21 Lessons for the 21st Century: A Belated Review

I was first made aware of Yuval Noah Hariri’s work by noticing his book ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ being carried around and read by others. That is probably how many of those others also discovered Hariri. For a time, it was difficult to board a bus or train without spotting someone reading ‘Sapiens’. I was immediately suspicious of the book and whatever its author claimed. I was an undergraduate student in mathematics at the time. Still, I knew enough mathematics to look askance at any claim to cover all of mathematics in a single volume. So, my thinking went, how could someone cover all of human history, a topic far more complex than the whole of mathematics, in one book?

Some years later Hariri’s writing was recommended to me by friends whose opinions I hold in high regard. So, in spite of my suspicions, I picked up his book ‘21 Lesson for the 21^st Century’. Within fifty pages I had decided that the read was not worth my time. It was clear to me that Hariri was speculating on things he knew next to nothing about, what he himself calls the “info-tech and biotech revolutions”. I set the book aside. Recently however, I discovered that he is a regular guest at the Davos conference, an annual shindig for global business and political leaders, and that he has written several guest pieces for the Economist, a newspaper which very much likes to give the (probably correct) impression that its audience is comprised of highly educated well-heeled types. That being the case, I picked up his book again, not because I thought I would find any insight in it, but because I wanted to see what it is that the big whigs at Davos and the Economist like to read. The following are my findings.

Hariri is not a gifted writer. ‘21 Lessons for the 21^st Century’ is a 350-page slug. Some parts read like an undergraduate’s hurried attempt at reaching the word limit. At one point, the word "algorithm” is used ten times on the same page. Incidentally, every occurrence of this word “algorithm” in the book may be replaced by “magic” or “spell”, since that is essentially what Hariri thinks algorithms to be. Other parts of the book read like a long monologue by your younger cousin who has just discovered Carl Sagan and atheism. That is to say, that it lacks sophistication in both content and presentation.

The book can be divided into two based on the subject matter. The first part, comprising the first five chapters, deals with the twin revolutions which Hariri dubs the info-tech and biotech revolutions. The rest of the book deals with questions of a socio-political or spiritual nature, generally having to do with the problem of meaning and purpose when the truth, according to Hariri, is that life is meaningless. Let us consider each of these parts in turn.

Hariri has not much to offer anywhere in the book, but his lack of knowledge about biology and information technology makes his attempt to explain and predict the course of the “info-tech and biotech revolutions” especially cringeworthy. It is difficult to describe his style of unmoored speculation about technology, but the closest analogy is the discourse on a typical tech-bro podcast. Even with the advancements made since the book’s writing, the gap between what AI can do and what the book claims that AI will be able to do is immeasurably vast. In the time since the book’s writing, the pioneering research discussed at AI conferences has moved on from generating cat pictures to generating short cat videos. Hariri, however, claims that

“In the not-too-distant future a machine-learning algorithm could analyse the biometric data streaming from sensors on and inside your body, determine your personality type and your changing moods, and calculate the emotional impact that a particular song – even a particular musical key – is likely to have on you.”

Of course, Hariri is free to speculate. But what leaves a poor taste in the mouth is his misuse of citations to dress up outlandish claims as authoritative. The aforementioned claim is ostensibly supported by a heavily cited 2014 paper (Youyou, Kosinski, and Stillwell, 2014). The problem is that the study merely claims that, on average, computer-based personality judgements (based on Facebook activity data) outperform an individual’s acquaintances at predicting his or her affinities on the Five-Factor model of personality (which was measured by a 100-question questionnaire). Everything between this claim and the one found in the book was filled in by Hariri’s mind. That is a lot of filling in.

Unfortunately, presenting science fiction as a sober vision of the future is far from the book’s worst offence. Far more damaging is Hariri’s flirtations with Scientism. Scientism is a philosophy, grounded in metaphysical naturalism, which asserts that Science is the only path to any truth and that which cannot be scientifically investigated has no truth value. As such, scientism is a metaphysical and epistemological system. So far, so good. The trouble begins when its proponents erroneously assert that the successes of that nebulous thing which they call “Science” in understanding the world and improving human lives privileges scientism as the premiere choice above the other philosophical systems.

In fact, there is no such thing as Science with a capital ‘S’, scientific practice has nothing to do with the beliefs of scientism and the positive impact of science and technology on the human condition are vastly overstated. These and others are some of the reasons why the preeminent philosophers of science in the 20^th century, such as Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend, rejected scientism. Nevertheless, the philosophy has found a home in the works of many so-called public intellectuals such as Hariri and through them it has entered the mainstream.

Consider Hariri’s claim that research in neuroscience and behavioural economics has revealed that

“Our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted ‘human intuition’ is in reality ‘pattern recognition’.”

One of the sources for this stupefying claim is the book ‘Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning’ By Christopher M. Bishop. Dear reader, this book, a textbook in Mathematical Statistics, makes no claim about human intuition or free will. The only tangentially relevant remark is Bishop’s brief digression about the inspiration for neural networks algorithms (a class of methods in mathematical inference), where he recounts how these methods were partly inspired by information processing in biological systems,

“The term ‘neural network’ has its origins in attempts to find mathematical representations of information processing in biological systems. Indeed, it has been used broadly to cover a wide range of different models, many of which have been the subject of exaggerated claims regarding their biological plausibility.”

I do not stress this issue to emphasize my own disagreements with Hariri. I stress it because this mode of argument, the insistence that scientism as a metaphysical system is supported by overwhelming empirical evidence, is too common among popularising books written by proponents of scientism (Richard Dawkins is another famous example). And I stress it because it is an erroneous argument which is hugely detrimental to the reader: by giving the false impression that scientism is the only tenable point of view, the reader is made to feel that if she does not accept it, she is either a fool or she lacks the mental fortitude to accept the cold and impersonal reality implied by scientism. This has the effect of narrowing her mental horizons and it demands of her adherence to a philosophy for which she knows of no arguments.

In the second half of the book, Hariri sets out to find the outlines of, or at least an inspiration for, a unifying narrative that makes sense of our modern world in a way that could heal our divided polities. But his quest is doomed from the beginning because, as he repeatedly reminds the reader, he does not believe in stories, and neither should they. One might question the wisdom of a man who sees no distinction between narratives and falsehoods and nevertheless spends his time looking for a suitable narrative of the future. But maybe – and this is not entirely clear from the book – that is Hariri’s point: To begin by searching for a new unifying framework of thought, to examine the candidates and to conclude, by refuting each one, that all possible frameworks are, at best, convenient falsehoods.

In our time, the point of view that every ideology and every value system is just another futile attempt at making sense of a senseless world is not uncommon. With this viewpoint established, the question then becomes, how can we live a human life in an inhuman world? It is this question which Hariri must contend with if he is to claim that he has made a meaningful contribution to the discourse regarding the human condition. In brief Hariri’s answer to this question is the following: do not engage with overarching narratives of history or humanity, because they are false. Instead, recognise that human suffering is the most real thing in the world, and aim to minimise this suffering. This is in no way a novel response, but it is not a bad response, if it is duly supported. Unfortunately, the case found for it in the book is inadequate and incoherent.

Hariri insists at several points that ideas such as nations and religion are not “real”, such as when he writes “You cannot see or hear France, because it exists only in your imagination... by waving a colourful flag and singing an anthem you transform the nation from an abstract story into a tangible reality.” The second part of that quote relates to the process by which, in Hariri’s telling, the ‘unreal’ idea of the nation can come to impact the ‘real’ world. The book makes it clear that although they are not real and just “imaginary”, religions and nations can and do impact the real world we experience. Therein lies the rub. As mentioned previously, a clearly materialistic metaphysics underlies all of this book. But the assertion that ideas, which are unreal, can affect the tangible, empirical world, which is real, seems to undercut Hariri’s materialism. It is as though the book is conflating the ‘reality’ of a thing with its empirical truthfulness (in particular, its empirical truth as independent from the human being), which are quite distinct concepts. At first one might think that this is simply a problem of imprecise terms and language which is unavoidable in this type of popular book.

Alas, Hariri bakes this inconsistency into his answer to the question I posed earlier. He predicates much of the book on the idea that many of our everyday notions and ideas, such as that of nations, of money, or even that of the self are unreal. In his own words “To the best of our scientific understanding, there is no magic behind our choices and creations...both the ‘self’ and freedom are mythological chimeras borrowed from the fairy tales of ancient times.” His denial of the self along with his criticism of several moral paradigms, be they religious or humanitarian, would lead one to suspect that he is a moral sceptic. But instead of following his scepticism to its logical conclusions, he bails himself out by declaring that “Of all the things in the world, [human] suffering is the most real,” and hence, we should practice and recommend compassion. But how can suffering be real if the self is not? If Hariri knows the answer to that question, then he has been loath to share, which leaves his case for compassion inadequate and incoherent.

Judged by this book, the Economist newspaper’s favourite historian is thoroughly unimpressive. He has warned in his most recent book ‘Nexus’ about the dangers of misinformation. Meanwhile, it would not be an exaggeration to say that his chapters on the “algorithm” and biotechnology are filled with misinformation. A popular book is usually not expected to engage with the serious scholarly arguments of the opposing side of a debate (although the best ones always do). But it must at least paint a convincing picture of its own. Such a picture is altogether missing here; indeed Hariri does not even attempt it. When he is not displaying his credulity about the potentials of the info-tech revolution, he is busy attacking different world views by arguing against the folk beliefs that surround them. Although he begins by searching for a post-liberal story, any specification of it is an afterthought in this book. Instead Hariri prefers to tread familiar ground, writing hundreds of pages about crimes committed in the name of God or the state, leaving the reader bored and unenlightened.