Making Sense with Sam Harris - #276 — Defending the Global Order

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about the wider implications of Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine. They discuss different forms of war, Putin’s miscalculation regarding the internal divisions of America and the EU, the problem of misinformation, international norms of behavior, the role of China, the civilizational importance of trust, globalization and de-globalization, existential risk, the role of India, Ukrainian leadership, the danger of nuclear war, regime change in Russia, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay. Well, today I'm speaking with Yuval Noah Harari. This was first recorded as a Zoom call for podcast subscribers, and there will be more of those coming, especially on topical subjects like the war in Ukraine. And that is the topic of today's conversation.

Yuval is a historian who probably needs no introduction. He's been on the podcast several times before. He is the author of the best-selling books Sapiens and Homo Deus, among others. And today we talk about the wider implications of Russia's war of conquest in Ukraine, especially as they pertain to the maintenance of global order. We discuss various forms of war. We talk about the problem of misinformation, international norms of behavior, the role of China, the civilizational importance of trust, globalization and deglobalization, existential risk, the role of India, Ukrainian

leadership, the increased risk of nuclear war, regime change in Russia, and other topics. nuclear war, regime change in Russia, and other topics. It's always great to speak with Yuval. He is a wealth of information and wisdom. So now, without further delay, I bring you Yuval Noah Harari. Yuval, thank you for doing this. Great to see you. Thank you for having me. So wait, you're in Israel now, right?

I'm right now in Tel Aviv, one of the most peaceful places in the world right now. That's right, yeah. Imagine the irony of that, yeah. Yeah. Wow. Well, I know our time is limited, so I'll just start running.

People will get in here when they get in here. Obviously, this is mainly a podcast. People are joining us to listen while we get it made. So we titled this Zoom event, Defending Western Civilization, or I titled it that. And some back and forth between the two of us has led me to believe that you don't think that's quite the right framing. And just to tee that up, I mean, you're someone who spends a lot of time thinking about the power of narratives to shape human events. And even just titling a conversation like this is to partake in the generation of narratives. generation of narratives. What is the right framing here, do you think, for this, what we most need to talk about now? And how does that fit into a larger story of what's going on at this moment in history? I think that the Russian invasion of Ukraine doesn't threaten Western civilization. It threatens the global order. And its repercussions threaten the ability of humankind as a whole to deal with the main

challenges of the 21st century, including climate change, including the rise of destructive technologies. So it's not at all about Western civilization. And also, if we title this defending Western civilization, it may give some people the impression that Russia is not part of Western civilization. It's an alien force, and it is a part of Western civilization. Yet again, we need to defend Western civilization from itself, not from an alien force. But what's really at stake is not the West. What's really at stake is the global order. And it concerns people in Africa. It concerns people in India as much as it concerns people in the United States, for example. Right. So when you say the global order, to my ear, that sounds like the

liberal global order or liberal democracy versus autocracy. I guess my framing, versus autocracy. I guess my framing, the Western got smuggled in there because I've been thinking perhaps inordinately about the role of China in all of this or the looming implications

of what happens in Ukraine for what happens with China and what seems to be a new Cold War or a great power clash in the making. I don't know if we want to take the China piece early or save it for later,

but how do you see it? No, I mean, first of all, I mean, it's not, again, it's not just democracy. It's not just liberalism. It's also, you know, self-determination. It's also nationalism. It's the basic idea that you can't just invade a neighboring country and conquer it and wiping it off the map. It goes far, far deeper than just a liberal democracy.

Over the last few generations, maybe the most basic rule established in the international arena, irrespective of the type of regimes you're talking about, is that you no longer do these things, which are very common. I mean, throughout history, this is kind of, you open one history book after the other. So you have the Assyrians or the Romans or the Mongols or the Russians invading neighboring countries and taking them over. This is how every empire in history was established. And over the last few generations, maybe the most basic rule of the new global order, and again,

it goes far beyond Western liberal democracies, is that you don't do that. You don't do that even if you are an Arab dictatorship or a military junta in South America.

And I think this is part of the shock that, you know, the shockwaves around the world, that people realize that if Putin succeeds, if Putin is allowed to win, then this will become the new normal all over the world. Well, let's cycle on that point one more time, because I think many people look at this, or certainly some people look at this and wonder why we're deciding to care so much about this particular invasion. Obviously, it's a humanitarian crisis, but there have been many of those, some of which we're in part or in whole culpable for, right? So we have invaded places. I think there's some obvious disanalogies there, but people look at this and say,

there's something about, again, the story we're telling ourselves or are inclined to tell ourselves at this moment that is different from the story we seized upon when Russia invaded Crimea previously or when Syria fell apart and Obama's red line was crossed, and we just decided to move on in the news cycle and talk about other things. Why is this a kind of 9-11 moment that puts us once again very close to the hinge of

history? Partly because it now establishes a pattern. When Crimea happened, then people said, well, this is a very unique situation and there are all kinds of excuses and it won't happen again, and it won't happen on a larger scale. Now you realize, no, this is the beginning of the pattern. If we don't stop it here, it will continue. It will also continue in other places around the world. If we don't stop it here, it will continue. It will also continue in other places around the world. Secondly, with regard to all the comparison, well, people didn't get so much excited or interested in what's happening in Yemen, what's happening in Syria, what's happening in Ethiopia. Part of it is because, again, it's a different kind of war. Part of the global order of the last few generations,

for better or worse, was that civil wars are part of the game, but invading and conquering other countries and wiping them off the map is not. And this is now what is at stake. And there is a huge difference there. It's not that civil wars are okay. It's not that civil wars are people don't die in them or suffer in them. It's, you know, we had throughout history several kinds of wars. External invasions and conquests were always the most dangerous and the kind of backbone of military and diplomatic history. But there were always other kinds of wars, like civil wars. And what happened in the last few generations is that, first of all, the big wars between superpowers,

and secondly, the external invasions and conquests, they kind of get out of the picture. You don't do that anymore. Whereas civil wars, they continue to be part of the picture, out of the, you don't do that anymore. Whereas civil wars, they continue to be part of the system. And now we are seeing the return of something that we thought, well, we already got over that. Yes, we still have a way to go. We also need eventually to reach a situation when there are no civil wars. But now we are feeling that we are falling back. We are falling back to the most dangerous and most destructive kinds of

wars. We are basically going back to the jungle, to the situation when at any moment the neighbors might invade and conquer us, which was the situation for most of history, but not in the last few decades. Hmm. Yeah, I guess another part of the picture here is that this recent adventure or misadventure, as it seems to be turning out for Putin, seems to have been occasioned by his perception of American and European weakness, right? And he's done a fair amount on his side to engineer that weakness. I mean, there are probably a thousand points of salience here we could seize on. But I mean, one is just, you know, we have built

these social media tools that allow bad actors like, you know, Putin's regime to use our own hyper-partisanship and divisiveness against us, right? So we have the kind of the rampant hacking of our society. I'm not making the claim that any election has been, quote, hacked with respect to voting machines, but there's no question that there's been an inflaming of public opinion from the outside, and we have built the tools to run that particular psychological experiment or psyops campaign ourselves. We've also collaborated in an increasing dependence on regimes that we can't actually trust. And some of this has been done with good intentions. I mean,

there's this notion that trade and engagement would modify the political visions and aspirations of autocracies, right? So we thought China would come around and Russia would come around and join the well-behaved democracies of the world as long as we traded enough and became aligned enough in our economic incentives. But that seems not to be happening. We have Germany, in retrospect, quite insanely deciding to become energy dependent upon Russia and decommission its nuclear plants. And in the current moment, that looks as masochistic as can be. We have the UK happily laundering the money of oligarchs endlessly, even as Putin poisons people with nerve agents on their soil, you know, Russian dissidents. It's just, at a certain point, you know, all of this was,

it should have been obvious this was leading in a dangerous direction. But now it finally seems, and this goes to the point of Putin's miscalculation, it finally seems that enough was enough. The spell has broken for all of us or most of us simultaneously. And we're now thinking of re-engineering a world where our ability to trust in the political vision of our allies is paramount. And I'm wondering what you think of that and how much of this sea change in our sense of globalization and global priorities is going to be durable? And what should we be re-engineering here and rethinking here? How do you see that part of the picture? I think it really was a very big shock because people, not only in the West, but people all over the world had the feeling that we are living in a more peaceful era, that we have managed

to somehow crawl out of the jungle, put at least some distance. When I talk about a jungle, I talk about a situation when at any moment the neighboring country, empire, tribe, city-state might invade our territory and just occupy us, conquer us, take our lands, drive away our people, whatever. Which was the basic situation for all over the world for most of history, whether it's ancient China, whether it's medieval Europe, whether it's the 19th century, this was the basic situation of human beings. And peace in those days, for most of history, meant simply the temporary absence of war. Now there is peace, but at any moment, a war might start.

And amazingly, humanity managed to really get out of this jungle and create not a completely peaceful world. You know, I come from the Middle East. I know perfectly well there are still wars in the world, but more peaceful than any previous era. And it's not some kind of hippie fantasy. If you want to really see peace in action, don't look in poems. Look in state budgets. You look at the budgets of the world in the last few years, and it's really amazing. Because the average military budget out of total government budget of countries all over the world, on average, is about 6-7%,

something like that. In Europe, it was something like 3%. Compared to most of history, when the majority of the budget of every king and emperor and sultan went to finance the army and the navy and the fortresses, not healthcare and education. The world that we know, not healthcare and education. The world that we know, whether in the US or in Israel, but also in Brazil, also in Indonesia, it's built on these foundations of the new peace. And Putin shattered that, reminding us that the jungle is still nearby. A few decisions by a few individuals, and we are back there. And the danger, again, the danger is not just to Ukraine or then to Poland. You will see military budgets all over the world skyrocket, which means healthcare budgets and education budgets decline. You see

less possibility for international cooperation on things like climate change, on regulating AI. So this has repercussions everywhere. Now, the positive potential, it's still just, we're not sure, but the positive potential is, a shock that you saw Europe and also to some extent the United States uniting and reacting in a forceful way that would have sounded impossible just a month ago. You know, with Switzerland joining the EU sanctions, with Finland sending arms to Ukraine, with Germany doubling its defense budget overnight. And I think the biggest, Putin made two big miscalculations. One was about Ukraine. He thought that Ukraine is not really a

nation, that the Ukrainians are actually Russians and they will welcome him. They will throw flowers on his tanks and they are throwing Molotov cocktails. He was completely wrong about Ukraine, but he also made a big miscalculation about the West, about Europe and about the United States. I think if he waited a few more years, just done nothing, just wait a few more years, there is a good chance that Europe and the United States would have self-destructed due to their internal conflicts and culture war. And he is now giving, with his own hands,

he has united them, and he is giving them a chance to save themselves. I hope that the positive results of this war on the big scale would be, on the one hand, that we will see a green Manhattan project to stop depending on oil and gas, which is what's fueling the Russian military machine, but also an end to the culture war in the West. Because suddenly you realize there are far bigger issues, there are far bigger dangers in the world than who gets to enter which toilet. And if we can unite around a really big issue, then, you know, the

Western democracies don't need to fear anybody. If you look again at the numbers, they are still the most powerful. You know, Russia has a smaller economy than Italy. The Russian economy is about the same as Belgium and the Netherlands put together. Forget even about the US. As long as Europe stands together, it has nothing to fear from Russia. Let's linger on the culture war piece here, because I do view that as, in large measure, here, because I do view that as, in large measure, what would seem to be provocative about our apparent weakness, that Putin felt that we were so divided against ourselves that we would never cohere in the face of this kind of challenge. And I think he rightly thinks that after all of our failed wars, our appetite for conflict is somewhere near an all-time low. So the idea

that we're actually going to get militarily involved in anything seemed remote, I'm sure. The culture war piece, I mean, it's hard to disentangle that from just the misinformation piece. I mean, we have tens of millions of people in America now, I mean, this cohort are disproportionately on the right, who believe that the world is being run by a cult of child raping cannibals, right? I mean, like there's no limit to the craziness that passes for political engagement on the right at this moment. And, you know, not quite that far toward the fringe, but still pretty far toward it. We have people with platforms in the millions who are obviously parroting Russian propaganda in the middle of this war.

And this piece needs to be disentangled from the quite odious claim that any criticism of any possible policy here, like enforcing a no-fly zone, is treasonous or carrying water for Putin. No, I mean, there are things that we need to debate with respect to how we react to this. But there are still obvious untruths being confidently spread by people who have bigger platforms than either of us do. And I'm hopeful, as you sound like you might be, that this challenge could get our head straight and cut through the culture war, but an information ecosystem where it's becoming harder and harder to agree about facts. One thing I thought just

the other day is, what would this current situation be like if deepfake technology was five years better than it is now, where really we were struggling to figure out whether any of the video we were watching of Zelensky or whether any of it was real, right? Like if that was where we were stuck. So anyway, just talk to me about the misinformation piece as you see it. You know, partly we can't get everybody on board. You can never get everybody on board. You just need enough. You just need enough of the still sensible people on the right and also on the extreme left to have their aha moment that, okay, we need to face this challenge. It's bigger than all the other things we've been discussing. And especially if you talk about the American right, they have

this Cold War inheritance of all the Rambo movies and all the Rocky movies with the bad Russians. And here you have it in real life. And it's almost irresistible. And I was kind of flipping between Fox News and CNN. And for the first time in a long time, they are actually showing the same thing. They are showing the same reality with a different take on it. So in Fox News,

we're really excited about all these people getting guns. And look, it's so important to have a gun in your home because when the Russians come, you can shoot at them. And you didn't see so much of that on CNN, but still they are on the same page roughly. They are on the same reality. And you'll never get everybody there, but you don't need everybody. It's never the case in history that you have everybody. And I'm less, you know, also I'm less familiar with the specific situation in the U.S., but you see also what's happening in Europe,

that the kind of closing of the ranks very quickly and quite surprisingly, and, you know, even figures like Viktor Orban saying that he will not oppose, he will not prevent sanctions against Russia and accepting waves of refugees. After all his talk against refugees, against the European Union, against Brussels, he's suddenly behaving in a different way, maybe because there is elections coming in Hungary. I'm not sure. But you see something changing. I can't predict the future, whether it will last. This could be a very long war. And people need, you know, it's not just the first two or three weeks. We need to see what happens in a month, in two months. And even after the war is over, at some stage,

a big question will be how to win the peace. No matter how the war ends, it's crucial, again, especially for Europe, to some extent also to the US, but Europe is the main player here, to win the peace. Europe has the economic resources to turn Ukraine, whatever the peace treaty is, Europe has the economic resources to turn Ukraine, whatever the peace treaty is, Europe has the power to turn Ukraine into a prosperous democracy by making enough investments and sending enough help in various forms. You know, not just rebuild roads and bridges and hospitals and schools,

and hospitals and schools, building research centers, moving factories. And if they make this investment and turn Ukraine into a prosperous country, this will obviously not just benefit Ukraine enormously, it will be the biggest defense for Europe and also the biggest challenge for the Putin regime to explain to the poor citizens of Russia how come the Ukrainians can do it and you don't see the same thing in Russia. You know, Russia is a much, much wealthier country than... It's one of the wealthiest countries in the world in terms of natural resources, but the citizens are poor. They receive very low-level government services, health care, education, welfare.

And that's, you know, maybe the biggest question that Russian citizens should ask their government. Why don't we get the same level of health care as they get in Finland or as they get in Canada? And the answer, of course, is because the money went for tanks. We mentioned earlier that the Russian economy is smaller than the Italian economy. So how come Putin has this military machine? Because the military budget of Russia in percentage out of government budget is not 3%, like in the EU. It's not 6%, like the world average. Nobody knows exactly how much it is because it's secret. The estimates, the lowest estimates are around 11%. The highest estimates, they reach 20, 30, 35%. Truth is probably somewhere in between.

And again, that's the key question for Russia, but also the key question for European citizens and for people all over the world. Which kind of country do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a country like Russia, which spends 10-20% of its government budget on the military or not? And I think that even people on the right know the answer to this question. No, we don't want to live in this kind of country. But it seems to me that if we're going to seize the right lesson from this moment and unite the liberal world order against all of the remaining autocracies. I mean, that's one lesson we might seize from it. And one of those being China, right? Then we're talking about acknowledging that we're losing this peace dividend,

and we're thinking it's a good thing that Germany now is willing to spend more on its own defense. So what is the normative that is desirable move now in light of what is happening with respect to things like military budgets? Don't unite the world against autocracies. Unite the world against aggression. We need some autocracies on the right side. It would be difficult. I mean, if you divide the world into autocracies and democracies, you're making it much, much more difficult. There are many autocracies that are not necessarily in favor of the kind of aggression. And again, this is why, what we talked about earlier, why is this so different from other wars and why does this create this kind of reaction?

Because it's not about the internal regime of a country. It's about the behavior, the norms of behavior in the international arena. When you look at the past few decades, you see that also many, if not most of the autocracies in the world, and again, there are many terrible things to say about them, of course, but at least most of them also

kept this key norm of the international community that you just don't invade a neighboring country and conquer it. And, you know, you look at China, since 1979 and the Chinese incursion invasion into Vietnam, China has not engaged in any external invasion. And we shouldn't kind of rush to, you know, push the Chinese together with the Russians into one camp. If the Chinese choose at this critical moment to join the Russians and support them,

that's terrible news. And if it happens, the world will have to deal with it. But it still didn't happen. And ideally, we should isolate the Putin regime, not push countries to join it. Now, China is not going to actively take actions against Russia, but it's also very careful so far about supporting it. The best we can hope from the Chinese is to stay on the fence, to stay neutral. And we shouldn't do anything to push them towards the Russians. The same is true of other countries like Iran, like Venezuela.

If the U.S. can diplomatically work with these countries so they don't join a bloc with Russia, a bloc with Russia, that's a plus. Right. What's your view of the degree to which the US and the EU or the NATO countries should be engaged on the ground or in the skies over Ukraine? I mean, so what's your position on enforcing a no-fly zone, for instance? That's above my pay grade. I'm not a military expert. I don't understand the kind of military issues involved. I also don't understand the complicated political issues involved with

NATO and Europe and so forth. I don't know. I don't have a strong opinion on that. Do you have thoughts about what this does to the logic of nuclear proliferation? It seems to me one lesson many countries might draw from this moment is that if you have nukes, no one invades you. And if you don't have nukes, you might be invaded at any moment. That's part of the danger. Again, the norm that you don't invade

and conquer countries was very important for a number of reasons. One of them is, again, military budgets, but the other is the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Because you had the kind of feeling that even if I don't have nuclear weapons, I'm still protected against the worst, and not against all violence, but against the worst form of violence, which is to just being wiped off the map by some crazy neighbor. And if this norm is no longer valid, then we are very likely to see the proliferation of nuclear weapons, not just in the usual suspects, you know, like Iran, but, you know, think about Germany.

like Iran. But think about Germany. If I'm now a German and I'm looking around, then I say to myself, okay, we need nukes to protect ourselves and also to protect Eastern Europe. Now, who controls these nukes? In NATO, there are three countries that control the nukes. It's the US, it's France, and it's Britain. Now, let's imagine a scenario that in 2024, Trump is again US president. Let's say that it's a bit extreme, but let's say that Le Pen, still possible, wins the coming elections in France, and Britain goes its Brexit way. Can Germany really trust Trump, Le Pen and the Brexiters to risk nuclear annihilation for the sake of Germany or for the sake of Poland? Maybe not.

If so, the logical conclusion could be Germany needs its own nukes. And the same kind of thinking can be happening in Japan, can be happening in South Korea, can be happening in more and more places, which is extremely dangerous, because the more fingers you have on these red buttons, chances grow that somewhere, sometime, somebody would press the button, with terrible consequences for the whole of humankind. button with terrible consequences for the whole of humankind. Nuclear weapons play a very double role here in this war. On the one hand, they prevent, for better or worse, I'm not sure, they prevent the entry of NATO into this conflict.

If Russia had no nuclear weapons, I think it was a very high chance that either NATO or at least some members of NATO like Poland would have intervened. On the other hand, if Putin is allowed to win, then the lesson for many countries around the world, including in Europe, as we just discussed, would be we need our own nukes. Right. Well, what do you see about the forces of globalization and de-globalization now with respect to... I mean, this was not only a story of what Russia invading Ukraine did to our minds, but this is obviously what COVID did as well. When we noticed that our supply chain was no longer reliable when everyone was faced with the same emergency. Again, this is part of a peace dividend unraveling for us, because obviously it's more expensive if you

need to vertically integrate much of what you care about economically. Where do you see that going? And is that something we should be resisting? It seems like the normative lesson you would want to draw here is that while some of this may be necessary, I mean, why it may be necessary for Germany to think about doubling or tripling its military budget now, and that seems appropriate, and it's also appropriate for them not to be dependent upon Russia for natural gas, several moves ahead, all of this begins to look like a more divided world, a world that's predicated far more fundamentally, even explicitly, on a loss of trust. And trust is a good thing. Trust is something we want, we want to maximize. And yet, it's unraveling here geopolitically. And again, this also links it back to the internal divisions of the culture war you

were discussing, because perhaps the most salient variable, right and left politically here, has been a total breakdown in trust of institutions. The far left and the far right agree about one thing, that you can't trust the mainstream media, you can't trust mainstream science, you can't trust corporations, certainly. And there's this epidemic of contrarianism that is being leveraged, which is being sold psychologically to people as a kind of skepticism. It's kind of like, do your own research, right? But it's actually not skepticism. It's skepticism about the mainstream narrative always and everywhere. You have people who will deride the New York Times as fake news, and they assume that

a corporation like Pfizer will always lie to them about their data, and yet they will trust something they get on a Substack newsletter about alternative medicine without blinking. So it's not skepticism proper, it's quite asymmetrical. But I got to think that civilizationally, the larger project here is for us to find some pathway back to trust, you know, both within and outside of our respective countries. Without trust, both on a national level and on the international level, civilization collapses. Trust is the glue that holds everything together. And trust in institutions.

I mean, not trust in the hundred people you know personally. You can't build a nation of 300 million people or a world of almost 8 billion people if you only trust the 100 people you know personally. How do you trust people you don't know personally? This is where institutions come into the picture. And again, without institutions, there is no civilization. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes

of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.