Sapiens: cortex versus striatum?

Even though I first heard about the extremely popular book by Yuval Noah Harari, “Sapiens: A brief history of humankind” several months ago, I did not get around to actually reading it until now. First published in Hebrew back in 2011, Harari’s highly entertaining history of the world was “updated with new material” in 2014 for the English edition, which judging by unusually frequent references to the USA, seems to have been aimed mainly at an American readership. Since that time, however, having been translated into dozens of other languages, it has now become the first of a set of three block busting bestsellers, that have collectively turned their author into a world-wide celebrity, far beyond his home base in the World History Programme of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Sapiens book is not at all the ordinary kind of dry collection of historical facts, arranged in chronological and geographical order, as well as in conceptual order (political, economic, social and cultural history), that I was expecting to read. That said, however, Harari’s decision to deliberately avoid thoroughness in his one-volume history, of everything important that human beings were supposed to have done since our species first appeared on this planet, certainly leaves out a great deal of highly pertinent information. The errors of omission in such a work being every bit as important as any errors of commission.

Especially since those same errors of omission seem to have led to what initially seemed to me to be Harari’s much too optimistic interpretation of today’s world, such as severely underplaying the importance of the current ecological crisis (well-publicized since the 1970s). An unfounded “optimism” that upon further reading turned into Harari’s overly-positive approach not toward the future of human beings, but instead toward what he projects as humankind’s ultimate replacement by a race of super-robots! Harari seems to be caught, therefore, in an even more extreme variety of the kind of “yellow-brick-road” illusions that led to the similarly overwrought views of the US State Department bureaucrat, Francis Fukuyama, back in 1989, when he wrote about the end of history because of what he thought was the total victory of liberal capitalism, all over the world.

A very good example of what is wrong with Harari’s approach has to do, paradoxically, with his initially quite well thought out analysis of the shortcomings of a significant part of the arguments provided by what he calls “the prophets of doom” from the ecological movement. One of the major misinterpretations of the “Limits to Growth” philosophy is that resources are scarce and that we are running out of everything that we need in order to keep the modern economy functioning properly; so we have to scale back on everything drastically, right now, or we are all going to die. Harari’s response to that ideological discourse is quite similar to the one concocted back in the 1980s by another “yellow-brick-road” illusionist, Lyndon Larouche.

In itself, Harari’s answer to the limits theory is completely valid, the entire history of the industrial revolution providing abundant evidence of the fact that whenever some source of raw materials was drying up, scientists and engineers soon managed to find a completely new source, dependent on a totally different technology. For example, burning scarce supplies of wood for heating houses, and for operating blacksmith furnaces, was replaced with coal, which was itself largely replaced by more efficient petroleum, long before the world’s coal supplies ran out. Hydraulic power was eventually replaced with hydroelectricity, to which were added nuclear fission, wind and solar power. For his part, Lyndon Larouche’s favourite source was fusion energy, the peaceful harnessing of the power behind the hydrogen bomb, to produce electricity from naturally occurring, extremely abundant isotopes of hydrogen (such as deuterium and tritium).

Harari should have known, however, that opposition to change from huge, already established, firms (like those in the fossil-fuel industry) and also from recently established ideologies, like the neoliberalism that took over the entire world during the 1980s (Thatcher, Reagan, etc.), are often quite capable of blocking major development projects that they do not support. Harari devotes several pages in his text to “the marriage of science and empire”, and fully realizes that in order to develop new things, scientists and engineers require enormous amounts of money that can only come from either very rich private capitalists, or from very rich state capitalists. For example, since the US Army launched the Internet back in the early 1980s, trillions of dollars have been invested since then to develop extremely profitable social media all over the world. But the secret of harnessing fusion energy has not yet been found, either because of severely underfunded research, or because some scientific secrets are a lot more difficult to uncover than others. We have developed a much more modest form of hydrogen power nowadays, but it is a much less significant contribution to humanity than fusion power would have been.

Twenty-five years after Fukuyama, Harari did not even seem to notice the rise of ultra-conservative atavism, also known as ultra-right-wing populism, or more simply as neofascism, not only in the Western countries but also in several different parts of the former “Third World” (fundamentalist Islamic terrorism being an excellent example). Harari has a lot to say about Nazism (more on that later), but nothing whatever to say about classical, Italian fascism, nor about the other forms of fascism (including Catholic and Jewish varieties) developed in several dozen other countries, all over the world, from the 1920s to the 1960s.

In my opinion, much of today’s neofascist atavism ought to be seen as a consequence of the post 1979, world-wide, neoliberal fixation on exclusively private capitalism as a capital-accumulating antidote to the kind of profit-limiting government “intervention” into economic and social policy, that characterized the entire 1914-1979, “neomercantilist” period of history. More or less in the same way that the laissez-faire of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century engendered (among other things) the rise of classical fascism during the 1920s. I was already writing about the recent, neofascist trend around the same time that Harari’s English-language version was being published. For example, in my blogpost from July 5, 2104, called “Regression trumps progress”.

Which explains the second part of my title for this blogpost, “cortex versus striatum”, based on the curious contributions of scientific journalist Sébastien Bohler, from his recent book (2019), “Le bug humain”, about how the human brain really works. That I found out about by reading a review (“Le cerveau, notre meilleur ennemi”) (“Our best enemy, the brain”), written by Fouad Laroui and published in the September-October 2019 edition of the French newsmagazine, “La Revue”. Bohler’s thesis, according to which the domination of the relatively primitive striatum in the brain, over the much more recent and much less primitive cortex, could presumably be interpreted as helping to explain why, in spite of all its cortex-driven advances, humanity never seems to be able to go beyond recurring episodes of an atavistic frame of mind, as in the current return of ultra-right-wing populism, all over the world.

The striatum is a small part of the brain that seems to communicate with the body through such hormones and neurotransmitters as dopamine, seeking to satisfy (at least according to Bohler) five (and only five) basic needs: eating, reproducing, laying the foundations of power and seeking useful information, while still expending the least amount of effort possible. (I always think of Donald Trump whenever I read that list of primitive desires.) All of which seems to fit in quite well with Harari’s contention (page 432) that recent discoveries in biology confirm that happiness is not so much related to “external parameters” like social relations and political rights as it is to the influence of “biochemical substances such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin”.

According to him, those substances tend to maintain the body at a steady state of emotional influences, making it impossible to remain happy, or sad, or angry, or whatever, without a constantly renewing stream of those same biochemical substances. Which he then interprets as meaning that instead of trying to improve the world through seeking world peace and/or ecological balance, we should instead be devoting our future efforts to controlling our biochemical happiness. As in Aldous Huxley’s science-fiction novel, “Brave New World”, that Harari considers to be a much more prescient work than George Orwell’s “1984”. But Harari never really explains in his book why happiness in and of itself ought to be the number one goal of human beings, which seems to contradict his own attempts as a good Buddhist to avoid craving altogether. Did he get the happiness idea from Thomas Jefferson?

If Harari is right about biochemical substances, and if Bohler’s book backs him up on this, then we inadequate humans are in for a very difficult time indeed in the immediate future. Certainly nothing like the rather smooth sailing projected by Harari’s artificial-intelligence-assisted transition into a robotic super-race. However, instead of accepting at face value what seems to be a biologically-grounded explanation of the past, and of the future, of homo sapiens as a species, what would happen if we quite simply decided to turn this hypothesis on its head, into something radically different?

It may very well turn out that Harari (and perhaps Bohler as well) made the same misinterpretation of biological science as Herbert Spencer made back in the nineteenth century, turning Darwin’s theory of evolution through “natural selection” into a “survival of the fittest” dictum applying to human society as well. Resulting in the foundation of “social Darwinism”, that underlay much of Western imperialism’s disdain for the various non-Western societies that they were turning into colonies and/or neo-colonial satrapies back then, as well as of Nazism’s own 1933-1945 version of racist imperialism. Not to mention the American empire joining forces with dozens of allied military dictatorships, during the Cold War, in the physical elimination of several million communist peasants, throughout the “Third World”  (another historical “detail” that escaped Harari’s attention).

Turning the whole Harari hypothesis upside down would mean that it was the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism and neofascism back in the 1970s, and the domination of those two reactionary ideologies since then, that caused such complete misreadings of recent biological science, rather than the other way around. Which could mean that instead of trying to find a biological underpinning for pessimistic interpretations of human history, and the projected need for an artificial replacement for our atavistic species, we should be positing instead an ideological underpinning for why some of today’s biologically-based theories seem to be leading us to “the eve of destruction”. Rather than accepting neoliberalism and neofascism as the only credible ideologies in today’s world, we should maybe be getting back to the reasons why we gave up so easily on much less reactionary modes of thought like democratic socialism back in the 1970s and 1980s.

The very numerous errors of omission contained in Harari’s book, therefore, cannot just be explained by the fact that no one could possibly include everything important that there is to say about humanity in only a little less than 500 pages of text. His chapters on “the scent of money” and “the capitalist creed”, for example, are considerably more developed than his treatment of any of the competing, anti-capitalist creeds, as well as being downright naive, even adolescent, at times. He starts out by providing only the official liberal view on those two related subjects, without delving into any of the very numerous criticisms, and denunciations, of the enormous conceptual weaknesses inherent in that highly biased, pro-capitalist, point of view.

In spite of loving capitalism so much, at least theoretically, Harari is still quite capable of making a causal connection between private investment and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as well as of several other major historical abominations, such as capitalism’s horrible treatment of the European working-class. (Without explaining why he thinks that only the European part of that social class was exploited so drastically, and why the same kind of treatment is not just as obvious nowadays as it was back in the nineteenth century). His naive emphasis on productive, economic growth as the very essence of capitalism fails to account for such recurring fetiches as its periodic fixation on speculative investment instead, leading to a long series of financial crises and economic depressions. Which, by the way, are lurking again, right around the corner, and do not just belong to the not-so-distant past (2008).

For him, the eighteenth-century Mississippi Bubble, for example, was an example of anti-capitalism, and not of capitalism itself at work, presumably because that “joint venture” of private capital and the French state turned out so very badly, causing an enormously destructive panic among investors, as well as as a major setback for the French economy. Resulting in the fact that France totally lost its battle with Great Britain for the control of the entire region that became the USA later on. (Harari did not mention the British retention of the northern part of that region, Canada and Québec, after the American Revolution, in his highly oversimplified analysis.) He also seems to truly believe in such incredible pronouncements as writing (page 356) that dictatorial states are opposed to defending private property (not even in today’s China?) and that “an oil-rich country cursed with a despotic government, endemic warfare and a corrupt judicial system will usually receive a low credit rating” (page 366). Which, to say the least, does not seem to describe very well the current situation in the Middle East.

Harari often denounces private capitalism quite severely, in dozens of different circumstances, such as the 10 million peasants killed off by the British East India company in the Bengal famine of 1769-1773, or the King of Belgium’s elimination of ten million colonial, Congolese subjects in his late nineteenth century rubber plantations. (Many more recent unnatural disasters, such as the 1943 Bengal famine, are completely ignored.) In spite of all that, he nevertheless totally supports Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” dictum in his book, of private vice somehow transmogrifying itself into public good (“egoism equals altruism”). He manages to convince himself through several succeeding chapters that, in spite of everything, capitalism has remained basically a good thing over the past few centuries, even though it has so often been associated with so very many, major, unnatural disasters. In his view, private capitalism, working alongside the “imagined communities” of the modern nation-state, has nevertheless managed to eventually produce good news, at least in recent times, since (according to him) recent statistics prove that humanity nowadays is not nearly as poor as it was in centuries gone by. So far as I can tell, the recent, unprecedented rise in social inequality, on every continent, somehow managed to escape his notice.

Since the only other alternative system he can think of, totalitarian communism, turned out to be a total disaster, resulting in such extremely murderous abominations as China’s “Great Leap Forward” (1959-62), capitalism must therefore be the only real alternative we have left, which means that we have to make do with it, after all. Even consumerism, convincing millions of people to consume goods and services that they do not need in any way whatsoever, and are often quite harmful to them (such as opioids, pornography, prostitution, gambling, video games and all the other contemporary obsessions), is also okay as a system. For no other reason than that at least it proves that people are doing exactly what the capitalist/consumerist system wants them to do, a claim that no other system can apparently make. In other words, successful manipulation of psychologically damaged people is a true sign of success!

Harari can also be quite insensitive toward poor people in many of his different comparisons, as when he ironizes about such middle-class habits as taking a shower every day for reasons of hygiene, that he considers to be a mere fad, a social habit not at all necessary. He seems completely impervious to the fact that upper middle-class people in Israel using a lot of water every day may be contributing to the much reduced consumption of poorer populations, not only within Israel but also in neighbouring countries, that constantly suffer from having his country completely dominate the vast majority of water use in that region.

His treatment of communism is extremely short and dismissive, concentrating exclusively on the totalitarian nature and social engineering experiments of the communist regimes that, in fact, though Harari never mentions it, abandoned the ideal of a classless society completely. Nor does Harari have anything whatever to say about the other, non-communist forms of economic nationalism that have been put into practice over the past few centuries, such as the governments that used the “infant industry” argument to protect their economies from neocolonialism (centred in Britain during the nineteenth century and in the USA in the twentieth century) while they were industrializing their own economies. His treatment of democratic socialism is also practically non-existent, no mean feat for a historian based in a country theoretically founded on democratic-socialist principles, which led even the USSR to support Israel in the beginning. At least before it joined Britain and France in attacking economic-nationalist Egypt, during the Suez canal crisis.

Harari’s congratulatory attitude toward liberal capitalism is particularly upsetting, so far as I am concerned, given the fact that in the rest of his book, he usually avoids the rather pedestrian error of maneuvering around historical controversies, without coming down on any one side, as do most of the other world histories that I have read over the past several decades. Instead, he plunges right into controversy from the very beginning, postulating the existence of a “cognitive revolution” about 70 000 years ago, that seems to have turned our previously uninspiring species of animal into a global killing machine, wiping out all the extremely large mammals that it encountered on its destructive path, over several dozen millennia, out of East Africa into all the other regions of our planet. A point of view that, to say the least, does not jibe very well with the more romantic description provided by many traditional historians, according to which all the world’s “prehistoric” peoples lived in perfect harmony with “Mother Nature” when they were still nomadic, or at least semi-nomadic, hunters and gatherers.

Harari’s coverage of the agricultural revolution (starting about 12000 years ago), as “history’s biggest fraud” since it presumably forced peasants into working much harder than hunters and gatherers had to do, is every bit as controversial as his treatment of “the first cognitive revolution”. As are his interpretations of the scientific revolution (500 years ago), which he thinks was based on the “discovery of ignorance” (that according to him had never before even been considered as a concept), and of the industrial revolution (200 years ago), even more enslaving for workers than the agricultural one was for peasants. So far as Harari is concerned, it was those economic systems that ruined millions of people’s lives, as systems, and not just the landowning aristocrats and the industrial capitalists, as slave-driving individuals exploiting the downtrodden masses. He finishes up his book by postulating the existence of an upcoming “second cognitive revolution”, based largely on the development of artificial intelligence, as part of what he sees as a “permanent revolution”, an idea that he seems to have further developed in his more recent works.

Apparently, Harari has gone on to write extensively about a “useless class” of future unemployables, an expression that recalls the Nazi reference to “useless eaters”, although his solution to that problem, the guaranteed annual income, seems a lot more palatable than anything the Nazis ever did. It will probably, however, be exceedingly difficult to convince the billionaire class to part with even a penny of their eternally-increasing wealth since they, like all the other psychologically dependent seekers of dopamine, will never want to stop pounding over and over again on the pleasure button, for all eternity.

Having myself published several books and articles supporting “universal skepticism” over the past twenty years, I find that by far the most entertaining aspect of Harari’s book is his entirely irreverent, even downright cynical, attitude toward most of the different forms of religion and ideology that have been invented over the past several thousand years. Which is to say, the kind of “imagined communities”, or “imagined orders”, that have been used by the world’s most successful ruling classes, throughout the sedentary part of history (since the agricultural revolution), to keep millions of ordinary peasants and workers under the control of the various different empires that sprang up over the centuries, from the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia (2250 BC) to the American Empire nowadays. (There is, however, no mention in his book of the quite popular contention that Israel also constitutes an empire, currently competing with Iran and Saudi Arabia for control of the entire Middle Eastern region.)

In spite of their entirely non-material nature, the world’s very numerous ideologies, for which Harari means not only spiritual religions like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, but also “secular religions” like liberalism, nationalism, humanism (including human rights), communism and Nazism, have all been more than useful in preventing both individuals and masses of people from creating any true forms of intellectual liberty. Not even during any of the world’s various political revolutions, such as the ones that began in the USA in 1775, in France in 1789, in Russia in 1917, or in China in 1949.

His treatment of Nazism is particularly odd, however, since he classifies it as a kind of illiberal humanism, whose extremely inhumane treatment of its victims was based on its contention that human beings have always been engaged in a biological “battle for existence” (social Darwinism), that favoured the “more advanced” peoples, such as Aryans like themselves. According to Harari (page 263), contemporary biology has also proven that they may have been right after all, not so far as genocide is concerned, but at least in the sense of anticipating the current revival in the quest for superhuman powers. A quest in which he himself indulges toward the end of his book, with all his talk about cyborgs and such. I find it strange, however, that in the twenty-first century we no longer seem to be able to rely on history professors, even those hailing from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to defend us all against Nazi ideology in any coherent way.

Harari himself seems to have succumbed at least in part to this kind of “progressive” thought control, not only through his tendency to support economic liberalism (otherwise known as laissez-faire, or neoliberal capitalism), through the exclusion of all the other possible points of view concerning economic development. But also through his adhesion to a form of “special-seeing” Buddhism. It seems to me that Buddhists fail in becoming successful followers of Siddhartha Gautama not merely by continuing to simultaneously believe in pagan gods, as Harari contends, but also by continuing to believe that they too are capable of attaining nirvana (an end to craving). The “enlightened one” (Buddha) himself only having done so according to Gautama’s own account, that no one else has ever succeeded in verifying, or replicating.

I do however very much agree with yet another aspect of Harari’s thinking, namely his contention that it is almost impossible to expect individual ideas, or ideas belonging only to an intellectual minority, no matter how well thought out they may be, to prevail over culturally implanted ideas. The division of all the world’s people into social classes, for example, at least since the beginning of the agricultural revolution, seems to be an unimpeachable constant in human societies throughout the ages. Even, or perhaps especially, when the very existence of social classes is called into question for purely ideological reasons, such as in today’s prevailing neoliberal order (particularly well-ensconced in the Western group of countries). Curiously enough, Harari seems to be able to support such very particular points of view, while still simultaneously pretending that he is being entirely neutral toward all points of view. Quite a mean feat, when you really think about it.

Once again, I do not agree at all with his overly optimistic attitude toward the very numerous problems affecting today’s world. In my view, most people living nowadays seem to be almost entirely controlled by two prevailing ideologies, neoliberalism and neofascism, which in many (if not most) countries seem to operate in tandem. So far as I am concerned, this observation applies to Islamic fundamentalist nations (Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.) as well as to sub-national movements like Hamas, Hezbollah and the so-called Islamic State. But it also applies to a wide variety of other governments and movements, also heavily influenced by other kinds of religious fundamentalism and ethnic isolationism, such as the Trump regime in the USA, Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, Modi’s India, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Orban’s Hungary, Netanyahu’s Israel, and dozens of other such regimes, all over the world. The first example of this kind of joint neoliberalism and neofascism having been the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973-1990), which was after all founded over forty years before the English version of Harari’s book came out, and still has an extremely powerful influence on that unfortunate country even nowadays.

The world that we are living in right now desperately needs a much more advanced system of international cooperation than anything that has so far existed, to deal not only with the horrendous ecological crisis, but also with the ever-widening proliferation of nuclear weapons all over the world. Not to mention the ever-growing rate of resistance to antibiotics among the world’s very numerous “superbugs” (see the article written by Canadian scientists Steven Hoffman and Charu Kauschic, that was published in “The Montreal Gazette” on November 20, 2019.) The nerve-wracking problem of superbugs, largely caused by the unnecessary overuse of antibiotics, is also being compounded in today’s world by the increased proliferation of religious fundamentalism, one of the major contributors to an enormous recent decline in “herd immunity”. These problems, along with unprecedented inequality between the social classes, and increasing intolerance of women’s liberation as well as of hundreds of ethnic minorities all over the world, cannot possibly be addressed in any real way without the development of some kind of world-wide cooperative organization of truly sovereign states that would not just be run by the same imperial powers that currently dominate the United Nations.

The communist international no longer exists, nor does the socialist international in any real sense. Everyone nowadays therefore acquaints internationalism with domination by enormous, neoliberal, multinational corporations, operating out of those same imperial nations, combining private capitalism with state capitalism. Harari’s book, theoretically focused on describing the past in a completely scientific (non-ideological) way, instead plays up exactly the kind of ideological blinders that prevent humanity from surviving much longer. Thereby paving the way, so far as he is concerned, for its replacement by a trans-human transition to a new race of super-intelligent robots. Harari’s history of “Sapiens”, therefore, reads more like a funeral oration than as a panegyric. It also seems to give credence to Bohler’s equally depressing theory about the striatum managing to win out over the cortex in the long run.