21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
Rating: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ 7/10
I both loved and hated this book, which makes this review difficult to write, but hopefully I’ll be able to share my mental struggle between the two effectively. I’ll start with why I hated the book.
I like my books how I like my math courses: rigorous. And for the most part, this book is anything but. By this I mean that Harari frequently makes sweeping generalizations about nuanced topics. Take this quote, for example:
War spreads ideas, technologies, and people far more quickly than commerce does. In 1918 the United States was more closely linked to Europe than in 1913; the two then drifted apart in the interwar years, only to have their fates inextricably meshed together by the Second World War and the Cold War.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Ch 6
I will be the first to acknowledge that from 10,000 feet, this is broadly true. At the same time, however, Harari reduces arguably the most complex 60 years of US history into one sentence, without a citation or qualifier in sight. Harari uses this to bolster his argument that war was a major factor in the globalization of modern culture and economy. Ironically, Harari also cautions readers to be cautious about the material they consume, to fact check everything and not take things at face value. Doesn’t this quote sound just like an unsubstantiated “fact” used by a leader to justify his agenda?
My second complaint is that Harari talks superficially about a broad swath of topics, and to a reader who might be an expert in one of these topics, the corresponding section in Harari’s book can seem contrived, trivial, or even ignorant. I’ve read many books on the future of AI and its impact on society (I am not claiming to be anywhere near an expert in this topic), but even my paltry knowledge about the topic made Harari’s first couple of chapters seem misinformed. Take, for example, this quote about high powered algorithms:
Perhaps you dislike a particular bit in an otherwise excellent song. The algorithm knows it because your heart skips a beat and your oxytocin levels drop slightly whenever you hear that annoying part. The algorithm could rewrite or edit out the offending notes.
Ch 2
Again, I would not disagree with this fictional situation because it is technically possible when AI becomes more advanced, but this problem is infinitely complex, and both technical and ethical issues are elided. Entire books and multitudes of academic articles have been written on the topic of universal basic income as a stopgap for major economic upheaval as AI emerges. To dedicate but a small section to it seems…wrong.
Obviously I must have liked something if my final review was 7/10. I started appreciating the book after I realized that this is not a book about 21 disjoint topics that people should be informed about nowadays. It is a discussion of how to stay human as the world changes rapidly around us. For the vast majority of human history, we’ve experienced glacial change. People lived entire their entire lives without much change. Suddenly, in the 21st century, things are changing faster than we can hope to understand. All of the stories humans have woven for ourselves, to keep ourselves sane, coherent, united, are starting to unravel — and this, Harari makes clear, is the real issue. The stories of liberalism, nationalism, religion, the meaning of life, are all threatened by technology and biotech (though again, this is less alarmist and more nuanced than Harari makes it out to be). Therefore, it is important to “know thyself” because we can’t know anything else.
In the last five pages of the book, I found the core, the little nugget of thought that blossomed into 21 Lessons for the 21st Century:
To change the world, you need to act, and even more important, you need to organize…it is easier to act and cooperate effectively when you understand the human mind, understand your own mind, and understand how to deal with your inner fears, biases, and complexes.
Ch 21
The 21 chapters are simply obstacles the 21st century has thrown in our way — obstacles that we humans must clear to “understand foreign cultures, unknown species, and distant planets”. Viewed in this light, the lack of rigor is still not justified but understandable. The sections about tech, philosophy, history, religion, were simply the supporting cast to meditation.
This is not a book I’d recommend to everyone. For people who regularly reflect on their lives like me, this book offered few insights. But for someone who is caught in the whirlwind of change, or has buried their head in pursuit of a goal, this book can help you take a step back and recognize what’s truly important.
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