21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

  10 Some rabbis allowed desecrating the Sabbath in order to save a Gentile, by relying on typical Talmudic ingenuity. They argued that if Jews refrained from saving Gentiles, this will anger the Gentiles and cause them to attack and kill Jews. So by saving the Gentile, you might indirectly save a Jew. Yet even this argument highlights the different values attributed to the lives of Gentiles and Jews.

  11 Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (London: Macmillan, 2017).

  12 Charles Allen, Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor (London: Little, Brown, 2012), 412–13.

  13 Clyde Pharr et al. (eds.), The Theodosian Code and Novels, and the Sirmondian Constitutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), 440, 467–71.

  14 Ibid., esp. 472–3.

  15 Sofie Remijsen, The End of Greek Athletics in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 45–51.

  16 Ruth Schuster, ‘Why Do Jews Win So Many Nobels?’, Haaretz, 9 October 2013.

  13. God

  1 Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).

  2 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

  14. Secularism

  1 Jonathan H. Turner, Incest: Origins of the Taboo (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005); Robert J. Kelly et al., ‘Effects of Mother-Son Incest and Positive Perceptions of Sexual Abuse Experiences on the Psychosocial Adjustment of Clinic-Referred Men’, Child Abuse & Neglect 26:4 (2002), 425–41; Mireille Cyr et al., ‘Intrafamilial Sexual Abuse: Brother-Sister Incest Does Not Differ from Father-Daughter and Stepfather-Stepdaughter Incest’, Child Abuse & Neglect 26:9 (2002), 957–73; Sandra S. Stroebel, ‘Father–Daughter Incest: Data from an Anonymous Computerized Survey’, Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 21:2 (2010), 176–99.

  15. Ignorance

  1 Steven A. Sloman and Philip Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017); Greene, Moral Tribes, op. cit.

  2 Sloman and Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion, op. cit., 20.

  3 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble (London: Penguin Books, 2012); Greene, Moral Tribes, op. cit.

  4 Greene, Moral Tribes, op. cit.; Dan M. Kahan, ‘The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks’, Nature Climate Change 2 (2012), 732–5. But for a contrary view, see Sophie Guy et al., ‘Investigating the Effects of Knowledge and Ideology on Climate Change Beliefs’, European Journal of Social Psychology 44:5 (2014), 421–9.

  5 Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016).

  16. Justice

  1 Greene, Moral Tribes, op. cit.; Robert Wright, The Moral Animal (New York: Pantheon, 1994).

  2 Kelsey Timmerman, Where Am I Wearing?: A Global Tour of the Countries, Factories, and People That Make Our Clothes (Hoboken: Wiley, 2012); Kelsey Timmerman, Where Am I Eating?: An Adventure Through the Global Food Economy (Hoboken: Wiley, 2013).

  3 Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I Am No Longer Talking to White People About Race (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Melbourne: Text, 2015).

  4 Josie Ensor, ‘“Everyone in Syria Is Bad Now”, Says UN War Crimes Prosecutor as She Quits Post’, New York Times, 17 August 2017.

  5 For example, Helena Smith, ‘Shocking Images of Drowned Syrian Boy Show Tragic Plight of Refugees’, Guardian, 2 September 2015.

  6 T. Kogut and I. Ritov, ‘The singularity effect of identified victims in separate and joint evaluations’, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 97:2 (2005), 106–16; D. A. Small and G. Loewenstein, ‘Helping a victim or helping the victim: Altruism and identifiability’, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 26:1 (2003), 5–16; Greene, Moral Tribes, op. cit., 264.

  7 Russ Alan Prince, ‘Who Rules the World?’, Forbes, 22 July 2013.

  17. Post-Truth

  1 Julian Borger, ‘Putin Offers Ukraine Olive Branches Delivered by Russian Tanks’, Guardian, 4 March 2014.

  2 Serhii Plokhy, Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation (New York: Basic Books, 2017); Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, op. cit.

  3 Matthew Paris, Matthew Paris’ English History, trans. J. A. Gyles, vol. 3 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), 138–41; Patricia Healy Wasyliw, Martyrdom, Murder and Magic: Child Saints and Their Cults in Medieval Europe (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 123–5.

  4 Cecilia Kang and Adam Goldman, ‘In Washington Pizzeria Attack, Fake News Brought Real Guns’, New York Times, 5 December 2016.

  5 Leonard B. Glick, Abraham’s Heirs: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 228–9.

  6 Anthony Bale, ‘Afterword: Violence, Memory and the Traumatic Middle Ages’ in Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson (eds.), Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narrative and Contexts (York: York Medieval Press, 2013), 297.

  7 Though the quote is often ascribed to Goebbels, it is only fitting that neither I nor my devoted research assistant could verify that Goebbels ever wrote or said it.

  8 Hilmar Hoffman, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism, 1933–1945 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997), 140.

  9 Lee Hockstader, ‘From A Ruler’s Embrace To A Life In Disgrace’, Washington Post, 10 March 1995.

  10 Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991), 616–17.

  18. Science Fiction

  1 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Vintage, 2007), ch. 17.

  19. Education

  1 Wayne A. Wiegand and Donald G. Davis (eds.), Encyclopedia of Library History (New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 432–3.

  2 Verity Smith (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature (London, New York: Routledge, 2013), 142, 180.

  3 Cathy N. Davidson, The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (New York: Basic Books, 2017); Bernie Trilling, 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009); Charles Kivunja, ‘Teaching Students to Learn and to Work Well with 21st Century Skills: Unpacking the Career and Life Skills Domain of the New Learning Paradigm’, International Journal of Higher Education 4:1 (2015). For the website of P21, see: ‘P21 Partnership for 21st Century Learning’, http://www.p21.org/our-work/4cs-research-series, accessed 12 January 2018. For an example for the implementation of new pedagogical methods, see, for example, the US National Education Association’s publication: ‘Preparing 21st Century Students for a Global Society’, NEA, http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/A-Guide-to-Four-Cs.pdf, accessed 21 January 2018.

  4 Maddalaine Ansell, ‘Jobs for Life Are a Thing of the Past. Bring On Lifelong Learning’, Guardian, 31 May 2016.

  5 Erik B. Bloss et al., ‘Evidence for Reduced Experience-Dependent Dendritic Spine Plasticity in the Aging Prefrontal Cortex’, Journal of Neuroscience 31:21 (2011): 7831–9; Miriam Matamales et al., ‘Aging-Related Dysfunction of Striatal Cholinergic Interneurons Produces Conflict in Action Selection’, Neuron 90:2 (2016), 362–72; Mo Costandi, ‘Does your brain produce new cells? A skeptical view of human adult neurogenesis’, Guardian, 23 February 2012; Gianluigi Mongillo, Simon Rumpel and Yonatan Loewenstein, ‘Intrinsic volatility of synaptic connections – a challenge to the synaptic trace theory of memory’, Current Opinion in Neurobiology 46 (2017), 7–13.

  20. Meaning

  1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London, New York: Verso, 2012), 34–5.

  2 Ibid., 35.

  3 Raoul Wootlif, ‘Netanyahu Welcomes Envoy Friedman to “Jerusalem, Our Eternal Capital”’, Times of Israel, 16 May 2017; Peter Beaumont, ‘Israeli Minister’s Jerusalem Dress Proves Controversial in Cannes’, Guardian, 18 May 2017; Lahav Harkov, ‘New 80–Majority Jerusalem Bill Has Loophole Enabling City to Be Divided’, Jerusale
m Post, 2 January 2018.

  4 K. P. Schroder and Robert Connon Smith, ‘Distant Future of the Sun and Earth Revisited’, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 386:1 (2008), 155–63.

  5 See especially: Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Graham Harvey, Ritual and Religious Belief: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2005).

  6 This is the most common interpretation, although not the only one, of the combination hocus-pocus: Leslie K. Arnovick, Written Reliquaries (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2006), 250, n.30.

  7 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (London: Fontana Press, 1993), 235.

  8 Xinzhong Yao, An Introduction to Confucianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 190–9.

  9 ‘Flag Code of India, 2002’, Press Information Bureau, Government of India.

  10 Ibid.

  11 ‘Here’s Why India’s “Tallest” Flag Cannot be Hoisted at Pakistan’s Border’, The News International (Pakistan), 30 March 2017.

  12 Stephen C. Poulson, Social Movements in Twentieth-Century Iran: Culture, Ideology and Mobilizing Frameworks (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006), 44.

  13 Houman Sarshar (ed.), The Jews of Iran: The History, Religion and Culture of a Community in the Islamic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 52–5; Houman M. Sarshar, Jewish Communities of Iran (New York: Encyclopedia Iranica Foundation, 2011), 158–60.

  14 Gersion Appel, The Concise Code of Jewish Law, 2nd edn (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1991), 191.

  15 See especially: Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 2005).

  16 Richard Griffiths, Fascism (London, New York: Continuum, 2005), 33.

  17 Christian Goeschel, Suicide in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  18 ‘Paris attacks: What happened on the night’, BBC, 9 December 2015; Anna Cara, ‘ISIS expresses fury over French airstrikes in Syria; France says they will continue’, CTV News, 14 November 2015.

  19 Jean de Joinville, The Life of Saint Louis in M. R. B. Shaw (ed.), Chronicles of the Crusades (London: Penguin, 1963), 243; Jean de Joinville, Vie de saint Louis, ed. Jacques Monfrin (Paris, 1995), ch. 319, 156.

  20 Ray Williams, ‘How Facebook Can Amplify Low Self-Esteem/Narcissism/Anxiety’, Psychology Today, 20 May 2014.

  21 Mahasatipatthana Sutta, ch. 2, section 1, ed. Vipassana Research Institute (Igatpuri: Vipassana Research Institute, 2006), 12–13.

  22 Ibid., 5.

  23 G. E. Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1925), 252–60.

  24 Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Buruma, Inventing Japan, op. cit.; Stephen S. Large, ‘Nationalist Extremism in Early Showa Japan: Inoue Nissho and the “Blood-Pledge Corps Incident”, 1932’, Modern Asian Studies 35:3 (2001), 533–64; W. L. King, Zen and the Way of the Sword: Arming the Samurai Psyche (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Danny Orbach, ‘A Japanese prophet: eschatology and epistemology in the thought of Kita Ikki’, Japan Forum 23:3 (2011), 339–61.

  25 ‘Facebook removes Myanmar monk’s page for “inflammatory posts” about Muslims’, Scroll.in, 27 February 2018; Marella Oppenheim, ‘“It only takes one terrorist”: The Buddhist monk who reviles Myanmar’s Muslims’, Guardian, 12 May 2017.

  26 Jerzy Lukowski and Hubert Zawadzki, A Concise History of Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 163.

  21. Meditation

  1 www.dhamma.org.

  2 Britta K. Hölzel et al., ‘How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action from a Conceptual and Neural Perspective’, Perspectives on Psychological Science 6:6 (2011), 537–59; Adam Moore and Peter Malinowski, ‘Meditation, Mindfulness and Cognitive Flexibility’, Consciousness and Cognition 18:1 (2009), 176–86; Alberto Chiesa, Raffaella Calati and Alessandro Serretti, ‘Does Mindfulness Training Improve Cognitive Abilities? A Systematic Review of Neuropsychological Findings’, Clinical Psychology Review 31:3 (2011), 449–64; Antoine Lutz et al., ‘Attention Regulation and Monitoring in Meditation’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12:4 (2008), 163–9; Richard J. Davidson et al., ‘Alterations in Brain and Immune Function Produced by Mindfulness Meditation’, Psychosomatic Medicine 65:4 (2003), 564–70; Fadel Zeidan et al., ‘Mindfulness Meditation Improves Cognition: Evidence of Brief Mental Training’, Consciousness and Cognition 19:2 (2010), 597–605.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank all those who helped me to write – and also to delete:

  To Michal Shavit, my publisher at Penguin Random House in the UK, who first came up with the idea for this book, and who guided me through the long process of writing; and also to Bea Hemming and the entire Penguin Random House team, for all their hard work and support.

  To David Milner, who as usual did a terrific job on the manuscript. Sometimes I just needed to think what David might say, to work extra hard on the text.

  To Preena Gadher and her colleagues at Riot Communications, for orchestrating a brilliant PR campaign.

  To Cindy Spiegel from Spiegel & Grau, for her feedback and for taking care of things across the Atlantic.

  To Sebastian Ullrich and Jonathan Beck from Verlag C.H.Beck for their careful reading of the manuscript and for their valuable comments and ideas.

  To all my other publishers in all the world’s continents (except Antarctica) for their trust, dedication and professional work.

  To my research assistant, Idan Sherer, for checking up on everything from ancient synagogues to artificial intelligence.

  To Shmuel Rosner, for his continual support and good advice.

  To Yigal Borochovsky and Sarai Aharoni who read the manuscript and devoted much time and effort to correcting my mistakes and enabling me to see things from new perspectives.

  To Danny Orbach, Uri Sabach, Yoram Yovell and Ron Merom for their insights on kamikaze, surveillance, psychology and algorithms.

  To all my friends and family members, for their patience and love.

  To my devoted team – Ido Ayal, Maya Orbach, Naama Wartenburg and Eilona Ariel – who have spent many days in email hell on my account.

  To my mother Pnina and my mother-in-law Hannah, for donating their time and experience.

  To my spouse and manager Itzik, without whom none of this would have happened. I only know how to write books. He does everything else.

  And finally to all my readers for their interest, time and comments. If a book sits in a library and no one is around to read it, does it make a sound?

  *

  As noted in the introduction, this book has been written in conversation with the public. Many of the chapters were composed in response to questions I was asked by readers, journalists and colleagues. Earlier versions of some segments were previously published as essays and articles, which gave me the opportunity to receive feedback and hone my arguments. These earlier versions include the following essays and articles:

  ‘If We Know Meat Is Murder, Why Is It So Hard For Us to Change and Become Moral?’, Haaretz, 21 June 2012.

  ‘The Theatre of Terror’, Guardian, 31 January 2015.

  ‘Judaism Is Not a Major Player in the History of Humankind’, Haaretz, 31 July 2016.

  ‘Yuval Noah Harari on Big Data, Google and the End of Free Will’, FT.com, 26 August 2016.

  ‘Isis is as much an offshoot of our global civilisation as Google’, Guardian, 9 September 2016.

  ‘Salvation by Algorithm: God, Technology and New 21st Century Religion’, New Statesman, 9 September 2016.

  ‘Does Trump’s Rise Mean Liberalism’s End?’, New Yorker, 7 October 2016.

  ‘Yuval Noah Harari Challenges the Future According to Facebook’, Financial Times, 23 March 2017.

  ‘Humankind: The Post-Truth Species’, Bloomberg.com, 13 April 2017.

  ‘People Have Limited Knowledge. What’s the Remedy? Nobody Knows’, New York Times
, 18 April 2017.

  ‘The Meaning of Life in a World Without Work’, Guardian, 8 May 2017.

  ‘In Big Data vs. Bach, Computers Might Win’, Bloomberg View, 13 May 2017.

  ‘Are We About to Witness the Most Unequal Societies in History?’, Guardian, 24 May 2017.

  ‘Universal Basic Income is Neither Universal Nor Basic’, Bloomberg View, 4 June 2017.

  ‘Why It’s No Longer Possible For Any Country to Win a War’, Time.com, 23 June 2017.

  ‘The Age of Disorder: Why Technology is the Greatest Threat to Humankind’, New Statesman, 25 July 2017.

  ‘Reboot for the AI Revolution’, Nature News, 17 October 2017.

  Index

  The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  AI indicates artificial intelligence.

  Abbasid caliphs 94

  Abraham, prophet 182–3, 186, 187, 274

  advertising 36, 50, 53, 54, 77–8, 87, 97, 113, 114, 267

  Afghanistan 101, 112, 153, 159, 172, 210

  Africa 8, 13, 20, 58, 76, 79, 100, 103–4, 107, 139, 147, 150–1, 152, 168, 182, 184, 223, 226, 229, 239 see also under individual nation name

  African Americans 67, 150, 152, 227

  agriculture 171, 185; animals and 71, 118–19, 224; automation of jobs in 19–20, 29; climate change and modern industrial 116, 117; hierarchical societies and birth of 73–4, 185, 266–7; religion and 128–30

  Aisne, third Battle of the (1918) 160

  Akhenaten, Pharaoh 191

  Al-Aqsa mosque, Jerusalem 15

  al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr 98

  Algeria 144, 145

  algorithms see artificial intelligence (AI)