Humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions.
As Yuval Noah Hurari states in his introduction, his book Sapiens was about the deep past of human history, Homo Deus was about our deep future, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a reflection on our present; where we are in the today of 2018 and where he sees us up to about the year 2050. Considering categories such as Work, Nationalism, War, and God, Hurari's primary point is that it's all fiction: Liberalism, Capitalism, Religion, National Borders; these are all simply stories that we tell ourselves and the biggest hurdle we are about to face is sleepwalking into a greater interface with “Big Data algorithms” and allowing them to shape our reality; allowing them to provide the new fictions by which we organise our thoughts about how the world works, enriching the few and enslaving the rest. Seemingly out of nowhere, the final chapter in this book is on the benefits of meditation – of recognising that the only reality is the fact of one's own body – and while I have long understood that meditation is an integral part of Harari's writing process, it's primacy here surprised me (not in a bad way, it just pushed the whole premise out of History and into a New Agey category in my mind). If John Lennon sang, “Imagine no possessions, no countries, no religion, too”, what Hurari is saying is, “We need to stop imagining that there are possessions, or countries, or religion”; and that won't be easy for our post-truth species without acknowledging that our brains are constantly creating these fictions.
I received an ARC of 21 Lessons, and although I am not actually supposed to quote from it, all I want to do in this review is allow Hurari to speak for himself, so be advised: these passages may not be in their final forms.
If somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then if somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it doesn't sound like science fiction – it is certainly false.As Hurari begins with, we Sapiens found ourselves in the 20th century being asked to choose between three organising stories – Fascism, Communism, and Liberalism – and after the fall of the Soviet Union, we in the West believed that we had arrived at the “end of history”; that the spread of liberal democracy (even if it was achieved with the threat or fact of violence) was inevitable; we were marching towards one global community with freedom and liberty for all. But we suddenly find ourselves facing the resurgence of strongmen on the other side of the world, and to the liberals' horror, the rise of nationalism/populism in our own countries. From this opening, all of the rest follows:
• In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail; in 2018 we are down to zero. No wonder that the liberal elites, who dominated much of the world in recent decades, have entered a state of shock and disorientation. To have one story is the most reassuring situation of all. Everything is perfectly clear. To be suddenly left without any story is terrifying.
• Any story that seeks to gain humanity's allegiance will be tested above all in its ability to deal with the twin revolutions in infotech and biotech. If liberalism, nationalism, Islam or some novel creed wishes to shape the world of the year 2050, it will need not only to make sense of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms and bioengineering – it will also need to incorporate them into a new meaningful narrative.
• Twentieth-century communism assumed that the working class was vital for the economy, and communist thinkers tried to teach the proletariat how to translate its immense economic power into political clout. The communist political plan called for a working-class revolution. How relevant will these teachings be if the masses lose their economic value, and therefore need to struggle against irrelevance rather than against exploitation? How do you start a working-class revolution without a working class?
• We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but these data-cows hardly maximise the human potential. Indeed, we have no idea what the full human potential is, because we know so little about the human mind. And yet we hardly invest much in exploring the human mind, and instead focus on increasing the speed of our Internet connections and the efficiency of our Big Data algorithms. If we are not careful, we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.
• Radical Islamists have been influenced by Marx and Foucault as much as by Muhammad, and they inherit the legacy of nineteenth-century European anarchists as much as of the Umayyad and Abbisid caliphs. It is therefore more accurate to see even the Islamic State as an errant offshoot of the global culture we all share, rather than as a branch of some mysterious alien tree.
• At present, it is far from clear whether Europe can find a middle path that would enable it to keep its gates open to strangers without being destabilised by people who don't share its values. If Europe succeeds in finding such a path, perhaps its formula could be copied on a global level. If the European project fails, however, it would indicate that belief in the liberal values of freedom and tolerance is not enough to resolve the cultural conflicts of the world and to unite humankind in the face of nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption. If Greeks and Germans cannot agree on a common destiny, and if 500 million affluent Europeans cannot absorb a few million impoverished refugees, what chances do humans have of overcoming the far deeper conflicts that have beset our global civilisation?
• When the peasants and workers revolted against the tsar in 1917, they ended up with Stalin; and when you begin to explore the manifold ways the world manipulates you, in the end you realise that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks...In truth, everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind.
• There is no divine script, and nothing outside me can give meaning to my life. It is I who imbue everything with meaning through my free choices and through my own feelings...In itself, the universe is only a meaningless hodge-podge of atoms. Nothing is beautiful, sexy or sacred – but human feelings make it so. It is only human feelings that make a red apple seductive and a turd disgusting. Take away human feelings, and you are left with a bunch of molecules.Always an interesting thinker, I really enjoy Hurari as a writer. As in his other two books, Hurari is able to find spots in 21 Lessons to promote his most personal causes – gay rights, the immorality of the meat industry, the Agricultural Revolution as the worst thing that ever happened to Sapiens – and for the first time, he is overt about the solution to what ails us as a species: the practise of daily meditation as a way to see past the fictions our minds create; those stories that create all the pain and suffering in the world. I have no doubt that humanity is marching towards a revolution in the ways we live our lives, and while I'm not sure that I agree with everything Hurari writes about here, it was fascinating to see what he had to say about our immediate future.
