Harari’s Sapiens on Religion

I’ve been slowly re-reading Yuval Noah Harari’s 2014 classic, Sapiens, which apart from being ridiculously over-scoped and hilariously under-evidenced, is proving delightfully entertaining.

I’ve just finished chapter 12, covering the world history of all religion in thirty pages. Of course, at that level of brevity, there will be many deficiencies. But here’s some thoughts - not terribly well organised - which stand out to me.

Hurari generally assumes a materialist metaphysic (a problem which blights the book more generally). Nothing exists except physical stuff. This gives him severe tunnel vision. As a consequence of this restricting metaphysic, he is forced to adopt limiting accounts of what the role of religion is in world history, and therefore what religion is.

The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to [all social orders and hierarchies]. Religion can thus be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.

It might seem a little unfair to criticise Harari for giving a materialist account of religion. Sapiens is, after all, a materialist world history.

But this account is just one extreme example of how that project, to give a materialist account of world history, will inevitably lack the metaphysical resources to really understand the human story.

On Harari’s view, any human enterprise which attempts to understand that which transcends direct human experience is at best an effort in imaginative story-telling. All scientific theory, theology, ethics and metaphysics either contorted out of all recognition into a pragmatic fiction or is cast to the flames.

In particular, it’s a view which is incapable of taking seriously some of the most important questions human beings have grappled with in the course of their history. Those who know me won’t be surprised at which ones I’m going to pick out: who was the being which made their covenant with Abraham? How is that promise being fulfilled? And who the heck was Jesus of Nazareth?

If Harari’s characterisation of religion is adequate - and the Abrahamic faiths come under that banner - then those questions are reduced to nothing more profound than Doctor Who fans arguing over ‘canon’. The question of who God is becomes a mere tool for the organisation of society, rather than a substantial and important question on a matter of fact.

This is a shortcoming for its own sake: a materialist account of religion cannot adequately account for the phenomenon of religion itself.

But it is also a shortcoming even by its own lights. Without giving serious consideration to the substantial matter of what Harari calls ‘religion’ (which, to his mind, includes the Abrahamic faiths, Hinduism, paganism, animism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucianism, capitalism, communism and Nazism), even the material facts are inexplicable. Why would, as Harari is keen to point out, out, people fight and die over and over again for a fiction?

The material facts themselves prove that ‘religion’ as he construes it is not window dressing to the real story of history. It cannot merely serve as a mechanism in the churning of material history. It is itself the centre of the story.