Sapienship: Addressing Humanity’s Existential Challenges

Continuing my exploration of organisations and thought leaders addressing the critical existential threats of our time, this week I turn to Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari and his organisation Sapienship. Co-founded in 2019 with his philanthropist husband, Itzik Yahav, Sapienship is a “multidisciplinary organisation advocating for global responsibility”.

Logo for Sapienship. Source: www.sapienship.co (This logo is used under the doctrine of fair use for editorial purposes. No copyright infringement is intended.)

Underpinned by his reflections on history and psychology, Harari, as with biologist Jeremy Griffith, has realised that in order to solve the threats posed by global war, AI and digital overreach, and environmental catastrophes, we need to address the psychological dilemmas within our species – as the great psychologist Carl Jung was forever emphasising, we need to “own our shadow”, our dark side. Through being aware of the psychological and societal forces that have defined us for millennia, Sapienship attempts to address some of the largest challenges facing the world.

Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. (Source: Martin Kraft, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

The Challenge of Human Nature

Like Griffith, Harari recognises that humanity’s future is not just about navigating the technological revolution or managing ecological crises, it’s about understanding the internal contradictions that have driven our species throughout history so that we don’t endlessly repeat the mistakes of the past. In looking for the source of humanity’s dysfunctional behaviour, Harari ultimately looks to our instincts. He argues that human dysfunction is a product of our evolutionary heritage:

our eating habits, our conflicts and our sexuality are all a result of the way our hunter-gatherer minds interact with our current post-industrial environment, with its mega-cities, airplanes, telephones and computers … Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah.

Moreover:

Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they’.

Worse,

Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.

Part of this “over-hasty jump” concerns the impact of our unique conscious mind. As Harari explains, consciousness bestowed upon us a ‘superweapon’ that allowed us to become the top-predator on the planet – our imagination, which in turn gave us the power to cooperate under imagined rules, gods and organisations. However, this power to create imaginary entities is a double-edged sword, and today, he suggests, our imagined concepts take such precedence in our minds that we can prioritise them over the reality of the world in front of us, to the point of causing devastating conflicts:

Humans don’t fight over territory and food. They fight over imaginary stories in their minds.

(from March 2024 Interview with Ian Bremmer).

Yuval Noah Harari & Ian Bremmer at The 92nd Street Y – March 2024 (Screenshot from YouTube)

Based on the idea that true progress requires us to resolve the internal conflicts that have held us back as a species, Sapienship seeks to bring understanding of how inherited traits such as xenophobia, our inbuilt need to continually gratify ourselves, and a belief in our imagined “fictions”, can lead us astray. The mindless pursuit of growth, the blind faith in technological solutions, and the deep divisions that separate us are all symptoms of these inherited traits.

Working across several domains

In a world where old paradigms no longer seem sufficient, Sapienship seeks to help leaders and decision-makers understand the long-term implications of their choices, using Harari’s historical analysis to make sense of contemporary issues. Whether in business or politics, Sapienship’s goal is to equip people with the tools to make decisions that acknowledge the complexities of human nature. Sapienship also brings together thinkers, activists, and leaders from around the world to discuss the world’s challenges, offering a platform for reimagining our future in ways that take into account the psychological dimensions of human behaviour.

Its main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important challenges facing the world today – through global projects in the realm of education and storytelling, as well as research and investments. (From Harari’s website)

Sapienship breaks its areas of focus into three of humanity’s existential threats, naming them the “Challenges We Focus On”. They are:

1. Technological disruption
2. Ecological Collapse
3. Global War

Sapienship’s strategies for actually making change is instructive as it highlights the importance of Harari’s belief that understanding humanity’s driving forces is the key to ensuring we don’t fall victim to them. For example, Storytelling is one of the main functions of Sapienship, and includes publishing versions of Harari’s book Sapiens in various forms and mediums, including children’s books and cartoons. Similarly, Education focuses on finding ways to teach Harari’s understanding of human history. Community is a venture toward creating a large motivated global community that has the power to enact change. Finally, Initiatives include donations to Ukraine, the World Health Organisation and in ‘sustainable’ investments like cultured meat and lab-grown milk.

Bold Vision, Divisive Views

Criticism of Sapienship must focus on Harari’s underlying theories of human behaviour, because that is Sapienship’s animating principle.

Critics have argued that at its core Harari presents a misanthropic view of human progress. Harari describes how “Homo sapiens hold the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology”; “the Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud”; and “The Scientific Revolution and modern imperialism were inseparable”.

Elsewhere, religion, philosophical schools, economic systems and hate groups are neatly bundled together: “Some religions, such as Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred… Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed.” While it is undeniable that “a significant proportion of humanity’s cultural achievements owe their existence to the exploitation of conquered populations”, the counter, that human progress is a heroic, magnificent endeavour, is dismissed.

Looking deeper, others have argued that Harari presents an oversimplified narrative that overlooks facts. For example, critics of Harari’s view of the role of “fiction” argue that he overemphasises the role of narratives and underestimates the importance of tangible, material factors such as technology, ecology, and geography in shaping human history.

British columnist and critic of Harari’s work, Andrew Orlowski (By DracoEssentialis – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons).

An even deeper question goes to the validity of evolutionary psychology, the school of thought to which Harari indisputably belongs, which says our behaviour reflects the influence of physical and psychological predispositions that helped human ancestors survive and reproduce. Here we must consider Griffith’s argument:

Surely this idea that we have savage competitive and aggressive, must-reproduce-our-genes instincts cannot be the real reason for our species’ competitive and aggressive behaviour because, after all, words used to describe our human behaviour such as egocentric, arrogant, inspired, depressed, deluded, pessimistic, optimistic, artificial, hateful, cynical, mean, sadistic, immoral, brilliant, guilt-ridden, evil, psychotic, neurotic and alienated, all recognise the involvement of OUR species’ fully conscious thinking mind. They demonstrate that there is a psychological dimension to our behaviour; that we don’t suffer from a genetic-opportunism-driven ‘animal condition’, but a conscious-mind-based, psychologically troubled HUMAN CONDITION.

(Jeremy Griffith in THE Interview, 2020)

Hope for a Transformed Humanity?

Sapienship deserves recognition for its ambitious attempt to address the root cause of humanity’s problems – ourselves. However, in my view, Harari’s misanthropic view of humanity, which underpins Sapienship, is too dismissive of the human journey to offer a comprehensive solution. While its vision for a transformed humanity is compelling, a misanthropic foundation can’t truly guide us toward a better future. Sapienship’s focus on human psychology is a crucial step, but it must be complemented by a more thorough and holistic understanding of the human condition.