The New Culture War
©️Patrick Peterson, Ph.D.
Dec 28, 2024
The historian Yuval Noah Harari has written a thought-provoking book called “Sapiens” which makes certain assumptions about the early history of humanity as a biological species. The central defining feature of our species Sapiens, says Harari, is that we are not only capable of inventing and believing fiction, but that the entire life and history of Sapiens is based on fiction.
Now Harari himself used the word fiction, so that’s not my read. That’s how he describes the human animal. Others might have followed a similar train of thought and used the word “imagination,” but Yuval specifically emphasizes fiction.
Harari’s larger point is that during the several tens of thousands of years that humanity has been fruitful and multiplying, our life, culture, and history revolve entirely around our ability to believe falsehoods, and to be even quite passionate and committed to falsehoods. But this remarkable characteristic somehow abruptly changes when Sapiens discovers science and technology, and therefore becomes capable of transitioning into Sapiens 2.0, or what Harari honors with the name “Homo Deus” as the title of Harari’s follow-up book. The phrase “Homo Deus” translates from Latin into English as something close to “Man God,” or “Human God.”
There are numerous holes in Harari’s imaginative history, but one does get the feeling that if all human belief is fiction, then why not just invent a clever narrative story around that? It’s all fiction anyway, so Yuval’s own fiction must be as good as the next person’s faith-fantasy. But Harari wants to assert that science and technology represent real truth, despite his foundational belief that every little old Sapiens is trapped in a pure fantasy world of fictional beliefs. He side-steps all of this, as the ultimate goal of Harari’s particular fantasy-truth is to envision the next step for humanity, the “Man God,” as thoroughly distinct from Sapiens. And so for Yuval there is no logical contradiction to say that Sapiens the species relies solely on fiction while the new Man God relies only on the truth of science and technology.
This might have remained a quirky infotainment side topic to mull over with your morning coffee. But Harari’s views just happened to fit in nicely with a number of political trends that have swept over us in recent years. Yuval became the favorite in-house guru for the World Economic Forum, the trendy club for billionaires, megalomaniacs, and cognitively deficient yet ambitious politicians. Sapiens (the book) is of course thoroughly atheist, in total acceptance of biology as a form of physics without a Creator. It’s amazing how atheists (at least the megalomaniacal atheists) are inevitably drawn though to grandiose dreams about a future trans-human Homo Deus. No matter how much they reject belief in God, they inevitably pursue re-creating God in some other way. Traces of Homo Deus fantasies can be found in much of our recent history, including the covid-19 episode, the ensuing government abuses of power, the dubious vaccines, and above all the endless gaslighting from government and mainstream media. When everything is fiction anyway, why can’t the President of the United States be a senile puppet? Why not even install the puppet President with a fraudulent election? While we are at it, let’s label certain kinds of vandalism and looting an expression of justice. Choose your pronouns, and above all become “unburdened by what has been” (Kamala Harris campaign slogan). Reality is after all whatever the Man God declares reality to be. Or so the new illogic appears to go, driven by this strange new culture war to convince us that fact is fiction and the preferred fiction a new kind of truth.
Whether intentional or not, Harari’s narrative defines this new culture war. It is not about conservatives versus liberals, and not even strictly theism versus atheism. This new culture war pits tradition versus trans-humanism. Reality and objective history go head-to-head against a rewriting of history, or at least a reinterpretation of it. In public discourse, it’s discovering the truth versus inventing the truth. While Donald Trump’s election in November 2024 represents a battle won by the realists, the war is far from over. Democrats and RINOs will no doubt reinvent themselves (what else?) in further homage to Homo Deus.
Perhaps surprisingly, there are parallel themes of this culture war found in theological history. The medieval theologian Scotus held that morality comes from God’s will and that everything in reality is in a sense the arbitrary choice of God, whether intelligible to us or not. Scotus thought of God as essentially will and power. While the followers of Homo Deus are not strictly theists, they parallel this thought in accepting the concept that will and choice define what is true. A contrasting theological view comes from Thomas Aquinas, who emphasized the Logos, or “Word of God” as a logical organizing principle of God’s being. Ironically for Harari, it is Aquinas’ view of God as intelligible, adopted by the Roman Catholic Church, that led to the rise and development of scientific thought in Europe. In this European Catholic tradition there is no contradiction between belief in God and the effort to better understand nature and reality through science. God is intelligible and his creation is intelligible.
I write these words just days before we enter the year 2025. It is remarkable that humanity is still in the throes of these ancient debates, over what is real and what is fictitious, and over just how far can or should humanity go in the pursuit of god-like powers and roles. But whatever the true nature of reality, I am confident we cannot just arbitrarily choose whatever reality we fantasize. Some things will remain impossible; some things will remain as bad choices, even if possible; and some truths will be worth fighting for and upholding, whatever opposition they face.
