English · Chapter 14
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
"Humility" is a chapter from Yuval Noah Harari's book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), in which each chapter takes up one pressing question of our time. Harari, born in 1976, is an Israeli historian who teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is best known for Sapiens and Homo Deus, books that trace the whole sweep of human history in plain, accessible prose. In this essay he asks why every nation believes it stands at the centre of the human story, and he answers with a plea for humility. He is unusually candid: he uses his own Jewish background as his main test case, so that his criticism cannot be dismissed as an attack on other people's traditions.
Harari opens with the observation that most people believe they are the centre of the world and that their culture is the linchpin of human history. He then shows how widely this belief is shared. Greek patriots think history began with Athens, Sparta and Plato. Chinese patriots reply that history really began with the Yellow Emperor and the Xia and Shang dynasties, and that whatever Westerners, Muslims or Indians achieved is only a pale copy of Chinese breakthroughs. Hindu nationalists go further and claim that ancient Indian sages invented aeroplanes and nuclear weapons long before Einstein and the Wright brothers. Pious Muslims dismiss all history before the Prophet Muhammad as largely irrelevant and see everything after the revelation of the Quran as revolving around the Muslim community, while Turkish, Iranian and Egyptian nationalists each insist that their own nation was the fountainhead of Islam. The British, French, Germans, Americans, Russians and Japanese believe that without them the world would still be barbaric and immoral. The Aztecs believed that without the sacrifices they performed each year, the sun would not rise and the universe would fall apart.