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+title: Harari’s Sapiens on Religion
+description: >-
+    In which I discuss why I think Harari’s characterisation of religion
+    is inadequate because it’s too materialistic.
+pubDate: 2024-01-14
+
+content: |
+  I’ve been slowly re-reading Yuval Noah Harari’s 2014 classic,
+  <a href="https://www.ynharari.com/book/sapiens-2">Sapiens</a>,
+  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 <em>a system of human norms and
+  > values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order</em>.
+  > <footer>p. 234</footer>
+  
+  It might seem a little unfair to criticise Harari for giving a
+  materialist account of religion. <i>Sapiens</i> 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.