Big Ideas find mass appeal beyond the sneering sceptics

It is popular to sneer at Harari et al for their sweep and scope but they help to illuminate our age of big questions.

Professor Yuval Noah Harari, modern publishing’s pre-eminent and most lavishly rewarded purveyor of Big Thoughts. Picture: Getty Images

I suppose it doesn’t much trouble multimillionaire, globally best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari that each new book he produces occasions an outbreak of haughty disdain. Harari is, after all, modern publishing’s pre-eminent and most lavishly rewarded purveyor of Big Thoughts.

The 25 million copy-selling Sapiens confidently divided the history of mankind into three revolutions (“cognitive”, “agricultural” and “scientific”). Harari’s latest, Nexus, provides a “history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI”. The common charge is that his books are simplistic, reductive and grandiose. Simple-minded readers, The New Yorker sniffs, are seduced by “the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs”.

The Big Ideas genre, whose practitioners seek to illuminate the human condition with a grand provocative thought, is one of the most successful enterprises in 21st-century non-fiction publishing. Its exponents include Malcolm Gladwell, whose Outliers investigated the secrets of creative and professional success; Steven Pinker, whose The Better Angels of Our Nature argued that history is a story of steadily declining violence and pain, and; Peter Frankopan, whose The Silk Roads retells world history from an Asian perspective. All these books were spectacular bestsellers but the genre needs defending from a newly endemic form of snobbery that answers any attempt at synthesis or sweep with the pseudo-sophisticate’s sneer that “it’s all so much more complicated than that”. I have lost count of the number of times I have listened to people explain that Sapiens oversimplifies world history (you don’t say) or that Gladwell is hardly the last word in academic social science (who knew?), as if these observations were proof of the speaker’s fierce independent-minded scepticism.

The mood is catching. A chart-topping podcast, If Books Could Kill, is dedicated to smirkingly taking apart the grand-canvas pretensions of writers such as Francis Fukuyama (The End of History), Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind) and Samuel Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations).

A recent article in the New Statesman applied the label “Waterstone’s Dad” to the archetypal consumer of Big Ideas books (after the UK book retail chain). Waterstone’s Dad is terrified by a complex world and in need of the reassurances supposedly provided by “epic chronology”, “prophecies” and “grand theses”.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I am not insensible to the genre’s absurdities and oversimplifications but I think we must resist the idea that scope, boldness and popularity are axiomatically marks of intellectual worthlessness. That they are thought to be is down to an age that has made a fetish of hyper-specialisation. Universities reward academics who know their tiny patches in miniature detail and defend them fiercely from intruders. In today’s intricate economy, professions often require workers to master and dominate a small field (a lawyer friend is apparently an authority on eggs).

This close focus has its rewards but is inadequate as a means of understanding a world that is infinitely interconnected. Harari’s free-range willingness to roam across social science, literature and history in search of insight sometimes leads him into naffness and error (I doubt we are on the verge of being seduced by AI-generated religions) but it is a usefully holistic approach to knowledge. The idea that certain topics can be snipped out of the tapestry of human learning and studied in isolation is just as futile as the idea that you can study everything, everywhere, all at once. A photograph of a leaf misses as much about the nature of a tree as a panorama of a 1000-acre forest.

Our age of crisis urgently demands thinkers prepared to traverse history and trespass over the traditional borders of academic disciplines, even at the risk of the occasional platitude or absurdity. Sometimes a theory that is interesting but wrong can be more useful than one that is boring but right. The 1990s were not, as Fukuyama contended, “the end of history” but his provocative idea has proved invaluable for arguing about and trying to understand the past 30 years.

Harari’s emphasis on the importance of “stories” to the unfolding of history may be overcooked but he has sharpened the average person’s awareness that current affairs can be fruitfully understood not so much as a series of discrete events as a range of competing narratives that rival parties seek to control.

Steven Pinker.

The popularity of Big Ideas books speaks less to the genre’s supposed simple-minded mass appeal than to the obvious fact that ours is an age of big questions. Not long ago, “What is a woman?”, “What is truth?” or “How will democracy end?” would have seemed hopelessly abstract. Today those questions have a charge of urgency. Similarly, in unprecedented times history acquires new fascination. Can the fall of the Roman republic tell us something about the state of American democracy? Or the invention of the printing press about the rise of social media? Many proper historians deplore such glib comparisons but trying to plot our position on the sprawling chart of human history is an illuminating enterprise, however futile it ultimately turns out to be.

The kind of unimaginative literalism that finds value only in discrete, verifiable facts is all too often a symptom of intellectual insecurity – an excessive terror of being caught out thinking something foolish or mainstream.

People who really like ideas don’t especially mind where they come from and are happy to be tickled or challenged without needing to feel themselves in either complete, credulous agreement or stubbornly hostile dissent. With that thought, I settle down to an evening with Nexus by that fool Harari. I think he talks a great deal of nonsense on AI – but usefully provoking nonsense all the same.

The Times

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Yuval Noah Harari, Fern Press, $39.99.