Yuval Noah Harari’s new book does little more than cash in on his popularity

Yuval Noah Harari is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. Very few people, other than celebrities, make a lot of money from writing non-fiction. Harari’s previous two books, Sapiens and Homo Deus however sold millions of copies and have been translated into dozens of languages.

It is safe to say that he is currently one of the most popular non-fiction writers in the world, if not the most popular. Unfortunately, Harari’s new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, seems more like an effort to cash in on this popularity and rehash his past writing, than a standalone book on its own.

As the title of the book suggests, Harari offers a sneak peak into the future of 21 different predicaments that he thinks mankind currently faces. These topics range from work, religion and nationalism to justice and education. The trouble, though, is that in many cases he is simply repeating things he has already discussed in great detail in his previous two books.

Too simplistic

Take the case of work and the fact of how robots and automation are going to take over. As Harari writes: “No job will remain absolutely safe from automation”. Even though the chapter is very well written and has many examples of how robots will take over human jobs in the 21st century, Harari has already discussed this topic in great detail in his earlier works.

Harari also brushes aside the potential problems arising from robots taking over human jobs, relegating them to a few paragraphs. Take the case of driverless cars. Driving is a thriving profession for people the world over. Will governments and drivers sit and watch as driverless cars take over? Or will they do something about it?

What about human beings as consumers? Humans can only spend the money they earn and when they do this, other businesses benefit. These businesses provide jobs to other people, who in turn spend the money they earn and create business for others.

This structure is at the heart of capitalism. Paid work creates more paid work. If robots replace human beings, like they will do in the case of driverless cars, how will the consumption dynamic continue to work?

Harari ignores these important issues. In trying to keep the narrative simple, he makes it simplistic at more than a few places. Maybe he does this knowingly, in the hope of increasing the readership of the book.

Getting to 21

Another huge issue with the book is the fact that Harari needs to stay true to the title. He has had to come up with 21 different issues to match the title. But many of these are closely linked and could at best have been sections in one chapter.

Returning to the case of driverless cars, he originally discusses them in a chapter on work and tells the reader that they are a great thing because they will result in fewer accidents. Then in another chapter on liberty, he discusses a theoretical problem in philosophy that will impact driverless cars.

Human beings make decisions while driving a car. Driverless cars will have to do the same. Sometimes, the driverless cars might find themselves in a situation where an accident is about to take place. They may have to decide between running over pedestrians or saving the pedestrians and killing the passenger(s) in the car. What happens in this case? How will the cars be programmed?

Ideally, this should have been discussed right after he analyses the concept of driverless cars in the chapter on work. Of course, Harari’s title wouldn’t have worked in that case so it comes in the chapter on liberty.

A similar problem is played out when Harari talks about the perils of too-much-digital in our everyday lives. In the chapter on liberty he talks about governments unleashing digital dictatorships in this century. He writes: “As algorithms come to know of us so well, authoritarian governments could gain absolute control over their citizens, even more so than Nazi Germany, and resistance to such regimes might be utterly impossible.”

In the very next chapter, on equality, Harari talks about the ill-effects of large corporations being able to capture a large amount of information on human beings they serve. As he writes: “The data-giants could hack the deepest secrets of life, and then use that knowledge not just to make choices for us or manipulate us, but also to re-engineer organic life and to create inorganic life form.”

Again, there was no reason for the ill effects of too-much-digital in our lives to be spread across different chapters, other than the need to justify the title of the book. The dynamic plays out again in chapters on community, civilisation, nationalism, religion, war and terrorism, all of which are closely linked.

Scattered insights

Despite these deficiencies, Harari does offer some interesting insights throughout the book. It opens with a very compelling point about humans thinking in terms of stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations. As Harari writes:

“During the twentieth century the global elites in New York, London, Berlin and Moscow formulated three grand stories that claimed to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world: the fascist story, the communist story, and the liberal story.”

The trouble is that right now the world doesn’t have a simple enough story that it can believe in. So what happens next? Harari’s treatment of this question is extremely thought-provoking.

Another fascinating insight is offered on war. “Military power cannot go far in the twenty-first century, and that waging a war successful war means waging a limited war,” Harari writes, moving on to talk about countries like Russia, Iran and Israel, which have adopted this strategy successfully. He also writes about how the economic rationale behind wars has changed:

“In the past, economic assets were mostly material, so it was relatively straightforward to enrich yourself by conquest. If you defeated your enemies on the battlefield, you could cash in by looting their cities, selling their civilians in the slave markets, and occupying valuable wheat fields and gold mines. Romans prospered by selling captive Greeks and Gauls, and nineteenth-century Americans thrived by occupying the gold mines of California and the cattle ranches of Texas.”

This section makes for very engrossing reading. In fact, there are several such interesting takeaways peppered throughout the book.

Those who like a non-fiction book to have a single integrated theme running through it will be disappointed with Harari’s latest effort. Having said that, a better way of reading this book is one chapter at a time, as a series of essays. In that case, a reader can look forward to several different insights.