Harari's Humanist Horror Story:
Why History Matters
6. What Humanist Tsunami?
Underlying Harari's historical edifice is his claim about scale. Harari confidently asserts that 'for 300 years the world has been dominated by humanism . . . humanism – the worship of humankind – has conquered the world' [2017: 75] and that 'Homo sapiens come to believe in the humanist creed' [2017: 77]. And how did this 'revolutionary new creed' conquer the world? With breathtaking vagueness, Harari [2017: 259–60] informs us: 'Thinkers wrote pamphlets, artists composed poems and symphonies, politicians struck deals – and together they convinced humanity that it can imbue the universe with meaning.'
This is where the fiction is most easily tested against fact, because if humanism—on Harari's own atheistic definition—had truly conquered the world, we should expect the world to have become largely non-theist. It did not. Take the very period Harari calls 'the humanist wars of religion'. In Homo Deus, Harari [2017: 306] tells us: 'From 1914 to 1989 a murderous war of religion raged between the three humanist sects'. However, the combatants of the First World War were not warring humanist sects but states calling god into service for the cause. The Allied and Central Powers alike invoked Christian duty and divine providence. The Ottoman Empire declared an Islamic Jihad (see Figure 2).
Figure 2 – First World War religious allegiances in 1914
In the Second World War, the Allies were overwhelmingly Christian. For the U.S., Franklin D. Roosevelt was an Episcopalian while Harry S. Truman was a Baptist. For the U.K., Winston Churchill was a Unitarian. For France, both Philippe Pétain and Charles de Gaulle were Catholic. The Axis powers bore a combination of religious identities. Fascist Germany established Positive Christianity as the state religion while fascist Italy was Catholic. The religion of Japan was Shintoism, with its head of state Emperor Hirohito worshipped as a living god. Thailand, a late combatant, was traditionally Buddhist (see Figure 3).
Figure 3 – Second World War religious allegiances in November 1942
Survey and census data tell the same story across the century. In the U.S. in 1914 at the start of the First World War, 86 per cent of survey respondents reported being raised as either Catholic or Protestant. In 1939 at the start of the Second World War, that proportion remained relatively stable at 87 per cent. By the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, even though the proportion had fallen significantly, people raised as traditional Christians remained a substantial majority at 71 per cent (see Figure 4). At that time, 15 per cent of the population identified with another denomination or religion. Altogether, there were six times as many religious as those declaring no religious affiliation.
This is hardly the 'veritable tsunami' [Harari 2017: 310–11] Harari wants us to believe. Perhaps the tsunami was delayed. Did religious affiliation drop dramatically following the collapse of the Soviet Union? In a subsequent survey conducted by Pew Research Center [2006: 5] in 1996, 60 per cent of U.S. residents regarded the U.S. a 'Christian nation'. In 2002, the proportion saying so increased to 67 per cent and increased again to 71 per cent according to the 2005 survey.
Figure 4 – Proportion of U.S. citizens raised religious since 1900
This high degree of commitment to Christianity is also reflected in the U.K. survey data. At the start of the First World War, 80 per cent of respondents identified as Christian. That proportion fell to 76 per cent by the time of the Second World War. Even by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the proportion who were Christian remained very high at 71 per cent. Add to that the 10 per cent of people adhering to another religious faith, the god-believers outnumbered the irreligious by more than 2 to 1 (see Figure 5). Whatever tsunami swept the twentieth century, it was not a tsunami of atheism. The peoples Harari says were converted to godless humanism remained, in their overwhelming majority, wedded to traditional religions.
Figure 5 – Proportion of U.K. citizens identified religious since 1900
Let us now turn our attention to Harari's overall timeline of the genesis and eventual dominance of humanism and its fragmentation into warring sects. Does it make historical sense? Harari gives us the key historical markers. For the beginnings of humanism, Harari [2017: 114] tells us: 'Whereas the Agricultural Revolution gave rise to theist religions, the Scientific Revolution gave birth to humanist religions, in which humans replaced gods.' And when was that? Harari [2017: 231] informs us it was 'around 1600 . . . the Scientific Revolution began in London and Paris'. 'For 300 years the world has been dominated by humanism' [2017: 75], he reckons. Working back from when Sapiens was first published, that puts world domination starting around 1715. Those dates allow us to build the early section of Harari's timeline, illustrated in Figure 6.
Figure 6 – Harari's timeline of the humanist tsunami
A problem already arises here as Harari's 'liberal revolutions' of 1848 [Harari 2015: 261] that were meant to establish liberal humanist states occurred over a century later than humanism's supposed world domination. Even more problematic is that what precipitated these revolutions was not a desire to be free of the shackles of the church but a host of political grievances arising from rapid industrialization, food shortages and cruel despotism. In fact, the states that did emerge from these revolutions were republics and constitutional monarchies holding fast to traditional Christian beliefs and practices.
Turning to the latter part of the timeline shown in Figure 6, the warring parties engaged in the two world wars were not humanist 'sects' but predominantly states fighting under the banners of the old established religions. The three labels that Harari co-opts to name his humanist 'sects' did not appear until after the close of the Second World War. Huxley conceived 'evolutionary humanism' as a reaction against fascism in 1946. 'Socialist humanism' emerged among anti-Stalinists in the 1950s and 1960s, after the terror it opposed. 'Liberal humanism' was a label applied to a particular school of literary criticism from the 1960s. Harari has three 'sects' fighting a war from 1914 using names that are so anachronistic as to be meaningless. Even with the end of the Cold War in 1989, the humanist tsunami turns out to be no more than a trickle. The leaders championing the charge against the Soviet Union were conservative Christians, along with the publics they led.
