn our world upside down. Popular religion is
dualistic and dialectical and perhaps those bureaucrats who have found themselves taking
responsibility for the questionable rewritings of words of ancient wisdom for heuristic
purposes may, in the long run, have done a disservice to the tradition.

The lecture concludes thus:

In a final discussion on the relation between Science and Religion Harari points to the fact
that the truths of science and religion clash but he then proceeds to claim that neither really
care about the truth and for this reason there is room for cooperation and compromise.
Religion will cooperate because it is more interested in order than in truth.
An amazing closing statement. We see again the postmodernist dismissal of the importance of
truth and knowledge and a postmodernist refusal to recognise the conceptual truth that the
cognitive attitude of understanding is inextricably bound up with the truth. Imagine Moses
upon presenting the ten commandments to the learned men of his tribe saying "here they are
but I am not sure whether they are true!". The tribe would have returned to their worship of
animal idols and the Israelites would probably have remained nomads with all the
consequences that this kind of life entails. It is because these commandments were understood
to be true that they were able to create the order that they did. Imagine if the learned men of
the tribe said "yes they may be true but you have your truth and we have ours", and you will
be imagining the consequences of the postmodernist position on knowledge and truth. In a
way, this might be consistent with Harari's overall position when he claims that the hunter-
gatherer life was in many respects better than the life of suffering during the agricultural
revolution. It is a strange position. There are those who long to go back to the Garden of
Eden. But to the wilderness?

The Third Lecture is entitled: “The Social Covenant”. It begins with an account
of the origin of Social Contract Theory and the claim that we are actors
following a scripted cosmic plan:
In response to social contract theorists, Hume once asked for the evidence and concluded
firstly that there is none and secondly, that the deal may be fictional: social contract theory
then faded away to be resurrected again by John Rawls in his work "Theory of Justice" but
not as an actuality. Social Contract theory for Rawls was an explanatory hypothesis designed
to explain our social and political behaviour. In the original deal that Hobbes proposed we
have agreed to give up some of our freedom in exchange for the security that the nation-state
offers. Harari's deal that modern man makes is to exchange meaning for power. With Hobbes
and Rawls it is clear that the parties to the deal are the nation-state and its citizens but it is not
clear who the parties to the deal are that the author of the work "Homo Deus" has in mind.
Power and not the truth, we know from earlier essays, is what science is concerned. Insofar as
meaning is concerned, it is claimed that in pre-modern times people believed that there was a
grand cosmic plan for human beings and it was this plan that provided life with a meaning at
the expense of power over their lives. Humans were merely strutting on the world stage like
actors.

The details of this scripted plan are:

If famine, plague, and war were in the script then everyone played their parts with varying
degrees of Stoicism. Humans had no control of the script, no control over famine, plague, and
war. It is this powerlessness that science challenges on the grounds that the cosmic plan has
no meaning. Life, it is claimed has no meaning and "the universe is a blind and purposeless
process, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing". The feeling that life is without
meaning is actually a symptom of the depressive phase of the mental illness: manic
depression. We know that the Shakespearean character associated with the above words was
not in a stable mental condition, so this statement that the life of humans and the processes of
the universe have no meaning would be somewhat puzzling if we were not familiar with the
cultural phenomenon of post-modernism. Postmodernists begin by denying the truth and then
they deny meaning on grounds that actually undermine their own position. To take
postmodernist claims seriously we would have to believe that they were true and meaningful.
If these claims were not meaningful, they could not be true and this relation between truth and
meaning has been a fundamental tenet of Philosophy since the time of Aristotle up until
modern times that Philosophers date back to Hobbes and Descartes. Hobbes, as we saw,
wished for humans to give up their freedom. This freedom, according to Kant, is the source,
principle, and meaning of human action and human activity. Kant would not, therefore, have
negotiated any deals with the Hobbesian Leviathan.
Normally the Shakespearean character in a mental state of confusion rants and raves about the
storm and the lightning and sees an adversarial meaning in the storm. If he is finally blinded
and moves toward a state of calmer equilibrium and as a consequence a greater understanding
of what has happened to him, it is not out of the question that he might sit and ponder his
behaviour in the storm and arrive at the Aristotelian analysis that the storm is a physical
process composed of the elements of earth, air, water, and fire and processes of hot and cold,
wet and dry interacting with the purpose of re-establishing an equilibrium in the weather
system. The storm is not a blind process: its power has meaning. Modern culture does not
reject this cosmic plan. Modern science might believe that power is the source of meaning and
if this is so then this is a problem that science needs to address. If science has been blinded by
its power then it is about time that it calm down and sit in Shakespearean fashion and ponder
its future.

After claiming that the motto of modernism could well be “Shit happens”. The
essay concludes with:

"Every generation destroys the old world and builds a new one in its place"

This could be the motto of postmodernism which is a movement committed to

the dissolution of the "old" system of values in favour of the new. We are told
that humans are greedy and that greed is good. We are further told that the world
needed to be turned upside down in the name of modernism whose task it was to
convince human collectivities and institutions that equilibrium is "far more
frightening than chaos". It is not clear what the author means but he claims that
the modern world is devoid of ethics, aesthetics, and compassion but not of
morality beauty and compassion which he believes somehow has managed to
flourish because of what he calls the new revolutionary "religion" of humanism.
Separating humanism from ethics and uniting it with Capitalism and
omnipotence is agreeably a chaotic assertion which could only be understood in
a through the looking glass world where words can mean whatever you want
them to mean. A world in which not only can cats smile but their smile can be
separated from their bodies symbolising the separation of biology from
psychology. But the world of the postmodernist is much worse than the fictional
world of Wonderland because not only is it upside down it is like a landscape
barren of everything human after an atomic explosion or a catastrophic tsunami.
Somewhere the author realises this is an untenable position and in the next
chapter agrees that the contract can be breached and must be breached because it
is impossible to establish order without meaning after the so-called death of
God.