Morally untenable

Re: “Not child’s play”, (PostBag, Oct 25).

Unfortunately, in his efforts to defend the indefensible, Vint Chavala falls into a common corruption of those whose position is intellectually and morally untenable. He has either not read Yuval Noah Harari’s excellent books, merely copying what others have said about them, or he has failed to understand what Harari says, or he has committed a more serious moral and intellectual sin.

In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari does indeed write the first two quotes Mr Chavala attributes to him. Namely, that “The voter knows best,” and “the customer is always right” (Harper, 2015, page 392).

However, contrary to Mr Chavala’s version, these groups of words are not a single quotation, but occur in two separate sentences in a discussion in which Harari is showing the poverty of those and other pious platitudes apparently beloved by Mr Chavala.

In the context, Harari is arguing that those sorts of simplistic slogans quoted to approvingly are not only false, but are dangerous for politics and morality. Mr Chavala is certainly right that Harari is a thinker well worth reading for the solidly supported insights he gives us into the human condition these past 70,000 years and more, but those insights are the opposite to the lessons that Mr Chavala appears to have learned from Harari’s books. Such sloppy quotation is careless.

In none of his three rightly famous books does Harari write the other words Mr Chavala “quotes” him as saying, although other writers do say that Harari suggests such views. Nowhere in the three books referred to does Harari say either: “The more people believe in free will, the easier it is to manipulate them,” or “You can’t live in the past, and you can’t live in the future; you can only live in the present”.

This confirms the suspicion that Mr Chavala got his ideas about Harari not from Harari but from hearsay accounts of Harari — a dangerously reckless strategy. Mr Chavala and others who would like to expand their understanding of what it is to be human might find it more profitable to actually read Harari himself in full.

I strongly recommend all three of Harari’s justly famous works, starting with the brilliant Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

I suspect that the intelligent and well-read men and women of Future Forward, including secretary-general Piyabutr Saengkanokkul and spokesperson Pannika Wanich, have indeed read Harari. But if they have not yet had that joy, I’m sure that they would be perfectly able to understand what the historian does in fact say about the human condition both as evolved individuals and social animals.

FELIX QUI