21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

Nationalist isolationism is probably even more dangerous in the context of climate change than nuclear war. An all-out nuclear war threatens to destroy all nations, so all nations have an equal stake in preventing it. Global warming, in contrast, will probably have different impacts on different nations.

An atom bomb is such an obvious and immediate threat that nobody can ignore it. Global warming, in contrast, is a more vague and protracted menace. Therefore whenever long-term environmental considerations demand some painful short-term sacrifice, nationalists might be tempted to put immediate national interests first, and reassure themselves that they can worry about the environment later, or just leave it to people elsewhere. Alternatively, they may simply deny the problem. It isn’t a coincidence that skepticism about climate change tends to be the preserve of the nationalist right. You rarely see left-wing socialists tweet that “climate change is a Chinese hoax.” Since there is no national answer to the problem of global warming, some nationalist politicians prefer to believe the problem does not exist.

The same dynamics are likely to spoil any nationalist antidote to the third existential threat of the twenty-first century: technological disruption.

the merger of infotech and biotech opens the door to a cornucopia of doomsday scenarios, ranging from digital dictatorships to the creation of a global useless class.

Nationalists think in terms of territorial conflicts lasting centuries, while the technological revolutions of the twenty-first century should really be understood in cosmic terms. After four billion years of organic life evolving by natural selection, science is ushering in the era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design.

In order to make wise choices about the future of life we need to go way beyond the nationalist viewpoint and look at things from a global or even a cosmic perspective.

Each of these three problems—nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption—is enough to threaten the future of human civilization. But taken together, they add up to an unprecedented existential crisis, especially because they are likely to reinforce and compound one another.

technological disruptions might increase the danger of apocalyptic wars, not just by increasing global tensions but also by destabilizing the nuclear balance of power.

war meant mutually assured destruction.

Just as the different challenges are likely to compound one another, so also the goodwill necessary to confront one challenge may be sapped by problems on another front. Countries locked in armed competition are unlikely to agree on restricting the development of AI, and countries striving to outstrip the technological achievements of their rivals will find it very difficult to agree on a common plan to stop climate change. As long as the world remains divided into rival nations, it will be very hard to simultaneously overcome all three challenges—and failure on even a single front might prove catastrophic.

A person can and should be loyal simultaneously to her family, her neighborhood, her profession, and her nation—so why not add humankind and planet Earth to that list? True, when you have multiple loyalties, conflicts are sometimes inevitable. But then who said life was simple? Deal with it.

In previous eras national identities were forged because humans faced problems and opportunities that were far beyond the scope of local tribes. Now we need a new global identity because national institutions are incapable of handling a set of unprecedented global predicaments. We now have a global ecology, a global economy, and a global science—but we are still stuck with only national politics. This mismatch prevents the political system from effectively countering our main problems. To have effective politics, either we must deglobalize the ecology, the economy, and the march of science or we must globalize our politics. Since it is impossible to deglobalize the ecology and the march of science, and since the cost of deglobalizing the economy would be prohibitive, the only real solution is to globalize politics. There is no contradiction between such globalism and patriotism. For patriotism isn’t about hating foreigners. Patriotism is about taking care of your compatriots. And in the twenty-first century, in order to take good care of your compatriots, you must cooperate with foreigners. So good nationalists should now be globalists.

This isn’t a call for establishing a “global government”—a doubtful and unrealistic vision. Rather, to globalize politics implies that political dynamics within countries and even cities should give far more weight to global problems and interests. When the next elections come along, and politicians implore you to vote for them, ask these politicians four questions: If you are elected, what actions will you take to lessen the risks of nuclear war? What actions will you take to lessen the risks of climate change? What actions will you take to regulate disruptive technologies such as AI and bioengineering? And finally, how do you see the world of 2040? What is your worst-case scenario, and what is your vision for the best-case scenario?

traditional religions are largely irrelevant to technical and policy problems. In contrast, they are extremely relevant to identity problems—but in most cases they constitute a major part of the problem rather than a potential solution.

The victory of science has been so complete that our very idea of religion has changed. We no longer associate religion with farming and medicine. Even many zealots now suffer from collective amnesia and prefer to forget that traditional religions ever laid claim to those domains.

A priest is not somebody who knows how to perform the rain dance and end the drought. A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed, and why we must keep believing in our god even though he seems deaf to all our prayers.

Yet it is precisely their genius for interpretation that puts religious leaders at a disadvantage when they compete against scientists. Scientists too know how to cut corners and twist the evidence, but in the end, the mark of science is the willingness to admit failure and try a different tack. That’s why scientists gradually learn how to grow better crops and make better medicines, whereas priests and gurus learn only how to make better excuses. Over the centuries, even the true believers have noticed the difference, which is why religious authority has been dwindling in more and more technical fields. This is also why the entire world has increasingly become a single civilization. When things really work, everybody adopts them.

in the twenty-first century religions don’t bring rain, they don’t cure illnesses, they don’t build bombs—but they do get to determine who are “us” and who are “them,” whom we should cure and whom we should bomb.

Religions, rites, and rituals will remain important as long as the power of humankind rests on mass cooperation and as long as mass cooperation rests on belief in shared fictions.

Unfortunately, all of this really makes traditional religions part of humanity’s problem, not part of the remedy.

We are trapped, then, between a rock and a hard place. Humankind now constitutes a single civilization, and problems such as nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption can only be solved on the global level. On the other hand, nationalism and religion still divide our human civilization into different and often hostile camps. This collision between global problems and local identities manifests itself in the crisis that now besets the greatest multicultural experiment in the world—the European Union. Built on the promise of universal liberal values, the EU is teetering on the verge of disintegration due to the difficulties of integration and immigration.

This fourth debate cannot be resolved before clarifying the exact definition of the three terms. As long as we don’t know whether absorption is a duty or a favor, what level of assimilation is required from immigrants, and how quickly host countries should treat them as equal citizens, we cannot judge whether the two sides are fulfilling their obligations. An additional problem concerns accounting. When evaluating the immigration deal, both sides give far more weight to violations than to compliance. If a million immigrants are law-abiding citizens but one hundred join terrorist groups and attack the host country, does it mean that the immigrants are complying with the terms of the deal or violating them?

Racism was seen not only as morally abysmal but also as scientifically bankrupt. Life scientists, and in particular geneticists, have produced very strong scientific evidence that the biological differences between Europeans, Africans, Chinese, and Native Americans are negligible.

At the same time, however, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, behavioral economists, and even brain scientists have accumulated a wealth of data for the existence of significant differences between human cultures.

Both of these cases may seem to smack of racism. But in fact, they are not racist. They are “culturist.” People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against traditional racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted. Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of “culturists.”

Today, in contrast, while many individuals still make such racist assertions, they have lost all of their scientific backing and most of their political respectability—unless they are rephrased in cultural terms. Saying that black people tend to commit crimes because they have substandard genes is out; saying that they tend to commit crimes because they come from dysfunctional subcultures is very much in.

The police view your skin color with suspicion not due to any biological reason but rather due to history.

The shift from biology to culture is not just a meaningless change of jargon. It is a profound shift with far-reaching practical consequences, some good, some bad.

A second key difference between talking about biology and talking about culture is that unlike traditional racist bigotry, culturist arguments might occasionally make good sense, as in the case of Warmland and Coldia. Warmlanders and Coldians really have different cultures, characterized by different styles of human relations. Since human relations are crucial to many jobs, is it unethical for a Warmlander firm to penalize Coldians for behaving in accordance with their cultural legacy?

Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians feel extremely uneasy about this issue. On one hand, it all sounds dangerously close to racism. On the other hand, culturism has a much firmer scientific basis than racism, and particularly scholars in the humanities and social sciences cannot deny the existence and importance of cultural differences.

Many culturist claims suffer from three common flaws. First, culturists often confuse local superiority with objective superiority.

Second, when you clearly define a yardstick, a time, and a place, culturist claims may well be empirically sound.

Yet the worst problem with culturist claims is that despite their statistical nature they are all too often used to prejudge individuals.

though citizens have a right to oppose immigration, they should realize that they still have obligations toward foreigners. We are living in a global world, and whether we like it or not our lives are intertwined with the lives of people on the other side of the planet. They grow our food, they manufacture our clothes, they might die in a war fought for our oil prices, and they might be the victims of our lax environmental laws. We should not ignore our ethical responsibilities to people just because they live far away.

At present, it is far from clear whether Europe can find a middle path that will enable it to keep its gates open to strangers without being destabilized by people who don’t share its values. If Europe succeeds in finding such a path, perhaps its formula could be copied on the 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 five hundred million affluent Europeans cannot absorb a few million impoverished refugees, what chance does humanity have of overcoming the far deeper conflicts that beset our global civilization?

One thing that might help Europe and the world as a whole to integrate better and to keep borders and minds open is to downplay the hysteria regarding terrorism. It would be extremely unfortunate if the European experiment in freedom and tolerance unraveled due to an overblown fear of terrorists. That would not only realize the terrorists’ own goals but also give this handful of fanatics far too great a say about the future of humankind. Terrorism is the weapon of a marginal and weak segment of humanity. How did it come to dominate global politics?

Terrorists are masters of mind control. They kill very few people but nevertheless manage to terrify billions and rattle huge political structures such as the European Union or the United States.

As the literal meaning of the word indicates, terrorism is a military strategy that hopes to change the political situation by spreading fear rather than by causing material damage. This strategy is almost always adopted by very weak parties who cannot inflict much material damage on their enemies. Of course every military action spreads fear. But in conventional warfare, fear is just a by-product of the material losses, and it is usually proportional to the force inflicting the losses. In terrorism, fear is the main story, and there is an astounding disproportion between the actual strength of the terrorists and the fear they manage to inspire.

the terrorists have little choice. They are so weak that they cannot wage war. So they opt instead to produce a theatrical spectacle that they hope will provoke the enemy and cause him to overreact. Terrorists stage a terrifying spectacle of violence that captures our imagination and turns it against us.

Terrorists don’t think like army generals. Instead, they think like theater producers.

Like terrorists, those combating terrorism should also think more like theater producers and less like army generals. Above all, if we want to combat terrorism effectively, we must realize that nothing the terrorists do can defeat us. We are the only ones who can defeat ourselves, if we overreact in a misguided way to their provocations.

A terrorist is like a gambler who is holding a particularly bad hand and tries to convince his rivals to reshuffle the cards. He cannot lose anything, and he could win everything.

This is why the theater of terrorism is so successful. The state has created a huge space empty of political violence, which now acts as a sounding board, amplifying the impact of any armed attack, however small. The less political violence in a particular state, the greater the public shock at an act of terrorism. Killing a few people in Belgium draws far more attention than killing hundreds in Nigeria or Iraq. Paradoxically, then, the very success of modern states in preventing political violence makes them particularly vulnerable to terrorism.

The state has stressed many times that it will not tolerate political violence within its borders. The citizens, for their part, have become used to zero political violence. That is why the theater of terror generates visceral fears of anarchy, making people feel as if the social order is about to collapse. After centuries of bloody struggles we have crawled out of the black hole of violence, but we sense that the black hole is still there, patiently waiting to swallow us again. A few gruesome atrocities, and we imagine that we are falling back in.

How then should the state deal with terrorism? A successful counterterrorism struggle should be conducted on three fronts. First, governments should focus on clandestine actions against the terrorist networks. Second, the media should keep things in perspective and avoid hysteria. The theater of terror cannot succeed without publicity. Unfortunately, the media all too often provides this publicity for free. It obsessively reports terrorist attacks and greatly inflates their danger, because reports on terrorism sell newspapers much better than reports on diabetes or air pollution. The third front is the imagination of each and every one of us. Terrorists hold our imagination captive and use that against us. Again and again we rehearse the terrorist attack on the stage of our mind, remembering 9/11 or the latest suicide bombings. The terrorists kill a hundred people—and cause a hundred million to imagine that there is a murderer lurking behind every tree. It is the responsibility of all citizens to liberate our imagination from the terrorists and to remind ourselves of the true dimensions of the threat. It is our own inner terror that prompts the media to obsess about terrorism and the government to overreact.

The success or failure of terrorism therefore depends on us. If we allow our imagination to be captured by the terrorists and then we overreact to our own fears, terrorism will succeed. If we free our imagination from the terrorists and then we react in a balanced and cool way, terrorism will fail.

It is hard to set priorities in real time, while it is all too easy to second-guess priorities with hindsight. We accuse leaders of failing to prevent the catastrophes that happened, while we remain blissfully unaware of the disasters that never materialized.

In 1914 the elites in Washington, London, and Berlin knew exactly what a successful war looked like and how much could be gained from it. In contrast, in 2018 global elites have good reason to suspect that this type of war might have become extinct. Though some Third World dictators and nonstate actors still manage to flourish through war, it seems that major powers no longer know how to do so.

Why is it so difficult for major powers to wage successful wars in the twenty-first century? One reason is the change in the nature of the economy. In the past, economic assets were mostly material; therefore, 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.

Yet in the twenty-first century only puny profits can be made that way. Today the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather than wheat fields, gold mines, or even oil fields, and you just cannot conquer knowledge through war.