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LitCharts | October 9 2024
Harari imagines a medieval market in Syria, full of exotic wares from around the globe. Then he thinks about Mecca, Islam’s holy shrine, where strangers from all over the world gather to pray together. He decides that religion is the third great unifier in the world—like money and empires. Harari defines religion as a set of values based on “a belief in a superhuman order.” He also thinks religions unify people when they’re “universal” and “missionary,” like Islam and Buddhism. Before the first millennium B.C.E, however, most ancient religions, he argues, were “local and exclusive.”
Before the Agricultural Revolution, Harari argues, foragers tended to believe in animism—they believed objects, plants, and animals had spirits, and an “equal status,” and they tried to cooperate with them, believing this would enable them to thrive in their local ecosystems. After the Agricultural Revolution, however, Harari says a “religions revolution” happened because human beings began treating animals and plants more like property. Harari thinks this prompted early farming societies to conceive of gods as supernatural beings that would help them keep their livestock and crops flourishing. Human beings, he says, began to see themselves as superior to animals under such early polytheistic religions
Map 5. The Spread of Christianity and Islam
Map 6. The Spread of Buddhism
Religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order. Football is not a religion because nobody argues that its rules reflect superhuman edicts. Islam, Buddhism and Communism are all religions, because all are systems of human norms and values that are founded on belief in a superhuman order.
Polytheistic religions believe in one supreme force or energy governing all existence. For the Ancient Greeks, this overarching power was “Fate.” For Hindus, it’s “Atman.” The overarching principle or power isn’t concerned with the mundane aspects of human lives, so humans pray to supernatural beings (“gods”) with “partial powers” for day-to-day help in their lives.
According to Harari, monotheistic religions evolved when some polytheists drifted into believing their local deities were the only ones. This first happened in Ancient Egypt around 1350 B.C.E, when Pharaoh Akhenaten “declared” that a minor god named Aten was the supreme power ruling the universe. Harari thinks Christianity evolved in a similar way. He argues that a Jewish sect decided that Jesus of Nazareth was God, and they sought to make other people in the world believe that too. They were so successful, that they took over the Roman Empire. Harari also points out that Christianity still includes some aspects of polytheism, since Christians often pray to different saints (who also have “partial powers” relative to an all-encompassing power).
Harari thinks about Siddhartha Gautama, a legendary prince who lived in 500 B.C.E. and founded Buddhism. Gautama noticed that people constantly crave things, which makes them suffer because they’re never satisfied. So, he developed a meditation technique to help detach himself from that feeling, achieved enlightenment. Harari thinks Buddhism isn’t really focused on individual gods, but many people who practice it still pray to gods from other religions (like Shinto gods in Japan) or enlightened beings (like Buddha).
Humanist Religions – Religions that Worship Humanity
Humanist Religions – Religions that Worship Humanity
The last 300 years have been more secular, but Harari thinks that worldviews like “liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism, and Nazism” are similar to religions. He calls them “natural-law religions.” Harari thinks Communism, for example, also has “holy scripts and prophetic texts,” like Das Kapital , holidays, and attempts to “guide human actions”. Harari thinks some of his readers will find his claims uncomfortable, but he feels strongly about this. He thinks capitalism is the most successful of the “modern religions,” though he’s going to discuss humanism first.
A Nazi propaganda poster showing on the right a ‘racially pure Aryan’ and on the left a ‘cross-breed’.
Humanism, to Harari, includes any belief system that claims Homo sapiens are special, unique, sacred, or different from other animals in nature. Liberal humanists think that being a free individual is humanity’s goal. Socialist humanists think that being an equal part of a community is humanity’s best expression. Harari also discusses evolutionary humanists like the Nazis. They believed that humans could evolve into better humans if they cleansed “inferior” populations from the gene pool. Harari thinks similar thinking existed among “elites” in the United States and Australia in the 1930s, many of whom published papers arguing that white people were more intelligent than Africans or Indians. Harari thinks that white supremacy remained popular in both countries until the 1960s.
Harari thinks that people no longer talk about exterminating other races, but scientists today do talk about using science to enhance human bodies. From Harari’s perspective, this is also a form of evolutionary humanism. He also thinks that many scientists today think genes are responsible for many human behaviors. He thinks that such research “thoroughly undermine[s]” the emphasis on individual freedom in liberal humanism.
Communism not only allowed unfit individuals to survive, they actually gave them the opportunity to reproduce, thereby undermining natural selection. In such a world, the fittest humans would inevitably drown in a sea of unfit degenerates. Humankind would become less and less fit with each passing generation – which could lead to its extinction.
A Nazi cartoon of 1933. Hitler is presented as a sculptor who creates the superman. A bespectacled liberal intellectual is appalled by the violence needed to create the superman. (Note also the erotic glorification of the human body.)
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