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Key insights from
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
By
Yuval Noah Harari
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What you’ll learn
The new century has been a dizzying spectacle so far, and it
shows no signs of slowing down. Harari assesses humanity’s current
predicament, discussing everything from AI and social media to evolving
religions and updated forms of justice and government. This book raises
questions and makes suggestions about how humanity might continue to find
its way forward.
Read on for key insights from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
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1. People are
experiencing intense disorientation between a lackluster liberal democracy
and disruptive technologies.
Humans are very drawn to stories. They provide a sense of
meaning and purpose. In the twentieth century, the popular political
stories were fascism, communism, and liberal democracy. Fascism fell with
Hitler, and after a grueling ideological battle between the remaining two
stories, liberal democracy won out. Free enterprise and representative
government became the political gospel to be spread to the corners of the
world. Whatever the social or economic maladies, the solution was freedom.
This was the prevailing notion for the 1990s and 2000s. It was not that
long ago that the United States was trying to democratize Iraq.
Since the financial meltdown of 2008, however, the narrative
of liberalism has lost its luster. Brexit and Trump’s election point to the
disillusionment with liberalism, as do the tariffs and the immigration
roadblocks. Chinese and Russian governments have doubled down on their
illiberal stances—at least as far as domestic policy goes. The
resurgence—and in some cases, fusion—of nationalistic and religious
identity in Turkey, India, and Poland are yet other indications.
Technological upheaval is further inflaming disillusionment
with liberalism. Technology is advancing with unprecedented speed, far
faster than we can understand how it works or how it will impact our lives.
Especially noteworthy are the biotech and infotech revolutions. As they
continue to advance, people will become increasingly obsolete as computers
and algorithms complete tasks previously delegated to humans—with far
greater efficiency and acumen. Exploitation of a lower class is no longer
the concern—the concern will be their complete irrelevance to the economy
system.
No doubt liberal democracy is the best form of government
that we’ve developed so far. On liberalism’s watch, the world has, on the
whole, experienced unprecedented prosperity and stability. For the first
time in all of human history, infectious diseases kill fewer people than
old age, and fewer die from acts of violence than from accidents. But
liberal thought grew up in a world of steam engines and assembly lines. It
does not equip us to confront our most formidable challenges of impending ecological
ruin and technological pandemonium.
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2. It’s not Big
Brother but Big Data that you should be wondering about.
Liberalism’s most cherished value is liberty. The right to
vote for politicians who will best represent the people’s interests is one
of the clearest manifestations of democracy, but what happens when we vote?
It isn’t a cool, disembodied calculation, but a gut reaction, a feeling.
This isn’t a bad thing (in fact, it’s part of an evolutionary rationality
that enables survival), but the decisions we make are based on the firings
of millions of neurons that process information at an unconscious level.
Liberalism’s belief in the supremacy of the individual is a
new idea. It’s supplanted an ancient notion that God dictates what is good
and true and we are to walk in the way that he commands. This
listen-to-your-heart decision-making has been fine, but what happens when
computers know us better than we do and can press all the right emotional
buttons? What we’ve considered “free will” will probably be shown as a
useful myth, and liberalism will become unwieldy as Google becomes a better
guide for interpreting our feelings. The individual has replaced God as the
source of ultimate authority, but are we on the verge of another
existential coup, in which algorithms replace human beings as authorities?
The silos of computer science and biology are beginning to
merge. As biotech and infotech revolutions continue to dovetail, they will
yield Big Data algorithms capable of surveying and interpreting feelings
better than the individuals experiencing them. Think about the possible
practices and implications for the field of health: Big Data could process
a steady stream of biometric input for individuals in their homes, provide
consistent updates on our health, and anticipate disease and cancer. It
could recommend foods, exercise plans, and lifestyle choices based on our
personality and DNA profiles.
With a knowledge of your decision-making, motivation, and
opinions that put your mother’s care to shame, algorithms would be able to
provide guidance on matters as trivial as movie selection and as important
as career path and marriage. AI already assists us when we are navigating a
new city or wondering what movie to watch, but this is Stone Age stuff
compared to where Big Data algorithms could take us.
The problem with these developments will come if we don’t
invest in advancing human consciousness as well as AI. If AI advances
outpace human development (which, at the moment, they do), it will enable
our human tendency towards stupidity and the path of least resistance.
Atrophy is a far swifter process than muscle development; this is true of
the body as well as the mind.
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3. Because human
beings have bodies, social media is not a substitute for genuine community.
At the 2017 Communities Summit, Mark Zuckerberg gave a
speech in which he argued that the present-day social and political
pandemonium can be traced back to community breakdowns. Zuckerberg
expressed Facebook’s commitment to developing tools that will help reverse
the dissolution of community ties that have reached epidemic proportion in
recent decades. It’s a commendable goal, and Zuckerberg’s observations are
both timely and accurate, but the task is a formidable one. Assuming that
Facebook manages to sort out its privacy issues (confidentiality and
voluntary self-disclosure are integral to any healthy community), it still
has the challenge of encouraging not just online participation, but online
participation that will lead to offline engagement. So far, online usage
has come at the expense of offline relationships.
Community can’t be grounded in cyberspace. It can’t be
grounded in imagined communities or abstractions like the GOP or the
Communist Party. We need flesh-and-blood comrades. If you are sick at home
in Florida, and you talk to your friend in New Delhi via Facebook, he might
send well wishes, but he can’t bring you a bowl of soup or drive you to the
hospital. Humans require intimate communities for a sense of wellbeing.
It’s impossible to know and be known by more than 150 people—whatever your
friend count may say to the contrary. One of the goals of Facebook is to
allow users to share and help others understand their personal experiences.
But people now have a hard enough time understanding their own experiences,
so shaped are they by the likes and comments of others.
Zuckerberg’s attempt at bridging the online and offline
experience is revolutionary. It is challenging for corporations to
facilitate efforts like these because philanthropic ends aren’t always the
most efficient or business-savvy, and most CEOs, employees, and
shareholders aren’t willing to make the kinds of profit sacrifices that
might be required. At any rate, it is the first try at using AI to
centrally plan social engineering on a global level. With over two billion
active users, this might work. If it succeeds, it will be the first of many
new AI-based community buildings. If it doesn’t, we will gain a better
understanding of the limitations of these algorithms.
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4. Belief systems
whose members are forthright about past moral failings will have the
greatest influence in the twenty-first century.
Secularism is often defined in terms of what it isn’t: what
people don’t believe, or rituals people don’t practice. The negative
description is neither flattering nor accurate. There are positive elements
to the secular world picture, and many of its beliefs overlap with the
beliefs of major religious traditions. What makes secularism different than
some of those traditions is that it doesn’t assert a monopoly on truth and
wisdom. They see these things as springing up from the human experience at
many times and in many places.
The secular mindset is also not a wholesale, either-or:
plenty of people observe their traditions, rituals and practices while
participating robustly in secular society and observing secular ethical
norms—morals that most Christians, Muslims, and Hindus would find
satisfactory.
The basis for truth and morality is different than religious
traditions, however. The secular ideal is truth based on empirical evidence
rather than divine commands. It never conflates truth and belief. The lack
of transcendent grounding does create some challenges for the secularist.
Without a divine code to refer and defer to, there must be a judicious and
thoughtful exploration of various opinions and feelings of those with a
stake in a given matter. Through this process, a middle way can hopefully
be synthesized which brings minimal harm to sentient beings.
Another challenge that the secularist will face is what
technological advances mean for categories like human rights. Human rights
were born out of a response to Nazi and Soviet massacres, the KKK, and
other oppressive religious practices. They have been an important
contribution to our world, but how helpful will they be in deciding
questions of cyborgs, supercomputers, and even superhumans?
Moving forward in the twenty-first century, secularists and
the religious alike must recognize where their belief systems have flown
off the rails, and identify what’s been done to curtail violence and
fanaticism from cropping up again. How did a religion like
Christianity—supposedly built upon love—permit such heinous episodes as the
Inquisition or the Crusades? What was it in the writings of Marx that led
to gulags and the KGB? Why was it so easy for Nazis and Jim Crow to bend
Darwinian theories to racist ends?
Each worldview has its own dark side. Whatever your beliefs,
do you have the humility to acknowledge grievances honestly? Secularists
tend to be more open to admitting faults because their system is not in
danger of collapsing over mistakes. If devotees of a belief system will not
be honest about shortcomings, they cannot hope that their worldview will
have prominent influence in global conversations.
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5. Justice has
become an increasingly complicated matter in the twenty-first century.
Justice and morality more generally have evolved over
millions of years. Times were simpler in Sapiens' hunter-gatherer
phase, though. Is it acceptable to take an armful of apples from another
person simply because you are bigger and stronger? If you hear that the rival
clan is planning on attacking your village tomorrow, are you justified in
leading the charge tonight? It’s tempting to think that justice has not
changed even if the particulars have. The truth is that changes in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have, from an evolutionary
perspective, left us scant time to adapt to our surroundings.
There’s no shortage of values in this world. It is not a
problem of values that we face, but a problem of numbers and complexity. In
the hunter-gatherer days, cause-and-effect relationships were much clearer.
If someone stole your kill, and you weren’t able to get it back, you’d go
home without food for your family, and you’d all go to sleep hungry.
Economic, political, and social systems cover the globe in a net that is
intimately interconnected and staggeringly complex. According to some
leftist groups, many of us are slave owners for buying clothes produced in
Cambodian and Bangladeshi sweatshops. Our continued silence on issues
of trafficking and child labor allow them to continue horrendous trades.
Even if you live a peaceful existence at home, you are still in bed with
smugglers and terrorists on the other side of the world. Are these
accusations fair? Sheer complexity makes it difficult to assess.
In the face of such dilemmas, people employ one of four
tactics. Some oversimplify the struggle, reducing a conflict involving
large groups to one representative good guy and bad guy: Trump versus Putin
or Assad versus a rebel. Others hold on to one story of a flesh-and-blood
human enduring the struggle as the best way to understand a struggle
(charities tend to utilize this tactic). Still others resort to conspiracy
theories, that the CIA, the Freemasons, or a handful of billionaires are
manipulating global affairs on a scale and level of effectiveness we can
scarcely imagine. A fourth tactic is to submit to a stable ideology or
institution that can give a sense of moral certitude in a world where the
lines are not clean-cut. It is hard to devise a suitable alternative for
our twenty-first-century world.
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6. The question we
need to ask is not about what life means but how we can reduce suffering in
the world.
As mentioned earlier, human beings tend to understand the
world around them in terms of stories. Narrative tends to stick better than
graphs and stats. Stories not only offer an explanation of life, the most
powerful stories give people a sense of meaning within the stories. Some of
these stories are more cyclical, like The Lion King and the
Bhagavad Gita, from which The Lion King draws a great deal of
inspiration. The “circle of life” and the harmony that comes when creatures
learn their place within it did not originate with Mufasa. The father-son
discourse with Simba about lions eating antelope eating grass eating lions
(in so many words) is reminiscent of the Hindu doctrine of dharma, or duty.
Other stories are more linear like Islam and Zionism. These
offer a narrative of creation, judgment, and a blissful afterlife. Muslims
and Zionists are in the middle of an epic drama, and faithful adherence to
faith produces the rewards of paradise, whether in a celestial realm, or in
Jerusalem. Even Communism holds out meaning-filled promises of working
class triumph over bourgeois forces followed by the era of proletariat peace
on earth.
Whether cyclical or linear, religious or secular, meaning is
something that people hunt for. There are two necessary components for a
person to feel her life has meaning. One, there must be something that she
can do within the cosmic story, and, two, the story must extend beyond her
horizons.
It’s important to note that truth is never essential to a
person feeling a sense of meaning. The problem with a story-driven approach
is that, given the numerous scientific discoveries that have been made, we
can confidently dismiss these stories as myth and wishful thinking. They
are powerful tools for motivating and mobilizing, but don’t look for truth
in these tales.
Liberalism has taken a slightly different tack with its
emphasis on individualism. By placing the self at the center of the
narrative, liberalism has bucked the need for anything close to a
totalizing narrative. Over two millennia ago, the Buddha took things
farther, by not only discouraging the pursuit of a grand story, but also
the inner drama that people unnecessarily amplify. The identities and
sources of happiness that we pursue never satiate. Moreover, the emotions
we attach to experiences, whether momentary happiness of acquiring
something or disappointment (which is far more likely and frequent) are
illusory. What are emotions but momentary vibrations?
Reality exists, but this doesn’t mean that it is contained
within a mythic creation story. The big question that we should be asking
is not “what is the meaning of life?” but “how do we reduce suffering in
the world?” By ending the hunt for meaning, we are liberated from
suffering.
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of 21
Lessons for the 21st Century here. And since we get a commission on
every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.
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