yuval harari 21 lessons for the 21st century

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Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.Urbanisation, mass politics and the idea that nothing lay beyond the transformative powers of the state – these developments rocked intelligentsias between giddy optimism and grave despair. In 1779, the republican philosopher Gabriel Bonnot de Mably thought the time was “not far away when Europe will languish under the splendour and misery of despotism and slavery”.ĭiscourses of catastrophe endured and flourished throughout the 19th century, as traditional social structures and ways of thinking were upended by the Industrial Revolution. Others forecast ecological ruin and the rise of populist demagogues, with the Scottish historian Adam Ferguson predicting that sooner or later the “boasted refinements of the polished age” would make way for “the government of force”. Europe’s monarchies and republics, he later prophesied, had “grown decrepit and threaten soon to die”. Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered alarming descriptions of this future, writing in his book Émile (1762) that societies were “approaching a state of crisis and the century of revolutions”. Many doubted modern states could survive the volatile mixture of public debt, social inequality, and the international struggle for resources that threatened to plunge them into eternal war and revolution. In the European tradition, tributes to progress are regularly offset by nightmares of decline and fall, especially during times of socio-economic turbulence or technological breakthrough, when, like Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, societies “sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts”.Įnlightenment thinkers in the 18th century were haunted by visions of the apocalypse. Since then, fascination with the end of times has been a constituent feature of humanity’s cultural and intellectual history. In his best-selling book Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes that it was during the Agricultural Revolution, around 10,000 years ago, when worries about the future “became central to the human mind”.

Yuval harari 21 lessons for the 21st century