Danny Gutwein: How Yuval Noah Harari Became the Pet Ideologist of the Liberal Elites

Professor Danny Gutwein
(source: Partners for Progressive Israel)
no copyright infringement intended

Why did Obama, Zuckerberg and Gates adopt Harari? Maybe it's the political benefit they hoped to extract from his view that there is no serious alternative to the neoliberal package

(Danny Gutwein in Haaretz)

My friend Hussain Rumi brought yesterday on Facebook this article from Haaretz, critical to the ideas of Yuval Noah Harari. The author, Professor Danny Gutwein, teaches Jewish History at the Haifa University, Faculty of Humanities. In 1993 he got a PhD degree in Jewish History from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research areas include Modernization of Jewish society, Jewish economic history, History of the Jewish national movement, Zionism, Antisemitism, Jewish economic elites, Jewish community in England.

How Yuval Noah Harari became the pet ideologist of the liberal elites - U.S. News - https://t.co/2AQwcqhHoq https://t.co/erykj6gQL9

— Pierre Radulescu (@pierreradulescu) November 22, 2018

Professor Gutwein is one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the Israeli Left today; spends much of his time inspiring, building and supporting a grassroots movement which offers an alternative political vision and action (Partners for Progressive Israel)

(Yuval Noah Harari)

Tamas Simon, A short story of Life and Death

Kanji Symbol for Life and Death
(source: pinterest)
no copyright infringement

Prin moartea noastră păstrăm tânără lumea 

(Nicolae Iorga în Gândirea, 1931)

Tamas Simon has published this wonderful essay on Facebook (Exploring the World of Yuval Noah Harari):

Doesn't science start with observation?
What I'm observing in the world, not sure about the universe but certainly here on Earth is that the entire system from the tiniest components is set up to self organize and create life. An electron wants to find a proton. A Hydrogen atom wants to find another Hydrogen atom and form a molecule. A molecule wants to make bonds and form other larger chemicals. Life - and I think consciousness too - emerges.
As if coming alive and maintaining life was a built-in incentive.
I don't think we have a good model that explains why or how this works.
Death then is a contradiction. Why is life in global so important and life of the individual so insignificant?
I tend to think about zebras. The entire zebra herd just keeps running all the time, the "great migration". Why? To keep life of the species going? Why is that so important?
If a zebra gets eaten by a lion, it suffers and then vanishes. Nobody will remember that zebra, nobody will know its name, its thoughts and feelings or that it ever existed. How does this make sense?
Humans die too and our situation is not that much better than the zebra's. Our children and at best our grand children still remember us after we die... and then?
It also doesn't make sense.
I think people have always felt this dissonance. That's why our imagination created the "afterlife", heaven and hell, eternal soul, reincarnation, all that. But we didn't have the means to change it. We have accepted it but deep down - certainly at the individual's level we have always fought it.
So - here comes my story - what if this is just temporary? What if death is the bootloader of life?
Maybe in the beginning of development resources were scarce, individuals had to die to give up their share. The only way progress could happen was through evolution. The neocortex and learning is a fairly new thing. What if death was a necessary evil, a painful trade-off that was needed to get here. Even human progress itself was a huge price to pay.
But, if we solve death... everything suddenly makes sense. The pieces of the puzzle fall into place.
We already have the technology to grow cultured meat and stop butchering animals for food. That's a first step, isn't it?
We are also researching longevity, how to add 10-20 years to the expected life span.
Up until now aging, getting older implied getting closer to the end of our life, going forward we can push out the end date. And if every year we spend living we can add more than a year to the end, then we reach longevity escape velocity; we become amortal. (not immortal, we can still get into an accident...)
When we look back is has always been about life. When figure ourselves out it will always be about life.

(no copyright infringement intended)

(Yuval Noah Harari)

Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari
(source: Riot Communications)
no copyright infringement intended

History began when humans invented gods and will end when humans become gods. So starts his web site. Well, this guy has the appetite for constructing shocking sentences (to put it mildly). And anyway, if we want to talk about scientists who know how to sell their ideas, seemingly he is a case in point. I bought today his Brief History of Humankind (Sapiens): about five hundred pages and it cannot be left from hand, presumably up to the last page. I stopped just to write a few lines about the author here, then I go back to the book. I'm reading it with passion, also with some uneasiness: I generally agree with his views, or at least I think they deserve full consideration, it's something else that I dislike there. I know it sounds strange what I'm saying, because this is a book that takes the whole history of humankind (prehistory included - he likes better another term for prehistory - but let's not digress now). But this book gives somehow a feel of pro-domo. Maybe this video below will give you a better idea of his way of presenting ideas:

What explains the rise of humans

And you should read also this article from Guardian:

The age of the cyborg has begun – and the consequences cannot be known

• Tamas Simon, A short story of Life and Death
• Danny Gutwein: How Yuval Noah Harari Became the Pet Ideologist of the Liberal Elites

(A Life in Books)