Dr Neville Buch[1]
Book Review: Reclaiming the Human Narrative from Biological Algorithms
Les, Allan (2026). Harari’s Humanist Wars of Religion: A Critique of Harari’s History of Modern Ideologies.
In his timely and provocative work, Harari’s Humanist Wars of Religion, Allan Les provides a surgical critique of Yuval Noah Harari’s popular historical narrative. Les argues that Harari’s portrayal of modern ideologies as mere “humanist religions”—comparable to traditional theologies but based on biological fictions—is not merely an academic oversimplification but a dangerous form of “denoetization” . By applying Dr. Neville Buch’s Dynamic of Cognition (DoC), this review recommends Les’s book as a vital contribution to the defence of human authorship in the age of algorithmic reductionism.
The Core Critique: Harari’s “Techné” Trap
Les identifies the fundamental flaw in Harari’s work as a regression into the “techné mindset”—a cognitive failure that treats human history as a series of data-processing challenges rather than a meaningful pursuit of wisdom. Harari’s assertion that “liberalism is a religion” based on the “myth” of the individual soul is, according to Les, a form of “potted thinking”. It strips the “thick” ethical concepts of human rights and dignity of their historical and social bearings, reducing them to “thin” biological anomalies.
Dynamic of Cognition (DoC) Analysis
The importance of Les’s contribution is best understood through the five quadrants of the DoC:
- Prejudice (Centre): Les unmasks Harari’s unexamined prejudice of biological reductionism. Harari begins with the assumption that if a concept (like “the individual”) cannot be found under a microscope, it is a fiction. Les counters this by asserting the ontological reality of the person as a proactive author of their own life.
- Attitudes (Thinking): Harari’s work promotes an attitude of cynical detachment, where the human “Who” is replaced by a technical “What.” Les shifts this back toward a “Senior” state of social accountability, demanding that we treat our shared ideologies as concept-practices that require intersubjective validity.
- Typology of Values: While Harari views values as utilitarian survival mechanisms, Les re-establishes a typology centred on Aristotelian flourishing (eudaimonia). He argues that the “wars of religion” Harari describes are actually struggles to define substantial fairness in a global society.
- Exclusion (Sensation): Harari’s narrative filters out the “messy” lived experience and the Synoptic Vision of history. Les identifies this as the “Analytical Abyss,” where Harari’s “big history” ignores the concrete particulars of local agency and historical contingency.
- Inclusion (Intuition): Les’s work facilitates a “personal breakout” from Harari’s fatalism. By including the history of humanism as a narrative of liberation and reason, Les restores the “Horizon Worldview” necessary for a Contributory Economy.
Conclusion: A Vital Defence of Agency
Allan Les’s critique is more than a rebuttal; it is a diagnostic tool for “crap detecting” in modern intellectual history . He effectively demonstrates that Harari’s “history” is an “institutional bullshit” of the digital age—a manufactured myth designed to justify the dominance of data over the person.
For anyone seeking to understand the current “immense regression” of agency and the rise of digital humanism, Harari’s Humanist Wars of Religion is an essential read. It is a powerful call to move beyond the “theological masks” of biology and reclaim our status as the proactive authors of our own future.
Bibliography
- Buch, N. (2015). The Dynamic of Cognition. Management Institute for Contributory Economy .
- Buch, N. (2024). Stiegler, Noddings, Williams: Ending the Immense Regression. Management Institute for Contributory Economy .
- Buch, N. (2026). A Matrix of Sociology. Management Institute for Contributory Economy .
- Les, A. (2026). Harari’s Humanist Wars of Religion: A Critique of Harari’s History of Modern Ideologies. Management Institute for Contributory Economy .
- Werthner, H., et al. (2024). Introduction to Digital Humanism. Springer .
- Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Fontana Press .
[1] Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has been fairly used in the production of this work. The tool used is Google NotebookLM (recently rebranded as Gemini Notebook). It is an AI-powered virtual research assistant and thinking partner designed to help a person interact deeply with their own documents. Unlike general chatbots, it is source-grounded, meaning it only generates answers based on the specific PDFs, documents, or links uploaded. The A.I. process in the production of this work has been limited to the attached (prompts) on each of the questions in turn. This ensures an accurate reading of each source. The author then rearranged and re-edited the answers the A.I. provided. The human author publishes this work. A.I. is never an author when used properly. This assistance is not qualitatively different from a human research assistant when that assistance is deemed to have no authorial status but is acknowledged.
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Neville Buch
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