Lessons for 2019, Or, How to Write a Global Story

Book Review:

Yuval Noah Harari, "21 Lessons for the 21st Century", Jonathan Cape, 2018.

This year, Yuval Noah Harari released his third book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which follows his bestsellers Sapiens (reviewed here) and Homo Deus (here). If Sapiens was about the past and Homo Deus was about the future, then 21 Lessons is about the present. In essence, the book explores whether we can still understand ourselves and the world we have created, and whether we can maintain focus in this age of bewilderment. Naturally, I had to complete the trilogy.

Harari states his purpose in the introduction:

"In this book I want to zoom in on the here and now. My focus is on current affairs and on the immediate future of human societies. What is happening right now? What are today's greatest challenges and choices? What should we pay attention to? What should we teach our kids?" (pp. ix-x)

The author's aim is to stimulate discussion about today's global issues such as technological challenges and political disagreements, and to explore ways of improving liberal democracy.

I will summarize each chapter below. Conveniently, each of the twenty-one chapters corresponds to a "lesson", although the author notes that he does not intend to "conclude with simple answers".

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Part I introduces the challenge posed by infotech (e.g. artificial intelligence, Big Data and blockchain) and biotech (e.g. genetic engineering) at a time when humanity is losing faith in "the liberal story".

• The lesson on disillusionment | Since the 1990s, the dominant story about the past and future of the world has been liberalism, which celebrates liberty, democracy, free enterprise, globalism and human rights. However, with the rise of Donald Trump and Brexit in 2016, it seems that things no longer make sense to the liberal elites. According to Y.N. Harari, one of the reasons why people are losing faith in the democratic process has to do with technological disruption that is making the common person feel increasingly irrelevant. If liberalism wants to survive, it needs answers to technological disruption and ecological collapse; simply "more economic growth" may not be good enough. But in order to choose our next steps, it will be useful to switch from panic mode into more clear-sighted bewilderment.
• The lesson on work | In the coming decades, machine learning and robotics may automate away billions of jobs as AI will start to outperform humans on both physical and cognitive tasks. AI will have further advantages over humans, namely the ability to connect to an integrated network and the ability to update quickly. In the future, algorithms could even create art that touches our emotions better than any human-created art. We will see not only AI drivers, but also AI doctors, bankers and lawyers. Even if new jobs for humans are created, the difficulty lies in retraining the unemployed, which will be a continuous and stressful cycle. And if job losses outpace job creation, how will we provide for people's basic needs while preserving their self-worth? Universal basic income and universal basic services are proposed ideas; but such support is typically neither "universal" (since the main victims of automation may live in developing countries) nor "basic" (since it is hard to define basic human needs). Harari suggests that we supplement economic support with meaningful pursuits such as sports, religion, and community.
• The lesson on liberty | Liberalism says that the voter knows best and the customer is always right, because the feelings, desires and choices of individuals reflect their authoritative "free will". (Personally I find this claim odd, as I don't perceive a necessary link between denying metaphysical determinism and valuing individual liberty.) Nonetheless, according to Harari, Big Data algorithms may undermine individual freedom because they will "hack" the biochemical mechanisms we humans use to reach our decisions. Infotech and biotech may come to understand us better than we understand ourselves; at that point, we will plausibly outsource much of our decision-making to them. Algorithms may simply be more reliable than humans, so we would willingly place our trust in them. Yet perhaps more frightening is the possibility of a digital dictatorship: some authoritarian regime could use killer robots to stifle dissent or perpetrate ethnic cleansing. AI could enable an Orwellian surveillance state, and even let a dictator manipulate the citizens into loving him. To prevent such outcomes, democracy will have to adapt. In addition, Harari recommends that we invest more in developing human consciousness, so that AI won't simply empower our natural stupidity.
• The lesson on equality | Liberalism also values equality, yet infotech and biotech are threatening to create the most unequal societies we've ever seen. At the start of the 21st century, people had hope that globalization and the Internet would spread economic prosperity throughout the world, yet today it seems that many folks are disappointed -- indeed, inequality within and between societies has increased. Things could get far worse if in the future the super rich are able to enhance and upgrade their physical and mental abilities, thereby becoming more talented, creative, intelligent, beautiful, and healthy than everyone else. Taken to the extreme, this would imply the separation of humankind into separate "biological castes", in the author's words. Without the goodwill of the small elite, the useless masses would be shut out of the "civilized" zone. So how do we prevent this? According to Harari, whoever owns the data owns the future; therefore, we should scrutinize giant "attention merchants" like Google, Facebook, Baidu and Tencent, and ask whether (a) we should continue giving away our personal data to corporations; (b) governments should nationalize it; or (c) we should somehow enforce the private ownership of our own data. This is still a conundrum.

Part II of the book explores a range of potential responses to the aforementioned challenges. But the response poses its own political challenge: how will we manage to cooperate on a global level given the hostility engendered by nationalism, religion and culture?

• The lesson on community | In February 2017, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a manifesto on the new role Facebook should play in building meaningful communities. Y.N. Harari agrees that the decline of intimate communities is behind much of our sociopolitical malaise, yet he doubts whether we need more online communities; it is arguably the disconnection from our physical environment and bodies that creates feelings of alienation and disorientation. Therefore, Harari says, we need more meaningful offline activities with friends.
• The lesson on civilization | It seems like many folks today believe that the "Western" and "Islamic" civilizations are bound to clash, because they simply do not share the same values and world-views. Thus, politicians in the USA and Europe argue that the West should cease accepting Muslim immigrants. But according to Harari, the Islamic fundamentalists are closer to today's global culture than to Muhammad, since human social systems rarely endure for more than a few centuries -- there is no unique Muslim or Christian or European essence that has remained unchanged for millennia. Moreover, the author notes that human tribes "tend to coalesce over time into larger and larger groups" (p. 98). Today, people all around the world accept a single global political paradigm. States have similar national anthems and flags, and nearly all send delegations to the Olympic Games. Doctors around the world will treat you with the same medicines. Harari uses these as examples of how, at least in practical matters, we are all part of the same civilization. So, instead of defining our group identities in terms of common traits (e.g. "we are Christians") we should define them in terms of internal disputes (e.g. "we Europeans disagree about immigration").
• The lesson on nationalism | In recent years, more folks have called for nationalistic isolation. Yet there are three major challenges we face, none of which can be adequately answered by nationalism. Firstly, nuclear war can be avoided only if we allow an internationalist regime to safeguard global peace. Secondly, the threat of climate change and ecological collapse is a global one, since no single nation can unilaterally stop global warming. Finally, technological disruption cannot be addressed by the nation state, because even if one country bans infotech and biotech, other countries may still pursue high-risk high-gain developments. These three problems together threaten the future of human civilization, and nationalism is ill-suited as a solution. Nevertheless, Harari reassures us that we do not need to abandon all local traditions or stop believing in the uniqueness of our nations; we just need to simultaneously forge a common global destiny.
• The lesson on religion | The majority of people in the world today are still religious, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or something else. But can religion offer us help with technical problems such as how to deal with droughts caused by climate change? Can religion help us with policy problems such as which economic policies to adopt to prevent global warming? According to Harari, the answer to both questions is no. Thanks to the achievements of science, there is no longer such a thing as "Christian agriculture" or "Muslim economics", since people everywhere have adopted the same technologies and similar economic theories. However, religion is still relevant to the problem of identities: i.e. whose problems should we care about? Religious myths can still determine who counts as "us" and who counts as "them", especially when mixed with nationalism. The results can be dangerous, because doctrinal differences and arguments over how to interpret medieval texts might very well escalate into World War III.
• The lesson on immigration | The debate on immigration is especially intense in the European Union, but according to Harari the conflict can only be overcome if people understand the four distinct debates, plus the underlying question of "culturism". To put it briefly, the four debates are: (i) does a host country have the duty to allow in immigrants or is it merely a favor that immigrants should feel grateful for? (ii) to what extent are immigrants obliged to assimilate into the local culture? (iii) how long does it take before the host country must accept the immigrants as full and equal citizens? and (iv) how do we know that both sides are living up to their end of the deal? Yet we may or may not enter these debates with the assumption that all cultures are inherently equal. There are cultural relativists who argue that we should not prefer one culture over another, but Harari dismisses this view as unrealistic: there are significant differences between human cultures, as anthropologists, sociologists and historians know very well -- and sometimes these differences include being more or less accepting of witch-burning and infanticide, and being more or less tolerant of strangers. When people criticize immigrants for failing to adopt the local norms and values, they are not being racist, but culturist. This is better than traditional biological racism (because it's scientifically sounder), yet culturist claims still fall into several traps, such as confusing local superiority with objective superiority, making overly general and hazy claims, and incorrectly judging individuals based on statistical stereotypes. Harari concludes that the immigration debate is "a discussion between two legitimate political positions, which should be decided through standard democratic procedures" (p. 154).

Part III, titled 'Despair and Hope', suggests that one way to overcome our disagreements is to keep our fears under control (especially regarding terrorism and war) and to be more humble, so as to diminish the biases and hatreds that can spark conflict.

• The lesson on terrorism | Each year, terrorism kills fewer people than traffic accidents, diabetes, or air pollution. Yet terrorists are skilled at instilling disproportionate fear in people's minds, because according to Harari, terrorists think like theater producers. Terrorism works not because it causes material damage, but because it provokes governments to overreact, like the proverbial bull in the china shop. And governments overreact because modern states base their legitimacy on keeping the public sphere free of violence -- thus, in the author's words, "a small coin in a big empty jar makes a lot of noise" (p. 165). In order to fight terrorism, we need to stop panicking. States should take clandestine action against terror networks, the media should stop obsessing over the theater of terror, and the rest of us should liberate our imaginations from the terrorists.
• The lesson on war | Many folks seem to think that we are on the brink of the Third World War. Harari reminds us, however, that 2018 is different from 1914 because there are very few recent examples of successful wars. Since 1945, Germany, Italy, Japan and China made most of their gains in power not from military conflict but from economic factors. The only successful invasion by a major power in the 21st century has been Russia's annexation of Crimea; but this was arguably feasible only because there was a lack of resistance, and it wasn't without cost to Russia. Putin's Kremlin still seems economically stagnant, and it does not excel in either biotechnology or information technology. The author argues that military power cannot go far in the 21st century, because the most valuable economic assets today are technical and institutional knowledge rather than natural/material resources. Of course, the combination of nuclear weapons and cyberwarfare also means that war has become a high-damage low-profit affair; thus, war is unlikely. But it is not impossible -- there is always room for human stupidity and/or bounded rationality in history.
• The lesson on humility | Everyone thinks that their culture is the center of the world and the "linchpin of human history", but Harari reminds us that none of the nations or religions of today existed back in the days when humans first spread out from Africa to colonize the world, domesticate plants and animals, build cities, and invent writing and money. He asserts that when people claim credit for all human achievements, they display a mix of racism, egotism, and ignorance of history. For most of the chapter, Harari criticizes the Jewish people, especially Orthodox Jews, since he is from Israel. He leaves it to the reader to "puncture the hot-air balloons inflated by their own tribes" (p. 183).
• The lesson on God | This short chapter clarifies the meaning of the word "God", which according to Harari has two meanings: (a) the grand cosmic mystery of what shaped the laws of physics and why there is conscious life; and (b) the worldly lawgiver whose preferences about human sexuality, gender roles and alcohol we know very concretely. The author has no problem with the former, but prefers to call it by a name other than "God". When it comes to the latter definition, there are several problems. Firstly, there is no logical connection between the awesome enigma and specific dress codes or food taboos. Secondly, all of the sacred holy texts (e.g. the Bible and Quran) were actually written by our human ancestors, not some cosmic force. And thirdly, religious faith is often regarded as being the bedrock of morality, but in reality, secular laws are just as good at maintaining the social order, and moral behavior is to a large extent natural anyway (because hurting others is usually not in our self-interest). Harari concludes that religious rituals and temples are fine as long as they make people experience harmony rather than conflict.
• The lesson on secularism | Like religion, secularism can be described in terms of a positive and coherent "code of values", but unlike religion, secularism does not claim monopoly over morality and wisdom. It is hence that the secular code forms the basis of modern scientific and democratic institutions. The secular ideal, according to Harari, values truth, compassion, equality, freedom, the courage to admit ignorance, and responsibility. As long as Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindus are committed to these core values, they should be allowed to partake in their own religious rites and ceremonies. However, any ideology, creed, world-view or movement (including secularism) has a "shadow": a major mistake made by those who misunderstand the ideals or promise too much. For example, secularism has influenced both Stalinist gulags as well as the melting ice caps caused by industrial capitalism. The doctrine of human rights may not be prepared to deal with biotech or AI. Thus, to avoid dogmatism, we must be ready to acknowledge our blind spots and blunders.

Part IV deals with the complexity of global processes and the ramifications this has for those who seek truth. Can we still make sense of the world and separate fact from fiction, wrongdoing from justice?

• The lesson on ignorance | Although the liberal story says the voter knows best and the customer is always right, the world today is even less comprehensible for individuals than it was in the Stone Age. We rely on others for almost all our needs. Thus, as the author notes: "Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire" (p. 219). The problem is even worse for people in power, like political figures and CEOs, because these people are just too busy to have the time needed to slowly explore the risky periphery of knowledge (which is where insights are usually found). Furthermore, the people surrounding them are always trying to get something from them. Harari thus advises those who seek truth to escape the "black hole" of power.
• The lesson on justice | Thanks to evolutionary psychology, we can argue that our sense of justice is better attuned to the kinds of ethical dilemmas that would arise in forager tribes of a few dozen people than it is to today's global world, where cause-and-effect relations are often obfuscated. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors on the savanna knew where their food came from and who stole it; today it is hard to know if our pension funds are investing our money in corporations that dump toxic waste into rivers and whether this counts as "theft" or not. This makes debates about climate change and artificial intelligence difficult. According to Harari, people use four methods to judge large-scale moral dilemmas: (i) they "downsize" the issue as if it were taking place between two foragers; (ii) they spin it into a personal human story; (iii) they weave conspiracy theories about who really controls the world; and (iv) they place all their trust in a single religious or ideological dogma. These methods tend to deny the true complexity of the world -- so should we just trust the liberal individualist dogma of aggregated preferences, or should we strive to create a global community that can make sense of the world together, or something else?
• The lesson on post-truth | Although people fear that we are in a new post-truth era, the truth is that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. Moreover, our species has always distinguished itself from other animals by the ability to create and believe in fictions -- indeed, this is one of the core lessons in Harari's book Sapiens. Therefore, we could argue that religion is a kind of "fake news". Of course, the fact that religious creeds are fictions does not necessarily make them less inspiring or beautiful, and Harari acknowledges the role they play in facilitating large-scale human cooperation. On the other hand, religions and other mythologies (e.g. communism, fascism, liberalism, nationalism etc.) can also be harmful. Unfortunately, it isn't possible to unite and organize masses of people without false stories; thus, as the author writes, "humans prefer power to truth" (p. 242). The important thing to remember is that human suffering is still real, and some politicians and newspapers are more honest than others. Harari's advice: (a) pay good money to get reliable information; and (b) read the scientific literature on the issues you care a lot about.
• The lesson on science fiction | Science fiction plays an important role in shaping the public's perception of things like AI and bioengineering. It is therefore important that science fiction writers avoid common pitfalls (like confusing intelligence with consciousness, discussed in Homo Deus) and start to pay attention to realistic ways in which technologies can be used to manipulate and control people. And realistically, technology won't trap our authentic selves in some kind of matrix; rather, there is no "authentic self" with free will. You are trapped inside your brain, which is trapped inside human society -- outside the matrix is just a bigger matrix. But, as Harari notes, your mental experiences are still real. You can still explore fear and love inside the simulation. An example of a science fiction work that accepts this (realistic) assumption that humans are biochemical algorithms is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which everyone lives in peace, prosperity and contentment due to the control exercised by the world government. One of the questions figuratively raised by Huxley was whether it is possible to escape the system. As Harari concludes: "Since your brain and your 'self' are part of the matrix, to escape the matrix you must escape your self" (p. 255).

The final part of 21 Lessons, Part V, is about building resilience in an age of bewilderment. The author takes a broad look at life: what kinds of skills do we need, and what is the meaning of life today?

• The lesson on education | A characteristic feature of the 21st century, according to Harari, will be the ephemeral nature of the basic facts of human life. We have no idea what the world will look like in 2050. Therefore, it makes little sense for schools to focus on cramming information, since much of it will probably be irrelevant in a couple of decades. What education should do instead is teach kids how to make sense of information and how to combine bits of data into a coherent, meaningful picture of the world. Likewise, teaching skills such as C++ coding is also not the best way to prepare people for the future -- schools should instead emphasize "general-purpose life skills", including how to learn new things, deal with change, and preserve one's mental balance. Change is stressful, yet it is likely to accelerate; thus, it is important for people to be able to constantly reinvent themselves. But to do so in a world where Big Data algorithms can hack and manipulate humans requires knowing thyself.
• The lesson on meaning | In this long chapter, Harari attempts to answer questions like "who am I?" and "what should I do in life?". People look for the meaning of life in various stories -- such as the eternal "Circle of Life" story (e.g. as in Hinduism and Buddhism), the linear grand narrative (e.g. Islam, nationalism, communism), the idea of "leaving something behind", and the poetry of romance. All of these have flaws, yet people still believe the stories because they give people a role to play, embed people within bigger horizons, and captivate people's attention with minute details. Of course, since stories are fiction, they cannot tell us the true meaning of life. Yet when people have built their personal identities and collective institutions on stories, it becomes hard to doubt these stories. This relates to the cognitive dissonance produced by the rites and rituals which make the abstract more tangible and often involve costly sacrifice. In addition, people compartmentalize as a way of hedging their bets -- thus few people put all their faith in a single identity. While religions try to emphasize unquestioning faith, the modern liberal mythology pushes back and upholds doubt as essential to freedom. According to liberalism, the meaning of life is not given to us from somewhere out in the universe, but we create meaning by feeling, thinking, desiring and inventing. Of course, Harari here repeats the argument from his two previous books, namely that we have no "free will" to decide what to desire; therefore, we should acknowledge that our desires are biochemical processes and that the "self" is a sanitized story. Why? Well, the author claims that only if we relinquish our attachment to whatever "eternal essence" we are pursuing can we escape suffering. This is because "... if you really know the truth about yourself and about the world, nothing can make you miserable" (p. 306). Although this is very hard to do, Harari offers a starting point: the test of reality is whether an entity can suffer.
• The lesson on meditation | The book concludes with an anecdote from Yuval Harari's own life, describing how a ten-day Vipassana retreat he attended in 2000 taught him the most important thing he ever learned: that observing the reality of the present moment and just being aware of it without trying to control anything is a practical way to understand one's mind and bodily sensations. With meditation, you learn that "nothing endures even from one moment to the next" (p. 311) and that you "never react to events in the outside world" (p. 312) but to the sensations in your own body. Not only is meditation a step toward reducing suffering, but it can also be a scientific tool to help us understand the human mind. It is still a mystery how exactly the material brain produces the subjective experiences of the mind; yet we cannot reliably access the minds of others in order to objectively and methodically study them. So why not be like anthropologists, zoologists and astronauts of the mind by directly observing our own minds? That way, we can dig the tunnel between mind and brain from both sides -- and hopefully understand our minds before the algorithms hack us.

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Readers of Sapiens and Homo Deus will recognize many of the themes recurring in 21 Lessons. Of course, Sapiens introduced the author's argument that Homo sapiens came to dominate planet Earth thanks to their ability to coordinate masses of individuals using fictive language -- in other words, talking about things that exist only in the imagination (like gods, nations, laws, and money). These shared myths return in 21 Lessons in the discussion about truth and meaning. Those who seek power may prefer stories, real or not, whereas those who seek truth would do well to forgo power, according to Harari. At the very least, one should be willing to admit the limitations of one's world-view and acknowledge that one's culture is not the center of the world.

Sapiens also mentioned the Buddhist idea that "suffering arises from craving" and that happiness comes from accepting things as they are in the present moment. This comes back in 21 Lessons when Harari shares his experiences with Vipassana meditation. But here, meditation is also offered as one potential method of exploring the truth of the human mind. In that sense, it is also an answer to some of the questions raised in Homo Deus, i.e. how can we fight our ignorance of the mental spectrum before techno-humanism inadvertently downgrades us? And could algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?

The potential future threats discussed in Homo Deus, namely that our decision-making gets taken over by non-conscious algorithms or that humanity gets split into unequal biological castes, are also recapitulated in Part I of  21 Lessons. But 21 Lessons also points out the possibility of a digital dictatorship and the spectre of technological unemployment, as well as threats from nuclear war and climate change. Thus, in some ways this latest book is even more pessimistic. However, at the same time, it puts more emphasis on things we can do now to avoid a catastrophic outcome:

Don't panic. In the absence of jobs, look for meaningful pursuits that preserve people's self-worth. Develop human consciousness. Figure out who should own the data. Spend more time offline. Remember your tribe's internal disputes, not just your commonalities. Accept that we need a global community to solve global problems. Beware mixing religion with nationalism. When debating immigration, be clear about what you're really debating. Don't overreact to terrorism. Don't dismiss war as impossible. Be more humble about your culture. Use "God" to foster harmony, not conflict. Have the courage to admit ignorance. Avoid the "black hole" of power (if you seek truth). Appreciate the world's complexity. Read science, because it is our most reliable source of knowledge. Write science fiction to teach science to the public. Learn how to deal with constant change. Don't think the meaning of life is some "eternal essence". Try Vipassana meditation.

That's a lot of advice -- but the common themes are humility, introspection, calmness, and clarity. The obvious question here is whether Harari's advice actually rises to the challenge. Recall that one of the core claims in the book Homo Deus was that liberal humanism (which Harari regards as the dominant world religion today) is being threatened by potential technological disruption, especially as we strive to defeat aging, find everlasting bliss and attain divinity. And 21 Lessons makes nearly the same core claim: that people are becoming disillusioned with the liberal story, yet it seems like no new story has emerged to replace it. So, to judge Harari by his own standard, the question should be: can humility, introspection, calmness and clarity help us reinvent liberalism and/or create an updated story for the world? Well, it may seem like a long shot; but note the first sentence in 21 Lessons: "In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power." Harari continues, "history gives no discounts. [...] If this empowers even a handful of additional people to join the debate about the future of our species, I have done my job" (p. ix). So if the author's aim is to give readers the tools to participate in discussions about today's global challenges, then humility, introspection, calmness and clarity do not seem too bad as tools.

One aspect of Y.N. Harari's philosophy that continues to puzzle me (despite him explaining it across all three books) is the implied notion that "knowing oneself" or "accepting things as they are" (through Vipassana or Stoicism or whatever) is a substitute for believing that there is meaning in life. Harari insists that there is no scientific meaning to human life, no free will, and no single true self. Yet it is unclear what one is supposed to do after accepting this -- presumably, the person who acknowledges that their self-concept and perception of meaning are merely illusions will go on living their lives as they did before (albeit perhaps with more meditation). Of course, I understand why Harari emphasizes the fact that our minds are biochemical processes; it is central to the argument that we are "hackable" by AI. For people to take the risk seriously, they should on some level accept that the mind is not magic but a natural phenomenon. However, in my opinion there is an easier approach here. Instead of telling people that their lives have no meaning, tell them that their lives have meaning because they are rich in conscious experiences, but the space of possible minds is huge and any superintelligent algorithm is unlikely to share their values by coincidence.

That said, I think 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is generally a great book, worthy of 5/5 stars for the same reasons as Harari's other books: it is well-written and engaging, accessible, and takes a big-picture perspective that helps the reader appreciate both the power of human imagination and the agency we have in shaping our future. Although it does not have illustrations or tables like the other two books, 21 Lessons compensates with more fresh content than its predecessor. It can be recommended to anyone.

As a bonus, it has an eye-catching cover...