And, of course, Sunni Islam’s attitude towards Christianity has changed over time: a rise in intolerance since the late

I have been looking to replace my MacBook Pro for the past two years. The MacBook wasn’t a bad computer, but it was too slow for my use, and I didn’t need a laptop that much anymore. So I decided to switch to the new M1 chip series.

Nor does comparing theologies make sense, unless of course one has been brainwashed by sociology texts and becomes unable to think with minimal clarity. The (Protestant) Puritans who inhabited New England and the Salafis of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf have nearly identical theologies, based on shared communitarianism (refusal of a centralized authority), iconoclasm (absence of representation, of saints, and of any elaborate aesthetics), absence of an organized “church”, and very stern practice of the religion. And never forget that it is the exact same God that they are worshiping.

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good at drawing, but over the last few weeks I’ve been using the reMarkable for taking notes during meetings and to remember tasks throughout the day. It’s been delightful for my memory to force myself to write things down by hand rather than trying to tap things into the Notes app on my computer, and keeping this habit helped me pay more attention to what’s going on as people talk in meetings.

Finally, we tend to attribute religious conflicts to religion, rather than cultures that want to cluster away from each other. “Scholars” keep discussing the theological wrinkes that differentiate the Maronites, Nestorians, and Copts from the Greek-Byzantine Orthodox Calcedonians. Few get that these heresies had to do with hatred of the Greco-Romans by people in the countryside who did not share the Hellenisms of city dwellers — again, to a statistician’s eye, here the marker is linguistic: Aramaic/Syriac or Coptic on one hand, Greek on the other (or Mediterranean urban Rum vs. inland or mountain Semitic-speaking peasantry). You find some theological disagreement that few non-initiated understand and the crowds will finally find a way to split along highly polarized lines (consider the absurdity of the filioque controversy or that great wedge between ὁμοιούσιος and ὁμοούσιος separating Eastern and Western identities). The same with the Irish-English divide. And the Shiite vs. Sunni wedge has little to do with the Calife’s succession and a lot more to do with groups that did not want to be part of the larger Sunna — recall that Shiites had, until fifty years ago, taqiyya, a form of Gnostic dissimulation, just like the Alevis, the Allawites, and the Druze, and that the exoteric must necessarily be different from the esoteric, so nobody alive may have a real clue about the true nature of the conflict.

So, it matters, for economic development, who you identify with. You embrace their appetite for boring, repetitive tasks, a focus on industrial growth and working in a hierarchy, the extraction of an individual from her or his family, the appetite to wait in line for hours without beating anyone, virtues (or defects) that allowed for the West’s industrial revolution.

¹ The original: Πάντα γὰρ τὰ κατὰ τὴν πόλιν τῶν τοιούτων πεπλήρωται, οἱ στενωποὶ, αἱ ἀγοραὶ, αἱ πλατεῖαι, τὰ ἄμφοδα· οἱ τῶν ἱματίων κάπηλοι, οἱ ταῖς τραπέζαις ἐφεστηκότες, οἱ τὰ ἐδώδιμα ἡμῖν ἀπεμπολοῦντες. Ἐὰν περὶ τῶν ὀβολῶν ἐρωτήσῃς, ὁ δέ σοι περὶ γεννητοῦ καὶ ἀγεννήτου ἐφιλοσόφησε· κἂν περὶ τιμήματος ἄρτου πύθοιο, Μείζων ὁ Πατὴρ, ἀποκρίνεται, καὶ ὁ καὶ ὁ Υἱὸς ὑποχείριος. Εἰ δὲ, Τὸ λουτρὸν ἐπιτήδειόν ἐστιν, εἴποις, ὁ δὲ ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων τὸν Υἱὸν εἶναι διωρίσατο. Οὐκ οἶδα τί χρὴ τὸ κακὸν τοῦτο ὀνομάσαι, φρενῖτιν ἢ μανίαν, ἤ τι τοιοῦτον κακὸν ἐπιδήμιον, ὃ τῶν λογισμῶν τὴν παραφορὰν ἐξεργάζεται.

Nature is full of wonders, and the splendor, variety, and majesty of the animal kingdom is a miracle that ought to inspire reverence in even the most cynical among us, but the fact is that some of these guys just didn’t get the memo. In honor of the goofs, the dopes, and, yes, the galoots who are just as much a part of Mother Nature’s Glorious Plan as anyone else, the Comedy Pet Photography Awards has taken on the noble task of compiling and rewarding animal moments that, while they may not rise to the level of majesty, are nonetheless precious and, in their own way, wonderful.

This identity-mentality business is responsible for many other things. Suicide bombers in the East Mediterranean and the Middle East weren’t initially Salafi Muslims; it was in the late 20th Century that the practice (reintroduced almost two millennia after the sicarii) started spreading, with Greek Orthodox Pan Levantine followers of Antun Saadeh. Nothing to do with the virgins one meets in heaven, the kind of ex post attribution one hears today.

I explained in Skin in the Game that dietary laws act as social barriers: those who eat together bind together. The onerous Jewish dietary laws helped create separate diasporas which allowed for survival, and prevented social dilution. Now consider the following: there is nothing particularly strong in Islam’s holy text against drinking alcohol, just a rather vague recommendation of avoidance of intoxication while facing the creator. But it made sense for social habits to interpret such a law as a firm interdict to avoid socialization with Christians and Zoroastrians in Bagdad when it was the capital of the Califate and Arabs were in the minority. It was the mentality that found theological backing, rather than the reverse.

Your way of thinking changes along with the identity, which includes approaches to problem solving. Even such things as “IQ” testing (which measures mostly the ability to test well on that specific test) has yielded an alteration of the hierarchy of results as populations started identifying with a different group than the original one they belonged to: the European Union made the test results of the Irish and the Southern Slavs converge to that of the mainstream.

On pourrait faire des observations similaires concernant l’islam, et aussi à propos des doctrines non religieuses. Si le communisme a influencé l’histoire de la Russie ou de la Chine, ces deux pays ont également déterminé l’histoire du communisme, dont le destin aurait été fort différent s’il avait triomphé plutôt en Allemagne ou en Angleterre. Les textes fondateurs, qu’ils soient sacrés ou profanes, se prêtent aux lectures les plus contradictoires. On a pu sourire en entendant Deng Xiaoping affirmer que les privatisations étaient dans la droite ligne de la pensée de Marx, et que les succès de sa réforme économique démontraient la supériorité du socialisme sur le capitalisme. Cette interprétation n’est pas plus risible qu’une autre ; elle est même certainement plus conforme aux rêves de l’auteur du Capital que les délires d’un Staline, d’un Kim Il Sung, d’un Pol Pot, ou d’un Mao Zedong.

Nul ne peut nier, en tout cas, au vu de l’expérience chinoise qui se déroule devant nos yeux, que l’un des succès les plus étonnants dans l’histoire mondiale du capitalisme se sera produit sous l’égide d’un parti communiste. N’est-ce pas là une puissante illustration de la malléabilité des doctrines, et de l’infinie capacité des hommes à les interpréter comme bon leur semble ?

While I was tempted to get a MacBook again, I went for the Mac Mini. It’s cheaper, and I use an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse anyway. If I need to be mobile, I can switch to either my iPhone 11 Pro Max or the 2018 iPad Pro.

In the early 1900s, urban Sunnis in the Levant identified with the Ottoman upper class, hence were readily “Westernized” as the Ottomans Westernized, but in the Eastern Mediterranean/Eastern European way: the Ottoman bourgeois class looked more, for identity, to resemble Greeks and Bulgarian Christians than Germans or other Northern Europeans. The Lebanese Sunnis later on, after Turkey became Turkey, identified with the Middle East, owing to the movement called “Arabism” and changed their mentality and habits. Today Lebanon’s Shiites identify increasingly with Iranians (the people, not the regime), and are embracing social behavior similar to the Iranians, with a focus on study, industry, etc. — ironically much more Western in spite of the theocratic regime. Amine Maalouf detected (as explained to me by the geneticist Pierre Zalloua) that Christians in Lebanon identified with the West, and the differentiation between them and the Muslims started increasing. The religions, meanwhile, stayed the same.

Ma conviction profonde, c’est que l’on accorde trop de poids à l’influence des religions sur les peuples, et pas assez à l’influence des peuples sur les religions. A partir du moment où, au IVe siècle, l’