**ABSTRACT: Paul LaClair reviews and interconnects two books: Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
KEY WORDS: CLIMATE CHANGE, EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, GLOBAL ECONOMY, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, BIOENGINEERING, **INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, ENLIGHTENMENT, PROGRESS
Every election cycle in the United States, public opinion polling tells us what is foremost on voters’ minds. The top concerns are predictable: the current economy, health care, maybe the natural environment, and lately in the United States, immigration and trade. Mainly, voters express concern about their lives, now, although ginned-up concerns from right-wing propaganda machines also make the lists. Far down on the list are critical long-term concerns like climate change, worsening mal-distribution of wealth and power, economic segregation, and political reform to restore some semblance of democratic control. Barely on the list are other critical concerns like developing a response to advancing technologies in a global economy. Not on the lists at all are the implications and possible responses to emerging developments in artificial intelligence and bioengineering.
“May you live in interesting times” is an ancient Chinese curse, which refers to living amid disorder and trouble. A central theme of Yuval Noah Harari’s book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, is that we live in not merely interesting but fascinating times. We face challenges that are not only unprecedented; they challenge us on a scale that no previous era has approached in scope or degree.
For the first thousands of years of history, human economies were local and regional. In the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution brought us into the era of national economies. We burned through that era in roughly 150 years, and are now in an era of the global economy, of indefinite duration. Economies have always required political responses. How can humanity develop a political response to the global economy, when essentially all our governments are national in scope? That question does not appear on virtually any list of voter concerns and, for that reason, people seeking office do not discuss it. The media do not address it either: most media sources are owned by corporations, which seek to make profits. Their incentive is to sell their product, not to alert the people to what we need to know. Even NPR and PBS rarely discuss this critical question: apparently there is no market for it. But if we do not address it, soon, we could very well be screwed, along with every generation that will follow us for as far into the future as we can foresee.
Now, what happens if a few obscenely wealthy people take advantage of the emerging technologies in bioengineering, and no one else has access to those technologies? Before long, Harari argues, humans are likely to have the ability to design and new and “improved” version of a human being. If wealth is stratified, perhaps even more than it is now, what is to prevent the development of a master race? And if information technologies continue to advance in the field of artificial intelligence, those who control those technologies are likely to develop ever-more sophisticated algorithms, which they are likely to use to manipulate people. Propaganda is an ancient art, but with the use of sophisticated algorithms, people in control of core information technologies are likely to know more about what drives you, and what you care about, than you than you do.
And let’s assume that the American people come to a widely shared understanding of all this, and want to do something about it. What is to prevent oligarchs in Russia or China, or anywhere, from using these new technologies to manipulate people in unprecedented ways? With the world divided into nations, and particularly with the recent rise of nationalism, how can any response to these new developments be effective? Harari summarizes the problem with this pithy statement that summarizes Part II of his book: “The merger of infotech and biotech threatens the core modern values of liberty and equality. Any solution to the technological challenge has to involve global cooperation. But nationalism, religion, and culture divide humankind into hostile camps and make it very difficult to cooperate on a global level.” And, I add, how can we cooperate to address these issues if most people are not even aware of them, and our political dialogue does not even acknowledge them?
The foregoing introduction touches on a few of the most important ideas in Harari’s brilliant and timely book. I am not accustomed to saying that anything in particular is required reading for humanists; this book is. It is required reading for anyone who cares about our future, or humanity’s future. If any single book addresses the human prospect, this book, above all others, is the one. So I offer not merely a rave review but a review of the utmost urgency.
Harari organizes 21 Lessons in a way that presents fundamental and unprecedented challenges of our time first, then turns to issues that are under political and cultural discussion, then finally to how we might respond to the challenges we face, individually and collectively.
Like all great thinkers, Harari asks essential questions, like these:
- “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?” (From Chapter 9, “Immigration”)
- “Since September 11,2001, each year terrorists have killed about 50 people in the European Union, about 10 people in the United States, about 7 people in China, and up to 25,000 people elsewhere . . . In contrast, each year traffic accidents kill about 80,000 Europeans, 40,000 Americans, 270,000 Chinese, and 1.25 million people altogether. Diabetes and high sugar levels kill up to 3.5 million people annually, while air pollution kills about 7 million people per year. So why do we fear terrorism more than sugar, and why do governments lose elections because of sporadic terrorist attacks but not because of chronic air pollution?” Harari also mentions the millions of lives lost in conventional warfare. (From Chapter 10, “Terrorism”)
In the middle two sections – Parts III and IV – Harari presents good ideas but not brilliant ones. In these chapters he addresses contemporary issues, including terrorism, war and justice. Three chapters, on humility, God and secularism, are built around an obvious core theme. They are worth reading but do not raise the bar, as the other parts of the book do.
In Part V, “Resilience,” Harari returns to his long view of humanity. His clear, long vision is what makes him exceptional, and makes his book essential reading. The chapter titles – “Education,” “Meaning” and Meditation – give little hint of this, but once you dig into them, revelations appear on nearly every page.
However, the core of Harari’s argument appears early on. He writes this in his Chapter 9, “Religion”: “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 generally learn how to grow better crops and make better medicines, whereas priests and gurus learn only how to make better excuses.” Harari knows how to turn a phrase; and he’s right. That pithy statement about a core difference between science and supernaturalism should suffice to convince the scientific naturalists and anti-theists who read The Human Prospect to obtain a copy of this book forthwith, and to read and study it with the greatest of care and attention.
However, he continues his thoughts with the following statement, in the same paragraph: “This is also why the entire world has increasingly become a single civilization. When things really work, everybody adopts them.” How perfectly obvious that is, once someone points it out. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is not a pessimistic book. On the contrary, it offers hope for and suggests a path toward a global community, grounded in universal concern for dignity. A commitment to these ideals is at the core of our Humanist Manifestos.
While reading Harari’s 21 Lessons, I came across Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Pinker is a renowned scholar, and Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard. Like his earlier book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now is extensively researched and referenced. I can just imagine the team of eager Harvard undergraduate and graduate students who must have assisted him with either of these books. Yet for all his prodigious intelligence, sometimes Pinker’s ego seems to get the better of him, as suggested by his presumption to make “the case” for these core values.
More important, Pinker’s view often is myopic. Few things could make that clearer than reading his book immediately after reading Harari’s. Pinker carefully examines certain trends, which he deems to be relevant to the subject matter of his book. Like Harari, he aspires to a visionary view of the world; but in this he does not exhibit Harari’s vision, or awareness. By not accounting adequately for key developments that are occurring in plain sight, such as technological advance – including advances in artificial intelligence and bioengineering – and the resulting globalization, he limits his vision and renders his work somewhat irrelevant.
In his Chapter I, “Dare To Understand,” Pinker reveals that he does not understand. Early on, he makes the following statement, referring to the Enlightenment of the 17th century: “The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Foremost is reason.” That statement about reason being foremost, is like saying that the brain is the most important organ in the body, because without it we can have no conscious experience. However, without a functioning heart, the brain will cease to function, quickly. Both organs are indispensable, as are the digestive system and a few other organs. So too, reason is indispensable, but so are values like empathy and compassion. A dose of humility helps too. I thought perhaps Pinker would subsume these values within humanism but he does not, at least not explicitly: he describes humanism as secularism, which is no more than a good start. In Chapter 23, “Humanism,” he further defines humanism to encompass “life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience . . .” These are all solid humanist values but an ordering of values requires more than an incomplete list. When he gets around to discussing humanism in the final chapter of his book, his idea of what it is lacks any clear structure or definition. Part III as a whole offers only a superficial treatment of three out of the four Enlightenment values that Pinker identifies. He does not appear to have put much thought into it.
Pinker’s argument for primacy of reason could have important implications. What if a person was abundantly committed to and skilled at reason but was only concerned about himself? What if a narcissistic sociopath became president, consummately skilled at reasoning through human responses to political maneuvers but utterly unconcerned about the consequences of presidential decisions for anyone but himself and maybe immediate family members? Imagine a nation being founded, supposedly, on principles of liberty and equality for all, then nearly annihilating one race of people and enslaving another, with a carefully constructed, reasoned plan to build a nation that spanned from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. (Pinker hints at this problem with a discussion of Nietzsche in Chapter 23, “Humanism.”) Yet Pinker’s myopic exaltation of reason above other indispensable values was touted within humanist organizations for most of the 20th century. I do not know quite what to call that but I would not call it enlightenment.
Perhaps Pinker means that reason was foremost in that it was the value on which people of that era placed most of their focus, time and energy; but that distinction seems to belong to progress, in the way that people saw “progress” in and growing out of that era. They busied themselves on expansion and the accumulation of wealth; and again, they did it in a thoroughly unenlightened way, by forcibly capturing lands inhabited by other peoples (most of whom they killed), then enslaving another race of peoples to work them, so they could become wealthy. And when they were seeking progress more ethically, they were inventing and using the technologies of the Industrial Revolution. When progress conflicted with reason, which one would you say prevailed? And when an author spends one-half his time discussing progress and a single chapter discussing reason, which would you say that he saw as the more important?
Perhaps he means that reason was foremost in that it was the focal point of the greatest changes; but that distinction seems to belong to science, which has leapt forward exponentially since and largely because of The Enlightenment. By contrast, reason today is not much further ahead than it was then; arguably, it has fallen back, especially in recent decades.
Harari might respond to Pinker by suggesting that reason as the foremost value of The Enlightenment is the story that people told themselves and others about what they were doing; but that distinction seems to belong to a precursor idea of universal human rights, expressed in the statement from the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” When people tell the story of The Enlightenment in the United States, they tell stories about “liberty and justice for all,” not stories about how “men” became more reasoned.
Pinker omits liberty, equality and other similar values, such as individualism, from his list of four values. And by no means is his list of four authoritative: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the subject lists three categories of Enlightenment values – The True, The Good and The Beautiful. Reason, science and arguably humanism fit under “The True,” progress is an avenue toward “The Good,” but what of aesthetics, or “The Beautiful”? Of what value is Pinker’s list of four? How does it help us understand Enlightenment values then, or now; or come to grips with our present, so as to shape our future? I was only in Chapter I but I was already missing Harari’s vision and clarity.
Reading on, if reason is paramount, then why does Pinker devote half the book to the subject of progress, leaving reason, science and humanism for the final chapters, combined as his Part III and filling approximately one-third of the book? Why is the core of his argument contained in Part II, “Progress”? Is Pinker merely constructing another narrative, as opposed to developing a useful way to see things more clearly? Does he even see the contours of his own argument?
To be fair, Harari omits important values too. He writes: “The most important secular commitment is to the truth.” Perhaps this statement is defensible on the grounds that Harari refers specifically to secularism, as opposed to humanism. Or perhaps the difference resides in their respective approaches: Harari does not claim to present “the case” for anything. He offers 21 ideas, without claiming or suggesting that they are the only ideas. He offers them without excessive volume, or presumption, and when he makes a claim, he supports it – in contrast to Pinker who merely asserts that reason is the Enlightenment’s foremost value, without even trying to support his claim. Harari offers his observations and his vision, without claims of exclusion, and in that relative humility, he is more complete and more instructive than Pinker, and a much more palatable and enjoyable read.
Chapter 4 begins with this: “Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressives’ really hate progress.” My country-boy sensibilities were making me wonder whether this feller’s politics might tilt a bit to the right; and whether these undisguised biases might affect the quality of his work. I was hoping he would explain who these backward-looking intellectuals were but he never did. Later on, he named a few of them.
Whoever they were, I surmise that they did something to provoke his ire. Pinker devotes Chapter 4 mainly to defending the thesis of his previous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he argued that violence has declined markedly throughout history. Many people criticized this thesis, arguing that we have essentially found more sophisticated ways to harm each other: these include large-scale warfare, environmental degradation, and wealth stratification. Pinker dismisses this argument with this statement: “War, crime, pollution, poverty, disease, and incivility are evils that may have little in common, and if we want to reduce them, we can’t play word games that make it impossible even to discuss these individually.” That is a poor and unpersuasive response. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote: “Evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole . . .” Without debating the fine points of Niebuhr’s observation, we are well advised to follow the money on most of the major issues that confront us today. Our primary challenges are all driven by the rise of new global oligarchies. If Harari’s concerns become the world’s reality, and a few extremely wealthy people engineer an Orwellian system in which most of the world’s people are rendered irrelevant, after the air, water and food have been contaminated for profit and forests have been turned into deserts, billions of people could suffer and die. That is not a word game. If Pinker wishes to argue that these concerns are unfounded, then he should make that argument, which he does not do. At this point in my reading, a comment Harari made in an interview came to mind; if in the first couple of chapters the author has not written anything of value, Harari is not inclined to finish the book.
That is rough criticism, so I spent some time considering whether Pinker’s work might yield new understandings that would help us move forward, in our small communities, nationally or internationally. Through Chapter 4, any such argument had escaped my notice – and I was looking for it, especially after Pinker’s snarky dismissal of his critics. Reading Enlightenment Now, I get the sense that he expected the world’s people to come running forward after the publication of The Better Angels, and thank him for helping them sleep at night. He seems to be upset that this did not happen. It must be those intellectuals.
However, once Pinker gets to his data, he exhibits the top-rate internal quality of scholarship that has earned him many accolades. In Chapters 5 through 18, which fill roughly half the book’s pages and form the essence of his Part II on “Progress,” Pinker makes a compelling case that life is better for most people across the globe today than it was, say, in 1950. He argues persuasively that even in undeveloped countries, people are better off today than people in developed countries were a few generations ago. Life expectancies have risen dramatically, all over the world, and while many African countries lag behind the rest of the world, average life expectancies in Africa are decades ahead of where they were 75 years ago, and ahead of where they were practically anywhere centuries ago. Even in the most impoverished regions, medical care is available, which was not available anywhere a century ago. Because of household consumer goods, people are freed from mundane tasks like hand-grinding grain and washing clothes with a tub and washboard: chores like these consumed tens of hours weekly. In the United States, an image of poverty might be a rundown trailer home with an air conditioner hanging out of a window. In successive chapters on life, health, sustenance, wealth, inequality, the environment, peace, safety, terrorism, democracy, equal rights, knowledge, quality of life and happiness, Pinker makes a compelling, data-rich case that life has improved throughout the world (though he does not discuss the persistent problem of starvation in particular regions).
Then we come to Chapter 19, entitled “Existential Threats.” Here, Pinker attempts to address what may happen in the future. Of course, he cannot rely on data in the same way or with the same degree of reliability to make his case. In this chapter, his biases become more apparent again. (They never disappear, even in his strongest chapters.) Repeatedly, he dismisses contemporary concerns, including those related to advances in biotechnology, artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons. He constructs straw men out of past predictions that did not come true. His tone is dismissive, repeatedly, which undermines his credibility – you may wonder whether he has cherry picked his data to make what seemed like a compelling case in the previous chapters. His book preceded Harari’s. I would be interested to see him address Harari’s specific concerns, keeping in mind that Harari is not predicting what will happen but only making a case for what could happen, and how, if humanity does not coalesce around a sustainable vision for a humanitarian future in which everyone’s interests are honored. Pinker’s chapter on inequality is especially vulnerable on this point: he fails to address what may happen if wealth and power continue to become more concentrated in the context of a global economy.
Pinker admits that his vision “depends only on the possibility that what has already happened will continue to happen.” The word “only” stands out like an elephant in the living room. Why should we assume that it will continue to happen, when the structure of the world is changing, in ways never seen before? That is the central concern Harari raises; essentially, Pinker does not address it. Instead, Pinker offers this rosy assessment:
Many things that people used to pay for are now essentially free, including classified ads, news, encyclopedias, maps, cameras, long-distance calls, and the overhead of brick-and-mortar retailers. People are enjoying these goods more than ever, but they have vanished from GDP.
He is correct, of course, but what will become of the people who might have been employed as journalists, printers, laborers, telephone operators and in retail sales? That is the growing problem of irrelevance. Will we learn to share, or will we continue on the same capitalist path that produced our current prosperity? Why should we assume that one economic model will last forever, when every previous economic model has fallen and been replaced? What will be the replacement this time? Who will decide? How will the decision be made? What course will this evolution take, or will it come by revolution; if by revolution, will Fox “news” lead it, or will an uprising of informed citizens lead it? How would that happen? If so many good things are now free, can Huxley’s feelies be far away? Pinker does not address these matters.
Part III of Enlightenment Now addresses reason, science and humanism in relatively brief successive chapters. Pinker’s arguments here are unpersuasive, and only tangentially related to his thesis.
Still, Pinker offers considerable basis for hope and optimism. If “people are getting healthier, richer, safer, and freer,” and “more literate, knowledgeable, and smarter,” then perhaps humanity can rise up to save itself, recent electoral history in the United States and elsewhere notwithstanding. To summarize Pinker’s defensible thesis in a sentence, humans have the tools to construct a sustainable future, if they choose to use them.
Both Harari and Pinker are intellectual heavyweights, and scholars. Harari’s book receives my highest recommendation. I recommend Pinker’s book. Better still, I highly recommend that you read both books sequentially or in tandem. They present two broad competing visions, of central concern to anyone who cares about the human prospect.