Harari's Humanist Horror Story:
Why History Matters
5. Exploitative Capitalism and
'Liberal Humanism'
The third humanist 'sect' Harari treats fares no better when tested against the historical sources. Let's get clear on what Harari means by 'liberal humanism'. Firstly, for Harari, liberal humanism is atheistic—its adherents hold that 'God is dead' [Harari 2017: 305] and a 'product of the human imagination' [Harari 2017: 435f]. Secondly, liberal humanism is simply identical with liberalism. Harari [2017: 289] explicitly conflates the two concepts when he writes: 'Due to this emphasis on liberty, the orthodox branch of humanism is known as "liberal humanism" or simply as "liberalism"'. Finally, liberal humanism is unequivocally exploitative as it 'perpetuates inequality, condemning the masses to poverty and the elite to alienation' [Harari 2017: 306]. Each of these claims stands in stark contradiction to the empirical evidence.
What is liberal humanism? To begin with, it is neither a term used in general discourse outside of universities nor a specific label adopted by actual humanist groups. Within academia, the term was used from the 1960s to describe a school of literary critics who held that great literature expresses universal human truths independent of cultural context.
Proponents from the 1930s to '50s include Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. Outside of university literature departments the phrase is vanishingly rare. There is, to be sure, a genuine historical connection between humanism and liberalism, but Harari grossly mischaracterizes it by treating a niche term used in literary criticism as though it named a politico-religious worldview. Harari makes no mention of the genesis of the term in his two books. Again, he seems completely ignorant of the term's etymology and specialist use before conscripting it into his grand history.
Considering Harari's first criterion, were the thinkers he actually enlists as liberal humanists in fact atheists? With a single exception, that being the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, the pre-twentieth-century figures he identifies were not atheists at all. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Giuseppe Mazzini were deists; Francis Bacon and John Locke were devout Christians; Pico della Mirandola founded the Christian Kabbalah. (Harari conscripted Hume, Bacon, Locke and Pico in his later dialogue with A. P. Norman. See Section 9 below.) All bar one worshipped God and revered the Scriptures. All bar one fail Harari's own criterion for membership of the 'sect'. His liberal humanists cannot be liberal humanists even on his own terms.
What of Harari's presupposition that 'liberalism' is simply 'liberal humanism'? His narrative of the ending of the Cold War belies that simplistic equation. In Harari's telling of the story, the 'liberal humanists' of the 'liberal West' eventually defeated the 'socialist humanists':
In the late 1980s and early 1990s the liberal wave turned into a veritable tsunami, sweeping away the mighty Soviet Empire, and raising expectations of the coming end of history. 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: 310–11]
The problem for Harari is that the two liberal Western leaders who did most to precipitate the Soviet collapse—Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—were conspicuously anti-humanist. Reagan was President of the U.S. from 1981 to 1989 and a devout Christian. As one example of how his Christian belief animated his hatred of Soviet communism, consider his speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, in which he asked: 'Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God' [Voices of Democracy 2016].
Reagan also relied heavily on the support of virulently anti-humanist political lobby groups, such as the Christian evangelical Moral Majority. One of its founders, Tim LaHaye, blasted: 'Secular humanism puts man at the center of all things. . . . They label it democracy, but they mean humanism, in all its atheistic, amoral depravity' [cited in Domke and Coe 2008: 173]. Reagan also vigorously opposed the largest humanist organization in the U.S. at the time. He spoke out against its campaigns to remove religious indoctrination in schools, liberalize abortion law, make contraception more accessible, legalize same-sex relationships and voluntary euthanasia, and remove the teaching of creationism from the science classroom.
Thatcher, Prime Minister of the U.K. from 1979 to 1990, was no less anti-humanist. Channelling her conservative Methodist upbringing and deep religious conviction, she wrote in a newspaper article in 1978:
I hold it to be the business of Government to ensure (though with proper respect for the consciences of all who dissent or who belong to another religion) that our schools shall be places in which Christian belief and morality are taught.
In that same article, she starkly warned of the danger in relying on humanist thinking:
True, there are loyal supporters of the Conservative cause today who would describe themselves as agnostic humanists. To my mind, such people are living recklessly on the dwindling spiritual capital of our Christian culture.
[Thatcher 1978]
In contrast, the largest humanist organization in the country, Humanists UK, objected to her inclusion of Christian worship in public schools. As with her ally against Soviet communism, Thatcher stridently opposed subsequent humanist campaigns. In direct opposition to Humanists UK, she pushed for the censorship of gay materials, the upholding of blasphemy laws and the continuance of parliamentary Christian prayers. She also supported U.K.'s soft theocracy in which the Anglican Church is the constitutionally established church of England. This anti-humanist arrangement grants Anglican bishops 26 unelected seats in the House of Lords. For Harari to make Reagan and Thatcher the champions of a triumphant liberal humanism is to invert the record.
Let me now deal with Harari's final charge, that liberal humanism (and liberalism) is exploitative. Harari [2017: 293] attributes the gross wealth inequality in Western societies to the liberal emphasis on 'each person narcissistically exploring their own inner depths'.
Here, Harari is mistaking liberalism for the quite different political philosophy of libertarianism. With that conflation, he imagines the liberal as being morally indifferent to inequality:
From a liberal perspective, it is perfectly all right that one person is a billionaire living in a sumptuous chateau, whereas another is a poor peasant living in a straw hut. For according to liberalism, the peasant's unique experiences are still just as valuable as the billionaire's.
[Harari 2017: 404]
Yet the very thinkers he names as liberal humanists were in fact vocal opponents of economic exploitation. Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1761: 202] condemned the 'moral inequality' in which 'the privileged few should gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude are in want of the bare necessities of life'. Giuseppe Mazzini [1862: 171, 181] complained about how the grossly inequitable distribution of property leads to 'misery of the working classes'. Adam Smith [1789: 95] lamented that 'the poor or the owners of small capitals enjoy scarce any [security], but are liable, under the pretence of justice, to be pillaged and plundered at any time'. Jeremy Bentham [1840: 122] pressed a reformist programme including instituting inheritance taxes, unemployment benefits, free education, cheap credit, savings banks, medical assistance and natal care. John Stuart Mill [1885: 208f] protested that the 'laws of property . . . have heaped impediments upon some, to give advantage to others; they have purposely fostered inequalities, and prevented all from starting fair in the race'. These are not the words of men reconciled to peasants forced to live in straw huts. Harari's third claim about liberal humanism, then, fails as comprehensively as his first two.
Summing up, Harari's 'liberal humanists' were not atheists, so are disqualified on his own definition. Secondly, his Cold War 'liberal humanist' victors were in fact hostile to humanism. And finally, his supposed apologists for economic exploitation were precisely its critics.
