14 11.14.
Ta l k
With the publication in the United States
of his best-selling ‘‘Sapiens’’ in 2015, the
Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval
Noah Harari arrived at the top rank of pub-
lic intellectuals, a position he consolidated
with ‘‘Homo Deus’’ (2017) and ‘‘21 Lessons
for the 21st Century’’ (2018). Harari’s key
theme is the idea that human society has
largely been driven by our species’ capaci-
ty to believe in what he calls fi ctions: those
things whose power is derived from their
existence in our collective imaginations,
whether they be gods or nations; our belief
in them allows us to cooperate on a soci-
etal scale. The sweep of Harari’s writing,
which encompasses the prehistoric past
and a dark far-off future, has turned him
into a bit of a walking inkblot test. ‘‘The
general misunderstandings of me,’’ says
Harari, 45, co-author of the recently pub-
lished ‘‘Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume
2,’’ ‘‘are that I’m the prophet of doom and
then there’s this opposite view that I think
everything is wonderful.’’ Each, of course,
might be true. ‘‘Once the books are out,
the ideas are out of your hands,’’ he says.
Some of the big ideas about humanity
that you’ve helped popularize — that
fi ctions or social constructs have polit-
ical power or that Homo sapiens might
be moving toward technologically driv-
en obsolescence — have been around
in various forms since way before you
wrote about them. So what do you think
it is about how you convey them that’s
been so compelling? One hypothesis is
that I’m coming from the discipline of his-
tory, and many of the recent attempts to
create this kind of big synthesis were from
biology and evolution or from economics
and social sciences. In recent decades the
humanities kind of gave up, and it became
almost taboo to try to create grand nar-
ratives. But the humanities’ perspective
is essential. Many of the philosophical
questions that have bothered humanity
for thousands of years are now becoming
practical. Previously philosophy was a kind
of luxury: You can indulge in it or not. Now
you really need to answer crucial philo-
sophical questions about what humanity is
or the nature of the good in order to decide
what to do with, for example, new biotech-
nologies. So maybe I’ve reached people
because I’ve come from the perspective
of history and philosophy and not biology
or economics. Also, my most central idea
is simple. It’s the primacy of fi ctions, that
to understand the world you need to take
stories seriously. The story in which you
believe shapes the society that you create.
When you’re working in a mode that
involves making broad conclusions
about humanity, is it hard to determine
whether those conclusions are banal?
Well, I discovered this: The more banal
they are, the more impressed people are.
That’s the trick? All these things about
the fi ctional stories, this was one of the
most basic things I learned in my fi rst
year doing a bachelor’s degree in history.
I thought this was the most banal thing
that everybody knows. It turned out that
for lots of people, it was a big discovery:
that you had these social constructs and
intersubjective^1 reality. I thought it was
the most banal thing in the world.
Does it make you cynical if what you’d
thought was the most banal thing in the
world ends up being wildly popular?^2
No. It just means that there is miscom-
munication between large parts of the sci-
entifi c community and large parts of the
public. The things that have been known
and accepted by science or by scholars formany years, they’re still big news for the
public. It’s just the way things are.
I know you get asked a version of this
question a lot, but what do you make of
the fact that your work is so popular in
Silicon Valley? As you’ve pointed out,
these are people whose work has very
dangerous implications. Your popularity
in that circle can’t be just a coincidence.
There are many things to say. One reason I
think that it’s popular in these circles is that
even though I criticize some of their prac-
tices and present some of these practices
as a major danger to humanity, I also point
out that maybe this is the most important
thing that now happens on the planet. So
even if you criticize them but also empha-
size the importance of what they do, it is
still fl attering to them to think that the
future of humanity is to some extent in
their hands. To be somewhat generous to
these fi gures, I defi nitely don’t think that
they are evil. Some of what they did was
good. I met my husband^3 online on one
of the fi rst gay dating apps in Israel, and
I’m grateful for this because as a gay man
in a small, provincial Israeli town, how doBelow: Harari at a
lecture on artificial
intelligence in Beijing
in 2017. Right: Being
interviewed by Mark
Zuckerberg in 2019.David Marchese
is the magazine’s Talk
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