Yuval Noah Harari: Why humanity faces its most critical decade yet

Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and social philosopher whose books have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, is often dubbed an Eeyore by peers; a man for whom the glass of the future is always half empty. 

Yet on Covid’s effect on humanity, the latter being the central theme of his bestsellers Sapiens and Homo Deus – he is surprisingly upbeat. “Humans have managed to withstand much worse epidemics in the past”, he points out to me over the phone, bullish that the pandemic won’t have long-term effects on our basic human instincts. 

Yes, 18 months of coronavirus have made us fearful, isolated, dislocated and uncertain – a study published earlier this month in The Lancet estimates that global cases of depression and anxiety have risen by more than a quarter during the pandemic – but we shouldn’t write off our desire to rebuild connections just yet. When this is over, he believes, “we will still be social animals. We will still love contact. We will still come to help friends and relatives.” And, more curtly, “If AIDS didn’t kill sex, Covid won’t kill hugging [and] kissing.”

All of this is more sanguine than I might have expected from a man who once described his greatest fear as that “we will destroy our humanity without even realising what we’ve lost.” Perhaps it’s down to the fact Harari hasn’t had too arduous a pandemic. Living in one of the world’s vaccine capitals and finding, like many professionals, that the vast majority of his work can be done remotely, the 45-year-old “like[s] to read books and walk by myself in the woods, so some quiet time at home is fine with me.” 

His annual 60-day silent meditation retreat might have been cancelled due to lockdown, but his workload has otherwise continued at pace: this week sees the release of the second volume of the graphic novel version of Sapiens, alongside the internet broadcast of an interview, Adapting to Change in an Accelerating World, for Cambridge Judge Business School.

In that talk, recorded earlier this month, he acknowledges that the pandemic – and the world before it – has become increasingly divided. Much of that is down to the vitriol and tribalism laid plain on social media, platforms he believes can democratise fear and harassment. But there are positives, points out Harari, who has more than 850,000 followers across Twitter and Instagram. “Social media has done a lot of good. Every time a new technology comes along and gives more people a voice, the first thing that happens is chaos. The old consensus and rules no longer apply. It’s not necessarily bad. But when it happens we need to create new rules and a new consensus, which is difficult as we need to take into account a lot more voices than before.”

Indeed it is not change, but the pace of it, that is of greatest concern, he explains. It is now “happening so fast that we are no longer able to really predict anything more than 10 or 20 years in advance.” Historically speaking, “the one thing which hasn’t changed is humanity itself. In terms of anatomy and emotions, we are still basically the same animals we were in the Stone Age.” But biotechnology – the ability to modify one’s body – may disrupt that too; in 100 years, we could be unrecognisable. That’s why the trans debate “draws such extreme emotional reactions,” he thinks – because “it’s seen as a vanguard of the future, a harbinger of transhumanism.” Transhumanism involves, among other things, the use of technology not just to enhance and elongate human life but to merge man and machine, producing hybrids with physical and mental capabilities way beyond our own. “This will be the change of the coming century: in humans themselves.”

Harari, a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who lives near Tel Aviv with his husband, Itzik, described the coronavirus epidemic at its outset as “a major test of citizenship”. He is a big believer in global co-operation – but in nationalism, too. “Some people imagine that nationalism is about hating foreigners, but that’s a complete misunderstanding,” he says. “Nationalism is about loving your compatriots and taking care of them, and there are many situations in which as a good patriot you need to co-operate with foreigners.” The vaccine is one such example: the “patriotic” option might have been for each nation to wait until a homegrown jab was ready, but “that wouldn’t be nationalism: that would be lunacy. So I don’t think there’s any contradiction between nationalism and globalism.”

The Pfizer jab – an American corporation whose vaccine was developed by a German company founded by Turkish immigrants – could hardly be a better example of global co-operation, he says. But, almost two years since the beginning of the crisis, “we still don’t have a global plan of action. Even when you take countries like the UK or Israel, which have vaccinated most of their populations: so long as the virus continues to spread in other countries it will mutate again, and maybe the next mutation will create a variant which overcomes the vaccine we have and which is more deadly. Nobody can feel safe until we overcome this thing as a species on a global level.”

While the Government has oft-repeated its desire to ‘build back better’, recovery from the pandemic “will vastly increase the inequality” vaccination rates have laid bare, Harari believes. Where some economists predict a U-shaped curve (with the recovery as fast and steep as the downturn has been) and others prefer an L-shaped model (fast downturn, slow recovery), “for me it will be K-shaped,” he says. “Some countries, some sectors of the economy, some people are doing fantastically. The wealth of the big tech companies has skyrocketed,” he adds by way of explaining the upper branch of the ‘K.’ For poorer communities on the lower slant, there could be “complete collapse. It’s not like there’s a single outcome for the whole of humankind. The biggest danger is different futures for different parts of humanity.”

The knock-on effects of this wider malaise remain to be seen: “it’s still too early to tell how people will react after the pandemic is over. It could make people realise how interdependent we are, leading to better co-operation on other problems such as climate change, or it could go the other way towards hypernationalism.” Either way, we are the ones with the power to change things, he thinks. “We should focus on the kind of choices we want to make rather than on a deterministic outcome. It’s not too late to create a very good world. This is the critical decade, and it’s a decade of choice.”

Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 2 by Yuval Noah Harari is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99. Visit books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514