The Modern Covenant

Chapter 6 explicitly describes the trade modernity made. Pre-modern societies, Harari argues, told their members: accept your place in the cosmic order, fulfill the duties of your station, and in exchange you get meaning. The meaning came from being part of a story larger than your own life — a kingdom under God, a tribe with ancestors, a great chain of being. The cost was that your life was largely scripted; you did not choose your work, your spouse, your beliefs, or your travel. The benefit was that you knew what your life was for.

Modernity reversed the bargain. Modern societies say to their members: you may choose anything — your work, your beliefs, your relationships, your nation — and you may pursue limitless growth. The cost is that no one will tell you what your life is for. The benefit is freedom and material abundance unprecedented in human history. The contract is between the individual and the engine of perpetual economic growth, and the engine has, by most measures, delivered: longer lifespans, lower infant mortality, more food, more education, less violence per capita.

But, Harari notes, the bargain has a hidden cost the contract did not explain. By design, modernity is a treadmill: you must keep producing, consuming, and growing, because growth is the only legitimating principle the contract offers. The economic system requires expansion to remain stable, and so do most modern political systems, which promise rising standards of living to their citizens in exchange for political legitimacy. When growth stalls — as it does in long recessions, in resource-constrained economies, in environments that cannot absorb more impact — the contract starts to fray, because there is nothing else holding it together. The pre-modern alternative — meaning from a fixed cosmic role — is no longer available, because modern societies have spent centuries dismantling the structures that produced it.

The chapter ends on what Harari calls humanism's solution to the meaning problem: if there is no fixed cosmic order to give your life meaning, then the source of meaning has to be moved inward. Your feelings, your experiences, your authentic self — these become the source of value. This is why modern advertising appeals to self-expression, why modern politics centers on the will of the people, why modern romance centers on listening to your heart rather than consulting your parents. Humanism is the answer modernity gave to the meaning vacuum its growth bargain created. The next chapter examines how this answer works in practice, and the chapter after that examines whether neuroscience is about to undermine it.