21 Lessons for the 21st Century

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Author	Yuval Noah Harari
Language	English
Subject	Civilization Technology and civilization Human beings
Publisher	Spiegel & Grau, Jonathan Cape
Publication date	2018
Publication place	Israel
Published in English	30 August 2018
Pages	372
ISBN	978-198-480-149-4
Preceded by	Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a book written by bestseller Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari and published in August 2018 by Spiegel & Grau in the US and by Jonathan Cape in the UK.

Having dealt with the distant past in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) and with the distant future in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), Harari turns in 21 Lessons his attention to the present. In a loose collection of essays, many based on articles previously published, he attempts to untangle the technological, political, social, and existential quandaries that humankind faces.

The book itself consists of five parts which are each made up of four or five essays.

Summary

Introduction

In his introduction Harari states that in this world, where we are flooded by irrelevant information, maintaining clarity is important. Unfortunately, if you are too busy or too lazy to partake in the debate about our future, the decisions will be made for you, whether you like it or not. Harari sums this up with the sentence that history is "unfair".

He, as a historian, hopes that he can offer said clarity, therefore giving people the power to join the debate about the future of humanity. He briefly mentions his first and second book (Sapiens and Homo Deus), where he first covered the past and then the future, after which he concludes that this book will focus on the present.

Whereas he acknowledges that people rarely have the luxury to think about problems like global warming or the crisis of liberal democracy, he states that he will focus on the global agenda, e.g. on the things that are likely to influence the future of our planet as a whole, although he would not neglect the personal level.

His lessons, Harari writes, do not conclude with simple answers but aim to stimulate the reader to think further, and help him/her "participate in some of the major conversations of our time". The different chapters would focus on many different aspects of life, such as technology, politics, or religion, but the overall question would remain the same: "what is happening in the world today, and what is the deep meaning of events?"

He compares the globalized world to a spiderweb in which every person is ensnared, where our movement is limited but each of them can have influences across the globe. A consequence of this is that we have to "uncover our religions and political biases, our racial and gender privileges, and our unwitting complicity in institutional oppression" now more than ever.

Harari then connects the first part of the book (which is the surveying of the current political and technological predicament) and the questions it tries to answer with the events of the twentieth century. He then points out some of the problems that the revolutions in information technology and biotechnology present (e.g. the possible loss of jobs, or Big Data algorithms), whereas his focus is not on the possible creation of inorganic life (which was discussed in Homo Deus). Rather than that, he wants to focus on the more present social, economic and political crises.

Although technology would hold promises, he would focus mainly on the threats and dangers, simply because the corporations make a good enough job of advertising the advantages of their technology, which would make it the task of sociologists, politicians and historians to point out what can go wrong.

The second part of the book would examine the responses to the challenges we face. The third part would come to the conclusion that "though the political disagreements are intense, humankind can rise to the occasion if we keep our fears under control and are a bit more humble about our views". The fourth part asks if and if yes, to what extent we can understand global developments, distinguish right from wrong and if the human species is still capable of making sense of the world it created.

The fifth part, Harari claims, takes a more general look at "life in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed, and no new story has emerged so far to replace them".

Critical response

The review aggregator website Book Marks reported that 44% of critics gave the book a "rave" review, whilst 11% of the critics "panned" the book. The rest of the critics expressed either "positive" (22%) or "mixed" (22%) impressions, based on a sample of nine reviews. The book has received significant media attention with articles and reviews published by The New York Times, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, New Statesman and The Times among others.

In The New York Times, Bill Gates calls the book “fascinating” and his author “such a stimulating writer that even when I disagreed, I wanted to keep reading and thinking.” For Gates, Harari “has teed up a crucial global conversation about how to take on the problems of the 21st century.”

John Thornhill in Financial Times said that “[a]lthough 21 Lessons is lit up by flashes of intellectual adventure and literary verve, it is probably the least illuminating of the three books” written by Harari, and that many of the observations in it feel recycled from the two others.

Helen Lewis review in The Guardian is not as glowing although she admires “the ambition and breadth of his work, smashing together unexpected ideas into dazzling observations.”

The book has also received negative reviews. Gavin Jacobson in the New Statesman sees it as “a study thick with promise and thin in import” with advice “either too vague or too hollow to provide any meaningful guidance.” In The Times, Gerard DeGroot writes: "The author of Sapiens is good at identifying the crises to come but his syrupy platitudes are no answer."

Controversy with Russian translation

A Russian translation of Harari's book was published in June 2019. However, the Russian media noticed that several passages about Russia and its President Putin were excluded from the translation. In particular, the chapter about post-truth begins in the Russian edition with referring to Donald Trump's speeches instead of Putin's false statements during Russian annexation of Crimea. The representatives of Harari admitted that this change was authorized. Leonid Bershidsky in Moscow Times called it "caution — or, to call it by its proper name, cowardice", and Nettanel Slyomovics in Haaretz claimed that Harari "is sacrificing those same liberal ideas that he presumes to represent".