laughed. “You know—the usual stuff.”
He deferred his compulsory military
service, through a program for high-
achieving students. (The service was
never completed, because of an undis-
closed health problem. “It wasn’t some-
thing catastrophic,” he said. “I’m still
here.”) When he began college, at He-
brew University, he was younger than
his peers, and he had not shared the ex-
perience of three years of activity often
involving groups larger than eight.
By then, Harari’s nationalist fire had
dimmed. In its place, he had attempted
to will himself into religious convic-
tion—and an observant Jewish life. “I
was very keen to believe,” he said. He
supposed, wrongly, that “if I read enough,
or think about it enough, or talk to the
right people, then something will click.”
In Chapter 2 of “Sapiens,” Harari de-
scribes how, about seventy thousand
years ago, Homo sapiens began to de-
velop nuanced language, and thereby
began to dominate other Homo species,
and the world. Harari’s discussion reflects
standard scholarly arguments, but he
adds this gloss: during what he calls the
Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens be-
came uniquely able to communicate
untruths. “As far as we know, only Sa-
piens can talk about entire kinds of en-
tities that they have never seen, touched
or smelled,” he writes, referring to myths
and gods. “Many animals and human
species could previously say ‘Careful! A
lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolu-
tion, Homo sapiens acquired the ability
to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit
of our tribe.’” This mental leap enabled
coöperation among strangers: “Two
Catholics who have never met can nev-
ertheless go together on crusade or pool
funds to build a hospital because they
both believe that God was incarnated
in human flesh and allowed Himself to
be crucified to redeem our sins.”
In the schema of “Sapiens,” money is
a “fiction,” as are corporations and na-
tions. Harari uses “fiction” where another
might say “social construct.” (He explained
to me, “I would almost always go for the
day-to-day word, even if the nuance of
the professional word is a bit more accu-
rate.”) Harari further proposes that fic-
tions require believers, and exert power
only as long as a “communal belief ” in
them persists. Every social construct, then,
is a kind of religion: a declaration of uni-
versal human rights is not a manifesto,
or a program, but the expression of a be-
nign delusion; an activity like using money,
or obeying a stoplight, is a collective
fantasy, not a ritual. When I asked him
if he really meant this, he laughed, and
said, “It’s like the weak force in physics—
which is weak, but still strong enough to
hold the entire universe together!” (In
fact, the weak force is responsible for the
disintegration of subatomic particles.)
“It’s the same with these fictions—they
are strong enough to hold millions of
people together.”
In his representation of how people
function in society, Harari sometimes
seems to be extrapolating from his per-
sonal history—from his eagerness to
believe in something. When I called
him a “seeker,” he gave amused, half-
grudging assent.
As an undergraduate, Harari wrote a
paper, for a medieval-history class, that
was later published, precociously, in a
peer-reviewed journal. “The Military Role
of the Frankish Turcopoles: A Reassess-
ment” challenged the previously held as-
sumption that, in crusader armies, most
cavalrymen were heavily armored. Ha-
rari proposed, in an argument derived
from careful reading of sources acrossseveral centuries, that many were light
cavalrymen. Benjamin Kedar, who taught
the class, told me that the paper “was ab-
solutely original, and really a breakthrough.”
It seems to be generally agreed that, had
Harari stuck solely to military history of
this era, he would have become a signifi-
cant figure in the field. Idan Sherer, a for-
mer student and research assistant of Ha-
rari’s who now teaches at Ben Gurion
University, said, “I don’t think the prom-
inent scholar, but definitely one of them.”
In academic prose, especially philos-
ophy, Harari seems to have found some-
thing analogous to what he had sought
in nation and in faith. “I had respect for,
and belief in, very dense writing,” he re-
called. “One of the first things I did
when I came out, to myself, as gay—I
went to the university library and took
out all these books about queer theory,
which were some of the densest things
I’ve ever read.” He jokingly added, “It
almost converted me back. It was ‘O.K.,
now you’re gay, so you need to be very
serious about it.’”
In 1998, he began working toward a
doctorate in history, at the University of
Oxford. “He was oppressed by the gray-
ness,” Harari’s mother recalled, at lunch.
Harari agreed: “It wasn’t the greatest time“He’s always been a little needy, but the despair is new.”