Buch-Review: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Harari

Jörg Schäfer — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 18:05:03 +0000

It is as if reality wants to refute Harari’s book. His initial thesis is that humanity has mastered the three main scourges that plagued it for the most time: famine, plague and war. He admits that all three can still happen but mankind has got a grip on them and can mitigate their severity. Thus, mankind faces a new agenda of three goals: the pursuit of happiness, the quest for immortality and transforming themselves into godlike beings. So much for the thesis. Now reality. Since writing this book, earth has been hit by Covid and just recently Russia pulled war from the shelves of history and invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked war for territory. Does this obsolete everything in Harari’s book? It looks like we could overcome Covid which might prove his initial point. The war in Ukraine? Let’s hope that Putin ultimately proves to be a dinosaur from the past activating his last powers and disappearing into history again, maybe in a decade or so.

Back to the book. After the introductory foreword of about 80 pages setting the stage, Harari divided the book into three main parts. Where homo came from, the situation now and the promised brief history of tomorrow. Looking at the bookmarks I put, the most interesting part is the middle part. The first part is too much verbose base-laying while in the last part, he jumps to potential futures that could come straight from the nightmarish visions of the Peter Thiel’s of this world with their focus on relentless realisation of personal interests, assuming this being the best for the whole as well.

What I liked best about Homo Deus is the analysis of humanities current situation. Harari puts many thoughts I pondered before into a structure I was missing. In order for humankind to function as a society, a dichotomy of power and meaning needs to exist. In history, power was exerted by kings and the church with meaning being given by religion. In contemporary society, this has been replaced by order given through democracy and science, together giving the individual meaning through humanism and liberalism, telling him that his own good is the goal to achieve. The interesting thing about this is that when looking back at history, it becomes unequivocally obvious that today’s maxims are as temporary as all maxims before. This is what Homo Deus is about. If homo becomes god, is there still space for the obsolete homo sapiens to be important as an individual?

While I don’t think that Harari’s possible development trajectories will happen, I fully agree with his premise that for tomorrow we have to think about the relevance of what we consider as the essential Leitbild today. The growing importance of China and the limited potential of the West to counter Russia’s invasion already hint at this. Harari comes from a scientific background. Thus, his ideas lean toward biogenetic information driven developments. My personal view is a more pessimistic one coming from the belief that ultimately egoism drives man and accordingly on a societal level, egoistic positions will prevail and lead to suboptimal results, ultimately dooming humanism to a backseat in history.

The Sense of an Ending von Julian Barnes

Jörg Schäfer — Tue, 04 May 2021 13:34:16 +0000

The Sense of an Ending is one of the few books I wished were longer. This small novel resonated with me in a way few books have done. Looking back at the past became a big thing with me the last year.

Barnes‘ claim is the unreliability of memories. How they are biased to serve the view of their bearers. What would happen if you were able to revisit the past. Another theme is the gap between the world view when you are young, your vision of the future and your preoccupations at the time in contrast to the perception of old age and its preoccupation with the past.

The story is told in short paragraphs that at times have to be located somewhere in between essay and aphorism. In three or four sentences, Barnes gives us small tidbits of wisdom gathered from life experiences which mostly strike home.

This is a book I shall reread every ten years or so.

Vintage – Jörg Schäfer

Buch-Review: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Harari

The Sense of an Ending von Julian Barnes