Harari's Humanist Horror Story:
Why History Matters

Harari failed to pin down the essence of humanism as it manifested across the periods he was writing about. He misrepresented the humanistically minded Enlightenment thinkers—Bacon, Rousseau, Locke—as wanting to replace the worship of gods with the worship of humanity. They were either deists or devout theists. In then trying to pin atheism on humanist Renaissance scholars, he miscast humanism further still. They were by and large institutionalized Catholics. His description comes closest with the nineteenth and twentieth century secular freethinkers. Crucially, however, they did not worship anything—including humanity—and critiqued hedonistic consumerism and exploitation. Harari paid little attention to the sources and was not at all interested in the history of modern humanism, let alone in working out what humanism has in common across these distinct periods.

Although Harari has no appetite for the question, is it possible to discern a common thread that runs through these three epochs—the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the modern period (post-1850)? Figure 8 represents some of the key figures and organizations in this historical development of ideas.

Figure 8 – Humanism through three epochs

If humanism is neither the human-worshipping religion of Homo sapiens nor the seedbed of totalitarianism, what, then, is it? Traced from the Renaissance to the present, humanism reveals, I think, three unifying themes:

1. a confidence in the ability of humans to reason

   • the gradual progress in logic, philosophy and empirical enquiry

2. a valuing of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies

   • the application of critical historical analysis to texts, and moral and political lessons drawn from other cultures

3. a commitment to religious tolerance

   • a defensive reaction against incessant religious wars and the persecution of heretics and blasphemers

What changed over those centuries was humanism's relationship to religion and the growth of empirical enquiry. It is exactly this development that Harari flattens. The following sketch shows how far humanism travelled and how recent its atheistic and agnostic worldview-forming phase actually is. The god-rejecting humanism that Harari treats as many centuries old is in truth a development of the past century and a half. For most of its history, what is generically labelled 'humanism' today was carried by theists and deists who worked within a religious conceptual scheme rather than against it. Collapsing this long, largely god-believing tradition into a single atheistic 'religion' that 'conquered the world' constitutes the master error from which all the others flow.

There are other very important differences between these three phases of humanism. I have summarized these in Table 1. The Renaissance humanists were deeply embedded in the Catholic institutions of church and university, many holding ecclesiastical positions. As humanist thought progressed during the Enlightenment, many thinkers eschewed biblical literalism and inerrancy. Belief in miracles and divine pronouncements gave way to naturalist explanations of phenomena. The use of reason was also increasingly applied to ethics, with moral norms judged by their efficacy in promoting social harmony. The right of rulers to impose religious dogma and enforce religious observance was resisted for this reason. These trends culminated in the modern period with self-described humanist societies finally rejecting religious moral authority altogether. A parallel trend was manifested in the treatment of scientific explanations. Whereas Enlightenment humanists often regarded god as a supplementary dimension to the universe with little to no causal impact, modern humanists removed god completely. For humanists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the god idea had no explanatory or philosophical import.

Table 1 – Points of difference in phases of humanist thought

Given these significant differences, we must exercise caution in using the one word to encapsulate a movement in ideas across such a vast expanse of time. We must avoid Harari's mistake in thinking that humanism can be encapsulated in a pithy slogan when talking about a progression of ideas over several centuries. (I say more on the history and philosophy of humanism across epochs in Harari's Humanist Wars of Religion, Chapters 4 and 8.)

Harari is a gifted and engaging writer, and nothing in this essay is meant to deny his significant talents. In wrapping up, however, it is clear his portrayal of humanism is largely a work of fiction. The three 'sects' of humanism he describes do not survive contact with the historical record: the Nazis were neither atheists nor Darwinians; the socialist humanists were among Stalinism's fiercest critics; and the thinkers he labels as liberal humanists were virtually without exception theists or deists as well as stridently opposed to economic exploitation. The humanist tsunami never drowned a stubbornly god-worshipping world. Harari's timeline is riddled with anachronism, and when the errors were put to him, he conceded the substance yet clung to the label while sliding deeper into confusion. A century of humanist manifestos, and a roll-call of humanist writers and activists from Russell to Fromm, stand in flat contradiction to the charge sheet.

Two books that were meant to illuminate the human story instead diminish their author's standing as a serious historian. That would matter little if the cost fell on Harari alone. It does not. His false depiction risks real harm to living humanists, in a climate where influential voices are already eager to blame them for the century's worst crimes. Getting the history of humanism right is not pedantry. It is a matter of justice to the people that history is about. That, in the end, is why history matters.

Copyright © 2026 Leslie Allan