Author: Thomas Hager
One of my all-time favorite books is “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari. The story behind that book is that he published the collection of notes that he made to teach young college students history. After reading Sapiens, I had no doubt in my mind, that Yuval had a firm grasp and a strong opinion on the history of the world. Yuval followed that up with “Homo Deus” where he took all the lessons from history to predict what our future would look like. Unfortunately, I was not a believer and consequently didn’t really enjoy that book.
With this one, Yuval decided to pick 21 important topics and write essays on them. Some of them are “Disillusionment”, “Work”, “Liberty”, “Equality”, “Community”, “Civilization”, “Religion”, “Immigration”, “Culture”, “Justice”, “Post-Truth” and “Meaning”.
Work:
He talks about the rise of a new “useless class”. He fears that in the twenty first century there will be revolts against the economic elite, not because they are exploiting people, but more because they don’t need people anymore. He cites the example of Orthodox Jews in Israel who don’t work, but derive a basic income from the state. The surprising conclusion is that they are actually quite contented. So is this the future for the masses whose jobs have been displaced? Sorry, I am not a big fan of this outome.
Liberty:
He worries that Big Data Algorithms might extinguish liberty and create some of the most unequal societies that mankind has ever faced. All the wealth and power will be concentrated in the hands of a few elite people, while the majority of the world will end up being irrelevent.
Equality:
Hunter-gatherers were the most egalitarian society. Agriculture allowed us to have property which gave rise to inequality. Today, the
- Richest 1% own half the worlds wealth
- Richest 100 people have more wealth than poorest 4 billion
There is a deep-seated thread that runs throughout the book about the Biotech and Infotech revolutions coming together. The author predicts a world where the deepest secrets of life will be deciphered and made available through big data analytics to understand and predict every aspect of your life. It will be so all encompassing that most of the brainpower in the planet will be rendered obsolete. Since our brains take up a lot of energy to operate it may make sense to simply shut them down and get rid of them. “Matrix” anyone?
Community:
He makes some observations that make me stop and reflect on what’s happening around me:
In the name of "sharing experiences," people are encouraged to understand what happens to them in terms of how others see it. If something exciting happens, the gut instinct of Facebook users is to pull out their smartphones, take a picture, post it online, and wait for the "likes." In the process they barely notice what they themselves feel. Indeed, what they feel is increasingly determined by the online reactions to their post.
A key point in this chapter is “a crucial step toward uniting humankind is to appreciate that humans have bodies”. Any technological advances that only satisfy online needs are insufficient as they don’t take care of our physical needs around companionship and community.
Civilization:
“The people we fight most often are our own family members. Identity is defined by conflicts and dilemmas more then by agreement”. He cites the example of the many different countries in an Olympics and how they all have similar flags, national anthems, passports, rules of engagement, financial systems, etc. He observes that “this seeming competition between nations actually represents an astonishing global agreement”. He goes on to say that “Though humankind is far from constituting a harmonious community, we are all members of a single rowdy global civilization”. Of course, this chapter is followed by one on Nationalism.
Religion:
In ancient times, religion was used for everything from Science to Policy to Identity. In terms of both Science and Economic policy, the world has pretty much one standard which has no bearing on your religious preferences. However, religion still plays a dominant role in Identity. Almost every country on this planet has a dominant religion that plays an oversize role in shaping the identity of its citizens.
Immigration:
I love the way Yuval breaks things down into three major points and then applies a rigorous logical argument to each point. With immigration it is
1. Should we let people in2. What criteria do we use to let them in3. Should they assimilate with the local culture
Culture:
Yuval looks at the distinction between race and culture. While the core tenets of racism, like biological differences have been squashed by recent scientific developments, the notion that we all have unique cultural backgrounds is very much alive and present. He points out that traditional racism is waning and the world is now full of “culturists” which have both good and bad consequences. Culture is more malleable than biology, so present-day culturists may be more tolerant than the racists of the past.
Ignorance:
He argues that what gave humans our power, is not just our individual rationality, but more signficantly our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups. Power distorts anything that comes near it much like a Black Hole distorts anything in its gravitational field. This is why powerful people are surrounded by sycophants who are mostly telling them what they want to hear. For powerful people to be exposed to new ideas they have to be willing to spend time at the periphery which can be wasteful as well. This is a dilemma for which Harari does not offer any solutions.
Justice:
Human morality has evolved over the course of millions of years. The problem is not the set of values for which we have no dearth of. The problem lies in implementing these in a complex world. Early civilizations had only to face the dilemmas that their had community to deal with. Today, we have to come up wtih a code that is meaningful for the billions of people that inhabit the entire planet. “Justice demands not just an abstract set of values, but also an understanding of the concrete cause-and-effect relations”, which is almost untractable in the world we inhabit today. One sobering thought from this section is “Even if you personally belong to a disadvantaged group, … that doesn’t mean you understand the viewpoint of all other such groups”. Climate change is a great example of a common outcome that people across the world have different viewpoints on.
Post-Truth:
“Homo-Sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions”. He soundly equates Religion with Fake News. “When a thousand people believe a made-up story for one month — that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years — that’s a religion.” This is not to say that religion is useless. It can be very useful in bringing people together and making them unite and fight against the collective enemy. He also talks about how humans have the remarkable ability to both know and not know at the same time. More precisely, humans know something when they really spend the time to focus and think deeply about it. However, most of the time, they don’t really think about it, so they just follow the common path. Money or sports are good examples of made-up stuff. We all know that, but we treat them as super real.
Meaning:
This is a philosophical treatise on the many different attempts throughout human history to give meaning to our lives. To most people this involves a story. Yuval argues that Homo sapiens are by nature, storytelling animals who think in terms of stories rather than numbers and equations. He says “most people who go on identity quests are like children going on a treasure hunt: they find only what their parents have hidden for them in advance.”
Harari’s knowledge of the world, both past and present, is impressive and he brings it to bear in this chapter on the “meaning of life”. His cultural references are also on-point. In describing the futility of the Hindu belief of rebirth he throws in the cultural norm of women arguing with their mothers-in-law, and having to do it all over again every time they are reborn. He also knows that a Hindu who supports the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, would consider himself a pious person. Monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) are more intolerant and have wrought far more death and destruction than polytheistic religions (Hinduism, Incas). While he delves into the stories that different religions have come up with to create a foundation for a belief system, he is able to see how even the “no story” approach of Buddhism can take on a meaning of it’s own and justify the killing and persecution of people following other religions.
Meditation:
The final chapter on Meditation is a way for him let the readers “know which hues colour the glasses through which I see the world, thereby distorting my vision and my writing”. He points out that asking the question of what happens after you die, is implicitly making the assumption that there is something that you endures from your birth to your death. He argues that we don’t have this constancy and are constantly changing from one moment to the next. Our mind is constantly moving from one thing to another and often our reactions are to the sensations that we experience in our body. Modern technology has not yet figured out how our mind works and he has found medidation to be very useful in this cotext. Yuval has personal experience with Vipassana which he describes as a “way to observe body sensations and mental reactions to sensations in a methodical, continuous and objective manner, thereby uncovering the basic patterns of the mind.”
In summary, this book is both enlightening and entertaining. I am thinking of reading it again in a few years to see how well it fares with the passage of time.
