Coronavirus: Yuval Noah Harari, philosopher and historian, on the legacy of Covid-19 - BBC HARDtalk

welcome to hard talk I'm Steven Sokka the corona virus pandemic has given humanity and almighty shock here we are in our technologically advanced interconnected societies now living in lockdown fearful for our health and the future of our economies so what better time than now to talk to my guest today the best-selling Israeli author and historian Yuval Noah Harare what are the lessons we can learn from the impact of kovat 19 [Music] [Music] Yuval Noah Harare welcome to hot talk thank you thank you for inviting me you are known around the world for taking the grand historical perspective of us Homo sapiens and you have described with wonderful detail how our extraordinary cognitive abilities have led to a mastery of our environment but this seems to be a moment when we're learning that our mastery of the environment is extremely fragile do you see it that way yeah it is very fragile though we I have to say that we are still in a much better position with regard to infectious diseases then perhaps in any previous time in history since the Agricultural Revolution you know this isn't the Middle Ages and we are not facing the black death when the black death spread nobody understood what was happening what was killing people today it took us just two weeks to identify the corona virus behind the present epidemic and to sequence its entire genome of course we still don't have the power to stop evolution to stop nature pathogens continue to jump from animals to humans and continue to mutate so they will continue to be epidemics but our ability to understand what's happening and to some extent control it is much bigger than ever before I understand that point but maybe there's something else - maybe our expectations of how science can protect us are very different now perhaps in the Middle Ages when faced with plague human beings accepted the inevitability that many would die and now we find that extremely difficult to accept completely I one of the main laws of history if you can call it a law is that as conditions improve expectations increase so people can read as be satisfied or as vulnerable as before so you're perfectly correct that as our civilization becomes most efficient and powerful our expectations also increase so in a way the sense of fragility also increases and I'm mindful that just one month ago it seems a long time ago now but just a month ago you wrote this humankind is now facing a global crisis perhaps the greatest of our generation the decisions people and governments take in the next few weeks could shape the world for years to come we must act quickly and decisively okay one month on how are we doing not so good I mean you know in some countries in some cases the responses has been quite effective but maybe the most important level which is the global level we are not seeing any kind of real global leadership any kind of real global plan not on the health care front and even less on the economic front and the big worry is what will happen as the crisis intensifies not only in the developed world but also in developing countries in South America and Africa in South Asia and if we don't get a kind of global safety net or a global plan the economic and political consequences could be recourse trophic and could poison international relations for years to come so as an as an historian as a guy who's looked at the nature of leadership over many centuries why right now at this moment of great need for global leadership is it so very lacking why pawn fleets because we are paying the price for recent developments in the international system over the last few years before the epidemic we saw the rise of extreme nationalism and isolationism and most notably maybe in the previous leaders of the international community like the United States in previous crisis like the Ebola epidemic of 2014 and the global economic crisis of 2008 the United States played the role of global leader when was quite effective now the current US administration has basically abdicated the job of global leader saying telling the world that if no longer cares about the world about humanity it cares only about America America first so you've alighted upon Donald Trump as a key factor but surely this goes much deeper than any individual including mr. Trump because what we're dealing with here surely is human nature we face a pandemic which to most of us if unless we live in wuhan for example has come in from outside the inclination is to shut borders to look for self-protection to blame others for what is happening to us all of those are instincts which do lead quite naturally and instinctively to isolation to a focus on self-interest rather than cooperation and collaboration and Trust I think we should we should separate quarantine and blocking borders and stopping flights from actually blaming and hating foreigners it doesn't have to go together the simple fact that I'm not meeting somebody or on cutting physical relations with somebody doesn't mean I stopped cooperating or start blaming that person I am now self isolating in my house I haven't met my sisters and my mother for more than a month it doesn't mean that I blame them or that I stopped cooperating with them even in order if you look at the international system even in order to isolate effectively you actually need to cooperate first and foremost in sharing in from a information is the vital fuel for everything we do on the national level on the local level and information in this pandemic demands international cooperation not a blame game of who is responsible and who is to blame from this epidemic within information about the virus about the disease even about the lockdown measures now governments all across the world of experimenting with somewhat different policies just one more thought about leadership this in a way is an authoritarian moment is it not because again around the world populations publics are looking for massive reassurance from their leaders they want strong leaders whom they believe will protect them and is that not why authoritarian strains of governance appear to be pretty effective right now I don't think I mean there are some governments more effective than others but I don't think the dividing line passes between authoritarian regimes and democracies you do see you see some democratic regimes something chronic governments which are dealing with this quite effectively whether it's in East Asia like South Korea in Taiwan whether it's New Zealand or Germany or Greece so I don't think it's a question of where of only the authoritarian systems you are right of course that in a time of emergency when people are afraid for their jobs for the future for their very lives there is a built-in tendency in humans to wish for some savior for some strongman it's almost always a man that will save us knows everything will protect us but this is very dangerous I don't think that the historical record indicates that the dictatorships are always better than democracies in dealing with these kind of situations yes dictate ships have one big advantage which is they can act faster because the dictator doesn't need to consult with anybody it just makes up its mind and says okay do that and that's an advantage certainly but it's also a huge disadvantage because if the dictator makes the wrong decision for whatever reason it's usually much harder to admit a mistake and to try some other course of action the dictator if I may interrupt for just a second you're sitting and talking to me from Israel we there we have a democracy led by a veteran Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu which in the course of a response to this emergency as basically curbed parliamentary sittings has passed legislation which increases the powers of the executive where we now know that surveillance powers are being employed by the Internal Security Agency without any parliamentary approval what we have is a democracy and it's not just in Israel but we see others too where the executive power without actual accountability is being vastly expanded yeah and I think this is very dangerous with what happened in Israel at the moment when it seemed that this Prime Minister which at the time was just a stand-in Prime Minister it did not win the election there was an election he didn't win it he had a minority in the parliament and he tried to use this emergency to basically shut down Parliament and rule by emergency decrees not as an elected government this is something very different from say the German government issuing emergencies decrees the German government has been elected by the people in Israel at the time about a couple of weeks ago you had a parliament elected by the people and a Prime Minister not elected by the people and the Prime Minister tried to shut down the Parliament and I personally at moment made an announcement at least in in my view this is an attempted coup an attempt to overturn the democratic system fortunately this was averted Parliament was reopened and the some measure of democratic balance was restored so yes there is this danger and what I try to say earlier is that the people who think that we should actually do these things because they're dictatorships work better in emergencies this is wrong because if a dictator makes the wrong decision and they often make wrong decisions I mean no system is perfect if you build a government system based on the assumption that it will never make a mistake this is a recipe for disaster the big advantage of democracies is that you have different voices and different centers of power so if one voice if one centre of power makes the wrong decision it's easier to notice it and to rectify it and this one this is why in the long run even in such emergencies I think that democracies performed better than dictatorships but let us go deeper into that question of surveillance because it has been raised again by kovat 19 there are governments both author or authoritarian and genuinely democratic who are now united in a conviction that they need a much greater level of surveillance of their populations now at the moment it's about public health but it could be about other things in the future but what they want in your phrase is to get under the skin of their population so that they're surveilling them in the most profound ways from body temperature to all sorts of other physical data which automatically is going to be recorded everything from their movements to their to their breath is going to be recorded is that in your view taking the historical perspective a a power that we should right now be happy to invest in our government well I'm not surveillance per se I think it's a very important technological tool that can help humanity fight against this epidemic and against future epidemics and we need to use it but we need to use it responsibly and carefully so we don't end up losing our freedoms in order to get protection from epidemics there is a huge danger of the rise of totalitarian regimes worse than anything we've seen before in the 20th century you had totalitarian regime that monitored what people were doing but they couldn't go under the skin and monitor what people were actually feeling and thinking this was absolutely impossible they didn't have the technology or the computing power to to analyze all the data now for the first time in history it is becoming feasible to monitor everybody all the time and not just what we do but even what we feel you know we have been hearing for many years about the rise of this surveillance but most people still focus on what you can call over the skin surveillance what you do not what happens inside your body like we already know that corporations and governments can know that you are now watching this show and they can even if you watch BBC how talk they can deduce from that all kinds of things about your political views about your artistic tastes even about your personality but this is still limited they don't know yet what you're actually feeling as you're watching us do you do you think that I'm talking nonsense do you I think the time I'm correct and you becoming very afraid are you bored and you're looking for the remote control to switch to another Channel they don't know that but once you have under the skin surveillance you can know that because emotions and feelings are biological phenomena just like fever the same technology if you were a badminton bracelet that constantly monitors your body temperature your heart rate your blood pressure and other biometric data it can know if you have fever but it can also know if you're angry or you feel joyful or if you're bored it's all because because yes and because this technology makes no real differentiation between the different aspects of what it can read about you surely if we give up our right to privacy when it comes to our health we are going to in the end give up our privacy when it comes to our thoughts and feelings as well because they're on the same sort of physiological spectrum to a certain extent not necessarily I think I don't believe in technological determinism I think it's very dangerous to believe that technology is deterministic once you can do something it will be done it doesn't work like this in the 20th century people use the same technology to build communist dictatorships and fascist regimes and liberal democracies they all used trains and electricity and radio but in different ways so this new surveillance technology that can go under the skin it can do good things like improve our healthcare and we can keep it focused on that and prevent its abuse it can be prevented first of all if you establish a new surveillance system that monitors people are medical conditions it should be an independent agency don't give it to the secret police like they did in Israel and like they did in several other other places this is not the business of the police I think for people around the world that be fascinated if we make this quite personal because in the past you've written and reflected on the degree to which in your own life when you were young a teenager you didn't for a long time acknowledge that you were gay I think you said as a teenager of 14 there were signals that you were perhaps sending to the world that you were gay but you didn't even acknowledge it to yourself till you were I think about 21 that is you know you're basically more interested in pictures of men than women but you didn't really want to know and so you didn't discuss it with yourself and in a sense these days had you been looking at a computer and had your feelings and your you're literally or your key taps been recorded in a sense social media platforms the data collection services would have known knew better than you knew yourself and I just wondered philosophically whether that's a good place that we are taking our species or a very bad place it's a new place I mean again it can do good things and it can do bad things it's like you know it's like a knife a knife can you can use it to kill somebody you can use it to save somebody's life if you're a surgeon in hospital and you can use it to cut salad the knife doesn't care now we have this unprecedented technology to get to know people better than they know themselves this can be very helpful to them not only in healthcare but in many other cases just think about you know now there is all this panic in the stock market and you see the news the stock market is down 8% in this morning and you panic and you immediately pick up the phone to sell your entire portfolio just imagine that you have an AI sidekick maybe in your smartphone which is monitoring the signals coming from within your body from your brain and recognizing that you are now in panic mode and this is you know a biological phenomena they're very easy to spot that and the smartphone tells you wait a minute we know from so much research this is not the time to make big financial decisions when you're in panic mode all right well no this is a kind of system that serves your interests it collects data about what's happening in your body not for the benefit of some cooperation or government but to serve you and it really works well it can help you make much better decisions in life about your financial situation about what to study about whom to date no it's a fascinating glimpse into into a positive view of a brave new world but I'm also very aware that right now thanks to the cove in nineteen pandemic we also see so many people including leaders of the world from Trump to balsa Niro to salvini in Italy many others to who are peddling false information fake news yes about different elements of this pandemic science which you've just described offering us the most amazing potentialities for the future right now is being traduced it is misinforming i mean we are being misinformed about the facts how dangerous is that it's extremely dangerous because in especially in this disaster in this crisis sciences is our bedrock if we can't trust the basic scientific facts for instance about what this disease is then we have no idea what to do or we do counterproductive things i think the good signals that we do see around us is that in this crisis even many people and politicians which previously disregarded science are turning to it as the ultimate authority is the most trustworthy authority in israel for example they close down all the synagogues in iran they shut down the mosques churches all over the world are telling people stay away from church because even the religious authorities are trusting what the scientists are saying when the scientists tell them that look these places of worship should be closed down because they could spread infection of course there is still a lot of fake news out there a lot of conspiracy theories out there and again is we are paying the price for developments in the last few years when it is politicians have undermined the public trust in science and in reliable media and but I think it's not too late just a final quick one Yuval we're almost out of time you you you have given us this sort of trajectory this arc for the development of Homo sapiens and you've looked far into the future does this Cove 8:19 crisis which you call the biggest crisis of our lifetimes does it to you represent in the end little more than a bump in the road or is it something more profound than that for me as a historian it's really very interesting this moment right now I think that in our lifetime if you think in terms of a couple of decades it will be big not just not because of the epidemic itself but even more so because of the economic and political consequences but in the long sweep of history you know thousands of years no I don't think it will be one of the big events of history it is it could be what a watershed event in several ways like we discussed earlier with surveillance people could look back in a hundred years and identify the corona virus epidemic as the moment when a new regime of surveillance took over especially surveillance under the skin which i think is maybe the most important development of the 21st century is this ability to hack human beings to go under the skin collect biometric data analyze it and understand people better than they understand themselves this I believe is maybe the most important event of the 21st century at the moment when a system out there knows me better than I know myself it has never been like this you are with that fascinating thought looking into the future I really do appreciate you being on hard talk and I thank you very much for joining me thank you very much indeed thank you been a pleasure [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: BBC HARDtalk

Views: 369,229

Keywords: BBC Hardtalk, Stephen Sackur, politics, interview BBC, Yuval Noah Harari, Coronavirus, Covid-19, philsophy, historian harari

Id: gfVrin7Ybp8

Length: 24min 15sec (1455 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020