Yuval Noah Harari's Message for Kids

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now, one of the world's most in-demand public intellectuals, the historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, best known for his 2014 book that some of you have no doubt read called Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and also his two follow-ups, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow from 2017 and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century published in 2018. He's reportedly sold more than 20 million books, but for someone who's been lauded by Masters of the universe from Barack Obama to Mark Zuckerberg, his latest target audience is a little more innocent, children.

He's out with a kind of Sapiens for kids, an illustrated version called Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World. A pretty triumphal-sounding title right, Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took over the World. How does he write for 10-year-olds that some of the darker themes of Sapiens apply to them too? As The New Yorker described sapiens, it says "Progress is basically an illusion. The agricultural revolution was history's biggest fraud, and the sapiens regime on Earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. He has said in an interview that in 200 years, I can pretty much assure you that there will not be any more homo sapiens. There will be something else.

He thinks technology, especially artificial intelligence, is changing us that much that quickly. Who's unstoppable now? With all of that, as a prelude, Yuval Harari joins us. It's so great to have you. Welcome to WNYC. Thank you for coming on with us.

Yuval Harari: Thank you for inviting me. It's good to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Why write now for children and why the title Unstoppable Us?

Yuval Harari: Unstoppable Us, it has two meanings. On the one hand, that we are the most powerful animal. We are the most powerful force on the planet. Nobody can stop us, not the lions or the elephants or the whales. On the other hand, it also has a sinister or dark meaning that we also can't stop ourselves. We always want more no matter what we achieve. We are never satisfied.

If we are going in a dangerous direction, there is no nobody out there, there is no responsible adult that can intervene and save us or save the planet from what we do. It has this double meaning. Why write about this for kids? Basically, because I think, to help children understand the world and to help children understand themselves, we need to understand our history.

History is not about things that happened a long time ago, it's about what happens to us every day and every night. I don't know if you're a kid and you wake up in the middle of the night afraid that there is a monster under the bed. This is actually a historical memory from tens of thousands of years ago when we lived in the Savannah in the wild and there were actually monsters coming to eat children in the night. A lion would come to eat you. If you wake up in fear, maybe you survive. To understand even something like that about ourselves, we need to understand where we came from.

Brian Lehrer: What's the main age range that this book is meant for?

Yuval Harari: Between 8 and 12. Of course, it depends on individual kids, their interests, and their abilities. That's the main group.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to talk more about the evolution of fear since you brought that up? There are certainly things to be afraid of in this world, and we certainly see politicians running on fear and trying to gin up fears perhaps beyond the objective percentage reality of whatever fear they're trying to gin up. Do you want to talk more about the evolution of fear?

Yuval Harari: Fear is something that you need to learn. It doesn't come just naturally. Humanity has learned to fear certain things over tens of thousands of years, which now completely distorts our understanding of the world. Most people are far more afraid, I don't know of spiders and snakes than they are of cars. When I was a kid, I was terrified of spiders. Now, this is strange because spiders hardly kill anybody in the world today, but cars kill every year more than a million people.

Why are we afraid of spiders and snakes more than cars? Because cars have been around for just 100 years, and deep down we haven't had the time to get used to these things. We haven't learned to fear them. Whereas we still carry the baggage from the African Savannah from, again, hundreds of thousands of years ago when snakes and spiders were the main danger.

This is also true for much bigger issues. For instance, a lot more people are afraid, say, of immigrants or of certain human groups than they are of climate change. Why? For the same reason that as we evolved for hundreds of thousands of years the tribe on the other side of the river, this is something that we always thought about. This was the main danger. We had to deal with it, whereas we had no impact on the climate. If we lit a fire, it didn't cause climate change. People are just not adapted by evolution to be concerned about the impact of our actions on the climate.

We are programmed by evolution to be very worried about the other tribe. This is something that politicians, even if they don't know history, and they don't know evolution, they discover by trial and error that it's much easier to push our emotional buttons when they warn us about the other tribe than when they warn us about what we are doing to the climate.

Brian Lehrer: How much of a moral judgment would you say you make in sapiens about the dominance of humans over all other species? How do you frame that for kids?

Yuval Harari: I think moral judgment is always part of history. We need to be as objective as we can when we answer the questions that we raise. Choosing which questions to raise, and what to focus on is in essence a value judgment. When you write about human history, how much attention do you give to the impact we had on other animals? Do you give it 1 page or 10 pages or 100 pages? This is actually a value judgment. I think every history book makes value judgments in choosing which questions to raise.

The important thing is not to be too judgemental or not to let your values sway the answers that you give. You need to stick with the facts. For instance, I think we should be very concerned about our impact on other animals. I would advise people to say, eat less meat. Now, I would like to find that in the past, in the distant past, humans did not eat meat. This is a new thing that we should just get rid of, but the facts just don't support it. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors didn't eat meat. I raised the question of how did we treat the other animals? When we come to the answers, we need to stick with the facts.

Brian Lehrer: There are references that I pulled from The New Yorker profile of you from a couple of years ago. How representative would you say they are of your thinking? "Progress is basically an illusion. The agricultural revolution was history's biggest fraud." I think that's a quote from the book, "The sapiens regime on Earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of."

Yuval Harari: I think this is quite representative in many ways. When you look at our impact on other animals and on the ecological system in general, there is very little to be proud of what we have done. Even when you look at ourselves. For most of human history, our big inventions in technology and things like that, they benefited a very small part of humanity. The average person after the agricultural revolution actually has a much harder life than the average person before. If you are Pharaoh, if you are a Sultan, if you are a high priest, your life is good.

If you're the average peasant in ancient Egypt, your life is actually much worse. Only in the last 100 years do we see a significant change when the life of the average person finally really becomes better. Thanks not so much just to technological inventions, but thanks to social and political developments such as democracy, which is meant to make sure that a new invention or a new economic system benefits everybody and not just a small elite, but this is a very short time, the last 100 or 150 years, and it's in jeopardy.

With nuclear war, with climate change, with the undermining of democracy in more and more countries around the world, this could be just a very, very short window when things began to improve before they again started to go downhill.

Brian Lehrer: You see-- [crosstalk]

Yuval Harari: We can't be complacent about it.

Brian Lehrer: You see human progress over the big sweep of human history as more from social developments if I'm understanding you correctly like the development of democracy than from anything technological? Again--

Yuval Harari: [crosstalk] Absolutely. The technology just to give a simple example you can use a knife to murder somebody. You can use a knife to save their life in surgery. The decision is not the decision of the knife. It's your decision. You look at the 20th century, the same technology was used to build terrible totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union and to build a liberal democracy like the United States.

You look today at North Korea and South Korea, they have the same technology. They use it in a completely different way. It's not the technology itself that makes the world better. A powerful technology can be a terrible thing in the hand of a dictator. It's the decisions we make. The question is, who makes the decisions? Is it a dictator or is it a democratic government?

One of the biggest dangers I see today in the world is for the first time in history we invented something that can take away from us the power to make these decisions. This is the big danger of AI of artificial intelligence because every previous technology, whether it's a knife or whether it's an atomic bomb, the atom bomb can't decide what to do with it. Humans decide what to do with it. AI is the first invention that can make decisions by itself, including decisions about us. When people today apply to a bank to get a loan, increasingly it's an algorithm, it's a computer that decides whether to give them a loan, not a human being. This is extremely dangerous.

Unfortunately again, our political systems are focused on other issues and not on this which is really I think an existential danger to our species.

Brian Lehre: The quote that I cited before from a previous interview of yours, "In 200 years I can pretty much assure you that there will not be any more homo sapiens. There will be something else." Can you expand on that and put it into context for us? Do you mean not just that technology might run us in the way that you were just describing, but that humans are going to that quickly evolve into something else?

Yuval Harari: The kind of technologies we are developing today they can completely destroy us like nuclear weapons. This is a very clear example or they can also change us. Whether you think about AI, whether you think about cyborgs, which are combinations of connecting our bodies directly to a computer, or whether it's genetic engineering and other bioengineering these are all ways to change human bodies and brains, and minds.

This is extremely dangerous if we begin to make such changes that within 100 years or 200 years that we can change ourselves to such a degree that the beings on planet earth in 200 years are likely to be much more different from us, than we are different from neanderthals or from chimpanzees. Then the big danger is that if you give these kinds of godlike technologies to armies and to co-operations, they are likely to try to use these technologies to enhance human skills that they need, like intelligence or discipline.

Armies want more intelligent, more disciplined soldiers, whereas they have very little interest in other human qualities like compassion or spirituality. The result might be the creation of a terrible new species of super-intelligent and super-disciplined humans who lack compassion and lack spirituality. If you think about a place like Russia, Putin needs intelligent and disciplined soldiers, but he would prefer them to have no compassion and no spiritual depth.

We are now developing technologies that can actually make this happen. Maybe to give just one thing more to think about. When people develop new technologies, they usually think about what they themselves will do with the technology. Usually, their aims are good. I want to use this to cure a disease, for instance. As an exercise, just if you develop these new technologies just think about the politician you most fear in the world and do a little thought experiment what would they do with the technology that I'm developing?

Can I develop it in a different way to make it safer, even from people like that? Because we have seen so many times in human history that people develop a technology with one aim in view and then it is hijacked to completely different purposes. I just heard a previous interview that you had on the show about all the disinformation campaigns and so forth when people created the internet and social media 20 years ago, 25 years ago, they thought this will bring truth and freedom, and democracy to the whole world.

They didn't see what was actually coming. We actually do have the best information technology in history and nevertheless, Americans are no longer able to even have a conversation. They can't agree on the most basic facts or something is clearly broken in the information system. Then you have people say, "Okay, we need even better information technology to fix the problem with the previous information technology," but I'm very concerned about it. Our record on the last few years and also from thousands of years is not very optimistic on this ground.

Maybe one last comment with regard to democracy. Large-scale democracy depends on information technology. People should understand this because for most of history, large-scale democracy was simply impossible. In the ancient world, you have examples of small-scale democracy, like in city-states like Athens, you don't have any example of a large-scale democracy anywhere until the late modern age because people just couldn't have a conversation over an entire country.

Then with new information technology like newspapers, like radio, it became possible for the first time to have a public conversation over an entire country like the USA and then large-scale democracy became possible, but it always remains dependent on information technology on this basic ability to just have a conversation and a new round of inventions of new information technologies can again make democracy impossible. It's not something that is possible under every condition. It needs very special conditions to function. One of the big fears is that we are now undermining the very foundations of democracy.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is the historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, most known for his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. There's now a kind of sapiens for kids that he's just released targeted he said earlier in the conversation for 8 to 12-year-olds, more or less called Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World. We'll get a few phone calls in for your Yuval Harari. (212)-433-WNYC, (212)-433-9692, or Tweet @BrianLehrer. Michael in Brooklyn Heights, you're on WNYC. Hello, Michael.

Michael: Hey. Hi. How are you doing? Hey, I've actually read Unstoppable Us, the Christmas season shopping is starting and I have a 10-year-old daughter and I loved it. Problem, it's fairly explicitly materialistic and atheist, and I absolutely respect that point of view, but that's not how we're raising our children. Again, no problem. Mr. Harari, this book should be in every library and Mr. Harari should publish it, and I hope he makes a ton of money off it, but that's going to be an issue for some parents.

Brian Lehrer: Is there a particular reference in the book that you would cite as an example?

Michael: He talks about something that humans do to make things work. I can't remember exactly, I should have taken notes, but how we create these stories and fictions that make us cohesive and he explicitly identifies religion as a fiction.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, thank you. Do you agree with that characterization of your writing to start off?

Yuval Harari: I'm writing about tens of thousands of years ago, all the religions that today dominate the world; Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, there may be 2,000, 3,000 years old, I'm talking about events 50,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago. Yes, religions have been invented and created and developed again and again throughout history. I'm not saying that they are something bad. They are something that helps people come together to cooperate in large numbers.

Sometimes, this is used for bad purposes, like to wage crusades and jihads and persecutions and inquisitions. Sometimes it can be used for very good purposes, like inspiring people to give full charity, like building hospitals and so forth but the key thing I think about religions is that we constantly change them. We constantly change the stories that we tell about our gods, about our heroes. Some gods that people revered thousands of years ago nobody cares about them today anymore. Zeus was once very big. Now everybody agrees that Zeus was just a story that people invented. Similarly, the gods of ancient Egypt, Ra and Isis, and so forth, for a time there were some of the most important entities in the world, now we look back and we say, "These were just inventions that helped the Egyptians create their kingdom."

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you a follow-up question. If you are characterizing religion as basically human created narrative, I understand you practice Vipassana Meditation very seriously, how does that fit into that paradigm, because I think Vipassana aims toward a transcendental reality beyond human narrative or is that wrong?

Yuval Harari: Not the way I understand it. For me, meditation is just a practice of getting to know myself better, of getting to understand the sources of my hatred, of my fear, of my anger, in order to learn how to generate less hatred in my mind. How to generate less fear, how instead to generate compassion towards other people, towards other beings. It's not about belief in this God or that God, in that guru or that guru. It's just a practice of observing your own mind.

When we observe our minds, especially in a time like this, like the elections, I don't know, you go to sleep at night, you close your eyes, you want to go to sleep, and suddenly all these thoughts start coming up in your mind. Very often there are thoughts filled with hatred towards other people, filled with fear against some other people and you are just alone in your bed with closed eyes. You are generating these thoughts, and it's your mind that are generating these stories. Then very often people, they start acting on the stories that their minds generate.

We are now talking on the radio, so maybe thousands of people hear what we say. If I now say things that are full of hatred, I'm planting seeds of hatred in the minds of thousands of listeners, and these seeds will maybe grow and lead to violence and so forth. I have to be very, very responsible about what I say. For this, I need to have the ability to, again, observe my mind and see where the hatred is coming from. For me, this is the practice of meditation. It has nothing to do with mythological stories about whatever.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Divine, in the Bronx. You're on WNYC with Yuval Harari. Hello, Divine.

Divine: How are you doing? This is Divine. Harari invoked so many more questions that I got now, but my main question was I agree with everything he's saying. Does he separate indigenous and African people from today's leadership of white people that's been leading us into this destruction?

Brian Lehrer: In the context of his big sweep of history, did colonialism and white supremacy evolve that of some larger narrative?

Divine: Do you incorporate that?

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Yuval?

Yuval Harari: It goes really back to the previous question that so many of the terrible things that we are doing to each other start with all kinds of fictional stories that somebody invents or that our minds generate. It's very common for people everywhere to create this story that we are superior to everybody else. In a way, it's tragic but it's also funny because this story is universal. There is hardly a single group of people in the world in history that didn't come up with this story that our people are superior to everybody else. This created so many wars and so many tragedies throughout human history.

The truth is that we all came from the same place. That if you go back tens of thousands of years, none of the groups that exist today in the world existed back then. 50,000 years ago, there were no Jews or Christians, or Muslims. There were no Americans or Chinese. There were not even Black people and White people. What you do find 50,000 years ago is actually a different human species. You have our species, Homo Sapiens living, mostly in Africa.

In other parts of the world, you have completely different species of humans, like basically other animals but Europe is inhabited by neanderthals. Gradually as Homo Sapiens spreads from Africa, all these other human species disappear. It's a big question whether we violently exterminated them or whether we to some extent at least intermingle with them. We now have genetic evidence that all of us today carry at least a little bit of neanderthal DNA. Between 1% and 3% of our genes come from neanderthals which mean--

Brian Lehrer: Just have 30 seconds left in the segment. Go ahead.

Yuval Harari: It just means that 50,000 years ago, there was a child whose mother was a sapiens and whose father was in neanderthal and we are the product, the offspring of such children. This way it's a point to reflect on when we think about all the divisions in the world today.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, The New York Times review of Yuval Harari's, new book says, "If you buy Unstoppable Us for your child, expect some very intense conversations." The kind we parents say we want to have but which can make us uncomfortable, roll with it. This conversation that we just had is probably a good example of that because his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, has now been adapted in a version for children called Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World. Thank you so much for joining us.

Yuval Harari: Thank you.

 

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