Nationalism vs. globalism: the new political divide

Chris Anderson: Hello. So welcome
to this TED dialogue.

It's the first of a series that's
really going to be done

in response to the current
political upheaval.

I don't know about you.

I've become quite concerned about
the growing divisiveness in this country

and in the world.

No one's listening to each other. Right?

They aren't.

And it feels like we need

a different kind of conversation,

one that's based on, I don't know,

reason, listening, on understanding,

on a broader context.

That's at least what we're going to try

in these TED Dialogues starting today,

and we couldn't have anyone with us

who I'd be more excited to kick this off.

This is a mind right here that thinks

pretty much like no one else on the planet

I would say, because I'm serious.

I'm serious.

He synthesizes history

with underlying ideas in a way

that kind of takes your breath away.

So some of you will know this book,

"Sapiens."

Has anyone here read "Sapiens?"

(Applause)

I mean, I could not put it down.

The way that he tells
the story of mankind

through big ideas that really make you
think differently, though,

it's kind of amazing.

And here's the follow-up, which I think
is being published in the U.S. next week.

Yuval Noah Harari: Yeah, next week.
CA: "Homo Deus."

Now this is the history
of the next hundred years.

I've had a chance to read it.

It's extremely dramatic,

and I daresay for some people

quite alarming.

It's a must-read,

and honestly, we couldn't have
someone better to help

make sense of what on Earth
is happening in the world right now.

So a warm welcome, please,
to Yuval Noah Harari.

(Applause)

It's great to be joined by our friends
on Facebook and around the web.

Hello, Facebook.

And all of you, as I start
asking questions of Yuval,

come up with your own questions,

and not necessarily about
the political scandal du jour

but about the broader understanding
of where are we heading?

You ready? Okay, we're going to go.

So here we are, Yuval, New York City,

2017, there's a new president in power,

and shockwaves rippling around the world.

What on Earth is happening?

YNH: I think the basic thing that happens

is that we have lost our story.

Humans think in stories,

and we try to make sense of the world

by telling stories,

and for the last few decades,

we had a very simple
and very attractive story

about what's happening in the world,

and the story said that, oh,
what's happening is

that the economy is being globalized,

politics is being liberalized,

and the combination of the two
will create paradise on Earth,

and we just need to keep on
globalizing the economy

and liberalizing the political system,

and everything will be wonderful.

And 2016 is the moment

when a very large segment,

even of the Western world,

stopped believing in this story.

For good or bad reasons doesn't matter.

People stopped believing in the story,

and when you don't have a story,

you don't understand what's happening.

CA: Part of you believes that that story
was actually a very effective story.

It worked.

YNH: To some extent, yes.

According to some measurements,

we are now in the best time ever

for humankind.

Today, for the first time in history,

more people die from eating too much

than from eating too little,

which is an amazing achievement.

(Laughter)

Also for the first time in history,

more people die from old age

than from infectious diseases,

and violence is also down.

For the first time in history,

more people commit suicide

than are killed by crime and terrorism

and war put together.

Statistically, you are
your own worst enemy.

At least, of all the people in the world,

you are most likely
to be killed by yourself,

which is very good news

compared to the level of violence

that we saw in previous eras.

CA: But this process
of connecting the world

ended up with a large group of people
kind of feeling left out,

and they've reacted, and so we have
this bombshell that's sort of ripping

through the whole system.

I mean, what do you make
of what's happened?

It feels like the old way
that people thought of politics,

the left-right divide,
has been blown up and replaced.

How should we think of this?

YNH: Yeah, the old 20th century

political model of left versus right

is now largely irrelevant,

and the real divide today

is in global and national,

global or local.

And you see it again all over the world

that this is now the main struggle.

We probably need completely
new political models

and completely new ways of thinking

about politics.

In essence what you can say

is that we now have global ecology,

we have a global economy,

but we have national politics,

and this doesn't work together.

This makes the political
system ineffective

because it has no control
over the forces that shape our life.

And you have basically two solutions

to this imbalance.

Either deglobalize the economy

and turn it back into a national economy,

or globalize the political system.

CA: So some, I guess
many liberals out there

view Trump and his government

as kind of irredeemably bad,

just awful in every way.

Do you see any underlying

narrative or political philosophy in there

that is at least worth understanding.

How would you articulate that philosophy?

Is it just the philosophy of nationalism?

YNH: I think the underlying
feeling or idea

is that the political system,
something is broken there.

It doesn't empower

the ordinary person anymore.

It doesn't care so much
about the ordinary person anymore,

and I think this diagnosis
of the political disease is correct.

With regard to the answers,
I am far less certain.

I think what we are seeing
is the immediate human reaction:

if something doesn't work, let's go back.

And you see it all over the world,

that people, almost nobody
in the political system today

has any future-oriented vision

of where humankind is going.

Almost everywhere, you see
retrograde vision.

Let's make America great again,

like it was great, I don't know,
in the '50s, in the '80s, sometime,

let's go back there.

And you go to Russia.

So a hundred years after Lenin,

Putin's vision for the future

is basically, ah, let's go back
to the Tsarist empire.

And in Israel, where I come from,

the hottest political vision

of the present

is "let's build the temple again."

So let's go back 2,000 years backward.

So people are thinking
sometime in the past we've lost it,

and sometimes in the past, it's like
you've lost your way in the city,

and you say okay, let's go back
to the point where I felt secure

and start again.

I don't think this can work,

but a lot of people,
this is their gut instinct.

CA: But why couldn't it work?

America first is a very
appealing slogan in many ways.

Patriotism is in many ways
a very noble thing.

It's played a role in promoting

cooperation among large numbers of people.

Why couldn't you have a world

organized in country

all of which put themselves first?

YNH: For many centuries,

even thousands of years,

patriotism worked quite well.

Of course it led to wars an so forth,

but we shouldn't focus
too much on the bad.

There are also many,
many positive things about patriotism,

and the ability to have
a large number of people

care about each other,

sympathize with one another,

and come together for collective action.

If you go back to the first nations,

so thousands of years ago,

the people who lived along
the Yellow River in China,

it was many, many different tribes

and they all depended on the river

for survival and for prosperity,

but all of them also suffered

from periodical floods

and periodical droughts,

and no tribe could do anything about it

because each of them controlled
just a tiny section of the river.

And then in a long
and complicated process,

the tribes coalesced together

to form the Chinese nation,

which controlled the entire Yellow River

and had the ability

to bring hundreds of thousands
of people together

to build dams and canals

and regulate the river

and prevent the worst floods and droughts

and raise the level
of prosperity for everybody.

And this worked in many places
around the world.

But in the 21st century,

technology is changing all that
in a fundamental way.

We are now living, all people
in the world are living

alongside the same cyber river,

and no single nation

can regulate this river by itself.

We are all living together
in a single planet

which is threatened by our own actions,

and if you don't have some kind
of global cooperation,

nationalism is just not on the right level

to tackle the problems

of whether it's climate change

or whether it's technological disruption.

CA: So it was a beautiful idea

in a world where most of the action,

most of the issues,

took place on national scale,

but your argument is that the issues
that matter most today

no longer take place on a national scale
but on a global scale.

YNH: Exactly. All of the major problems
of the world today

are global in essence,

and they cannot be solved

unless through some kind
of global cooperation.

It's not just climate change,

which is, like, the most obvious
example people give.

I think more in terms
of technological disruption.

If you think about, for example,
artificial intelligence,

over the next 20, 30 years

pushing hundreds of millions of people
out of the job market,

this is a problem on a global level.

It will disrupt the economy
of all the countries,

and similarly if you think
about, say, bioengineering

and people being afraid
of conducting genetic engineering

research in humans,

it won't help if just a single country,

let's say the U.S.,

outlaws all genetic experiments in humans

but China or North Korea
continues to do it.

So the U.S. cannot solve it by itself,

and very quickly, the pressure on the U.S.

to do the same will be immense

because we are talking about
high-risk, high-gain technologies.

If somebody else is doing it,

I can't allow myself to remain behind.

The only way to have regulations,

effective regulations,

on things like genetic engineering,

is to have global regulations.

If you just have national regulations,

nobody would like to stay behind.

CA: So this is really interesting.

It seems that this might be one key

to provoking at least
a constructive conversation

between the different sides here,

because I think everyone can agree
that the start point

of a lot of the anger that's
propelled us to where we are

is because of the legitimate
concerns about job loss.

Work is gone, a traditional way of life

has gone, and it's no wonder
that people are furious about that.

And in general, they have blamed
globalism, global elites

for doing this to them
without asking their permission,

and that seems like
a legitimate complaint.

But what I hear you saying

is that, so a key question is,
what is the real cause of job loss,

both now and going forward?

To the extent that it's about globalism,

then the right response, yes,

is to shut down borders

and keep people out

and change trade agreements and so forth.

But you're saying, I think,

that actually the bigger cause of job loss

is not going to be that at all.

It's going to originate
in technological questions,

and we have no chance of solving that
unless we operate as a connected world.

YNH: Yeah, I think that,

I don't know about the present,

but looking to the future,

it's not the Mexicans or Chinese

who will take the jobs from
the people in Pennsylvania,

it's the robots and algorithms,

so unless you plan to build a big wall

on the border of California --

(Laughter) --

the wall on the border with Mexico
is going to be very ineffective.

And I was struck when I watched
the debates before the elections,

I was struck that certainly Trump
did not even attempt

to frighten people by saying
the robots will take your jobs.

Now even if it's not true,
it doesn't matter.

It could have been an extremely
effective way of frightening people

and galvanizing people.
"The robots will take your jobs."

And nobody used that line.

And it made me afraid,

because it meant

that no matter what happens

in universities and laboratories,

and there there is already
an intense debate about it,

but in the mainstream political system

and among the general public,

people are just unaware

that there could be an immense
technological disruption,

not in 200 years,

but in 10, 20, 30 years,

and we have to do something about it now,

partly because most of what we teach

children today in school

or in college

is going to be completely irrelevant

to the job market of 2040, 2050.

So it's not something we'll need
to think about in 2040.

We need to think today

what to teach the young people.

CA: Yeah, no, absolutely.

You've often written about
moments in history

where humankind has

entered a new era kind of unintentionally.

Decisions have been made,
technologies have been developed,

and suddenly the world has changed,

possibly in a way that's
worse for everyone.

So one of the example
you give in "Sapiens"

is just the whole agricultural revolution,

which for an actual person
tilling the fields,

they just picked up a 12-hour
backbreaking workday

instead of six hours in the jungle

and a much more interesting lifestyle.

So are we at another possible
phase change here

where we kind of sleepwalk into
a future that none of us actually wants?

YNH: Yes, very much so.

During the agricultural revolution,

what happened is that immense
technological and economic revolution

empowered the human collective,

but when you look at actual
individual lives,

the life of a tiny elite

became much better,

and the life of the majority of people

became considerably worse.

And this can happen again
in the 21st century.

No doubt the new technologies
will empower the human collective,

but we may end up again

with a tiny elite

ripping all the benefits,

taking all the fruits,

and the masses of the population

finding themselves worse

than they were before,

certainly much worse than this tiny elite.

CA: And those elites might not
even be human elites.

They might be cyborgs or --

YNH: Yeah, they could be
enhanced superhumans.

They could be cyborgs.

They could be completely
nonorganic elites.

They could even be
non-conscious algorithms.

What we see now in the world

is authority shifting away

from humans to algorithms.

More and more decisions

about personal lives,
about economic matters,

about political matters,

is actually being taken by algorithms.

If you ask the bank for a loan,

chances are your fate is decided
by an algorithm, not by a human being,

and the general impression is that

maybe homo sapiens just lost it.

The world is so complicated,

there is so much data,

things are changing so fast,

that this thing that evolved
on the African savannah

tens of thousands of years ago

to cope with a particular environment,

a particular volume
of information and data,

it just can't handle the realities
of the 21st century,

and the only thing that may
be able to handle it

is big data algorithms.

So no wonder that more and more
authority is shifting from us

to the algorithms.

CA: So we're in New York City

for the first of a series of TED Dialogues

with Yuval Harari,

and there's a Facebook live
audience out there.

We're excited to have you with us.

We're going to start coming
to some of your questions

and questions of people in the room

in just a few minutes,

so have those coming.

Yuval, if you're going
to make the argument

that we need to get past nationalism
because of the coming

technological danger, in a way,

presented by so much of what's happening

so we've got to have
a global conversation about this.

Trouble is, it's really hard to get people
really believing that, I don't know,

AI really is an imminent
threat, and so forth.

The things that people,
some people at least,

care about much more immediately perhaps

is perhaps climate change,

perhaps other issues like refugees,
nuclear weapons, and so forth.

Would you argue that

where we are right now

that somehow those issues

need to be dialed up?

You've talked about climate change,

but Trump has said
he doesn't believe in that.

So in a way your most powerful argument,

you can't actually use to make this case.

YNH: Yeah, I think with climate change,

at first sight, it's quite surprising

that there is a very close correlation

between nationalism and climate change.

I mean, almost always the people
who deny climate change are nationalists.

And at first sight, you think why?

What's the connection?

Why don't you have socialists
denying climate change?

But then, when you think about it,

it's obvious.

Because nationalism has
no solution to climate change,

if you want to be a nationalist
in the 21st century,

you have to deny the problem.

If you accept the reality of the problem,

then you must accept that yes,

there is still room in the world

for patriotism,

there is still room in the world

for having special loyalties

and obligations towards your own people,

towards your own country.

I don't think anybody is really
thinking of abolishing that.

But in order to confront climate change,

we need additional loyalties
and commitments

to a level beyond the nation.

And that should not be impossible,

because people can have

several layers of loyalty.

You can be loyal to your family

and to your community

and to your nation,

so why can't you be also loyal

to humankind as a whole?

Of course, there are occasions
where it becomes difficult,

what to put first,

but life is difficult. Handle it.

(Laughter)

CA: Okay, so I would love to get
some questions from the audience here.

We've got a microphone here.

Speak into it, and Facebook,
get them coming too.

Question: So one of the things

that has clearly made a huge difference

in this country and other countries

is the income distribution inequality,

the dramatic change in income distribution

in the U.S. from what it was 50 years ago

and around the world.

Is there anything that we can do
to affect that,

because that gets at a lot
of the underlying causes?

YNH: So far I haven't heard
a very good idea

about what to do about it,

again partly because most ideas
remain on the national level,

and the problem is global.

I mean, one idea that we hear
quite a lot about now

is universal basic income,

but this is a problem.

I mean, I think it's a good part,

but it's a problematic idea because
it's not clear what universal is

and it's not clear what basic is.

Most people when they speak
about universal basic income,

they actually mean national basic income,

but the problem is global.

Let's say that you have an AI

and the 3D printers

taking away millions of jobs in Bangladesh

of all the people who make my shirts

and my shoes?

So what's going to happen?

The U.S. government will levy taxes

in Google and Apple in California

and use that to pay basic income
to unemployed Bangladeshis?

If you believe that,

you can just as well
believe that Santa Claus

will come and solve the problem.

So unless we have really universal

and not national basic income,

the deep problems

are not going to go away,

and also it's not clear what basic is,

because what are basic human needs?

A thousand years ago,
just food and shelter is enough,

but today people will say education

is a basic human need.

It should be part of the package.

But how much?

Six years? Twelve years? PhD?

Similarly with health care,

let's say that in 20, 30, 40 years,

you'll have expensive treatments

that can extend human life

to 120, I don't know.

Will this be part

of the basket of basic income or not?

It's a very difficult problem,

because in a world

where people lose their ability
to be employed,

the only thing they are going to get
is this basic income.

So what's part of it

is a very, very difficult
ethical question.

CA: And there's a bunch of questions
on how the world affords it as well,

who pays.

There's a question here
from Facebook from Lisa Larson.

How does nationalism in the U.S. now

compare to that between
World War I and World War II

in the last century?

YNH: Well the good news,

with regard to the dangers of nationalism,

we are in a much better position

than a century ago.

A century ago, 1917,

Europeans were killing each other
by the millions.

In 2016, with Brexit,

as far as I can remember,

a single person lost their life,

an MP who was murdered
by some extremist,

just a single person.

I mean, if Brexit was about
British independence,

this is the most peaceful
war of independence in human history.

And let's say that Scotland
will now choose to leave the U.K.,

after Brexit.

So in the 18th century,

if Scotland wanted,
and the Scots wanted several times,

to break out of the control of London,

the reaction of the government
in London was to send an army up north

to burn down Edinburgh

and massacre the highland tribes.

My guess is that if in 2018,

the Scots vote for independence,

the London government
will not send an army up north

to burn down Edinburgh.

Very few people are now willing
to kill or be killed

for Scottish or for British independence.

So for all the talk
of the rise of nationalism

and going back to the 1930s,

to the 19th century,

in the West at least,

the power of national sentiments today

is far, far smaller

than it was a century ago.

CA: Although some people now,
you hear publicly worrying

about whether that might be shifting,

that there could actually be
outbreaks of violence in the U.S.

depending on how things turn out.

Should we be worried about that, or
do you really think things have shifted?

YNH: No, we should be worried.

We should be aware of two things.

First of all, don't be hysterical.

We are not back
in the First World War yet.

But on the other hand,
don't be complacent.

We reached from 1917 to 2017

not by some divine miracle

but simply by human decisions,

and if we now start making
the wrong decisions,

we could be back

in an analogous situation

to 1917 in a few years.

One of the things I know as a historian

is that you should never
underestimate human stupidity.

(Laughter)

It's one of the most powerful
forces in history

is human stupidity and human violence.

Humans do such crazy things

for no obvious reasons,

but again, at the same time,

another very powerful force
in human history is human wisdom.

We have both.

CA: We have with us here
moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt,

who I think has a question.

Jonathan Haidt: Thanks, Yuval.

So you seem to be a fan
of global governance,

but when you look at the map of the world

from Transparency International,

which rates the level of corruption
of political institutions,

it's a vast sea of red

with little bits of yellow here and there
for those with good institutions.

So if we were to have
some kind of global governance,

what makes you think that it would end up
being more like Denmark

rather than more like Russia or Honduras,

and aren't there alternatives

such as we did with CFCs?

I mean, there are ways to solve
global problems with national governments.

What would world government
actually look like,

and why do you think it would work?

YNH: Well, I don't know
how it would look like.

Nobody still has a model for that.

The main reason we need it

is because many of these issues

are lose-lose situations.

When you have a win-win situation

like trade, both sides can benefit
from a trade agreement,

then this is something you can work out.

Without some kind of global government,

national governments each
has an interest in doing it.

But when you have a lose-lose situation,
like with climate change,

it's much more difficult

without some overarching
authority, real authority.

Now, how to get there

and how would it look like,

I don't know.

And certainly there is no obvious reason

to think that it would look like Denmark,

or that it would be a democracy.

Most likely it wouldn't.

We don't have workable

democratic models

for a global government.

So maybe it would look more
like ancient China

than like modern Denmark,

but still, given the dangers

that we are facing,

I think the imperative

of having some kind of real ability

to force through difficult decisions

on the global level

is more important

than almost anything else.