Professor David Peimer
Contemporary Israeli Thinkers: Yuval Noah Harari
Professor David Peimer | Contemporary Israeli Thinkers: Yuval Noah Harari
- So, hi everybody, and hope everybody is well, and lovely to see Wendy as always, our magnificent Wendy. And also thanks to Georgia. I know she came on late and really appreciate the help. So I want to dive in today with one of the individuals, and as we all know, of course, he’s Israeli and I think he’s one of the most interesting intelligent minds of our generation. And I just want to preface, before going into talking about Yuval Noah Harari, just, I’m going to briefly talk about his life, a very brief biography in a sense, give us a flavour of his life and experience, and then go into some of his main ideas from the primary book “Sapiens: Brief History of Humankind”. And I’m going to minimise the other two main books because I think one book is enough for one session. And just a couple of things before we even dive into Harari’s life. I just love watching him on YouTube. I love listening. I love reading his work. Why? Because I find there’s a hungry, curious intelligence. It’s not that, and as many sort of more traditional scholars, academic scholars have said, it’s not that every single idea is brand new and takes your breath away and is going to revolutionise in the way that an Einstein or a Freud or anything. Of course not. And yes, he is populist, popular, sorry. And many of the ideas come from other places, of course, but the brilliance of the way he puts ideas together, the metaphorical examples he gives, and I think he does have some very original ideas embedded inside the books and the thoughts. And for me, he’s an eternal inspiration, obviously being Israeli, but not only because he is Israeli, but because there’s a mind which deals with Israel and current situations.
And or let’s say more recent, the last couple of decades, even to the founding of the state of Israel, but broader, 70,000 years ago, he’s able to zoom right in the micro picture of the Middle East and Israel and zoom right out to millennia, going back thousands of years in human history, culture, anthropology, science. It’s a renaissance mind. It’s a mind that encompasses so many fascinating areas and yet intelligently and thoughtfully puts things together that haven’t necessarily been put together before. Ideas that have existed more on their own in a way. And that’s one of the main reasons that I love reading his work again and again, that I love listening to his podcasts and reading some of his shorter pieces and so on. And I’m completely biassed because I think he is one of the really most interesting and thoughtful minds of our generation. And I think that’s rare. so many minds have opinions, not thoughts or have emotions rather than considered thoughts or it fall into binary polemic as opposed to trying to tease out nuance and bigger picture. And I think Harari really tries to achieve all of that. And I think that’s something in our very polarised, binary way of thinking, current consciousness, if we put it like that. And he always opens my mind and makes me think about something new and inspires curiosity, the simple age old idea of inspires curiosity. So I’d love to share this with everybody, and I am biassed, and of course he’s Israeli as well. And my sister is just arrived two days ago with her daughter and our family and come for two weeks. So, we, for me, it’s a bit of a very special moment and moment to be looking at Harari, having looked at Gold Maier and Diane, Rabin and Sharon and others fairly recently.
So, just very briefly, Harari comes from a secular Jewish family. His origins are Lebanese and Ashkenaz, Lebanese Jewish and Ashkenazi, interesting combination. Without wanting to fall into the obvious stereotype trap, he taught himself to read at the age of three, he was sent to an intellectually gifted school, a school for intellectually gifted children. And at the age of 17, he went to study at the Hebrew University, studied history and international relations. He then went on to do his PhD in England at Oxford, where he specialised in mediaeval history and military history. And I think that’s really important. He talks a lot about studying military history and how that opened his eyes to so many ways of seeing history and societies and structure of societies and what it may mean for us today. So I think these are important highlighted markers in his life. The one book that influenced him the most that he talks about is by Jared Diamond. Some people may well know it, the book is “Guns, Germs, and Steel”. And he says in his words, he had an epiphany and the very title says it, “Guns, Germs, and Steel”. We can imagine the putting together in the interdisciplinary mode, the ideas coming from history, coming from warfare, military, trade, money, changes in institutional societal structures. We can imagine all of this going on in Harari’s mind and religions, of course.
The book that we all know, I’m sure so well, the first primary book that he, the main book that he’s known for of the three main books is “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”. Of course he part takes the title from Stephen Hawking, but it’s inter, and he talks about, uses the word sapiens as a species, not just humans, which has a different connotation force or as we know, written in 2011. And he wrote it because he was encouraged at Hebrew University. He was encouraged to try and give a sense of world history going back 70,000 years to give a 20 lecture course to his students because he felt there was such a thing lacking. So much of modern academia is so compartmentalised, and I’m not just talking about the sciences, specialist in neurology, cardiology, others ‘cause that’s obvious. But in the arts and humanities, they can be so specialised in one little area, and nobody knows something else and something else. And it loses that renaissance spirit, which I think is so beautiful, mysterious, and important for us in our times. And I think that’s what it gave him. And certainly Jared Diamond’s book, I think helped. The other very important thing that Harari talks about is his absolute dedication to Vipasana. And Vipasana is a kind of Indian meditation, which he’s been practising since 2000. And in his own words, he said it transformed his life. And it’s his word that. What he does and he lives like this. He meditates for two hours every day, hour in the morning, hour in the evening, and never misses. Every year he goes to meditation retreat for at least 30 days. And Vipasana meditation is quite special and unique because it demands total silence.
No speaking, no books, no social media, no phone, nothing. Complete silence, obviously if one has to, if one is feeling sick, emergency or something. But generally, if we just imagine for a moment every year, 30 days, we go to a retreat and we have to commit to absolute silence. But if we imagine for ourselves, I think it’s quite extraordinary, and this is what he says, transformed his life and no books and no social media, certainly no iPhone. And he writes, and I’m quoting him, “I could not have written my books without the focus gained from practising Vipasana meditation for 15 years of my life. It’s going to the retreat, but then doing it every day for two hours.” That’s an incredible commitment. And when one tries it, and I’ve tried it a few times, and when you try it, your mind first goes nuts and buzzing all over the place, but slowly, slowly it forces a focus. It’s almost like a forced focus where you start to get to the essence of something. New ideas come from wherever God knows, but it starts to become creative curiosity and intermingled with mobilised imagination and thought and history and what one’s learned and discovered in life. So that’s what he does and I stress it because he stresses it as being crucial to his creativity and his ideas. He never had a smartphone until 2021.
He has one now. He says it’s mainly for organisational things, travel journey, this that, et cetera. I don’t want to draw a picture of a purist, sort of hermit 'cause he is not, he’s very engaged with the world. I think what it’s about is trying to gain a clarity of thinking and moving away from what Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning Israeli psychologist called the noise and the distraction of noise from social media and from life in our times. I think that’s what he really is aiming for with all of these activities. 2017, the book won the German economic book award of the year as the most thoughtful influential book. 2018, 2020 Harari spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, as we all know. And he was a professor of military history, still is. He still gives some lectures at Hebrew University. And of course the bestseller was “Sapiens: Brief History of Humankind”. He writes obviously about Middle East and so on, but also free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, suffering. And the phrase which comes from partly from Vipasana meditation and certain kinds of Indian meditation, without getting into the jargon of it. And the cliche is morality is about lessening suffering in the world. And Harari uses that so often when he’s interviewed. And I find it fascinating 'cause it again forces us to think in a different way compared to the usual binary platitudes about what is morality and what isn’t or the binary simplistic, good, bad, right, wrong, et cetera, to lessen suffering in the world. It’s a fascinating new way that you shift of perceiving this one word suffering. In the book itself, it’s a study of Homo sapiens, which begins 70,000 years ago.
And when our species began to overcome other species, primarily the Neanderthals, they were the ones that our species started to conquer 70,000 years ago. All these ideas are broadly scientifically accurate where we begin world domination as Homo sapiens. And I’m using it again 'cause he uses it, not just humans. We also then start to develop speech, language, sounds. Much later we develop writing and things like money. All of this enables us to what he calls cooperate and work as groups. And through all of this combination of developments enable us to take over of ruling the planet or dominating it really, and getting bigger and bigger groups and organising better and better. Okay, go to the next slide please. So the key books that he wrote, here they are “Sapiens”, “Homo Deus”, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”. I’m going to focus today on the first one primarily. If we go to the next slide please. Some of the key articles he’s written, many, he does plenty podcasts and fascinatingly, he started doing animation, which is the contemporary aesthetic style on YouTube for the younger generation from about 16, 17 up to about 28, 30 years old. Primarily where animation is used. 10, 12, 14 minutes, it’s animation. I’m going to give one example of how to get complex ideas communicated effectively using very contemporary digital media. And he sussed it together with his partner. And he’s using it now more and more of how, not just to sell the book, but how to capture the essence of his main ideas in using, in this very contemporary approach.
So these are some of the, some articles some people may be interested in reading. I’m not going to go into them now 'cause it’s too much for one session, but some of them are and they just always provoke new thinking and new ideas. Okay, if we can go onto the next slide please. So this is the main book I’m going to focus on, which is “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, again, that word sapiens, because as a species 70,000 years ago, how we began to dominate the planet because there’s certainly no guarantee and there was certainly no logical rhyme or reason why we should, except for certain biochemical physiological developments in us. He talks about the study of sapiens from basically the stone age 70,000 years ago to the 21st century in this book. And he basically divides history into four key areas. If you can show the next slide please. And the four key areas of evolution that he talks about, of course he’s taken from Darwin and many, many others. Cognitive revolution, first of all, 70,000 BCE, which is the beginning of what we might call behavioural modernity. And the key is imagination. Fascinatingly its imagination that develops and that enables sounds to become words and much later writing, but it’s through the imagination. And I’m going to link that to what for me is probably his most important idea, which I’m going to come to in a little bit about storytelling and stories. Imagination is the key to develop. We have no clue if other animals have imagination or not, but he puts it at the centre of the cognitive revolution.
And the usual is to say reason and thinking and logic, et cetera, which of course are crucial and are not to be minimised for a second. But in the spirit of the graceful art of gentle debate, the word imagination needs to be included I think together with cognitive reasoning. That’s what he would add. Then the second key area of human evolution is the agricultural about 10,000 BCE, which of course we know with wheat and cows and primarily wheat, cows and other animals and creatures as well. But those are the two key. As a side anecdote, Julius Caesar 2000 years ago realised that the Roman army could march three times longer and fight for three times longer when they had a diet of corn and wheat as opposed to meat. And he changed the diet of the Roman army and just one small little thing. Many, many things of course came. But the main thing of course, agricultural revolution, which enable cities, towns, larger groups of humans to get together, which means they have to have language, they have to have the ability to organise, structure a society so they don’t kill each other. The neighbour doesn’t kill neighbour and have an argument and stab them or whatever. Structure, organisation, planning, architecture, what we call town planning today, city planning, all of that would’ve gone together with the agricultural revolution as we can imagine. The third main area of evolution for Harari is a unification of humankind, roundabout 34 CE which is the gradual consolidation for him of human, political or social organisations, which leads towards today 21st century globalisation, obviously enabled through technology, obviously the phone, internet, all of us today in over 40 countries around the world today.
So, this is the beginning of gradual consolidation of human political organisations, law, justice, if we think of Roman law, ancient Greek law coming even from some Egyptian before that. But consolidated in the Roman and Greek times, certainly through Augustus and others before that. And social structures together with legal structures to which require all sorts of things of courts and prosecuted defence, all these things we can imagine and of course some sort of a written way of structuring a society, who should live where, why, how, what, who does this? Yeah, sewage, running water, aqueducts, whatever, transportation, roads. All of these things begin as part of generating human organisation in larger and larger groups. The height of Rome was imagined around about a million people might have lived in Rome itself and the military organisation obviously as well, and food getting grain from Egypt and other colonies and so on. So it’s, how all of this has to be structured and organised and planned, which requires two crucial things for Harari. Number one is of course writing and language developing, and the second is trade and money, because without money, how does one do trade? I might have five bananas and you might have a knife, but how do we equal say, I’ll give you my five bananas and you give me the knife in return, good old bartering system. But as we get more complex and we can imagine it, well, I want a knife and I want a sheath and I want a leather handle. Well then five bananas are not enough. Okay, gimme 10, no 15.
Well, bartering becomes too difficult. So writing and trade, as many people know, I’m sure beginning with the Sumerians, in terms of basic money and accounts and the need for writing to start to develop in what we might know as writing today, and I don’t want to get into the specifics of hieroglyphics and the Venetian alpha, et cetera, et cetera, Sumerian and so on. But he’s talking about it in a very big broad way here, which enables trade 'cause trade is not only in goods and services, but trade in ideas. So ideas can move because we can write. So in number three, he’s also talking about, and Alexandra the Great certainly knew, which is one of the reasons he set up the library in Alexandria for the proliferation of ideas and how ideas can change. How do we build a bridge? How do we build a new piece of warfare? How do we improve production of wheat and grain, milk, et cetera. All the distribution, all of these things we know today, but this all had to begin somewhere. Then number four, the scientific revolution, which he argues begins round about the middle of the 1500 CE, the beginnings of objective science, which is of course, as we know, the separation from religion and or at least the setup, a relative divorce with religion and divine right of kings and other things which had ruled before feudal system as well. But the beginnings of reason, rationality and science, which leads in terms of biochemistry, medicine, engineering, so many areas we can imagine and how that starts to take over and really kickstart the modern era if you like. And of course the enlightenment that goes with it. So with a broad picture and it’s very broad, Harari puts these four basic ideas together for us. What’s fascinating to me about this is that he talks now the future, which is probably could be number five.
He doesn’t call it that in the book. The future is the biotechnology, he calls it the biotechnological Homo sapiens. And that the biology as we know it can disappear in a century or two because technology can take over what chips can achieve, what could be. I don’t want to get into all of that debate and AI and everything, it’s just the idea is planted that it could well happen. We can alter the structure of genes. We can alter many, many other things we can imagine start to come in the biomedical biotechnological impact, which can have a profound improvement for disease and health and human life and living longer. And of course it can have the reverse like all human activity and all human endeavour. It has, it can have both the positive and the negative result. So his argument is that sapiens dominated the world because they were the only animal that developed the ability to cooperate but cooperate flexibly in larger and larger numbers that enabled them to basically exterminate other species, primarily the Neanderthals because their brain didn’t develop in these ways. So together with language and everything else I mentioned was the ability larger and larger, we fundamentally could agree to collaborate. So not only am I going to trade five bananas for a knife, but now I’ve got, there’s somebody with bananas, somebody with oranges, somebody with apples, somebody with pens and Coca-Cola, whatever. And how we all start to bigger and bigger groups which acquire so many different levels of human activity can start to kick in and we take over because like a pack of wild dogs, we can dominate any other species on the planet.
Together with that argument and this is the main idea that I’m really fascinated with because a lot of this is fairly well known in a broad context. And I link this now to what I mentioned about imagination at the beginning. And I think this is his, one of his great original ideas, Harari that sapiens dominated the world because of the ability not only to cooperate in large numbers, but how were they able to collaborate in large numbers? How could a million live in Rome without just killing their neighbour 'cause their neighbour insulted them or stole a piece of meat or bread or something? How could they start to collaborate in larger in town, what we call town, cities, bigger villages today, transport on the road so I can go travel with my horse and cart on an old Roman or whatever road and if I steal something, well what’s going to happen to me? Why? How can I start, how does this happen? And he argues it’s through purely through the existence of the imagination, through the imagination we created stories, stories about how to, what is a nation, what is nation, what is nationhood going back thousands of years I’m talking. Way before the ancient Greeks, ancient Egyptians, ancient Chinese, whatever, smaller, medium, larger size. What is a nation? Money. The belief in money, which it’s not nature, it doesn’t exist in nature, it’s not a tree, it’s not a chimpanzee, it’s not a banana. Human rights. Well that doesn’t exist in nature. It doesn’t exist in a sunflower. It doesn’t exist in a squirrel leaping around. Through the imagination, nations, money, human rights, gods, religions, all of these things start to come about because the human imagination created stories. And of course I love it because it links to culture and literature and novels and short stories and plays, et cetera, which is all about storytelling. I’m trying to tell a good story about Harari and his ideas here. Not just I hope give a lecture on some ideas, but tell the story of his ideas.
Through the ancient art of storytelling he argues, we created fictional what he called collective fictions. Collective fictions, which do not exist in nature at all. Human rights, justice, money, nations, gods, these things don’t exist. Government, government structures, states, so ministers, cabinet ministers, presidents, whatever. It’s all created through the human imagination which required stories. And if the majority of the people in that town or that city or that village could agree on the one story, this is the god, that we’ll use money. You’d call it coins, call it paper, call it plastic card, whatever. If we all agreed to that story, which is fictional, we can have a functioning society, but it requires the majority to agree to the story. And that’s where the beginning of all of this happens. Even the belief in the enlightenment. We all agreed, okay, we’ll take science seriously and reason and rationality over religion and other things and divine right of kings and feudalism, et cetera. Or at least part of it. It’s the story of human evolution and it’s the story of how the imagination kicks in to create the ideas and belief systems. We go to war, and I’m not talking about current wars, I’m talking about war in general over thousands of years of history because of a belief. A belief we want more bananas from that tribe over there. A belief we want oil over there, a belief that we want those people’s land because it’s much more agriculturally productive, a belief 'cause we want all their ships, whatever it is, or just a belief 'cause we think we’re superior and they should be our servants, our slaves.
It’s a belief system in the stories. And I find this is most provocative and powerful idea of all, and it comes through human imagination, which he celebrates in the beginning. And this to me, this is his great contribution, if you like, collective fictions, which are myths actually, which we need the majority believe and buy into. And then we can have a society which in large numbers can relatively flexibly within more or less agreed rules, collaborate, tolerate each other to some degree and more or less live together. Fascinating idea to me. They don’t exist the ideas purely in the imagination. So he goes on about religions, political structures, legal institutions, all of this comes from our cognitive capacity for fiction. What a fascinating idea I think from Harari. So all of this comes about in these ways. If we can go to the next slide please. Okay, this is just a short little clip which I want to show. We can show it please. Georgia.
- [Person 1] Story of how Homo sapiens came to be the dominant species on earth from evolution to present day. This is an ambitious attempt to capture the complexities of human existence, all explained in fine lines of print. As the book portrays, human history has been shaped by three major revolutions. Firstly, there was the cognitive revolution, which happened more than 70,000 years ago. The cognitive revolution allowed humans to maintain free will while creating common systems such as money that required only belief in order to be realised. When the cognitive revolution occurred, sapiens were able to imagine and describe things which do not exist in the real world. This fictive language has enabled all finance, culture, religion, and politics in the millennia since. The ability to believe in an afterlife can lead to a belief in morality, which can lead to a belief in human rights. None of these concepts exist in the natural world. They are all collective imaginations of humanity, yet they all shape the destiny of our species and our planet more than our genetic code ever has. This period was followed by the agricultural revolution that took place 10,000 years ago. The author is referring to this period by building narratives from some of the first known hunter gatherers to the first major agricultural civilization that led to the beginning of globalisation. This was a period of technological improvement and increased crop productivity that occurred in Europe. During this period, the sapiens developed and implemented major inventions that spurred a shift in agricultural production and therefore improving our life standards.
Ultimately, the scientific revolution brought forward the period when humans made the transition to a scientific and factual approach towards life. According to the book, this period started 500 years ago and is constantly improving. These revolutions serve as proof that humans were able to form ideas that no other life form was able to do, such as politics, religion, and capitalism. Furthermore, the scientific revolution, which emphasised systematic experimentation as the most valid research method resulted in developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry. These developments transformed the views of society about nature. Also, those concepts contributed to the human’s process of overcoming the forces of natural selection. Interestingly enough, the author accepts the common view that our basic emotions and desires weren’t influenced by these revolutions. Here the author is referring to our fundamental sexual and romantic needs. The author also refers to our eating habits that haven’t changed much. However, this aspect can be argued by recent scientific and nutritional discoveries that lead to significant changes in our diet. For example, more and more people are shifting away from meat and sugar-based diets due to scientific discoveries that prove they do not contribute to a healthy lifestyle. In contemporaneous times, sapiens represents the only remaining species of human. A very long time ago, 100,000 years ago to be more precise, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one, us, the Homo sapiens. According to the book, Homo sapiens rule the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that purely exist in its own imagination, such as God, states.
Hold please. That we rule the world because we believe in things that purely exist in the human imagination. What an extraordinary, ironic, paradoxical thought like gods, states, money, they’re fictions again, collective fictions because we have the imaginability to believe in that we can create larger and larger societies, we can control, we can more or less live together in some way without killing each other every five minutes. Hopefully. It’s through the collective fictions. Again, one of the key ideas in the book, how our species took over from the other five human species that inhabited the Earth. Okay, if we can go on to the next clip please. This is the collective fictions, the main idea from Harari’s book. The ability of sapiens to cooperate in large numbers arises from its unique capacity to believe in things existing purely in imagination like gods, nations, money, human rights, et cetera. Okay, we can go to the next slide please. And this is a short clip from Harari. This is a 10 minute piece he made for children based on his main book “Sapiens”, using the very contemporary animated form. Okay, if we can show it please.
Two in the series. My favourite is Dr. Fiction. Dr. Fiction is a superhero who has a central role in the books because she represents the human superpower that has allowed our species to conquer the planet. Humans control the world because we are the only mammal that can cooperate in very large numbers. And we can do that because we can invent and believe fiction. All large scale human cooperation is based on fictional stories. Legends are based on mythological stories. Nations and states are also stories that exist only in our collective imagination. Corporations are what lawyers call legal fictions. Money too is just a story. Take the dollar bill, it has no value in itself. You cannot eat it or drink it or wear it. The value of the dollar comes–
It’s only from the stories that bankers tell us and we all believe. So, and he goes on and on using this animated style. And obviously this is for young kids, a 10 minute version to help teach some of the main ideas in the book, which is the the main idea I’ve been saying today. Okay, if we can show the next slide please from the book. If we can show this clip
[Person 2] “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”. He reviews each step that got us here. Here you’ll learn each of the elements in our history from language and money to science that made us who we are. Here are the three most interesting lessons this book teaches us about our species. One, the ability to think gave early humans language, which eventually led to agricultural advances, allowing them to grow exponentially. Two, improvements in trade were only possible with the invention of money and writing. Three, with better economic and communication means scientific progress gave our race the abilities necessary to get where we are today. Are you ready for an exciting crash course on the entire history of mankind? Here we go. Lesson one. Exponential population growth began with agricultural advances after early humans had the ability to think and speak. Homo sapiens had some distinct advantages that let them get ahead of other human species on earth. Most importantly are the differences in humans’ brains. These began with the cognitive revolution around 70,000 years ago. This was a time when mental development rose relatively suddenly setting our ancient ancestors apart. With our newfound better brains Homo sapiens could outperform other species of humans forming communities, developing better hunting tools and building simple trade networks made everything about life and survival easier.
As the ability to communicate grew, so did the population. Language set our species apart from others because it made us able to distribute information more freely. This helped early people share lessons about predators and food with each other. Because humans could cooperate as a society and flexibly, ideas spread, which made even more progress possible. Not long later, the agricultural revolution gave humans another great advantage. By deserting old hunting and gathering methods for farming, mankind further improved their situation. This new method also slow to begin, was far more efficient than the old ways and let population growth explode. Things were looking up, but there was a problem. Coping with this larger community would require mankind to make even more advances to get where we are today. Lesson two, the inventions of money and writing let mankind trade more efficiently. Paving the way for further expansion. With agriculture, humans became more efficient with our time and energy. This let some people begin doing work like weaving or blacksmithing. These individuals would then trade or barter with farmers exchanging their goods for food.
While this new system was better, it quickly became inefficient. Let’s imagine that you’re living at the time when you’ve chosen blacksmithing as your profession. Your assortment of knives and swords provide good means of trade for food like pork. Seems easy enough. Just make the trade. But what if the farmer in your town already has a knife? Or maybe he’s not got a pig to kill for you yet, he can promise you one. But how do you know he’ll be honest about it? It’s easy to see how having writing and money would make your situation a lot better. With the ability to record your transaction with the farmer you can make sure he keeps his word if he needs to promise you a pig. And if you don’t have anything he needs, you can just sell your knife for currency like barley to make the transaction. From here advancements for Homo sapiens began happening rapidly. Pretty soon laws helped regulate everything to be safer. With the ability to write, economies and governments could grow. Society began to flourish and the next step was sci–
Okay, so this again, just putting it in this fun contemporary form of animation. We start to get an idea, and I know it sounds like it’s maybe simplifying it, but I think it’s getting to the essence of the main ideas. Money and language go together. And of course, together with language and writing, trade is enabled, as I said earlier, not only trade in goods and services of pork or meat or knives or blacksmithing, but trade in ideas through writing as well. And the development of societies and ideas of human rights and justice and legalities. Ideas of values and religions and social values. But again, all fictional but essential ironically, for us to collaborate in larger and larger societies and more flexibly. Okay, if we go on to the next clip, please.
70,000 years ago, humans were insignificant animals. The most important thing you need to know about our prehistoric ancestors is that they were unimportant animals. Their impact on the world was not greater than that of fireflies or jellyfish or woodpeckers. Today, on the other hand, we control this planet. And what I would like to talk about today is how exactly did we reach from there to here? How did we turn ourselves from insignificant apes minding their own business in a corner of Africa into the rulers of planet earth? Now usually when we try to answer this question, we look for the answer on the individual level. We want to believe, I want to believe that there is something special about me, that there is something special about my body, about my brain that makes me such a superior creature to a dog or a pig or a chimpanzee. But the fact is that on the individual level, I’m embarrassingly similar to a chimpanzee. If you put me and a chimpanzee together on a lone island and we had to struggle for survival, I would definitely place my bets on the chimpanzee, not on myself. And this is not something wrong with me personally. I guess it’s true for you also, that if they took any one of you, almost anyone and placed you on a lone island with a chimpanzee, the chimpanzee will do better. The real advantage of humans is in the unique ability to cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. Now, the only animals that can do that, there are some other animals like the social insects, the bees and the ants that can cooperate also in quite large numbers. But they do so in a very rigid way. They’re inflexible in the way that they cooperate. If there is a new opportunity or a new danger, the beehive cannot change overnight its social system, the way that they cooperate, say execute the queen and let’s have a republic of bees.
They can’t do it. They’re rigid in the way that they function. There are other social animals like wolves, like dolphins, like chimpanzees, that they’re much more flexible in the way that they cooperate. But they can do so only in very small numbers because cooperation among wolves or among chimpanzees depends on intimate and personal knowledge, acquaintance one of the other. If I’m a chimpanzee and you are a chimpanzee and I want to cooperate with you, I need to know who you are. Are you a good chimpanzee? Are you an evil chimpanzee? Are you reliable? Are you a cheat? If I don’t know you, how can I cooperate with you? Humans are the only ones that can combine the two abilities together, cooperate very flexibly, much more than chimps, but in very large numbers, especially with large numbers of strangers. One versus one we may not be superior to chimpanzees, but if you place 1000 humans and 1000 chimps together on a lone island and they have to struggle, then the humans will definitely win. For the simple reason that 1000 chimpanzees cannot cooperate at all. And if you now take 100,000 chimpanzees and cram these 100,000 chimpanzees into Yankee Stadium or Wall Street, you will get chaos, complete chaos. But if you take 100,000 humans and cram them together into Wall Street or into Yankee Stadium, you get amazingly sophisticated networks of cooperation that are the real basis for human dominion on planet Earth.
Take even this talk that I’m now giving in front of you. I don’t know most of you. There are about 200 people now in the auditorium. I know maybe two or three of them really well. All the others are basically strangers to me. I don’t really know the people who organised this event. Yes, I’ve met them once or twice for rehearsal and so forth, but I can’t say I really know them intimately. I certainly don’t know the people who invented this microphone and this computer and this camera, which we are using. I don’t know the persons behind the cameras, which are now taking footage of what I say. And I don’t know the people who might be watching this talk over the internet somewhere, maybe in New Guinea or New Delhi or Buenos Aires or New York. Yet all of us strangers cooperate together in a very flexible and sophisticated way to create this global exchange of knowledge. This is something that chimps don’t do. You’ll never catch a chimpanzee standing in front of an audience of 200 other chimps and giving a talk about bananas or about humans or something. Only humans do such things. It should also be said however, that chimps not only don’t give talks to strangers, they also don’t have prisons, they don’t have concentration camps, they don’t have slaughterhouses, they don’t have armors factories. Cooperation is not always nice. Often when we think about cooperation, we think about “Sesame Street” and teaching children to cooperate together. But all the terrible things that humans have been doing, still are doing in the world.
They too are the outcome of this ability to cooperate flexibly in very, very large numbers. Now suppose I’ve managed to convince you that the secret of success of our species is this ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. The next question that immediately arises in the mind of an inquisitive person is how exactly humans do it? What give us this ability to do something no other animal can do? And the answer is our imagination. Humans cooperate flexibly in large numbers because humans can create imagined realities together. All other animals use their communication system in order to describe reality. A chimpanzee can say, “Look, there was a lion run away.” Or, “Look, there was a banana. Let’s take it.” Humans can use their language not only to describe reality, but also to create new realities, to create fiction. A human can say, “Look, there’s a lion, or look there’s a banana.” But a human can also say, “Look, there’s a God above the clouds. And if you don’t do what I tell you to do, God will punish you.” And if you believe this fictional story, then you will do what you are told to do.
And this is the secret behind large scale human cooperation. As long as everybody believes in the same fictional stories, everybody obeys the same laws and the same rules and the same norms. And this is something that only humans can do. You can never convince a chimpanzee to do something for you by telling him, “Look, if you do what I tell you to do, you know what will happen after you die. You’ll go to chimpanzee heaven and there you’ll receive lots and lots of bananas for your good deeds here on earth. So now do what I tell you to do.” No chimpanzee will ever believe such a story. No chimpanzee will ever be willing to do anything for you in exchange for such promises. Only humans can believe such fictions. And this is why humans control the world. Whereas chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories. Now you may find it possible to accept that in the religious–
- Let’s hold it there. Let’s hold it there, please, Georgia. Thank you. So what I find fascinating is not only how articulate he is, how clear he is with each word, each thought, the wit, the humour, the irony, the playfulness of metaphor and idea. It’s all there inside it. The ability to communicate complex stuff to so many people everywhere, whether we agree or disagree is an entirely separate thing. And we can absolutely debate in the great spirit of education. We can debate, we agree, we disagree, it’s nonsense, it’s right, it’s wrong, whatever. But what I love is the idea, the inspirational quality that he brings to that clarity of expression for all of us. Just one or two other ideas as we move towards finishing, because these are the main ideas from the one book really, that I think we can achieve in today’s talk is that human’s ability to collaborate flexibly in large numbers. Of course, we eventually end up with empires and not only multinationals, but empires greater and greater, bigger and bigger. And that requires what he talks about in a more recent book, the 21st century book, where the need to define the society in terms of the binary polemic, which I’ve often, which I’ve spoken about before, which is the colonialists, which is the theory on inside colonialism of them and self of us and them, superior, inferior, I’m superior because I have no hair. Somebody is inferior because they have more hair or because I’m taller or shorter or skin colour or whatever it is. So he talks about it in the later book of as a part of the nuance of this collaboration is the necessity to divide the society into classes, groups, superior, inferior and nuanced levels of inferiority and superiority.
You belong to the feudal lords and the king at the top, the aristocracy, and you go down right at the bottom is the peasant who looks after the tools, the land or the cows or whatever, or the janitor or whatever. The structures that we have also created and our need to define groups by self and other by superior and inferior, which has developed as part of this, which is not necessarily in nature, but it is for him through the imagination again. And what he calls later, these collective fictions are the very myths of the very stories that we come to believe in, in a compelling way. He talks also about in a fascinating idea that the fiction sustains the social order, the fiction of writing and contracts and trade and all the other things in just in one example. Or it might be in human rights, it might be another, it sustains the social order, the very word democracy, which is so used and frighteningly and importantly today, sustains a certain social order. And that’s what he mean, the flexibility argument that he brings leads towards a democracy ‘cause the flexibility of ideas. When it’s more inflexible, the example that he gave about the bees or getting together and deciding they want something changing. All they can do is execute the queen bee, but that’s not going to change anything necessarily 'cause they’re too rigid. That would be the inflexible and that’s what leads towards the dictatorship as well in our collective imagination.
The one other example is that he talks about the main challenge today, just to bring it to a conclusion here, is not only the conflict between autocracy and democracy, the conflict between fascism and democracy or emergent contemporary approaches to those old, those well-known words. But in fact the main challenge comes from the laboratory, the scientific laboratory. And he’s been accused of sort of doom wizardry in a way. That everything is going to be terrible because of AI and biomedical and biomechanical changes through genetics, et cetera, et cetera. Which I said earlier on has the good and the bad. But what’s fascinating is the role of free will, will free will exist still if we are genetically modified if we are, and I’m thinking in maybe a century’s time as he’s thinking. Is free will still part of it, does free choice still occur or doesn’t it? So a fairly old debate, which we know quite well, but what if our bodies are different parts of computers or chips or other things we can’t imagine yet. And our bodies are a mixture of things as evolution continues on its forward march. So it’s fascinating and how the algorithms, we just, at the very beginning of algorithms, perhaps like the Wright brothers with aeroplanes almost, it was 66 years from the Wright brothers just over 100 feet to Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon, 66 years. It’s extraordinary.
One lifetime. So where we are at the beginning stages of AI, and where we might reach in a generation or two or three, what will happen to free will, choice, et cetera, or will the algorithm give us the illusion he argues of free choice and may think that we are choosing this or that, but the algorithms know us so well, our desires, our tastes, our wants, our needs, the algorithms will get together so well, all the data is so clear that in fact a state or corporation in an Orwellian sort of nightmare will be able to give us the illusion of free will but the reality won’t be. That’s part of his much later book, which is highly debatable and highly, but it’s a provocative, again, interesting ideas that he keeps coming up with. So I wanted to, and he comes up with a phrase that in 100 years maybe we will be hackable animals, which are structured by algorithms together with remnants of human nature and human emotion from the past. Yes or no debate, provocative ideas for the future, who really knows. So he has been called just to end it now completely, that he’s talking about big history, he has been accused of the facts being more or less correct, and that big history genre writing sort of thing. But that he is not coming up with really new ideas. And the reason I’ve harped on this idea of imagination and story is because I think that is his real new idea. That is his one great idea, which runs all the way through his books. He’s been accused of being the facts are correct but are not new, of not really being a serious scholarly contribution to knowledge and a kind of infotainment, if you like, and that it’s a wild intellectual ride through a blood curdling history.
As one critic, one scholarly critic wrote about him. Predictions of the future, who knows? He’s been told he’s a gifted storyteller, but he sacrifices science for sensationalism. These are all true. And that he’s turning himself as a historian into a brand himself in the very modern way of self selling and self prophesying. So all of these aspects involve a fascinatingly complex individual who I find endlessly fascinating as I’m sure there’ve been through all history, but somehow he’s captured the imagination from China to Europe, to Africa, to Americas, all over books have been translated into over 60 languages, sold millions and millions, especially the first book “Sapiens”. And I think there’s a reason not just popularising it like Stephen Hawking did as well “A Brief History of Time”. But it is popularising, but it’s making it fascinating and reminding us of the gift of curiosity, the graceful gift of imagination which we can use to destroy or to create whatever the future is and to stimulate ideas about how we are living and how we may choose and want to live in the future in the best attempt of a kind of graceful discussion of complex ideas. And I wanted to share just this, just a couple of these main ones with all of us today here with a bit of the romantic and idealistic passion that I have for him and his work, because I find it endlessly thought provoking, far more than so many other half baked thinkers. If I’m really being honest with everybody. And I’m not trying to be arrogant, I just found that he is constantly trying to come up with something which seems to make sense somewhere. Not necessarily agreement, but provoke curiosity and imagination. Okay, so thank you very much everybody. Sorry I’ve gone over time a little bit. I got carried away with Mr. Harari and I haven’t begun even what his writings about Israel or the Middle East, his writings about war, about many, many other things. He’s really try to take in so much in this kind of, I guess, version of a contemporary renaissance mind. Okay, so just quickly some questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Thanks Mavis.
Q: The name of the meditation?
A: Vipasana, as Rita has written here, Vipasana meditation is the kind that he practises every day for years.
Barbara, a few years ago, Obama was asked to name his favourite book and he replied, “Sapiens”, absolutely, I think Obama, Clinton, just many, many, not only political leaders, but many, many artists, writers, thinkers, not, I suppose broadly creators have referred to him in this way. He sparked something in us wanting to make connections and understand bigger pictures. And the smaller day today. Mary, the concern, the communication in cooperation amongst animals, insects, and plants ignored human DNA. It contains a lot of neanderthal DNA absolutely in there. And of course, absolutely. And low fertility amongst Neanderthal men and modern men. The low fertility was partly responsible. Absolutely. So reproduction may be important as part of the extinction. I think it’s a great point, Mary, and thank you for that. It’s, I think it really is part of it, the low fertility rate as well.
Rita, for those interested in Vipasana meditation. Thank you, there it is. Mavis, thanks, thanks. And Rita. Appreciate. I love the way how everybody just helps each other on this, Wendy, you call the community of lockdown.
Cecilia, what happens when imagination creates conflicting stories. Ah, that’s a great question, Cecilia. Absolutely. And it does, imagination will create conflicting stories whether it’s about gods, about religions, about trades, about empires, about war, about rules and justice and what is justice what is injustice? And that’s part of the fascinating endless rich treasure of our human imaginations. I agree.
[Wendy] Can I jump in there? David would?
[David] Yeah, please.
[Wendy] But that’s then linked to belief systems.
Brilliant, absolutely. Absolutely Wendy. He would say–
[Wendy] Shifting belief systems or holding onto primary belief systems.
Beautiful. Exactly. Agree completely. Absolutely. As he talks about, with the bananas or painting on a wall or whatever, but the belief system crucial. Yeah. And they’re coming from the imagination why there’s thunder, why there’s lightning, rain, whatever. Exactly. Sorry, Wendy, did you want to say other things?
[Wendy] You know, this is how one shifts belief system, what the imagination. Imagination shift belief system, what comes first?
Well that’s fantastic. I mean, I think he would argue, Harari would argue that the imagination creates a belief system that is one god or for the ancient Greeks, they had over 2000 gods, the Romans had about 1000 I think. So those are the, sorry?
Yeah. And also, and then also it goes back to the first question. I dunno who it was that asked nature versus nurture.
Yeah, absolutely. So it does go back to nature versus nurture. You know, what’s already in nature, what’s already in nurture, DNA separate to genetically modifying DNA, but the Greeks we know had over 2000 gods, and we have one God and others, from wherever else, different kinds of meanings of gods. And what a God is. The Romans over 1000. So I agree entirely. Imagination and belief systems, I think almost go hand in hand to help to try and explain and understand something about the world we live in. But then it gets challenged by something new and a new belief system, a new approach, human rights, suffragettes, it gets challenged constantly. As the imagination expands and a new belief system challenges the older one, the earth is flat. The earth is round, yeah, all of those. I agree Wendy yeah, great.
Delia, I learned in school in the forties, agricultural revolution gave mankind time. They didn’t have to spend all the time hunting animals. Yeah. With time they had time to think this led all to the development. Yeah. And what he argues that, but what he argues, I think, and quite a few other scientists from about 70,000 years ago, is the beginning of cognitive development, which is reason, logic and crucially imagination. And slowly, slowly things start to develop. If we imagine those first humans in the middle of Africa, why would they start to walk out, plenty food, plenty vegetation, plenty animal. Why would they even start to move? You know what something sparked. Why roam? Why move out? You’ve got what you need there mostly and many, many other things as well. So yeah, I think they had time to think, but it was, I think, which is what the agricultural revolution gave, I think Harari would say. But it started even before.
Amy. I’m just trying to give what I think Harari would say. With the ability to kill each other in the name of some imagined fiction or imagined beliefs. You should be a lot less enthused about this. Yeah, well, we can kill and we can kiss, we can kill and we can create, as part of what Wendy was saying, the DNA, the nature, the nurture. Is it our nature to kill and kiss? Is it in our nature to imagine another way of living and being, which involves laws and human rights and structures and democracy and all of these things to limit that ability to kill.
Susan in some recent evidence, chimpanzees also cooperate with each other. I think, great point Susan, as he says in small numbers, but that’s why he gives the example. You have 1000 chimpanzees and 1000 humans on an island, who’s going to win? Well, the humans are probably going to collaborate, cooperate much better than 1000 chimpanzees. I think that’s why he gives that examples. But if there were 10 chimps and 10 humans might be a different story. It’s about the numbers and the flexibility within the numbers. And he talks about that personal, if I know them personally or I don’t.
Monty, humans and chimps share 98.8% of the DNA. Absolutely. Which goes back to Wendy’s point about the nature and nurture. Absolutely.
Rita, the quest for superiority is a marked trait of Homo sapiens. Yeah. Well, is it a sense of superiority through the brain developing, or is it from 70,000 years ago, once we start the cognitive, what he calls a cognitive revolution, is it that’s when the superiority idea begins? Is it because we large and larger numbers, we are convinced now we’re superior not only to other animals and insects and creatures, but we are superior to other humans and even other humans who live in the same city as us, or the same area as us, or part of the same, what we might call nation state or whatever. Not only those who live somewhere else far away. And that becomes a nuanced subtlety, especially in a lot of post-colonial theory. It’s a great point, Rita.
Reeva, psychology, the study of the human mind calls the imagination created reality a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reeva, you’d know that better than me. And Wendy. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, it can be, imagination created reality, but it is an imagination, which yeah. Creates reality, I think Harari would say, but also the imagination to, I imagine a reality. But that becomes the core belief system, as Wendy was saying, that we all agree to live by, which is extraordinary that we agree to live day to day in a society by not only that it’s some vague pipe– Sorry, Wendy.
[Wendy] No, no, no. Sorry I didn’t mean to do that. I just want to say yes, if you’re thinking about it all the time, you actualize it. That’s why it’s frightening, when people start to say or threaten, you have to take these things seriously.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And in that way we become, as you’re saying, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Absolutely. Yeah. Stan, thank you–
[Wendy] David I’m going to have to jump off, I’m going to have to jump off. I want to say thank you to everybody for being on. Thank you guys. Thank you, David. Chat soon.
Yeah, thank you so much, Wendy. Okay thank you so much. Okay and speak to you soon.
Mavis thanks, very kind. Okay thank you. Gene, very kind.
Q: How does he reconcile his ideas with a fiction of religion, fictions for himself? Does he consider himself Jewish?
A: Absolutely. And yeah, he’s Jewish. And also, I mean, some of his family members were in one of the kibbutzim that was attacked and some of them were killed in the Hamas massacre. So he has a very direct personal connection to October the seventh horror. And he absolutely connects to Jewish religious in a secular way, I guess. But he absolutely considers completely Jewish and Israeli as well.
Okay Rita, thank you. Diane. Thanks. And to Wendy thank you all very kind. Nadine thank you. Thank you, Lorna. It’s too optimistic and pro-human. Maybe we are only here because of a favourable set of circumstances, geographic, climate, et cetera. Things are going to change. We’ll be scorched up. Yep. Could be. We’re not above the other animals. Yep. Oh, that’s part of the fascinating debate, Lorna. Exactly. And here I’m just presenting his ideas, but what I like is that he’s opening the box of ideas for us to discuss debate. Agree, disagree.
Okay, Marcia, thank you. Michelle. Yeah, I mean, his ideas of Israel are fascinating and the Middle East, it’s a whole, it’ll be a whole separate talk to give. Nadine thank you. Helen. Thank you very much. Put up lectures on his views in Israel. Yeah, him and others, definitely.
Q: George and Olga. Where does emotion come from?
A: That’s a great question. And he would say that we have the emotion to say, “Okay, I like sushi and you like bananas, or I want to marry Mary and you want to marry Susan.” And that is desire and that is part of human emotion. And that’s where the complication comes in. And he questions in the last book will algorithms in a century or whenever be able to even understand our emotions and be able to influence them, if not dictate them? So the emotion of, okay, the algorithm will know what kind of food I like. I prefer pizza to hamburger. I prefer salad to chicken. So the algorithm will know all of that. Or the algorithm might know I prefer Italian people to French or whatever. The algorithm might pick up lots of emotions and be able to influence because it can predict our emotions. And he talks about that in the last book when he talks about us becoming hackable animals, that data we will become, so much data will be collected about us that in fact our emotions will be manipulated. Which is an Orwellian thought in a way. He might be right, he might be wrong.
I’m just presenting the idea and thank you Sandra. In a way that advertising, once the algorithm knows we like Colgate toothpaste and not another kind of toothpaste, it can feed us that and all variations on it. Or maybe it’ll pick up more emotions of other tastes and desires, maybe not. Thank you, very kind Sandra.
Diane, covering his other work. Yeah, certainly, I think he’s great.
Q: Anna, is he more sociologist?
A: That’s a great question. More a sociologist than an historian. I think he would call himself an historian, but an historian in the broad renaissance sense of the word influenced by art, culture, literature, biology, science, medicine, anthropology, architecture, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I would say a historian with that broad, it’s a terrible word, but the contemporary academic word is interdisciplinary. But that broad open mind to see connections. I think that’s how I’d prefer to say it. That the more narrow-minded kind of scholarly approach, often pushed and demanded through publication is pushed today still I think.
[Georgia] David you have time for one more question. So if you want to pick one.
Okay sure, sure, sure. Lots of fantastic questions here.
Ron conflicting imaginations are the engine that drives progress and conflict. Yep. And I agree. Group think or not. Yeah, that’s it.
Okay and then the last question, Sandy, I’m a great fan of Jared Diamond. Geography plays a great part. Yes, in human destiny, without a doubt. Living near great rivers, increased enabled irrigation, proximity of animals absolutely could domesticate and building cities and towns and villages near rivers. Absolutely good transportation. Yep. And many things, the wheel, and then later electricity and you know, oil, et cetera, et cetera. So I’m going to need to hold it here. And thank you so much everybody, and hope you have a great rest of the weekend. And I hope this has been some, a glimpse of what I think is a fascinatingly contemporary mind full of curiosity. Thanks so much Georgia, and take care everybody. Stay well.