The Humanist Revolution

The self is sacred. Feelings are reliable guides. Experience is the ultimate source of authority. From these axioms flow modern ethics (consent matters because the individual's experience matters), modern politics (the voter expresses authentic preferences and the state aggregates them), modern economics (the consumer's preferences are the source of value), and modern aesthetics (the artist expresses an inner truth and the audience responds with their own inner truth).

The chapter distinguishes three branches of humanism that have competed over the last two centuries. Liberal humanism — the dominant branch in the West — holds that every individual's inner experience matters and that political and economic systems should maximize individual freedom. Socialist humanism agrees that human experience matters but argues that individual experience is shaped by collective structures, so the system should equalize material conditions. Evolutionary humanism — the branch Nazism embraced — holds that some humans matter more than others depending on their position in some hypothesized evolutionary hierarchy. The 20th century was, on Harari's reading, a struggle among these three humanist branches more than a struggle between humanism and anything outside it.

The chapter pays particular attention to how humanism transformed everyday life. Marriage was once a contract among families to manage property and lineage; it became an arrangement between two individuals to express their authentic selves. Work was once a station you were born into; it became a vehicle for self-realization. Education was once the transmission of inherited authority; it became the cultivation of personal potential. In each case the change was framed as liberation, and in important ways it was, but the change also placed enormous weight on the individual self — the self had to know its own desires, articulate them, act on them, and be responsible for the outcomes. Pre-modern humans did not bear this weight because the role they were born into bore most of it for them.

The chapter closes with a question that drives the rest of the book. If humanism rests on the doctrine that the self is sacred and feelings are reliable, what happens when science demonstrates that the self is not a unified entity but a collection of competing brain processes, and that feelings are predictable biochemical patterns that can be measured, predicted, and engineered? The 20th century took humanism as obviously true. The 21st century is going to test it. Harari is not yet claiming that humanism will fail; he is observing that its philosophical foundations are being undermined by exactly the science that humanism unleashed.