Frans de Waal & Yuval Noah Harari – Empathy, Ecological Collapse & Humanity’s Future Challenges

on behalf of the freedom games welcome to this uh amazing event and uh thank you so much for joining us uh mr franz deval and mr yuval harari are with us thank you so much for finding time to talk to us um the there are many many topics that i would like to go over so let me start with an easy and simple question first uh are we humans as as humans unique on earth or uh are we just a part of a bigger system or are we something very distinct from the from the system that is around us mr deval please well we are primates i'm a primatologist and so i look at humans as one of the 200 primate species and it's a special species if you want to but certainly a species that has language which i think is very special and walks on two legs which is somewhat special you know penguins walk on two legs too and so there's a bunch of other species that walk on two legs but other than that we are animals among animals in my in my view and so we um we have a long tradition in the west especially of setting ourselves apart and saying that we're closer to the angels than to the beasts and many of us have believed that because uh it was repeated so often by both religion and philosophy uh but i think it's it's a wrong view of the human species well i think that on on one level yes we are just animals not particularly different from other apes and other animals on another level of course we are unique we have unique abilities to cooperate in large numbers which makes us more powerful than any other species on earth and this ability in turn is rooted in the capacity to use language and to create imaginary realities we know more truth than any other animal but we also believe more nonsense than any other animal and this is part of our power if you look at any large-scale human cooperation at the basis you will find mythologies and fictional stories not just about gods but also about nations also about money as far as i know we are the only animal that uses money which is a fictional creation and the other i think distinct thing about us when i look to the future is i think we are on the verge of really changing the basic rules of the game of life which makes us really unique for four billion years life on earth was governed by the evolution of organic beings and we are the product of this organic evolution like the chimps and like the jellyfish and like viruses but we are on the verge of starting a potentially new process breaking um out of the limited organic realm and starting to create the first inorganic beings in the history of life and also transcending in a way evolution by natural selection and starting a process of creating life by intelligent design not the intelligent design of some god but our intelligent design so this makes us really unique compared to all the other animals yeah yeah it could go well that you're an optimist maybe this could go well but uh i'm not saying it will go well i mean it's just something we do it could go terribly wrong of course yeah the the the times that we have messed with nature like invasive species introduced in australia things like that it has not gone so well so um yes we are have the capacity i think we have the capacity to create actually new human beings which is ethically uh a frightening prospect actually um we have that capacity and and it's gonna come and and you're right um that could change the whole game uh and i hope it goes well yeah the new human being when you say new human being what what are you talking about what is the new well you could change the the dna you could you could create new new kinds of human beings and and i don't know what people would want would they want more intelligence would they want nicer people i don't know what the desires are in this regard but we we have that capacity that's coming yeah yeah we already today we have the technical ability to start redesigning humanity luckily we still have ethical and political breaks to slow it down or to prevent it but the technical abilities is already there yeah and you know genetics and genetic engineering is just one avenue of doing that we are also have this remarkable improvement in computer science and artificial intelligence so now genetics is really just in a way taking natural selection evolution and pressing the fast forward button something that would have taken a million years of evolution will try to do it in 10 years but then we have completely new ways to create and redesign entities um the inorganic way of linking humans to computers brains to computers or even creating completely non-organic entities artificial intelligence perhaps even artificial consciousness which is even a more radical change you can say that genetic engineering is just playing with the same bits and pieces that evolution has played for billions of years this is something completely new that uh to create really inorganic entities yeah so the i'm just reading this book the code breakers about crispr technology and when in china there was a a chinese scientist who applied that actually to human fetuses and and so he created some new humans with new dna in them and it became a big scandal and i think he's now in jail um but still this is gonna come we're trying to slow it down the process and to have philosophers involved about the moral implications but it's going to come and and i think it's a very difficult decision do you want smarter people for example and and if we create them what what are we going to do with them are they going to be in charge or you know it becomes a really a difficult decision i think as a historian i think it's really almost inevitable because humans have always dreamt about perfecting themselves like every religion and every ideology in history whether it's christianity communism they dreamt about perfecting humanity but they always had this problem or that they didn't understand really how humans work and they had to they couldn't overcome biology so they always postponed the the dream of perfection to some other place and time so the christians realizing that they won't be able to perfect human beings on earth they said okay the perfection will come in another world in the afterlife after you die you become perfect and the communists after gaining power and failing to create the new perfect society and the new perfect man they said oh well it will take more time not now but in 50 years a hundred years then it will happen yeah so the dream was always there and biology was always the the biggest obstacle that people had these this fantasies and biology was in the way and now if you give the tools to start changing or overcoming biology just you know think about sex life almost every religion and every ideology wanted to really change uh human sexuality or limit it but they couldn't you had those of chastity in the church and how many people actually lived up to the walls of chastity now think if you can really start messing with human biology what will be the result of these sexual fantasies of different religions and ideologies yeah but you have to be careful with biology because um as i said this can also go wrong i think we we have this idea that we have to overcome biology there's this old tradition of dualism where the human mind is in charge and and controls the body so to speak and we've always wanted to control the body and this has been mostly a masculine endeavor it's the male mind that is superior and the male mind is superior the white male mind is superior and all the rest of creation including animals and women and other racial groups they were inferior and so the male the human male mind was seen as the pinnacle of uh evolution and the body you know the flesh is weak that's how we would put it is that the body was considered um something uh cumbersome that we maybe we want to get rid of it one day and there are actually people who want to freeze their brains after death and and hope that they can implant them in some some machine later on their brain contents uh i see i think all this running away from biology which which which we've been doing for a couple of thousand years is potentially very dangerous because i think biology will always come to bite back and act lib is the is the current pandemic that's what we're seeing biology is coming back nature is coming back and and biting us back because we have tried to control the whole world and over fish the oceans and and overheat the planet and eating bats and whatever we we we have mistreated nature and nature is coming to bite us back at the moment and and i think um this kind of interventions where we want to overcome biology have an enormous grave danger i think so we have to be careful it's a complex system that's what it is it's not a simple system it's a very complex system there's many moving parts and you take this part out or you remove it yeah you may you may be disturbing something terribly is there any human behavior that you would call that that this behavior goes against the nature it's unnatural there are many people who say that humans are unique in a sense that for example we are the only species that kill for pleasure and no other species kills for pleasure is killing for pleasure unnatural have you ever seen a fox in a hen house i'm not sure that animals don't kill for pleasure so i don't think that's typically what they do that's for sure uh but um yeah and that's of course killing between species that's a predator and a prey um uh what is special about humans is maybe genocide there are animals who kill sometimes on massive scales like ants you know if you read on ant wars you you get this impression that they they may kill millions of their own species but i think humans human genocide is something special i'm i'm not sure i have equivalents of that in other species it's a problem with humans is we we do all the all the things that other animals do but we do them better and more systematic and and that also applies to the bad things that we do it applies to the good things but also to the bad things i would say that we do many special things we can list a few but again none of them is against unnatural or against the nature because this is simply impossible i mean the whole idea of against nature came from theology that there was this theological idea that god when he created animals and humans he gave them certain purposes and it's natural to act towards these purposes and if you act any other way against the purposes god gave you this is unnatural now this was an idea from theology not from biology not from science from a scientific perspective nothing has a purpose the laws of nature or nature doesn't set purposes to things like with the feathers it's not that feathers were given to birds for the purpose of keeping themselves warm and if you now use it to fly you're doing something unnatural no i mean in evolution things begin with a certain usage and they acquire other usages like fingers evolved initially so i can climb trees and pick fruits but if i now play the piano or if i now hit the keyboard in my computer that's that's natural that's perfectly okay yeah of course yeah yeah we've had this discussion also when when we came to altruism you know at some point we had these theories that uh genuine altruism doesn't exist neither in humans nor in other animals and so then when people came up as examples of altruistic acts that are not repaid and that give no benefits to the one who performs them people for example dawkins would say these are misfiring genes what he means it's basically an unnatural act he was using that kind of terminology because he in his theory it didn't fit and so they called it a natural behavior and a lot of altruism in nature um is performed under circumstances where it gives no benefits um and and i think it's perfectly natural it's just an outgrowth of that general tendency so for example i've done a lot of research on empathy how do how do animals react to the emotional states of others and empathy for the longest time was not considered a natural tendency empathy was restricted to humans according to most psychologists and that it was a typically human tendency and now we have this idea that empathy actually being sensitive to the emotions of others is something we find in many species and it can be applied within the species which is the normal circumstances for it like you apply it to your offspring or to your friends but it can also be applied sometimes between species and so humans do that of course we empathize sometimes with a stranded will for example which is certainly not why empathy evolved but uh animals can also sometimes empathize with uh with other species such as for example when dolphins save uh human swimmers that kind of things happen so empathy evolved for this particular purpose and then it can be expanded and i think with sexuality we have the same thing it evolved initially and the fed your feather example is the same thing it evolved initially for this and then it expands to other possibilities and this happens all the time with all sorts of capacities and some of these things uh our i mean humans take some of these things to places which are really unique to them so um yeah if you think about money this as far as i know is unique to human beings and it's it's linked to the capacity to create uh imaginary realities that we all agree on to basically tell fictional stories and believe them and money is not an objective entity it has no objective value it's not like a banana that can really feed you you can't eat it you can't drink it you can't do anything with it but as long as we all agree i mean you have these storytellers come the big bankers the best storytellers in the world and they come with this fantastic fictional story that this little piece of paper is worth 10 bananas and if we all agree on that it serves as the basis for a global trade network i can go to a supermarket give this piece of paper to somebody i never met before and he gives me a banana i can eat now as far as i know it humans are able at least with some animals like capuchin monkeys or chimpanzees they can teach them how to use tokens yeah there are there are studies by robert yerkes it started like almost 100 years ago he started doing studies with a machine that i think they call it the monkey atom automaton or something you they they taught chimpanzees to to have coins and put them in there and they could get goods for it and so you can teach them to use money and and they even understand that they can exchange less valuable items for more like that would be like a ten dollar bill for a hundred dollar bill and they would prefer the hundred hundred dollar bill and yeah we've done all these exchange experiments with capuchin monkeys too and so they can understand i wouldn't say the concept of money but they can understand the exchange concept and the value of certain value-less items that have a potential to give you rewards but i don't think animals i don't think any animal uses uh this capacity in nature so so humans have elevated this to an enormous level of course and and yes there's an enormous amount of manipulation going on with money and so on but you did the very basic principles can be taught to other species yeah i'm all for statement that money is unnatural if we can agree that money is unnatural no it's it's it comes from a natural capacity that we have to tell stories and to create kind of fictional realities that we all agree on if you can you know we are now in the midst of the olympics so think about this amazing thing that people from all over the world come to this one place and compete in all kinds of games now to competing we tend to think about the olympics as a clash between different nations like everybody is cheering for their own national team but underneath it there is first of all agreement consensus that everybody needs to agree on the same rules for their swimming competition otherwise you can't compete and these rules are most of the time that there are on fictional creations and i mean nobody would argue that the laws of football came down from heaven in a fixed form or are encoded in our dna we invented these rules and the amazing thing is we can reach a global consensus how to play football and this is not something unnatural but it is something that you know it exists to some degree among other animals but we have taken it to an extreme which is the basis for everything from you know from religion to trade to sports yeah it's very it's very that's very human-like because of course my primates this they play all the time play and and also measuring your strengths against others all of that they do that all the time but i i don't see much of a rule uh general rules in there the only rule is that you don't hurt your partner and if you do the partner will certainly protest and and get back at you so uh so so that kind of roles but uh playing sports like we do and the off-site role in football for example which is very complex in my my opinion uh that's not something that it will ever understand and never follow but do different groups have different games that they play like can you describe a different culture for different groups well they they the apes have a tendency to the young ones have a tendency to invent new games all the time and so they they may have a game of digging a hole and putting water in it and then stirring it and that's their game for the for the coming two weeks and then the somebody else invents another game and so like children they have these phases that they go through with different games but um most of those are not competitive it's not like one team against another team it's just a game that they play together it's more togetherness than com competition now and there's they play a lot of games but the rule based games that is a very human thing you know you mentioned empathy and i think this is something that i would love to focus on a little bit more the looking at the evolution of human spaces especially in terms of public life in in among humans do you see that we have we have more empathy toward each other less empathy as we go on and the evolution moves on uh i i think the basic forms of empathy in humans and and other mammals are very similar humans have have a more complex form of empathy maybe so the basic form of empathy is that i'm affected by the emotions that you show you you are distressed it makes me distressed you are happy and laughing i will be laughing miss you that's a very basic emotional connection it's called emotional empathy and i think that is what we find in all the mammals there's no rodent studies on it dog studies also all sorts of mammals have that basic emotional contagion the more complex forms is where i try to understand your situation i try to understand your life and imagine myself in your position for example or walk in your shoes that is much more complex we have we have indications that apes can do this i personally think that also dolphins and elephants can do this to some degree but that's a more complex form of empathy and then the most complex forms i think they may be uniquely human is where we we can even empathize with somebody who we don't see we read we read about a person in a novel and we empathize with this person in the novel which is a completely abstract sort of situation uh and i don't think that that kind of empathy occurs in in other species so so there's many levels and the the very complex cognitive levels are maybe uniquely human but but let's take a very simple expression of empathy in in chimps if one chimp loses a fight and and screams and sits in the corner others will come over and groom and kiss and try to reassure them and and that's that's a very typical act of empathy in the chimpanzee dogs do the same thing with humans there's now experiments also on that is that if a person cries in the family the dog will come over and put their head in their lap and have also a tendency to console so these very basic forms of empathy are general but there are forms i think that are too complex and that are found only in our species [Music] i think that what we see in history is the capacity of humans to take this basic ability and then stretch it in all kinds of directions for either good or bad you can use cultural means again like storytelling and mythology to create empathy towards people you never met and um you just read about them and you still have very strong empathy towards them and this is the basis for nationalism you know there is a lot of argument about nationalism as a story and i think that if you understand nationalism correctly it is one of the best inventions of humankind ever because at the basis of nationalism is not hatred of foreigners hating foreigners and minorities this is not not nationalism nationalism is about loving your compatriots and caring for them and the amazing thing is that we are able to care for millions of strangers we never met and you know i pay my taxes so that somebody on the other side of the country that i never met will get good health care or good education i empathize with this person which i've never met him or her and this is really amazing and wonderful the other side of the coin of course that you can use the same mechanisms of inventing all kinds of stories and spreading them to cause hatred and and and cruelty towards people you never met or told people that you don't know anything about them except for their skin color or except for the religious belief or the sexual orientation and you will immediately feel very negative emotions towards them just because of some story you believe i think i've i've read in your new book but one of the one of the things that really caught my attention is that in among apes for example there is no discrimination against an ape just because of their fur color or because of their sexual preferences yeah yeah that's both true is that there are primates uh like a certain kind of spider monkey that has many color variations from very dark to almost white and um people have never found that they discriminate on the basis of color so so that that would not be typical and sexual orientation for sure no i i don't think they they think in terms of categories in that regard they think more in terms of individuals this individual is like this that individuals like that and and there's no intolerance there but do you think because you say nationalism has little to do with disparaging other groups do you think nationalism could exist in humans if there were not some outside groups i look at it as an in-group outgroup phenomenon which we find in many animals uh in humans of course it's on a much larger scale the group is is not just 100 individuals it's like a million of multiple millions and so there's anonymity in in that in that area but do you think humans could be nationalistic if they were not outside groups uh because because i think those two things are linked yeah i think there is you need outside groups to have nationalism but then at the basis it you don't need to have hatred and violence and war uh you can have more positive attitudes as the basis and you know it it can manifest itself in things like again the olympics that you need the other teams in order to feel great loyalty towards your own team but it doesn't mean that the the main thing you do is go around beating the fans of the other team or or starting wars no i mean you you you need several teams but you can have consensus about the basic rules and how to organize everything and the main expression of your nationalism is loving your team not hating the others and this manifests also i think in politics that the good type of nationalism you know i mean you look around the world today you see leaders who claim they are great patriots why because they hate the foreigners or the minorities but the same leaders don't pay their taxes and for me this is it's completely wrong i mean you want to prove your your patriotism pay your taxes honestly this is far more important than hating some foreign group or you want to prove your patriotism don't uh when you come to appoint officials appoint the most qualified persons and not your cousin or your friend this is proof that you're putting the nation first hating minority groups this is no proof at all so i think in in history we have these different models of nationalism and i think there is a tendency in some scholarly circles to have a knee-jerk uh hostility towards nationalism as if it's all bad and it causes nothing but wars and so forth but we need a more balanced view that nationalism yes historically it often led to terrible things because people understood it mainly as about hatred but we should cultivate a more positive understanding of nationalism is caring about your fellow uh uh citizens that it manifests itself in paying taxes and creating a national health care system not in fighting wars and this understanding i think would be uh much more helpful than kind of tarnishing the whole national project as something negative that we should somehow uh eliminate because it's not going to happen i mean at least not in the foreseeable future yeah because humans are very quick in making in-group out-group distinctions there are these early experiments by a dutch psychologist yap rabi was his name after the war after world war ii he wanted to understand how groups could have hated each other so much and he set up these experiments in the netherlands where he would bring in groups into a room a group of people randomly he would randomly assign them a blue pen some of them would get a blue pen and the other ones would get a green pen and then he would start talking about them like the blue pens people and the green pants people and very soon he would have them give a little speech and and then you would have to rate this speech very soon the green band people felt that the green pen speeches were much better than the bloop and and and the other way around and so it was in randomly assigned people he immediately created groups but but the thing is that if you look at the experiment you see that it didn't come out naturally it was the result of manipulation from above yeah divide and rule if you have a leader that deliberately creates division in society you have the green people and the blue people then yes you have this kind of thing but this is the responsibility of leaders they can create division and hatred but it it's not inevitable but but it shows how easy it is in the in the human species to create that and often the groups that we dislike are the groups that are most similar to us so for example um i remember the dna studies that show that the japanese and the koreans are dna wise very close but they don't like each other i think with the jews and the palestinians in israel it's probably very similar dna wise they're very close but they don't like each other and so um i think the groups that are close to each other are the ones who often dislike each other the most because they also they interact more of course yeah i mean i think freud called it um what was it um the kind of i i forgot the expression but they you need to you need to it's harder to separate yourself from somebody who is very close to you so you need to to work harder and again you look at religious divides so if you look back at the history of europe or even the netherlands and the way that catholics and protestants yeah i know all about it yeah i know all about that you know about what about different interpretations of the religion of love they go around telling everybody that love is the main principle of our religion but because the other person understands the religion of love a little bit differently than me then i'll kill him in the name of the religion of love so i some some of that is completely artificial but in uh in chimpanzees for example we've had cases well it's not based on ideology or religion for sure but in um in one group of chimpanzees that were studied by jane goodall the the the individuals lived together they did everything together at some point the group split in two and so one group went to this territory the other one went to that territory and within a couple of years they started killing each other so so that's very amazing to us as primatologists as these are individuals who play together they know each other they know each other very well but now they hate each other and so they you can create hatred also in humans between individuals who normally could get along and sometimes these things happen i suppose under tito in yugoslavia everyone got along but as soon as this man disappeared everyone was not getting along anymore and so in humans you have these artificial situations that can either bring people together or drive them apart and the politicians know very well how to do that they do that all the time so is the hatred unique to humans is it do animals know how to hate each other oh yeah of course they know how to love each other and how to hate each other and so uh the the in-group outgroup distinction is is very very serious for them and uh and and goes together with a lot of aggression and uh sometimes killing in some species in most places because i understand how i do understand how animals can fight over territory for example that's obvious that's easy to understand but like pure hatred because you just mentioned that animals don't hate each other because of a different color of fur for example yeah we know very well people do know how to hate each other because of the color of this yeah yeah yeah so is it unique to humans this kind of way yeah i don't think hate is unique to humans i think love and hate are things that you find in other species but hating based on an artificial small usually small distinction i think that's typically human and so as you've all said for example the protestants and the catholics it's amazing because they basically have the same religion in my opinion it's not terribly different uh but they they and visinder within the protestants i live now in the us where you have all these protestant denominations that hate each other even though they're even harder to tell apart i would say but yeah people people hate on small differences now and that i think that's typically human human to carve up things we do that with racists we do it with ideologies we do it with sexuality we label things and we carve it up and then we start hating each other for this or for that and i don't know why we do that but it's it's a terrible affliction of our species in a way you can say that in animals sometimes objective conditions kind of force them into competition and violence like there is a limited amount of food and if the other group gets it then we don't and sometimes people imagine that humans fight for the same reason that there is a limited amount of territory and food so we have to fight but actually again as a historian my impression is that the vast majority of wars in history were not about objective resources they were about all these invented stories that define our identity and the the the wars are really about the stories not about the territory not about the food if you look at the history of europe a century ago europeans were killing each other by the millions even though at the time they controlled most of the world and still they had all this territory and and resources still couldn't agree now europe doesn't have these enormous empires actually they have a much smaller territory and yet they lived in in amazing peace at least when looked from the middle east it's amazing the peace of europe not because they have more territory to divide but because they found a story that they all can agree on and when i look at it israelis and palestinians it's the same if you look at the territory between the mediterranean and the jordan river it's one of the i would say yes it's one of the most crowded places on earth that's true but still objectively there is enough space to build houses and schools and hospitals for everybody there is enough food people fight because they can't find a single story that they can all agree on of who we are and how should we live yeah but i think in europe yeah there is maybe a narrative there but there's also an important economic incentive now after world war ii the europeans uh especially italy france the benelux germany decided that it would be better to create mutual dependencies uh economic dependencies and that that would foster peace that was the idea of the european union and uh at that time the brits were still on board they now have decided that they don't need to be part of it but um to to create an economic unity would prevent war and i think it has worked and and by the way in the primates we have the same thing we have i've done a lot of research on conflict resolution and the main idea in that field is what we call the valuable relationship hypothesis which is that if you need each other if there's value to your relationship you will try to get along and you will make peace after fights if there's no uh shared value to your relationship you don't get much out of it then you can have these endless wars as we used to have in europe so the european union was based on the idea is that you increase the value of the relationships economic value and that will create peace and i think it has worked marvelously in the european union and and what you say about getting along without resource competition that is of course something that many political leaders try to do when they try to divide people they try to tell them that these immigrants that are coming are going to take your jobs you know these immigrants even though i can see here in the u.s with the immigrants from from the south from mexico and so on they do a lot of jobs that americans don't want to do so so they're not taking anybody's jobs but that's that's the storyline that that we are being told we are being told that we will lose because they're coming in and and that's what politicians do all the time everywhere i think and and it's really a manipulation of of this of the storyline as you say yeah i mean the thing is that we have within us these tendencies we've inherited from our evolutionary past that can be easily manipulated it's much easier to win an election by scaring people about immigrants than by scaring people about climate change why not because immigrants are inherently more dangerous to our survival than climate change but because we are kind of evolutionarily programmed to fear uh the other group the other the chimpanzees beyond beyond the hill much more than to think about the impact of what we do on the atmosphere and the climate and so forth because until very recently there was no way that we could really impact the climate or that we could do anything about it so we kind of we are not emotionally we are not prepared to the kind of power that we have and that's a basic problem in in today's politics yeah yeah yeah and also the problem is that even though we humans we can think ahead and we can think ahead better than almost any other species we don't use that capacity very often so we so we we can think ahead 10 years 20 years 50 years we know what's coming and and the the scientists tell us what is coming in terms of climate change uh but the politicians and most people i think they think short term they think in in five years terms are that's all they do so the other conclusion that you're trying to make as far as understand is that this is all the blame of the politicians so if not the world would be a better place to live which being a journalist i totally agree on i i think this is up the absolute truth but you also mentioned the values that the values that we are building as humans that that makes it easier for us to live together and with the with the all of the evolution and all of the scientific progress the technology the amazing technology that we're witnessing right now uh do you think that it's easier for us to create the the values that make it make make it easier for us to live together or does it make it more difficult for us to create the values no but potentially it makes it easier we do see today more global cooperation and tolerance than in any previous time in history again if you take the example of the olympics you could not have an olympics a thousand years ago you could never reach some kind of global agreement on something like that and also i i i'm not against politicians as a group i think some politicians are wonderful it's not inherent in the profession that they should all be evil or corrupt or whatever it's a profession like any other i don't think i could do their job for them i'm totally against giving for example scientists political authority i don't think it's a good idea politics is a vocation in its own right you need to train for it you need specific skills you need to uh be able to represent people i don't represent people nobody voted for me so i'm totally against you know like pushing the politicians aside and letting scientists decide everything politicians should consult with scientists but ultimately the political decisions should be made by the representatives of of people not by some professional experts but politicians again i'm in favor of responsible politicians too often today you get this kind of authentic politician a person who says the first thing that comes to their mind and thinks that this makes them authentic and i don't want authenticity from politicians i want responsibility i look at my own mind i see all the nonsense and all the terrible things that sometimes pop up in my mind i don't say them at least i try not to there should be some kind of barrier between the mind and the mouth and i expect even more from politicians that don't tell me the first thing that comes to your mind like your words are like seeds that go into the mind of millions of people if you say words of hatred you are planting seeds of hatred in the minds of millions of people they will result in a forest of violence and hatred so be very responsible and careful and there are politicians like that it's not impossible yeah so when we complain about politicians we're in a way complaining about you the human response to politicians because the politicians manipulate us and they can manipulate us because we fall for the nonsense that they tell us and and so the politicians are not entirely to blame for uh what their followers do with them uh and as far as leadership is concerned um well i agree completely that we don't need to hand it over to the scientists i don't trust science with this necessarily mistaking moral decisions or political decisions um i've studied alpha males in in many species and alpha males come in sort of two varieties it in simple seas for example you have you have the bullies who who do the sort of thing that yuval is talking about the bullies who manipulate and and try to dominate everybody and terrorize everybody and and insist on loyalty and all of that kind of things but you also have leaders uh um who are real leaders in the sense that they they keep the peace they come up for the underdog they lead the group and so they exist too and so you have sort of a variety of leaders and it's up to the group to decide who will be in power in a way it's a democratic process so for example in chimpanzees the smallest male can be the alpha male it doesn't need to be the biggest and the strongest male but that small male will need support from the group otherwise he cannot keep that position so the group needs to put their weight behind him and if he's a good leader they will keep him there and if he's not a good leader they will wait for an opportunity to have a challenger get rid of him and so in a way you have that same sort of variety of leadership at the moment in human society very interestingly we have more and more female leaders and uh i don't know if you've noticed but with the with the the covid crisis the female leaders have generally reacted a little bit differently than the male leaders so at least we have had some male leaders like here in the us and in brazil and other places who have tried to manipulate the system instead of fighting the virus they they made the virus the enemies have to speak of their political enemy and they didn't listen to the scientists and they have tried to manipulate things based on what happened with the virus but we have now increasingly female leaders and they have on average i would think done better than the male leaders in handling the corona crisis so so at the moment we have these um this variety you have good good male leaders bad male leaders you have female leaders probably also good and bad ones and um so we have a greater variety of them do you see uh evolutional change in the in the in the role of of the gender in in human species because you mentioned the the human the the i'm sorry the the female politicians who deal differently with the chronovirus situation does it there are a lot of people who say that there's a bigger change coming in in a way that the in the role that gender plays in human life do you see it coming yes i think the human gender roles are fairly flexible in my opinion uh there are certain biological constraints like women can make babies and and women need to nurse babies and so so there are certain biological constraints but not in what i would say leadership necessarily i don't think males are better leaders and and i don't think humans need to fixate on that and and if i look at our closest relatives we have chimpanzees and bonobos as our two closest primate relatives and the brothers are female dominated species and the triplets are male dominated species so they don't tell us a very consistent story on what we need to do in our society and i think in in both species we have female leaders and in both species we have male leaders so so even in the chimpanzee which we call male dominated because the males are are really dominant there you have female leaders i have written a book about a female temple c mama who was a really central figure in a chimpanzee community and so um physical dominance and leadership are not the same thing for me and so you can have a society like the chimpanzee society where the males are physically dominant that doesn't mean that they decide everything that's going on there so i i do have a more flexible view of this and i don't think there's any reason biological reason why you would say that males need to be the leaders of human society that would be nonsense in my opinion is the harare do you see the change coming in the history of humanity yeah you know the patriarchal societies dominated by males have been the norm among humans for thousands of years and if we had this conversation a century ago two centuries ago uh it would have been easy to imagine that this is just dictated by biology because you look throughout the world throughout history in the middle east in europe in america and at least if you look at large-scale societies not at hunter-gatherer bands but at kingdoms and empires and so forth they are all patriarchal so you would think this is a fixture maybe dictated by biology but then the last 100 years have seen maybe the biggest revolution social revolution in human history the change in gender relations and gender roles and the amazing thing from my perspective about this revolution is not only how swift it was and how big it was but also how peaceful it was you know for people who think about revolution something like the french revolution or the russian revolution then they think that in order to have a big change in society you need a lot of violence you need guillotines you need gulags you need to wage wars otherwise how can you make change you know all these communist slogans that you to make an omelette you need to break a few eggs or if you want to chop wood there are splinters but you look at the revolution in gender relations and it's a completely different story as far as i know feminists never started any wars never assassinated any presidents did not stout did not send people to the gulag and they managed to change maybe the most fundamental aspects of human society very quickly and i think that in the 21st century the pace of change will be even faster and i mean when i look today at the academic world i see something that as a historian makes me a bit ashamed i see tyrants and autocratic rulers like putin in russia like urban in hungary that they are closing down departments of gender studies and their kind trying to wage war against gender studies and they leave the history department and the philosophy department alone and this tells me that we don't endanger them but the gender studies department this is where the really important stuff is happening because these are the departments that they are trying to close and i think that if you want to understand not just gender relations but the more broad revolution that will happen in human relations and in the very meaning of humanity in the coming decades the place to go is the gender studies department and you know some of that started with biology so the pill this is the only pill that we call the pill the pill um is a small biological invention that changed a lot of things because it gave us control over reproduction and it it allowed sort of decoupling of sex and reproduction because of course they have smaller families we could also have stopped having sex but for the human species that is not really a good option and so the pill was necessary but it's a small biological invention that greatly contributed to this particular revolution by reducing the family size and and i think you're right i think them the gender relations first of all they have they have some basis in biology but we shouldn't exaggerate that basis i think there's quite a bit of flexibility there and and second it is on the move it's clearly on the move another major difference that i see is that in the old days if if i had been born 50 years before when i was born i would probably have ended up in the army or something and many young men in europe during world war one and world war ii were killed on the battlefields and so uh in the old days the privileges of men um were only for the for the rich man i think poor men poor boys they ended up in the army and they ended up being killed and that stopped when that stopped in europe all this warfare that we had going on um it exposed more the privileges of maleness than before so so before that time you could argue well all these boys they end up in the army and so being a boy was not really a privilege in my opinion in that time but after the piece settled in in europe it became more obvious that men have a good life compared to women and that and that women have to fight for a lot of basic things like voting rights education birth control women had to fight for a lot of things that were not available to them and i think it became more clear how the general relations were out of whack at that time and i think those two things have greatly contributed the invention of the pill and the ending of the wars and and the killing that was associated with that yeah and when we think about the invention of the pill as you say it's such a small technological invention with such a huge social and and cultural impact so now we are developing far more um remarkable technology to start changing the the human body the human brain and again i think much of you look at the debates today about transgenders and i try to understand why are so many people so upset or excited or whatever about this relatively very small part of humanity and i think that deep down we understand that this is kind of the vanguard of the future that if you want to think about one field in which new technologies are really changing in a fundamental way what it means to be human or identity then transgenders is kind of the obvious place to go and this is kind of the template for transhumanism in many ways that it's it starts maybe with gender but it will increasingly impact more and more parts of of human identity you mentioned the pill and um i think for me the pill is about the freedom of a woman to choose and before i let you go in last few minutes i would like to ask you a more general question about freedom with all the evolution going on with all the history of humanity going on do you think we get more freedom and and we talk a lot about freedom politicians talk about freedom but all of us talk about freedom all the time do you see more that this is this is the key issue for us and do you do you see a humanity getting more freedom to choose to live the way that we want to live to explore and do everything else or do we do or do you see us doing everything we do and and and and limiting the freedom that we have i think i think we have a choice again between extremes the technological and political developments are kind of constantly increasing the stakes we have the potential for greater freedom than ever before including especially freedom from disease freedom from hunger freedom from oppression we can create a more free world than ever before but at the same time the same technology also creates the potential for the worst totalitarian regimes in human history if you think about the new surveillance technology so you know in the old communist bloc there could be a secret police agent following you 24 hours a day but they didn't really have the capacity to follow everybody all the time and they didn't have the ability to analyze all the information like you would have these mountains of of paper in the secret police headquarters and nobody had the ability to read all that and analyze it and of course they never had the ability to go inside your body to actually monitor what you feel and think so if there is a speech by the great leader on television or on radio everybody has to listen and you can smile and clap your hands and nobody knows that you actually hate the guy but in 10 years with the present technology you can create something far worse than the soviet union or poland under communism yeah it is already happening yeah you can use you don't need human agents to follow you around use technology to follow everybody you can for the first time in history you can follow everybody 24 hours a day you can analyze all that information and you can go under the skin you can increasingly also monitor what people actually feel and think and we have to be very careful about it so we have this choice if we make the wrong decisions in the next 10 years we will end up with a totalitarian regime worse than the soviet union in the days of stalin if we make wise decisions we will end with a better and more free society than ever before yeah yeah yeah since we all walk around with iphones nowadays smartphones that that has become a device to to check on everybody we know where everybody is but we may even know what they are saying with whom they are talking it's just incredible the the potential for monitoring that occurs um so yeah and for me the word freedom is always so a bit triggering because i think freedom is overrated um makes me think of charles the goal that the president of france who says um the pursuit of happiness you know the americans had that freedom and the pursuit of happiness and and the goal said happiness is for idiots and and i think in a way that's maybe true i think freedom is overrated because people for example have children are they free no no they they have children at home they need to take care of them so how free are they to do whatever they want to do and so i think um we should be careful with the term freedom and and as you say we live in a time where it's getting scary now it's getting scary the way the chinese for example are monitoring everybody in their country and so we we get now these systems being set up that that may suppress an enormous amount of human activity because um big brother is watching us all the time now yeah i think maybe i'll just add you know when you think about freedom some people think that again it's an innate human right or innate human ability we have free will or whatever i think freedom is not something we have freedom is something we have to struggle for that it's uh you need to struggle for it you can never take it for granted that you just have it because you're a human being yeah but you also we all have obligations and commitments and so freedom uh yeah it's it's wonderful to be free to some degree but it's overrated yeah i think that if you understand freedom is just i'll do whatever i want at any minute that's not real freedom real freedom includes the ability to commit to something long-term it can be to commit to another person a husband a wife to commit to children to commit to some you know i want to write a book so the freedom to write a book involves spending i don't know three years researching and writing and editing it if it's just a momentary impulse i do it now in five minutes i'll stop i will never be able to write the book so freedom real freedom very often includes a large measure of committing yourself long term to some individual to some group to some project yes so it's a bit like with animals in the wild like let's say chimpanzees in in the forest people say oh they're free you know they have to work every day to get their fruits they have to be careful because they're leopards and they have the enemy chimpanzees that they need to deal with they are free compared to let's say a captive sympathies in captivity who get their food brought to them by humans um so uh i think freedom is is a difficult concept but it's thrown around very easily and it's equated with happiness which to me is not the same thing yeah i think you can be perfectly happy in an unfree situation my freedom to postpone the end of this discussion is definitely over so we we have to finish this thank you so much for finding time i do hope to see you in in poland in person i hope so yeah yeah this is the second time i meet mr harari and we i still never met so please come come to poland next year i i really want to i mean my family is originally from poland so i really want to come and see kind of my ancestral uh home but you know until the coffee crisis is over i'll probably have to wait yeah mr harare mr deval thank you so much for finding time thank you thank you bye-bye nice seeing you bye-bye

Channel: Yuval Noah Harari

Views: 139,500

Keywords: humans, history, science, future, nationalism, global, harari, yuval noah harari, technology, ai, frans de waal, freedom games, animal behavior, primates

Id: g8gStd80vwY

Length: 66min 20sec (3980 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 11 2022