HOMO DEUS. A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOMORROW

Historian Yuval Noah Harari (YNH), author of the successful book Sapiens, a Brief History of Mankind, reviewed above, ended that exposition by asking if we know ourselves well enough to be accountable in future. YNH has now turned his attention to the future with Homo Deus: a brief history of tomorrow. As the popular baseball philosopher Yogi Berra once said "it is tough making predictions, especially about the future." He also said "the future ain't what it used to be." YNH uses 400 pages to prove this bucolic wisdom. SMN reader may not agree with all he has to say, but will likely find it interesting.

In general, YNH argues that we are at a pivotal point in history involving a "new human agenda." Much as the news may dissuade us from optimism, the facts show a global decrease in mortality from famine, plague and war. More people die from overeating than starvation, and most famines are "political" caused by humans not nature. Turning to the age-old metaphysical question of death, YNH boldly states that "for modern people death is a technical problem" to be solved. [He is presumably not familiar with such die-with-dignity projects fostered by Peter Fenwick et al.,]. He does nod to spiritual beliefs (reincarnation, the afterlife) but gives them short shrift, apparently intimating, as he did in Sapiens, that these are 'fictions,' or somehow unreal.

He takes Google engineer's efforts "to solve death" rather too seriously, though with some skepticism. He also approaches the "the right to happiness" from a technological perspective as "determined" by biochemistry, at least in the modern mind. [I'd prefer him to have said 'some' modern minds]. All this raises, for this reader, perennial metaphysical questions about immortality and our intuitions about meaning and the spiritual dimension, which YNH seems a little coy about tackling head on. In other words, he frequently discusses the latest biotechnology and its implications and then ruminates inconclusively on the directions such paths may lead us. There is nothing wrong with uncertainty as intimated in my review of Sapiens. We would indeed be at a "historical" turning point if humankind's perennial questions were about to be solved biochemically by early 21st century science. While SMN members may have faith in some medications, the problems of drug abuse, legal and illegal, are hardly compatible with authentic happiness, and certainly they are not any kind of global panacea. YNH is not unaware of these issues, and after ostensibly suggesting hope for technical solutions, swings over to say "it is far from certain that humankind should invest so much effort in the biochemical pursuit of happiness." Asking if this is "the highest aim of human society." Fair questions in a troubled world.

From here we make a quantum leap to the possibility of a re-engineering of the human mind and the question of what "beings with a different kind of mind do with biotechnology." YNH admits, echoing Einstein, that "our present day minds cannot grasp what might happen next." [There seems to be an evolutionary chicken and egg problem here. Technology is the birth-child of the human mind, and the creation, for better or worse of what the mind then has to deal with. Rudolf Steiner said only sapiens we create problems in order to solve them. YNH worries, as many do, about the "breakneck" speed of progress and upheaval." His title – Homo Deus – refers to the modern humanist paradigm, which seeks utopia and the attaining of near-divine powers and status [however that is conceived] in a culture where, for many, God is irrelevant and humans have "conquered the world." But are God, conscience and perennial good v. evil questions really so irrelevant? Inevitably the subject of consciousness arises. While happily confessing that we do not understand it, YNH compares and contrasts it with intelligence, especially the artificial (AI) variety.

Much of the book's thesis returns to the question of whether AI is getting so far ahead of humankind as to send us in unforeseen directions. [This may be the case, but are such paradigms shift so new? The Paleolithic, Neolithic, industrial and electronic-media revolutions all launched humanity on new trajectories, with concomitant chicken and egg shifts in consciousness]. Here I was a little disappointed with YNH for omitting reference to pertinent if not classic literature on the evolution of consciousness. He talks of the Anthropocene, globalisation and future humans with faculties far superior to we moderns, but does not mention Teilhard de Chardin's notions of biosphere, planetisation and "Omega Man." Nor does he refer to the Gebserian and Wilberian paradigms of consciousness structures (Archaic, Magical, Mythical, Mental and Integral). [In my view shifts in consciousness are ultimately organic, and even our technological creations (biochemical and electronic) are part of the evolutionary continuum, as Teilhard believed].

Here YNH might have got some mileage with an explicit exposition on the "Conscious Evolution" paradigm. He often seems to imply that he has just noticed runaway cultural and technological evolution and the potential pitfalls it may entail. But the spectre of technological Frankenstein creations is not new (e.g., atom bombs) and recognising such is a manifestation of Conscious Evolution, that peculiarly human faculty which Teilhard and his supporters (e.g., Julian Huxley) characterised as evolution becoming conscious of itself. These in turn a manifestations of the emergence of a new consciousness structures. Unpredictable quantum leaps still fit the punctuated, and paradigm shift dynamics, and it is fair to say we do not know what the future holds. [Phase shifts involve uncertainty]. However, I agree with YNH that humanism's search for utopian happiness and problem-solving technology simply reinvents religious aspiration, complete with belief in heaven, immortality and all that!

On the subject of unpredictable quantum leaps, what of Peter Russell's 'Global Brain' concept, which in the early 1980s was prescient in foreshadowing the Internet? Popular and provocative as YNH's books might be in some circles, the Global Brain idea, is just as popular and intriguing [and if you ask Wikipedia!] connected to the aforementioned ideas of Teilhard on 'organicism', 'encyclopedism ', 'emergentism', 'evolutionary cybernetics' and 'macrobiological evolution'. None of these topics are addressed directly by YNH. Could this be because, according to Wikipedia "This approach is most popular in New Age circles, which emphasise growth in consciousness rather than scientific modeling or the implementation of technological and social systems." But one must ask where do scientific modeling, not to mention AI and big brother algorithmic regulation paradigms come from if not changes or "growth" in consciousness? So has YNH avoided ostensibly "New Age" thinking deliberately?

A few of my academic colleagues continue to lament the straight-jacketed thinking of the 'mainstream' intellectual fraternity, who are afraid to think outside the box, on big picture or 'holistic' and 'synthetic' questions, for fear of not appearing objective, analytical and suitably rational. [Intellectual ideology]! We cannot charge that YNH avoids big picture even holistic questions, but we may ask 1) whether he is approaching them with a holistic and integral consciousness, and 2) whether as a historian he has some obligation to view so called "New Age" thinking [however defined] as an authentic sociological phenomenon. Related to this is a third point (3): purveyors of these big noospheric and global brain ideas were competent, often innovative, scientists, who cannot be branded as 'new age' in any derogatory or non-objective sense. They have been, and will remain, serious contributors to scientific history, deserving of attention not only from the Gebser-Wilber-Thompson crowd [dare we mention Rudolf Steiner!?] but also from the likes of Bryson and YNH who take on big picture histories of our species and its scientific-intellectual achievements without much of a nod to some of these perennial socio-spiritual and scientific questions of meaning.

One area where YNH nods to affirmatively to collective consciousness is in reference to intersubjective meaning, dealt with under the heading 'The Web of Meaning.' He asserts that 'people…assume there are only two types of reality' objective and subjective, with no third option. While this simplistic binary thinking has been an impediment to creative thinking, most people would recognise that there is a third option 'intersubjective reality' or what YNH calls 'imagined orders', things we collectively agree on like money, religion and empire, agents that unify societies to varying degrees. As he intimated in Sapiens, it is these intersubjective, imagined realities that have allowed Homo sapiens to 'rule the world' and organise 'crusades, socialist revolutions and human rights movements' all with their ideological or imagined baggage, and all raising the ever debatable subject of human 'exceptionalism." With these caveats YNH ends with a penultimate chapter on 'The Ocean of Consciousness' and a final one on 'The Data Religion.'

My take was that YNH struggles, as we all do, with understanding the complexities of consciousness, human and animal, on the one hand, and on the other, the problems that a barrage of information and data create for sifting out any wisdom. YNH does not say this explicitly, but does point out that we need to learn what to 'ignore.' This assessment of our species condition is more or less the self-evident part of human self-consciousness and its ability to "know itself," and what is meaningful. The uncertain part is in what we do not know about our species condition, where new consciousness structures might lead us in future, not just as individual seekers with spiritual sensibilities but as a species coming to better know its ecological and ethical place in the biosphere.

So the perennial human condition has not changed too much when it comes to uncertainty: the questions of meaning and destiny remain necessarily elusive if curiosity, aspiration and questing is to continue. The future remains difficult to predict, and the questions remain: Quo vadis sapiens? SMN members may not always agree with YNH's expositions but, in fairness, some of this may be due to semantic quibbles about paradigms, definitions and the sources he chose to 'ignore' or address with different vocabulary and 'spin'. The important thing is that he asks questions most of us have or should have on our minds at this latest turning point in the evolution of humankind, biosphere and contributions by authors who use big words like Deus in their provocative book titles!