Harari Gets It Wrong Part 2
3. Harari and Co. in the Quest for Immortality
Yuval Harari is nothing if not consistently inconsistent. In Sapiens he goes to great lengths to express his concerns—and rightly so—about commercial livestock yards that keep pigs and cows locked inside cages barely bigger than their bodies. But apparently he’s not too worried about all the monkeys that will have to go through the tortures of the damned in pursuit of our biochemical godhood. (See Part 1.) Is it just that he prefers cows and pigs to monkeys? Harari begins from the sound premise in Homo Deus that we need to be protected from “the dangers inherent in our own power,” but then shoves it aside when it serves the purpose of engineering human physical endowment, prowess, and immortality. The ancient Greek writers had a word for this: hubris. And we all know how well that works out. Unless you’re Harari, who seems to think he knows better than all the great poets and philosophers of the past 3,000 years.
Not to mention his casual dismissal of a hundred millennia of archaeological evidence for humanity’s spiritual nature and the legacy of religious tradition that has accrued during recorded history. While Harari isn’t wrong when he writes: “…as collective institutions, science and religion prefer order and power over truth,”[1] he makes no distinction between religion as an organized corporate entity and its role as a spiritual wellspring capable of nurturing the human spirit. Membership in an organized religion is not required for one to pursue spirituality, yet Harari seems to imply in his books that religious thought is itself delusional rather than being a fundamental, inseparable component of human nature.[1] Belief in technocracy and materialism as ascendant values is merely the latest manifestation of religious thought.
Speaking of hubris, Harari makes a halfhearted attempt to brush aside the moral lesson of our earliest extant tale, the Epic of Gilgamesh, with its wise admonition that immortality is not and never was for humans. Far better, as the barmaid Siduri tells Gilgamesh, to accept our mortality and “let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace. That is the best way for a man to live.”[2]What comes after is not for us to know. Completely missing the point, Harari proclaims:
“When the gods created man, Gilgamesh had learned, they set death as man’s inevitable enemy, and man must learn to live with it. Disciples of progress do not share this defeatist attitude. For men of science, death is not an inevitable destiny, but merely a technical problem… And every technical problem has a technical solution… True, at present we cannot solve all technical problems. But we are working on them. Our best minds are not wasting their time trying to give meaning to death. Instead, they are busy investigating the physiological, hormonal and genetic systems responsible for disease and old age.”[3]
This is the language of total control. This is the language we’ve been hearing now in various guises since the Victorian age: the “mastering” of Nature. “For every technical problem, a technical solution.” We can’t even get software to work consistently, for God’s sake. This is just a retrenchment of the Industrial Revolution’s creed to subdue the planet, torture out of it its secrets. And speaking of God’s sake, suddenly we have the power to re-engineer life itself? Or the right to do so? Harari does his best to upend Mary Shelley’s dystopian morality tale Frankenstein, casting contemporary technocrats as the enlightened Dr. Frankenstein to global village Luddites waving torches and pitchforks. His message is quite simply: Why not? Why can’t we use Nature any way we see fit if it suits our aims? Why not torture her to extract the secret that generations of humans have unsuccessfully striven to find? The very thinking that led us to the environmental crisis we now face.
Not only that, but as Harari points out, donning his plebeian hat: “However, most humans will not be upgraded, and will consequently become an inferior caste dominated by both computer algorithms and the new superhumans.”[4]Hey, thanks for letting us know! We couldn’t have guessed that in the race to become gods and goddesses, 99.9 percent of us would be left out. Just like we couldn’t have guessed who would own everything when the rest of us no longer owned anything.
Then there’s the blind—dare I say it, religious—faith in technology as saviour. “For every technical problem, a technical solution.” The same mentality that brought us nuclear bombs, the perennial problem of nuclear waste storage, entire nations of people addicted to useless mood-altering drugs, global deforestation, chemically saturated food crops, etc. etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseam. In his treatise Rhetoric, Aristotle divides good and evil into two categories: those “goods” that are indisputable and those that are disputable. He places in the “disputable” category “that which is possible is good (to undertake).”[5] Just because humanity can do a thing, does that mean it should? At what point do we take into consideration the Law of Unintended Consequences and decide the risks are simply too great? Is this not what Robert Oppenheimer, co-engineer of the nuclear bomb, realized to his horror upon first testing these massively destructive devices in the Nevada desert? The idea that because we’ve started down a technological path we must follow it to the end—also known as “path dependence” or the “sunk cost fallacy”—is lunacy. Every great poet from the writer of Gilgamesh to visionary William Blake wrote to warn us of this folly.
Here Harari merely clones the capitalist habit of obsessing over symptoms while politely ignoring the root issues, since these are usually tied to some profit-generating enterprise. Each generation of kids sicker than the last, and reacting to half the food on the grocery shelf? Well, hell, don’t stop spraying that glyphosate! There’s billions to be made from that stuff! Unhappy? Take a chill pill, dude. But don’t expect to ever get off drugs. Harari seems to see only emotional “algorithms” that need tweaking, once again mistaking metaphor for reality—a common mistake of technocrats. He at least gets it right when he concedes that our emotional “algorithms” are “vital for the survival and reproduction of all mammals,” besides being indispensable to “writing poetry and composing symphonies.”[6]
4. Killing the Ghost in the Machine
I can see why Harari is so addicted to the idea that our bodies and minds need to be re-engineered. When you believe this life is your one and only shot, the urge to extend it as long as possible acquires an imperative born of sheer desperation. The atheistic materialism he espouses won’t get you far when your spiritual tank is dry. As the apostle Paul tells fellow Christians in one letter: “If in this life only we have hoped, we are of all men most to be pitied.”[7] Harari goes to great lengths in both books to “debunk” the concept of the soul, claiming that the life sciences have somehow disproven millennia of religious and philosophical tradition: “Scientists have subjected Homo sapiens to tens of thousands of bizarre experiments… But they have so far discovered no magical spark. There is zero scientific evidence that in contrast to pigs, Sapiens have souls.”[8] A neat trick that, proving the absence of something!
Harari seems incapable of seeing consciousness as an emergent property of biological evolution—the classic “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” or more poetically, “the ghost in the machine.” Rather than seeing consciousness as a miracle of evolution, he calls it “the biologically useless by-product of certain brain processes… (that) fulfills no biological function whatsoever.”[9] Yet he quotes the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, which states, in part, that, “the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”[10] Once again, poor Mr. Harari seems hopelessly lost in a welter of self-contradiction. On the one hand, he goes to great lengths to deny that humans might have a soul—a higher consciousness that transcends physical existence—and on the other, he is willing to argue (rightfully, I believe) for the consciousness of animals.
Given that such atheistic materialism has become the de facto religion of much of the civilized world, could it be that this is the root, not the symptom, of our skyrocketing rates of despair, depression and suicide? But no, Harari doubles down on the technocratic imperative. His words conceal the thinly veiled desperation of the atheist: “Even if one promising path turns out to be a dead end, alternative routes will remain open. For example, we may discover that the human genome is far too complicated for serious manipulation, but this will not prevent the development of brain-computer interfaces,[11] nano-robots or artificial intelligence.”[12] In contrast to Harari’s techno-triumphalism, Vandana Shiva—who has a degree in nuclear physics—has pointed out that, “genetic reductionism leads to the false assumption that genes control the traits of life… a defined, discrete or simple pathway from gene to trait probably does not exist.”[13] As she explains in her book Oneness vs. the 1%:
“As of now, it is not technically possible to make a single (and only a single) genetic change to a genome using CRISPR and to ensure that it has done so. As Franziska Fichtner notes, ‘in mammalian systems Cas9 causes a high degree of off-target effects.’ And Jonathan Latham cautions, ordinary CRISPR ‘can induce mutations at sites that differ by as many as five nucleotides from the intended target;’ in other words, CRISPR may act at unknown sites in the genome where it is not wanted.”[14]
For all of the above reasons, as I like to reassure friends who are panicked about the transhumanist agenda, the technocratic daydreams of Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari are just that—pure fantasies. As Dr. Robert Malone explained in an interview with Tucker Carlson,[15] his dreams of a career curing disease with genetic therapy were quickly dashed when scientists realized that any foreign DNA is treated by the body as an invader, causing an immune response just as it would for a virus, bacteria or any other pathogen. In some experiments, even DNA taken from a patient, altered and then re-inserted into the body prompted the same immunological response.[16]
Dr. Malone’s response was to make this limitation work for him by co-designing an mRNA vaccine, based on the principle that a dead or attenuated virus in a vaccine causes the body to mount an immune response. Even then, the mRNA molecule must be packaged in a lipid nanoparticle to get past the innate immune system. Worse, as has been amply demonstrated by the fiasco of mRNA-based Covid-19 “vaccines,” there were unintended consequences galore, or what Shiva calls “off-target effects.” Not least has been the problem of the replication of the spike protein that never shuts off, causing multiple organ failure and galloping cancer in many cases. The court-ordered release of Pfizer’s clinical trial documents has revealed more than 1,200 different types of adverse reactions to this experimental inoculation.[17] This is in addition to the 24,000 deaths in the US and some 30,000 or more in Europe resulting from these “vaccines.” I think it can safely be said that the transhumanist vision is a dead letter. Schwab and his cronies, including Harari, better get used to that reality.
5. Seeds of Regeneration
Rather than looking to global elites for a solution to our social and environmental problems, there are visionary ideas much closer to home for 99.9 percent of the human race. After all, it’s clear that these billionaires aren’t living on the same planet as the rest of us. Their money has an insulating, isolating effect that, from a compassionate point of view, makes such people pitiable, especially in the absence of any form of spirituality. What a lonely, alienating life it must be, moving from private jet to private limousine to cloistered five-star hotel suites to seaside villas surrounded by security fences. No wonder they can convince themselves of their technocratic daydreams—their entire lives are lived in man-made parallel worlds, seldom touching the Earth.
Vandana Shiva’s work with Indian farmers fighting off the ravages of genetically modified (GMO) crops, chemical pesticides and herbicides has taught her a great deal about the acquired wisdom of local cultures. She writes of the thousands of varieties of rice developed over the centuries by farmers across India’s varied ecosystems, each strain uniquely adapted to its ecological niche. This makes a mockery of Bill Gates’ “One Ag” model of a single set of GMO crops for the entire world, with him owning all the patents, of course. In countries like India a monoculture strain of GMO “golden rice” is neither needed nor appropriate; in fact, it has repeatedly proven a failure in field tests.[18]
For these and many more reasons Shiva is pointing toward a hopeful future that does not require robots, AI, GMO or the destruction of hard-won democratic constitutions in favour of an oligarchic one-world government. She calls it “the Resurgence of the Real,” and it’s a vision far more appealing, liveable and obtainable than the one presented to us by the World Economic Forum cult’s “Great Reset.” It begins with us first reclaiming our humanity—not abandoning or re-engineering it, as Harari and Co. would have us do. So doing, says Shiva, we take “a quantum leap in our imaginations, our intelligences, our capacity for compassion and love, as well as our courage for creative nonviolent resistance and non-cooperation with a system that is driving us to extinction. Our only option is to heal the earth, and in so doing, heal and reclaim our humanity, creating hope for our only future—as one humanity on one planet.”[19]
The way forward is not through playing God but learning the secrets of Earth and working cooperatively, not tortuously, with our home planet. Not re-engineering but biomimicry—benefiting by the living legacy of millions of years of planetary development by studying and emulating it. The Biomimicry Institute explains:
“After billions years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what remains hold the secret to our survival. The goal is to create products, processes, and systems—new ways of living—that solve our greatest design challenges sustainably and in solidarity with all life on earth. We can use biomimicry to not only learn from nature’s wisdom, but also heal ourselves—and this planet—in the process.”[20]
As the New Testament visionary John wrote, describing a post-apocalyptic world cleansed of corruption: “Then he showed me the river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb... On either side of the river stood a tree of life, which yields twelve crops of fruit… the leaves of the trees serve for the healing of the nations.”[21] As we’ve known all along, clean water and wholesome, unprocessed food unadulterated by chemicals will go much farther toward maintaining health than drugs or genetic engineering. Industries that profit by poisons are in their last days. We’re closer to a new world than we think.
[1] Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Signal/McClelland & Stewart, 2015 (2017 ed.), p. 231.
[2] Gilgamesh: A New English Version, Stephen Mitchell, Free Press, New York/London/Toronto/Sydney, 2004, p. 168.
[3] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Signal/McClelland & Stewart, 2014, p. 267.
[4] Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Signal/McClelland & Stewart, 2015 (2017 ed.), p. 403.
[5] Poetics and Rhetoric of Aristotle, On Style by Demetrius, J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., London/New York, Everyman edition, 1943, p. 86.
[6] Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Signal/McClelland & Stewart, 2015 (2017 ed.), p. 97.
[7] 1 Corinthians 15:19.
[8] Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Signal/McClelland & Stewart, 2015 (2017 ed.), pp. 118–19.
[9] Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Signal/McClelland & Stewart, 2015 (2017 ed.), p. 136.
[10] Quoted in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Signal/McClelland & Stewart, 2015 (2017 ed.), p. 142.
[11] See section 2 of this essay: “Re-engineering the Brain” on the current state of the “neuralink” project.
[12] Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Signal/McClelland & Stewart, 2015 (2017 ed.), p. 56.
[13] Vandana Shiva with Kartikey Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont/London, 2018 (2020 edition), pp. 68, 103 (emphasis mine).
[14] Vandana Shiva with Kartikey Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont/London, 2018 (2020 edition), p. 102.
[15] Tucker Carlson interviews Dr. Robert Malone on Tucker Carlson Today show February 9, 2022, BrandNewTube: https://brandnewtube.com/watch/dr-robert-malone-tucker-carlson-today-feb-9-2022_KxjJGpsYclKlDF2.html
[16] Dr. Robert Malone, “When is mRNA not really mRNA?” Substack, March 28, 2022:
[17] “CHD Says Pfizer Clinical Trial Data Contradicts ‘Safe and Effective’ Government/Industry Mantra,” Children’s Health Defense, March 3, 2022: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/press-release/chd-says-pfizer-clinical-trial-data-contradicts-safe-and-effective/
[18] Vandana Shiva with Kartikey Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont/London, 2018 (2020 edition), pp. 90–92.
[19] Vandana Shiva with Kartikey Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont/London, 2018 (2020 edition), pp. 171–72.
[20] “What is Biomimicry?” Biomimicry Institute: https://biomimicry.org/what-is-biomimicry/
[21] Revelation 22:2, The New English Bible with the Apocrypha, Oxford Study Edition, Oxford University Press, New York, 1976.