The Great Worldview Divide Revealed by Harari’s “Sapiens”

Photo by Neroli Wesley on Unsplash. A review of Yuval Noah Harari’s very popular book Sapiens attracted attention and plenty of comments. They reveal a deep divide that is traced back to greatly differing worldviews.

When I posted my thoughts about Yuval Noah Harari’s wildly popular book Sapiens, I never expected the response I got. As of this writing there are about 4500 views, almost 2000 reads, and many comments. That’s unusual for my posts, to say the least. As someone commented, it looks like I ate the sacred cow. What is striking to me from this is the role that worldviews play in filtering information and responding intellectually and emotionally to ideas or arguments that oppose our preferred understandings of the world.

Worldview comes from the German word Weltanschauung coined by Immanuel Kant in his 1790 work Critique of Judgement. The English translation of that book uses the term “intuition of the world” to describe what Kant called Weltanschauung. Our worldview is our most fundamental ideas of the world, its origins, its purpose and meaning, and most of all, our place in it as homo sapiens as a species and as individual human lives.

According to the late David Naugle who wrote Worldview: The History of a Concept, we develop our fundamental picture of the universe through our contemplation of what we observe:

“Martin Heidegger notes that Kant employed Weltanschauung in reference to the mundus sensibilis, that is, as a ‘world-intuition in the sense of contemplation of the world given to the…