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Moving beyond humanity

Can an Israeli history professor predict the future?

September 15, 2016 11:45
Switching between epochs: Yuval Noah Harari

By

JP OMalley

6 min read

When the Nazis overran France in the Spring of 1940, thousands of Jews attempted to cross the boarder south to Spain and Portugal. There was a major problem though: they needed visas, and the Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France at the time to issue any visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry.

Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul-general in the French city of Bordeaux during this period, defied the orders of the Estado Novo regime, issuing thousands of visas to Jewish refugees, saving their lives.

In his latest book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, the Israeli historian, Yuval Noah Harari, cites this episode as an example of how written documents can change the course of a life.

History, Harari writes, is predominately based around a web of fictional stories. While the primal abilities of individual humans has really not changed, narratives that humans created to give meaning to their lives has grown exponentially: most notably since writing emerged 5,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia.