Homo Deus: reading a pretty, well-packaged salad

Title: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Author: Yuval Noah Harari

Publisher: Signal (McClelland & Stewart)

Pages: 440 (285)

My rating: ⭐⭐

Who will like it? People who would like to achieve immortality and have their similarly groundbreaking opinions validated by an acclaimed author. And people who can’t fumble out any meaning from the increasing entropy of the universe and would like an IV injection of common sense instead of an organically developed one.

If I hopped on a spaceship through the ever-expanding galaxies to millions of lightyears away, and I could only clutch a few books and store them in a spacecraft locker, this might just be one of them. On Earth, would I read it? Yes, but slowly, in situations when other books are not accessible. To be fair, I had extremely high expectations beginning this book and I didn’t read its predecessor, Homo Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (which received more extraordinary praise). Reading Homo Deus was like dabbling in everything but effectively nothing at the same time.

It was like reading a mush of pop science articles and Harari’s train of thought was just spinning and spinning and spinning then reiterating, albeit in a logical way. Spinning is a motion and action, and it is a very valid and possibly productive movement. It allows the person’s visual field to blend, and a gentle, soothing breeze might appear, and the dizziness experienced can be psychologically interpreted as stimulation, but I was on the verge of nausea and then falling asleep at some points, as I spun around in cycles that slowly move forward with Harari’s language.

Reading Homo Deus is like listening to a super intelligent friend tell you about the advances in technology and in our society, through pulling out the interesting and captivating tidbits, as bait to convince you to shift your view on human civilization. Harari conveys some pretty dense stuff through very open and accessible language, which is admirable, and some things he states makes you go, “Huh, I didn’t think about it that way”, but those are just flickering thoughts, or little crystallized pieces of information, nothing enough to be retained in memory.

It’s not a one-star book because there are still very important concepts for us to grasp. Here are just five ways Harari astonished me, summarized:

1. The future of humankind shouldn’t be in the hands of top-tier engineers who have backup plans of building exclusive Noah’s Arks to leave our planet and strand everyone behind. They will not halt in their footsteps to become richer, and ecological destruction matters little to them directly. So only the rich will escape. The poor will not have connections or chances to. But the poor are not protesting, because present-day economic growth offers greater and immediate quality-of-life improvements to the poor.
2. We cooperate because of fiction. We believe in growth, corporations, collaborations, the government, and all of these entities because we agree on abstract principles as a society. They are not real in the sense that they’re touchable and bring survival if we were isolated. Also, no more than a couple of people can effectively collaborate just by means of trusting and knowing each other. They work together because they share an abstract, greater purpose.
3. In the 21st century, we are most likely to pursue immortality, bliss, and divinity even though these topics seem selfish and greedy. But they make sense because we are moving in a trajectory to live longer and better, and “the right to life” in the Bill of Rights does not come with fine print. As we continuously learn more about diseases and utilize science as power, immortality apparently isn’t a pot of gold under a faraway rainbow.
4. Religion governed our morality and put masses of people in social order. There are ethical judgements, factual statements, and that merge into a practical guideline that parses reality and acceptable behaviour for us. Anything that provides social order through belief can be a religion (like Communism) and in present-day, Humanism runs our gears. People used to entrust their confessions to priests, now to therapists.
5. We don’t have free will. It’s all determinism, random chance, and neurological processes colliding in a cold, meaningless universe, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, while we provide meaning for ourselves. (sure feels like we have free will as I type this!)

(and also, Harari kind of sort of predicted the COVID-19 pandemic.)

It’s like everything is common sense, but it’s retold and it’s more than just common sense. There’s a special sprinkle of pepper Harari added to spice things up. It’s really good to mix in one of these books once in a while so you are not stuck on reading exclusively LGBTQIA+ romance novels or cli-fi or gripping horror (but if that is the case for you, I applaud your clear discernment of genres, as not many people even read anything or know what they like), but when I personally was reading this book, it was like filling a reserved quota seat to diversify my reading. Perhaps it made me more of a whole, reasonable, and intelligent human being, but would I read Homo Deus Deus if Harari wrote a third book? Mmm, it’s like asking me to eat a salad with only spinach, kale, collard leaves, romaine, and microgreens. Some people think it tastes fine and plus science shows that can be really good for you. Me? I’ll pass.