Michael Sandel & Yuval Noah Harari in conversation

hello michael it's very good to have you here good to be with you you all good to see you again even if remotely yeah this is the way things are these days uh maybe we'll just introduce ourselves for a brief moment for the sake of the people who are watching us so i'm professor yuval noah harari i teach history at the hebrew university of jerusalem and i'm the author of sapience and homo deus and a new graphic novel sapiens the birth of humankind and i'm michael sandell i teach political philosophy at harvard and i've just written a book called the tyranny of merit what's become of the common good and i should add that yuval and i have began our conversation didn't we in on a trip in to chile and antarctica yeah it was like four or five years ago five years ago i think yeah in in prehistory as has things evolved since then so i actually have a number of questions about your new book the tyranny of merit but maybe it's best if you first present the main thesis of the book uh so everybody would be on on the same page sure i began thinking about the book in 2016 with the spread of authoritarian populism the election of trump in the u.s brexit in britain and the rise of authoritarian hyper-nationalist populist parties and movements in many parts of the world and i think so i wanted to try to make sense of it and i think a lot of it has to do with the sense of anger and resentment even a sense of humiliation that a great many working people feel and that these figures including trump have been able to tap into i think at the heart of it is the fact that the divide between winners and losers has been deepening in recent decades poisoning our politics and driving us apart this has partly to do with the widening inequalities that we've seen during four decades of globalization but it's not only economic inequality i think it has to do also with changing attitudes towards success toward winning and losing that accompanied the rising inequality those who've landed on top have come to believe that their success is their own doing the measure of their merit and by implication that those who fall short those who are struggling have no one to blame but themselves now this way of thinking about success reflects a certain meritocratic ideal the idea is and it seems inspiring on the face of it if chances are equal or could be made equal the winners would deserve their success and the benefits that flow from it and so while this is inspiring in in one way it leads to the rhetoric of rising the promise you can make it if you try it's invidious in another meritocracy has a dark side because it generates hubris among the winners and humiliation among those who are left behind one of the most potent sources i think of the populist backlash against elites is the galling sense among many working people that elites look down on them this i think is is one of the important factors that that has roiled our politics and led to the populist backlash you've all i've also been trying for the last few years to understand what's happening in the world um as a historian i tend maybe to be a bit more skeptical about our ability to identify cultural connections in history i belong to the type of historians who think that we are much better at describing what happens than at understanding why it happens i think that many of the big events of history we still don't have a good explanation for them why did christianity rise to become the dominant religion in the roman empire and then spread from there i've never read a convincing argument why it was christianity and not any of the other many religions that were on offer in the supermarket of ideas of the roman empire similarly i don't think i understand or anybody really understands why the scientific revolution took place in europe and not in the middle east or china i've read many many explanations again i think we can describe what happened with a high degree of accuracy but we don't know why it happened and my gut feeling about 2016 and the populist uprising is is really the same that we still don't understand um i know that a lot of people are pointing the finger at globalization and meritocracy and inequality in general and it may be true in in some cases like in the us i'm not an expert on u.s society or u.s politics so i don't know but the thing about the populist wave of the last few years is that it's a global phenomenon it's not just brexit it's not just trump you see the rise of authoritarian populists all over the world in brazil in hungary in poland in turkey in my home country of israel in the philippines in india and under very diverse conditions some countries like the us you can make a very convincing argument that at least the working classes have lost a lot from globalization so they are against it but the working classes in turkey in india in brazil arguably benefited enormously from globalization so what explains what's happening there and it's it's the same with meritocracy and i'm still struggling to find a global explanation for this phenomenon the other thing i i have trouble with is okay maybe populism is a reaction to elite hubris and the fact that you have these winners who take all and everybody else are left behind and even blamed or ridiculed for their failure but why then is the uh anger results in anti-democratic forces rising how come we don't see the rise of leaders and parties or committed to the core values and institutions of democracy and express these views why must it go in the anti-democratic direction and related to that why are the main victims of populism not the rich elites well supposedly to blame for all that the main victims are minorities and immigrants and lgbts and and and so forth you know you look at the trump administration it doesn't seem that it's kind of directing its uh uh false against the rich and powerful or even the educated they are not the main victims so i i'm struggling with with this and i would be very interested to hear what what you have to think what you think about it yeah well thanks for that you all i do think there are some common threads that connect the the populist movements and the populist backlash in countries around the world one thread is the failure of mainstream political parties and especially of center-left political parties to deal with the rising inequality brought about by the globalization of the last four decades and one could almost say that the success of right-wing populism is a symptom of the failure of progressive or social democratic politics and in almost every country where we see populism flourish authoritarian populism because it's important to emphasize that right-wing populism is not the only possible version of it though that's what we're seeing predominantly today but that in itself is important because it gives a clue to the common thread which has to do with the fact that center left social democratic parties have failed and what they failed at is contain is there at performing their historic mission their historic mission has been to reign in the excesses of capitalism and to hold it to democratic account that is the traditional mission and purpose of central after social democratic parties to to provide a counterweight to the concentrated power into the inequality that results from unfettered capitalism and to seek a more just society and during the past four decades center-left parties have failed to do this and i think one of the reasons they failed to do it is that they did not they accepted uncritically the premise of the reagan thatcher celebration of markets that premise was that a market faith that market mechanisms are the primary instruments for defining and achieving the public good now in the 1990s when they faded from the political scene and center left parties replaced them bill clinton in the united states tony blair in britain gerhard schroeder in germany they didn't challenge this fundamental premise they moderated its harsh edges they softened it they shored up the safety net to some degree but they never challenged it they embraced the project of neoliberal globalization they embraced as a bipartisan project the deregulation of the financial industry and when it came to contending in the 2000s 90s and 2000s with the deepening inequality and the wage stagnation and the outsourcing of jobs they offered the following promise they said if you want to compete and win in the global economy go to university get a degree what you earn will depend on what you learn you can make it if you try so this yuval is how the meritocratic idea was offered together with the promise of individual upward mobility if you get a college degree this was offered by the center-left parties as the answer to the inequality of globalization but it was far too narrow a response to inequality partly because individual mobility social mobility is not easy and it is stalled but also because implicit in the offer was an insult that they missed they were tone deaf to the insult implicit to the offer go get a university degree then you too can rise the insult was if you didn't go to college and if you're struggling in the new economy your failure is your fault this i think is what contributed to the anger the resentment the sense of grievance felt by great many working people we can easily forget that in most countries most people don't have a university degree about two-thirds do not in the united states and in most european countries so it's follied to create an economy that makes dignified work in a decent life dependent on the idea of a university degree that most people don't have so this i think is a common thread and we see in most every country where authoritarian populism has come to power or is flourishing we see that the greatest casualties have been center-left or social democratic parties and it's they who have failed and i think the only way really to to heal this depolarization and to rein in this authoritarian populist tendency is to reconceive the mission and purpose of progressive or social democratic politics what do you think about that well do you find that did you find that persuasive or or not i mean a couple of things i mean first it's like the original sin was the fault of reagan and thatcher and the right-wing parties you're saying that the left-wing parties are being the main blamed for just following the right direction and the right goes like scot-free even though they should they are the main culprits they are and they aren't because the center-left parties did not challenge them in a fundamental way they took over that project even as they offered a meritocratic justification for the inequality that made that inequality more galling it converted it from an inequality of income and wealth which is bad enough to an inequality of honor and esteem and one of the central themes of the tyranny of merit is that we miss a lot if we focus only on the economic aspects of inequality important though they are we need also to focus on the economy of esteem and the way in which recent decades have eroded and these policies and this politics have eroded the dignity of work the sensor sense of honor and recognition and esteem that that all of us would like to receive uh in in return for the contributions we make to the economy and to the common good i think that's the heart of it that's why the politics of humiliation which is really about recognition or the lack of it it's about honor and esteem or the lack of it i think that's the deep animating force in the populist backlash more than the the material inequality as such does that make sense yeah it makes a lot of sense uh originally i'm a medievalist i specialize as a historian in the middle ages so for me you know talking about the economy of honor is like you know the bread and butter of of the middle ages honor is much more important in many ways than economic factors so i'm completely open to the idea that a lot of politics is actually about honor yeah but then when you look at the world over the last few decades and you look at the honor economy so the main thing i see is not just the question of education it's above all the question of race and sex and gender the biggest upheavals weren't so much in terms of the honor of education it was in the honor attributed to racial and gender identities and you know maybe i'll give you a concrete example that if indeed much of the anger behind populism is against the universities and the meritocratic ideal then we should see authoritarian figures populist authoritarian figures attacking the universities and the academic establishment and you do see such such uh things happen but when you look closely it's strange or maybe not strange who are the main victims for instance you would expect that the biggest victims of all would be the economics department they are the big villains of all that all these people in the economic department but i never saw a single authoritarian figure not trump not bolsonaro not urban not erdogan turning against the economists but i didn't see victor orban closing down banning all gender studies programs in hungary and you know as a historian i'm a bit envious of the people at the gender studies department apparently they are so threatening to orban and that he he bothers to close them down he did not bother to close down the history department or the philosophy department now i don't think that the people at the gender studies department they have so much esteem or the people who have a degree from a gender studies department they get such a high paying jobs in industries that they should be the main victims and it's the same when i look at it in israel i'm that the main attacks are on departments in the humanities and the more and the softer edges of the social sciences nobody attacks the economics department the business department the computer science department and one example i know from the states is that trump recently a couple of months ago issued an executive order banning the teaching to federal employees or in federal programs of any theory of racial of institutional racism or institutional uh sexism that's an executive order of president trump he never issued as far as i know any order banning uh capitalist economics from being taught to federal employees so if we talk about the economy of honor i think we should focus more on issues of race and gender not completely obscuring the issue of class and working class versus the educated elites but it should be much more central in the conversation i think that the that liberalism and progressive politics and social democratic politics has done has done a a a good job [Music] of focusing on questions of race gender sex in terms of social justice and honor and in many ways this has been the strongest most prominent most visible feature of the political message in the political project of center-left parties in recent decades and there's no question that the populist backlash has been led by figures who have made racist misogynist xenophobic appeals there's no question about that and one need only look at trump as well as some of the figures you've all you've mentioned but i think it's and so our tendency and by our i mean those of us who are appalled by this kind of politics our tendency is to to direct our outrage and our attention to the uh and also our interpretation of what the populist protest is about to the groups that have been targeted by populists rightly so and i think it's no accident that during the trump presidency we have seen the emergence of the metoo movement and the black lives matter movement as truly powerful multiracial multi-generational movements and actually i think this is one of the greatest achievements of the trump presidency to have called forth and reinforced and broadened the appeal of these movements but i think it's important not to allow our outrage to be monopolized and directed by the targets that trump and other populists choose i think we also have to engage in diagnosis and interpretation to disentangle from those ugly sentiments which are clearly a part of the these authoritarian populist political appeals we have to disentangle the legitimate grievances on which they also draw and exactly and that's and that's what the tyranny of mayor tries to do in no way to diminish the importance of these um uh the movements for racial justice and for gender equality but to notice and this i think s sent uh social democratic parties need to be self-critical it's not enough to say they're all voting for him because they are all racists because what that misses that lets us off the hook too easily in the aftermath of this 2020 election the question democrats should be asking themselves is not thank goodness we can restore things the way they were before trump interrupted our steady march to progress the question we should be asking the number we should have foremost in our minds is 70 million why despite the disaster of the last four years despite his bungling of the pandemic 70 million people wanted this to continue why is that now some of those 70 million may have been drawn to the xenophobia and the racism and misogyny but a lot of them have legitimate grievances that the mainstream center-left parties have ignored not only that have contributed to which which goes to the to the tyranny of merit which goes to the rhetoric of rising which goes to the embrace of neoliberal globalization policies which goes to the deregulation of finance wage stagnation but especially it goes to the insult of telling workers who are struggling your failure is your fault if you didn't get well credentialed as most of us are by the way and it's no accident i i would just add yvonne that the that by the by 2016 the democratic party uh in the u.s the labor party in britain the socialist parties in europe were more attuned to the values and interests of the professional classes the well-educated classes the the the credentialed elites then they were to the working-class voters who once constituted their base and in strictly electoral terms uh we we can see how the how people who people with a college education used to vote for conservative parties mainly for reasons of economic interest and people without a college degree used to vote for center-left parties but in the 90s and 2000s that has flipped now education is one of the deepest divides in politics trump among whites without a college degree in 2016 trump won two-thirds of them and in 2020 when biden defeated him trump won two-thirds of them so that problem remains i completely agree that there is an entanglement here and we shouldn't just focus on the issues of race and gender and and so forth but the question is why why is there such an entanglement why are these um more justified concerns of working-class people entangled and not just in the u.s but in so many other places with um racist and sexist and homophobic attitudes what's the source of that entanglement and in particular and the question that i raised in the beginning i mean all of this i don't i don't think would concern so much you and me if we saw the rise of a party which is clearly against inequality it's against the excesses of the meritocratic elite it's against the excesses of capitalism but it's not against democracy and the the big question mark for me is why haven't we seen the rise of that kind of party and you know if it was only the u.s then you can explain it with various accidents or unique situations but we haven't seen it almost anywhere and if you again you look a global picture then i don't know compare the us to brazil so you can say many things about the policies of president democratic presidents like clinton or like obama and the impact of globalization on the american working class but in brazil it's a completely different story if you look at least at the long term the last 40 years when the condition of american working class was stagnant or even deteriorating in brazil it was improving globalization on the whole was generally a good thing for the brazilian worker many of the jobs lost in the us migrated south and you have a party like the pt like the workers party which is much more closely aligned with the working class than the democratic party was in the u.s under obama and clinton and still you got bolsonaro you understand the american situation much better than me but i'm concerned about the global situation there is i i feel that there is something deeply troubling about the turning away from democracy itself and and this is the troubling thing if it was only turning away from the excesses of capitalism and inequality and meritocracy wonderful welcome aboard uh we are not against that right well but i think these are inseparable i think that the democratic project broadly conceived depends on the ability of democratic societies and political parties who organize those societies to oppose a certain restraint on the excesses of capitalism and instead what's true in most of the countries where we see the populist backlash is that they've lost the the political parties have lost the capacity to do this they ceased to be effective instruments of popular will one could imagine another way i suppose of putting your question yuval and i think it's a very good question is why do we not see left populism why do we see the proliferation of right wing authoritarian populism and this goes back to i mean it seems to me it goes back to the to the need to fundamentally rethink what social democratic politics or center-left politics are about and how they can under conditions of a global economy reclaim their role as counterweights to unfettered capitalism and markets in a way this also raises the question of the status of the nation now i uh and in recent centuries the the fate of democracy has been closely connected to the nation state now you've you've written um often skeptically about nationalism along with various other ideologies as myths as uh as imaginings that you juxtapose to what's real to what's objective although you've acknowledged their potence their force to move people to inspire people for better and for worse but i think part of what we've seen over the past four decades with the embrace of not only markets but the globalization of markets which really means the the obsolescence or seeming obsolescence of nations and national borders as goods and capital and people move freely across national borders i think part of the anxiety is related to your question about democracy if the nation matters less and less if national identities matter less and less and if national governments are less and less effective at governing themselves in the face of a global economy then what becomes of democracy is it possible to conceive a democracy that can be uh that can be worked out on on a global scale so far we haven't achieved that so i in a way yuval i would i would like to put to you um an offshoot of this question do you think despite your worries about national nations as imaginary communities do you think that the response the alternative to the authoritarian populism that we've seen requires depends upon giving nations and maybe even nationalism it's due as a as a way of shoring up democracy what do you think about that first in in my view saying that something is a product of the human imagination and not an objective reality doesn't mean that it's not important it doesn't mean that it's not good you know to take an obvious example the laws of football are obviously a human invention nobody would claim they are natural or eternal or coming from physics or whatever we invented the laws of football and still football is a wonderful thing it can bring a lot of joy a lot of interest a lot of good things to the lives of millions of people it's the most popular sport in in the world i'm not against playing football or having fierce loyalty to your football team just because it's uh actually exists only in the human imagination and it's the same with nations and nationalism yes we created them they are stories that exists only in our own minds they are not an objective physical or biological reality but it doesn't mean that they are not important and it doesn't mean that they are not at least potentially beneficial i think that nationalism is one of the best inventions of humankind at the core of nationalism is the idea that i should be loyal to complete strangers that i've never met in my life and that i should care about them care about them enough to take care of their welfare and education and health and so forth so i don't think that nationalism is rooted in the biological tendency of apes and humans to live in communities because apes chimpanzees gorillas and also ancient homo sapiens they lived in very very small bands in which everybody knew everybody else they were intimate communities the amazing thing about nationalism is that it enables you to care not about 50 individuals you actually know it enables you to care about 50 million individuals that you never met and you will never meet and nevertheless you are willing um to pay taxes so that somebody on the other side of the country would get a good health care and that's a wonderful thing nationalism can turn ugly just like football when the main thing becomes hating the others and not loving us well if you think that nationalism is about hating other people then that's a very negative turn but it doesn't have to be like that just as if you think that in football the main thing is to fight with the fans of the other teams then it goes in the wrong direction now i think that you can't have democracy at least in the world of today without a strong sense of nationalism because if you don't feel connected if you don't feel that you have a shared fate with the other people in your country there is absolutely no reason in the world to accept the verdict of democratic elections it makes sense only if you think that they care about you and you care about them if you think that your political rivals they may be stupid even but they are not evil they are not there to get you if that's the case then there is no democracy it can be dictatorship it can be civil war but no democracy now when i look at the world today one of the other things that strikes me about the rise of populists is that they are not nationalists they are not really patriotic at all if you think that patriotism is hating foreigners then yes they are great patriots but if you think that nationalism is loving the the other people in your country they are the opposite of patriots they are trying to break the nation on purpose into hostile tribes you see it with trump in the us with bolsonaro in brazil with netanyahu in israel so many places that they are tribal leaders not nationalist leaders the main project of the nation the main difficulty of the nation historically is not fighting against foreigners that's easy the difficult thing is to get 50 million people or in the case say of india more than a billion people with different languages and religions and social class to nevertheless feel connected that's the big project of nationalism and people like trump and bolsonaro and netanyahu they are working against this project not in favor of it i look at the us today and what i see is that americans today hate and fear one another much more than they hate or fear the russians or the chinese or anybody else on the planet you know 50 years ago democrats and republicans were both afraid that the russians are coming to impose to destroy our way of life now the democrats are afraid that the republicans are coming to destroy our way of life and the republicans have the same fear about the democrats and the nation is collapsing you know in some countries the collapse of the nation leads to just civil war syria iraq libya yemen there are many examples in the u.s in brazil in israel it's not civil war yet but you see that people hate their fellow citizens much more than they hate or fear anybody else and it's not an accident it's fueled deliberately by these populist leaders so i mean if you ask me what's the definition of populist that that's that's the king they divide their populists are people leaders who say the name the country is divided into two camps there are the real people my supporters and there are the enemies of the people all those on the other side of the political aisle they are not really part of the people they are enemies they are traitors and this runs contra to the nationalist project and this is also i think the one of the reasons that democracy is in trouble is collapsing and why is it happening all over the world i don't know i'm not sure but i would characterize the crisis we are seeing with populism it's not a resurgence of nationalism it's a collapse of nationalism at least if we understand nationalism in the sense of loving your compatriots and not hating foreigners yeah well i agree with a lot of that yuval i certainly think you make an important point that nationalism properly understood invokes a sense of community a fellow feeling of shared responsibility for one another as members of the national community a civic project and that civic project that sense of community the solidarity that holds it together is i agree it's under siege today and in that sense the authoritarian populists who inflame uh racial hatred and tribalism and uh are are not nationalists in the sense of building solidarity or a sense of community it's i i hope that we don't accept the idea that the only version of populism is this divisive authoritarian right-wing intolerant populism because populism more broadly conceived appeals to and seeks to amplify the the voices and aspirations of ordinary citizens against the powerful and while that that broad definition of populism has been seized and monopolized in just the ways you describe today it doesn't have to be that way and the reason i think it's important to remember this is that in order to revive a vigorous civic life and a progressive politics a more generous politics of the common good i think it is important to take on the concentration of power and also the the privileged positions of elites not only financial and economic and corporate elites who have gathered enormous amounts of power we're beginning to hear a little bit about the concentration of power represented by silicon valley and the tech companies and social media [Music] i think that a politics that was concerned with monopoly power for example in with the handful of giant tech companies that not only have economic power but enormous cultural power because they sit right at the heart of civic and cultural life not only economic life i think that a progressive politics a renewed progressive politics has to take on those forms of concentrated power and that kind of politics would be a kind of populist politics arraying the the the common good the interests of ordinary people against those who have basically shut off competition in important sectors of the economy with enormous social and cultural and political implications so perhaps i don't think we disagree about this i think that we need to reclaim populism for the the vision of a politics that would take on elites and concentrated power uh in the name of empowering ordinary citizens my worry is and this goes is back to the diagnosis that we were discussing earlier my worry is that part of what ill-equipped would be left populists or center-left parties generally from this mission is that they have sought to address the inequalities that we've seen not in a way that takes on the structural sources of those inequalities but instead by offering individual upward mobility through higher education and that's tied in with a kind of credentialist prejudice that almost invites working people who don't have university degrees it invites them to seek redress of their grievances elsewhere in dark places in ugly places and it empowers it opens the way to trump it empowers authoritarian populists but i don't think i don't hear a fundamental disagreement between us in this conversation on on what the democratic alternative would would be i want to ask you about we we've been talking about contemporary politics and about populism and democracy and the nation uh meritocracy i i'd like to talk about our respective enterprises a bit you're a historian i'm a political philosopher we're creatures of the academy you've all at least initially and yet now you you've written a graphic history you've turned sapiens into a graphic history with pictures now that's a that's a kind of departure from an academic project and i've been accused of trying to make a political philosophy accessible beyond the bounds of the academy how do you think about this project about the relation between the academy and everyday life uh who do you see as the audience of the the graph sapiens and graphic history i would say that maybe this is a populist science that this is uh uh at essence a populist project of going beyond or through this kind of meritocratic or academic divide that i think it's very dangerous on a number of levels to keep science confined to a small academic elite or to any kind of elite i think it's it's unjustified it it creates wrong impressions um i think the latest scientific findings in most areas should be accessible to everyone both as a project of enlightenment and also as a political project because more and more of the main political controversies of the 21st century revolve around scientific fields we saw it already with climate change that began as a scientific theory and was politicized we see it now with covet 19 when like almost everybody now has a degree in epidemiology or at least think they have a degree in epidemiology we'll see it with other other fields like artificial intelligence that they will become increasingly politicized and if you have this notion this technocratic notion that only epidemiologists know something about epidemics they should solve this matter by themselves only economists understand economics only climate scientists understand climate and only computer scientists understand artificial intelligence that's extremely dangerous both because yeah maybe they understand the subject but they don't bring a representative view of human interest into the debate and also because if you shut out most people from the conversation saying to them no that's too complicated for you to understand then that's the fertile space that's the vacuum which all kinds of conspiracy theories and this information is is that then feels think that most of these subjects need to be confined to a small number of people maybe some academic subjects really are so complicated that most people can't understand them like i don't know uh quantum mechanics i don't understand it i think most people don't understand it you need very high levels of mathematics to grasp it maybe this is an exception but economics and history and climate and diseases you should be able you can understand the basic facts of science without a degree but for that the people who are kind of keeping are the guardians of this knowledge they need to make an effort they need to make an effort to reach a broader audience and for that they need to sometimes change the way they speak or write when you talk with other professionals in your narrow field then you speak your professional jargon and in many cases you talk in numbers and statistics and models that most people don't understand even most academics outside your field don't understand them when i read a professional article paper in macroeconomics or in climate science i can't follow it i can't understand it but i think that the key ideas and insights which are important to have a public conversation about it they can make the effort to make it accessible and that's part of my project as a historian to translate the latest scientific findings and theories to a med human to a language that everybody can understand you don't need a a phd or a ba degree to to follow that and you know because most people think in stories then i focus on storytelling and in the new project the graphic novel i try to switch to a new medium of images which many people find easier to understand and easier to connect with than just words even if you write in a very accessible style still reading a 500 pages book of mostly just words with footnotes that's that's a tall order for many people so i now tried to translate this into the language of graphic novels and comics but without looking down at people without simplifying the ideas in many ways i think the graphic novel is even deeper than the original version of sapiens it's certainly not sapiens with illustrations on the side it's a completely new approach to how to tell science which might not be to the to the liking of some professors and academics but i think it doesn't sell science short there are actually a lot of new questions scientific questions that i had to engage with when creating this graphic novel together with danielle and david i couldn't do it myself i don't know how to draw so i teamed up with two artists to do it and it raised a lot of new scientific questions that previously i i simply ignored you know words can often be abstract you can talk in obstructions when you draw images you have to be concrete there is no such thing as almost no such thing as abstract images if i talk about um sapiens and neanderthals having sex and i write about it in words i can just write okay we know that 50 000 years ago some sapiens had sex with neanderthals and even produced babies together when when you draw that you have to decide what to draw is it a sapience man with any unbuttoned woman is it a sapience woman with any young little man maybe it's two men having gay sex 50 000 years ago sapiens and neanderthals you have to decide and similarly you have to decide what's their skin color what's their hair color and all these return you to the scientific research to look for answers so i think that making the effort to reach out to a broader audience is not undermining the deep values of science it's actually um serving it in a much better way than just confining the discussion to a few phd students or professors in in a closed room right right yeah well i think that's a very powerful ambition and i agree very much with what you've said and with what you're trying to do in this way to to open scientific and historical uh and philosophical discourse and findings to people who may not have degrees in those subjects but for whom those subjects are important what you've just now said about science evolving it brings to mind something that worries me about the way science is invoked in public discourse these days especially by those on the opposite side of the authoritarian populists we've been discussing by liberals by progressives by democrats small d democrats more and more we hear especially during the pandemic the failure of trump for example is he's not following the science i will be followed we should follow the science i'll be guided by the science i believe in science we've heard that this has become a slogan actually in politics in public discourse especially among progressives and liberals i believe in science they don't they are not following the science this worries me it worries me not because i don't think we should follow fouchy's public health advice we should it worries me because it's embracing precisely the technocratic orientation to public discourse that i think discredits the proper role of science in this case public health and medical advice in public discourse why has the wearing of masks become such a flash point of political controversy it's really become the centerpiece of the culture wars whether to wear a mask it's hard to explain this without noticing that science has become the invocation of science has become a cudgel a faith interesting the language of faith i believe in science by progressives to explain what's wrong with authoritarian populists who are not taking the pandemic seriously and what i think it misses is political responsibility there has to be a political argument and there has to be an attempt to deal with the anger and the grievances that lead a lot of people to say i'm not going to wear a mask despite what they tell me the real reason it's not a scientific reason it's not that they're scientifically illiterate it's that they mistrust the elites and the technocrats who've been governing them this goes back to what you were saying about the economists the economists discredited scientific expertise during the age i think of neoliberal globalization it was they who said do you agree yes and again as in previous cases we discussed the main culprits haven't paid the price yeah i mean economists have discredited science but nobody is attacking the economists they are mostly attacking the climate scientists the gender studies department they are made to uh pay the price for the sins of the economist the economists are still there telling everybody what to do right so i agree completely but i think we've got to diagnose the reason for this this resistance to science there is a familiar story that says the divisions that we see the depolarizations are rooted in divisions about facts we occupy different factual universes we follow different social media we read different newspapers from one another so we don't have a sense of shared facts and without sharing facts and getting the science right and agreeing on the science we will never overcome our political disagreements i think that has it backwards i think the reason we disagree about the facts and about science is that we have these deep political divisions and the only way to heal the polarization about separate factual universes is to deal with the underlying political problem you mentioned climate change yuval if the factual scientific explanation accounts for disagreements about climate change partisan disagreements one would expect that the more education people have the greater the tendency to converge on climate change whether it's human cause whether it's really a problem whether we should do something about it in fact it's just the opposite the partisan divide on climate change exists at all levels of education democrats think one thing republicans think another but the more education the greater the partisan divide on climate change and whether it's human caused and whether it's being exaggerated and the greater the scientific literacy is not only the surveys have looked not only at education levels but even the scientific literacy and knowledge the more science people know the great more likely they are to disagree on a partisan basis about climate change which supports the idea but tell me if you find this plausible that the way to heal the seemingly separate universes of fact in the climate change debate is not to say if only we could get those people to grasp the right facts it's to see that it's really about trust it's about authority it's about polit political deep political disagreements to ask what's the source of those disagreements how can we begin to address those how can we begin to restore some trust across social divisions then i think the problem about facts and science will become more pliable rather than the other way around what do you think about do you agree or do how do you view that i i i'm not completely sure because again it's a very american thing you don't see this in china you don't see this in many other countries around the world this kind of politization and polarization around climate change to the degree that you see it in in the us what i would say is that we are seeing increasing uh politization of more and more scientific disciplines what you say is is is mainly from the viewpoint of politicians who hope that the scientists would do the heavy lifting for them you know you have a politician who doesn't have a formula for how to overcome the political divide so he or she expects some kind of scientific deus ex machina okay let the scientists come and solve this political problem that i can't solve this won't work i mean i completely agree i don't think that scientists are good politicians i think that politics is again it's a profession on itself you can be the best scientist in the world and a terrible terrible politician right and actually it's almost guaranteed to be like that because science is about truth eventually whereas politics is about power and truth and power pull you in opposite directions i think that somebody tries to win an election in the us in israel in brazil and tells the public the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth has a hundred percent guarantee of losing the election politics is never just about the truth you need some ingredient of truth there but this is not the way that you win an election so i think that it's very problematic to entangle the scientific and the political projects together unfortunately as i said before uh i think it's it's it's a rising wave and it will just become worse and worse because more and more of the things that the forces that change the world are scientific when we again when we start with climate change we see it now is the epidemic it will be even worse with artificial intelligence with bioengineering and the scientists that most scientists they don't want to be involved in politics they want to sit in the laboratories just do their research write their papers and forget about the political implications of what they are doing but increasingly that will not be possible and how to deal with this increasing entanglement of politics and science um i'm not sure i completely agree with you that the naive belief that oh we just need to agree on the scientific facts it's not going to happen because as the scientific facts become more and more important in the political debate then the interests to twist them will will become bigger than ever people won't be able to consent to to con concede the scientific battle because that will decide to a large extent the political battle we've been having i guess running through our conversation yuval have been the themes of politics or politics and economics on the one hand and themes of science on the other and i suppose it's it's true that these themes have run through um all of our respective works and here's something that that strikes me and this may be a thread that emerges from both of our works but we may have different views about it i'd like to see what you think stepping back and looking at at a broader theme about science and politics these days if we think about human agency if we think about the aspiration of humans to exert mastery and control over our circumstances for us these days it seems that the most promising buoyant confident arena for the exercise of human mastery agency control consists in our faith and our growing power to engineer or to re-engineer nature including our own nature stupendous advancements it seems in the exercise of human nature exercise of human agency in exerting control and dominion over nature including our own and yet when we think about social life when we think about politics and economics we feel disempowered we feel at a loss social and economic and political arrangements seem to elude our mastery ability to exert mastery and control to transform our political circumstance the sense of impasse and impotence that most of us have when we look out upon the political world and political arrangements now this seems to me a paradoxical and maybe even a historic reversal because the way we organize our society in our economy after all these are the products of our design in the first place what social arrangements and political arrangements and economic arrangements we devise this is all a matter of of human ingenuity artifice imagination construction whereas nature science seemed to provide a distant horizon with respect to our ability to shape events to shape our circumstance historically traditionally but now it's as if that's reversed i think this reversal here's my hunch but tell me what you think is that this reversal actually is deeply disempowering it's a measure of our disempowerment it's a measure of the loss of human agency which should consist not in changing our nature to fit the social arrangements we've created but should consist in transforming our social and economic arrangements the better to fit the kind of creatures we are i think it was always harder to control humans than to control have mastery over animals and plants and the environment at least since then for thousands and thousands of years if you go back to the agricultural revolution 10 000 years ago humans have gained an amazing ability to control other animals and plants and the landscape they had much much less success in building in using the power the new powers of agriculture to build um happy just human society that was a miserable failure and you see that after the agricultural revolution humans are much more powerful but generally speaking i would say more miserable they have more miserable life because they don't know how to use their power wisely if you're a king or a priest then life is great in ancient egypt but if you're an ordinary farmer life is much worse than 20 000 years previously as a hunter-gatherer you work harder you eat worse you have more diseases you are under far worse social and political exploitation you go to the industrial revolution you see the same thing it was much easier to invent steam engines than to correctly understand what to do with them you have one failed experiment after another of how to create a flourishing peaceful just industrial society [Music] eventually i think we got it right relatively speaking but after several terrible failed experiments like uh soviet communism or nazi germany and and so forth so in this sense it's not i would say it's not a completely new phenomenon that as humans we find it easier to manipulate the outside world like nature than to manipulate in a good way uh human society and and the way that we ourselves behave the stakes are just getting higher and higher you know if we get it wrong this time maybe we don't get a second chance with agriculture we you had thousands of years to experiment with different kingdoms and empires and slave holding societies and whatnot and every time there was a disaster you could try again with industry the the the price was much higher but we managed to live through or to recuperate from the terrible experiments failed experiments of the 20 of the 20th century with the kind of powers we are now developing especially ai and bioengineering i don't think we have more than one chance if we get this one wrong this may very well be the end of of humankind in one way or the other and this is extremely troubling um and you know i still have some optimism in our ability to do it but i think that the danger of what you describe this discrepancy it's not a new danger but the the price of failure is much worse than ever before again i i do take some comfort in the thought that yes maybe people feel that they can't affect the social and political arrangements but actually they have a greater influence than ordinary peasants in the middle ages or the vast majority of the population in ancient egypt or in ancient china and similarly when you look at the at the outcomes then despite all the problems of our society we are still much better off than the average medieval kingdom or the average uh ancient empire so there is still cause for optimism but i agree with you that it's a it's a very frightening thought i know that we we need to um bring the conversation we need to wrap it up in a few minutes but not you all but here's here's um here's a small anecdote about what brought this worry to mind for me some years ago i was teaching a course on ethics and biotechnology discussing a lot of the issues that that you and i have subsequently discussed in after you wrote the book homo davis and we were discussing various aspects of the project of re-engineering human nature and my colleague a scientist and i taught this course and one day we invited james watson to come to the class and he was making the argument watson who had won the nobel prize for describing the structure of dna and he he was talking about cognitive enhancement through genetic alteration and he was very much in favor of it um and his argument was i asked him do you consider having a low iq to be a disease in need of a cure and he said yes of course because people with low iqs live very difficult lives they have trouble making a living and so on and a student raised her hand and asked well given that's the case why don't we try to reform the economy and societies so that people with low iqs don't live such hard lives and watson's reply was we're never going to be able to change society that's way too hard that's why we need to use genetic engineering to solve this problem and i found that a revealing but chilling answer not only because of its eugenic sensibility but also because it seemed to concede so readily the project of moral and political improvement as if to say that human agency is is impotent in the face of that project therefore better to repair ourselves the better to fit the world the social roles that are beyond human repair or reform that's the worry that that i think represents the fundamental concession to the to the moral and political disempowerment of humanity that's what motivated the question at least you are yeah i mean uh in in one way i can understand why he said it humans resist manipulation in a way that genes don't in a way that stones don't when you invent a new stone tool the stones don't get together to throat your plane but when you try to manipulate humans this is a system that reacts to your attempts to manipulate or to predict its actions so in this sense yes it's more difficult but at least i think it is just not true there are many successful attempts to better human society not through the invention of some new tools some new technology but by changing the values the stories the structure of the society itself you know one of the biggest achievements i think of humankind has been the drastic reduction of violence over the last few generations and even though it owes something to a technical invention the nuclear bomb to a large extent it's was done by changing human values in human society and you know we talked a lot during this conversation about the fail the failures of center-left parties and progressive parties but they also had enormous success and when it comes to racial inequality to gender inequality they really managed to improve things and not by inventing a new technology so this fixation that the answer to any problem we have is just to invent a new technology that's extremely dangerous first of all because it gives up so many other things that we can do and secondly because it ignores the main problem that okay you invent the technology but then the decision what to do with it is not in the hands of the tool it's in the hands of the same society so if you have done nothing to change the society and its values you just invented a new tool then if the if the society has evil values it's now just more powerful to to do its evil things you have done nothing you just made things worse um and i i hope that uh people will realize and especially the people who work so hard to develop the new technology the new tools that tools never until at least until the the rise of artificial intelligence tools don't tell you what to do with them so no matter which wonderful technology you invent you always have to change society alongside the tools again to change the values the core stories the structure and this can be done yeah it's difficult but it's feasible i i suppose that we could conclude by agreeing that even the smartest smart machines can't tell us how they should be used that i think is ultimately for us as democratic citizens which suggests a project not of manipulation but of education and of persuasion i've i've really enjoyed the conversation involved yeah me too i think that opens a completely new conversation we can have on on a different occasion of whether or not smart machines will be able to tell us what to do with them um but i would just say that maybe part of what is fueling the political crisis we are seeing around us is this deep sense that time is running out that if humans don't exercise their agency in the near future they will lose that agency i mean all previous technological inventions in human history they did not they empowered humanity but the current wave of technological inventions for the first time at least i think it really endangers human agency we see a shift in power from humans to algorithms and one possible explanation i don't know if it's true but one possible explanation for the political upheavals around the world is that a lot of people are sensing that this is kind of almost the last chance to exercise their agency but yes we would leave that to to another conversation so um thank you very much and thank you thanks everybody that spend the time and attention to to listen to us and i hope that they got something out of it thank you yuval really enjoyed it thank you bye-bye

Channel: Yuval Noah Harari

Views: 210,461

Rating: 4.8974705 out of 5

Keywords: Yuval Noah Harari, Michael Sandel, political philosophy, truth, innovation, democracy, liberalism, science, science accessibility

Id: _NbChMEoGFE

Length: 84min 0sec (5040 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021