 "Lunch with BS: Yuval Noah Harari")
History books aren’t supposed to make you think about the future, but that’s what Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind ends up doing. Harari takes up the not-so-easy task of chronicling human history – how an insignificant animal even 70,000 years ago became the master of Planet Earth – which he does well. But when he says the human is now on the verge of becoming a god thanks to technological advances, Harari doesn’t seem like a typical historian.
While I find it a challenge to decide what parts of Harari’s ideas I will discuss with him over lunch, I wonder how he went about collapsing the history of humans in less than 500 pages. I ask him why he wrote a compact book on such an expansive topic, and Harari says, “Readers consider history to be boring – with dates, wars and kings – and not relevant to their lives. So I chose to focus on the key concepts and processes of history and kept the book short.”
When I meet Harari for lunch, I find that he is as unconventional in his personal life as he is with his ideas in the book. A 10-day Vipassana meditation course would daunt most of us, while he is on his way to a second 60-day course. Harari wears his social consciousness on his sleeve. He has been critical about the havoc humans have wreaked on fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem. He also has a problem with animals being raised for slaughter on modern industrial farms, which he says is the greatest crime in history. So it comes as no surprise when I find out Harari is vegan.
Harari would prefer having Indian food so we go to The Sahib Room & Kipling Bar at The St. Regis Mumbai (earlier Palladium Hotel) in mid-town, which isn’t too busy at lunchtime. Harari says he is a light eater, and we go straight for the main course. Harari suggests we share aubergine in sweet and sour gravy, tawa-cooked fresh organic greens and the waiter’s recommendation of the signature black dal. Veganism is not easy even in India, the waiter returns in a few minutes with the chef’s message that the aubergine can’t be cooked without ghee and the dal will have butter. Harari says we can still go ahead; as a vegan he avoids dairy products but is not “religious”.
Religion is an oft-repeated theme in Harari’s book. Religion was one of the three binding forces--the other two being commerce and empires--that unified the world. It comes as a “myth” or “fiction”, a term he uses to explain how humans could transmit stories about entities that they had never seen, touched or smelled, and belief in these common stories led large numbers of strangers to cooperate successfully. Thus, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint stock companies. In the last 300 years, he says, it’s been an age of secularism, and conventional religions have increasingly lost their importance, while new natural-law religions such as liberalism, communism, capitalism and nationalism have emerged.
“Money,” Harari says, “is the most important and revolutionary invention in history.” It creates trust among strangers. Osama Bin Laden didn’t trust the US, but he trusted the US dollar. Adds he, “The amazing thing about money is that it is not a technological revolution but a psychological revolution.” Though capitalism is a late-comer in history, he says, “It is the most successful modern religion as most countries and people believe in it.” For the longest period of history, it was thought that the economy was like a pie and somebody could have a bigger slice only at the expense of another, but capitalism said the pie could grow. Two hundred years ago people thought that poverty, famine and war would never be solved by humans, but today we have managed to largely overcome these problems thanks to capitalism.
A PhD from Oxford, Harari specialised in military history and accepted The Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s offer to teach an introductory course on the history of the world for first-year students. Harari says other university professors weren’t interested in teaching the course as it was too general, required hard work, and wasn’t academic enough. Harari didn’t have a position at the university and he accepted. The success of the course led him to write the book, first in Hebrew and then it was published in other languages. The book has sold 600,000 copies so far, not a mean feat for non-fiction.
Harari finds the aubergine excellent, and takes a small piece of the second roti. Taking a page from Guns, Germs and Steel author Jared Diamond’s evolutionary theory, he says agriculture is “history’s biggest fraud”. Farming brought long working hours for the hunter-gatherer, led to population explosion, a pampered elite and a worse diet, along with pestilence, famine and war. Agriculture was a luxury trap in the same way that people take up demanding jobs in high-powered companies, working hard to make money so that they can retire early.
Skipping desserts, we order Harari’s green tea and my coffee. Nobel Laureate behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman loved the chapter title 'The Discovery of Ignorance', which Harari says is the most important discovery of science. For most of history, most cultures were built on the assumption that religious books had answers to all questions, but the Scientific Revolution began with the premise that there are important questions which we don’t have answers to.
New breakthroughs in bioengineering and artificial intelligence (AI) will enhance our bodies and brains. Humans will be able to cure diseases and cheat death; people will be able to live longer and healthier. He says, “Companies like Google, Facebook and Apple are working on these technologies. Today, the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Middle East but Silicon Valley where new techno-religions will be created.” These are religions that make all the traditional promises of what people want for thousands of years from religion. He adds, “You pray to God to be healthy, rich and live longer; these techno-religions will give you everything that these old religions promised.”
How does a historian make predictions about the future, I ask. Harari says it is a natural continuation – if you don’t understand the past, your ability to understand the future gets limited. He also says his main task as a historian is to get people to consider possibilities.
What are the dangers of this Second Industrial Revolution that technology will unleash, I ask. “The masses will lose their relevance and inequalities will rise,” he replies. There will be inequalities between countries and within countries, between classes.
Previously, the gaps between rich and poor were social and economic, now they will be biological. The gaps that technology will create could be much bigger than in the past as the rich will have different bodies and brains. Experts believe AI will make half the population of even the developed world redundant. Armies no longer require millions of soldiers, but a few skilled experts as wars are fought by drones or in cyberspace. The real scare, says Harari is that masses would lose their political, military and economic usefulness, and hence, their voice. "The elite don’t really need all these people,” he says. The internet and social media are unlikely to be of much help to the masses as has been the case after the Arab Spring experience. China has made great economic progress, but at the same time we have seen a greater ability of the government to control the internet. If countries like China and India are unable to fulfill the aspirations of their people, you could have an explosive situation.
On this gloomy thought about the future, we leave. Harari goes for a talk at Mumbai University, and I reach out for my phone to google the Taiping rebellion, a 19th century civil war in China, which, according to Harari, had more casualties than the US Civil War and Napoleonic wars.
