The audacious first act, Sapiens, ended with a wild and apocalyptic prophesy - that the Sapiens were cooking up the next epochal revolutHomo Obsoletus
The audacious first act, Sapiens, ended with a wild and apocalyptic prophesy - that the Sapiens were cooking up the next epochal revolution that will overshadow the previous three: the cognitive, agricultural and scientific/industrial revolutions. Home Deus, the second act, is the full exploration of that prophesy.
Both Sapiens and Homo Deus are compulsory reading in my book, even though the macro-history presented is plenty vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. But then, it might be better to think of these as works of philosophy and not of history. Just like Sapiens is not a History, Home Deus is not a prophesy, both are explorations.
This line can be taken as the transition line that links the first book with the second one: “Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”
The old enemies of mankind— plague, famine and war—are now under control. Except for the potentially restrictive energy constraint, Sapiens has very little standing in our way now. The result is that the Sapiens are becoming more and more God-like, Harari says, and one is forced to pause and reflect: by any previous standards of our history, are we not already Gods? Have we not already exceeded most wild power fantasies? Well yes, but even more God-like attributes are coming: cheating death and creating new life being primary.
And along with this march towards the godlike we are marching towards being machine-like too, as we outsource more and more of our internal algorithms to better data-based external algorithms. And the march is relentless, Homo Deus is taking birth before our eyes. The tomorrow is already upon us, and so forth.
However, just like the previous three revolutions that infused the Sapiens with power, this revolution too will come at a price, the price of a ratcheting up of inequality. The new Gods will be the techno-super-rich. BTW, reading Harari is good motivation to work on getting rich faster: he hints at a possibility that anyone who is rich enough to afford it, some 50 years into the future, should be able to buy proxy-immortality. And it will probably be a window that closes quickly, since the super-rich would soon take over the monopoly on immortality. So if you are rich enough at the right point in time, then you can be part of Olympus too. That might not be a deal many would want to miss out on…
There is one more catch: as technology takes over most of the functions, even the godlike sapiens will find themselves stuck in a universe devoid of real meaning. Bulk of humanity will have no economic, social or cultural purpose since anything we can do our new creations would be able to do even better. “Organisms are algorithms,” and the new algorithms will be so much better than the imperfect ones we are made of. As Bill Gates asked in his article about the book, “What If People Run Out of Things to Do?” We will be stuck in an immortal meaninglessness, our own creations clearly our betters. We will need a new religion to make sense of all this, since the powerful combo of Humanism+Science will not work in world where the sanctity of being Human has lost meaning. Harari feels that “Dataism” will be the religion that will fill the avoid left by Humanism.
The whole of Humanity, the Earth, and maybe the entire Universe will become servants to data - a huge data-processing system, the eternal all-knowing Atman. And serving this goal will be the only meaningful pursuit left for us.
Immortal, All-powerful, Obsolete: this is the future of the Sapiens....more
This book should be read along with Levin’s Great Debate. That will allow a right wing perspective to balance out a left wing persp The Shifting Lights
This book should be read along with Levin’s Great Debate. That will allow a right wing perspective to balance out a left wing perspective. It is very interesting to note how two authors with different viewpoints approach the same two protagonists and mould them to their requirements. With Paine and Burke this is easier because they lived through such momentous events that their ideas and actions can be seen differently depending on where the author chooses to stand.
Levin chooses to stand and judge both from a post-revolutionary viewpoint and exult in the fact that Burke knew the French Revolution would be disastrous while naive Paine precipitated the disaster by not realizing that human institutes and traditions can’t be just pulled down so easily without consequences.
In fact, Levin chooses to examine Burke’s attitudes towards the American Revolution to show his progressive nature and then his attitude to French Revolution to show his wisdom; and Paine’s attitude during the pre-Revolutionary zeal to show how he was just a revolt-monger who has grand plans and no sense of the reality.
Hitchens on the other hand chooses to view the debate from a pre-revolutionary position. This allows him to praise Paine for his contribution the American Independence and Constitution, showing his skills as a spokesman and influencer par compare. When Hitchens comes to Burke, he focuses on his opposition to the French Revolution and ridicules his passionate defense of monarchy. This allows Hitchens to show Paine as a progressive future-oriented leader who changed the course of history and Burke as a reactionary who just wants to hang on to the outdated age of chivalry.
Of course, neither Paine nor Burke were consistently right throughout their political engagement. Both were probably right in supporting the American Revolution and both were perhaps wrong in their over-the-top attitudes to the French Revolution. But Hitchens and Levin combine to show us how just by shifting the viewpoints we can see them in such different lights — the naive and the wise keep shifting before our eyes like in a hall of mirrors. It is a spectacle....more
A good investigation of the origins of the great liberal political debate. Levin takes us to the original arguments and shows us how The Perfect Omelet
A good investigation of the origins of the great liberal political debate. Levin takes us to the original arguments and shows us how at a distance the great but nebulous political divides of our day take a much more concrete shape. Of course the author is slightly right-leaning and this bias shows through in his characterizations. For instance even though the book claims to be about the Right & The Left, in fact it is about the moderate Right & the Radical Left. Once that is how the lines are drawn, it is an easy guess as to which position can be made to sound more reasonable. It should be a fair contrast moderate Right vs moderate Left or Radical right vs Radical Left. In any case, the excuse that can be made is that Burke was in fact a moderate Right (he was Whig after all, so we might even say he was of the Left but leaning Right) and Paine was clearly a revolutionary radical.
Levin tries to show that Paine has a overly simplistic picture of history and political institutions and believes that reason can help us create perfect societies. Burke is shown as a realist who accepts society is too complex to be radically reengineered without too many eggs being broken to create the perfect omelet. In fact you might never create the perfect omelet no matter how many eggs you break.
The Paine Vs Burke debate is fascinating and is well captured, and from my limited knowledge I might even say that it seems accurate. But to import those themes into the modern political debate is to make the Left seem much more radical and unrealistic than they really are. Paine's times called for radical measures and commonsense (if you would excuse the usage) would clearly have indicated that Pane's position and not Burke's sentimental defense of the monarchy was more reasonable back then. A full fledged revolt might seem more unreasonable now but that is only till the crisis becomes large enough to make it seem reasonable again.
We need the Paines and the Burkes.
The Burkes will keep order and resist radical change and try to do prescriptive, incremental change so as to keep up with changing demands of the world, trusting their institutions to do much of the heavy-lifting. But when they fail, the Paines will call for revolution passionately and articulately. And more often that not it is that call that will galvanize the Burkes out of their plodding action and speed up their adaptation. So to dismiss even the radical Left as childish and without enough appreciation of the realities and complexities of political and social life is a mischaracterization. Quite often it could be the other side who is lacking the imagination to see that times have moved on and fast adaptation is needed -- as is the case today, for instance, with the changes in climate presenting us with an unprecedented challenge which our existing institutions are not well-quipped to confront adequately. It is a balance that has to be maintained and in that sense Burke's call for partisanship in politics might be a useful standard to hold on to after all. Of course all this would depend on the Right and Left being reasonable to each other and willing to engage in constructive debate.
Otherwise we would be left with repression and revolts and not much to show for it all. No omelets at all, let alone any perfect ones. Just a lot of broken eggs....more
Azar Gat could learn a thing or two from Miller. But then Miller could also learn a thing or two -- about spending less time on the obvious and moving Azar Gat could learn a thing or two from Miller. But then Miller could also learn a thing or two -- about spending less time on the obvious and moving on to interesting and controversial subjects earlier in a book, especially such a short one.
Too cursory for much of the book. Mildly interesting towards the end, but that is primarily because Mill goes into polemic mode and reveals his cards and thus exposes his reasons for the way the book was constructed. He does not think over-enthusiastic criticism of the nation-state system is warranted and he believes it is our best chance at stability. Need to read his more detailed works before any comment can be made on how effective his defense is. But miles ahead of Gat, I will grant him that....more
Singer looks at Marx, the Philosopher, and relegates Marx, the Economist to the background. This allows Singer to put aside all the 'refuted' aspects Singer looks at Marx, the Philosopher, and relegates Marx, the Economist to the background. This allows Singer to put aside all the 'refuted' aspects of Marx and focus on the key and relevant ideas. Singer discusses alienation and historical materialism in some detail and tracks their evolution in Marx's thought, but the most interesting segment is when he tries to pin down marx's own conceptions of what a communist utopia should be like. Turns out Marx was extremely pragmatic about it and let slip such ideas only in moments of weakness. As I always like to say to anyone discussing Stalinism wrt Marxism -- just because the prescribed treatment turned out to be off the mark, the diagnosis is not to be dismissed (and that is if the Soviet Russia was even remotely Marxist! Marx must have anticipated all this and is known to have cried out in later life: "All i know is that I am not a Marxist!").
Marx is strongest when he is identifying the deficiencies of capitalism, not when he is trying to propose solutions. Those are our responsibility too. After all, we shouldn't leave everything to one man....more
I believe that the capacity of an introductory book to impress a reader is directly proportional to the reader’s lack of initial knowledge about the s I believe that the capacity of an introductory book to impress a reader is directly proportional to the reader’s lack of initial knowledge about the subject matter.
That said, I felt this was an impressive piece of scholarship. Wokler comprehensively draws up all the major contributions to the thought of Rousseau in his treatment of Rousseau’s intellectual development against the background of the enlightenment. Much space is given to explaining the associations, and repartees present in his works, thus providing us an unravelling of the differences between the principal antagonists. For a philosopher whose majority of works are in response to others or drawing so heavily on others, an introduction had to draw out all these connections, without getting too imposing in the process. Wokler manages that quite finely and leaves us with a wonderful picture of the intellectual atmosphere in which Rousseau was fermented. One of the best VSIs I have yet read....more
The history of all hitherto existing society* is the history of class struggles.
* That is, all written history.
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We read the same written history and The history of all hitherto existing society* is the history of class struggles.
* That is, all written history.
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We read the same written history and read it as progress, as stories, etc. The real history, on the other hand, is something else. Played out differently. Yeah, that is the catch.
This was a reading of only the bare text (along with the many prefaces!). It was very powerful and I am now reading the Penguin edition with the really long introduction next. Will write more about this important book there.
In the mean time, it is hardly 40 pages - why haven't you read this yet? It is not often that you get the summary of one of the most influential thought-structures in history in under 40 pages! It was a rhetorical masterpiece too, by the way. ...more
This is an important work and I will review it over the weekend. In the meantime, I will leave this twitter conversation with David Graeber here. Shou This is an important work and I will review it over the weekend. In the meantime, I will leave this twitter conversation with David Graeber here. Should be useful.
An introduction to a historical work (or any work for that matter) should not be a thorough deconstruction, undertaken from an ideologically opposite An introduction to a historical work (or any work for that matter) should not be a thorough deconstruction, undertaken from an ideologically opposite standpoint. The reader should be given an introduction and in fact (as much as possible) a defense of the work. This introduction sets out to do the opposite.
I don't have a problem with Marx being critiqued but it should have been done in an independent book. This is like making a reader buy something for the value he attributes to the main work and then forcing a criticism of it down his throat, when all he wanted was a commentary on the main text.
3 stars for this edition, only because I bought it for the intro and it did not serve its purpose: of introducing me to the work and helping me understand it better. It only tries to prejudice me even before I read!...more
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