The new century has been a dizzying spectacle so far, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Harari assesses humanity’s current predicament, discussing everything from AI and social media to evolving religions and updated forms of justice and government. This book raises questions and makes suggestions about how humanity might continue to find its way forward.

Humans are very drawn to stories. They provide a sense of meaning and purpose. In the twentieth century, the popular political stories were fascism, communism, and liberal democracy. Fascism fell with Hitler, and after a grueling ideological battle between the remaining two stories, liberal democracy won out. Free enterprise and representative government became the political gospel to be spread to the corners of the world. Whatever the social or economic maladies, the solution was freedom. This was the prevailing notion for the 1990s and 2000s. It was not that long ago that the United States was trying to democratize Iraq.

Since the financial meltdown of 2008, however, the narrative of liberalism has lost its luster. Brexit and Trump’s election point to the disillusionment with liberalism, as do the tariffs and the immigration roadblocks. Chinese and Russian governments have doubled down on their illiberal stances—at least as far as domestic policy goes. The resurgence—and in some cases, fusion—of nationalistic and religious identity in Turkey, India, and Poland are yet other indications.

Technological upheaval is further inflaming disillusionment with liberalism. Technology is advancing with unprecedented speed, far faster than we can understand how it works or how it will impact our lives. Especially noteworthy are the biotech and infotech revolutions. As they continue to advance, people will become increasingly obsolete as computers and algorithms complete tasks previously delegated to humans—with far greater efficiency and acumen. Exploitation of a lower class is no longer the concern—the concern will be their complete irrelevance to the economy system.

No doubt liberal democracy is the best form of government that we’ve developed so far. On liberalism’s watch, the world has, on the whole, experienced unprecedented prosperity and stability. For the first time in all of human history, infectious diseases kill fewer people than old age, and fewer die from acts of violence than from accidents. But liberal thought grew up in a world of steam engines and assembly lines. It does not equip us to confront our most formidable challenges of impending ecological ruin and technological pandemonium.

Liberalism’s most cherished value is liberty. The right to vote for politicians who will best represent the people’s interests is one of the clearest manifestations of democracy, but what happens when we vote? It isn’t a cool, disembodied calculation, but a gut reaction, a feeling. This isn’t a bad thing (in fact, it’s part of an evolutionary rationality that enables survival), but the decisions we make are based on the firings of millions of neurons that process information at an unconscious level.

Liberalism’s belief in the supremacy of the individual is a new idea. It’s supplanted an ancient notion that God dictates what is good and true and we are to walk in the way that he commands. This listen-to-your-heart decision-making has been fine, but what happens when computers know us better than we do and can press all the right emotional buttons? What we’ve considered “free will” will probably be shown as a useful myth, and liberalism will become unwieldy as Google becomes a better guide for interpreting our feelings. The individual has replaced God as the source of ultimate authority, but are we on the verge of another existential coup, in which algorithms replace human beings as authorities?

The silos of computer science and biology are beginning to merge. As biotech and infotech revolutions continue to dovetail, they will yield Big Data algorithms capable of surveying and interpreting feelings better than the individuals experiencing them. Think about the possible practices and implications for the field of health: Big Data could process a steady stream of biometric input for individuals in their homes, provide consistent updates on our health, and anticipate disease and cancer. It could recommend foods, exercise plans, and lifestyle choices based on our personality and DNA profiles.

With a knowledge of your decision-making, motivation, and opinions that put your mother’s care to shame, algorithms would be able to provide guidance on matters as trivial as movie selection and as important as career path and marriage. AI already assists us when we are navigating a new city or wondering what movie to watch, but this is Stone Age stuff compared to where Big Data algorithms could take us.

The problem with these developments will come if we don’t invest in advancing human consciousness as well as AI. If AI advances outpace human development (which, at the moment, they do), it will enable our human tendency towards stupidity and the path of least resistance. Atrophy is a far swifter process than muscle development; this is true of the body as well as the mind.

At the 2017 Communities Summit, Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech in which he argued that the present-day social and political pandemonium can be traced back to community breakdowns. Zuckerberg expressed Facebook’s commitment to developing tools that will help reverse the dissolution of community ties that have reached epidemic proportion in recent decades. It’s a commendable goal, and Zuckerberg’s observations are both timely and accurate, but the task is a formidable one. Assuming that Facebook manages to sort out its privacy issues (confidentiality and voluntary self-disclosure are integral to any healthy community), it still has the challenge of encouraging not just online participation, but online participation that will lead to offline engagement. So far, online usage has come at the expense of offline relationships.

Community can’t be grounded in cyberspace. It can’t be grounded in imagined communities or abstractions like the GOP or the Communist Party. We need flesh-and-blood comrades. If you are sick at home in Florida, and you talk to your friend in New Delhi via Facebook, he might send well wishes, but he can’t bring you a bowl of soup or drive you to the hospital. Humans require intimate communities for a sense of wellbeing. It’s impossible to know and be known by more than 150 people—whatever your friend count may say to the contrary. One of the goals of Facebook is to allow users to share and help others understand their personal experiences. But people now have a hard enough time understanding their own experiences, so shaped are they by the likes and comments of others.

Zuckerberg’s attempt at bridging the online and offline experience is revolutionary. It is challenging for corporations to facilitate efforts like these because philanthropic ends aren’t always the most efficient or business-savvy, and most CEOs, employees, and shareholders aren’t willing to make the kinds of profit sacrifices that might be required. At any rate, it is the first try at using AI to centrally plan social engineering on a global level. With over two billion active users, this might work. If it succeeds, it will be the first of many new AI-based community buildings. If it doesn’t, we will gain a better understanding of the limitations of these algorithms.

Secularism is often defined in terms of what it isn’t: what people don’t believe, or rituals people don’t practice. The negative description is neither flattering nor accurate. There are positive elements to the secular world picture, and many of its beliefs overlap with the beliefs of major religious traditions. What makes secularism different than some of those traditions is that it doesn’t assert a monopoly on truth and wisdom. They see these things as springing up from the human experience at many times and in many places.  

The secular mindset is also not a wholesale, either-or: plenty of people observe their traditions, rituals and practices while participating robustly in secular society and observing secular ethical norms—morals that most Christians, Muslims, and Hindus would find satisfactory.

The basis for truth and morality is different than religious traditions, however. The secular ideal is truth based on empirical evidence rather than divine commands. It never conflates truth and belief. The lack of transcendent grounding does create some challenges for the secularist. Without a divine code to refer and defer to, there must be a judicious and thoughtful exploration of various opinions and feelings of those with a stake in a given matter. Through this process, a middle way can hopefully be synthesized which brings minimal harm to sentient beings.

Another challenge that the secularist will face is what technological advances mean for categories like human rights. Human rights were born out of a response to Nazi and Soviet massacres, the KKK, and other oppressive religious practices. They have been an important contribution to our world, but how helpful will they be in deciding questions of cyborgs, supercomputers, and even superhumans?

Moving forward in the twenty-first century, secularists and the religious alike must recognize where their belief systems have flown off the rails, and identify what’s been done to curtail violence and fanaticism from cropping up again. How did a religion like Christianity—supposedly built upon love—permit such heinous episodes as the Inquisition or the Crusades? What was it in the writings of Marx that led to gulags and the KGB? Why was it so easy for Nazis and Jim Crow to bend Darwinian theories to racist ends?

Each worldview has its own dark side. Whatever your beliefs, do you have the humility to acknowledge grievances honestly? Secularists tend to be more open to admitting faults because their system is not in danger of collapsing over mistakes. If devotees of a belief system will not be honest about shortcomings, they cannot hope that their worldview will have prominent influence in global conversations.

Justice and morality more generally have evolved over millions of years. Times were simpler in Sapiens' hunter-gatherer phase, though. Is it acceptable to take an armful of apples from another person simply because you are bigger and stronger? If you hear that the rival clan is planning on attacking your village tomorrow, are you justified in leading the charge tonight? It’s tempting to think that justice has not changed even if the particulars have. The truth is that  changes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have, from an evolutionary perspective, left us scant time to adapt to our surroundings.

There’s no shortage of values in this world. It is not a problem of values that we face, but a problem of numbers and complexity. In the hunter-gatherer days, cause-and-effect relationships were much clearer. If someone stole your kill, and you weren’t able to get it back, you’d go home without food for your family, and you’d all go to sleep hungry. Economic, political, and social systems cover the globe in a net that is intimately interconnected and staggeringly complex. According to some leftist groups, many of us are slave owners for buying clothes produced in Cambodian and Bangladeshi sweatshops.  Our continued silence on issues of trafficking and child labor allow them to continue horrendous trades. Even if you live a peaceful existence at home, you are still in bed with smugglers and terrorists on the other side of the world. Are these accusations fair? Sheer complexity makes it difficult to assess.

In the face of such dilemmas, people employ one of four tactics. Some oversimplify the struggle, reducing a conflict involving large groups to one representative good guy and bad guy: Trump versus Putin or Assad versus a rebel. Others hold on to one story of a flesh-and-blood human enduring the struggle as the best way to understand a struggle (charities tend to utilize this tactic). Still others resort to conspiracy theories, that the CIA, the Freemasons, or a handful of billionaires are manipulating global affairs on a scale and level of effectiveness we can scarcely imagine. A fourth tactic is to submit to a stable ideology or institution that can give a sense of moral certitude in a world where the lines are not clean-cut. It is hard to devise a suitable alternative for our twenty-first-century world.

As mentioned earlier, human beings tend to understand the world around them in terms of stories. Narrative tends to stick better than graphs and stats. Stories not only offer an explanation of life, the most powerful stories give people a sense of meaning within the stories. Some of these stories are more cyclical, like The Lion King and the Bhagavad Gita, from which The Lion King draws a great deal of inspiration. The “circle of life” and the harmony that comes when creatures learn their place within it did not originate with Mufasa. The father-son discourse with Simba about lions eating antelope eating grass eating lions (in so many words) is reminiscent of the Hindu doctrine of dharma, or duty.

Other stories are more linear like Islam and Zionism. These offer a narrative of creation, judgment, and a blissful afterlife. Muslims and Zionists are in the middle of an epic drama, and faithful adherence to faith produces the rewards of paradise, whether in a celestial realm, or in Jerusalem. Even Communism holds out meaning-filled promises of working class triumph over bourgeois forces followed by the era of proletariat peace on earth.

Whether cyclical or linear, religious or secular, meaning is something that people hunt for. There are two necessary components for a person to feel her life has meaning. One, there must be something that she can do within the cosmic story, and, two, the story must extend beyond her horizons.

It’s important to note that truth is never essential to a person feeling a sense of meaning. The problem with a story-driven approach is that, given the numerous scientific discoveries that have been made, we can confidently dismiss these stories as myth and wishful thinking. They are powerful tools for motivating and mobilizing, but don’t look for truth in these tales.

Liberalism has taken a slightly different tack with its emphasis on individualism. By placing the self at the center of the narrative, liberalism has bucked the need for anything close to a totalizing narrative. Over two millennia ago, the Buddha took things farther, by not only discouraging the pursuit of a grand story, but also the inner drama that people unnecessarily amplify. The identities and sources of happiness that we pursue never satiate. Moreover, the emotions we attach to experiences, whether momentary happiness of acquiring something or disappointment (which is far more likely and frequent) are illusory. What are emotions but momentary vibrations?

Reality exists, but this doesn’t mean that it is contained within a mythic creation story. The big question that we should be asking is not “what is the meaning of life?” but “how do we reduce suffering in the world?” By ending the hunt for meaning, we are liberated from suffering.

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