My Book Pick: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Aichi Insurance Physicians’ Newspaper
January 15, 2020
Yuval Noah Harari
Vintage
August 22, 2019
Following Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, this book is a noteworthy work that offers a panoramic examination of the present state of humanity, encompassing politics, religion, economics, and military affairs.
The book is structured as follows:
Introduction
Part I: The Technological Challenge
Disillusionment
Work
Liberty
Equality
Part II: The Political Challenge
5. Community
6. Civilization
7. Nationalism
8. Religion
9. Immigration
Part III: Despair and Hope
10. Terrorism
11. War
12. Humility
13. God
14. Secularism
Part IV: Truth
15. Ignorance
16. Justice
17. Post-Truth
18. Science Fiction
Part V: Resilience
19. Education
20. Meaning
21. Meditation
Although the book is more than 400 pages long, it is easy to read because of Harari's conversational style. His discussion of Japan, the island nation in the Far East, as a “Shinto state that modernized at breathtaking speed while simultaneously cultivating fervent loyalty to the nation” is an outstanding insight that gets to the heart of Japan's 150-year history of modernization since the Meiji Restoration.
His stance of discussing these issues freely, liberated from the constraints of every form of power, is exhilarating and refreshing.
I cannot help but agree with his observation: “Even though we are now living in an age of global ecology, economics, and science, we are still stuck at the level of national politics.”
His analysis of the real world, presented under the subtitle Twenty-One Lessons for the Twenty-First Century, is remarkably original. It is certainly a thought-provoking book well worth reading.
