Natural Law and Human Rights

Yuval Harari’s Snake Oil

The other day while perusing Twitter I ran across a tweet by Theo Jordan of

Logical Reasoning

showing a clip of historian Yuval Noah Harari author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and “one of the world's most influential public intellectuals today.”  In the clip Harari states that “human rights are just like Heaven and like God, it’s just a fictional story that we’ve invented…it’s just a story, not a reality…Just as jellyfish, and woodpeckers, and ostriches have no rights, Homo Sapiens have no rights also.”  Harari bases his claim on the fact that unlike a mountain, you cannot touch human rights.  They are not physical and therefore not part of objective reality.

The ramifications of this statement took a few seconds to sink in.  If Harari’s claim is true, then what’s to stop us from changing the story?  Is the concept of a moral foundation also a fiction?  Is the difference between right and wrong simply a popularity concept open to debate?  If so, then there is no moral arch of the universe bending towards justice, just an arch bending in the direction that selfish individuals trying to get a little more for themselves wish it to bend.  If Harari is correct, then might actually does make right.  But is he correct?

Harari is clearly a very smart person – he claims to have taught himself to read at 3 - and a very charismatic speaker.  However, science is not based on intelligence and charisma but on building on existing facts and proving an hypothesis.  There is also the question of context.  The clip in question is short and so we cannot be certain what his purpose was in saying what he did.  Was he arguing that we can modify rights based on what our goals are or was he trying to make some other point?  While I was not able to find the extended version of the clip in question, I did find a 15-minute-long presentation he gave making similar claims.   The thesis of the presentation is that our ability to create “stories,” fictional realities “made of fictional entities, like nations, like gods, like money, like corporations” explains “the rise of humans.”

It is an interesting idea, and as I stated previously, Harari is a charismatic speaker.  However, listening to his presentation reveals how insightful Robert Hallpike was in reviewing Sapiens “whenever his facts are broadly correct, they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own, he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously.”  I will not pretend to be an expert in philosophy, biology, evolution…well the list could go on, but I know a little about quite a lot and am a decent researcher with access to Google and it was not difficult to find flaws in many of his statements.  Harari’s argument goes something like this:

1. We are not very different from chimpanzees.

   1. Ok.  A little simplistic but you have to start somewhere.

2. Human imagination enables us to “cooperate both flexibly and in very large numbers.” 

   1. Here Harari takes a simple truth, that our intelligence separates us from other animals, and complicates it by calling it “imagination,” “cooperation,” and “flexibility.”  There’s a reason he does this which we will get to a little later.

3. “All other animals use their communication system only to describe reality.”  Imagination and communication allow humans to “create and believe fictions.” 

   1. While both are true, Harari uses both “false equivalence” and “false binary” hoping we won’t notice:

      1. False equivalency – animals and humans experience the same reality.  Animals and humans do not have the same level of intelligence and consequently do not understand reality at the same level.  Animals do not understand reality beyond the physical (I’m coming to the conclusion that neither does Harari), however human intelligence enable humans to comprehend reality at a deeper level.  Atoms and molecules for example are real and yet animals have no concept of them.

      2. False binary – there is physical reality and there is fiction.  Here Harari limits our choices so that he may later argue that anything that isn’t physical is a fiction. However, we know this to be false. Abstract concepts lack a physical nature and yet are undeniably real.  “What did you do yesterday?”  Is time not real?  Can I touch it?  No, but I can prove its existence through observation.  Similarly, physical phenomena, such as gravity are real and yet lack physicality. It cannot be seen or smelled but tumble down the stair and its reality becomes concrete (and even animals believe it exists).

4. “Human rights, just like God and heaven, are just a story that we've invented. They are not an objective reality; they are not some biological effect about homo sapiens. Take a human being, cut him open, look inside, you will find the heart, the kidneys, neurons, hormones, DNA, but you won't find any rights. The only place you find rights are in the stories that we have invented and spread around over the last few centuries.”

   1. Having “proven” (false binary) that there is physical reality and there is fiction we have no other choice but to agree that human rights, lacking physical form” is a fiction.  Oh, what a clever web you’ve weaved Harari!

Before moving on to human rights, it is important to determine, or at least make an educated guess as to why Harari is playing these games.  As previously noted, he’s a smart guy so it’s doubtful that he’s unaware of the games he’s playing.  There is the possibility, as some fear, that he’s trying to undermine rights so that he and others can convince society to do away with some of them (free speech, property, freedom of movement, etc.).  Lacking concrete evidence, I tend to discount this view.  It’s not impossible, but in the words of Carl Sagan, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."  I tend to favor more humdrum explanations and greed is always a good starting point.  In 2022, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung referred to Harari as a brand. They pointed out that Harari’s partner, Yahav, built the Yahav Harari Group, to sell comics, children’s books, films, and documentaries.  Put simply, Harari is not in the business of advancing human understanding but in selling books.  The former requires logic and intellectual honesty, the later, a good story. 

Selling books is also the reason why Harari complicates some things and simplifies others.  His audience is the general public not academics and thus he does not need to present anything new, the appearance of something new will suffice. He must also be wary of making things too complicated.  If, for example, he claims humans are different from chimpanzees because we’re intelligent then he hasn’t said anything new and won’t sell many books.  Placing humanities uniqueness in our “imagination,” “cooperation,” and “flexibility,” rather than our intelligence, enables Harari to appear to be saying something new and intelligent while avoiding the distractions of a long, complicated explanation and the dangers of attracting real intellectuals who will pull his books apart (see Hallpike’s statement above).  Some examples:

• Cooperation – While “cooperation among chimpanzees is based on intimate knowledge…humans cooperate by believing in the same fictions.”  Clear, simple, and wrong.  According to scientific studies, in contrast to other animals, humans “have the cognitive capacity to keep track of others' contributions to the collaborative activity and regularly employ control mechanisms such as punishment, reputation and ostracism that allows them to maintain cooperative behaviour in groups.”  Imagination is not to be found anywhere in this explanation (except in the sense that imagination is an extension of intelligence which we have already covered).

• Money – “money is not an objective reality; it has no objective value…then came these master storytellers – the big bankers, the finance ministers, the prime ministers – and they tell us a very convincing story: “Look, you see this green piece of paper?  It is actually worth 10 bananas.” and if I believe it, and you believe it, and everybody believes it, it actually works.”  Again, clear, simple, and wrong.  It takes a certain ignorance or some big cajónes to explain the rise of money and the free market as the story of big bankers but here we are.  Money has its origins in a concept known as “coincidence of wants” and precious metals and is very complicated (and interesting).  Paper money is more recent and fiat currency even more so.

  • He also has a little “throw away” lie a little later stating that “Chimpanzees trade, of course: ‘Yes, you give me a coconut, I'll give you a banana.’"  Unfortunately, they only trade if they’ve been taught by humans.  Is he so arrogant that he’s sure no one will call him on it or has he simply not bothered to do the research (it took me 30 seconds to discover this by the way)?

Does Harari really believe that human rights are a fiction?  It’s impossible to say but some people do believe this and so we must answer the question…

Are Human Rights Real?

I’m going to confess right now that, with respect to human rights, this posting will barely scratch the surface.  A basic understanding of the camps and what is at stake should be achievable though.  When we speak about rights people generally fall into one of two camps:

• Those who believe that rights are inherent, “conferred not by act of legislation but by "God, nature, or reason."

• Those who believe that rights are granted by governments (“stories”)

Those in the first camp believe in natural rights and natural law while those in the second believe in legal positivism and both philosophies trace their origins back to antiquity.  You will find both the religious and atheist in the first camp but are likely to find only atheists in the second (or at the very least I can’t think of a religion that doesn’t believe in some god given laws).  Natural rights association with religion is one reason why it, and human rights, are not universally accepted and why Jeremy Bentham, a proponent of legal positivism, referred to natural law as “nonsense on stilts.”  The problem with those that believe in legal positivism is that they seem to want to “have their cake and eat it too.”  They argue that laws are social constructs (i.e. they are what we decide they are) but that they can be unjust and “there may be no obligation to obey them.”  Where morality comes from is left unstated.  Perhaps it is another of Harari’s “fictions.”  If so then we may be entering the area of “moral relativism” and that will have to wait for another day.  

I confess to being, at a minimum, someone who believes that it is possible to determine natural rights through reason.  Rights are not made up nor are they granted by governments but can be determined through observation.  Today this methodology is known as “historical and comparative analysis” in which theorists “examine legal systems and comparative law to identify moral principals embedded within them…and ethical norms that have stood the test of time.”  As with scientific analysis we may determine the best ethics, laws, morals, and norms by observing the rise and fall of empires and nations.  Societies that are governed by the best laws (ex. those that promote freedom) prosper while those with bad laws (ex. pro-slavery, the arbitrary rule of kings) fail.  This view is not unlike that of the evolution of morality in which “morality is defined as the set of relative social practices that promote the survival and successful reproduction of the species.”  The fact that we disagree on exactly what constitutes human rights (life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, The Four Freedoms, etc.) is not an argument against their existence but rather an indication that our understanding is still incomplete, not unlike the evolution of physics which has seen the addition of relativistic and quantum physical to classical physics.

Conclusion

One wonders what Harari really believes.  Do right and wrong exist or are they simply stories which could be told a different way if enough of us wanted them to?  Had the Aztecs survived into the 20^th century would human sacrifice be viewed as just be a cultural quirk rather than a monstrous evil?  Had the Confederate States of American won the Civil War would slavery be moral?  I cannot read Harari’s mind, but I suspect he hasn’t given it much thought.  Despite the publicity on the TED Talk site, he’s no intellectual.  If anything, he’s the modern equivalent of snake oil salesman telling people what they want to hear so they’ll buy his goods and the TED Talk is simply his medicine show.

Our “stories” about human rights are imperfect, but these rights are nonetheless real regardless of whether you think they are based on God’s Law or Natural Law.  Their truth is demonstrated by their longevity.  Individual rights have evolved over time in an almost Darwinian “survival of the fittest” clash against competing ideas which saw the best ideas spread and replace inferior ones.  Slavery failed not because we told a story that it was wrong, but because slave societies could not compete with free ones.  Societies that prioritize individual rights outperform those which allow slaves or those which prioritize the collective over the individual.  Societies that fail to adapt to these truths become casualties of history.  Just ask the Soviets or the Aztecs.  These are not stories we tell each other but demonstratable truths.  Harari’s position that human rights are nothing more than a story we tell each other is itself a fiction and what’s more a dangerous one.