“Unremarkable genes:” Does Harari dabble in eugenics?

On the antiegalitarian nature of Harari’s gene-centric worldview in “Sapiens”

[Section of a lithograph by

April Burke

]

Part 1.6 in my critique of Harari’s 2015 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, a book which has sold over 21 million copies and been endorsed by the likes of Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. 

See the full series of my critical reading to date.

Harari’s speculations are consistently based on a poor understanding of science. His predictions of our biological future, for instance, are based on a gene-centric view of evolution—a way of thinking that has (unfortunately) dominated public discourse due to public figures like him. Such reductionism advances a simplistic view of reality, and worse yet, veers dangerously into eugenics territory.

—Darshana Narayanan (2022) “The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari,” Current Affairs.[1]

In my previous essay, I explained how Harari supplies mutually incompatible arguments against reform and revolution, including an argument based in a reductive understanding of biology. I explained how Harari thereby follows in the footsteps of counterrevolutionary thinkers, like Nietzsche, whom Harari references on the topic of happiness and the need for a meaningful life.

Like Nietzsche, Harari targets modernity and dismisses talk of human rights and equality in favor of more “scientific,” biological discussions of happiness.[2] Thus, it was even rather Nietzschean of Harari to claim that all that matters in history is biochemistry and its effects on happiness; that revolution can’t raise serotonin levels; and that revolutionaries who launched the French Revolution, in the name of human rights, simply had a “gloomy biochemistry.”[3]

Thus, despite being endorsed by many liberal elites, Harari’s Sapiens is steeped in reaction, particularly against basic liberal values.

In this essay, I’ll look more at the antiegalitarian nature of Harari’s gene-centric worldview: how Harari 1) dabbles in eugenics, which is inherently anti-egalitarian 2) counterposes biology against equality; and 3) counterposes biology against the humanities and social sciences, including accusing the latter of what he calls “culturalism.”

“Niches for imbeciles”

In describing Harari’s speculations on the future of genetic engineering, evolutionary biologist Narayanan writes that Harari’s “gene-centric view of evolution” is not only simplistic and reductive—by excluding “the many non-genetic mechanisms that form us”—but also “veers dangerously into eugenics territory.”[4]

I think there’s at least two passages in Sapiens where Harari veers into eugenics territory in his telling of history.

In one passage, Harari argues that brain size decreased with the Agricultural Revolution because small-brained “‘imbeciles’” were able to survive in simplified divisions of labor:  

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.[5]

So, rather than being to any extent victims of theirs and their ancestors’ place in life and living conditions, people of lower classes today actually owe their existence to there having been in society “‘niches for imbeciles,’” presumably thanks to the ingenuity of the ancestors of todays’ ruling class people for creating such imbecile-enabling societies? It’s a curiosity as to which side of that average reduction in brain size Harari sees himself on, the imbecile side or the non-imbecile side? The remarkable-genes side, or the unremarkable-genes side?

Consider as an alternative, Marx’s social theory—which, as I’ve shown, Harari only addresses in strawman form. Marx describes how the development of the division of labor in manufacture limited both the independence and the intellectual potentials of the individual workers. Marx 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.[6]

Thus, unlike Harari, for whom the intellectual capacities of those with “unremarkable genes” were enabled by simplistic and prefigured niches, Marx understands intellectual capacities as being more contingent upon the division of labor itself, upon the relations of social production.

“An inverse relation between physical prowess and social power”

Behind the idea that the Agricultural Revolution enabled “niches for imbeciles” to pass along their “unremarkable genes” is the presupposition that people who do manual labor are 1) less intelligent than intellectual elites (a story maintained, unsurprisingly, by intellectual elites[7]); and 2) this is why they are the ones doing the manual labor, while the most powerful people in society are in their positions because they’re the smartest.

As I’ve explained in a previous essay comparing Harari’s Sapiens with Connor’s A People’s History of Science, despite the legacy of intellectual elitist disdain for manual labor, the Scientific Revolution was largely born in the workshops of artisans.

According to Harari, the historical process which separated those with social power from “the lower classes who do the manual labour” was determined by intelligence and social skills. For him, an extraordinary level of intelligence and social skills placed the ruling classes at the top of society in a natural way that reflects Sapiens leap to the top of the food chain via the Cognitive Revolution:

In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labour. This may reflect Homo sapiens position in the food chain. If all that counted were raw physical abilities, Sapiens would have found themselves on a middle rung of the ladder. But their mental and social skills placed them at the top. It is therefore only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force.[8]

Harari quite literally naturalizes the division of labor and the order of class in society on the basis of his gene-centric worldview, one which is not only ahistorical but also already well within eugenics territory.

“They certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’”

It’s not difficult to acknowledge differences in ability among the population while also believing in equality. For example, Marx is famous for having proposed, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Nevertheless, counterposing of biology against equality is a common practice for those representing reductionist biological worldviews, given the antiegalitarian nature of such views. For example, the 19th century anthropologist Paul Broca defended against criticism of his “race science” views by claiming political bias on the part of those advocating for human equality. As historian of science Clifford D. Connor explains:

When a few of Broca’s contemporaries challenged his pronouncements on black inferiority, he responded by accusing them of allowing their political bias in favor of human equality to get in the way of the objective scientific truth … But in retrospect, it is clear that it was Broca himself who was allowing his social prejudices to lead him to utterly worthless conclusions about brain size, race, and intelligence.[9]

Broca takes for granted that racial hierarchies were based in biology and assumes that objections to the contrary are based in ideological bias toward equality. While Harari does not think in terms of race, he maintains the supposed opposition of biology against equality. For example, Harari critiques the ideas behind the U.S. Constitution from a biological point of view:

According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’. … Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. … Equally, there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities and characteristics. … And what are the characteristics that evolved in humans? ‘Life’, certainly. But ‘liberty’? There is no such thing in biology. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree.[10]

Contrary to Harari’s claim that, from a biological point of view, there’s no difference in freedom between humans in democracies and humans in dictatorships, there are all kinds of ways in which human bodies are determined by states and policies. It’s not difficult to think of examples—consider the ways in which the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade is affecting the biology of countless women in many states by effectively diminishing their access to healthcare.

On the other hand, if in some sense it’s true that from a biological viewpoint, “[t]here is no such thing in biology” as liberty, this just highlights the limitations of biology in explicating major topics of history like the concept of liberty or equality and the movements represented by those concepts. So, what value is there in emphasizing that from the biological point of view, there’s no such thing as “liberty,” if not merely to undermine the idea?

“We no longer say, ‘It’s in their blood.’ We say, ‘It’s in their culture’”

Harari extends the opposition of biology to the disciplines most commonly known for representing ideas like equality: the humanities and social sciences. In defense of biology’s history of racism in theories like eugenics, Harari charges historians and anthropologists with “culturalism:”

Such racist theories, prominent and respectable for many decades, have become anathema among scientists and politicians alike. People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted, and that the place of racism in imperial ideology has now been replaced by ‘culturism’. There is no such word, but it’s about time we coined it. Among today’s elites, assertions about the contrasting merits of diverse human groups are almost always couched in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between races.

Such culturist arguments are fed by scientific studies in the humanities and social sciences that highlight the so-called clash of civilisations and the fundamental differences between different cultures. Not all historians and anthropologists accept these theories or support their political usages. But whereas biologists today have an easy time disavowing racism, simply explaining that the biological differences between present-day human populations are trivial, it is harder for historians and anthropologists to disavow culturism. After all, if the differences between human cultures are trivial, why should we pay historians and anthropologists to study them?[11]

In a tone of defensiveness, Harari not only addresses, apologetically, the history of racism in elitist science (and seems to identify himself as a representative of what “today elites” think—“[w]e no longer say … ”) but also shames humanities scholars for not denouncing culturalism, a term the coining of which he states the need for in the paragraph prior.

However, “clash of civilizations” thesis is not, as I’m aware, an operative discourse anywhere in academia today, much less is it paradigmatic, contrary to what Harari seems to suggest. Moreover, the leading criticism of this thesis comes from scholars in the humanities and social sciences.[12]

I earned my M.A. in Humanities in 2019, but I’m hardly even familiar with the “clash of civilizations” thesis, which Harari refers to as if it’s the paradigm according to which scholars in the humanities and social sciences spend their time studying these days.

The only place I encountered this kind of theory was in a class on the History of the Middle East, while studying the rather racist and xenophobic history of the long-dead discipline of “Orientalism”—which fell by the wayside during the post-Second World War decolonization movements. The leading critic of Orientalism and founder of post-colonial studies, Edward Said, was a literary critic. The notion that “clash of civilizations” is a dominant theory or project of the humanities broadly today or in the years Harari wrote Sapiens is simply not true.

A Wikipedia search reveals that the thesis is attributed to one person, a political scientist from the Cold War era, unsurprisingly. Meanwhile, in the Wikipedia page’s section on criticism, Harari is named among maybe a half dozen critics of the clash of civilizations thesis, all of whom are humanities or social science scholars, including Chomsky and Said.

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Whatever your political leanings, it should be clear that this guru of liberal elites does not represent liberal values. Quite the contrary, from the basis of a reductive interpretation of biology, Harari challenges the ideological foundations of human rights; he also challenges their scholarly foundations in the humanities and social sciences, accusing the latter of “culturalism;" and he presents a view of history that dabbles in eugenics.

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Notes

[1]. Narayanan, “The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari,” Current Affairs. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari

[2]. See Losurdo on Nietzsche. Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), 286-9.

[3]. Harari, 388-9. See also Harari on happiness and modernity (391); and on biology vs. human rights (109-10).

[4]. Narayanan, “The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari.”

[5]. Harari, Sapiens (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 49.

[6]. Marx, Capital (New York: Penguin, 1990), 482.

[7]. See Clifford D. Connor in the book A People’s History of Science.

[8]. Harari, 155.

[9]. Connor, 129-30.

[10]. Harari, 109-10.

[11]. Ibid, 303-4.

[12]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations#Criticism