by Leslie Allan, Australian Humanists
How did a worldview associated with reason, human rights and human flourishing come to be portrayed as the ideological source of Auschwitz, the gulags and rapacious capitalism? That question lies at the heart of my new book, Harari’s Humanist Wars of Religion: A Critique of Harari’s History of Modern Ideologies. Through my involvement with humanist and secular organizations in Australia, I have long worked to strengthen public understanding of humanism and its ethics. I was troubled, then, to encounter Yuval Noah Harari’s portrayal of humanism in his international bestsellers Sapiens and Homo Deus.
Harari presents humanism as a type of religion that treats humanity as sacred, a “natural-law religion” divided into three rival “sects”, which he calls “liberal”, “socialist” and “evolutionary humanism”. To the conflicts between these sects he attributes the “bloodiest wars of religion in history” and some of the most destructive ideologies of the modern era.
I knew almost immediately that something was seriously wrong with this account. Harari’s history was not merely an oversimplification for a popular audience. Some of his claims were so plainly at odds with the historical record that I began checking his references. What started as a brief investigation became a year-long examination of the foundations on which his account rests.
What I found was not simply a matter of questionable interpretation. Harari repeatedly misrepresents the philosophy, origins and development of humanism, at times inverting the historical record outright. He assigns major thinkers and movements to categories that contradict their intellectual commitments and their actual historical relationships. Mazzini, Rousseau and Humboldt, for example, are presented in ways that badly distort their relationship to humanistic ideas. Hitler is likewise absorbed into a supposed tradition of “evolutionary humanism”, despite the deep incompatibility between Nazi ideology and humanist principles.
The treatment of “evolutionary humanism” is particularly revealing. The term was coined by Julian Huxley after the Second World War, and Huxley used it to articulate an explicitly anti-totalitarian philosophy. His evolutionary humanism sought to understand humanity as part of the natural world while rejecting supernatural authority and affirming human autonomy and responsibility. Hitler denied that the various human races shared a common biological ancestor, and Nazi ideology rested on a divinely ordained racial hierarchy and the subordination of the individual to an authoritarian state. The gulf between the two could hardly be greater. Yet the term Huxley devised to oppose racism and totalitarianism is the very one Harari fastens to the most murderously racist and totalitarian regime in history.
The same inversion occurs with “socialist humanism”. Harari associates it with Stalinism and the Soviet regime’s brutal repression. Yet socialist humanism emerged explicitly in opposition to Stalinism. In the 1950s and 1960s, thinkers who described themselves as socialist humanists used the term to challenge the authoritarianism, dogmatism and dehumanization of Stalinist communism. They defended human freedom and autonomy against a political system that subordinated the individual to an allegedly infallible state and party. Harari places the opponents of Stalinism in the intellectual camp of Stalinism itself.
These examples reveal a deeper problem with Harari’s approach. His categories are not simply too broad or insufficiently nuanced. They detach labels from the ideas and historical contexts that gave those labels their meaning. Once the labels float free, thinkers with opposing commitments are grouped together and pressed into a narrative in which humanism becomes responsible for ideologies that rejected its central principles.
This is especially apparent in Harari’s treatment of human autonomy. Humanism is characterized, among other things, by the conviction that human beings are capable of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for their own lives and societies without submitting to supernatural authority. Hitler’s Nazi ideology and Stalin’s dictatorship were deeply hostile to individual autonomy of this kind. To classify either as an expression of humanism requires ignoring irreconcilable differences in their conceptions of human beings, individual freedom and political authority.
The consequences of this distortion extend beyond historical scholarship. Harari’s books have reached millions of readers around the world, giving his interpretation considerable influence over popular understandings of religion, politics, science and humanism. When a prominent intellectual presents humanism as a religion whose rival sects produced Nazism, Stalinism and the destructive excesses of capitalism, readers are left with a badly misleading picture of what humanism is and where it came from.
That matters directly to humanists today. Where such a portrayal is accepted, humanists are placed in the absurd position of having to explain why a philosophy supposedly responsible for these regimes is also committed to human dignity, freedom of thought, democratic values and human flourishing. Historical accuracy is no academic luxury here. It bears on the public standing of humanists, who must now spend their energy correcting gross misrepresentations before they can begin to set out their ethical and philosophical commitments.
Cleared of these misattributions, humanism is not difficult to describe. It is a naturalistic philosophy grounded in human reason and experience rather than supernatural authority. Its modern forms have developed through diverse intellectual traditions, but its central themes include intellectual curiosity coupled with humility; care for all living creatures and the natural environment; and the rejection of stifling dogma, religious and political alike. Humanists have disagreed among themselves about ethics, politics and economics, but disagreement within a tradition should not be confused with the abandonment of the principles that define it.
Nor should the history of humanism be rewritten by attaching the humanist label to its ideological opponents. Hitler and Stalin did not identify themselves as humanists, nor did they promote the human autonomy that is central to humanism. Their regimes subordinated individuals to racial, national and class-based authority. Whatever superficial similarities might be found at the level of appeal to human interests, differences of this order cannot be erased by placing the two under a single ideological heading.
The stakes here go well beyond scholarly tidiness. Historical narratives shape public understanding, and public understanding shapes how ideas are evaluated. When a narrative as influential as Harari’s repeatedly reverses the relationship between humanism and its historical opponents, the result is more than a collection of isolated errors. It leaves readers with a fundamentally distorted picture of one of the major intellectual traditions of the modern world.
My book examines these claims in detail, returning to the historical sources and tracing the development of the ideas and labels Harari uses. The aim is not a flattering history of humanism but an accurate one. Humanism does not need a sanitized history to deserve serious consideration. It needs its actual history to be understood.
For humanists committed to reason, evidence and intellectual honesty, that distinction matters. We should be prepared to scrutinize our own history, acknowledge real disagreements and correct our mistakes. But we should not accept a history in which humanism’s opponents are transformed into its representatives and those who resisted authoritarianism are cast as its architects. Harari has done precisely that. Correcting the record is not simply a defence of humanism. It is an exercise in the intellectual honesty that humanism itself demands.
Harari’s Humanist Wars of Religion: A Critique of Harari’s History of Modern Ideologies is available worldwide in print and Kindle editions from Amazon. https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0H4HP8MRK
About the Author: Leslie Allan is an Australian philosopher whose work examines the intellectual foundations of humanism, secular ethics and Enlightenment thought. He studied history and philosophy at La Trobe University, where he was awarded the David Hume Prize. He is a non-executive director of Humanists Australia and founder of the Ex-Religious Support Network. His work is published at RationalRealm.com. His recent book, Harari’s Humanist Wars of Religion, offers a detailed critique of Yuval Noah Harari’s account of modern humanist ideologies.