The Many Imagined Histories of Yuval Noah Harari

The thing about history is that the meaning of historical events is often revealed only in hindsight.
Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari may be the world’s most famous historian. He is controversial, charismatic, and successful. His writing has real power. Many rely on his foresight. But his tautological comment that history is only revealed in hindsight shows why many people doubt his insights.

There is a reason for that. It has been a while since Harari really wrote history. Instead, he has speculated about the future and advocated controversial positions. Sapiens established his fame. But since its publication, Harari has used that fame not to be a student of the past, but to speak like a prophet of the future. His most recent book, Nexus, continues his speculation on the future of artificial intelligence.

But should you heed the prophecies of a historian if his histories are unreliable?

Harari’s Histories

Harari’s original training as a historian was in early modern European history. He wrote a PhD on a minor figure from this history and wrote specialised works on military history in the early modern and medieval period.

But his ambition to write history on a grander scale was ignited when he read Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years (1997). Diamond came to history late, after decades of scientific work in many fields including evolutionary biology. This scientific perspective on history inspired Harari. He read Guns, Germs and Steel in 2004 and had an epiphany. Diamond’s discipline-spanning text showed Harari how to write books of universal scope that reached a popular audience, beyond the academy. At the same time, he discovered meditation and has since practiced meditation as an integral part of his life. These two discoveries led to Harari’s personal transformation from dry historian to charismatic guru. He too set out to write a history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. It was called Sapiens.

Sapiens: a brief history of humankind was published in Hebrew in 2011 and translated into English in 2014. It has sold over 45 million in 65 languages. It is a big history of the human mind. I will explore its themes of the development of a global civilisation, and human dominance of the planet, in more detail after reviewing his other works.

In some ways, Sapiens recycled the traditional historiography of Western civilisation. But Harari’s next book began to leave history behind. Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015) explicitly claimed to know the future. This book explored the possibilities and limitations of humanity, beyond traditional goals of survival and basic well-being. Its discussion of a new human agenda revived old dreams of achieving immortality, happiness and near-divinity. Harari speculated that data, or Big Data, would reshape decision making and the possibilities of cognition. He predicted that artificial intelligence and biotechnology would revolutionise human life. This revolution would create new forms of inequality and ethical challenges.

In 21 lessons for the 21st century (2018) Harari examined contemporary issues and future challenges, such as identity, politics, and technology. He returned to his themes of automation and artificial intelligence, and their impact on the economy. But in the wake of the 2016 political upheavals in the USA and Britain, Harari focused on the political and social challenges of responding to nationalism, globalism, and populism. He joined a chorus worried about the rise of authoritarianism and linked it to the impact of technological change. He discussed how individuals and societies would define life purposes when artificial intelligence and other technologies displaced people from meaningful jobs.

His most recent book, Nexus: a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024) returns to the topics of artificial intelligence, misinformation and existential crisis. It explores how artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and data are reshaping human identity, politics, and economics. It presents ready-made stories of witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism and the Bible in a new story about relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. Harari claims algorithms might understand us better than we understand ourselves, and traditional notions of free will, privacy, and even humanity have broken down. Inequality and totalitarianism threaten. He calls for a reevaluation of ethical frameworks to respond to these challenges.

In addition to his books, Harari has become a prestigious speaker, including at the World Economic Forum. His talks focus on current political issues and future ‘existential risks,’ but with few signs of historical scholarship or caution. He defends the Western liberal rules-based order and Western civilisation against the West’s adversaries. For example, in his inaugural lecture on his appointment to the Centre for Existential Risk at Oxford University, he spoke little of history and much about the conflict in Ukraine. His public appearances have gained many followers. But many readers are skeptical of his objectivity and scholarship. Harari is both lionised and demonised. The noise that surrounds his public persona can detract from careful assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of his histories.

Assessing Sapiens as History

That careful assessment should focus on Sapiens. I noted above that Sapiens is a reworking of conventional themes of the historiography of Western civilisation. Sapiens is a chronicle that captures the development of what Harari sees as global Western civilisation.

Harari divides the entire history of homo sapiens into three historical phases, marked by the rising power of this species. The first phase was the cognitive revolution about 70,000 years ago. The second was the agricultural revolution, about 12,000 years ago, and the third was the scientific revolution about 500 years ago.

Each revolution enabled homo sapiens to create imagined realities – Harari uses the term ‘myths’ - that facilitated social cooperation among large numbers of people. These innovations of social behaviour gave rise to the development of human civilisation, nations, corporations, religions, and the great stories and legends. It is also a story of the integration of the world into a single world civilisation, and in making this claim Harari departs from many of the best contemporary historians of the world.

The first revolution or the cognitive revolution was sparked by the evolution of human brains in ways that allowed human ancestors to invent new ways of thinking and communicating. Harari reflected his interest in evolutionary biology, inspired by Jared Diamond. However, the fields of evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology are vast and deep. There is a huge debate and considerable uncertainty about what exactly happened 70,000 years ago. Harari’s account should be treated with caution, not as the foundation of a guru’s speculations on the future.

The second transition was the agricultural revolution, in which the forager was replaced by the farmer. People discovered plants and controlled seeds. They herded and tamed food animals. These new roles of farming, cultivation and herding led the human mind to create new imagined realities, new myths of society, and new ways of organising their lives. Through the evolution of feedback loops between culture, society and the human brain, history changed. Social hierarchies, priestly castes, human rights, currencies, social order, cultural icons and many other ‘myths’ came into being.

The idea that the ‘agricultural revolution’ launched the rise of Western civilisation from the Fertile Crescent to North America is a common trope. Through the work of the Australian archaeologist, Vere Gordon Childe, in the early twentieth century the Agricultural Revolution became central to defining ‘civilisation’. The idea spread through popular science books, like Guns, Germs and Steel, and integrated into popular culture, including computer games, such as the Civilisation franchise. However, decades of scholarly work by historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists since 1942 have changed conceptions of the development of agriculture in human societies across the world and over time. In Sapiens, Harari returned to Childe’s simplified model and presented an old idea in new clothing.

The same judgment can be made of Harari’s third transition, the Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution sparked, according to Harari, the discovery of ignorance. Humans – especially European humans – realised that belief systems were not complete and total. They came to accept the limits of knowledge and acquired the discipline to test those limits through the scientific method. The scientific practice of falsifying hypotheses became, in Harari’s account, the greatest discovery that human knowledge had ever obtained. It changed human minds, and made human culture open to change, more tolerant and liberal.

Sapiens tells a classic story of European Enlightenment. His traditional account of Europe’s Scientific Revolution shows little sign of the vast historical, cultural, scientific literature that has accumulated to tell a different story. It does not explore how non-Western societies had “scientific revolutions” of their own at different times and in different ways. Again, Sapiens recycles a dated history of ‘Western civilisation’ as the history of the human species, if in the updated language of cognitive science.

Throughout Sapiens Harari presents a materialistic understanding of humanity. Humans are animals for Harari. Their history arises from the biological reality of their brains. Old patterns of Western history are rewritten as an account of the physical adaptation of the human brain. Sapiens is a history of the mind of the human species, through the evolution of our brains, and out struggle with its physical and biological constraints.

At the end of the book, this story reaches its climax. Harari proposes that the human species, the human brain, and human cognition are now transcending the limits imposed on other living things. Homo sapiens is beginning to break the laws of natural selection. We bend them with the laws of intelligent design. Humans are, he writes in his afterword, “the animal that became a God.” It is the old myth of transcendence.

Can You Rely on Harari’s Histories?

Harari’s books are ambitious and have inspired millions around the world to explore this big history of humanity. They have convinced many of his foresight. But can you rely on his histories?

Harari is a brilliant storyteller. He stresses the fact that humans are storytellers, and his books are outstanding examples of narrative art. Sapiens has a beautiful story structure of transformation. First, the hero’s story begins when the human mind is born in the cognitive revolution. When human society advanced during the agricultural revolution, the hero encountered many challenges and struggles. Then in the scientific revolution the human mind slayed the monster of ignorance. Now, 70,000 years ago after the adventure of the human mind began, the hero of the story is about to leap beyond its limits, and, with the assistance of AI, become a God. It is a well-crafted archetypal story, and no wonder people have connected with it.

Harari also has charisma. His stage presence and use of metaphor have made him a loved guest for many talk shows, interviews, conferences and media appearances. He presents his mesmerising stories with charm and in ways that engage and interest people.

Harari chose an important field. He aspired to write big history, and the public hungered for a deep cognitive history of the human species. He helps to make sense of how we live within biological limitations, and how our biological history interacts with our culture and the way our minds work. His success is driven by his readers’ curiosity about a profound engaging subject.

Despite his success, Harari’s work has weaknesses that invite criticism. Some criticisms are personal attacks that are rooted in conspiracy theories and prejudices. But this white noise should not prevent us from exposing the weaknesses of Harari’s history. Harari fans sometimes respond to scholarly criticism with reciprocal personal attacks. Critiques are dismissed as the petty jibes of writers who are jealous of his commercial success. Harari’s status as a prophet of the future requires serious attention to the flaws of his history. None of us have any facts about the future. We ought to be scrupulous about the past.

The first major weakness of Harari’s history is his reductionist view. He assumes humans are animals and he reduces many events in history to questions of evolutionary biology. Despite claiming that ideas or myths are powerful, Harari tends to reduce ideas and all human responses to the world to biological responses. For example, in Sapiens, he wrote Nobody is ever made happy by winning the lottery, buying a house, getting a promotion, or even finding true love. People are made happy by one thing and one thing only. Pleasant sensations in their bodies. A person who just won the lottery or found new love and jumps from joy. It’s not really reacting to the money or the lover she is reacting to various hormones coursing through her bloodstream, and to the storm of electric signals flashing between different parts of her brain.

Such a reductionist view undercuts the arguments Harari presents in his own book about the power of myths and stories. It unravels his own history of the human mind and its ‘imagined realities.’ There are clearly subtle relations between culture and biology, and between ideas and brains. We cannot reduce the connections between minds and brains to one thing and one thing only, the pleasant sensations in our bodies.

Second, despite his charisma and broad appeal, Harari projects a haughtiness in his public presentations of issues that many people find objectionable. Sapiens has an admirable audacity. But writing a simplified story of 70,000 years of human history requires startling intellectual confidence. It leads to a visionary’s disdain for the subtle byways and forgotten paths of human history. Many people have objected to Harari’s views on AI and intelligent design. They sense Harari is most comfortable with the movers and shakers of world history, and despises the lower classes of people, whose lives are made redundant and meaningless by the gifted human animals who may one day become gods.

The third problem is linked to Harari’s talent as a storyteller. He does tell great stories, but the grand stories are more driven from his own world view. They do not retell a true encounter with detailed real history. The reader senses the book is written to support Harari’s ideas and aims for the world, rather than to explore and to recreate the actual experiences of the very different people he might discover in history. The detailed, empirical, complicated evidence that careful, modest historians have accumulated about the cognitive, agricultural and scientific revolutions do not make the cut. They would spoil Harari’s grand story of an animal who becomes a God.

Real history is in the details. It hides in the unique paths that emerge from the chaos of events. Compelling simple narratives provide unreliable tourist maps for this real history. Harari’s histories do not emerge from an encounter with the real substance of history. They do not inspire empathy with the real people of history or today.

But for readers interested in the big issues that Harari raises, there are, in fact, better historians of the deep history of human cognition. One such historian is Felipe Fernández-Armesto, one of the world’s leading historians of the world. In a series of books, including Civilisations, Ideas, Truth, and One Foot in the River, he explored the detailed issues of the entanglement of biology and culture, with more exactness and empathy than did Harari. Together with other scholars, he has opened up a field of Deep History that explores the complex stories of the human body, brain, energy and ecosystems, language, food, kinship, migration, and other social systems in ways that incorporate real evidence and cutting-edge social and evolutionary theory. Readers who want to understand how human genes, brains, and material culture intertwine over human history would do better to shelve Harari, and read Felipe Fernández-Armesto.

Historian or Futurist?

Harari is a futurist, not a historian. Even Sapiens, his most famous book about history, belongs to the jaded Western tradition of speculative, philosophical history. It is a schema that imprisons history in grand narrative. The curious, idiosyncratic, real material of history rarely appears. Unsurprisingly, Harari has never truly returned to history after launching his spectacular career from the platform of Sapiens. He has forged on with his speculations about the future, and practiced his pseudoscientific, speculative history. He does not seek empathetic understanding of the many puzzling stories of human history. He does not help us see the reality of the present, that emerged from that complex past. He turns both history and the present into fables, and not the study of particular and intricate places, times, cultures, and peoples.

If the deep themes of the evolution of culture and biology over human history intrigue you, then seek out better histories than those written by Yuval Noah Harari.