Harari's Humanist Horror Story:
Why History Matters

How did Harari respond to the kind of critique I am advancing in this essay? The most substantial response he gave is in answer to U.S. philosopher Andrew P. Norman in an extended dialogue published in Free Inquiry [vol. 38, no. 3], the journal of the Council for Secular Humanism. In his initial approach to Harari, Norman [Harari and Norman 2018: 34f] pointed out how his portrayal of humanism 'is in many ways the polar opposite of what you depict' and in so doing his usage of '"humanism" could also cause great harm'. Norman politely requested that Harari find another term, such as 'human-centrism' or 'sapiens-sanctifying'. Correcting the historical record, he pleaded, would remove the risk to humanists.

Norman made clear the dangers in Harari's serious distortions of history:

Your characterizations of humanism as nothing less than the root cause of Nazism, Stalinism, and environmental destruction are also quite dangerous. They could easily frighten religious know-nothings into scapegoating humanists. Given the prevalence of humanists in higher education, it could exacerbate anti-intellectual fervor. What if your portrayals of humanism—backed by your substantial rhetorical gifts—were to inspire Mao-style thought reform, humanist witch-hunts, or intellectual purges in the West?

[Harari and Norman 2018: 40]

In response to Norman's pushback, Harari conceded two points. He retreated from the assertion that humanists 'worship humans' to the milder idea that they hold humanity in 'deep respect and awe' [Harari and Norman 2018: 38]. And he abandoned the claim that Nazism and Communism are 'sects' of humanism, settling for the weaker position that they are 'based on misunderstanding and distorting the core humanist ideals' [Harari and Norman 2018: 38]. These are substantive concessions that greatly lessen his charge against humanism. Yet, having given ground on these major points, Harari never the less refused Norman's modest request to change the label. That refusal and the fresh contortions it forced on him are worth examining in their own right.

Norman had directed Harari to the 'decades of intellectual and social toil' embodied in the humanist manifestos and declarations—the very documents surveyed above. Not noticing the irony in his reply, Harari [Harari and Norman 2018: 36] brushed them off with an appeal to historical relevance:

I pay little attention to what you define as secular humanism, because I am interested in the historical impact of ideas rather than in the ideas per se.

Harari [Harari and Norman 2018: 38] insisted that his use of the term was much broader than Norman's contemporary usage:

I use the term ["humanism"] to refer to a much wider historical current, which goes back at least to the late medieval and early modern Italian humanists (for instance, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's "Oration on the Dignity of Man" from 1486).

Harari [Harari and Norman 2018: 38] defended his usage by appeal to what he learned in his student days:

This broad understanding of humanism is not some new invention of mine, but something that is very common among historians in general. When I did my BA in history twenty years ago, when my professors talked about "humanism" they usually talked about Pico della Mirandola, Bacon, or Locke rather than about the 1933 Manifesto.

In trying to avoid considering what actual humanists have said and done, here Harari dug himself into a hole. Whereas in his popular books Harari set the birth of humanism to the time of the Scientific Revolution around 1600, he now pushed it back by hundreds of years to the much earlier time of the Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This is the first revision Harari made to his timeline.

Never the less, Harari managed to look at one of the humanist declarations to which Norman pointed only to find within it the seeds of totalitarianism. Harari squarely laid the blame for the horrors of the twentieth century on the 1933 Humanist Manifesto I. As Harari [Harari and Norman 2018: 39] explained:

I would recommend similar soul-searching for humanists appalled by the crimes of Nazism and Communism or by the destruction of the ecosystem.

Indeed, even if I go with the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, I can find there all the key ideas that could lead to environmental destruction and to totalitarian projects of human perfection.

. . .

It is dangerously easy to reach from such maxims to the conclusion that . . . we should strive to perfect human beings and human society by scientific means (and if you happen to believe in the "science" of Social Darwinism or the "science" of Communism, the results could be rather ugly).

This causal link between a modern humanist manifesto and the rise of Nazism and Stalinism is one for which he thought humanists ought to confess. Harari [Harari and Norman 2018: 35–6] put a positive spin on any such admission:

What do we do with our shadow? People who celebrate the achievements of modernity, of the enlightenment, and of secularism often are not sure what to do with communism and fascism. Are they too part of modernity? Are they too a product of secular enlightenment? My view is that they are . . .

I think one of the great achievements of humanism, as against traditional religions, is that humanism has the courage and wisdom to acknowledge its shadow and its mistakes.

Harari's rhetoric is generous-sounding, but the chronology tells decisively against him. Consider Harari's revised timeline, which I have reconstructed in Figure 7.

Figure 7 – Harari's revised timeline of the humanist tsunami

Note first what has happened to the timing of the birth of humanism. Under Norman's questioning, Harari [Harari and Norman 2018: 38] pushed the genesis back from around 1600 to 'the late medieval and early modern Italian humanists', citing Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man. That work was published in 1486. Petrarch, considered the 'father of humanism' by Renaissance scholars, died in 1374.

Now consider the latter part of the timeline encompassing the events of the twentieth century. I have placed on the timeline two representative acts of totalitarian barbarity that Harari would consider the 'mistakes' of humanism. The first is Stalin's Great Terror of 1937–38 in which 1.5 million counterrevolutionaries were either executed or sent to the Gulag. The second is Hitler's Operation Reinhard in 1942–43 that led to the mass extermination of 1.5 million Jews and others at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Events such as these were supposedly the 'shadow' cast by the 'key ideas' Harari found in Humanist Manifesto I. But this is absurd. Such totalitarian cruelties were already in full swing well before the writers of this first Manifesto put pen to paper.

The Red Terror in which Lenin had thousands of suspected counterrevolutionaries executed by his secret police happened in 1918. The Nazi party platform calling for a one-party state, the forced colonization of neighbouring countries and the revoking of the citizenship of Jews dates to 1920. Hitler finished writing his violently anti-Jewish Mein Kampf in 1925. In 1929, Stalin began his Dekulakization program of mass executions, imprisonment and deportations of millions of Kulaks (independent farmers).

A document published in 1933 cannot be the intellectual wellspring of terror that was already years, in some cases more than a decade, old. Worse, the Manifesto had no fascist or communist signatories and, as we have seen, explicitly called for a 'free and universal society' working towards 'a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few'. Harari's revised timeline makes no more sense than his original and only deepens the incoherence of his critique of humanism.

Copyright © 2026 Leslie Allan