Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Yuval Noah Harari
- Publish Date: February 21, 2017
- Language: English
- Genre: Science Essays & Commentary
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 14.7 MB
- Pages: 464
- Price: Free
- ISBN: 1910701882
The New Human Agenda
At the dawn of the third millennium, humanity wakes up, stretching its
limbs and rubbing its eyes. Remnants of some awful nightmare are still
drifting across its mind. ‘There was something with barbed wire, and
huge mushroom clouds. Oh well, it was just a bad dream.’ Going to the
bathroom, humanity washes its face, examines its wrinkles in the
mirror, makes a cup of coffee and opens the diary. ‘Let’s see what’s on
the agenda today.’
For thousands of years the answer to this question remained
unchanged. The same three problems preoccupied the people of
twentieth-century China, of medieval India and of ancient Egypt.
Famine, plague and war were always at the top of the list. For
generation after generation humans have prayed to every god, angel
and saint, and have invented countless tools, institutions and social
systems – but they continued to die in their millions from starvation,
epidemics and violence. Many thinkers and prophets concluded that
famine, plague and war must be an integral part of God’s cosmic plan
or of our imperfect nature, and nothing short of the end of time would
free us from them.
Yet at the dawn of the third millennium, humanity wakes up to an
amazing realisation. Most people rarely think about it, but in the last
few decades we have managed to rein in famine, plague and war. Of
course, these problems have not been completely solved, but they have
been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of
nature into manageable challenges. We don’t need to pray to any god
or saint to rescue us from them. We know quite well what needs to be
done in order to prevent famine, plague and war – and we usually
succeed in doing it.
True, there are still notable failures; but when faced with such
failures we no longer shrug our shoulders and say, ‘Well, that’s the way
things work in our imperfect world’ or ‘God’s will be done’. Rather,
when famine, plague or war break out of our control, we feel that
somebody must have screwed up, we set up a commission of inquiry,
and promise ourselves that next time we’ll do better. And it actually
works. Such calamities indeed happen less and less often. For the first
time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from
eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious
diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers,
terrorists and criminals combined.
In the early twenty-first century,
the average human is far more likely to die from bingeing at
McDonald’s than from drought, Ebola or an al-Qaeda attack.
Hence even though presidents, CEOs and generals still have their
daily schedules full of economic crises and military conflicts, on the
cosmic scale of history humankind can lift its eyes up and start looking
towards new horizons. If we are indeed bringing famine, plague and
war under control, what will replace them at the top of the human
agenda? Like firefighters in a world without fire, so humankind in the
twenty-first century needs to ask itself an unprecedented question:
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