Future Gazing with Harari

Yuval Noah Harari (2018), 21 lessons for the 21^st century,  

Jonathan Cape, pp. 352

Yuval Noah Harari is an Oxford-educated historian to watch out for! Through his three books Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 lessons for the 21^st century, Harari makes sense of what this century is all about, with historical and contemporary evidence on the biggest forces sweeping our times. The merging of biotech with infotech, the global dimensions of our personal lives and inequality resulting from institutional complicity are the scenarios he examines the most through his work. He speaks of our times as one in which ‘the old stories have collapsed and new stories have not taken over’ and his attempt is to bring light to this liminal space.

The limits of the liberal story

At the heart of his argument is the perceived limit of the liberal story that dominated the political and economic ideologies of the twentieth century. As we shift authority from humans to algorithms, we are shifting the battle from one against exploitation to that against irrelevance. In this battle, ideas about ‘free will’ and freedom go for a toss and the common enemy becomes flawlessly rational and empirical evidence more compelling. An example is the nature of discrimination that we have historically fought (group prejudice that is based on social attitudes against minority groups which is malleable) to one that we might fight against algorithms (personal prejudice based on empirical evidence of incompetence that is not easily mutable). How is the protection and rights of the majority of us to be conceived in this unfolding age? And who is to lead us in thoughts and value models in the age of flux? Harari ominously warns that historically corporations were never ideal vehicles to launch social and political revolutions because of their focus on wealth maximization. The pre-eminence of corporate solutions to human problems has to be evaluated afresh and the resurgence of public-funded institutions such as universities is the need of the hour.  

The secular ideal

The resurrection of extreme ideologies such as the rise of the religious right and the extreme left is to be seen in this context. The path that Harari pursues is re-examining our commitment to what he refers to as the ‘secular ideal’. He charts out the tenets of this ideal based on commitment to truth based on evidence, compassion based on appreciation of suffering, equality based on suspicion of a priori hierarchies, freedom to think, investigate and experiment and courage to fight biases and oppression. This might seem like an idealist’s dream, but the author warns us with a grounded pragmatism that human history is not one long story blessed with a continuous evolving meaning. It is made up of disparate strands of episodes each with its own illuminating inferences. To think through our times is the first step of appropriating agency.

A superb companion to the new year!

The Renegade Apostle

Amos Oz (author)/ Nicholas de Lange (translator), Judas, 2016

There are two stories here, both of them, timeless and tender. In the fringe of Jerusalem in harsh winter, Shmuel lives a contented life, going about his graduate studies at the University, political activism with like-minded friends and a tender longing for the woman in his life. The quiet of his commonplace life is suddenly disrupted and he is compelled to be the conversation companion to the aging and argumentative Gershom Wald. In the closed confines of that mysterious house, he meets the enigmatic Atalia. The avid Zionist in Wald and the mysterious Atalia open to him a world of new possibilities.

Shmuel’s enquiry into the character of Judas, the traitor of the son of God, ends in his assessment that Judas may not be the renegade apostle, but an ardent believer whose immutable faith leads to his own tragedy and his teacher’s. More than anyone, Judas was awaiting the ultimate miracle from his master, the return from death, even as Jesus questions himself relentlessly. It is with Jesus on the Cross, irreversibly lost to the world, that Judas comes to terms with the complete breakdown of his faith and the fatality of his persuasion. With the core of his belief shaken, the only possible way out is death.

By traversing with the beliefs of Judas, we are travelling through one of the most sought after and abused road of treachery and betrayal that has simmered in medieval Europe between Judaism and Christianity. What is the most inventive part of the book is Shealtiel Abravanel, the only man who opposed the Zionist project as the modern apostate equivalent of Judas. Traversing through the veins of old Jerusalem of Jesus and Judas, Shmuel unwittingly also crosses the dreams and destiny of the sparring friends Wald and Abravanel, insider and outsider, believer and traitor, Zionist and apostate in a war of ideas about truth, faith and mercy.

One of the boldest novels from a perpetual favourite for the highest honour in Literature, the Nobel Prize, Amos Oz does it again long after his magnum opus ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness’ and does it with the panache of a master storyteller. His is a vision that brings together the proximity of diametrically opposite notions of trust and betrayal, love and hate, the safe confines of lost inheritance to the words and ideas of our times. And in doing so, how tender the strength of our views looks in the eyes of the other and how the certainty of our justices shudders in the pain on the other side! Truth, ever so fragmented, lies in so many voices on both sides of the transgression.

The Limits of Rationality

Economic Fables, Ariel Rubinstein, Open Book Publishers, pp.253

Introduction

Economic Fables is part memoir, part description of a work life that single-mindedly engaged with one of the most fascinating fields of Economics- Game theory.  Rubinstein began his incessant engagement with this field since he was thirteen, learning the importance of mathematical logic, the construction and importance of economic models to explain reality and the most difficult variable that all game theorists had to grapple with- human behaviour. Rationality is only one of the many ways of understanding human choices and financial gain is only one of the utilities humans consider while making decisions. While Game theory has had wide implications in understanding and demystifying human decision making, it is also important to separate the myths of what economics can perform from the magic of the actual power of the discipline. In a way this book cautions us from applying neat theories to reality with a caveat that the difficulty is not capricious human behaviour that overrides rationality but the values that people hold of which rationality is only one. In another way, this work is a generous acknowledgement to those that went before Rubinstein- from John Nash to Amartya Sen, Amos Tversky to Daniel Kahneman.

The Idea of Models as Fables

The heart of the book is the idea of Economics as a kind of story telling that helps us understand the world better. ‘In economic theory as in Harry Potter, the Emperor of new clothes or the tales of King Solomon, we amuse ourselves in imaginary worlds,’ explains the author. Rubinstein’s somewhat eclectic introduction to the theory is responsible for this way of thinking. Speaking of his earliest influences, he acknowledges a teacher whose lucid mathematical proofs he devoured along with Sen’s Collective Choice and Social Welfare.

This simultaneous engagement prodded him to explore the vistas of modelling with the traps that comes with uncritical attitude. He elaborates that models might seem simplistic and even unrealistic, but it is the only way ‘to clarify concepts, evaluate assessments, verify conclusion and acquire insights.’ However, since the storytelling takes place in the house of Mathematics, formal language can be both clarifying as well as clouding. The meaning of clarity does not necessarily mean the idea of scientific temper. Mixing up these two, the common perception is that whatever is modeled has predictable value. Rubinstein cautions against this belief by illustrating modeled examples to real world situations in economic crisis and geo-political contentions.

Meeting Nash

The most interesting part of this book is the implicit references and vignettes on John Nash, the most important contributor to Game theory in recent times. Rubinstein encounters Nash metaphorically all through his academic life and finally one winter morning in 1994, the year Nash wins the Nobel prize, actually strays into him. In this wonderful encounter, Nash is revealed as an absorbed genius rambling through the Princeton landscape, always surprised at the impact of his own work on others. The author ponders as he teaches Game theory whether it would lead the students into self-centred deviousness. In the last part of the book, the entire discipline is prismatically analysed through interdisciplinary realm.

This book is written in simple yet provocative style and it never fails to engage and amuse the reader. Economic conundrums are placed before the reader with powerful illustrations. In the end, the book tries to critique both the powers and limitations of the growing discipline that Economics has become in the twenty first century.