A bewildering palette of possibilities
Critiquing Harari on division of labor
Painting by April Burke
Part 2.7 in my critique of Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
In a previous essay from the intro portion of this series, I explained some of the ways I think Harari dabbles in eugenics, including a passage wherein he describes how the Agricultural Revolution created “niches for imbeciles,” resulting in differences in brain size: “You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.”[1]
Here’ I’ll take a closer look at that passage on “niches for imbeciles,” critiquing it further toward understanding the role which labor history and class plays in Sapiens, particularly as it pertains to the economic category of the division of labor.
I’ll briefly summarize Harari on this point, and then I’ll briefly compare him with Marx.
“We must get inside the heads of our hunter-gatherer ancestors”
Harari opens chapter three of Sapiens by emphasizing the need to focus on the preindustrial and preagricultural periods of human history in order to understand ourselves:
To understand our nature, history and psychology, we must get inside the heads of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.[2]
He diminishes the significance of the history of industrialization, and of economics in general, in determining the most pressing issues of modern psychology:
The past 200 years, during which ever increasing numbers of Sapiens have obtained their daily bread as urban labourers and office workers, and the preceding 10,000 years, during which most Sapiens lived as farmers and herders, are the blink of an eye compared to the tens of thousands of years during which our ancestors hunted and gathered.[3]
He then introduces evolutionary psychology as a “flourishing field”—a kind of description that is characteristic in Sapiens when it comes to theories or disciplines Harari favors. [4]
For example, in my essay “The specter of Marx is haunting Harari,” I explained how—without any specific reference or citation, or even without contextualizing to any particular discipline or current within one or more disciplines—Harari claims that “Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite,” counterposing what he sees as the theory representing the dynamics of history, memetics, against some conspiracy theory he misattributes to Marxist theorists:
Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. … According to this approach, cultures are not conspiracies concocted by some people in order to take advantage of others (as Marxists tend to think).[5]
In the case of chapter 3, it’s evolutionary psychology which Harari elevates:
The flourishing field of evolutionary psychology argues that many of our present-day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this long pre-agricultural era.[6]
Harari then goes on a few pages later to introduce a conception of a horizon of possibilities pertaining to societies and individuals—the “spectrum of beliefs, practices and experiences that are open before a particular society”—which according to him is limited by ecological, technological and cultural factors.
However, despite his own emphasis on the need to focus on the preindustrial and preagricultural periods of human history, it’s only a few pages later that he raises the point about “niches for imbeciles,” which pertains not only to one’s horizon of possibilities but specifically as determined by the division of labor—which, it’s worth noting, is a social and economic category.
“A ‘horizon of possibilities’”
Ever since the cognitive revolution, there hasn't been a single natural way of life for Sapiens, only cultural choices from a bewildering palette of possibilities.[7]
The definition Harari provides for a horizon of possibilities is a sort of “marketplace of ideas” formulation: “the entire spectrum of beliefs, practices and experiences,” beyond a fraction of which societies and individuals rarely explore, due to “ecological, technological and cultural limitations” (rather than, for example, the hunter-gatherers’ lack of social division of labor and mode of production capable of producing a surplus):
A ‘horizon of possibilities’ means the entire spectrum of beliefs, practices and experiences that are open before a particular society. Given its ecological, technological and cultural limitations, each society and each individual usually explore only a tiny fraction of their horizon of possibilities.[8]
To me, this definition ignores the most fundamental aspects of a society’s way of living: it’s social relations; it’s divisions of labor and class. For no matter what beliefs, practices and experiences they’ve had, virtually all humans in history have lived in tribes or societies operating via the productive activities of either foragers, slaves, peasants or serfs, or wage workers.
These economic distinctions themselves place important limitations on both what a person can do as well as imagine, i.e., they limit beliefs, practices and experiences, the horizon of possibilities.
Notably, this relation between division of labor and what a person can do pertains to the passage on “niches for imbeciles.”
“Niches for imbeciles”
Indeed, a few more pages later in the same chapter, Harari touches on one possibility within the horizon which opens up in the advent of agricultural society, a possibility which pertains immediately to the economic category of division of labor: “niches for imbeciles.”
Rightly so, Harari explains that foragers were more widely knowledgeable than modern people:
the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.[9]
However, Harari follows with a eugenics-dabbling paragraph about brain size and “niches for imbeciles” being developed in the Agricultural Revolution:
There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. […] When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.[10]
In short, we might say that, for Harari, the Agricultural Revolution and the division of labor that came with it created a “horizon of possibility” which would include imbeciles; the beliefs, practices and experiences of imbeciles.
There is an obvious eugenicist interpretation of class implied by the idea that a correlation between brain size and class is explained by the simplified division of labor enabling the existence of small-brained people who could then “survive and pass [their] unremarkable genes to the next generation.”
(For the sake of staying on track here, I’ll set aside the fact that Harari ignores our long-held, widely known knowledge of brain plasticity; or the numerous studies showing how brain growth can be diminished in contexts of impoverished living conditions within a single generation).
Of course, it’s not the laboring classes but the ruling classes which would, more than any other, increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, even without performing any task as important as assembly-line worker or water carrier.
Unlike Harari, for whom the intellectual capacities of those with “unremarkable genes” were enabled by simplistic niches, Marx understands intellectual capacities as being more contingent upon the division of labor itself, upon the relations of social production.
Marx describes how the development of the division of labor in manufacture limited both the independence and the intellectual potentials of the individual workers. He provides an economic concept for understanding how the conditions of production have transformed over time such that, through specialization in manufacture, the individual’s labor power and the value of it became diminished, and the capacities for scientific innovation once held in the hands of artisans and housed in workshops became concentrated in the machinery owned by capitalists.
“An extremely narrow horizon”
Recognizing that division of labour and cooperation are essential to the functioning and flourishing of human life and society, Marx critically analyses exploitative uses of division of labor under capitalism, which in Capital includes descriptions of the “suppression and crippling” of productive forces.
Ernest Mandel describes this concept in Marx’s works as ‘alienation of human activity in general’, whereby overspecialization results in a “shut-in horizon,” a reduction in the range of activity one could perform socially and politically:
What is meant by the extension of the concept of alienation to human activity in general? We live in a society based on commodity production and a social division of labor pushed to the limits of overspecialization. As a result, people in a particular job or doing a certain type of activity for a living will incline to have an extremely narrow horizon. They will be prisoners of their trade, seeing only the problems and preoccupations of their specialty. They will also tend to have a restricted social and political awareness because of this limitation.[11]
In Capital, Marx explains how capital ‘modif[ies] the general nature of the human organism’ such that it “becomes labour power of a developed and specific kind,”[12] what Mandel describes in terms of “overspecialization.” By division of labour, manufacture and machine production modify labour power toward overspecialization as a means of increasing the rate of surplus-value.
Division of labour allows an increase in productivity of the collective of workers in correlation with the change in productivity of the technical machines, but it also diminishes each individual’s productive power and its value. The combined productive power of the workers employed is increased, but so too the productive power of the mind and body of the individual worker is suppressed, creating “new conditions for the domination of capital over labour.”[13]
Noting that “[s]ome crippling of body and mind is inseparable even from division of labour in society as a whole,” Marx theorises that the ‘crippling’ conditions of division of labour under manufacture is the cause of “industrial pathologies” or workers’ diseases.[14] However, with the development of the factory system, these conditions are only intensified and expanded.
Returning to the case of Harari’s Sapiens, on the other hand, if we’re focusing on preindustrial and preagricultural periods, what relevance does the agricultural division of labor which enabled “niches for imbeciles” even have?
For Harari, all mass cooperation and social organization is predicated upon myths, fantasies, and fictions, figments of imagination, and thus these “niches”—and the passing on of the “unremarkable genes” which these niches enabled—are the product of that myth-enabled agricultural cooperation. Hence, for him, we can focus more broadly on “ecological, technological and cultural limitations,” rather than particular social or economic limitations.
In effect, this eugenics-dabbling interpretation of history naturalizes the existence of class relations to this day, as well as the limitations upon our own horizon of possibilities which such class relations place.
I guess Harari would have most of us believe that our own horizon of possibility is thanks to our uniquely small-brained ancestors’ existence being enabled by the imbecile-enabling societies dreamed up and realized by his own large-brained ancestors.
Notes
[1]. Harari, Sapiens (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 49.
[2]. Ibid, 40.
[3]. Ibid.
[4]. As biologist Darshana Narayanan writes in her 2022 article on Harari in Current Affairs, “The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari,” Harari “does something very sneaky” when he presents the view of “Dataism:”
Harari is careful to fashion himself as an objective scribe. He takes pains to tell us he is presenting the worldview of the Dataists, and not his own. But then he does something very sneaky. The Dataist view “may strike you as some eccentric fringe notion,” he says, “but in fact it has already conquered most of the scientific establishment.” In presenting the Dataist worldview as conclusive (having “conquered most of the scientific establishment”), he tells us that it is “objectively” true that humans are algorithms, and our march to obsolescence—as the passive recipients of decisions made by better algorithms—is unavoidable, because it is integrally tied to our humanity. Turning to the footnote in support of this sweeping statement, we find that of the four books he cites, three have been written by non-scientists—a music publicist, a trendcaster, and a magazine publisher.
[5]. Harari, 242.
[6]. Ibid, 40.
[7]. Ibid, 45.
[8]. Ibid.
[9]. Ibid, 49.
[10]. Ibid.
[11]. Ernest Mandel, The Marxist Theory of Alienation (Pathfinder Press, 1970) 27-28. This is one of several categories Mandel summarizes within Marx’s theory of alienation in capitalism. There is alienation from the means of production and the means of subsistence; alienation from the land; alienation of labour and from the products of labour; alienation of capacity to perform creative work; alienation of the consumer in the provocation of ‘continued artificial dissatisfaction in human beings’ [i.e., alienation via the creation of lack through marketing]; alienation from human activity in general by overspecialization, to which corresponds a reification of social relations; and alienation of capacity to communicate’ (Mandel, 15-34).
[12]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 275-6.
[13]. Ibid, 486.
[14]. Ibid.
I can dig your argument, specially Hararis leap of faith in numbers saying the rudimentary tools that started t ag revolution constrained the attention. There is zero reason One: to suppose that a highlands Papuan with a digging stick is an idiot. And two, the inmovations came slow to our lights as molasses, your grandmother was not less agile for reusing things than we are for th rowing them away. His intuition that our horizons are limited by work is one of my own worth saying outloud: in my repeated experience your bosses' horizons limit yours. Observe your bosses blind spots, and you might like I have discover yourself trying to find a place for yourself in a pitiless situstion. Which is not like is in youth or in imaginatiom. But that comes from the relationship and not the tool. 40 generations takes us where, thirdly, nearly to the agricultutal revolution? Famously 10000 years is a minimum under auspicious island conditions to expect to see genetic differences. You make a better case for the Davids Dawn book / than against Harari who as you show here, clings to extra terrestrial technological invasians to explain change, where the Davids's suggestion that tribes dis t inguish themselves out of force of persuasion, in order (schismogenesis) to di stinguish themselves, that is the simpler solution t o explain why for example the Incas di d not grasp who they were dealing with, more simply than his what? Would you call it if you strong manned it, a case for genetic change based on bad nutrition? But we know all about that , and the consensus is that peoples appetite for more fat sugar and the third thing goes back much further....