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in 1882, when Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, it lost a mere fifty-seven soldiers in the decisive Battle of Tel el-Kebir.
Together, the United States and the European Union have five times more people than Russia, and ten times more dollars.
Even more important, Putin’s Russia lacks a universal ideology. During the Cold War the USSR relied on the global appeal of communism as much as on the global reach of the Red Army. Putinism, in contrast, has little to offer Cubans, Vietnamese, or French intellectuals.
Even in the days of George W. Bush, the United States could wreak havoc in Baghdad and Fallujah while the Iraqis had no means of retaliating against San Francisco or Chicago. But if the United States now attacks a country possessing even moderate cyberwarfare capabilities, the war could be brought to California or Illinois within minutes. Malwares and logic bombs could stop air traffic in Dallas, cause trains to collide in Philadelphia, and bring down the electric grid in Michigan.
We should never underestimate human stupidity.
National, religious, and cultural tensions are made worse by the grandiose feeling that my nation, my religion, and my culture are the most important in the world—and therefore my interests should come before the interests of anyone else, or of humankind as a whole.
Pious Muslims regard all history prior to the Prophet Muhammad as largely irrelevant, and they consider all history after the revelation of the Quran to revolve around the Muslim ummah.
From an ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history.
What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars. Polytheists found it perfectly acceptable that different people worshipped different gods and performed diverse rites and rituals. They rarely if ever fought, persecuted, or killed people just because of their religious beliefs. Monotheists, in contrast, believed that their God was the only god, and that He demanded universal obedience. Consequently, as Christianity and Islam spread around the world, so did the incidence of
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by insisting that “there is no god but our God,” the monotheist idea tended to encourage bigotry.
In addition to such well-known names as Einstein and Freud, about 20 percent of all Nobel Prize laureates in science have been Jews, though Jews constitute less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population.16
Indeed, Jews began to make their remarkable contribution to science only once they had abandoned the yeshiva in favor of the laboratory.
Einstein was Jewish, but the theory of relativity wasn’t “Jewish physics.” What does faith in the sacredness of the Torah have to do with the insight that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared? For the sake of comparison, Darwin was a Christian and even began his studies at Cambridge intending to become an Anglican priest. Does it imply that the theory of evolution is a Christian theory? It would be ridiculous to list the theory of relativity as a Jewish contribution to humankind, just as it would be ridiculous to credit Christianity with the theory of evolution.
Indeed, the Jewish habit of seeking the answers to all questions by reading ancient texts was a significant obstacle to Jewish integration into the world of modern science, where answers come from observations and experiments.
After giving the name of “God” to the unknown secrets of the cosmos, they then use this to somehow condemn bikinis and divorce. “We do not understand the Big Bang—therefore you must cover your hair in public and vote against gay marriage.”
The deeper the mysteries of the universe, the less likely it is that whatever is responsible for them gives a damn about female dress codes or human sexual behavior.
The idea that we need a supernatural being to make us act morally assumes that there is something unnatural about morality.
(Often, strong beliefs are needed precisely when the story isn’t true.)
There is something deeply troubling and dangerous about people who avoid killing just because “God says so.” Such people are motivated by obedience rather than compassion, and what will they do if they come to believe that their god commands them to kill heretics, witches, adulterers, or foreigners?
Rape is obviously unethical, not because it breaks some divine commandment but because it hurts people. In contrast, a loving relationship between two men harms no one, so there is no reason to forbid it.
In fact, modern history has demonstrated that a society of courageous people willing to admit ignorance and raise difficult questions is usually not just more prosperous but also more peaceful than societies in which everyone must unquestioningly accept a single answer.
Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.
Secular societies and institutions are happy to acknowledge these links and to embrace religious Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus, provided that when the secular code collides with religious doctrine, the latter gives way. For example, to be accepted into secular society, Orthodox Jews are expected to treat non-Jews as their equal, Christians should avoid burning heretics at the stake, Muslims must respect freedom of expression, and Hindus have to relinquish caste-based discrimination.
secular education does not mean a negative indoctrination that teaches kids not to believe in God and not to take part in any religious ceremonies.
The only place rights exist is in the stories humans invent and tell one another.
For example, Christianity has been responsible for great crimes such as the Inquisition, the Crusades, the oppression of native cultures across the world, and the disempowerment of women. A Christian might take offense at this and retort that all of these crimes resulted from a complete misunderstanding of Christianity. Jesus preached only love, and the Inquisition was based on a horrific distortion of his teachings. We can sympathize with this claim, but it would be a mistake to let Christianity off the hook so easily.
What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.1
People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming news feeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.3
Since I depend for my existence on a mind-boggling network of economic and political ties, and since global causal connections are so tangled, I find it difficult to answer even the simplest questions, such as where my lunch comes from, who made the shoes I’m wearing, and what my pension fund is doing with my money.2
The commandment not to steal was formulated in the days when stealing meant physically taking something with your own hand that did not belong to you. Yet today, the really important arguments about theft concern completely different scenarios.
But without the benefit of hindsight, moral certainty might be beyond our reach.
In another study, scholars solicited donations to help either one sick child or eight sick children. People gave more money to the single child than to the group of eight.6
The third method of dealing with large-scale moral dilemmas is to weave conspiracy theories. How does the global economy function, and is it good or bad? That question is too complicated to grasp. It is far easier to imagine that twenty multibillionaires are pulling the strings behind the scenes, controlling the media and fomenting wars in order to enrich themselves. This is almost always a baseless fantasy. The contemporary world is too complicated, not only for our sense of justice but also for our managerial abilities. No one—including the multibillionaires, the CIA, the Freemasons, and the
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Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions.
We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively.
When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion,
Whereas in the age of Facebook and Twitter it is sometimes hard to decide which version of events to believe, at least it is no longer possible for a regime to kill millions without the world knowing about it.
In practice, the power of human cooperation depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction.
We learn to respect holy books in exactly the same way we learn to respect paper currency.
You cannot play games or read novels unless you suspend disbelief at least for a little while. To really enjoy soccer, you have to accept the rules of the game and forget for at least ninety minutes that they are merely human inventions. If you don’t, you will think it utterly ridiculous for twenty-two people to go running after a ball.
Much of what kids learn today will likely be irrelevant by 2050.
Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs”—critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.3 More broadly, they believe, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills.
As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides.
the best advice I can give a fifteen-year-old stuck in an outdated school somewhere in Mexico, India, or Alabama is: don’t rely on the adults too much.
The voice we hear inside our heads is never trustworthy, because it always reflects state propaganda, ideological brainwashing, and commercial advertisements, not to mention biochemical bugs.
Eternity is at the very least 13.8 billion years—the current age of the universe. Planet Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and humans have existed for at least 2 million years. In contrast, the city of Jerusalem was established just 5,000 years ago and the Jewish people are at most 3,000 years old. This hardly qualifies as eternity.
A wise old man was asked what he learned about the meaning of life. “Well,” he answered, “I have learned that I am here on earth in order to help other people. What I still haven’t figured out is why the other people are here.”
While a good story must give me a role and must extend beyond my horizons, it need not be true. A story can be pure fiction, yet provide me with an identity and make me feel that my life has meaning. To the best of our scientific understanding, none of the thousands of stories that different cultures, religions, and tribes have invented throughout history is true. They are all just human inventions. If you ask for the true meaning of life and get a story in reply, know that this is the wrong answer. The exact details don’t really matter. Any story is wrong, simply for being a story. The
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What evidence do we have that the son of the Creator of the entire universe was born as a carbon-based life-form somewhere in the Milky Way about two thousand years ago?
Of all rituals, sacrifice is the most potent, because of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real. You can never ignore it or doubt it. If you want to make people really believe in some fiction, entice them to make a sacrifice on its behalf. Once you suffer for a story, it is usually enough to convince you that the story is real.
