21 Lessons for the 21st Century you need to learn

A blockbuster historian turns to the present

Nobody could ever accuse Yuval Noah Harari of lack of ambition.

The Israeli historian who recounted the whole genesis of our species in his bestselling 2011 book Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind (translated from Hebrew to English in 2014), and then the whole future of our species — including what that species might be once the bio-tech revolution has been fully realised — in his equally block-busting 2015 follow-up, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow, is now setting his sights on the present. Or rather, presents, as a fundamental basis of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is that despite globalisation and social media and all that, we all experience the world a little differently.

The majority of the 21 lessons are frankly pretty terrifying. Each starts with an abstract concept or trigger word — from terrorism and religion to capitalism and artificial intelligence — which prompts musings on the recent disillusionment with the West and its liberal ideology following Trump and Brexit, or the perils of fake news and the struggles of finding truth in a world flooded with more information than ever, or our continued failure to deal with global problems as we obsess over sectarian issues of religion and nationalism.

And all this at a time when we are faced with a growing threat of AI that could ultimately mean we no longer have any understanding of the world we have created, because we’ve made ourselves obsolete. (Dummies!)

A word of caution: Harari does not refer to “lessons” in an anticipatory, educative sense. There is little here that is positive or instructive. Instead, his purpose is to reveal the hardlearned lessons we have all already encountered this century, to be used in the 82 years we have going forward. It could just have easily have been called 21 Problems for the 21st Century, or even 21 Nightmares. Yet there is, at the same time, one big positive lesson that he tries to impart to us: to keep control of our minds.

It’s probably not hard to deduce that 21 Lessons is a collection of thoughts more than a single, cohesive idea. The genesis of the book — interviews and discussions Harari has had in various outlets over the years, amalgamated at the suggestion of his publisher — might even intimate it has come into existence to satisfy those market forces of which Harari teaches us to be suspicious.

Yet the persuasiveness of Harari’s philosophical analysis, and the engaging quality of his writing, is hard to deny. Sometimes you just have to give the people what they want.

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21 Lessons for the 21st Century is published on 30 August

(Jonathan Cape)