Is there a ’best age’ to be in today’s world? How scary, really, does the future have to be? Life lessons with Yuval Noah Harari
“A writer who waits for ideal conditions
under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” (E. B. White)
I’m hardly stooping so low as to refer
to myself as a ‘writer’. But this is the situation I always seem to find myself
in, and life during this quarantine is only exacerbating this.
The time, the mood, everything always
has to be just right. If I don’t have a chunk of quiet, private, guaranteed
uninterrupted time, then I’m hopeless. Just the mere hint of interruption is
enough to send my heart into palpations.
BUT…this quarantine has been a blessing
in disguise, at least as far as writing goes. I’ve not only written more,
whenever I can squeeze it in, but I’m being a bit more social in terms of
keeping in touch.
But ‘paper’? Good lord, how
old-fashioned can one get? Am I cut out for this world and its impatience? I’ve
already written one excessively long diatribe about the news and newspapers and
what a dying art sitting down to read in long stretches has become. Please,
dear author, please don’t go down this road again!
My last post saw me waxing nostalgic about
music and the [art of] the mixtape. A former member of the band Plam Poom noted
in the comments that ‘[he] [could] even detect the message that you are sending
with this… a cry for help, but also a wistful pang of longing.’ A wistful pang
of longing indeed.
Who the hell knows when we’ll emerge
from this lockdown and in what state we’ll be in when we do. Who the hell knows
what the future has in store for all of us. Who the hell knows whether it’s a
good idea to bring a child into this world, in the uncertain, perilous state we
live in. Who the hell knows anything anymore.
It could be worse. I’ve just finished Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel,
just one in a long line of post-apocalyptic novels for you to choose from. A
previous effort from a few years ago, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, left me cold and made little impact. I enjoyed – if ‘enjoyed’
is the right word – this one more and it at least offers the comfort that we
really could be in far deeper shit than we are. Not a spoiler alert, but Station Eleven deals with a ‘Georgian
flu’ that features an intubation period of 3-4 hours, kills you within a day
and wipes out over 99% of humanity. Hey, nothing like putting things into
perspective.
Perhaps for my next book I ought to dive
into something more realistic, and even scarier. Who needs fiction?
This might be more the thing to really
fuel things:
I know little about this author, a Senior
Research Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University, other than that in an interview
the other day, he put humanity’s odds of surviving this century at 1-in-6. Have
I mentioned how much of a pessimist I am?
I set out to write this post not
intending to delve into existentialist crises and the dire straits we’re in. I
set out to write something a bit more enlightening, less doom-laden and without
the scare-mongering.
There are plenty of books that I think
everyone really ought to read. Yet I utterly despise any list reeking of the
‘top 100 books to read before you die!’ and ‘top 10 places to visit before your
demise!’
Call me naïve, but I do think humanity
might be a little bit better off if we all took the time to read Yuval Noah
Hariri.
I’m barely into his latest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century,
yet I’m already overwhelmed, perplexed and deep in thought – in a very good,
productively thought-provoking way. He’s not a fear-mongerer, and he’s not flawless
and beyond reproach in everything he has to say – you can find holes and gaps
in his writing, and perhaps at times he’s a bit too broad-sweeping and offers
up a few too many hypotheticals – but he
does say much that speaks to our desire to understand the direction humanity is
hurdling towards.
His first two books, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,
and Homo Deus: A Brief History of
Tomorrow, are not exactly hidden, undiscovered gems. They’re everywhere.
Everyone seems to have read them. Leaders have been photographed with them.
They’re on everyone’s ‘to-read’ list, if they haven’t been read already. And
they’re essential reads for today’s world. They’re the kind of books – another
has to include Thinking, Fast and Slow,
by Daniel Kahnemann – where you feel the urge to highlight every other sentence
or paragraph or where the margins rapidly fill up with notes and lines.
21 Lessons, and I’m only on number 3.
And I’m already immersed in trying to figure out what the future holds.
Back to the question posed at the outset
of this post, slightly altered: what is the best age to be in today’s world?
Would you want to be born into it now, given a choice? Does it depend on
whether you’re a pessimist or an optimist? (Pet hate alert: when you ask
someone whether they are a pessimist or an optimist, and they answer a
‘realist’.)
I was born in 1976 and based on what I
now know, and the life I’ve lived, and my personality type, and my relationship
with the printed word, technology and communication networks, and what I think
looms in the near and more distant future, and from a purely solipsistic
perspective, I truly and honestly feel that I am almost the perfect age, as far
as one exists. This does not at all mean that I am saying to anyone not born
within a year or two that you are of the ‘wrong age’, but I mean that this is
the age that best suits me.
What a preposterous, ludicrous question
to ask, perhaps? Perhaps. Perhaps it’s the same thought process that sent me
spiraling down memory lane in my last post when I went on another one of my maudlin
ditties about the good ‘ol days. What can I say, I’m a blatherskite at the best
(or worst?) of times.
The case for 1976. For those who know me
best, and for regular, loyal readers, it will all make sense. When I finished
university, nobody had a mobile phone, but just barely. I’m sure some people
had them, but I didn’t see them and you never saw people using them. But this
changed really quickly. This was still the newspaper reading, early days of
internet, mixtape, CD-listening days, pre-social media days. My kind of world.
It all changed so suddenly.
In Edinburgh, 2002, everyone had a
mobile phone but me. I was there, four years after university to do my
Master’s, and all of a sudden, the ‘old-fashioned’ ‘make-plans-in-advance-for-a-set-date-and-time-and-stick-to-it’
schtick was no good anymore. Get yourself a phone, old man, one of my new
classmates told me. I was 26.
My friend Aoife was the first to tell me
that I didn’t need to write in complete sentences, with salutations and proper
pronunciation when writing text messages. I was clueless.
But hell, mobile phones are (were?)
merely the tip of the iceberg. Where do we go from here?
Harari, in ‘Disillusionment’:
‘The revolutions in biotech and infotech
will give us control of the world inside us, and will enable us to engineer and
manufacture life. We will learn how to design brains, extend lives, and kill
thoughts at our discretion. Nobody knows what the consequences will be.’
But later, he reassures us. There’s no
need to ‘panic’. As I said to one of my students once who interrupted my
lengthy end-of-term, final class inspirational motivational ‘speech’ with a
disgruntled and aggravated ‘okay, can you just give us our certificates?’, we
should all just ‘chill the fuck out’ and try to relax a bit.
‘The first step is to tone down the
prophecies of doom, and switch to panic mode to bewilderment. Panic is a form
of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that I know exactly where the world
is heading – down. Bewilderment is more humble, and therefore more
clear-sighted.’
I’m not sure why, but I find
bewilderment to be a soothing, more comforting feeling. I’m often bewildered. I
feel much better now.
I’m not really a Luddite, despite the ad
nauseam claims I’ve made on these pages. I’m okay with technology – not for me
is the adage ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’. Yet. I don’t quite think
I’ve reached the stage of hopelessness. Yet. I read and love e-books, after all,
and I enjoy Netflix. I think Twitter is great as a news aggregator. I’m a fully
paid-up member of today’s streaming, instant gratification generation.
Instagram and TikTok are a stage too far but I think I’m coping well over all.
What’s prompting all of this? Is it that
stage of the lockdown where we all start to come to terms with existential
angst? Is it all the time sat at computers, staring into the screens, as our
necks ache from all the sitting and slouching? Is it the realization that as
the world moves more and more online – I am teaching online lessons after all –
that we are slowly losing control of our more ‘traditional’ ways of existence?
Is it the German time-travel series ‘Dark’, with its shifting sands of time and
jumping back and forth in and out of wormholes and it’s time-bending loops and
how that’s playing with my mind?
Who the hell knows.
I have shared this quotation, from Martin
Rees, the astrophysicist and cosmologist, and Astronomer Royal, on these pages
before. It never ceases to be one of the most mind-blowing thoughts I’ve ever
come across, and it reminds us yet again of how trivial and inconsequential our
existence is, in the general grand scheme of things:
‘Most educated people are aware that
we're the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many
tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is
less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the
sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from
bacteria or amoebae.’ (my italics)
Perhaps I should add, if they (we?)
exist. In Our Final Century: Will the
Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century?, his 2003 book, he puts the
chances of civilisation coming to an end in the 21st century as high as 50:50.
[Interlude: living in Belfast some 15-16
years ago, I lent this book to a barista named Kat who I had asked out in a
café (but they certainly weren’t called ‘baristas’ back then, that’s for sure).
The book was heavily annotated, with all sorts of lurid thoughts in the margins
and manic comments about the future and how pointless our existence probably
was. It probably sounded pretty nihilistic. Anyway, as I was lending her the
book, she agreed to go out on a date. But then she stood me up. And then didn’t
return my calls. And when I went back to the café, she wasn’t there. I never
saw her again. To this day, I’m terrified that something dreadful happened to
her because of that book. It sounds absurd, I realise, but it’s a mystery as to
where she vanished to. Maybe that should have been a sign not to read books like
that?]
If you’re an optimist, think positive:
17 years later and the odds seem to have improved to 1-in-6, if we can believe
this Toby Ord character.
Back to Harari. Three lesson into his
latest effort, and there has yet to be anything as terrifying as that. We’re
talking more ‘Black Mirror’, less of a ‘humanity being wiped out’ scenario.
It’s more of an algorithm-fuelled, Artificial Intelligence-laden existence that
we will need to get used to. We’ve already reached that point with things like
GPS, online dating and Netflix, and health care and automated work is probably
next. The tried-and-tested method of decision-making will even be taken out of
our hands, thanks to machines and algorithms. We’re only at the start.
From ‘Liberty’:
‘Once AI makes better decisions than us
about careers and perhaps even relationships, our concept of humanity and of
life will have to change. Humans are used to thinking about life as a drama of
decision-making…[o]nce we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where
to work, and who to marry, human life will cease to be a drama of
decision-making…[i]magine Anna Karenina taking out her smartphone and asking
the Facebook algorithm whether she should stay married to Karenin or elope with
the dashing Count Vronsky.’
(Or as Ed Yong put it in a recent Atlantic article, ‘It does not help that online information channels are heavily
personalized and politicized, governed by algorithms that reward certain and
extreme claims over correct but nuanced ones.’)
There’s much, much more. In fact, 18
Lessons more.
It’s well worth reading this stuff –
Harari is, after all, incredibly popular. It’s how you interpret it and process
it that makes much of the difference. A lot of what he writes is wildly
speculative, but it never ceases to be entertaining, insightful and ultimately
fascinating.
I’ve lost count of the number times I’ve
asked myself – or someone has asked me – why I read this stuff. And whether we
should read this stuff. Harari’s thoughts are not terrifying at all, and he’s
not full of doom and gloom. I think there’s a valuable lesson in what he writes
and in why we read this type of material: it’s better to know and be prepared
than to remain in the dark.
For reading so goes writing.
‘When you’re writing, you’re trying to
find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me
is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out.
But something forces you to anyway.’ (James Baldwin)
How many times I’ve told myself to
switch off from this stuff and just spend a year of my life reading innocent
fiction and avoiding news. A year of Jane Austin, George Eliot, Charles
Dickens. Some nice classics. This was going to be the year that I tackled
Proust, but I thought I’d wait a bit.
But I can’t. I just have to know, and I
feel it’s part of our civic duty to know.
The pessimism? We’ve been down this road
before, and it’s another area I’ve talked about in-depth. Being too optimistic
is dangerous. Being oblivious to the dangerous, dark ramifications is, to me,
irresponsible. Don’t let yourself get lulled into a false sense of complacency,
or a feeling of ‘everything’s going to be fine.’ In all likelihood, it
certainly will be. But if we bury our head in the sand and turn into victims of
the Ostrich Effect, we may be living a blissfully ignorant,
happy-as-a-pig-in-shit existence, only to be caught unawares at the most
inopportune time. If we ignore the danger signs and close ourselves off to the
possibilities of peril, then who knows what path that will lead us down.
Where was I?
I’m just glad I’m the age I am. Though I
think I’m just about able to hack it with this online teaching lark, I’m not so
sure how many new tricks this old dog can learn. I think I should be okay to
make it to a decent retirement age while remaining gainfully employed. Before
machines, AI and automation come into full force and render me obsolete, I should
be able to get to the finish line.
I fear that this post may only be part 1
and that part 2 will take on an even darker tone. Maybe this is enough. Though I
do have more sobering thoughts for a potential part 2, that might have
something to say for less of a pessimistic approach and more of a ‘rational
optimist’ one.
And so I ask you, dear readers, for your
help. Stop me from continuing with my blathering. A friend says that I might
suffer from graphomania. I think – and hope – she meant it as a compliment,
even if it might have been backhanded (I love backhanded comments). It’s either
that or what I think is a nasty case of logorrhea. This seems to be a chronic
ailment going back to this blog’s earliest (but not darkest) days.
I want to try something different. Send
me a short[ish] paragraph with your thoughts on the ‘best age’ to be right now.
Try to be objective, unlike me. I might be biased because I think my age,
backache and mid-life crisis, warts and all, to be the best. But what do you
think? Do you think your age is the best?
Depending on how many contributions I
get, and if you’re happy for me to publish them – with or without your name –
then I’d like to do, for the first time, a ‘reader-generated’ post, with
content only from you. If you don’t want to answer the question I’m posing,
feel free to berate and insult me and tell me what a hopeless old crank I am.
Fine. I’ll still gladly publish it.
Extra Reading
Here are three articles by Harari, from
three different sources.
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