An ideal of social order?
Harari’s confusing historiography on the Code of Hammurabi
Painting by April Burke
Part 2.8 in my critique of Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
One of the most basic premises of Harari’s historiography, his way of thinking and writing about history, is the idealist conception that mass cooperation—and thus society more broadly—requires myths, imagined social orders, to organize around.
An example Harari focuses on in developing this historical theory is The Code of Hammurabi, which he describes as “a cooperation manual for hundreds of thousands of ancient Babylonians”[1] and “a good source for understanding the ancient Mesopotamians’ ideal of social order.”[2]
Written on the surface of a seven-foot-tall black basalt stele (c. 1754 BCE), Hammurabi’s Code is a legal text defined by relations between superiors, commoners and slaves, with differing values for people across classes as well as genders. As Harari explains:
people are divided into two genders and three classes: superior people, commoners and slaves. Members of each gender and class have different values.[3]
The code, as Harari explains, consists is nearly 300 variations on “eye-for-an-eye” type prohibitive justice, favoring especially the “superior” class man:
if one superior man kills the daughter of another superior man, the killer’s daughter is executed in punishment.[4]
The historiographical problem I see here is that the Code of Hammurabi—what Harari thinks of as representative of “the ancient Mesopotamians’ ideal of social order,” what serves as his key example for how “cooperation networks” are fundamentally “imagined orders”—reflects an unequal society involving a slave class, as well as class divisions between “superiors” and commoners.
Hence—despite Harari’s arguments against “the materialist school” of history; despite straw-manning Marxian theory; despite championing the theory of memetics, the idea that culture is essentially an ever-evolving mind virus—Harari highlights, as an example of an “ideal of social order,” a legal code that presupposes the existence not only of class society but class society involving slavery.
Ideas, ideology, myths are, of course, important in history; where I take issue is the extent to which Harari makes this factor the primary driving force of history. Contradictions arise in the process of articulating that history, wherein examples like the Code of Hammurabi ultimately work as evidence against the historical logic of Sapiens, where the role of imagination supposedly takes precedence.
As the reader, the tension around these kinds of inconsistencies is felt not only between arguments but even within Harari’s writings on single topics like the Code of Hammurabi.
Here, I’ll breakdown Harari’s arguments about The Code of Hammurabi and show why it does not support but rather confuses the historical principles laid out in Sapiens.
“All these cooperation networks […] were ‘imagined orders’”
As I’ve indicated, myth plays a fundamental role in Sapiens.
[Side note: To be clear, Harari’s category of myth is rather broad, to include essentially any sort of conception of social groupings, such as things like corporations—however, it’s also important to note that what Harari emphasizes in terms of human cognition as a determining factor in history is specifically the ability to believe in things that do not exist].
Harari writes:
All these cooperation networks – from the cities of ancient Mesopotamia to the Qin and Roman empires – were ‘imagined orders’. The social norms that sustained them were based neither on ingrained instincts nor on personal acquaintances, but rather on belief in shared myths.
For Harari, large social groupings are not merely reinforced by but predicated on and impossible without myths. Absent myths, in his view, people would be biologically limited in terms of a capacity for mass cooperation [I’ve covered previously Harari’s reductive, gene-centric, even eugenics-dabbling view of biology]:
Understanding human history in the millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.
In Harari’s view, once agriculture created the possibility for cities, “imagined orders” enabled humans to “organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks.” But why does he presume humans lacked the biological instincts to make it happen?
He says in another place in Sapiens, without any evidence, that humans are instinctively xenophobic:
Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they’.
Harari doesn’t explain the criteria by which our instinct would divide between “we” and “they,” and he simply takes for granted that these “imagined orders,” these “ideal” social orders, must be unequal and, in his words, “neither neutral nor fair:”
The imagined orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people into make-believe groups, arranged in a hierarchy. The upper levels enjoyed privileges and power, while the lower ones suffered from discrimination and oppression. Hammurabi’s Code, for example, established a pecking order of superiors, commoners and slaves. Superiors got all the good things in life. Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained. (p. 133)
As I’ve explained in a previous essay, Harari’s historical logic aligns with a legacy of intellectual elitism which extends at least as far back as ancient Greece in the works of the philosopher Plato and is characterized by reaction against egalitarianism and materialist philosophy.
The main throughline between Harari and elitist thinkers like Plato is the idea that society depends on widespread belief in some “imagined hierarchy”—to use Harari’s terms (Plato called it a “noble lie”)—which functions to naturalize things like class, race, and caste. For if there’s one line in Sapiens which best captures the thesis of the book, it’s that, “Unfortunately, complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination.”[5]
Again, for Harari, large social groupings are predicated on and impossible without myths (which, for some mysterious reason, must involve unjust discrimination).
However, …
Confusion: “If the king’s subjects all accepted their positions in the hierarchy …”
There is considerable ambiguity in Harari’s conception of the role of myth in history.
There are a couple of instances where he seems to imply a sort of secondary role for myths in relation to economy. For example:
Hammurabi’s Code was based on the premise that if the king’s subjects all accepted their positions in the hierarchy and acted accordingly, the empire’s million inhabitants would be able to cooperate effectively. Their society could then produce enough food for its members, distribute it efficiently, protect itself against its enemies, and expand its territory so as to acquire more wealth and better security.[6]
This passage implies that “the king’s subjects” had “their positions” at the time of writing and that it was intended for reinforcing the existing social relations.
However—if, as Harari says, “Hammurabi’s Code was based on the premise that if the king’s subjects all accepted their positions in the hierarchy and acted accordingly”—how is it also “a good source for understanding the ancient Mesopotamians’ ideal of social order”?
In other words, how was the code both an ideal social order of the Mesopotamians but also one devised by a king with the intention of keeping people in their place? How can it be both a reinforcement of existing inequality as well as anything that can be called ideal—unless we are taking a more historical materialist critique of ideology, for example?
The Code of Hammurabi presupposes all the social divisions on which it was based: it represents a master-slave society which existed when the Code was written; the kind of society which by any definition involves an entire class which did not enter their position voluntarily, a class which I doubt would uphold the Code as their “ideal of social order.’”
Contrary to Harari, I don’t see why human collective interests, passions, and activities would depend, in any universal sense, on our abilities to believe in things that do not exist, the more irrational and superstitious side of our cognitive capacities (or for that matter why they would depend on unjust discrimination and naturalizations of things like class, race, and gender). Moreover, cooperation is joint action which implies tasks, divisions of labor, things to do—not merely things not to do.
In my view, the social function of something like myth or ideology is more re-productive than it is productive, a factor that is, thus, more secondary than primary in determining history. Harari sometimes seems to agree with this view, which contradicts the general thesis of his book Sapiens.
Notes
[1]. Harari, Sapiens (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 105.
[2]. Ibid, 106.
[3]. Ibid, 107.
[4]. Ibid.
[5]. Ibid, 136.
[6]. Ibid, 107.
"I don’t see why human collective interests, passions, and activities would depend, in any universal sense, on our abilities to believe in things that do not exist"
We cannot build what we cannot imagine.