Digesting Ideas

You know those foods you enjoy so much while you're eating them, only to regret them later when your digestive system starts protesting?

As I get older, that list seems to grow longer. But I'm not writing about my current dietary challenges.

I'm writing because ideas can work the same way. Some go down so easily when you first hear them that they feel undeniably true. Then, given a little time to digest them, you realize they don't make nearly as much sense as they first appeared to.

Often, it's all in the delivery.

Yuval Noah Harari is a master communicator. He expresses himself clearly, concisely and compellingly. He has a remarkable gift for making something fairly obvious—for example, that human beings are storytelling animals—feel profound and revelatory. I suspect that's a large part of why his books have been so successful and why he's become such a fixture on the podcast circuit.

Lately, though, I've found myself growing skeptical of some of his most appealing ideas—the ones that go down easiest at first. I've started taking more time to reflect on what he's actually saying.

That happened recently while listening to his interview with Ezra Klein on The New York Times podcast.

The moment that stuck with me was Harari's comparison between religion and liberalism. Paraphrasing, he argued that religion promises redemption, whether in this life or the next, whereas liberalism does not. Liberalism, he said, accepts that human beings are inherently flawed and that conflict, tension and mistakes are permanent features of society. Rather than seeking redemption, liberalism invests in mechanisms that allow societies to correct themselves. Elections, he suggested, are one of the clearest examples of a 'self-correcting' mechanism.

It's an attractive argument. Liberalism sounds humble, realistic and practical. It doesn't promise perfection; it simply promises a way of correcting mistakes.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the argument was built on a series of false or mischaracterized understandings.

The first problem is that it compares two fundamentally different kinds of things.

Liberalism is primarily a political philosophy. It concerns itself with how societies should organize power, rights and institutions. Religion, by contrast, is principally concerned with questions of meaning, morality and humanity's relationship to the divine. Certainly, religions contain laws governing communal life—Judaism, for example, has extensive legal traditions covering everything from commerce to civil disputes—but even those laws are ultimately understood as serving the spiritual development of individuals and communities.

In Judaism, tradition identifies 613 commandments in the Torah, yet more than a third relate specifically to Temple worship in Jerusalem. Since the destruction of the Second Temple, only around half remain practically applicable. That alone illustrates that religion has never simply been a political system.

Liberalism and religious identity are not mutually exclusive, quite the opposite.

Someone can quite comfortably describe themselves as both a liberal and a Jew, or a liberal and a Christian. I certainly describe myself as a liberal Jew, and I suspect Harari would as well. Liberalism, properly understood, accommodates people of many different religious convictions precisely because it operates in a different sphere.

Second, Harari's understanding of redemption, at least the way he is using it here, is incorrect.

He seems to treat redemption as if it means arriving at perfection. But that's not how most religious traditions understand it. For practicing believers, redemption is not a final state of flawless existence. It is the ongoing work of self-examination, repentance, learning and moral growth. In other words, redemption is itself a self-correcting process.

My third objection is to describe elections as "self-correcting."

Elections don't inherently correct anything. They simply measure the preferences of a population at a particular moment in time. Sometimes those preferences lead to better outcomes; sometimes they don't. Elections provide peaceful accountability and adaptability, which are enormous strengths, but calling them "self-correcting" gives them more credit than they deserve. They are mechanisms for expressing collective will, certainly not guarantees of progress.

Harari, like every public intellectual, approaches the world with his own assumptions and preferences. As someone who has often criticized traditional religious authority, it's hardly surprising that he's drawn to philosophies that maximize individual freedom and remain skeptical of inherited dogma.

The rest of us have our own biases too. I certainly have mine.

What concerns me is how easily we can be seduced by attractive rhetoric at the expense of logic and coherence. There's something larger at stake than whether one agrees with Harari about liberalism or religion. It's the habit of intellectual honesty—the willingness to examine arguments carefully, even when they flatter our instincts or confirm our existing beliefs.

In an age of information silos and algorithmically curated worldviews, we all have reason to cultivate a healthy skepticism—not cynicism, but the discipline of questioning ideas before embracing them.

The ideas we consume deserve the same scrutiny as the food we eat. Some are nourishing. Some simply taste good in the moment.

It's worth taking the time to digest them before deciding whether they're actually good for us.