21 Lessons for the 21st Century
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"At the close of the twentieth century it appeared that the great ideological battles between fascism, communism and liberalism resulted in the overwhelming victory of liberalism."--21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) by Yuval Harari "Even in the wake of the Second World War, Western liberals still had a very hard time applying their supposedly universal values to non-Western people. Thus when the Dutch emerged in 1945 from five years of brutal Nazi occupation, almost the first thing they did was raise an army and send it halfway across the world to reoccupy their former colony of Indonesia. Whereas in 1940 the Dutch gave up their own independence after little more than four days of fighting, they fought for more than four long and bitter years to suppress Indonesian independence. No wonder that many national liberation movements throughout the world placed their hopes on communist Moscow and Beijing rather than on the self-proclaimed champions of liberty in the West."--21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) by Yuval Harari "Would Tesla have to actually take a stance on such knotty matters in order to produce a car? Well, maybe Tesla will just leave it to the market. Tesla will produce two models of the self-driving car: the Tesla Altruist and the Tesla Egoist."--21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) by Yuval Harari "As Pankaj Mishra and Christopher de Bellaigue have convincingly argued, radical Islamists have been influenced by Marx and Foucault as much as by Muhammad, and they inherit the legacy of nineteenth-century European anarchists as much as of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs. It is therefore more accurate to see even the Islamic State as an errant offshoot of the global culture we all share, rather than as a branch of some mysterious alien tree."--21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) by Yuval Harari "More importantly, the analogy between history and biology that underpins the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis is false."--21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) by Yuval Harari, first published in "Why there’s no such thing as a civilisation" (2018) "Anti-immigrationists reply that if you use sufficient force, you can completely stop immigration, and except perhaps in the case of refugees fleeing brutal persecution in a neighbouring country, you are never obliged to open your door. Turkey may have a moral duty to allow desperate Syrian refugees to cross its border. But if these refugees then try to move on to Sweden, the Swedes are not bound to accept them. As for migrants who seek jobs and welfare, it is totally up to the host country whether it wants them in or not, and under what conditions"--21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) by Yuval Harari Page 195 in the Dutch translation: "landen zijn verplicht hun grenzen open te stellen voor vluchtelingen die vluchten vanuit een buurland omdat hun leven daar in gevaar is, zelfs als de eigen bevolking daar niet blij mee is."--21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) by Yuval Harari, I was unable to find this sentence in the English version. "I am aware that many people might be upset by my equating religion with fake news, but that’s exactly the point. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month – that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years – that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it ‘fake news’ in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath)."--21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) by Yuval Harari "The role of Judaism in the story of humankind is a bit like the role of Freud's mother in modern Western history. For better or worse, Sigmund Freud had immense influence on the science, culture, art and folk wisdom of the modern West. It is also true that without Freud’s mother, we wouldn’t have had Freud, and that Freud’s personality, ambitions and opinions were likely shaped to a significant extent by his relations with his mother – as he would be the first to admit. But when writing the history of the modern West, nobody expects an entire chapter on Freud’s mother. Similarly, without Judaism you would not have had Christianity, but that doesn’t merit giving much importance to Judaism when writing the history of the world."--21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) by Yuval Harari |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a book written by bestseller Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari and published in August 2018 by Spiegel & Grau in the US and by Jonathan Cape in the UK.
Having dealt with the distant past in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) and with the distant future in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), Harari turns in 21 Lessons his attention to the present. In a loose collection of essays, many based on articles previously published, he attempts to untangle the technological, political, social, and existential quandaries that humankind faces.
The book itself consists of five parts which are each made up of four or five essays.
Critical response
The review aggregator website Book Marks reported that 44% of critics gave the book a "rave" review, whilst 11% of the critics "panned" the book. The rest of the critics expressed either "positive" (22%) or "mixed" (22%) impressions, based on a sample of nine reviews. The book has received significant media attention with articles and reviews published by The New York Times, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, New Statesman and The Times among others.
In The New York Times, Bill Gates calls the book “fascinating” and his author “such a stimulating writer that even when I disagreed, I wanted to keep reading and thinking.” For Gates, Harari “has teed up a crucial global conversation about how to take on the problems of the 21st century.”
John Thornhill in Financial Times said that “[a]lthough 21 Lessons is lit up by flashes of intellectual adventure and literary verve, it is probably the least illuminating of the three books” written by Harari, and that many of the observations in it feel recycled from the two others.
Helen Lewis review in The Guardian is not as glowing although she admires “the ambition and breadth of his work, smashing together unexpected ideas into dazzling observations.”
The book has also received negative reviews. Gavin Jacobson in the New Statesman sees it as “a study thick with promise and thin in import” with advice “either too vague or too hollow to provide any meaningful guidance.” In The Times, Gerard DeGroot writes: "The author of Sapiens is good at identifying the crises to come but his syrupy platitudes are no answer."
Controversy with Russian translation
A Russian translation of Harari's book was published in June 2019. However, the Russian media noticed that several passages about Russia and its President Putin were excluded from the translation. In particular, the chapter about post-truth begins in the Russian edition with referring to Donald Trump's speeches instead of Putin's false statements during Russian annexation of Crimea.
See also
- Warmlanders and Coldians
- Simba as Arjuna, the importance of fiction to the human race, Hamlet, BNW, the Matrix, 1984, Willow.
- Vipassanā
- "So far the only successful invasion mounted by a major power in the twenty-first century has been the Russian conquest of Crimea."
