I'm about to start Kazuo Ishiguro's "Klara and the Sun" Apparently the nobel-prize winner, Kazuo Ishiguro is also a fan of History Prof. Yuval Harari and popular futurist Yuval Harari:
Ten years ago, Harari was an obscure history professor at a university in Israel. Today he is the world’s most famous public intellectual and science writer: with a fan base that includes Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Kazuo Ishiguro. His books Sapiens and Homo Deus have sold millions worldwide, and he is courted by the …
It is not just that I (like much of the rest of the world) profoundly connect to the clarity of ideas in Harari's history books. His books and public speaking events are now enormously popular. He has the rare ability to reach out and talk to all side, rich and poor, powerful and weak.
Yuval Harari has gone on to be an extremely popular "futurist" and public speaker, he always appears very calm and sympathetic, also he is not pulling back from asking the "big tough questions":
1) I'm passionate about protecting the environment, a paid-up member of the green party for the last 15 years. Yuval Harari sees tackling global warming as one of humanity's top priorities. For those of you going "duh of course everyone knows about global warming", however there are still a lot of climate-sceptics out there…, especially within my family!? Fortunately, Harari doesn't seem to think it is already too late "for humanity" but he highlights the consequences are going to hit the poorest parts of the world first and hardest plus we really need to act quickly, otherwise the consequences are going to be even more extreme, especially for the poorest countries and communities.
2) I'm also passionate about tackling inequality, Yuval Harari speaks strongly on how the growing inequality in the "west democracies" is already undermining the basis of our societies. Again our model he emphasises that our western liberal democracy are not yet dead, but it does appear to be going into crisis and the growing inequality is an underlying threat. This is another contentious idea, atleast within my family, who still seem to believe in the Regan/Thatcherite revolution in the 80s as a 'generally very good thing', a source of friction at family reunions ;)
3) Yuval Hurari is also now best known as the "surprise darling of silicon valley": he warnings around avoiding an AI arms race, which is rapidly heating up between the US and China. Hurari sees the 2016 election scandals (both Trump and Brexit) as a wake-up call. I was shocked by the corporate (Cambridge Analytica/Facebook) and foreign state (Russia) interference in these elections, but Harari seems to think that the worst is still potentially to come in the rapidly evolving fields of AI and Surveillance Capitalism, The next generation of biometric tracking devices, while offering some amazing health benefits (why so many of us geeks have adopted them already), they also make us even more hackable! He also takes a gentle approach on Facebook, which is now trying to do the right thing, for example Mark Zuckerberg 2019 U-turn: praising Europe's GDPR data privacy laws! Very nice to see some praise for EU leadership and good governance. To be honest, I was less concerned about AI but then 2016 was a wake up call for me. AI is also the topic Ishiguro's new novel: "Klara and the Sun is the eighth novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published on March 2, 2021. It is a dystopian science fiction story"
The above three reasons are probably the ones that resonate with the vast majority of millions & millions of other people who have read his books, attended his talks, follow his youtube channel… his following is just enormous now.
However, I also love Yuval Harari for the above reasons plus a few of extra reasons:
1) For most of my adult life I have followed a vegetarian or vegan diet. Again my family are resistant/mocking, back in the 90s I was mocked and warned that it was unhealthy to be vegetarian (unless you are fastidious about making sure you get enough protein). Vegan diets were just a fad too far, and there were dire stories about what would happen to me if I was foolish enough to follow my vegan ways… Over the last two decades, the more I've read and learnt about nutrition & health, the more I've learned about who a whole-good plant-based diet is critical for good health. I'm now in my 50s and in relatively good health, which I partly attribute to my almost vegan diet. So I LOVE that one of the greatest intellectuals of our time is vegan.
2) Next I really like that Harari meditates for two hours every day and goes on long retreats every year, again respect! Personally, I struggle to meditate even 10 or 20 minutes per day and almost never go on any retreats (unfortunately I'm a bit of a workaholic). Personally, I equate prayer with meditation which is an idea that Harari sometimes touches on, he also pushes back against any black & white thinking with regards to religion, he argues that religion has severed a critical role in the evolution of all modern civilizations and that some people with "religious beliefs" are more open and less dogmatic than some of the more modern secularists? Although I do see Harari as more sceptical about religion than myself, I still LOVE the idea of meditating for a couple of hours per day, I tend to see this as an act of devotion.
3) Lastly he is openly gay, when I grew up being gay was at best very unfortunate, a sickness/abnormality which was barely tolerated. It is easy for many to forget the open-homophobia of the 1980s. Matthew Todd's "Straight Jacket" is also a shocking reminder of the disgusting prejudice of the UK government of the 1980s i.e. Mrs Thatcher, who started down the road of re-criminalisation of gay men (i.e. section 28 legalisation which made it illegal to talk about gay people in a normal way in front of children), even more shocking were the rank and file Tory MPs and their out-spoken hatred of gay's, they advocated camps and refused to even criticize the fire-bomb and arson attacks on gay organisations!!! Tory MP Kellett-Bowman responded to these life-threatening attacks on gay men with "I am quite prepared to affirm that it is quite right that there should be an intolerance of evil", shortly after this utter disgusting statement in the House of Commons (yes it is even in Hansard), that witch Mrs Thatcher made Kellett-Bowman a Dame of the British Empire i.e. well done you're a good egg. I don't want to dwell too long on the sorry mistakes and hatred of the Tories in the 1980s, but personally, I'm delighted that Harari is openly gay and this just isn't an issue for anyone in the UK (I guess it is still a problem in some countries in Africa and Asia).
