Few intellectuals can match the extraordinary popular success of Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. In two best-selling books, Sapiens and Homo Deus, he tackles the big questions about the human condition and its future. Harari’s wide-ranging, macro-histories have clearly struck a nerve with the public. Yet his account of our collective past assumes that the biological, scientific version of human nature provides the true and full explanation of what we are. Writing in City Journal, Sir Roger Scruton notes that Harari’s reductive view of history skirts the rather gaping matters of human self-consciousness and self-awareness. In the end, writes Scruton, Harari’s histories are about homo without the sapiens.
Yay Brexit!
Brendan O’Neill in Spiked enthuses that Brexit is superior to just about anything else in the world. “There should be street parties” on the 10th anniversary of the popular vote to withdraw from the EU, he writes. “Let the bells peal for that momentous day when in our millions we said No to globalism.” The continuing surfeit of saboteurs and naysayers among Britain’s “idiot elites”, O’Neill snorts, are gripped by Brexit Derangement Syndrome.
