Harari’s Insights on Community, Civilization, and Nationalism
Chapter 5 — Community
On tech addiction and how it is compromising genuine human connection and community, Harari makes the point that it is easier than ever to talk to his cousin in Switzerland but it is harder to talk to his husband over breakfast because he constantly looks at his smartphone instead of at him.
Chapter 6 — Civilization
10,000 years ago, humankind was divided into countless isolated tribes where we knew no more than a few dozen people. With each passing millennium, these tribes fused to larger and larger groups creating fewer and fewer distinct civilizations. In recent generations, the few remaining civilizations have been blending into a single global civilization.
People care far more about their enemies than about the trade partners, says Harari. For every American film about Taiwan there are probably about 50 about Vietnam.
The people we fight most often are our family members.
Chapter 7 — Nationalism
There is nothing wrong with benign patriotism.
The problem, Harari warns, starts when benign patriotism morphs into chauvinistic ultra-nationalism. Instead of believing that my nation is unique, which is true all nations, I might begin feeling that my nation is supreme.
The Environment
Unless we dramatically cut the emission of greenhouse gases in the next 20 years, average global temperatures will increase by more than two degrees celsius resulting in expanding deserts, disappearing ice caps, rising oceans and more extreme weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons.
It isn’t a coincidence that skepticism about climate change tends to be the preserve of the nationalist right, says Harari. You rarely see left-wing socialists tweet that climate change is a Chinese hoax. When there is no rational answer, but only a global answer to the problem of global warming, some nationalist politicians prefer to believe the problem does not exist.
To counter this, the advent of unconventional technologies might help. For example, clean meat. This might sound like science fiction but the world’s first clean hamburger was grown from cells and then eaten in 2013. It cost $330,000. Four years of research and development brought the price down to $11 per unit and within another decade, clean meat is expected to be cheaper than slaughtered meat, which can count for a lot towards ecological rejuvenation when you consider that the water footprint of beef alone is 1,800 gallons per pound of beef.
Three threats facing humanity: technological nuclear and ecological
We now have a global ecology, a global economy and global science but we are still stuck with only national politics. This mismatch prevents the political system from effectively countering main problems. To have effective politics we must either be globalising economics and the major science or we must globalise politics.
Global governance, Harari says, is unrealistic. Rather, to globalise politics means that political dynamics within countries give far more weight to global problems and interests.
Chapter 8 — Religion
Harari says that in order to understand the role of traditional religions in the world of the 21st Century, we need to distinguish between three types of problems:
1- Technical problems: how should farmers in arid countries deal with severe droughts caused by global warming?
2 Policy problems: what measures should Government adopt to prevent global warming in the first place?
3 Identity problems: should I even care about the problems of farmers on the other side of the world?
As Karl Marx argued, religion doesn’t really have much to contribute to the great policy debates of our time.
Freud ridiculed the obsession people have about such matters as a narcissism of small differences. On this point, I did some research to find out why the Eastern Orthodox and Western Christian religions branched off from each other. One of the key points of difference that ultimately split the churches was that most Western Christians use a version of the Nicene Creed that states that the Holy Spirit