21 LESSONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
The human mind wants to worry. This is
not necessarily a bad thing — after all, if a bear is stalking you,
worrying about it may well save your life. Although most of us don’t
need to lose too much sleep over bears these days, modern life does
present plenty of other reasons for concern: terrorism, climate change,
the rise of A.I., encroachments on our privacy, even the apparent
decline of international cooperation.
In
his fascinating new book,
“21 Lessons for the 21st Century,” the
historian Yuval Noah Harari creates a useful framework for confronting
these fears. While his previous best sellers, “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus,”
covered the past and future respectively, his new book is all about the
present. The trick for putting an end to our anxieties, he suggests, is
not to stop worrying. It’s to know which things to worry about, and how
much to worry about them. As he writes in his introduction: “What are
today’s greatest challenges and most important changes? What should we
pay attention to? What should we teach our kids?”
The point is
that today’s competition among nations — whether on an athletic field or
the trading floor — “actually represents an astonishing global
agreement.” And that global agreement makes it easier to cooperate as
well as compete. Keep this in mind the next time you start to doubt
whether we can solve a global problem like climate change. Our global
cooperation may have taken a couple of steps back in the past two years,
but before that we took a thousand steps forward.
So
why does it seem as if the world is in decline? Largely because we are
much less willing to tolerate misfortune and misery. Even though the
amount of violence in the world has greatly decreased, we focus on the
number of people who die each year in wars because our outrage at
injustice has grown. As it should.
Here’s
another worry that Harari deals with: In an increasingly complex world,
how can any of us have enough information to make educated decisions?
It’s tempting to turn to experts, but how do you know they’re not just
following the herd? “The problem of groupthink and individual ignorance
besets not just ordinary voters and customers,” he writes, “but also
presidents and C.E.O.s.” That rang true to me from my experience at both
Microsoft and the Gates Foundation. I have to be careful not to fool
myself into thinking things are better — or worse — than they actually
are.
What does Harari think we should
do about all this? Sprinkled throughout is some practical advice,
including a three-prong strategy for fighting terrorism and a few tips
for dealing with fake news. But his big idea boils down to this:
Meditate. Of course he isn’t suggesting that the world’s problems will
vanish if enough of us start sitting in the lotus position and chanting om.
But he does insist that life in the 21st century demands mindfulness —
getting to know ourselves better and seeing how we contribute to
suffering in our own lives. This is easy to mock, but as someone who’s
taking a course on mindfulness and meditation, I found it compelling.
AUTHOR
By Yuval Noah Harari
BILL GATE Wrote:-
As
much as I admire Harari and enjoyed “21 Lessons,” I didn’t agree with
everything in the book. I was glad to see the chapter on inequality, but
I’m skeptical about his prediction that in the 21st century “data will
eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset” separating
rich people from everyone else. Land will always be hugely important,
especially as the global population nears 10 billion. Meanwhile, data on
key human endeavors — how to grow food or produce energy, for example —
will become even more widely available. Simply having information won’t
offer a competitive edge; knowing what to do with it will.
Similarly,
I wanted to see more nuance in Harari’s discussion of data and privacy.
He rightly notes that more information is being gathered on individuals
than ever before. But he doesn’t distinguish among the types of data
being collected — the kind of shoes you like to buy versus which
diseases you’re genetically predisposed to — or who is gathering it, or
how they’re using it. Your shopping history and your medical history
aren’t collected by the same people, protected by the same safeguards or
used for the same purposes. Recognizing this distinction would have
made his discussion more enlightening.
I
was also dissatisfied with the chapter on community. Harari argues that
social media including Facebook have contributed to political
polarization by allowing users to cocoon themselves, interacting only
with those who share their views. It’s a fair point, but he undersells
the benefits of connecting family and friends around the world. He also
creates a straw man by asking whether Facebook alone can solve the
problem of polarization. On its own, of course it can’t — but that’s not
surprising, considering how deep the problem cuts. Governments, civil
society and the private sector all have a role to play, and I wish
Harari had said more about them.
But
Harari is such a stimulating writer that even when I disagreed, I wanted
to keep reading and thinking. All three of his books wrestle with some
version of the same question: What will give our lives meaning in the
decades and centuries ahead? So far, human history has been driven by a
desire to live longer, healthier, happier lives. If science is
eventually able to give that dream to most people, and large numbers of
people no longer need to work in order to feed and clothe everyone, what
reason will we have to get up in the morning?
It’s
no criticism to say that Harari hasn’t produced a satisfying answer
yet. Neither has anyone else. So I hope he turns more fully to this
question in the future. In the meantime, he has teed up a crucial global
conversation about how to take on the problems of the 21st century.
Bill Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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