“Noble lies” about humankind: Harari and the legacy of intellectual elitism
How Harari’s “Sapiens” supports Plato’s “noble lie.”
[Section of a lithograph by
]Part 1.3 in my critique of Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. See the full series to date.
Two characteristics of Harari's Sapiens which I've been highlighting in this series are anti-egalitarianism and a rejection of materialism. In the first essay in this series, I elaborated on one example of Harari's arguments against egalitarianism, and in the second essay, I elaborated on his rejection of materialism. In this essay, I’ll briefly contextualize these characteristics as being part of a legacy of intellectual elitism, as described by Clifford D. Connor in the book A People’s History of Science.
Connor published A People’s History of Science in 2005, less than a decade before Harari’s Sapiens and just a few years after Jared Diamond's famous Guns, Germs and Steel. Both Connor and Harari reference Diamond’s book, and they could be thought of as successors of Diamond in the sense that all three of these books are “big picture” histories for popular audiences. However, Connor’s and Harari’s books are directly opposed stories of human history. Very simply put, whereas Harari’s historical logic prioritizes the superstitious side of our cognitive capacities, Connor’s prioritizes the rational side.
In A People’s History of Science, Connor challenges the Great Men Theory of History—the “traditional heroic account” wherein “a few Great Men with Great Ideas tower over the rest of humanity”—an account which has been supplanted by historians in general but which has remained influential in the history of science.[1] Against that “traditional heroic account,” Connor’s thesis is essentially that modern science rests on a bed of intellectual development by masses of ordinary, usually anonymous, often illiterate people in productive and economic activity, producing science more broadly defined as knowledge of nature, empirically, through trial and error. And while the “The Great Men of Science” cannot be ignored, “their stories have been traditionally told from the perspective of ruling elites.”[2]
Harari’s historical logic aligns with the legacy of intellectual elitism which Connor critiques throughout A People’s History of Science. This elitist legacy extends at least as far back as ancient Greece in the works of the philosopher Plato and is characterized by reaction against egalitarianism and materialism. However, the main throughline between Harari and elitist figures 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.”[3] Harari even makes the anti-egalitarian nature of his thesis on imagined hierarchies quite clear, explicitly arguing against advocates of equality and human rights: “Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.”[4] This thesis lends legitimacy to the “noble lie” of Plato and of others like him throughout history.
An aristocratic reaction against materialism and egalitarianism
Connor describes the idealist philosophy of Plato as “represent[ing] an aristocratic reaction against Ionian materialism,” that is, against the materialist philosophy of the ancient Greek region of Ionia. The Ionian materialist philosophers developed the atomic theory of matter, “an abomination in the eyes of Plato and Aristotle.”[5] Of course, the atomic theory of matter says that, at bottom, everything is made of the same substance, atoms. Hence, the abomination from the eyes of elitists.
Much of the Ionian philosophers’ ideas were characterized by analogies of economic and productive activity, such as comparing the way fire apparently exchanges for everything the way money does in the economy.[6] The Ionians developed their theories in a diverse context of commercial trade, where classes of merchants and artisans, as well as plebians, were growing in strength; where aristocracies had been overthrown after replacing the hereditary kings; where there was a politically active population that could not be easily suppressed or intimidated, in a social climate with relatively uninhibited free speech; “it was a tumultuous ‘marketplace of ideas.’”[7]
The Athenian aristocrat Plato, on the other hand, was one of history’s greatest opponents of democracy, and he wanted the books of the Ionian materialists burned. Connor describes Plato as “one of the most forthright elitists of all time,” whose ideology was a major detriment to the history of science: “it certainly played a significant role in a two-thousand-year retardation of scientific thought—arguably the greatest damage any scientific elite has ever inflicted on science in all of human history.”[8]
Plato’s “Noble Lie” and Harari’s apologia
For Plato, government requires grounding in a lie, a “noble lie,” one which warrants brutal, authoritarian protection against potential scrutiny. As Connor explains:
To uphold that falsehood, Plato urged that the books of the Ionian materialists be destroyed. … For dissenters who objected to his plans, he advocated the death penalty. … Plato's ‘noble lie’ … was the ultimate ideological justification of elitism: that social hierarchies are immutable because they are created by God, and that the ruling class deserves to rule because God made its members out of superior material. The aristocrats are the Golden Men, whereas the farmers and artisans are composed of brass and iron.[9]
Plato’s vision is bleak and totalitarian. Book burnings and death penalties, all in the service of maintaining a false belief in the natural origins of class; a lie about people of different classes being made of more or less quality substance.
It is with this kind of vision in mind that Harari argues imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination appear necessary for complex societies. For example, he argues:
Unfortunately, complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination. … Time and again people have created order in their societies by classifying the population into imagined categories, such as superiors, commoners and slaves; whites and blacks; patricians and plebeians; Brahmins and Shudras; or rich and poor.[10]
He seems to claim that these social categories were assigned with the purpose of creating order, but how does classifying people as “rich and poor” create order? Surely, these societies weren’t kickstarted when some people were just repeatedly told they were rich and others they were poor. At most, the laws detailing these categories served to help ensure order in societies that were already operating on the basis of such socio-economic divisions. However, if the role of these categories was secondary in Harari’s eyes, then he wouldn’t be arguing for the social necessity of “unjust discrimination;” nor would he need to make his case against advocates of equality.
Harari’s emphasis on order being created by hierarchies of race, caste and class is informative for understanding his anti-egalitarian, anti-materialist stances, sentiments common among the legacy of intellectual elitism. In my next essay, I’ll compare several passages between the two books—Sapiens and A People’s History of Science—passages where Harari reads like a direct reaction against Connor.
Notes
[1]. Clifford D. Connor in the book A People’s History of Science (New York: Nation Books, 2005): 1, 17.
[2]. Ibid, 18.
[3]. Harari, Sapiens (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 136
[4]. Ibid, 110.
[5]. Connor, 146; 156.
[6]. Ibid, 134-6; 142-7.
[7]. Ibid, 134-6; 142-7.
[8]. Ibid, 142-3. If Connor’s take on Plato sounds hyperbolic, consider aristocrat Joseph de Maistre who considered himself among the legacy of Plato. Historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin argued that Maistre was the earliest representative of fascist thought. In exile in Russia in the wake of the French Revolution, Maistre “looked to the Society of Jesus to act as the elite of Platonic Guardians” (Berlin, 119). Like Plato, Maistre: opposed equality; opposed systems with methods in any way connected to the natural sciences; admired Sparta for not having contaminated itself with science; advocated for the death penalty for challenges to authority. Moreover—like a representative of Connor’s point about Plato’s legacy of causing a retardation of science—Maistre literally advocated for the retardation of science, in such terms. Concerning Russia, Maistre writes: “‘A great political step in this country would be to retard the reign of science’” (Ibid, 157). His advocacy was not just in vain. His influence upon the Curator of the St. Petersburg school district resulted in the elimination of the humanities and social sciences from the schools under his supervision. With an influence lasting half a century, the same principles were later applied at universities and across the educational system in Russia, which was then alternatively principled upon orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality (Ibid, 155). Isaiah Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, edited by Henry Hardy (Princeton University Press: 2013).
[9]. Connor, 144-5.
[10]. Harari, 136.