What does it mean to present something new? What does it mean when someone is appointed the spokesperson of an age?

Does it mean that the anointed one is saying something that has never been said before? Or, does it mean that what is being said is the same old stuff but in new packaging and those who believe in the status quo lap it up as further validation of their beliefs?

These are the questions that I ask myself after reading Yuval Noah Harari’s book Homo Deus. A Brief History of Tomorrow. At the back of the book, critics rave about Harari as a rod for the Zeitgeist and his uncanny ability to predict where human civilization is going. After finishing this book, I agree with none of that. If Harari is a rod for the Zeitgeist and able to predict where humanity is headed, we are in trouble.

Harari’s thesis in Homo Deus is that famine, plague, and war has prevented humanity from realizing its full potential, but now in the twenty-first century when these three are about to be eradicated, humanity will move on to pursue the goals of immortality, happiness, and divinity. The goal is to make ourselves immortal. To upgrade ourselves from Homo sapiens to Homo deus. We will achieve this upgrade through biomechanical engineering, that is through the indefinite postponement of death.

The first couple of chapters of Homo deus are thought-worthy discussions where Harari sets up the parameters of his argument. The idea that we can change the future by abandoning how history has been written in the past is a compelling one and charts out a direction for twenty-first century historians working to save the discipline from its own sordid past. The discussion on how human’s fear of death drives creativity, compassion, and ingenuity is also interesting, although not particularly groundbreaking.

The purpose of these early discussions is for Harari to set the stage for an in-depth discussion about how human beings are biological machines who can, and should, be engineered for optimal performance. The premise here is that human beings do not have a soul. That is to say, Harari dehumanizes human beings by claiming that there is no humanity to them, only biology. Because humans beings are only biology, they are not sentient. What we perceive as consciousness are neurological responses to external stimuli. Conclusion: Non-sentient beings can be experimented upon without ethical implications.

As the book progresses, it becomes evident why Harari spends so much time removing humanity from human kind. Because what Harari ends up advocating for in our future is the engineering of humans. That is to say, Harari is an advocate for eugenics on a scale never seen before.

The future that Harari predicts is based on his own worldview, which by the end of the book has revealed itself as anti-democratic, anti-human rights, pro-eugenics, pro-totalitarianism, and racist. What began as an interesting discussion on how to change history writing as we move into the future has at the end morphed into a screed against liberalism as a political ideology, the complete dehumanization of humanity, and the promotion of the opaque, ill-defined new religion of Dataism.

To get there, Harari engages in hypotheticals of the type if-so-then-this, which are never backed up by evidence. The analytical leaps he takes are gigantic. The language is consistently vague. The comparisons are in the vein of comparing apples and oranges. Historical facts are either misrepresented so that liberal achievements are turned into socialist achievements or plain misunderstandings of history, period. Singapore is called a successful no-nonsense city state, the Soviet Union is called mighty, conquest and colonization of other (read: Black and Brown) civilizations is a good thing, and Hitler was right in principle but wrong in method.

Homo Deus is an incoherent argument in favor of eugenics, totalitarianism, and colonization. View anyone who agrees with this book with great suspicion, and whatever you do, keep them away from your human and civil rights.

In the words of my friend, the Australian, I shall return.

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