A recently unearthed video of WEF guru, Israeli Professor, Yuval Noah Harari, has made the rounds of late. As Dr. Harari asserted not only that God is a fiction, but he also asserted that human rights are a fiction, a nice fairy tale with no basis in reality. Dr. Harari apparently believes that human rights are simply a made up story. He further explains that if you dissect a human there are no rights there. Instead, there is simply a physical display of anatomy and what is left of the biological processes. Thus, he concludes that the only place human rights exist is in the imagination. A mountain is a reality, countries and legal systems, heaven, God, are not based in biological reality, they are merely artifacts of the imagination. Thus, homosapiens have no rights.
If there are no human rights, then none of us have a right to protections under the law. Neither do we have the right to possessions or relationships, or our experiences, or our body, or our mind, or to our life. If this is the case, then it begs the question, does Dr. Harari have a right to live?
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First, let’s address the certainty, some might even say hubris, that Dr. Harari appears to project his opinion on human rights and even reality itself. The healthy skepticism of the ancient Greeks taught us empiricism and logic. Yet even logic and empiricism have an Achilles heal.
There is an often unspoken reality that underlies all, whether philosophical, religious, political, legal, ethical, or even scientific discussions and debates. This is the unfortunate reality that the original assumption or premise of every discussion or debate is always unproven. We accept, often unconsciously, the agreed upon unproven premise or assumption and engage in the discussion or debate.
Consider the scientific method and testing of a hypothesis or theory. Technically a hypothesis or theory can never be proven. We can only accumulate data that either supports the hypothesis or theory or does not support it. This in itself is often forgotten when the high priests of science push scientific theories as if they were scientific dogma. Still, in a perfect world science is an open ended continuous search for the truth relying upon the scientific method. Yet, the premise underlying the scientific method itself, and the view that a hypothesis can never be proven, is based on an unproven premise. Essentially, we come to an approximation for the truth and take a leap of faith on the original premise.
Humility is required.
Even Dr. Harari’s belief in material monism, which rests on the unproven premise that physical reality is all that there is, is dubious on multiple fronts. For instance, we experience the material world through our senses, which are experienced in the mind.
Can you really prove that anything exists outside of your mind?
The point is not to promote nihilism, it is to emphasize the inherent limitations of our perceptions in this limited time space reality.
We don’t have to go to this extreme to question Dr. Harari’s world view. The mechanistic universe with eternal laws is inherently flawed as laws are anthropogenic projections, manmade concepts. Some scientists have cogently argued that there are no laws of nature, rather, these are more like habits. This would infer both memory and consciousness in nature, which is a direct contradiction to the material monist view that consciousness is a construct of the imagination. Even the material constant of the speed of light has been questioned and shown to change.
Dr. Harari has relegated science into a belief system rather than simply a method of inquiry. Most scientific debates are political and theological. Harari, although doing it to an extreme, is arguing a neo platonic view of Divinity, (God is out there) rather than an Aristotelian view of Divinity being immanent (in here) whether he knows it or not. I’d say it is both and the distinction is arbitrary anyway….Harari is arguing for eternal laws to nature in his overreliance on biology and materialism.
When you unplug a toaster why does it no longer operate?
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The toaster is still there yet there is no toast. Electricity is required to produce the toast. When Dr. Harari dissects the human body and discovers no human rights there, it is similar to discovering no toast in the unplugged toaster. Like electricity, the soul is required to produce the human rights. This is because every human being has a Divine spark in them.
Whether you believe in the dualistic presentation of the electricity in the toaster as analogous to the soul in the body, or if you see the body as an extension of the soul, the absence of the rights in the inanimate corpse is arguably an admission that the soul or Divine spark brings with it inherent rights, not proof that these rights don’t exist.
These rights exist in animated human beings as evidenced by the willingness of human beings to fight for them. It is the unhindered individual expression of Divinity through the human experience that is the core basis for human rights. Human rights are not a fantasy of the imagination, they are necessary to allow Divine expression.
The preservation of Natural Rights are the only legitimate basis for the existence of government. The Bill of Rights are universal rights. The Ninth Amendment is the most important Amendment as it protects the reservoir of unstated Natural Rights. We can argue over the precision of these rights and their application, however, their existence preexists and transcends government.
