Book Review
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2018. 372pp. $16.53
by Neal D. Presa
Historian Yuval Noah Harari of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has written a trilogy of his reflections on the lessons that can be gleaned from the past, applied to the future, and, seen in the present. This present volume builds upon his two prior books, Sapiens (on the history of humanity) and Homo Deus (on artificial intelligence and living in a digital technology age). I saw this volume on Bill Gates’s recommended reading list and suggested to our church’s reading club that we discuss it.
Harari, in a sort of Malcolm Gladwell-esque fashion, names 21 dimensions of our modern era that pose both potential challenges to our shared space as a human race and the opportunities to take stock in the creativity and innovation that is within the human spirit to shape a better future. Harari sweeps through such areas as biotechnology and data science and what it would mean for artificial intelligence to understand, predict, and, therefore, shape human desires and human response to such things as our favorite time to eat and a favorite eatery, given our patterns of mood in prior instances. He addresses issues such as how our liberty and notions of equality and equity in political and economic systems are understood. He takes issue with how religious systems have used God to oppress and subjugate, or have weaponized notions of God to lord one religious system over another.
What is instructive for us as Christian faith communities, pastors, teachers, and followers of Jesus Christ is that Harari expresses the pulsations of what is percolating in the hearts, minds, laboratories, centers of government, and R&D (research and development) hubs in this country and in many countries around the world. Harari speaks a timely word about global nationalism and local political populism, or what immigration and migration mean for whole societies that seek to balance a welcoming spirit towards seeking asylum or a better future with the perceived threat that one’s national identity would be elided or a national infrastructure would not be sustained. Harari’s volume is not about raising the fear factors. On the contrary: his is a truth-telling of the dinosaurs in the room, so to speak. The call for us as pastors, teachers, and practitioners of a tradition who have been gifted with faith, hope, and love in the person of Jesus Christ is to offer the promise of the Good News of the Lord for the world around us, a Word of hope and promise that is not disembodied from the immense challenges that are in front of our collective humanity, but a Word that speaks directly to the fear and anxiety that are sitting in our pews and walking outside our sanctuaries and classrooms, and are too often part of our conversing on social media. Harari is a cultural and historical exegete who reads the signs of the times with astuteness and who applies lessons of the past to where we are now and where we might be going. As students of history, we need to pay attention to what he says on the one hand, so that in the other hand, where we are holding our iPads with digital Bible app opened, we can have the two converse, and we can proclaim and teach a word from the Word of life.
