Yuval Noah Harari's new book to cover global warming, God and nationalism

Faced with a world stuck in “nostalgic fantasies about going back to the past”, where politicians are “no longer capable of producing meaningful visions for the future”, Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari is turning to the present in a new book announced on Thursday.

Random House imprint Jonathan Cape acquired Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, as excitement built around the title ahead of next week’s Frankfurt book fair. It is due to be published next August. Harari said: “If Sapiens was about the past, and [follow-up] Homo Deus was about the future and distant future of humankind, the new book is about the present, and what we need to do to prepare ourselves for the coming revolution of the 21st century.”

Jonathan Cape said the title would examine “some of the world’s most urgent issues, including terrorism, fake news and immigration”, as well as looking at more individual concerns such as resilience, humility and meditation. He will, said the publisher, “help us to grapple with a world that is increasingly hard to comprehend, encouraging us to focus our minds on the essential questions we should be asking ourselves today”.

Harari said: “A good way of putting it is, ‘What should we teach children today to prepare them for the world of the 21st century?’

“We have no way of knowing what kind of world they will inhabit, when they will be in their 30s or 60s. But it’s something we should be thinking about very carefully.”

The book tackles “the phenomenon of the rise of Donald Trump, and what it means in the greater context of the crisis of liberal democracy”. It will look at the events of the last 30 years and, specifically, “the 1990s, with all the talk about the end of history and the conviction that liberal democracy had won the ideological war, and how it would eventually spread and the entire world would come to look like Denmark or something”.

“Looking back, it sounds extremely naive,” Harari said. “On the one hand the big question is what went wrong and on the other the big question is, ‘OK, this didn’t work out very well, so what next? What’s going to replace this vision for the world as Denmark?

“What’s happening now, not just with Trump but with many other political crises especially in the western world, is that the political system is no longer capable of producing meaningful visions for the future, so you see nostalgic fantasies about going back to the past,” he says. “This definitely is not going to work, because nostalgic fantasies by their very nature don’t provide us with answers to the real questions we are facing. It’s kind of a transitory phase until somebody manages to come up with a new meaningful vision for the future. So people hold on to these fantasies.”

Harari warned that the “meaningful vision for the future” may well “not necessarily be a very nice vision”, referring to past visions such as facism and communism.

The historian, who lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, captured imaginations with his “brief history of humankind”, Sapiens, which charted the human story from our origins as apes. The book, which has fans from Barack Obama to Bill Gates, has sold 1.2m copies, and is published in 46 countries and 45 languages.

Homo Deus, explored humanity’s future, arguing that our pursuit of dreams such as artificial life could render many human beings superfluous. It has sold more than 500,000 copies around the world. The titles currently hold the No 1 and No 2 spots in the non-fiction paperback bestseller lists.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century will also tackle questions including “whether or not God is back, and whether nationalism can help solve problems like global warming,” Harari said.

Religion, he said, was still extremely relevant. “Technology doesn’t make religion less relevant, it just poses new questions. … “If you are an engineer in Silicon Valley and you think you’re shaping the future of humankind, then you are right to some extent – your inventions are changing the agenda of everybody – but you’re wrong if you think you’re going to be the person who will decide what to do with your invention. It could very well be some ayatollah or some pope or some ideologue who would decide what to do.”

Jonathan Cape publisher Michal Shavit said the author has a “unique ability to look at where we have come from and where we are going”. “Few writers of non-fiction have captured the imagination of millions of people in quite the astonishing way Yuval Noah Harari has managed, and in such a short space of time.”

Harari admitted that there has been “a lot of luck” involved in his success and that publishers weren’t initially interested in his book Sapiens. “The reason Sapiens became so successful is that it offers a very broad picture of history, of the world,” he said. “We are now living in an age of information explosion … the last thing people need is more information. What they really need is somebody to arrange all of the bits of information into a meaningful picture – and this is what I try to do.”