21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

In 1846 it invaded Mexico and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous U.S. annexation of Texas. About thirteen thousand American soldiers died in the war, which added 888,000 square miles to the United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain, and Italy).4 It was the bargain of the millennium.

China, the rising power of the early twenty-first century, has assiduously avoided all armed conflicts since its failed invasion of Vietnam in 1979, and it owes its ascent strictly to economic factors. In this it has emulated not the Japanese, German, and Italian empires of the pre-1914 era but rather the Japanese, German, and Italian economic miracles of the post-1945 era. In all these cases economic prosperity and geopolitical clout were achieved without firing a shot.

Iran gained nothing from the long bloodbath of the Iran-Iraq War and subsequently avoided all direct military confrontations. The Iranians finance and arm local movements from Iraq to Yemen and have sent their Revolutionary Guards to help their allies in Syria and Lebanon, but so far they have been careful not to invade any country. Iran has recently become the regional hegemon not by dint of any brilliant battlefield victory but rather by default. Its two main enemies—the United States and Iraq—became embroiled in a war that destroyed both Iraq and the American appetite for Middle Eastern quagmires, thereby leaving Iran to enjoy the spoils.

Like the United States, China, Germany, Japan, and Iran, Israel seems to understand that in the twenty-first century the most successful strategy is to sit on the fence and let others do the fighting for you.

The West went on to ignore Russian interests in the Middle East, invaded Serbia and Iraq on doubtful pretexts, and generally made it very clear to Russia that it can count only on its own military power to protect its sphere of influence from Western incursions. From this perspective, recent Russian military moves can be blamed on Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as much as on Vladimir Putin.

However, we would also do well to remember that Putin’s Russia is far weaker than Stalin’s USSR, and unless it is joined by other countries such as China, it cannot support a new Cold War, let alone a full-blown world war. Russia has a population of 150 million people and a GDP of $4 trillion. In both population and production it is dwarfed by the United States (325 million people and a $19 trillion GDP) and the European Union (500 million people and a $21 trillion GDP).6 Together, the United States and the European Union have five times more people than Russia, and ten times more dollars.

locomotive

One can hope—with some justification—that the takeover of the Crimea and the Russian incursions in Georgia and eastern Ukraine will remain isolated examples rather than harbingers of a new era of war.

An organization such as the Islamic State may still flourish by looting cities and oil wells in the Middle East—it seized more than $500 million from Iraqi banks and in 2015 made an additional $500 million from selling oil—but for a major power such as China or the United States, these are trifling sums.7 With an annual GDP of more than $20 trillion, China is unlikely to start a war for a paltry billion.

There are no silicon mines in Silicon Valley.

feat

At the Battle of Hastings in 1066 William the Conqueror gained the whole of England in a single day for the cost of a few thousand dead. Nuclear weapons and cyberwarfare, by contrast, are high-damage,

Of course, if somebody does find a formula with which to wage successful wars under twenty-first-century conditions, the gates of hell might open with a rush. This is what makes the Russian success in the Crimea a particularly frightening omen. Let’s hope it remains an exception.

FOLLY

it is exceedingly dangerous to assume that a new world war is inevitable.

Even if war is catastrophic for everyone, no god and no law of nature protect us from human stupidity.

One potential remedy for human stupidity is a dose of humility. National, religious, and cultural tensions are made worse by the grandiose feeling that my nation, my religion, and my culture are the most important in the world—and therefore my interests should come before the interests of anyone else, or of humankind as a whole. How can we make nations, religions, and cultures a bit more realistic and modest about their true place in the world?

Pious Muslims regard all history prior to the Prophet Muhammad as largely irrelevant, and they consider all history after the revelation of the Quran to revolve around the Muslim ummah. The main exceptions are Turkish, Iranian, and Egyptian nationalists, who argue that even prior to Muhammad their particular nation was the fountainhead of all that was good about humanity, and that even after the revelation of the Quran, it was mainly their people who preserved the purity of Islam and spread its glory.

All these claims are false. They combine a willful ignorance of history with more than a hint of racism. None of the religions or nations of today existed when humans colonized the world, domesticated plants and animals, built the first cities, or invented writing and money. Morality, art, spirituality, and creativity are universal human abilities embedded in our DNA. Their genesis was in Stone Age Africa. It is therefore crass egotism to ascribe to them a more recent place and time, be it China in the age of the Yellow Emperor, Greece in the age of Plato, or Arabia in the age of Muhammad.

egotism,

Talmud.

Secular Jews may be a bit more skeptical about this grandiose claim, but they too believe that the Jewish people are the central heroes of history and the ultimate wellspring of human morality, spirituality, and learning.

chutzpah.

Since it is more polite to criticize one’s own people than to criticize foreigners, I will use the example of Judaism to illustrate how ludicrous such self-important narratives are, and I will leave it to readers around the world to puncture the hot-air balloons inflated by their own tribes.

Israeli Jews, who are educated from kindergarten to think that Judaism is the superstar of human history. Israeli children usually finish twelve years of school without receiving any clear picture of global historical processes. They are taught almost nothing about China, India, or Africa, and though they learn about the Roman Empire, the French Revolution, and the Second World War, these isolated jigsaw pieces do not add up to any overarching narrative. Instead, the only coherent history offered by the Israeli educational system begins with the Hebrew Old Testament, continues to the Second Temple era, skips between various Jewish communities in the Diaspora, and culminates with the rise of Zionism, the Holocaust, and the establishment of the state of Israel.

Unlike such universal religions as Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, Judaism has always been a tribal creed. It focuses on the fate of one small nation and one tiny land, and it has little interest in the fate of all other people and all other countries. For example, it cares little about events in Japan or about the people of the Indian subcontinent. It is no wonder, therefore, that its historical role was limited.

there is also no reason to credit Judaism with the important Christian idea that all human beings are equal before God (an idea that stands in direct contradiction to Jewish orthodoxy, which even today holds that Jews are intrinsically superior to all other humans).

Sigmund Freud had immense influence on the science, culture, art, and folk wisdom of the modern West. It is also true that without Freud’s mother we wouldn’t have had Freud, and that Freud’s personality, ambitions, and opinions were likely shaped to a significant extent by his relations with his mother—as he would be the first to admit. But when writing the history of the modern West, nobody expects to find an entire chapter on Freud’s mother. Similarly, without Judaism you would not have had Christianity, but that doesn’t merit granting much importance to Judaism when writing the history of the world. The crucial issue is what Christianity did with the legacy of its Jewish mother.

It is further true that, relative to their numbers, the Jewish people have had a disproportionate impact on the history of the last two thousand years. But when you look at the big picture of our history as a species, since the emergence of Homo sapiens more than a hundred thousand years ago, it is obvious that the Jewish contribution to history has been very limited.

esoteric

Christianity (2.3 billion adherents), Islam (1.8 billion), and Judaism (15 million). Hinduism, with its 1 billion believers, and Buddhism, with its 500 million followers—not to mention the Shinto religion (50 million) and the Sikh religion (25 million)—don’t make the cut.

insolent

ape leaders developed the tendency to help the poor, the needy, and the fatherless millions of years before the Bible instructed ancient Israelites that they should not “mistreat any widow or fatherless child” (Exodus 22:21), and before the prophet Amos complained about social elites “who oppress the poor and crush the needy” (Amos 4:1).

allegory,

This is one of the first recorded instances in human history when genocide was presented as a binding religious duty.

It therefore makes absolutely no sense to credit Judaism and its Christian and Muslim offspring with the creation of human morality.

quibble

monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history.

do you really think Muslims are inherently more ethical than Hindus just because Muslims believe in a single god while Hindus believe in many gods?

What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars.

Monotheists, in contrast, believed that their God was the only god, and that He demanded universal obedience. Consequently, as Christianity and Islam spread around the world, so did the incidence of crusades, jihads, inquisitions, and religious discrimination.11

by insisting that “there is no god but our God,” the monotheist idea tended to encourage bigotry. Jews would do well to downplay their part in disseminating this dangerous meme and let the Christians and Muslims carry the blame for it.

about 20 percent of all Nobel Prize laureates in science have been Jews, though Jews constitute less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population.16

But it should be stressed that this has been a contribution of individual Jews rather than of Judaism as a religion or a culture. Most of the important Jewish scientists of the past two hundred years acted outside the Jewish religious sphere. Indeed, Jews began to make their remarkable contribution to science only once they had abandoned the yeshiva in favor of the laboratory.

During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries Judaism was hardly instrumental to the outbreak of the Scientific Revolution.

Jewish Enlightenment caused many Jews to adopt the worldview and lifestyle of their Gentile neighbors.

Einstein was Jewish, but the theory of relativity wasn’t “Jewish physics.”

Darwin was a Christian and even began his studies at Cambridge intending to become an Anglican priest. Does it imply that the theory of evolution is a Christian theory?

It would be ridiculous to list the theory of relativity as a Jewish contribution to humankind, just as it would be ridiculous to credit Christianity with the theory of evolution.

The Scientific Revolution wasn’t a Jewish project, and Jews found their place in it only when they moved from the yeshivas to the universities. Indeed, the Jewish habit of seeking the answers to all questions by reading ancient texts was a significant obstacle to Jewish integration into the world of modern science, where answers come from observations and experiments. If there was anything about the Jewish religion itself that necessarily leads to scientific breakthroughs, why is it that between 1905 and 1933 ten secular German Jews won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine, and physics, but during the same period not a single ultra-Orthodox Jew or a single Bulgarian or Yemenite Jew won any Nobel Prize?