Harari's Humanist Horror Story:
Why History Matters
2. Harari's Schism into Three 'Sects'
Harari's history of humanism begins with an origin myth. In Homo Deus he tells us when humanism first arose and what, at bottom, it is:
Whereas the Agricultural Revolution gave rise to theist religions, the Scientific Revolution gave birth to humanist religions, in which humans replaced gods. While theists worship theos (Greek for 'god'), humanists worship humans. The founding idea of humanist religions such as liberalism, communism and Nazism is that Homo sapiens has some unique and sacred essence that is the source of all meaning and authority in the universe.
[Harari 2017: 114]
Note what has happened already. Humanism has been redefined as a religion whose adherents 'worship humans', and communism and Nazism have been quietly enrolled as species of it.
Harari later goes on to tell us when the big schism occurred:
Humanism split into three main branches. The orthodox branch holds that each human being is a unique individual possessing a distinctive inner voice . . . Due to this emphasis on liberty, the orthodox branch of humanism is known as 'liberal humanism' or simply as 'liberalism'. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as humanism gained increasing social credibility and political power, it sprouted two very different offshoots: socialist humanism, which encompassed a plethora of socialist and communist movements, and evolutionary humanism, whose most famous advocates were the Nazis.
[Harari 2017: 289–90]
I will unpack this timeline connecting humanism to the Scientific Revolution, along with the supposed split that occurred centuries later, in Section 6. For readers interested in Harari's fuller pseudo-history, he weaves this story in Sapiens Part 3, Chapter 12 titled The Law of Religion and in Homo Deus Part 2, Chapter 7 titled The Humanist Revolution. Harari succinctly tabulates what he sees as the three 'sects' and their distinguishing features in Sapiens Chapter 12 [2015: 260] (see Figure 1 below).
Figure 1 – Harari's classification of three humanist sects
For Harari, each of these humanist 'sects' is a non-theistic 'natural-law religion'. Why are they classified as a 'religion'? Because according to Harari's definition, a religion is 'a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order' [Harari 2015: 254].
And just like the centuries of wars between the Catholics and Protestants, the humanist sects followed suit in violent disagreements over dogma. For Harari, the disagreements were cataclysmic: 'From 1914 to 1989 a murderous war of religion raged between the three humanist sects, and liberalism at first sustained one defeat after the other' [Harari 2017: 306]. Following the catastrophes of two world wars, one sect, he announces, emerged victorious: 'After decades of defeats and setbacks, liberalism won a decisive victory in the Cold War, emerging triumphant from the humanist wars of religion, albeit a bit worse for wear' [Harari 2017: 311].
The story Harari weaves is neat in its simplicity while pinning humanism in readers' minds with blame for the catastrophes of the previous two centuries. The charge sheet Harari draws up against his so-called humanist 'sects' is severe. Against 'evolutionary humanism' he cites the Nazi ambition to 'bludgeon or even exterminate anyone standing in their way' [Harari 2017: 300]. Against 'socialist humanism' he adduces Lenin's bloodbath [Harari 2015: 409], Stalin's gulags and Mao Zedong's 'worst famine in history and the death of tens of millions of Chinese' [Harari 2017: 193]. Against 'liberal humanism' he alleges that it 'perpetuates inequality, condemning the masses to poverty and the elite to alienation' [Harari 2017: 306]. And against the humanist collective he lays 'the bloodiest wars of religion in history', including the two world wars and the war in Vietnam [Harari 2015: 254]. Add to Harari's charge sheet the suicidal proliferation of 'nuclear weapons' and relapse to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It is a spectacular indictment. The trouble is that it dissolves the moment one examines any of its four counts.
