21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)
Yuval Noah Harari (1976)
372 pages
With the end of the Cold War in 1990 a kind of euphoria swept through the West, a potent belief that Western political, economic and cultural values had prevailed over Communism, vanquishing the final contender to the throne and so becoming not only the dominant, but in fact the only rational order around which civilization needed to construct itself. Certainly challenges remained to be addressed in the world, but it was felt that these could and would be surmounted as democracy and capitalism spread globally to those last outposts of darkness that still resisted its blessings.
What a difference a couple of decades makes.
As China pursues a broad range of political and economic strategies that directly challenge U.S. status as the sole, global superpower, and Russia reasserts itself militarily on the world stage in such places as Syria and Ukraine, much of the West has descended into a crippling malaise. Though globalization has brought about a significant reduction in global poverty levels, and a prolonged period of relative peace, citizens in the U.S. and Europe have seen domestic inequality increase dramatically, and many feel left behind by the impacts of free trade and immigration policies --- they watch their economic situation deteriorate, and perceive their cultural values to be under threat. In response, countries in the West have experienced a rise in populism and nativism, leading to an increasing domestic political divisiveness that has put Western governments on their heels. This has made it difficult for them not only to counter the advances of China and Russia, but, more broadly, to take the lead in addressing challenges to mankind’s future that increasingly require global solutions.
Why has liberal democracy suddenly gone from appearing to be the only viable order, to a system apparently incapable of dealing with not only current day challenges, but also the even greater threats that lie seemingly just over the horizon? And what are those coming challenges, and how will they change the world as we know it? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if the current social and political structures are not up to the task, what potential alternatives should be considered?Based on his study of mankind’s origins and evolution, historian and author Yuval Noah Harari explores these pressing questions in his timely and thought-provoking book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. In it he argues that the very advantage that not only separated Homo Sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom but also catapulted us over all other human species --- the ability and in fact need to create stories --- he now sees as shackling us in the face of global problems. This gives him profound concerns for our future, and over his 21 Lessons, on topics ranging from the concrete, such as Work, Nationalism, and War, to the abstract, such as Liberty, Humility and Justice, he makes a clarion call for humankind to recognize the shortcomings and challenges of our innate behaviors, and how these have prevented us from addressing the existential crises he sees bearing down upon us.
Harari opens the book with a lesson that sets the stage for the reminder of the book, by describing the spreading Disillusionment with economic and political structures, a situation evident in the West through the strengthening politics of populism and nativism, but visible also in various forms elsewhere in the world. He notes that although
by the early 1990’s, thinkers and politicians alike hailed ‘the end of History’ … and that the refurbished liberal package of democracy, human rights, free markets, and government welfare services remained the only game in town [that, in fact,] history has not ended. (11)Although the liberal story has not been completely rejected, he argues that many people have concluded that globalization has been detrimental to them, and so have turned inward to embrace nationalist policies.
Harari describes other systems of governing that have arisen to challenge the Western liberal order, in Russia or China for example, but finds none of these alternatives to have proven themselves attractive solutions. Thus in a sense humanity, as a global people, has lost the plot: human communities, built around the stories we tell ourselves, at this point have no global story that binds us together. (The impact of this ‘loss of story’ in the U.S. has been eloquently described by the historian Vincent Harding.)
And having such stories has been fundamental to our development as a species, as Harari himself explored in detail in his deeply engaging book Sapiens, from a few years ago. In that work he begins at the Big Bang, pushes quickly forward to the rise of humankind, and then examines in detail the history of our evolution through to the present day. Instead of describing the rise and fall of empires and peoples, he focuses on how Homo Sapiens ‘won out’ over other human species, and how the development of civilization occurred, from the agricultural revolution to ever larger communities that eventually became empires and finally nation-states. (My review of Sapiens linked to at right.)What becomes clear in that earlier work is that it has been the unique ability to imagine and tell stories that allowed Homo Sapiens to develop much larger cooperative communities than could other human species who did not possess this ability, allowing it to dominate and finally eliminate those other species, who were often physically stronger as individuals. In 21 Lessons, he centers on the limitations of this benefit that arise as we, Homo Sapiens, attempt to create binding, agreed-to stories at the level of global communities.
One of the challenges we face today in this regard can be understood by recognizing the striking reality of how slowly our progress as a species has in fact proceeded historically: a ‘timeline of history’ that prefaces Sapiens shows that our species evolved in East Africa some 200,000 years ago; that the Cognitive Revolution with its emergence of fictive language and so stories occurred some 70,000 years ago; that the agricultural revolution began perhaps 12,000 years ago; and the industrial revolution some 200 years ago. I don’t recall now where, but I’ve read or heard someone point out the vast expanses of time in between the early events in that timeline, which imply that many thousands of generations lived and died in nearly the same circumstances, and with nearly the same understanding of the world, as their distant ancestors. Progress did occur, but for long millennia it came imperceptibly slowly indeed.
Suddenly, in the last century or so, and especially in the last few decades, humans confront unprecedented changes even within the span of a single generation. And, as Harari points out in lessons on Work, Liberty and Equality, even more dramatic and consequential changes await in our immediate future. He foresees, in particular, “biotech” and “infotech” revolutions that “could restructure not just economies and societies, but our very bodies and minds” (7)
Specifically, with such physical and mental enhancements likely affordable only to some few, with advances in artificial intelligence making many, if not most, workers irrelevant, and with the increasing importance of data as both an economic asset and a means of control over individuals and so entire populations, he foresees an ever more dramatic and irreversible growth in inequality. As a consequence, according to Harari, inequality will rise to such unprecedented levels that the current social compacts --- already fragile --- collapse entirely, as the biologically enhanced super-rich isolate themselves ever more completely from the rest of humanity, who will no longer be needed to perform work, and so will discover themselves to have become irrelevant.
Avoiding such a dystopian future requires addressing the risks associated with these coming biotech and infotech revolutions now, before they occur. Unfortunately Harari sees little chance of humanity coming together to address them. He argues that --- just as for climate change --- solutions for these coming issues implemented at a local or national level will prove insufficient and ineffective. These problems require globally coordinated solutions, and yet, for the reasons Harari goes on to explore in the book, the current-day expression of many human traits and characteristics developed through the long millennia of our evolution conspire against our working together to develop a globally coordinated response.
Over several lessons, Harari looks in detail at some of the challenges to achieving the required global coordination, beginning with our social and political structures. In Community he points out, for example, the disorienting impact of social media on people, as they withdraw from psychologically vital physical connections into isolating digital ones. His discussion on Civilization repudiates the concept of a “clash of civilizations,” arguing in fact against the entire “thesis [that] humankind is inherently divided into diverse civilizations whose members view the world in irreconcilable ways” (93); he concludes that this widespread belief in the fundamental existence of such a divide reinforces separation between cultures and hinders making common cause. Similarly, in Nationalism and Religion, he examines how the separation into tribes that comes with these sentiments and ideologies, and the associated creation of the idea of ‘the other,’ again prevent us from coming together to address global challenges.
Having thoroughly discredited the concept of a clash of civilizations, Harari uses his lesson on Immigration to present a nuanced exploration of what could be referred to as the ‘clash of cultures’ that occurs as immigrants move across borders. He opens by acknowledging that immigrants can bring cultural patterns of behavior that conflict with the norms of their host country, but argues that while some of these foreign cultural behaviors can reasonably by found to be unacceptable and even abhorrent in the host country, others are simply different, neither better nor worse. Thus, he concludes:
It would be wrong to tar all anti-immigrationists as “fascists,” just as it would be wrong to depict all pro-immigrationists as committed to “cultural suicide.” Therefore, the debate over immigration should not be conducted as an uncompromising struggle over some nonnegotiable moral imperative. Rather, it must be a discussion between two legitimate political positions. (156)A refreshing lesson indeed for these partisan times, in which both sides of the immigration debate seem hell-bent on giving no quarter to their opponents, always assuming the worst possible motives.
In the third section of lessons, Harari shifts his focus from the weaknesses that make current-day institutional structures ineffective for addressing global problems, to the human fears and blindnesses that have similar impact. The ability of Terrorism, for example, to generate fear far beyond the demonstrably limited extent of its actual reach, results in a paralysis that diverts attention from more consequential dangers. (Harari does acknowledge the potential for dirty bombs and other more destructive attacks, but at the same time points out that those are, up to now --- fortunately --- hypothetical.)
More broadly, in lessons on Humility, God, and Secularism, Harari argues that the human tendency toward dogmatic certainty about the value and accuracy of our beliefs relative to those of others leads to tension and conflict between people and peoples that cripples the ability to be open and willing to work toward global solutions. Even secularists, he notes, fall victim to a hardening of their beliefs, a violent aversion to those who believe differently.
Harari’s lesson on War initially seems to offer a ray of hope. He describes war as having become a low-profit affair as economies have become more global and so the success or failure of nations more intertwined. Even here, however, he has sobering concerns, summarized in the concluding section of the lesson, entitled “The March of Folly”, a phrase clearly borrowed from the title of Barbara Tuchman’s brilliant book of the same name, which detailed several examples in which human folly led to war from the ancient world to recent times. In a similar vein, Harari writes:
We should never underestimate human stupidity. … [It] is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often tend to discount it. … Even if war is catastrophic for everyone, no god and no law of nature protects us from human stupidity. (182-183)
Harari’s comments here have striking parallels to sentiments expressed by Barack Obama, as captured by one of his speech writers, Ben Rhodes, in his book The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. Rhodes quotes Obama as telling him:
“After I was reelected,” he said, “I pulled together a group of presidential historians that I have in from time to time. … They made the point that the most important thing a president can do on foreign policy is avoid a costly error.” … The lesson? “Don’t do stupid shit,” he told us, tapping on the table in front of him. (277, Rhodes)
Some lessons are indeed straight-forward, if not, apparently, always easy to follow. (My review of Rhodes' book linked to at right.)Having described what he sees as the coming technology challenges, and examined the shortcomings of our institutional and social structures in rallying to address them, Harari shifts to an exploration of the difficulty for us individually to even understand “the truth about the world” (219), much less know how to engage to address complex global problems. In his lesson on Ignorance, he notes that the increasing flood of available information necessarily leads to a filtering by leaders in political, technological and social power structures, to make their situation more manageable. This same filtering, however, often blinds these leaders to important facts, and prevents consideration of new, potentially beneficial ideas and approaches. It becomes a catch-22 for leaders and others interested in bringing about change: stay engaged in existing organizations and institutions and lose out on finding potentially critical new ideas, or shift to a place “in the margins” (226) to discover new ideas, but in so doing lose the leverage to act.
We face a similar challenge, according to Harari, in our sense of and attempts to achieve Justice. Built to comprehend justice at the level of individuals or small communities, we struggle to deal with what justice means --- what it demands of us in a moral sense --- when whole societies or nations are, for example, afflicted by a natural disaster or fall into turmoil. Harari describes methods we commonly resort to in comprehending these distant crises --- such as allowing an individual tragedy to stand in for the larger, too complex catastrophe, or resorting to conspiracy theories that blame a small group. But, these methods and others simply represent crutches that attempt to simplify the unfathomable complexity, and so inevitably fail to provide an understanding of how justice can be accomplished, particularly in global settings.
In the final section of lessons, Harari explores ways in which people can attempt to find a path through the complexity of modern life and global problems. Education seems like an obvious answer, but he argues that the pace of change makes that an imperfect solution. In the 15-20 years of education that will today supposedly prepare a child for adulthood, the world will change nearly unimaginably, particularly with the bio- and info-tech explosions Harari sees coming. How then to choose what to study, he asks, how to decide what will be important a decade or more hence?
Given that reality, the education that Harari finds most critical is an understanding of oneself, as a kind of inoculation against the already building tidal wave of the information economy and society. As companies and governments assemble ever more comprehensive databases of detail about our lives --- our purchases, our queries, our very movements through the world --- they develop a revealing window into our body’s health, our mind’s thoughts, and our innermost desires, including things we may not ourselves be aware of. When the path of least resistance is to simply accept what the algorithms present us based on what they figure out we want, or knowingly manipulate us into wanting, will we simply give in to it, or will we have the self-awareness and motivation to find our own path through it?
Unfortunately, Harari thoroughly dismantles the most comfortable and easy source of attempting to know oneself, that of finding a Meaning for life in one of the many stories humankind has created over the millennia to explain our existence. Religious traditions --- the dominant few or the myriad ancient versions --- and more recent political ‘isms’ are but stories that have tried to provide humankind the motivation to follow a particular path, or even just go on living. Whatever partial benefits these stories may have provided for particular communities at particular times, Harari deftly dissects them to reveal their inadequacies in dealing with our current situation in the world, and the global challenges that need addressed.
Harari’s work as a historian finally comes full circle in the lesson on Meaning. As described earlier, his book Sapiens convincingly demonstrated how the ability to create stories --- fictions about the world, how it is and how it could be, how we are related to our community and how we differ from others --- gave Homo Sapiens the decisive edge over other species of humans. However, this ancient evolutionary heritage, as so much else from what natural selection instilled in us, now works against us, or at least comes up short in the face of current-day realities. And so, in his final lesson, Harari writes “if you want to know the truth about the universe, about the meaning of life … the answer isn’t a story.” (313)
This failure of our evolutionary heritage Harari describes has fascinating ties to the arguments that author Richard Wright makes in his book Why Buddhism Is True. In that work, Wright focuses on the naturalistic aspects of Buddhism (as opposed to what he refers to as ‘the “supernatural” or more exotically metaphysical parts [such as] reincarnation’ (xiii, Wright)), demonstrating how the conclusions of current-day evolutionary psychology and neuroscience resonate strongly with Buddhist teachings now several millennia old.
Evolutionary psychologists have discovered myriad ways in which our thought patterns and processes, originating in the survival instincts of the earliest forms of life and molded in Homo Sapiens in the ancient environment of the savanna, fail us as we try to navigate the rapidly changing world of our present. In particular, they have concluded that our decision making processes are principally driven by our feelings, and that though these feeling can be informed by reason, they are largely out of our conscious control. Not only does this impact our ability to make decisions based on logical, rational choices, but also leaves us open to the kind of manipulation Harari laments, whether in our consumer choices or our political decisions. Perhaps more damningly, Wright points out research that shows that our feelings also color our interpretation and understanding of reality as we perceive it through our senses. (My review of Wright’s book linked to at right. )
The ties to Wright’s book deepen in Harari’s final lesson, in which he admits that, after 20 lessons describing the global challenges we face, the shortcomings of our political and social structures, and of ourselves, he owes it to the reader to “explain how somebody so skeptical can still manage to wake up cheerful in the morning.” (314) In Meditation, after acknowledging that his solution may not work for everyone, he introduces a bit about his personal history, saying that:
as a teenage I was restless and troubled …. I didn’t understand why there was so much suffering in the world and in my own life, and what could be done about it. (314)Eventually, in his mid-twenties, a friend convinced him to try meditation, and for Harari this has become the path to an understanding of the source of his suffering, and human suffering more broadly. He has discovered that he “knew almost nothing about [his] mind, and … had very little control over it.” (316) Through meditation he has not only begun to understand himself, he says, but also “humans in general.” (317) These concepts about overcoming suffering are central to Wright’s exploration in Why Buddhism Is True of the doctrines and practices of naturalistic Buddhism, and how strongly they align with what scientists are discovering about human behavior.
Harari acknowledges that meditation will not, in and of itself, solve climate change, or the challenges presented by the burgeoning bio-tech and info-tech revolutions. Instead, Harari argues, it can give us an awareness of ourselves and others, an ability to see through the ever more complex and irresistible stories being created by companies and institutions to funnel us along particular paths of their choosing, stories that threaten to prevent us not only from opening up to the full reality of what is at stake, but also from pursuing potential solutions outside the limited set presented to us. But the time for starting this journey to self-awareness is now, he warns, before things have progressed too far for us to be able to recover.
We have seen countries around the world descend into civil war and genocide in the last decades. And now, in the liberal democracies of the West, we watch populations turn against themselves in increasingly partisan disputes between groups that embrace globalism and others that struggle with its impacts and so turn to a powerful mix of populism and nationalism. Advances in information technology allow powerful private and governmental interests to corrupt the presentation of facts and truth, and brazen politicians make truth itself seem mold-able and untrustworthy.
It becomes increasingly difficult not only to know which sources to trust, but also to make sense of events, or how to react to them, how to begin to work to understand and finally improve our future. Into this confusion, Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century offers a concise and engaging exploration of the issues humankind faces, the existing social and political structures and human psychology and behaviors that limit our ability to respond, and the resulting threat to our future. His solution --- meditation --- may seem at once too limited and too pat, but it has the benefit of addressing something more fundamental than would a prescriptive list of policy solutions. It could be, finally, that the way to solve a difficult issue --- one with a lot of momentum and resistance to change --- is not to attack it directly but rather to change the thing behind the problem that hinders its solution, and so create an environment, a reality, in which the solution to the main problem becomes, if not inevitable, at least visible.
Other reviews / information:
Harari recently discussed his book 21 Lessons with Sam Harris, on Harris’ Waking Up podcast entitled The Edge of Humanity, linked to at right.
In her article Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer, journalist Nellie Bowles makes the surprising revelation that a number of the leaders in the technology industries about which Harari expresses his most dire concerns have embraced his message. (The New York Times, 9 November 2018)
In his novel East, West, author Mohsin Hamid offers an engaging look at the immigration issue. Told around the journey of a couple escaping their homeland as it descends into civil war, Hamid envisions the impact on the world of suddenly having all borders become circumventable. (A link to my review of East, West at right.)Author Johann Hari provides fascinating insight into the issues Harari explores in his lesson on Community, and in particular the destructive impacts of social isolation, in his discussion with Sam Harris, on Harris’ Waking Up podcast entitled Addiction, Depression, and a Meaningful Life, linked to at left. 
The 21 lessons that make up Harari's book are listed on the back cover, each with a few words that encapsulate the central idea. (Click to enlarge.)
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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