The Coming of the Space Nazis 📙

Selections | Yuval Noah Hariri's "Homo Deus"

Welcome to Selections. Where we slide a book off the shelf or a record from the stack, and talk about it. I’ve got something just for you.

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Or in this case buy something else, because I would hate to promote this thing…

The waning days of war are often bearers of strange fruit, scientifically speaking. In the midst of the carnage, disciplined men and women committed almost fanatically to the march of progress sometimes reach breakthroughs that impact humanity for generations. Guided by cutting edge research and the consensus of the scientific community, they reach just slightly further than anyone else was prepared to go. And for a few doctors working as the Third Reich crumbled around them in the mid-1940s, those breakthroughs arrived just in time. Their experimentation and imagination led men like Aribert Heim, Eduard Wirths, and Josef Mengele to discoveries that pushed the boundaries in many fields: human body response to extremes in temperature, human body response to extremes in pressure, effects and processes of dehydration, and even more esoteric subjects. The subjects of these experiments were antisocial elements and prisoners of the state, and according at least to consensus accepted by many intellectuals and scientists at the time, were therefore incapable of advanced function and perfect subjects for these kinds of tests, closer in kind to animals than real people. The carefully documented research findings which resulted are still extant, and some have even resulted in new understandings of how the human form responds to true stress and trauma. And progress marches on.

Photo by Ryan Faulkner-Hogg on Unsplash

I hope by now you’re nauseated, perhaps even questioning my own intentions and trustworthiness. I wonder why you are so moved by these historical atrocities? Can you, from within your own worldview, demonstrate that the sadistic and methodical nightmare perpetrated on the prisoners of Ravensbrück, Dachau and Auschwitz was a moral evil? I can. Yuval Noah Hariri, author of the “provocative” Homo Deus, has demonstrated that he cannot. I struggled with whether to even review this book, and I warn you now that the tone and content of this essay may diverge significantly from what you have come to expect from me. Simply put, I’m deeply disturbed at the failures of Dr. Hariri to meaningfully grapple with the elementary principles of philosophy, moral ethics, religious doctrine, human biology, neuroscience, and technological futurism. I am also deeply disturbed by the apparent failure of large numbers of people who have read his work, including many intellectual critics who should know better, to recognize and denounce his apparent moral insanity. I am neither an intellectual critic nor an academic philosopher. I warned you.

[The smile] seemed to summon Ransom, with horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence.

~ C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

For our purposes I will summarize my honest understanding of Dr. Hariri’s arguments in Homo Deus. If I seem to be straw-manning or simplifying his reasoning, I would encourage you to read the work and discover deeper logic than I have been able to. Hariri argues:

1. All human religions and spiritualities and thus any immaterial or non-physical reality is a false illusion.

2. This is because Darwin’s Origin of Species proved all organisms are simply biological algorithms and the soul cannot exist.

3. This, combined with a few anecdotal descriptions of psychological and neurological experiments, disproves the minor concepts of the individual self and human free will.

4. Machine algorithms will become inevitably all-encompassing, and negate human life as we know it.

5. Some humans will conquer the “technicalities” of mortality and the human form itself and become as gods.

6. These humans will then follow a techno-human or “data-religion” spirituality. 

7. But also, liberal humanism is a failed project because of its inability to determine the moral “ought,” and modern science is equally weak. And fundamental flaws in data sampling and research construction may doom the very experiments that Hariri denotes as forging the understanding of human brains and consciousness.

8. Based on this chain of reasoning, our only conclusion is to take up the tools of evolutionary humanism (explicitly connected to Nazism by the author), but this time, use them for good. Hopefully Dataist religions will be invented to save us. 

If a weakness or overreach can be determined in any one of these dizzying logical leaps, then of course the entire flight is called into question. But I’ll leave you to examine the chain and see if you can find any weak links. For me, I confess it is too tiresome a prospect. You see, beneath the layers of academic pseudointellectualism and fashionably nihilistic acerbity I can glimpse the form that my forbears have faced and sparred against for centuries. Nothing is new under the sun, reminds the original and true Prophet. And his disciples have written more imaginative and colorful versions of the character Dr. Hariri is playing.

"The tragedy of my life," he said, "and indeed of the modern intellectual world in general, is the rigid specialisation of knowledge entailed by the growing complexity of what is known. It is my own share in that tragedy that an early devotion to physics has prevented me from paying any proper attention to Biology until I reached the fifties. To do myself justice, I should make it clear that the false humanist ideal of knowledge as an end in itself never appealed to me. I always wanted to know in order to achieve utility. At first, that utility naturally appeared to me in a personal form--I wanted scholarships, an income, and that generally recognised position in the world without which a man has no leverage. When those were attained, I began to look farther: to the utility of the human race!’”

~ C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

You see, generation after generation has seen the rise of the morally deranged scientific true believer, coming to save us wielding the tools of a demigod and unencumbered by even the moral reasoning of a Sunday school child. I would be terrified, to hear Hariri calmly and dispassionately describe to dismantling of humanity itself, giddily depicting the suffering and intellectual dissolution of billions in the face of technological assimilation. Or predicting the coming of unimaginable dystopias in which human, animal and machine are indistinguishable material for the motive spiritual force of Algorithm. But I cannot be terrified, because I am bored. I have heard the voice of Dr. Hariri before, most memorably from the mouth of a caricatured portrayal in an almost forgotten work of science fiction.

The quotes I’ve been referencing come from the second part of C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, in which the survivor of Great War trenches and witness of Second World War horrors depicted a science-fantasy future where his greatest philosophical fear came true. Lewis returned often in his works to the theme I’ll informally call Space Nazis (apologies to my hero, which I will render in person when we meet in paradise). For Lewis, moral insanity wed to technological power, seeking ever greater heights of human achievement and with the ambition to spread itself across the world and then the galaxy, was a primary vision of damnation. In the Space Trilogy, this fear takes human form as Dr. Weston, an arrogant and sociopathic scientist whose grasp across the stars ends up exceeding the power of his own soul to contain the evil he has trifled with. Weston literally preaches the coming Kingdom of Man, free of moral strictures and able to finally reach his own potential. That is, until a character called Ransom saves the day by grappling with Weston’s body, possessed by a nameless spiritual evil, and finally beating its skull in with a rock. Lewis was many things, but rarely allegorically subtle.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Perhaps you scoff at my backward ideology and failure to submit to the intellectual bravery and curiosity on display in Homo Deus. I can understand your feelings, but you must answer my question. What moral basis do you have to denounce the inhumanity of the Holocaust? Hariri is at his best when he carefully disassembles the moral fig leaves that have clothed liberal humanism for over a century. He understands with subtlety the inability of a secular scientific humanist to make true and consistent moral judgements between the rights and consciousness of an animal and that of a human being. Therefore, he argues that perhaps the liberal project is misplaced, and humanity needs a new and more evolutionarily accurate ideology to guide its progress. If this sounds familiar, here it comes.

It should be remembered, though, that Hitler and the Nazis represent only one extreme version of evolutionary humanism. Just as Stalin's gulags do not automatically nullify every socialist idea and argument, so too the horrors of Nazism should not blind us to whatever insights evolutionary humanism might offer. Nazism was born from the pairing of evolutionary humanism with particular racial theories and ultra-nationalist emotions. Not all evolutionary humanists are racists, and not every belief in humankind's potential for further evolution necessarily calls for setting up police states and concentration camps.

~Noah Yuval Hariri, Homo Deus

It’s supposed to shock and amaze us, I suppose. I’m just too busy sighing heavily. The moral derangement of National Socialism stemming from its total embrace of evolutionary values was predicted, tiresomely and unfashionably, from pulpits and rostra since the Scopes Monkey Trial. To be blunt, we warned you. And before anyone rushes to tar this opinion as unscientific and unreasonable, let me remind you that Lewis himself was a firm believer in biological evolution. I’m not making a biological point right now. I’m pointing out that the brave new experiment in science without moral judgements is neither brave nor new. It has been tried thoroughly, to the incomprehensible suffering of billions throughout the 20th century. Hariri displays himself as a philosophical and moral suicide, gutshot yet laughing hysterically, unreeling his intestines with his own hands while unable to comprehend how fundamentally he has been compromised. He has heard and heeded Nietzsche’s frantic oracles of doom, but his moral amusia interpreted them as a song to which he blithely taps the rhythm with his toe.

I can rightfully be accused of not engaging with the actual arguments in Hariri’s work, but frankly I searched briefly for information regarding several of the ironclad statements he flings at entire branches of human thought and found them wanting. Some of his most confident statements regarding ancient Hebrew written culture confronted a brutal gang of facts as recently as this week. If Hariri is incorrect in his own area of academic expertise, how can I be blamed if I simply don’t get excited about his cross-disciplinary escapades? The work is filled with statements concerning the inability of materialistic scientism to make moral judgements, sweeping dismissals of any historical structure which could provide us with moral judgements, and with sweeping predictions of dire futures in which moral judgements will be sorely necessary. This seems to be internally contradictory.

Throughout this book we have repeatedly asked what makes humans superior to other animals. Dataism has a new and simple answer. In themselves, human experiences are not superior at all to the experiences of wolves or elephants. One bit of data is as good as another. However, a human can write a poem about his experience and post it online, thereby enriching the global data-processing system. That makes his bits count.

~Noah Yuval Hariri, Homo Deus

I simply reject a vision of the future that anticipates the dissolution of human consciousness, or that demands humans take on the brave and noble task of retrofitting a godlike elite into cyborg deities to rule the natural untermenschen. It won’t be the last time fevered academics pound proudly on the door of the Church with their ink-slicked collection of damning revolutionary theories. Read Walter Miller Jr.’s bitter hallucination A Canticle for Leibowitz. The Church forgivably tends to chuckle sadly and refer the scientists to religiously equipped scholars who have already tested these ideas and found them philosophically and morally wanting. Or at the very least, we offer some moral scaffolding, a map and compass should science insist on tramping on a day hike through the uncharted wilderness where our distant ancestors have already built intellectual cities and monasteries. They always scoff at us. Insist that we should catch up to the razor edge, accept the hard facts. This time won’t be like the last time. We’ve learned from the mistakes of the last batch of scientists who exercised intelligence and logic in service of contemporarily legitimate scientific theories without the encumbrance of tiresome antiquarian moralists.

If a man is by his own admission unable to discern any data through the sensation of sight, then perhaps he would be wise to find a sighted man who could describe for him the vast realm he is tragically incapable of perceiving. At the close of his work Hariri breathlessly hopes that technological god-men will explore new states of consciousness and cognition and moral understanding hitherto unimagined, where material worlds fade and new metarealities can be plumbed. I’m afraid that if this vision comes to pass, these unrecognizable beings will be greeted by the silliest and most pedestrian of parish priests and vacation Bible school teachers, smiling in welcome.