Sapiens and Pandemic: A Special Discussion with Yuval Noah Harari - NHK WORLD-JAPAN

[Applause] hello [Applause] today we've come to an international school in karuizawa where a special one-time only class is about to begin the instructor is the author of a best-selling book that took the world by storm [Music] yuval noah harari a historian who was raised in israel and got a phd from the university of oxford in britain [Music] his book sapiens a brief history of humankind has been translated into 60 languages and has sold over 16 million copies worldwide in it harari surveys 2.5 million years of human history to assess where we are today [Music] and now amid the current pandemic harare's way of looking at the world is gaining renewed attention we are entering a time when history is accelerating in the next two three months we will conduct we are conducting enormous social and political experiments that will completely change the world harare believes it's more important than ever for young people to understand the lessons of human history he has even created a graphic adaptation of sapiens he was eager to get into a dialogue with these students in japan as a historian i'm aware that we should never underestimate human stupidity it's one of the most powerful forces in history again and again people are faced with a choice and they choose the wrong thing today we sit down with yuval noah harari as he shares lessons for the future hello nice to meet you nice to meet you thank you so very much for agreeing to be interviewed today it's my pleasure i hope i could have been with you in person actually had plans to come to japan maybe for the olympics but it's not happening i even have family in japan my cousin lives in okinawa he is married to a japanese woman so kind of i have japanese family i wanted to visit them and we have the olympic games rearranged for you so that you can visit us next year hopefully and we have um students from diverse backgrounds and they have studied your graphic book sapiens and so obviously very excited to see you in person you said then that the coveted 19 will accelerate change it certainly has but we are not entirely sure where this change will take us to and and so today we are joined by a group of eight students from isaac to gauge the current situation we have found ourselves in and to think of what future we want to to bring about in harare's best-selling sapiens the 2.5 million year history of humankind is divided into three stages the cognitive revolution the agricultural revolution and the scientific revolution the first of these the cognitive revolution took place about 70 000 years ago [Music] humankind that is homo sapiens acquired the ability to create fictional stories out of the imagination and share those stories with others [Music] they organized themselves into communities based on these shared fictions harare writes that this is how homo sapiens came to conquer the world a sapiens can say look up there there's a god above the clouds and he'll punish you if you don't do as i say and if you all believe in that story then you'll all follow the same laws and rules so you'll be able to cooperate effectively even if you don't know each other harare believes that this dynamic offers valuable insights into how humanity can survive a pandemic [Music] i mean we control the world because we can cooperate in larger numbers than any other animal certainly than any other mammal individually we like to think about ourselves as very you know smart and powerful and unique but individually as just one person we are not stronger than a chimpanzee or an elephant or even a pig our big advantage that a million chimpanzees or even a thousand chimpanzees cannot cooperate whereas a million people even a billion people can cooperate you can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that if you do that after you die you'll go to chimpanzee heaven and you will receive lots and lots of bananas after you die no chimpanzee will ever believe that but humans believe such stories so we can cooperate and all our big achievements as a species whether it's building the pyramids or flying to the moon they are based on large-scale cooperation and when a million people believe in the same story they can all follow the same rules and cooperate even if they don't know each other personally that's something that only we can do uh to take other examples if you think about say the economic system money is also just a story we created and we believe no other animal on earth uses money or knows it exists 90 something percent of the money in the world it's just data in computers now in the covet crisis governments have been creating trillions really trillions of dollars in euros and yens out of nothing again money is just a story it has no real value you know you take a yen bill or a dollar bill you can't eat it you can't drink it and today actually they don't even bother to print most of the money they don't even bother to print banknotes somebody just goes into the computer as is a zero somewhere and poof hocus pocus a trillion dollar is created from nothing and the amazing thing is that not only americans but people all over the world are willing to believe that you know even people who are the political opponents of the united states even people like i don't know islamic jihadist who hate the united states they are still willing to use united states dollars to finance their activities so this is a really amazing thing that all the people in the world are agreeing on at least some stories i hope that we will have even better stories to unite us in the future because we are facing really tremendous challenges there are questions many questions regarding the the fiction i i think i have questions from mirimo when i was reading your book i found the idea of fiction and you know stories as something very extraordinary and i would be honest because it really challenged my thoughts and my beliefs i would like to talk about the background i come from i come from a very religious background um islam is a predominant religion in my country and reading about um about your thoughts on you know viewing religion as a fiction i really it was really something i've never thought about and having that conversation with my parents was also very challenging because they they are very you know they're strong believers and they're like what do you mean that's a fiction are you trying to say that uh you know that's a lie or like whatever we believe in you know the the almighty god that is out there and you know like the story of all our prophets and everything do i try to say that's a fiction yes you know it's it's so hard to talk to some people because they think you know it's the traditions are everything and you know and your um your thoughts about this being a fiction that made me think and i wanted to ask you this question like to what extent should like religious people believe the fact that um or or knowing the fact that um religion is a fiction can lead to more inclusiveness uh you know equality and peace a first question which uh maybe the most important and complicated in this respect about religion i think what we need to realize is that even religious people first of all they would admit that all religious in the world except one are fictions jews have no problems saying that islam is a fiction but journalism no no that's the truth and muslims would say hinduism is a fiction you know you have a billion hindus and they all believe in some nonsense story that somebody invented but our religion this is the truth and everybody says by interpretation is correct the other interpretation oh this is just a story that some human being invented but ultimately it should be clear that you know even if you even if we believe in god every and this is something i think that even pious muslims will agree humans don't really understand god they all the time try to understand god with their own limited human brain and they fail they all the time come up with all kinds of stories and fictions oh god he's like this old man with a big beard who sits above the clouds and obviously this is just a human fiction religion is about answers it's this is the story this is the answer you must accept it and that's it now i'm not a very religious person but i think of myself as a spiritual person spirituality is when you have a big question like who am i what is the meaning of life what is good and what is evil spirituality is about questions religion is about answers and i think that in every religion islam judaism buddhism there is a spiritual essence that we need to connect to that to really connect to the spiritual essence i think one of our friends here has a question related to that in the context of the world we live today so um um so one of the questions i've had after reading your book was actually if fiction would in the future would unite us or divide us especially that we have pandemic and a lot of social problems nowadays that sometimes a fiction can actually cause some conflicts due to some certain beliefs or certain ideologies that really depends on us i mean we can tell different kinds of stories some stories are divisive some stories are united uniting them so i'm not against i'm not saying stories are bad they are tools if you think about a knife you can use a knife to murder somebody a surgeon in a hospital can use the same knife in order to save somebody's life operate and i don't know remove some cancerous humor and save the person's life and if you're a chef in a restaurant you can use the same knife to make a delicious meal the knife doesn't care it's just a tool it's the same with stories stories are tools it's up to us to use them correctly if we use them right they are the most powerful tools we have and they can unite us uh in in good causes whether it's to build hospitals or to fight climate change but we have to be careful not to use these tools for bad like to start wars and persecutions and things like that there is always choice we can choose how to react to the crisis again we can choose to react by generating hatred blaming the epidemic on foreigners the minorities becoming more isolated more competitive all we can react by generating compassion and a spirit of togetherness and sharing resources sharing information the ultimate yardstick i would say is is suffering and happiness does the story create more suffering or does the story help us alleviate suffering liberate ourselves and others from suffering that's the that's the big out stick when i was in elementary school i felt that teachers were trying to grow a good kiss by making them conform the norms and expectations and i was the one who didn't fit the fiction and i was the one who did not want to fake the fiction how can we make a new one in a way that use differences as a strength and how can we move forward again it's crucial to realize these stories were created by imperfect human beings not by some all-powerful all-knowing gods for instance when i was a teenager i didn't recognize the fir the fact that i was gay partly because i grew up in a very homophobic society in israel in the 1980s was an extremely homophobic society then one of the prevailing stories the religious story was that god hates gay people that if i'm a boy and i have a boyfriend i'll go to hell god is becomes angry about it and the story was this is not something that humans invented this came from god so how can you argue with that but over time as i grew up and as partly i read history i understood no this story was invented by human beings even if there is a god down above the clouds why would a good god punish anybody for love if two men or two women love each other and they don't harm anybody what's wrong with that so this is just a story that some rabbis or priests invented 2 000 years ago 2500 years ago and it's not an absolute truth and once you realize it then even religious people can start changing their mind that can give room to different people and to different communities and different tendencies not everybody have to be exactly the same [Music] this special dialogue would not have been possible without the corporation of uwc isaac japan it is an international high school with students from 84 countries and it empowers young minds to make a positive impact on the world today is what we're going to be talking about is the u.n through its robust financial assistance program it brings together excellent students from very different socioeconomic backgrounds and regions of the world [Music] for this discussion the students thought of questions from a cross-cultural perspective hello my name is angela i'm from afghanistan and currently studying grade 12 as uwc is japan regarding the environment that i grew up in i should say that growing up as a girl within a western country like afghanistan is not easy if there's lots of uncertainties in your life you're not sure whether you're going to be able to go to school or not you're not sure whether you're going to be able to see your family and friends or not because suicide addicts could happen anytime anywhere what i would like to ask professor hirari is that is the world responsible for helping developing countries when a global issue is happening or to what extent are they responsible as a teenager coming from a developing country i'm really worried about future and how it may look like hi there my name's lydia i'm 17 years old and from canada i grew up in a small town in rural ontario about a two hours drive from toronto when i was young my town was almost entirely white and although it's still predominantly white there are a lot more cultures and backgrounds and ethnicities represented in my small town when i get the chance to talk to yuval noah harari i want to talk to him about how kovid is impacting the way that we interact with each other on an individual all the way to a global scale other participants in the discussion include mirimo from tajikistan a muslim majority nation in central asia [Music] jay an american with roots in india and huaqin who grew up near a mountainous region of bolivia in south america we also have kai yuina and yuka all from japan this after the cognitive revolution the next turning point for humanity came roughly 12 000 years ago the agricultural revolution homo sapiens succeeded at cultivating grain and began acquiring property this led to the establishment of hierarchies the division of people into rulers and the ruled [Music] harare believes this was the beginning of the kinds of social stratification and inequality that we continue to see today [Music] um if that was the starting point for um what we now know as like haves and have-nots arguments if that was about um the grossly disproportional distribution of wealth being brought about do you think that the the disparity and inequity that we are seeing today um the key to solving that can be found in that agricultural revolution 12 000 years ago well the agricultural revolution was really all about control that's the main thing before agriculture humans hunted animals humans gathered plants but they did not try to control the lives of these animals and plants you go to the savannah and you hunt a zebra but you don't tell the zebra where to go and what to eat and who to have sex with once you have agriculture this is what farmers do all day they control the lives of the other animals and plants they lock them in inside cages and pens they supervise what they eat and don't eat they decide which male have sex with which were a female and at the same time that humans began to control other animals you know and it's the first time it happened in really in the evolution of life on earth life has existed animals have existed for hundreds of millions of years and you never saw anything like it in the agricultural revolution this idea comes hey living beings can be my property they belong to me and once this idea comes it starts expanding it's hey if i can own cows and i can own chickens why can't i own humans and you see that slavery appears at the same time as the agricultural revolution and you see the rise of elites kings and priests that control masses of people at the same time you also see a shift in gender relations that men have this idea hey if i can own a cows and i can own slaves why can't i own women also so and you see this idea that the wife is the property of the husband it appears at about the same time can that concept like hierarchy be justified well humans have been trying to justify it for ever since the agricultural revolution they again and again come up with all kinds of stories that explain why humans it's oh it's fair it's okay that humans should own animals and it's okay that kings should own slaves and it's okay that men should own women and women should obey them and so forth you have so many stories that people invented to explain that but of course these are just our own imagination it's not it's not biological laws that make homo sapiens uh superior to cows it's just a story we invented so um in answer to your question is it justified i think that no from scientific perspective i don't think that kings are really superior to the peasants or to the slaves they they owned but humans believed such stories for thousands of years and unfortunately there are even some societies today that still believe some kind of version of this story that one group of people is superior to another or one gender is superior to another uh and i think um nukovit 19 not only accelerated change it has also exposed in a rather grotesque way no disparity and discrimination that exists in our society for example in blm we see intense anger but also people are trying to jointly raise voices across the world and and also cross-generational in may 2020 as the pandemic raged the world saw massive protests for racial justice under the banner of black lives matter at the u.s open tennis star naomi osaka wore a series of masks bearing the names of unjustly killed black americans including george floyd seven masks for the seven rounds of the tournament a powerful act of protest the black lives matter movement marches on so understandably there is quite a bit of anger from myself as an individual because it seems like something that should have been that shouldn't even have come up we have instances such as george floyd and things that should never have happened and we have to fight as a generation to ensure they don't happen again um but we have so much hatred and so much conflict has arisen from these fictions so how will kovid change the ways that we interact with other ethnicities well as i said before um i can't predict what the impact will be because it depends on the decisions that all of us take in the coming weeks and months and years i mean the wise thing i would say of course is to unite our biggest advantage as human beings over the virus is our ability to cooperate if we don't use it we are uh really giving up our our most powerful force the ability to cooperate you know to to pull information and insights and knowledge from china and canada and the us and brazil together to solve it faster but i don't know what people will actually do as a historian i'm aware that we should never underestimate human stupidity it's one of the most powerful forces in history again and again people are faced with a choice and they choose the wrong thing uh it's happened so many times before in history unfortunately it can happen again i would just add also with regard to blm that you know the thing about racism is racism really makes you not just cruel it also makes you stupid it also makes you weak because um if you think that your group is superior that only the things that your group your race your nation your religion that's the only good thing in the world all other people they are far lower than us we shouldn't read their books we shouldn't use their insights then you're making yourself deliberately weaker and more stupid and even races if you go back 30 40 000 years ago there aren't any blacks and whites even these things are a later development or a later invention you know you go down to the biological level all of us are not even pure homo sapiens in the dna of every person today on earth there are genes from other human species like neanderthals we now have quite conclusive evidence that something like 40 50 000 years ago our sapiens ancestors coming out from africa as they spread to different parts of the world they interbred with other human species like like neanderthals and like homo denisova so all these ideas about racial purity and uh sticking only with our own tradition and things like that it it makes almost no sense at all and if i go on to yuka do you have any follow-up questions or any clarifications you want from professor harari and personally i feel like extreme nationalism leaves the world collection so if you believe in like diversity um should do like should we um value those factions as well that should be allowed those fiction even though it's extreme two very good questions people are complex beings we belong to a lot of groups at the same time we should we have a lot of different relationships you can be loyal to your family to your business to your profession to your nation to humankind to truth to beauty all at the same time uh nationalism religion um ideology they they can all be okay provided they don't demand a hundred percent of our loyalty the problem usually starts when some movement comes along and says no you are loyal to only one thing let's say to your nation if your nation requires that you kill millions of people kill millions of people you have no no moral duties to anything but your nation if your nation requires that you lie then lie if your nation requires that you i don't know betray beauty like you create out only to glorify the nation we don't care about any other autistic values this kind of thing this is fascism the difference between fascism and nationalism is that nationalism says yes you need to be loyal to your nation but there are other things in your life we understand that fascism says no there is only the nation there is nothing else and if we avoid these extremes and we realize yes reality is complicated we uh have different relationships we need to have a complex story then that's the way towards finding some workable compromise but we need to remember that our rivals are not our enemies once you begin seeing your political rivals as enemies and as traitors then this is the road leading eventually to civil war and to violence because you you cannot you ultimately you will not accept the democratic verdict in a competition between enemies you cannot end a war a real war with a democratic election like i don't know the conflict in the middle east okay you take all the israelis and all the arabs and you just vote what should be done no why should i accept the opinions of people who hate me who are my enemies so this is when order completely collapses and we need if if we want to avoid this we need to work hard to find the the common points about which we still agree the agricultural revolution led to the development of hierarchies in human society then in the 16th century the scientific revolution gave humanity the power to fundamentally alter the natural world [Music] harare lays out how advances in science and technology have allowed us to control the planet but is this control exerted by homo sapiens ultimately an act of hubris in the sapiens graphic adaptation humankind is shown to have destroyed ecosystem after ecosystem harare says we are serial killers and should be put on trial directly or indirectly they killed off hundreds of species of birds insects snails and other local inhabitants [Music] we have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the history of biology we're all guilty and it's time we realized that [Music] as you say if sapiens are the intercontinental syria serial killers um can they be brought to to justice is there a remedy we need to be first of all aware of our immense power and therefore of our responsibility we now are basically compared to the other animals on the planet we are now gods we have divine powers you may not feel like gods but compared to the other animals whether it's the wild animals i don't know the dolphins in the ocean or the chimpanzees in the african savannah or certainly compared to the domesticated animals the cows the chickens in our farms we are gods we completely control their future they exist only because we allow them to exist if tomorrow morning we wanted to destroy to kill all the lions in the world it would take us like two days like if somebody gives the order kill all the lions on planet earth two days there are no longer any lions left very easy and we can even start you know manipulating their bodies um some especially domesticated animals they're completely different from their wild ancestors we have reshaped their body with more and more sophisticated methods of bioengineering so in and we need to acknowledge that we have these divine powers uh because so far we have been very irresponsible gods ecological degradation the destruction that the the undermining of the ecological system it's happening all around us it's not some possible future scenarios entire habitats are being destroyed species are disappearing in an alarming rate and the very foundations of human civilization is now in danger and we don't have a lot of time um to deal with that you know it's not about a process of thousands of years it's within a few decades within our lifetime certainly within your lifetime the people of your generation we might pass a tipping point beyond which it will be maybe impossible to stop the process of ecological collapse i guess some humans will somehow survive but billions of people might suffer tremendously might even lose their lives alongside countless animals and plants if we don't get our act together fast enough follow-up question yes uh so my question is that um when i was reading the book i found this idea of like our species being extinct in by 2100 interesting at the same time alarming right i mean i think it's difficult for me as a human being to imagine that by probably the end of my lifetime whether i'll be gone or all holy species will be gone so i wanted to ask you um why why why this claim okay so the key thing is that it's not necessarily an extinction it's the disappearance of homo sapiens uh we didn't say a century or two you know what it's a very very rough estimate but it can happen in two radically different ways one option is that it is an extinction event and that we destroy our species completely by some combination uh an equal and accelerating ecological crisis which leads also to a political crisis and ends in a nuclear destruction or the use of some even worse new weapons coming out of the laboratories of bioengineering and machine learning in the coming decades so that's one scenario the violent and complete destruction of our species it is possible and ever since the bombs were dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki in 1945 we knew that for the first time in history we can destroy ourselves so far it didn't happen and i think it's the less likely scenario i don't i think there is some chance but i don't think it's very big that will completely destroy ourselves the more likely scenario is that we will use the new technologies to upgrade ourselves into something which is more different from us then we are different from neanderthals or from chimpanzees you know species disappear not just by being violently exterminated but also by evolving into something else in 2018 a laboratory in china announced the birth of gene-edited babies it had taken embryos and rewritten some of their genetic code this claim remains unconfirmed but controversy erupted about the ethics of humans performing genetic engineering on other humans a million years ago there are different human species on earth they are no longer here because they evolved into something else so this is likely to happen to us also but on a much much faster time scale evolution by natural selection takes hundreds of thousands of years but as we shift to evolution by intelligent design it can happen within a few decades with the powers of artificial intelligence and bioengineering by 2100 or 2200 within a century or two as i said we are likely to have the power to re-engineer our bodies and our minds to such an extent that we or our descendants will be a completely different kind of being and this i think is the more likely scenario natural selection is increasingly replaced by intelligent design as the basic principle of how life evolves intelligent design not of some god above the clouds but our intelligent design increasingly becomes the engine the motor of evolution that's a very different process to design a life intentionally than to have it evolved by natural selection this would really be the biggest revolution in the history of life for four billion years and it might happen in our lifetime so this is really kind of mind-blowing but the key thing to realize is that we are now acquiring the technology to re-engineer the body and the brain and the mind and this is such a powerful technology i find it hard to believe that people will not use it that people will have the power to re-engineer bodies and brains and minds but they will refrain from using it and people will continue looking and thinking like us one very important one is that we are still animals we said earlier that we are gods and that's true in terms of our power but at the same time we are still also animals we are still part of the ecological system and a virus that starts with a bat or some other wild animal can within months you know shake our entire global civilization so we need to keep both perspectives at the same time yes in terms of power we outline gods and we should be very responsible but we are also animals so we are completely tied to the rest of the ecological system we cannot expect to disrupt and destroy the ecological system and stay safe and protected from the shock waves just just one additional question the last question comes from angela oh yes from the background that i come from like a war-torn country where we have been suffered from civil wars for like decades do you think well and then the like pandemic happened i noticed that we were saying that yeah we are all in this together but actually the developing countries are suffering the most so it made me like worried about the future what i want to ask is that do you think the world is responsible for developing countries or to help developing countries when a climate change like when a global issue is happening or is it only that single state who should deal with it but it's a good question whether it's covered or whether it's climate change we need a global unity around it we need a global safety net to protect the weakest members of society and the weakest members of humankind the developing nations the poorer nations they will not be able to deal with it by themselves whether will actually have this kind of global unity i don't know it's up to all of us and i really hope that you as especially as members of the younger generation that you will take up this responsibility to focus on the global challenges that face our species and to make sure that nobody is left behind as i said that um you know nobody knows where we are heading it's the first time in history that we don't have any idea how the job market would look like in 20 or 30 years how society would look like how politics would look like so you know it's a very difficult time to be a young person because you cannot rely on the wisdom of the elders the elders just don't know we really don't know how the world would look like in 2050. we are not kind of trying to dodge the issue or no when you grow up you understand no we really don't know so it's a it's a great difficulty and it's a tremendous responsibility and uh in this you know we need your help it's not kind of some wisdom of the ages that the older people will now pass on to you it's a common project i hope that the older people and the younger people together will combine their viewpoints their skills their wisdom to solve the common problems of humanity so that's a big load heavy load of homework from professor harari today so thank you very much professor harari for making the time to to answer all the questions please continue to stay safe and healthy wherever you are and please remember that the conversation we had with you today will stay with us as we live through this pandemic let's give the class a round thank you thank you you

Channel: NHK WORLD-JAPAN

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Length: 49min 5sec (2945 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021