Best Books of 2018

Last Saturday Bill Gates published his list of the five best books of 2018, and I hope to read four of them.  Gates is usually a pretty good judge of books.

Yesterday I found two of them, "Bad Blood" and "21 Lessons for the 21st Century."  I'm starting the latter today, as a good airplane read.

Yuval Noah Harari wrote:

Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often tend to discount it. Politicians, generals and scholars treat the world as a great chess game, where every move follows careful rational calculation. This is correct up to a point. Hideki Tojo, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong-Il had rational reasons for every move they played. The problem is that the world is far more complicated than a chessboard, and human rationality is not up to the task of really understanding it. For that reason even rational leaders frequently end up doing very stupid things.

Other Yuval Noah Harai startling revelations:

1. Although global warming will be bad news for the majority of people on Earth, it might actually benefit two countries: Canada and Russia.  They could become the "breadbaskets of the world."  Therefore beware of climate science coming out of these two players.
   
   
2. Religions and religious leaders of the past derived their power from solving, or appearing to solve, technical problems. Crop calendars.  Weather control.  Healing the sick.  Now that science has taken over these and other technical challenges -- challenges of observation, interpretation and pattern recognition, mostly -- religions have become a lot less central to peoples' lives.  Religions are still useful as organizing principles, as a unifying force across countries, ethnicities, generations and political ideologies.
   
   
3. Nations arose when tribes were no longer big enough to solve shared problems.  In a similar way, we are now facing global problems like climate change, technological Armegeddon, global hunger and food production/distribution/waste, clean air/water/food/energy that no single nation can solve.  Therefore some kind of global human community-building seems to be called for.  Global government is unlikely.  Global religion is even more unlikely.  Perhaps it will be a technological community like Facebook?
   
   
4. Immigration really only causes problems when the immigrants come from a different culture, and bring their culture with them.  People don't mind other cultures, but they don't want them living next door to them*.  So, should immigrants be required to shed all trappings of the culture they're coming from?  Should they be required to adopt all of the cultural norms of the adoptive country, including religious practices, food taboos, political views?  Or is globalism and transnationalism the requirement that all host countries accept all incomers, no matter how "foreign"?
   

*- It occurs to me that because of nationalism, people feel a sense of proprietorship about their homeland even though it is theirs only through the accident of their birth.  Nationalists feel protective of their culture, and don't feel obliged to share it with outsiders or compromise it by being accepting of foreign practices or especially to adopt any characteristics of incoming foreigners to make it more accommodating to them.  Yet it is PRECISELY the celebration of diversity, the welcoming of differences that makes people kinder, gentler, more open and loving.  If, for instance, Sweden welcomes Syrian refugees, the Swedes would have to accept daily prayers in public places and various food taboos and hijabs in public.  But it is also incumbent on the migrating Syrians to not be offended by uncovered Swedish women, by pork chops in supermarkets, or by Swedes not being religious.  I could no more move to England and insist on driving on the right side of the road, because it's what I'm used to, than my wife could move to Baghdad and refuse to cover her hair.  Mutual respect for our differences is key.  Throwing someone in jail (or worse) for blaspheming Allah is exactly the wrong attitude in a globalist society.  So is forcing Muslim women to discard their hajibs. But in the interests of "getting along," they should be willing to do it occasionally voluntarily when called for.  Higher principles than absolutism.

And if a significant population of immigrants moves to a democratic nation, and gains citizenship and voting rights, do they not have a right to vote for policies that favor them?

This is as true of Syrians in Sweden as it is of Mexicans in the United States.

As explained to me in high school, the "transubstantiation of the mass" is one of the key differences between Catholics and Protestants. If you are Protestant, you can believe this is a symbolic thing. If you are Catholic, you are supposed to believe the magic is real, and the bread and wine really do change.

Christian magic is really pathetic, if you ask me.