PORTRAIT. Yuval Noah Harari, the rock star of historians who is upsetting scientists

So you can appear on the cover of hundreds of magazines and be one of the last people on Earth to learn of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election. Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari only found out about it five weeks after the billionaire’s surprise victory in the race for the White House. He was on a spiritual retreat cut off from the world in England. For two months a year, this great follower of silent meditation isolates himself in a room barely larger than a telephone booth.

Something to remove impurities from the mind, apparently. That said, he would not have been better informed in his house in the suburbs of Tel Aviv (Israel): the intellectual who claims on his site to have sold 45 million copies in 64 languages ​​does not have a smartphone. A real paradox for someone who delves into the behavior of men from the dawn of time to explain the future. A stock in trade that he describes in his latest book, Nexuspublished Wednesday September 25.

Nothing predisposed Yuval Noah Harari to become the “rock star” of historians and one of the gondola leaders of the literary rentrée – in the essay section – to the point of battling in France with Gaël Faye and Amélie Nothomb. A trained medievalist, it was somewhat by chance that he inherited a global introductory course in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he teaches. A revelation. From this series of courses a book was born, Sapiensin 2011. “The structuring ideas have not moved an inch”Harari summarizes in the New Yorker.

The promise is enticing: “a brief history of humanity”, the subtitle of the book, in less than 500 pages. It tells how homo sapiens, a species that was not called to reign on Earth, came to dominate the planet thanks to three revolutions: cognitive (the ability to tell stories, 70,000 years ago), agricultural (11,000 years ago) and then scientific (500 years ago). Before the arrival of the 21st century and its biotechnological revolution where artificial intelligences could free themselves from the tutelage of man. “Everyone’s story, since always”synthesizes the New Yorker.

The book was an immediate hit in Israel… but it flopped outside the Jewish state. To the point that Harari found himself offering an English translation for self-publishing on Amazon. At the time, her email address was on the cover page and her husband, Itzik Yahav, made the illustrations. A few hundred copies sold and three years later, Anglo-Saxon publishers smelled a good deal. Quickly relayed by a few luxury aficionados, like Bill Gates. “I’ve always loved writers who connect the dots.”he wrote on his blog in 2016. Barack Obama, who judges on CNN that he “helps put things into perspective”also slips it into its list of books of the year. Mark Zuckerberg, for his part, places it on the shelves of Facebook’s Book Club.

The reception was more lukewarm among academics, even though the essay has been on the best-seller list for years, to the point that in France, Albin Michel has still not released a paperback version ten years after its release. Canadian anthropologist Christopher Hallpike has issued a vitriolic critique of the book, “devoid of any contribution to science”relevant to the“infotainment” according to him. A trial of demagogy that the Indian neuroscientist also makes him Darshana Narayanan, who places it in the category of “populist scientists”.

“He develops great theories, very seductive. But while it is undeniable that he has indeed read a lot, he cannot connect things, draw conclusions like that. Science does not work like that.”

Darshana Narayanan, neuroscientist

in the journal “Current Affairs”

The one who listed the factual errors in Harari’s books in Current Affairs adds: “If he had published his theses in a scientific journal, there would necessarily have been some work of fact-checking or peer review. This was not the case for the book.” One example among others: confusion between cheetahs and leopards which do not live in the same areas of Africa.

Harari’s thesis supervisor at Oxford, Steve Gunn, half-admits this in the New Yorker. He admires his student’s ability to “playing leapfrog with fact-checking. It asks questions so broad that no one can really answer categorically: ‘This part is wrong, that part is wrong.’ No one is an expert on what everything means.”

“This is an overview and a book that is not intended for the scientific community”defends Boris Valentin, a specialist in prehistory and a teacher at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He also takes issue with the agricultural revolution presented as sudden “while it took two good millennia”on a vision sometimes too focused on Europe and the Middle East or on a narration “too linear of a plural story”This does not prevent him from willingly placing Yuval Noah Harari alongside Alain Decaux in the category of “historians as passers-by”. “What he writes is simplified. It is in the contract with the reader, the ‘brief history of humanity’. But in no way simplistic.”he applauded.

Almost a must for the new figurehead of “Big History”, ambitious works embracing different disciplines on the entire history of humanity. “In twelve years of Israeli schooling, I never had a single lesson on Chinese history or anything predating Judaism. Let’s not even talk about the agricultural revolution.Harari summarizes in the New Yorker. People need that big picture, and Sapiens provides them in a way that we have strived to make accessible, interesting and fun.”

Accessibility is also reflected in his sparing use of references and footnotes. Sapiens only has about a hundred in 480 pages. “How many people now cite the book for ideas that have, in fact, been known in the scientific world for much longer?” laments Stéphane Debove, doctor of cognitive sciences and popularizing YouTuber on his channel Homo Fabulus.

One consequence of Harari’s success may be to push academics to adopt more accessible language: “I campaign for researchers to write more simplyadds Stéphane Debove. There is a kind of cognitive bias where we feel like we are not taken seriously when we express ourselves with simple words. As if we have to confuse the reader so that they think we are saying profound things.”

From Alain Decaux 2.0, Yuval Noah Harari has become a philosopher and thinker with his following works Homo Deus And Twenty-one lessons for the 21st century. Which earned him some kindness from those who put Plato and Sophocles in their breakfast cereal bowl. The philosopher Roger Pol-Droit sees in him a “c“skillful actor” and one “fragile thinker” In The Echoes. Readc Ferry judge, him, Homo Deus “fallacious”of “Orwell repainted in the colors of Silicon Valley”In The Figaro.

But not enough to tarnish his status as the darling of globalized elites and tech billionaires. The Davos Forum invited him in 2016? He declined, the participants at his conference were not up to par, says his husband and agent. The following year, his conference was slotted between those of Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel at the big Swiss gathering. In Israel, it is rumored that it is the reading of Sapiens who encouraged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to go meatless every Monday.

A presentation of Homo Deus in private at the Elysée, conferences in Silicon Valley and guru status new age of the great and the good of this world have earned him a tenacious hatred from a section of the left. The academic Danny Gutwein summed it up in a scathing article published in the daily Haaretz. He sees in Harari “the domestic ideologue of the liberal elites” who explains at length in his work that man has no control over his destiny. “From his first book, Sapienswe come away with the impression that world history was made without politics, according to a kind of natural code”Gutwein explains in ReleaseA message that reinforces the current social order, according to him.

Politically, Harari’s small SME – five full-time employees, including a Peruvian chef with unrivaled vegan dishes, according to the New Yorker – is scrupulously careful to avoid any faux pas. Debating with Trump is OK, but not in public. Out of the question to appear with Israeli settlers. “We don’t know exactly where he’s taking us.concedes Boris Valentin, but if everyone projects themselves into it, it’s because the book is quite open.” Didn’t Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who can hardly be suspected of liberalism, quote Harari in an interview with Socialize ? “Yuval Noah Harari shows in Sapiens that the stability of human groups depends on the imagination that brings them together”declared the leader of La France Insoumise.

Maybe that’s what makes him the “first global thinker of the 21st century”according to The Economistor even the “the world’s most important thinker”according to The Point. Being able to give brownie points to Francis Fukuyama, the theorist of the “end of history” after the fall of the USSR. Giving his opinion on the way forward during the Covid-19 crisis, without any scientific degree on CNN’s flagship show, on the BBC, or in the Financial Times… The list is not exhaustive. Asked by the New Yorker On her husband’s place in the world hall of fame, Itzik Yahav responded: “Somewhere between Madonna and Steven Pinker”, a famous American psycholinguist and best-selling author. That’s what it’s like to be a rock star in history.