I'm still struggling through the first part of the profile, which seems much more about his husband than about Harari. So far the piece has divulged very little about what has made Harari famous and successful, except where it has very briefly touched on The Singularity. I haven't reached the future part of his book, so I'll withhold judgment but I don't really buy into the whole Singularity thing, but maybe he'll convince me.
it seems a little strange that someone who has benefited from thousands of years of civilization would be complaining about or condemning civilization.
Without civilization, the lives of Homo sapiens would no doubt be "nasty, brutish, and short."
Was Hobbes talking about hunter-gatherer life, or just life without a central government? In any case, I can't imagine 17th-century Europeans were all that knowledgeable about prehistory.
I wouldn't say Harari is condemning civilization per se. He's saying hunter-gatherer life was, in some ways, less nasty and brutish back then than we like to think. It was short, no doubt, because an infected cut, poison berry, intertribal conflict or attack by a saber-tooth tiger (or whatever they had back then) could kill people at a young age, bringing the average lifespan way down.
And yes, I'm sure Harari recognizes that civilization has made
his own life more comfortable and enriched. The argument is that hunter gatherers as a whole were, some ways, more comfortable. More leisure time, less viral or chronic disease, less dependence on successful crops to avoid starvation, etc. And that while it's easy for Harari or for us to say our lives are way better because of agriculture and consequent civilization, his point is that many, many people in the world still do not share those benefits, even now, let alone for the past however many millennia.
So he's not really tossing out his computer and complaining that he himself can't live on a nice soft bed of leaves in the forest.
I have an article he wrote on this topic on a tab on my computer. I'll try to read it over lunch.
Harari is thinking big but not big enough. His lens is the Jewish and proto-Jewish cultures of the Middle East. If he knows anything about other cultures, he has dismissed them or is excluding them. His bias is showing. Of course, I've only read the article, not the books, and I plan to.
Actually he writes quite extensively about other parts of the world. For example, the one that comes to mind is how quickly and brutally a small number of Spaniards managed to destroy longstanding Latin American cultures like the Incas and Aztecs. He takes examples from all over the place -- including many from this country. His book starts out with the evolution of homo sapiens, so by necessity it's in a particular part of the world, but he follows as humans spread through Europe and other continents. One interesting part is his exploration of how Europeans managed to subdue and colonize other cultures, partly because non-European cultures didn't take as much interest in exploring the world outside their own areas, let alone conquering other places.