human values in 21st century essay writing

Essay on Role of Human Values in 21st Century

Students are often asked to write an essay on Role of Human Values in 21st Century in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Role of Human Values in 21st Century

Introduction.

Human values are essential elements that guide our behavior and decisions. They are the foundation of our character and influence our actions.

Importance in the 21st Century

In the 21st century, human values like honesty, respect, and empathy are more important than ever. These values help us to communicate effectively, understand others, and build strong relationships.

Role in Society

Human values guide us in making ethical decisions and contribute to a harmonious society. They encourage us to respect diversity and promote peace.

In conclusion, human values play a critical role in shaping our world. They help us to live together in harmony, making the world a better place.

250 Words Essay on Role of Human Values in 21st Century

In the 21st century, characterized by rapid technological advancements, globalization, and cultural amalgamation, human values hold paramount importance. They serve as the foundation for building harmonious societies and foster a sense of responsibility, empathy, and respect among individuals.

The Necessity of Human Values

The significance of human values has escalated in the contemporary world due to the increasing interdependence of societies. Values like empathy, respect, and tolerance are vital in fostering global harmony. They facilitate understanding and acceptance of diverse cultures, thereby mitigating conflicts and promoting peaceful coexistence.

Human Values and Technology

With the digital revolution, the world has witnessed a surge in ethical dilemmas. Issues like data privacy, digital discrimination, and cyberbullying have raised concerns about the role of human values in technology. Upholding values like honesty, integrity, and respect for privacy is crucial in ensuring ethical use of technology.

Human Values in Education

Incorporating human values in education is instrumental in shaping responsible global citizens. Education should not just focus on cognitive development, but also on fostering values like honesty, empathy, and social responsibility. This holistic approach can help shape a balanced society, ensuring sustainable development.

In conclusion, human values are the bedrock of a harmonious 21st century society. They guide our actions, influence our decisions, and define our relationship with technology and each other. As we stride towards a more interconnected world, the importance of nurturing and upholding these values cannot be overstated.

500 Words Essay on Role of Human Values in 21st Century

The 21st century, characterized by rapid technological advancements and globalization, has brought about significant changes in the way we live, work, and interact. However, amidst these transformations, the importance of human values has not diminished but rather increased. Human values, such as honesty, respect, compassion, and responsibility, serve as the foundation for a harmonious society. They guide our actions, shape our interactions, and influence our decisions, playing a pivotal role in personal development and societal progress.

The Need for Human Values in the 21st Century

The 21st century has seen a surge in technological innovations, leading to increased connectivity and communication. While these advancements have brought about numerous benefits, they have also ushered in challenges such as cyberbullying, privacy invasion, and misinformation. Herein lies the importance of human values like respect for others’ privacy, honesty in communication, and responsibility in using technology. These values act as a moral compass, guiding individuals to use technology ethically and responsibly.

The globalization of economies and societies has also led to increased cultural diversity. In this context, values like respect for diversity, tolerance, and empathy become crucial for peaceful coexistence. They help in bridging cultural gaps, fostering mutual understanding, and promoting social harmony.

Human Values and Sustainable Development

The 21st century has underscored the need for sustainable development to address environmental issues and ensure the well-being of future generations. Values like respect for nature, responsibility towards the environment, and commitment to sustainable practices are essential to achieve this. They motivate individuals to adopt eco-friendly lifestyles, businesses to implement sustainable practices, and governments to enact environmentally friendly policies.

In the 21st century, education is not just about acquiring knowledge but also about nurturing responsible and compassionate individuals. Incorporating human values in education helps in developing critical thinking, empathy, and ethical decision-making skills among students. It prepares them to face the challenges of the modern world and contribute positively to society.

In conclusion, human values hold immense significance in the 21st century. They guide us in navigating the complexities of the modern world, foster social harmony, promote sustainable development, and shape the future leaders of our society. Despite the rapid changes brought about by technology and globalization, the importance of human values remains constant. They are the pillars that uphold the fabric of society and the guiding light that leads us towards a better future.

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• Values Essay

Essay on Values

Values are principles or moral standards that define someone’s behavior and judgment about what is important in life. Human society cannot sustain itself if there are no values instilled in humans. They are the essence of our personality and influence us to make decisions, deal with people and organize our time and energy in our social and professional life. Values differ greatly among individuals. The character of each person is shaped by the set of values he cherishes. Along with our academic courses, we are also educated to follow certain values throughout life. This value-oriented education helps us to develop the temper of our mind, compassion in our heart, cooperation with others, tolerance towards others, respect for the culture of other groups, etc. Helpfulness, honesty, self-discipline are all examples of personalized values.

Inculcate Values from Childhood

People learn most of their values in the early years of their life from those they see around them. Children absorb these values from their parents and teachers. Families and educators play a crucial role in building values in children and students as they see them as role models. One can also learn about the morals of the good life from the holy and religious books. Childhood and the teenage period is the most crucial phase in a person’s life because it is at this time that one cultivates most of his normal principles or values. Human values are formed by different stages and incidents in one’s life, especially in teenage and college life. Education without values tends to make a man miserable. Hence, it becomes of the utmost importance to impart correct and positive values among children and students. 

Diminishing of Values in Modern Times

In modern times, people have become extremely self-centered and have forgotten their instincts. They run behind success and want to win at any cost. It has become a rat race and humans have become mechanical like robots without feelings and values. They have become heartless and lack morals. Success may come to us but in the end, we do not feel a sense of fulfillment because of the lack of values within us. It is very important to taste success in life by keeping values at the top of anything else. This will give us joy from the inside that can never be destroyed. Values such as sharing, patience, hard work, curiosity, politeness, kindness, integrity, and other good behavioral attitudes help us to get through in life. These positive instincts will bring true success in life. One can never feel happiness and peace if one tries to build a castle at the cost of someone else’s happiness. Good nature never allows one to perform under pressure or greed. It is important to have a sharp and bright mind but it is far more important to have a good heart. 

Importance of Values in Life

Value creation is an ongoing process. It also means amending one’s wrong behavior. Schools and colleges must conduct regular counselling sessions and moral education classes to help in this regard. Apart from this, since early childhood, parents and guardians should talk about the importance of values with their children. 

Teaching children to help in household activities, making them share their toys and other stuff with their siblings, teaching them to respect their grandparents, etc., help in inculcating some most important values like patience and sharing among them. 

Participation in school activities like organizing events, doing group projects results in students learning values like adjustment, cooperation, perseverance and tolerance. There are also values fundamental to identifying one’s culture. 

Values Important for Society

As human values play a vital role in society, they are regarded as the basis for human beings to lead better life. Hence, the importance of values in a civilized society is immense. People with the right values in life will be a pillar for the development of society and the nation. They will not only go in the right direction themselves but will also teach others to do the same. With the right beliefs and values, one can make the right decisions in life. Being humble, empathetic towards others, self-discipline, having courage and integrity will not help one to climb the ladder of success but also make one strong so that he can make breakthroughs in all obstacles and challenges in life.

An individual's values determine the decisions that he or she makes. Using these opposing things as a basis, an individual must choose between two things. The life of someone with good values is always prosperous, whereas a person with bad values is a liability to society. Individuals' values are shaped by the schools they attend, their parents, their homes, colleagues, and friends.

A child can be made into a good person by being molded and motivated. If one were to follow such a path, they would be prevented from engaging in corrupt practices. This prevents him or her from leading an unethical life. This gives him or her a deeper understanding of what is right and wrong. In an ideal world, a person should have all moral values in place, be disciplined, and have good manners. Life in an ideal world would be simple. Life is rich and luxurious in that respect.

Values should be instilled from a Young Age

Most people learn their values from the people around them in the first few years of their lives. Parents and teachers help instill these values in children. Educators and parents play an important role in the development of values in students, as the latter view them as role models. The holy and religious books can also instruct the reader about good morals. During childhood and adolescence, a person forms the majority of the values that she or he uses in everyday living. Values are formed by different phases and incidents in a person's life, especially as they develop in the teenage and college years. Man can become miserable without values. Educating children and students about correct and positive values becomes extremely important. 

Values have diminished in Modern Times

Modern society has become extremely self-centered and has forgotten its instincts. Success is the ultimate goal, and they will do anything to win. People are becoming more robotic and valueless like robots, and they have turned into a rat race. Their morals have become skewed and they have become heartless. Even if we achieve success, we may not feel fulfilled because we lack moral values. Keeping values at the top of our priorities is vital for tasteful success in life. Doing so will give us inner happiness that we can never lose. In life, values like supporting each other, being patient, hardworking, curious, being polite, being kind, being honest, being true, and having integrity will help us succeed. We must apply these traits to succeed in the world of work. Building a castle at the expense of the happiness of others will never bring happiness and peace. It is inconceivable for a good-natured person to perform under pressure or greed. The richness of a good heart far outweighs the importance of a sharp and bright mind.

Values are Important in Life

The process of creating value is ongoing. To create value, one must also rectify undesirable behavior. Counseling programs and moral education classes in schools and colleges are helpful in this respect. Moreover, parents and guardians need to talk to their children about values from early childhood. 

Children are taught some very important values including sharing and patience by helping with household chores, sharing their toys and other belongings with their siblings, respecting their grandparents, etc. 

Students learn values such as adjustment, cooperation, perseverance, and tolerance through school activities such as organizing events, doing group projects. Cultural values are also essential to understanding oneself. 

Society's Values

Considering that human values are regarded as a basis for achieving a better quality of life, they are considered an essential part of society. A civilized society, therefore, places great importance on values. In order to develop society and the country, people should have the right values in their lives. Those who follow the right course will not only lead themselves in the right direction but will also instruct others. Making the right choices in life is possible with the right beliefs and values. The attributes of humility, empathy, self-discipline, courage, and integrity not only enable one to succeed in life but will also help one to overcome obstacles and develop resilience in the face of challenges.

Values as Characteristics

The value of something is always determined by many factors. Although some values might differ from culture to culture, some values have remained intact for centuries. Cultures and eras may have different values. Women with moral values were previously considered to be expected to stay at home and not express their opinions, but this has changed over time. Values are largely determined by culture and society. Our childhood years are the time when we imbibe values that will stay with us for the rest of our lives.

When it comes to valuing something, the family is our top priority. Our values influence our choices in life. They are rarely altered. You can always tell who someone is by the values they possess. An individual's personality and attitude are constantly determined by his values.

We learn about some good and bad actions through education, but we learn how to distinguish between them by virtue of values. An educational experience should be as rich in moral values and character as possible. Education filled with values can empower a student to become virtuous. With values-laden education, poverty, corruption, and unemployment can be eliminated while social ills are banished. Having high values instills self-motivation and helps a person progress in the right direction. 

Respect for elders, kindness, compassion, punctuality, sincerity, honesty and good manners are important values. Little ones are often seen throwing rocks and garages at animals, pelting stones at animals on the roadside, teasing animals, and bullying their friends and younger siblings. They might ultimately commit big crimes in the future if no steps are taken to check on these activities.

People with high moral values are respected in society. That contributes to their spiritual development. Valuable characteristics define a person as a whole. The path of righteousness motivates people to reach their goals by following all good values. A person is also responsible for instilling values in the upcoming generations. It is important that people never stray from their morals and always motivate others to pay attention to the same. 

Education teaches about good and bad actions while values help us to differentiate between them. Real education should come with moral values and character. Education with values can lead a person to the path of virtue. Education laden with values can help to eradicate poverty, corruption, and unemployment and remove social ills. A person can be self-motivated and advance in the right direction only when he is instilled with high values. 

FAQs on Values Essay

1. What Do You Understand By Values?

Values are principles or moral standards that define someone’s behaviour and judgment about what is important in life.

2. How Can Parents and Teachers Help Children to Learn Values of Life?

Parents and teachers must teach children about values of life with their own life experiences. They should discuss the moral values taught in the holy and religious books. Teaching them to help each other by doing household chores, sharing toys and other stuff with their siblings and respecting their elders and grandparents will inculcate good values in their lives. Participation in school activities like organizing events, doing group projects result in students learning values like adjustment, cooperation, perseverance and tolerance.

3. What are the Behavioural Attitudes a Man Must Have?

A man must have humility, empathy, courage, integrity, kindness, perseverance, and self-discipline as behavioural attitudes.

4. How is Value Important for Society?

People with the right values in life will be a pillar for the development of society and the nation. They will not only go in the right direction themselves but will also teach others to do the same. With the right beliefs and values, one can make the right decisions in life. Being humble, empathetic towards others, self-discipline, having courage and integrity will not help one to climb the ladder of success but also make one strong so that he can make breakthroughs in all obstacles and challenges in life.

5. How can We inculcate Values into Young Children in Five Innovative Ways?

Children can be inculcated with values in five innovative ways:

Show movies and pictures that inspire.

Organizing.

Providing the opportunity for Service.

A self-reflection exercise.

Observation. 

6. What are the Most Important Values that Need to be Taught to Children?

Be respectful of elders.

A willingness to sacrifice.

Education is of great importance.

Love for the family.

The ability to persevere.

Embrace the spirit of religion.

The act of being charitable.

The ability to be honest.

Being self-disciplined can be rewarding.

 7. What is the Secret to Becoming Courageous?

A willingness to take on difficult tasks in challenging circumstances. A person's courage can be measured by how they deal with fear in difficult or unpleasant situations. Under unfavorable circumstances, it is about facing agony and pain with bravery. In order for this habit to be successful, children must also be involved.

8. How does it Result in a Prosperous Society?

Growing physically and intellectually.

A society free of crime is possible.

Social development.

A boon for the nation.

Make the world a better place.

Eradicating social ills.

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Human rights for the 21st century: by Margaret Atwood, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Dave Eggers and more

The right to live offline, to self-define, to choose, to a healthy planet ... as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 70, leading authors reimagine it for today

The right to be a person, not a thing Margaret Atwood

People, we have a problem. Or rather two problems. The first is a matter of definition: who or what is a human being, entitled to the rights spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? The second is the old mind-body split: what if these two components have different wills?

I illustrate by means of the Ohio Republicans, who have recently moved to declare motherhood mandatory , and also to define any fertilised egg – whether in a woman’s body or in a Petri dish – a person under the law. Causing a non-living condition in such an entity would be murder, incurring the death penalty. Even if by miscarriage, it could be manslaughter: a woman might spend years in prison for falling off a horse, like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind . (These same Republicans have plans to declare an acorn an oak tree: anyone destroying an acorn would incur the full wrath of the environmental tree-protection forces.)

But the Libertarians too must be satisfied: the rights of the individual must be respected! This could be solved by reverting to the 19th century and declaring women to be adults in respect to responsibilities, but children in respect to rights. Though that might not wash today, considering all the new rights children have been granted.

However, a more sophisticated plan is being mulled over, helped by another Republican who declared that pregnant women cannot have been raped, since a woman’s body “shut(s) that whole thing down”. According to this theory, the body is a sort of automaton.

Thus one proposal might be to declare women persons from the neck up, but things from the neck down. The things could then be requisitioned by the state, like parcels of land. In fairness, compensation would have to be paid to the head, at full market value. The head would be, legally, a she; the body would be an it.

This will annoy some of the female heads, and squawking will ensue; but anti-squawking legislation should take care of that! (Not applicable to chickens.)

However, with advances in transplant surgery a solution satisfactory to all could be legislated: a mandatory Head Exchange! Those heads that don’t want their bodies to have children would be made to switch with those heads who’d like to have children, but whose bodies refuse to comply. Joy all round! (These lawmakers would surely pass a sub-clause changing the words of “I’m So Pretty”, from West Side Story , to “I’m So Itty”. This would reinforce the message to women that their bodies are things, and have no human rights.)

People, I don’t recommend any of this. It would go pear-shaped very fast (no innuendo intended). Instead of happiness there would be strife. Imagine the arguments that would take place over the allocations of heads and bodies! Bribery and political influence would play their part – and picture the lawsuits concerning bodies that malfunction. Some heads – I hesitate to say – might declare a wish to get pregnant simply in order to obtain a body more to their liking. What uproar!

To forestall this sad state of affairs, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should add a clause concerning the Right to Refuse Ittiness. In view of the new findings that the intestinal tract constitutes a second brain, this clause would reject the mind-body split and declare the neck a protected area, much like the Korean demilitarised zone. Problem solved!

Not that such a clause will do much good in Ohio, where they don’t seem so keen on the universal declaration in any case.

The right to an inhabitable planet Bill McKibben

It makes sense that the original Declaration of Human Rights ignores the Earth – the Earth was the backdrop to the human story. Against that backdrop, for thousands of years, the great dramas had been carried out: tyrannies risen and fallen, wars won and lost, ordinary people oppressed and rebelling. The idea of the “environment” would barely have made sense at the time – obviously the physical systems of the planet were necessary to grow crops, obviously the Earth’s resources could be hoarded or shared. But it was the scenery, not the play. As we got better at storing food and fighting germs, and as world wars terrified us with their uncontrollable violence, the physical world seemed to be receding ever further. We needed instead to focus on what humans could do to each other, for better and for worse.

And now that has shifted, decisively. Though all the concerns of the universal declaration – intolerance, poverty, ill health, the lack of education, suffrage, work – remain as acute as ever, they have been joined by an overriding if often unspoken dread. We have begun (slowly, perhaps too late) to understand what we can do to the Earth, and what in turn that damaged Earth can do to us.

It was a recognition that began to dawn in the years just after 1948 – by the early 1960s Rachel Carson had begun the vital task (in Silent Spring ) of knocking the shine off “progress”. It’s given rise to one of the greatest movements the world has ever seen, this thing awkwardly called “environmentalism” that has united people across continents and faiths and races. But it still exerts a tenuous claim on power: no one “denies” war or hunger or unemployment, but many of the world’s paramount leaders continue to pretend we cannot damage the planet .

That pretence, of course, is rooted in the wealth and power of precisely those humans who do the most damage. The oil industry, for instance, long the richest single force on this globe, and one that has spent a generation insisting that climate change isn’t real, even as the Arctic melted and the sea began to rise. Or agribusiness, or the chemical industry, or many others – all of whom insist that they are merely meeting the human needs enshrined in the declaration, for housing and energy and dinner.

And so it is necessary to postulate a new right: that humans must be protected against those forces that would damage the Earth’s systems. Indeed, none of the other rights can be guaranteed on an unstable planet: a heating planet endangers everything from food supplies to political freedom. In some sense, securing the physical Earth is the first order of business now, not an add-on.

But it is a complicated right, one that comes with a corresponding responsibility not to do that damage ourselves. Or not any more than we absolutely must. And it is complicated further by the fact that we must think not only about the humans of the moment, but the humans of the future as well: the Peloponnesian war is not still claiming human lives because it ended 2,500 years ago, but our current destruction of the climate will be impoverishing people for 10 times that long.

It is complicated further still by the fact that it’s not just humans who are laid waste, but the rest of creation. We have apparently wiped out more than 60% of the animals that shared the world with us when the declaration was written – it is possible that the moment has come to expand our vision of who deserves protection.

This “right” is not an aspiration but a requirement. If we mistreat each other for another 70 years that will be hideous, but humans of 2088 will still be able to change. If we mistreat the Earth for another seven decades, implacable physics and chemistry and biology will write the next chapter in our history.

The right to live free from blame Anne Enright

The right to live free from blame for the fact that someone or something has made a man feel small or unimportant, for example if they are not King of the Entire World, if they have not won the medal, or made the money, if they have not beaten the opposition in the last 24 hours, even if the opposition is in their own head. The right to live radiantly free of a man’s feelings about all this, even if you are the person who makes their dinner, or the person who does not make their dinner but probably should because they really need something from you, they are feeling so undervalued, and maybe sex will do.

The right to freedom from blame if you are a woman who sleeps with a man or does not sleep with a man, who flatters or fails to flatter a man who is feeling the grip of shame or mortality because he is not the poshest, or the strongest, or the most eloquent, or in some way the most important person in the world, or at least in the room.

The right not to get hit for all the above.

The right not to get raped ditto.

The right not to make anyone’s dinner but your own.

The right not to be compared with a man’s mother, if she was lovely, or confused with a man’s mother if she was not – this especially if she made him feel small or unimportant or mortal at the age when every child deserves to feel like the King of the Entire World. We are sorry you missed all this, or that this phase ended abruptly or badly for you, it is not our fault. We were not there. Yes we have breasts and no, despite the fact that these are actual breasts and therefore very confusing for you, we were not there.

The right to bodily autonomy, of course.

The right to live free from a man’s need to use you as a way to bond with other men, by turning you into an object of shame or derision.

The right to call out the difference between wanting and possessing, between liking and taking, looking and touching. The right to your own ideas, even if a man at the meeting likes them and therefore thinks that they are his. The right to your own body, even if a man at a meeting likes it and therefore thinks it is his. The right to both these things even if everyone else at the meeting agrees with him for reasons that are completely hidden from their conscious minds and also inexplicable and strange.

The right to call it out when a man takes something and holds you responsible for the theft – of your work, your talent, your body, your sweetness or sexuality, your good thing. The right to tell this to the world without being accused of masochism or greed or of wearing the wrong underwear, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or of wanting a job, of wanting to be hurt, of wanting it, whatever it is, sex, or power, or humiliation, because when a woman wants a little she gets everything and then some. She gets the blame. The right to hand back the blame.

The right to love a good man, and to love the goodness in men, when they are authoritative and gentle and know who they are.

The right to desire, because your mind is always free.

The right to understand James Bridle

We live in strange times, and we’re actively making them stranger. Volkswagen has been forced to pay out more than €28bn for designing cars that could cheat emissions tests. Political operatives use the unstated fashion choices of voters to microselect for campaign ads. YouTube’s recommendation algorithms are implicated in the radicalisation of flat earthers and ultranationalists. Artificially intelligent machines beat us at games with novel strategies we do not, and cannot, understand. The future is only going to be more confusing. Six years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov proposed his famous Three Laws of Robotics: that a robot must not harm or, through inaction, allow harm to come to any human being; that it must obey orders given to it by human beings where they do not contradict the first law; and that it must protect its own existence to the extent that doing so would not conflict with the first two laws. They’re good laws, but the robots that Asimov imagined were discrete beings, aloof and accountable – and very different from the entangled, ever-present, overwhelmingly sophisticated yet often obscure technologies we actually find ourselves living among today.

Instead of visibly dangerous robots, we have hidden programs inside car engines that poison the atmosphere, prejudiced automation systems for sentencing and job selection, covert data-gathering regimes that sell us out to corporations and political enemies, and proprietary attention-seeking algorithms which distract our attention, and amplify division and conspiracy. If it were robots that were doing all that, a contemporary update to Asimov’s laws might require them to explain themselves to humans, so that we might not be harmed by the fact that most of the time, we have no idea what they’re doing. But really, the onus is on us, not on them.

What then would this requirement look like if framed as a right? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was primarily concerned with interpersonal relationships and mutual understanding; it speaks of “a common understanding of these rights and freedoms” as well as the promotion of “understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups”. But when so many of those relationships are mediated by inscrutable technologies, the understanding required is that of systems, not of one another.

Today we hear a lot about the benefits new technologies such as artificial intelligence and mass automation will bring to our lives, but even those tasked with constructing them have little understanding of the effects they will have on our societies. Lack of understanding – the feeling of being lost and powerless in the world – leads to fear, apathy and rage. It’s hardly surprising then that in these times of technological acceleration and complexity, those are the dominant emotions felt across the globe.

The right to understand, then, would be a useful addition to what is expected for us today. A demand both for better education – not just in technology, but in all forms of critical thinking – allied with the requirement that those deploying complex and life-affecting technologies must consult with those subject to them, engineer them for transparency, and actively work to make them comprehensible and accountable. Only through mass understanding, and thus mass engagement and mass participation, might we hope to get a firmer grip on an increasingly strange and inscrutable world.

The right to live free from discrimination Reni Eddo-Lodge

Everyone has the right to fulfil their potential, free from discrimination.

It’s time to recognise drastic racial disparities in our institutions for what they are – a threat to human potential. Discrimination places an insidious stranglehold on what a person can be, and how far they can go. It limits individual lives, marginalises talent, and hinders society.

No child should ever have to be warned that in the worlds of school and employment, they’ll have to work twice as hard for half the reward. That this lesson must be instilled in a child of colour before they strike out on their own is an indication that we still live with drastic inequality.

That same child should never have to look at leadership and decide that it isn’t for them, because leaders don’t look like them, or come from where they come from.

Not everyone aspires to achieve great things. Each of our understandings of “great” is different. A fair society doesn’t demand that you should be a leader, but it certainly doesn’t try to hold you back if you want to be. It won’t tell you that you’re too poor, or too female, or too black to be where you want to be, or do what you’d like to do.

Outside of aspiration, every person deserves fair treatment inside each institution that we have to interact with to survive – employment, education, housing and healthcare. You deserve to live your life without being blown off course by the distraction of racism.

No burden should be placed on the shoulders of marginalised people to live a double consciousness, in which we know the reality of discrimination, but never speak of it in order to keep the peace. Your safety and stability should never be reliant on an expectation that you’ll be silent about subtle injustice.

You should never have to make the case to be seen as a full human being. Immigrants and refugees should have the freedom to live a banal and mediocre life in their country of asylum without the threat of being sent back to danger. You shouldn’t have to climb up the side of a building and rescue a toddler to be granted citizenship, because being exceptional is not a passport to being an agreeable refugee.

If you’re a British citizen who is not white, your “not whiteness” should never be provided as an explanation as to why you did a bad thing. The fact that you are not white does not indicate a tendency to doing bad things. Black is not shorthand for bad.

You deserve to live in a society where the life-limiting aspects of discrimination are eliminated. Where your race, gender or class has a nominal effect on your life’s trajectory. Where no one is held back by structural bias.

The right not to work Josh Cohen

Thanks to article 23 of the declaration, we can all claim the right to work. Article 23 also gives us the right to do the work we choose under decent conditions, protected from all the adverse consequences of losing both wages and a sense of human purpose. Oh, and a just living wage, social insurance and the individual and collective safeguarding of workers’ interests.

These precious provisions around the right to work are followed immediately by a recognition of the right to limits on work, or in the words of article 24, “the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay”.

The adjacency of the articles implies their inextricability; the right to work is meaningless in the absence of a right to a life beyond work. Yet survey the landscape of work today, and we find the latter everywhere under assault. For the sweatshop workers of China and Bangladesh , the precarious workforce of our expanding gig economy , even for the chronically enervated workaholic bankers and lawyers of Wall Street and the City , the right to a non-working life has been annulled by the sovereignty of work.

How have we allowed the right to non-work to be so thoroughly undermined? The first point to make is that this is as a predicament of psychology and culture as much as politics and economics. It is rooted in a deeply entrenched conception of the human being as a creature whose substance and meaning lie in work above all. The declaration, in defining the right to non-work in terms of “rest and leisure”, implies that its purpose is to serve the imperatives of work; we rest in order to restore ourselves for work; leisure is the term used for play outside working hours.

While the declaration, in other words, clearly recognises the essential place of work in human self-definition, it recognises non-work only in the negative – as an interval in or limit on the state of work. What if non-work could gain a new, positive and substantive place in the declaration? If we human beings could be established by it as creatures who paint, sing, speculate idly or stare out of the window not because it restores our working batteries, but because the state of idleness is its own value?

The British psychoanalyst DW Winnicott saw us as composed of two fundamental elements: “doing” and “being”. His point was that as we grow more distant from the daily reveries of infancy and childhood, we define ourselves increasingly in terms of doing at the expense of being. But neglecting the dimension of being, he argued, can make us psychically and physically ill. “After being,” he writes in a typically terse formulation, “doing … but first, being.”

Could the declaration find a place among the fundamental human rights for the right to be? This is to be distinguished from the right to life, which secures the bare fact of existence. The right to be is the right to a space freed from the imperative of doing, from aim, purpose, productivity. It is at least as essential as action to what the declaration calls “the free development of personality”.

The right to be has as much bearing on political and economic justice as it does on human health and inner security. If non-productive, aimless time and space is protected as a basic human right, it becomes that bit more difficult for, say, Chinese corporate masters to insist that two five-minute toilet breaks in a 16-hour shift constitute a sufficiently “reasonable” limit on working hours.

“There is nothing,” wrote the great American writer Henry David Thoreau , “not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay to life itself, than this incessant business.” Let us declare freedom from this incessant business; call it a right to non-work, a right to be, a right to poetry and philosophy; or indeed, a right to life itself.

The right to define yourself Olivia Laing

In 1910, the German doctor and sexual reformer Magnus Hirschfeld calculated that there were 43m possible combinations of gender and sexuality. His thinking came out of extensive clinical experience. Over the years he had interviewed thousands of people, whose diversity of genitalia, physical appearance and sexual desires astounded him. “The number of actual and imaginable sexual varieties is almost unending,” he wrote. “In each person there is a different mixture of manly and womanly substances, and as we cannot find two leaves alike on a tree, then it is highly unlikely that we will find two humans whose manly and womanly characteristics exactly match in kind and number.”

Hirschfeld’s words are radical even now, though versions of them were repeated right through the 20th century. You can, for example, find very similar statements in Virginia Woolf , who thought of herself as not quite one thing or another, who loved both men and women and who was perennially at sea between the fixed poles of gender. Excited by a newspaper story about a pretty young woman who became a man, in 1928 she channelled her feelings into Orlando , her ebullient masterpiece, a novel bent on unsettling binary notions of gender and identity. “Different though the sexes are, they intermix,” it reports. “In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.”

Sexual desire and gender identity are the base notes of bodily experience and yet the wish to organise them into categories of right and wrong, permissible and illicit remains overwhelming. The 1948 Declaration of Human Rights safeguards the right to a nation and the right to be safe from imprisonment, but not the right to express one’s own personal experience of gender; nor to choose, within the absolute limits of consent, with whom and how one wishes to conduct a sexual life. A body can be a prison too. You can exile or incarcerate someone simply by defining them against their own living sense of who they are, by forbidding them love or erotic range. And then, of course, you can make their life a misery, regulate their clothes, their use of lavatories and changing rooms, stop them being able to work or marry.

Anyone who’s read the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance list of deaths will know the stakes are high. In August 2013, to take a single story, Islan Nettles , a 21-year-old transgender woman, was beaten to death in Harlem. Her assailant was a young man who had been flirting with her when his friends told him Islan had been born a boy. “I just didn’t want to be fooled,” he told the police.

What rights would have helped Islan? Not so much a right to self-define, which can be made to sound arbitrary and whimsical, as a right not to be forcibly defined by the state, to have a gender identity imposed from outside, to be told that what you aren’t is natural, and what you are is deviant, wrong, illicit, fake. The right to have the stays of gender unloosed, the right to breathe. The right to transition, to shift, to exceed or refuse the expectations and constraints that have attached to the categories of man and woman. The right to dress in whatever clothes one chooses. The right to love whoever one chooses. The right to be different. The right to be neither. The right to be both.

The right to a life offline Dave Eggers

The framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights couldn’t foresee that in the 21st century, we would need two sets of rights – one for our lives in the physical world, and one for our lives online. But the beautiful thing is that we don’t, actually, need to rewrite the UDHR for the digital world. We might need an amendment or two, but to begin with, we only need to recognise that the same rights we expect in the physical world should be afforded in the online world, too.

Article 12 of the declaration states: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, no attacks upon his honour or reputation.” Online, countless social media platforms, websites and apps may violate users’ privacy, tracking our movements online, studying and manipulating our digital behaviour, and intercepting and monetising our correspondence.

Article 26 of the declaration states that “Everyone has a right to education” and that “Education shall be free”. Increasingly in elementary and secondary schools, students are required to access, complete and submit their homework using digital tools. Given a laptop can cost at least $1,000, and having wifi at home requires monthly payments to private providers, education in such a situation is no longer free.

Later in article 26, the UDHR asserts that “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” Given the vast wealth of research that proves that increased screen time for children and teenagers leads to higher rates of depression and even suicide, schools that push their pupils into more screen usage are doing three counterproductive things simultaneously: they’re forcing young people on to the screens that have been proved unequivocally to be addictive and harmful; they’re making learning more difficult; and they’re creating a two-tiered system, whereby those wealthy enough for computers and phones and wifi at home have an easier time accessing their education, while lower income students are left to scramble and to feel inferior.

Article 27 asserts that “Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.” The original sin of the digital world was the well-intentioned belief that everything online needed to be free. This led to the hollowing out of the creative middle class, as musicians, journalists, photographers and countless other creators no longer controlled their work, and consumers no longer expected to pay for it. Thus we have now had two generations that can’t conceive of the notion of paying .99 cents to own a song. Because their music is given away for free — or next to free — online, musicians have to tour incessantly to make a living, or else be forced to sell their work for use in car commercials.

Articles 28 and 29 are probably the most poignant here. They state that “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order” and that “Everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.” Currently the digital world does a poor job in achieving any of these objectives. Whereas laws of civility govern the physical world and lawmakers and law-enforcers endeavour to keep us safe from harassment and threats, few such protections are afforded online. The digital world is anarchic, and largely without recognition of rights, public order or general welfare. It’s every person for him or herself. That is in opposition to the soul of the UDHR, which envisions a latticework of rights and responsibilities of all humans – one that might keep us responsible to each other and invested in our mutual wellbeing.

This is not the feeling we get while online. So the digital world has some work to do. If we add to the UDHR a handful of amendments necessary and specific to the digital world, we just might create a framework within which all but the most outlaw tech entities might operate. Here are two amendments: we need to clarify that all surveillance is inherently abhorrent and should be undertaken only in the interest of law enforcement, and even then, only after an independent judiciary signs off on that surveillance. All other dossier-creation is inherently immoral and stands in clear violation of everything that the UDHR states and implies. If we eliminate all tracking from the web – and all tracking is surveillance, after all – we’d be well on our way to a digital world that actually conformed to the spirit of the UDHR.

Most important of all, though, is that we need to ensure that humans in the 21st century will be allowed to enjoy analogue lives. When a student needs a $1,000 device to do her homework, her fundamental rights are being violated. When any government service requires the ownership of a smartphone to gain access to basic services, then their rights are being compromised. Scientific studies have proved that every additional hour we spend in front of screens makes us less happy and less healthy. So we must put the brakes on moving every last element of our lives into the digital realm. We must ensure that humans can live offline as much as humanly possible.

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Impacts on Human Beings in the 21st Century Essay

With the progress in the technology industry, humanity has begun to use the possibilities of innovation widely in the 21st century. The boundaries between cities and countries have blurred due to advanced trade ties and convenient and fast communication, which, in turn, has led to transformations in the principles of knowledge sharing (Makarova et al. 112). Freer conditions of interaction have opened up opportunities for the adoption of cultural values and scientific developments. At the same time, the factor of globalization in various areas has affected society negatively, causing the problem of mass migration and barriers for small participants in the trade market.

The increased power of corporations is directly proportional to the weakened development potential of smaller companies and businesses, which is expressed in monopolization. Globalization, communication, and biotechnology are the phenomena that have had the largest impact on human beings in the 21st century because these factors have transformed traditional notions of distance between people, shaped new economic trends, and expanded understanding of the role of innovation.

Three key reasons support these claims about the proposed factors. Firstly, globalization, communication, and biotechnology have become an impetus for introducing new forms of interaction characterized by advanced tools and means of cooperation. Secondly, these aspects have directly influenced political trends, changing the geopolitical balance. Finally, globalization, communication, and biotechnology have become the result of many years of progress in the technology industry, which can be considered a natural outcome of continuous work on innovation.

Globalization, communication, and biotechnology have become the drivers for the emergence of new interaction algorithms implemented through advanced cooperation systems. Applications for remote communication, especially those used during the COVID-19 pandemic, are an example of such progress. Their use has made it possible to bring together people who are far apart (Sobaih et al. 6520). Another example is the strengthened trade ties between countries and continents.

The ability to control supply chains and financial transactions effectively demonstrates this strengthening. One can also note the optimization of the seller-buyer relationship improved due to the factors considered. Personal feedback, open communication, fast delivery of goods, and other positive aspects are the consequences of the changes. The emergence of tools for remote communication has become one of the clear results of progress, thereby eliminating the issues of distance in both ordinary and work interactions. The same can be said about strengthened trade ties; state borders are not a barrier to cooperation. The improved quality of service achieved through innovation increases competition between merchants and, at the same time, stimulates market development.

The aspects under consideration have largely transformed geopolitical trends and changed the balance of power. Countries with strong trade potential have developed economies successfully, reaching leading positions. The example of China confirms the importance of working to bring modern developments into production and trade (Afshan and Ali 84). Superpowers have strengthened their positions and become opinion leaders, like the United States of America. Due to active imports and free supply channels, the country has acquired the status of a global economic and political coordinator.

The economic crises of the 21st century have become an occasion to reform the traditional principles of control over state budgets. Numerous regulations and laws have emerged related to antitrust programs and other aspects of control. The emergence of individual states in leading positions is an important indicator of the role of globalization and innovation in view of the gap in economic development indicators. The positions of some countries have become dominant, which is manifested not only in trade but also in political aspects, for instance, voting rights in international agencies. Reforming the principles of state control can be considered a natural solution in the context of gaps between individual participants in financial markets.

The continuous drive toward innovation has resulted in globalization, communication, and biotechnology being the key impacts on humanity in the 21st century. Individual companies have developed through the use of innovative developments. This progress has been driven by investment in biotechnology research and the promotion of digital tool skills (Lavrynenko et al. 2336). Various social sectors, including medicine, education, and other fields, apply technological innovations to increase productivity. For instance, artificial intelligence in medical education allows for utilizing advanced training and visualization algorithms (Paranjape et al. e16048).

The work of global companies to continuously optimize business models is another example of innovation. Planning programs, machine learning, and other support mechanisms ease decision-making, which, in turn, improves productivity. The involvement of innovative developments by companies is a natural process in the context of the global trend toward optimization. The application of advanced developments in numerous areas indicates a close connection of innovations with different areas, which speaks to the mass idea of ​​adapting to updated operating modes. Continuous optimization is also a natural trend and suggests that modern developments are indispensable for addressing various development objectives.

Globalization, communication, and biotechnology are the concepts that can rightly be considered the most significant factors that have influenced social development in the 21st century due to the special role of innovation, transformed remote interaction, and updated economic trends. These aspects have become an incentive for the emergence of new forms of cooperation, changed global political trends, and determined continuous movement toward innovation.

By evaluating examples from world practice, the ideas about the significance of the phenomena under consideration are proved, despite the ambiguous theses about the negative role of globalization and the dominance of the corporate development model in economies. In a general context, the analysis allows for reflection on crucial shifts in the development of civilization in recent decades and emphasizes the special function of technological progress as an incentive to changes in various areas.

Works Cited

Afshan, Sahar, and Panira Ali. “Balance of Power in the Era of Technological Globalization.” Pakistan Horizon , vol. 74, no. 2/3, 2021, pp. 81-101.

Lavrynenko, Alina, et al. “Managing Skills for Open Innovation: The Case of Biotechnology.” Management Decision , vol. 56, no. 6, 2018, pp. 1336-1347.

Makarova, Elena A., et al. “The Role of Globalization and Integration in Interdisciplinary Research, Culture and Education Development.” Journal of History Culture and Art Research , vol. 8, no. 1, 2019, pp. 111-127.

Paranjape, Ketan, et al. “Introducing Artificial Intelligence Training in Medical Education.” JMIR Medical Education , vol. 5, no. 2, 2019, p. e16048.

Sobaih, Abu Elnasr E., et al. “Responses to COVID-19 in Higher Education: Social Media Usage for Sustaining Formal Academic Communication in Developing Countries.” Sustainability , vol. 12, no. 16, 2020, p. 6520.

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Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

A collection of new essays by an interdisciplinary team of authors that gives a comprehensive introduction to race and ethnicity. Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are , but rather sets of actions that people do . Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

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Human Values – Concept and Importance

Human values are the core values that make up our personality and define how we act in life. These values are very important as they make up who we are and are what guide us through life. The values that we hold determine who we want to be as well as how we live our lives and the decisions that we make on an everyday basis. Without these values, our lives would become chaotic and there would be no meaning behind any of the things that we do or say.

All humans have these values in some way or another, and it is up to us to choose which values we hold most dear. The 20th century philosopher Martha Nussbaum puts forth a list of ten innate human values: truth, beauty, justice, courage, temperance, wisdom, love, equality, modesty and hope. These are values that all humans should try to uphold as they go through their day-to-day lives. It is also important for society at large to recognize these values and make them explicit in social systems, institutions and organizations so that people will always know what they stand for.

Importance of Human Values:

The importance of human values is that it provides an understanding of what people find to be important in their lives. There are many different aspects of human values. For example, integrity, morality, and benevolence are all aspects of human values. The value system is not static and can change depending on context or social situation. This means that some people have a certain set of values for one context but may have completely different values in another context. One specific aspect of values is the idea of self-esteem. Self-esteem has two forms: internal and external self-esteem. External self-esteem deals with how others perceive you while internal self-esteem deals with how you perceive yourself. If someone has high external esteem, they want to make sure other people think highly of them as well whereas if someone has high internal esteem, they only want other people to like them because they do themselves

Types of Human Values:

The 6 types of human values are autonomy, community, creativity, justice, power and self-direction. These values are the things that motivate us to do what we do and make decisions based on these values.

• Autonomy is the ability to be self-directed and take charge of our own actions. When someone has autonomy they have the freedom to choose their own path in life and they can pursue a career or lifestyle they want without feeling like they are being pushed into something that isn’t for them.
• Community is the sense of belonging and connection to other people. People who value community tend to feel like everyone needs each other to survive and succeed. 
• Creativity is all about having fun with new ideas and thinking outside the box. It’s important because it helps us solve problems in creative ways so we don’t have to rely on old methods that might not work anymore. 
• Justice means fairness for everyone and taking care of those who need it most, even if it costs more than usual.
• Power is the ability to act on one’s desires without interference from others.
• Self-direction refers to making choices and living according to one’s beliefs instead of letting others tell you how to live your life.

Individuals who value this type of human value enjoy exploring opportunities and trying new experiences. These individuals are often drawn to careers that allow them to explore different fields or at least allow them to change careers throughout their lives. Creative individuals may find themselves drawn to professions such as inventors, musicians, architects and filmmakers. Those who value justice usually end up in careers where they serve others such as doctors, lawyers, teachers and social workers. Those who value power will likely go into law enforcement or government positions where they have authority over what happens in society.

What are the main Human Values?

The main Human Values are honesty, fairness, respect, responsibility, caring and citizenship. These values are the core of any human society and they should be applied in every area of life. Honesty is not just telling the truth, but also includes telling people how you feel about them when necessary to maintain their trust. Fairness is not only making sure that everybody has an equal opportunity to play sports or succeed academically, but also means making sure that people are treated equitably within a team or group. Respect goes beyond basic politeness and good manners; it involves recognizing other people’s achievements as well as their differences from ourselves. Responsibility requires us to care for others, but also to do what we say we’re going to do. Caring is not simply providing emotional support for someone who needs it, but acting with concern for their needs even if there is nothing in it for us personally. Citizenship means being loyal citizens of our country, but also promoting justice and peace around the world.

What are Human Values in Ethics?

Human Values in Ethics are concepts that govern how people should act. For example, some Human Values are justice, honesty and kindness. These values can provide a framework for ethical decision-making. One could imagine an individual who is faced with a moral dilemma such as whether to save their family from drowning or rescue one of their friends. In this situation, different human values might dictate which option is preferable. Some may be more interested in selflessness than others and might choose to save the family even though they know they will die while saving them. Others may place great value on loyalty to friends and choose to save their friends even if it means sacrificing their own life.

How do Human Values Influence Daily Life?

Human Values are aspects of life that are important to individuals in their daily lives. These values can be both abstract and concrete, and they can include: love, joy, truth, peace, justice, beauty, and freedom. Human Values influence daily life by directing our attention to what is most important to us as human beings. In turn, these values influence the way we live our everyday lives by helping to determine how we spend our time and energy. For example, if a person’s value is true, then they may want to pursue knowledge or challenge false beliefs with their friends or family members. If a person’s value is justice, then they may want to help someone who has been wronged in some way. Ultimately, these individual Human Values make up an individual’s life philosophy which guides them throughout their journey in this world.

Characteristics of Human Values:

Human values are the things that a person feels are most important in life. For example, family is a human value for some people, while success is a human value for others. The characteristics of human values are what they mean to different people and how they can be applied to real-life situations. People may hold one or more human values as their core values. It is not necessary to have only one set of human values because these can change over time or because one might not have thought about them before.

Nature of Human Values:

Human Values are a topic that is still not completely understood. There are many definitions of Human Values, but the most commonly accepted definition is that Human Values are perspectives or priorities that people use to give meaning to their actions and experiences. The nature of Human Values can be seen as complex and abstract because it deals with how humans experience the world. In this sense, it has an anthropological perspective. People’s experiences shape the way they view things and in turn, these views help define human values. These values are then passed down through socialization. It should be noted that these values may have different meanings for each individual person based on who they interact with and what they see.

Conclusion:

The term human values is a difficult one to define, but they are essentially moral values that apply to all humans. Different cultures will have different sets of human values, but some can be found in every culture. These are things such as equality, freedom, and justice. It may be easier to think of human values as principles or guiding beliefs instead of an organized list. Some people may use a religion’s commandments as their set of human values while others find their values within themselves. Either way, individuals need to know what their own set of human values is because these provide guidelines on how they should behave with other people, at home and at work.

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The 21st century has witnessed an unprecedented transformation in the way people communicate. Rapid technological advancements have reshaped the landscape of communication in the 21st century, enabling instant global connectivity, diverse modes of expression, and new challenges and opportunities. This essay explores the multifaceted nature...

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Beauty in the 21st Century: Embracing Diversity and Empowerment

The concept of beauty has evolved significantly in the 21st century, reflecting a cultural shift towards inclusivity, diversity, and empowerment. No longer confined to narrow standards, beauty in the 21st century celebrates individuality, challenges stereotypes, and embraces a broader range of ideals. This essay explores...

Advantages of 21st Century Learning: A Transformative Educational Landscape

The 21st century has brought about a paradigm shift in education, ushering in a new era of learning that is characterized by innovation, technology integration, and a focus on holistic skill development. The advantages of 21st century learning are manifold, revolutionizing the educational landscape and...

Exploring the Impact of 21st Century Technology

The 21st century has witnessed a technological revolution that has reshaped every facet of human existence. From communication to commerce, education to entertainment, the influence of 21st century technology is pervasive and transformative. This essay delves into the profound impact of technology in this era,...

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The 21st Century Teacher: Education's Transformative

The role of a teacher has evolved significantly in the 21st century, reflecting the dynamic changes in education, technology, and the needs of modern learners. The 21st century teacher is not merely an instructor but a guide, mentor, and facilitator of learning. This essay delves...

Nurturing 21st Century Skills: Preparing for Success in the Modern World

The 21st century is characterized by rapid technological advancements, shifting global dynamics, and a growing need for individuals to possess a distinct set of skills that go beyond traditional academics. The acquisition of 21st century skills has become a critical component of education, enabling individuals...

Transforming Education in the 21st Century

Education in the 21st century has undergone a profound transformation, driven by the rapid advancement of technology, changing societal demands, and a growing recognition of the need for holistic skill development. This essay delves into the landscape of 21st century education, exploring the key features...

The 2020 Mark: Reflecting on a New Decade of Transformation

The transition into the new decade marked by 2020 was a moment of anticipation and reflection. As the previous decade drew to a close, and the dawn of the 2020s emerged, I found myself looking both backward and forward, considering the lessons learned and the...

Digital Piracy as Main Crime of 21st-Century

Humans have been performing illegal activities for years. With today’s 21st-century society being technology, illegal activity within the technological/internet-based realm is a major occurrence. Digital piracy is the illegal trade in software, videos, digital video devices, and music. Piracy occurs when someone other than the...

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John Dewey, and the 21st Century Cinematic Aesthetic Experience 

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To What Extent is NATO Still Relevant in the 21st Century

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Gun Control: The Controversial Issue of the 21st Century

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China's Vision of the Silk Road for the 21st Century

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“To Be Or Not To Be?” How Relevant Is Shakespeare

Shakespeare has been dead for over four hundred years now. Four hundred two years now to be exact. Many people recognize the name William Shakespeare but when was the last time you have read one of his poems or stories or even watched one of...

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Data In The 21St Century And Its Importance

In the 21st century, globalization is the spreading of everything around the world, especially the internet. Now, internet has become an important tool for the business success. The internet has helped the organizations to gathers and records data. In the 21st century, data is the...

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Obsolescence Of Major War Between Great Powers In The 21st Century

Ever since the collapse of Communism in 1991, the international society has been experiencing perhaps the most peaceful era in history. However, others argue that threats to national security have not yet been completely eliminated and the potential for the next major war still prevails....

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Anthropological Pieces To Understand A Culture

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Best topics on 21St Century

1. Navigating the 21st Century: Understanding of Modern Learning

2. The Essential Role of Human Values in the 21st Century

3. The Dynamic Role of Media in the 21st Century

4. Human Values in 21st Century: A Blueprint for a Better World

5. Feminism in the 21st Century: Empowerment and Progress

6. Education in the 21st Century: Navigating a Transformative Landscape

7. Communication in the 21st Century: Navigating the Digital Age

8. Beauty in the 21st Century: Embracing Diversity and Empowerment

9. Advantages of 21st Century Learning: A Transformative Educational Landscape

10. Exploring the Impact of 21st Century Technology

11. The 21st Century Teacher: Education’s Transformative

12. Nurturing 21st Century Skills: Preparing for Success in the Modern World

13. Transforming Education in the 21st Century

14. The 2020 Mark: Reflecting on a New Decade of Transformation

15. Digital Piracy as Main Crime of 21st-Century

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Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are , but rather sets of actions that people do . Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

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Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a banal and risible self-help book

Like an undergraduate struggling to reach the word count, Harari writes in pointless asides and cringeworthy platitudes of fortune-cookie quality.

By Gavin Jacobson

In his best-selling book Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind , the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes that it was during the Agricultural Revolution, around 10,000 years ago, when worries about the future “became central to the human mind”. Since then, fascination with the end of times has been a constituent feature of humanity’s cultural and intellectual history. In the European tradition, tributes to progress are regularly offset by nightmares of decline and fall, especially during times of socio-economic turbulence or technological breakthrough, when, like Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick , societies “sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts”. 

Enlightenment thinkers in the 18th century were haunted by visions of the apocalypse. Many doubted modern states could survive the volatile mixture of public debt, social inequality, and the international struggle for resources that threatened to plunge them into eternal war and revolution. Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered alarming descriptions of this future, writing in his book Émile (1762) that societies were “approaching a state of crisis and the century of revolutions”. Europe’s monarchies and republics, he later prophesied, had “grown decrepit and threaten soon to die”. Others forecast ecological ruin and the rise of populist demagogues, with the Scottish historian Adam Ferguson predicting that sooner or later the “boasted refinements of the polished age” would make way for “the government of force”. In 1779, the republican philosopher Gabriel Bonnot de Mably thought the time was “not far away when Europe will languish under the splendour and misery of despotism and slavery”.

Discourses of catastrophe endured and flourished throughout the 19th century, as traditional social structures and ways of thinking were upended by the Industrial Revolution. Urbanisation, mass politics and the idea that nothing lay beyond the transformative powers of the state – these developments rocked intelligentsias between giddy optimism and grave despair.

Richard Wagner, whose operas were often set against a backdrop of mythological hellscapes, claimed that “everything mankind did, ordered and established was conceived only in fear of the end”. His friend Friedrich Nietzsche also envisaged Europe’s tormented atrophy after the death of God: “For a long time now our whole civilisation has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe… Where we live, soon nobody will be able to exist.”

Few authors captured the anxieties of the age with as much bracing clarity as Fyodor Dostoevsky, who in 1862 described London’s Crystal Palace, the great glass exhibition hall showcasing the latest technological wonders, as resembling “some prophecy out of the Apocalypse being fulfilled right before your very eyes”. His subsequent novels focused on the spiritual desolation initiated by man’s agnostic plans for self-redemption. In The Idiot (1869), the character Lebedev describes the mid-19th century as “the time of the third horse… and there will follow a pale horse and him whose name is Death, and after him Hell”.

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Twentieth-century obsessions with disaster emerged from the killing fields of the First and Second World Wars, and were conveyed with the greatest lyrical force by modernist poets such as WB Yeats in “The Second Coming” or TS Eliot in “The Hollow Men”, which described the world ending “not with a bang but a whimper”. Yet between 1945 and 1989, societies wondered if, in fact, the world might end with the bang of nuclear war. Even in the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the entrenchment of neoliberalism as the organising principle of the world, prophecies about the End of Days lingered.

Francis Fukuyama’s apocalyptic expectation that history had come to a close is the best-known (if least understood) example, while in a 1997 essay, “Our Merry Apocalypse”, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski warned against the vertiginous speeds at which societies were evolving: “I do not say that we are rushing towards catastrophe,” he wrote, “only that, like Alice, we must make a huge effort to run very fast to stay in the same place.” The millennium was greeted with a surge of penitential exuberance and the dread of hi-tech meltdown.

Since 9/11, and certainly since the financial crash of 2008, there has been what the literary critic Frank Kermode once called a perennial “sense of an ending”. Climate change is making life a living hell, especially in Africa and Asia. More people have been driven from their homes by wars and ethnic or political persecution than at any time in history. Strongmen leaders have entrenched themselves across Europe and Asia. Western interventions in the Middle East helped create the barbarisms of Isis. Globalisation has decimated cultures, hollowed out working-class communities, widened the gulf between rich and poor, and privileged wealth over welfare. Rates of suicide and depression have soared in the world’s fastest-growing economies, George Orwell and Hannah Arendt are best-sellers again, and the super-rich are building doomsday bunkers. And as Harari says in his new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century , “liberals fear that Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump portend the end of human civilisation”.

If Sapiens examined humanity’s deep past, and his follow-up work, Homo Deus , considered its potential long-term future, 21 Lessons focuses on the troubles of the here and now. As Labour and the Conservatives are busy wrestling with their internal psychodramas of anti-Semitism, Brexit and Boris Johnson, it is refreshing to read someone seemingly more attuned to the potential doomsday scenarios we are facing.

How should democracies contend with the quantum leaps in biotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI), just as “liberalism is losing credibility”? How should we regulate the ownership of data, which “will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset”? How will societies respond to AI, and the conceivable uselessness of workers? What will a progressive politics look like since it’s “much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation”? Should we fear another world war? What can be done about climate change? And what are the best responses to terrorism and fake news?

It would be easier to take Harari seriously if his “lessons” in any way measured up to these global conundrums. Unfortunately, for those who were expecting more from such a celebrated author, his injunctions simply die on contact with the reality of our present moment.

The first problem is one of conception. The book is composed from various op-ed columns, as well as responses to questions asked by readers, journalists and colleagues. These may have worked well as individual pieces. But taken together, the result is a study thick with promise and thin in import. The sort of messages Harari issues – “the only real solution is to globalise politics”; “humans of all creeds would do well to take humility more seriously”; “invest time and effort in uncovering our biases”; “Leave your illusions behind. They are very heavy”; “When you wake up in the morning, just focus on reality” – are either too vague or too hollow to provide any meaningful guidance.

Harari’s concluding style comes straight from the insipid “on the one hand, on the other” school of second-rate essay writing. In the meagre ten pages he devotes to “War” and the chances of a third global conflict, he ends by saying that, “On the one hand, war is definitely not inevitable… On the other hand, it would be naive to assume that war is impossible.” And, in the confused and disjointed chapter on “Humility”: “It goes without saying,” he writes, before going on to say it, “that the Jewish people are a unique people with an astonishing history (though this is true of most peoples).”

“It similarly goes without saying,” he continues, before, again, going on to say it, “that the Jewish tradition is full of deep insights and noble values (though it is also full of some questionable ideas and of racist, misogynist and homophobic attitudes).”

Like an undergraduate struggling to reach the word count, Harari ends up trafficking in pointless asides and excruciating banalities. The debate about immigration “is far from being a clear-cut battle between good and evil” and “should be decided through standard democratic procedure”. (He then lazily suggests that if Europe manages to solve the issue of immigration, then “perhaps its formula can be copied on a global level”.) “The world,” we are subsequently told, “is becoming ever more complex.” “Humans have bodies.” “We just cannot prepare for every eventuality.” Nuclear states and terrorism represent “different problems that demand different solutions”. “The world is far more complicated than a chessboard.” “Putin is neither Genghis Khan nor Stalin.” And there are “several key differences between 2018 and 1914”.

Then there are the risible moral dictums littered throughout the text, cringeworthy platitudes of fortune-cookie quality. So a “small coin in a big empty jar makes a lot of noise” and “hurting others always hurts me too”. “Suffering is suffering, no matter who experiences it” and “pain is pain, fear is fear, and love is love”. Not forgetting that “change itself is the only certainty”, “emotions such as greed, envy, anger and hatred are very unpleasant” and “everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind”. Reading Harari reminded me of the line attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I have ever met.”

The point about lousy prose isn’t just one of style. As Tony Judt argued in the New York Review of Books in 2010, rhetorical fluency doesn’t always signify originality or depth of thought. But hesitant, digressive and mediocre writing does indicate an impoverished argument or analysis. As Judt put it, “When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express.” This is clear in Harari’s chapter on post-truth, for instance, in which he circles around the issue, meandering into subjects such as the history of Nazi and Soviet propaganda, without really landing on any kind of substantive point that helps us make sense of what’s going on now. His eventual lesson is typically flat: “instead of accepting fake news as the norm, we should recognise it is a far more difficult problem than we tend to assume, and we should strive even harder to distinguish reality from fiction. Don’t expect perfection. One of the greatest fictions of all is to deny the complexity of the world.”

Fine. But once we have accepted that the world is complex, what then? Harari is silent. He further warns us of politicians who “start talking in mystical terms”. We should be “particularly careful” about the words “sacrifice, eternity, purity, [and] redemption”. “If you hear any of these words,” he instructs, “sound the alarm.” By doing what, exactly? He doesn’t say. Judt argued that instead of “suffering from the onset of ‘newspeak,’ we risk the rise of ‘nospeak’”. Harari’s is the sort of shoddy rhetoric he was thinking of.

The larger issue with 21 Lessons , however, is its depressingly apolitical message. In both Sapiens and Homo Deus , Harari reminds us that it has been the ability to co-operate that has led to our species’ domination of the world. In 21 Lessons , there are occasional doses of political and economic consideration, such as a discussion of universal basic income. But by and large his lessons for living in the 21st century are distinctly Western, individualistic and self-regarding. This is expressed most succinctly towards the end of the book, when he says that, “If we want to make the world a better place, understanding ourselves, our minds and our desires will probably be far more helpful than trying to realise whatever fantasy pops up in our heads.” To understand ourselves, we “should observe the actual flow of body and mind”.

This is not to undermine the importance of self-reflection, nor to question the virtues of private meditation, which is the subject of Harari’s unbearably dull concluding chapter. It is rather to note that such political problems he identifies have invited such diminished political reflection or solution. 21 Lessons offers no thoughts on collective action, and no vision for the common good. The scale of the political crises, however, demand that we face them together and in the political domain. If we are approaching some kind of apocalypse, it is surely not enough to just “know thyself”. 

Gavin Jacobson is a writer based in Hong Kong, and is working on a book about the history of the 1990s

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This article appears in the 22 Aug 2018 issue of the New Statesman, Will Labour split?

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