More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
the nuclear demon.
it takes nearly four thousand gallons of fresh water to produce a little over two pounds of beef, compared to the seventy-five gallons needed to produce the same weight of potatoes.11
cornucopia
goo.
vilifying
The Catalan attempt to break away from Spain has resulted in considerably more violence, but it too falls far short of the carnage Barcelona experienced in 1939 or in 1714.
when you have multiple loyalties, conflicts are sometimes inevitable. But then who said life was simple? Deal with it.
Hundreds of years ago, religions such as Christianity and Islam already thought in global rather than local terms, and they were always keenly interested in the big questions of life rather than just in the political struggles of this or that nation. But are traditional religions still relevant? Do they retain the power to shape the world, or are they just inert relics from our past, tossed here and there by the mighty forces of modern states, economies, and technologies?
bioengineering,
Yet secular people are a minority. Billions of humans still profess greater faith in the Quran and the Bible than in the theory of evolution; religious movements shape the politics of countries as diverse as India, Turkey, and the United States; and religious animosities fuel conflicts from Nigeria to the Philippines.
A priest is not
religious authority has been dwindling in more and more technical fields. This is also why the entire world has increasingly become a single civilization. When things really work, everybody adopts them.
religion doesn’t really have much to contribute to the great policy debates of our time. As Karl Marx argued, it is just a veneer.
So in the twenty-first century religions don’t bring rain, they don’t cure illnesses, they don’t build bombs—but they do get to determine who are “us” and who are “them,” whom we should cure and whom we should bomb. As noted earlier, in practical terms there are surprisingly few differences between Shiite Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia, and Jewish Israel. All are bureaucratic nation-states, all pursue more or less capitalist policies, all vaccinate kids against polio, and all rely on chemists and physicists to make bombs. There is no such thing as Shiite bureaucracy, Sunni capitalism, or Jewish
...more
Decades before the United States fielded the smart bomb, and at a time when Nazi Germany was only beginning to deploy dumb V-2 rockets, Japan sank dozens of allied ships with precision-guided missiles—better known as kamikaze.
Knowingly or not, numerous governments today follow the Japanese example. They adopt the universal tools and structures of modernity while relying on traditional religions to preserve a unique national identity. The
deification
To clarify matters, it would perhaps be helpful to view immigration as a deal with three basic conditions or terms: TERM 1: The host country allows the immigrants in. TERM 2: In return, the immigrants must embrace at least the core norms and values of the host country, even if that means giving up some of their traditional norms and values. TERM 3: If the immigrants assimilate to a sufficient degree, over time they become equal and full members of the host country. “They” become “us.”
Which means that immigrants who are allowed into Sweden should feel extremely grateful for whatever they get, instead of arriving with a list of demands as if they own the place.
want to eat their cake and have it too.
Why accuse people of being racists or fascists just because they refuse entry into their own country?
If Europe allows in too many immigrants from the Middle East, it will end up looking like the Middle East.
As long as Europeans are bitterly divided about this question, they can hardly have a clear policy about immigration. Conversely, once Europeans know who they are, five hundred million Europeans should have no difficulty absorbing a few million refugees—or turning them away.
For pro-immigrationists, if third-generation immigrants are not seen and treated as equal citizens, this means that the host country is not fulfilling its obligations, and if this results in tensions, hostility, and even violence, the host country has nobody to blame but its own bigotry.
It is hard to expect society to fully absorb foreign groups within a few decades.
If a third-generation immigrant walks down the street a thousand times without being molested but once in a while some racist shouts abuse at her, does it mean that the native population is accepting or rejecting the immigrants?
Indeed, it is probably easier for even a Muslim refugee from Syria to immigrate to Germany than to Saudi Arabia, and since 2011 Germany has taken in many more Syrian refugees than has Saudi Arabia.1 Similarly, the weight of evidence suggests that the culture of California in the early twenty-first century is more immigrant-friendly than the culture of Japan. Therefore, if you think that it is good to tolerate strangers and welcome immigrants, shouldn’t you also think that at least in this regard, German culture is superior to Saudi culture, and Californian culture is better than Japanese
...more
terse
In any case, even if you are a tourist from Delhi who knows nothing about American history, you will have to deal with the consequences of that history.
African Americans from a poverty-stricken slum who honestly try to fit into the hegemonic American culture might first find their way blocked by institutional discrimination—only to be accused later of not having made sufficient effort, and so they have nobody but themselves to blame for their troubles.
Since September 11, 2001, each year terrorists have killed about 50 people in the European Union, about 10 people in the United States, about 7 people in China, and up to 25,000 people elsewhere in the globe (mostly in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria).1 In contrast, each year traffic accidents kill about 80,000 Europeans, 40,000 Americans, 270,000 Chinese, and 1.25 million people altogether.2 Diabetes and high sugar levels kill up to 3.5 million people annually, while air pollution kills about 7 million people per year.
This strategy is almost always adopted by very weak parties who cannot inflict much material damage on their enemies. Of course every military action spreads fear. But in conventional warfare, fear is just a by-product of the material losses, and it is usually proportional to the force inflicting the losses. In terrorism, fear is the main story, and there is an astounding disproportion between the actual strength of the terrorists and the fear they manage to inspire.
puny
If you add up all the people killed and wounded in Europe by terrorist attacks since 1945—including victims of nationalist, religious, leftist, and rightist groups alike—the total will still fall far short of the casualties in any number of obscure First World War battles, such as the third Battle of the Aisne (250,000 casualties) or the tenth Battle of the Isonzo (225,000).9
During every storm, many unforeseen things happen. Mistakes are made, atrocities are committed, public opinion wavers, neutrals change their stance, and the balance of power shifts.
terrorists resemble a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot move even a single teacup. So how does a fly destroy a china shop? It finds a bull, gets inside its ear, and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened after 9/11, as Islamic fundamentalists incited the American bull to destroy the Middle Eastern china shop. Now they flourish in the wreckage. And there is no shortage of short-tempered bulls in the world.
Terrorists don’t think like army generals. Instead, they think like theater producers. The public memory of the 9/11 attacks testifies that everyone understands this intuitively. If you ask people what happened on 9/11, they are likely to say that al-Qaeda knocked down the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Yet the attack involved not merely the towers but two other actions, in particular a successful attack on the Pentagon. Why do fewer people remember that?
Why are states so sensitive to terrorist provocations?
States find it difficult to withstand these provocations because the legitimacy of the modern state is based on its promise to keep the public sphere free of political violence.
In France, for example, more than ten thousand rape cases are reported to the authorities each year, with an estimated tens of thousands of additional cases left unreported.11
over the last few centuries modern Western states have gradually established their legitimacy on the explicit promise to tolerate no political violence within their borders.
Paradoxically, then, the very success of modern states in preventing political violence makes them particularly vulnerable to terrorism.
The most efficient answer to terrorism might be good intelligence and clandestine action against the financial networks that feed terrorism. But this is not something citizens can watch on television. The citizens have seen the terrorist drama of the World Trade Center collapsing. The state feels compelled to stage an equally spectacular counterdrama, with even more fire and smoke. So instead of acting quietly and efficiently, the state unleashes a mighty storm, which not infrequently fulfills the terrorists’ most cherished dreams.
A successful counterterrorism struggle should be conducted on three fronts. First, governments should focus on clandestine actions against the terrorist networks. Second, the media should keep things in perspective and avoid hysteria. The theater of terror cannot succeed without publicity. Unfortunately, the media all too often provides this publicity for free. It obsessively reports terrorist attacks and greatly inflates their danger, because reports on terrorism sell newspapers much better than reports on diabetes or air pollution.
States should be even more careful not to start persecuting all dissident groups on the grounds that they might one day try to obtain nuclear weapons or that they might hack our self-driving cars and turn them into a fleet of killer robots.
We cannot prepare for every eventuality.
If in 2050 the world is full of nuclear terrorists and bioterrorists, their victims will look back at the world of 2018 with longing tinged with disbelief: how could people who lived such secure lives nevertheless have felt so threatened?
Never Underestimate Human Stupidity
The last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history. Whereas in early agricultural societies human violence caused up to 15 percent of all human deaths, and in the twentieth century it caused 5 percent, today it is responsible for only 1 percent.1
Both laypeople and experts fear that just as in 1914 the murder of an Austrian archduke sparked the First World War, so in 2018 some incident in the Syrian desert or an unwise move in the Korean peninsula might ignite a global conflict.
