How much will the internet change religion…
..and why hasn’t it changed it so much yet?
Or perhaps it already has?
At any rate, I’ve thought for a while that the internet could dramatically change how religion is practised.
Think about it in the following way: religion is a way of provding meaning, and a story with which people can understand their own history and future. In the past, this was done in a very standardised way; for example, all people in a given community would have heard the same sermon.
In an age of personalisation, that model sounds dated.
What comes next? Some thoughts on this appeared in an article in the FT:
Rabbi Stanton believes that too many religious institutions have ignored their communities’ evolving needs. “People are yearning for spirituality and a place to reflect [but they associate] houses of worship with materialism, hypocrisy and vapid reflections on life,” he says.
Covid-19 is creating “a winner takes all marketplace” in religion in which a few dozen houses of worship stand to achieve national or international reach while life gets harder for the rest, Rabbi Stanton says. That would echo what internet economics have done to newspapers and many other industries.
I’m not so convinced by the second quote — the final model will involve a great deal more differentiation and personalisation than a few dozen houses of worship could offer. I suspect an entirely new kind of structure will arise.
In praise of the Stiff Upper Lip?
"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" said the tragic hero Hamlet. It seems he may have had a point, if by “good” we assume he means painful (rather than the non-natural property the word “good” should refer to).
This is the impression one can get from the following passages from The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich, where the pain one feels is influenced by other people’s reactions.
This could give rise to interesting dynamics in some cases, such as where people claim that a given speech act, hitherto seen as innocuous, can hurt feelings. Initially this claim will be seen as bizarre, but due to cultural learning it can become self-fulfilling.
Parents, like me, have probably had the experience of watching their child fall and then look up at them for a reaction. If the parent has a smile or looks unconcerned, the child may just stand up and press on. If the parent flashes a grimace, empathetically feeling the fall, the kid is more likely to burst into tears and need a hug.
My UBC colleague, the psychologist Ken Craig, has directly tested the relationship between cultural learning and pain. Ken’s team first exposed research participants to a series of electric shocks that gradually increased in intensity and thus painfulness. Some participants observed another person—a “tough-model”—experience the same shocks right after them, and some did not. Both the participant and model had to rate how painful the shock was each time. The tough model, however, was secretly working for the experimenter and always rated the pain about 25% less painful than the participant did.
Those who saw the tough model showed (1) declining measurements of electrodermal skin potential, meaning that their bodies stopped reacting to the threat, (2) lower and more stable heart rates, and (3) lower stress ratings. Cultural learning from the tough model changed their physiological reactions to electric shocks. The effect of observing a tough model and inferring their underlying experience is a more potent inducer of placebo effects than mere verbal suggestions. In fact, it’s about as effective as direct conditioning. (pp. 275-276)
Thoughts on cultural decadence
A very interesting controversy has been stirred up by Netflix’s promotion of the film Cuties. I found this to be an interesting take from the director of the film:
"I saw that some very young girls were followed by 400,000 people on social media and I tried to understand why," she told CineEuropa.
"There were no particular reasons, besides the fact that they had posted sexy or at least revealing pictures: that is what had brought them this 'fame.'
"Today, the sexier and the more objectified a woman is, the more value she has in the eyes of social media. And when you're 11, you don't really understand all these mechanisms, but you tend to mimic, to do the same thing as others in order to get a similar result.
"I think it is urgent that we talk about it, that a debate be had on the subject."
This piece brings many thoughts to mind.
What is decadence? To take Ross Douthat’s definition, it is mostly repetition.
Why does repetition arise? Fundamentally, a decline in creative energy or instinct. Toynbee would have said that this comes about though a sacralisation of values or ideas which eventually inhibit the adaptation of society to new problems.
But can that explain the trend the director describes above? The connection is not direct. So let’s try some backward-induction.
The girls imitate this behaviour which they observe in a) the popular culture industry, or b) perhaps this is simply an emergent phenomenon on social media.
Regarding a) the objective function of this industry is to make money, and suggestive imagery and themes is one effective way of doing this. Regarding b) the motivator could simply be attention, or again money, as a large following raises the possibility of selling advertising.
So in both cases, it seems that the root of this behaviour is a desire for money.
An important qualifier: for those referred to in 4.b, they may have a need for money e.g. this may be the only way of funding education. Poverty or inequality could thus also be a driver.
But is it possible to reduce the desire for money? Only by creating a set of higher ideals to which people can work towards. It is partly the lack of a telos in the Aristotelian sense, and the self-worth and sense of coherent narrative it provides, which results in people pursuing meaning and self-validation through consumption and attention-seeking, rather than through creativity which requires some level of sacrifice. It hard to justify the sacrifice creativity requires if self-interest is your prime motivator.
I discuss how this sense of a telos can be restored in Chapter 12, which should be posted in a few weeks. But you can get a glimpse of a building-block in Chapter 5.
So what is the link to decadence and Toynbee? If a creative culture becomes rigid due to excessive sacralisation, it will lose its attractiveness and motivating power. As it begins to visibly fail, people will not sacrifice their self-interest, and the level of creativity falls further. Positive role models die off, without being replaced. In their place, imitators arrive, who affect the form of creativity without channeling any of its substance. This is one aspect of decadence.
The inability of this culture to provide meaning then results in other people turning to more immediate forms validation, including status goods such as money and fame. This is the second aaspect of decadence.
Ivan Krastev on Anne Applebaum
Or more precisely: on her latest book, which he reviews here.
I’m a bit surprised by the main argument, which he expresses as follows:
But the book’s subtitle “The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism” is rather misleading. Unlike communism, authoritarianism is not an ideology. Populists, unlike communists or fascists, do not dream about a “new man” who will be born of their revolution. What drives intellectual supporters of Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orban is not some new vision of society but a pathological hate toward liberalism.
I can well understand losing faith in liberalism, if it didn’t deliver the goods you imagined it would, or it it led to places you find repugnant. But I can’t quite grasp why you would hate it, especially the very moderate, even conservative, kind of liberalism to be found in Eastern Europe. The article makes clear that this resentment arises from ex-communists managing to benefit from the post-Cold War arrangements.
Perhaps this speaks to a desire many have for vengeance upon those they saw as collaborators. It’s difficult to see how that can be resolved, if winning elections is not enough to satiate it.
Two more quotes:
What we see in countries like Poland and the United States is that a democracy of citizens has been replaced by a democracy of fans. While for a liberal citizen the readiness to point out and correct the mistakes of your own party is a sign of the highest loyalty, the loyalty of fans is zealous, unthinking, and unswerving.
The major challenge Western liberalism is facing today [is] how to uphold Western universalism while Western power is in decline.
I’m pretty sure the latter is not possible. Far better to focus on mitigating the decline, by designing the political and cultural institutions of the future.
The causes of stagnation in physics
According to Sabine Hossenfelder, stagnation in physics is partly caused by groupthink and an unwillingness to reconsider how to do science.
This reminds me of Kegan’s five stages of individual psychological development. Here, the difficulty is in moving from a Stage 4 rational system to a Stage 5 meta-rational system, where you are able to rethink your own axioms and methods. Stage 3 is associated with groupthink. I will discuss how this model links to Metasophism in Chapter 12, but for now if you are interested in reading more about how this applies to academia, David Chapman has a very good piece here.
Here are the key quotes from the Hossenfelder piece:
And so, what we have here in the foundation of physics is a plain failure of the scientific method. All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis.
They do not think about which hypotheses are promising because their education has not taught them to do so. Such self-reflection would require knowledge of the philosophy and sociology of science, and those are subjects physicists merely make dismissive jokes about.
Why don’t physicists have a hard look at their history and learn from their failure? Because the existing scientific system does not encourage learning. Physicists today can happily make career by writing papers about things no one has ever observed, and never will observe.
The surprising effectiveness of placebos
This came to mind after reading this extract from The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich:
Depending on a person’s beliefs, desires, and prior experiences, taking a placebo or experiencing any “sham” medical procedure including fake surgery can activate biological pathways in the body. Often these pathways are the very same pathways triggered by the active chemicals in popular drugs. Placebos can reduce pain, activate the immune system, mitigate irritable bowel symptoms, improve motor coordination in Parkinson’s patients, and ameliorate asthma. The more you believe it will work, the more it may actually work. Not only that, there appears to be a synergistic interaction between the size of the placebo effects and the size of the chemical effects; that is, the more one believes a drug like morphine will reduce pain (measured by using placebomorphine), the more effective real morphine actually is. Henrich, Joseph. (p. 273)
He goes on to discuss further dimensions of this, such as certain placebos for reducing blood pressure not working as well in Germany as in other countries, while those for ulcers worked better in Germany than in other countries. He states that Germans care a great deal about low blood pressure compared to other countries, which must affect the results.
Social capital is underrated
Few explicitly discuss how social capital is a big driver of inequality. I think that’s because this would require thinking about and creating new systems; far easier to throw out a proposal for a new tax or demand spending more money on an already-existing budget line.
It’s probably also because the importance of social capital is underrated. Consider the abstract from this paper however:
We argue that low levels of social capital are conducive to the electoral success of populist movements. Using a variety of data sources for the 2016 US Presidential election at the county and individual levels, we show that social capital, measured either by the density of memberships in civic, religious and sports organizations or by generalized trust, is significantly negatively correlated with the vote share and favorability rating of Donald Trump around the time of the election.
A key priority for Metasophism must be creating a high level of social capital. I think I partly deal with this issue in the chapters on Societal Identity, and the discussion on forming a new elite. And I will discuss it further in the final chapter on providing meaning for the individual.
What is the link to individual meaning? I suspect high trust causes high social capital (though there may be some causation in the other direction as well). But to trust other people, you must sense a high degree of commonality i.e. broadly aligned interests, pursuing a common mission, and parrticipation in similar rituals.
Secularism in decline
Tom Holland points out how secularism in increasingly being rejected by ruling elites in Turkey and India. He sees this as being one dimension of the decline of the West. Here are the key quotes:
All of which should serve as a wake-up call to the West that it is not only its financial, economic and military muscle that is currently atrophying. So too is its ability to market its culturally conditioned assumptions as universal.
That there existed things called ‘religions’ — ‘Hinduism’, ‘Islam’, ‘Judaism’ — and that these functioned in a dimension distinct from entire spheres of human activity — spheres called ‘secular’ in English — was not a conviction native to anywhere except for Western Europe.
Yet if the West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had proven itself skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences, then the spread of secularism inevitably depended for its success upon the care with which it covered its tracks.
Countries perceived as successful are imitated; when they stop being successful, then others no longer look to them for inspiration or models of governance. Demonstration of power rather than persuasion is what really convinces.
A related article here by Ashutosh Bhardwaj examined one of this arugments for why secularism failed in India:
The proposition is that the RSS has succeeded because it communicates with people in Indian languages they understand; whereas the English-speaking liberal intellectuals have failed to connect with people.
The author disagrees with this for two reasons, one of which I think has some lessons for the EU:
One of the reasons secularism is in crisis today is because although India boasts of being a multilingual society, we have stopped producing bilingual, let alone multilingual, writers in the last few decades. Many Indian writers born before Independence were effortless polyglots, but the eminent ones from the last few decades seem cocooned in their own languages. Surprisingly, as well as ironically, writers of a multilingual nation find little intellectual stimulation to work in more than one language.
Bilingualism is pretty common among most European elites. But even in a country like the Netherlands, where English is widely spoken, the national debate is still insular and self-referential. More people learning English won’t change that. A common language is probably only a strong centripetal force when it is a common first language. That’s not an option for the EU, so we need other methods.
Thoughts on QAnon
Some quotes:
All of them support QAnon, a vast conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is waging a war against the “deep state” made up of elite families, politicians, and celebrities
It’s a conspiracy that’s been able to reach new heights during the pandemic as people around the world desperately search for community and any way to make sense of the chaos. The QAnon community is welcoming to anyone as long as they believe in at least one of the many tendrils that branch out from the theory’s heart—that the world is extremely screwed because of bogeymen behind the scenes, and only those smart enough to see through the veil can fight them. While the actual details of the conspiracy are hyper-focused on the U.S., the broad strokes can be applied to almost anywhere, which helps to explain the rapid growth of QAnon across borders.
Does this movement satisfy the same kind of psychological need for its followers as anti-semitism? That is, the need for a belief in an all-powerful enemy, or the need for a justification for why things are going wrong in one’s own life.
Given the viral structure of this movement, and the fact that there are probably some true believers to keep it alive even if it falls out of popularity, it might last a very long time indeed.
This article gives an overview of the political candidates (some successful) linked to QAnon. Here’s an interesting fact:
The first third party in the United States, the Anti-Masonic Party, was dedicated to the proposition that freemasons were running a shadow government and were secretly plotting to control the world. Though the Anti-Masonic Party was short lived, at their peak in 1833 they controlled 10.5% of the House of Representatives.
The Gender of a Teacher Matters
I was very surprised by some passages in The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Heinrich. Essentially, the more similar a student is to their teacher in terms of gender, ethnicity, and other markers, the more likely one is to learn from them. My prior was that the perceived prestige of the teacher was what mattered, not these other characteristics. This is something I will look into in more detail in the future.
Here are the key parts from the passages:
Recent work by the brain scientist Elizabeth Reynolds Losin, a former student of mine, and her colleagues at UCLA has begun to illuminate the neurological underpinnings of sex-biased cultural learning. Using fMRI technology, Liz focused on the difference between people’s brains when they imitated a same-sex model versus an opposite-sex model. She asked both men and women in Los Angeles to first watch and then imitate the arbitrary hand gestures either of a same-sex or opposite-sex model.…This finding suggests that we experience copying same-sex others as internally more rewarding than copying opposite-sex others. We like it more, so naturally we are inclined to do it more.
And later:
Florian Hoffman and his collaborators unearthed real-world evidence consistent with the experimental findings discussed above: being taught by instructors whom you match on ethnicity/race reduces your dropout rate and raises your grades. In fact, for African-American students at a community college, being taught by an African-American instructor reduced class dropout rates by 6 percentage points and increased the fraction attaining a B or better by 13 percentage points. Similarly, using data from freshman (first-years) at the University of Toronto, Florian’s team has also shown that getting assigned to a same-sex instructor increased students’ grades a bit.
Malcolm Gladwell: How I Rediscovered Faith
Other people’s power to forgive impressed him sufficiently to renew his faith. I find these cases interesting because they could be symptons of a “Second Religiousness" which both Spengler and Toynbee thought could arise in the late stage of a civilisation. Here are some quotes:
Why are so many successful entrepreneurs dyslexic? Why did so many American presidents and British prime ministers lose a parent in childhood
Where did the people of Le Chambon find the strength to defy the Nazis? The same place the Derksens found strength to forgive. They were armed with the weapons of the spirit.
The willingness to sacrifice one’s own self-interest for higher ideals is not unique to Christians of course.
Does time flow backwards?
I’m not very convinced overall by this article, but it articulates some interesting facts nonetheless. Some quotes:
Take two radioactive atoms, so identical that “even God couldn’t see the difference between them.” Then wait. The first atom might decay a minute later, but the second might go another hour before decaying. This is not just a thought experiment; it can really be seen in the laboratory. There is nothing to explain the different behaviors of the two atoms, no way to predict when they will decay by looking at their history, and—seemingly—no definitive cause that produces these effects. This indeterminism, along with the ambiguity inherent in the uncertainty principle, famously rankled Einstein, who fumed that God doesn’t play dice with the universe.
Aharonov accepted that a particle’s past does not contain enough information to fully predict its fate, but he wondered, if the information is not in its past, where could it be? After all, something must regulate the particle’s behavior. His answer—which seems inspired and insane in equal measure—was that we cannot perceive the information that controls the particle’s present behavior because it does not yet exist.
The Universe still seems to be flat
In What Shape Is the Universe? A New Study Suggests We’ve Got It All Wrong, some researchers sought to present the case that the Universe is shaped like a sphere.
But then note the correction at the very bottom, from last month:
New measurements of the cosmic microwave background by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope find that the universe is flat, with a density matching the critical density. “We find no evidence of deviation from flatness,” the ACT scientists write, “supporting the interpretation that the [deviation seen by Planck] is a statistical fluctuation.”
Of course, we still don’t know whether the Universe is finite or infinite.
Critique of Judith Butler
The Professor of Parody — The hip defeatism of Judith Butler (1999) by Martha Nussbaum on Judith Butler
This piece mostly addresses the performative nature of the subversiveness that Judith Butler seemed to promote (past tense, as it’s an old article). I found this interesting in view of the fact that today’s protests in the US also seem to avoid demands for real structural change (aside from reforms to the police).
From today’s perspective, the article underestimated what the long-term impact on discourse would be of the ideas criticised. But will there be a major change in economic reality in the coming years? It’s too early to answer that question.
Some quotes:
they were also right to demand the specialized research on women’s bodies that has fostered a better understanding of women’s training needs and women’s injuries.
Indeed, it is clear that Butler, like Foucault, is adamantly opposed to normative notions such as human dignity, or treating humanity as an end, on the grounds that they are inherently dictatorial.
For every friend of Butler, eager to engage in subversive performances that proclaim the repressiveness of heterosexual gender norms, there are dozens who would like to engage in subversive performances that flout the norms of tax compliance, of non-discrimination, of decent treatment of one’s fellow students. To such people we should say, you cannot simply resist as you please, for there are norms of fairness, decency, and dignity that entail that this is bad behavior. But then we have to articulate those norms--and this Butler refuses to do.
In Butler, resistance is always imagined as personal, more or less private, involving no unironic, organized public action for legal or institutional change. Isn’t this like saying to a slave that the institution of slavery will never change, but you can find ways of mocking it and subverting it, finding your personal freedom within those acts of carefully limited defiance? Yet it is a fact that the institution of slavery can be changed, and was changed — but not by people who took a Butler-like view of the possibilities. It was changed because people did not rest content with parodic performance: they demanded, and to some extent they got, social upheaval.
The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment. In this sense, Butler’s self-involved feminism is extremely American, and it is not surprising that it has caught on here, where successful middle-class people prefer to focus on cultivating the self rather than thinking in a way that helps the material condition of others.
Cognitive benefits of walking
M.R. O’Connor (@TheOChronicle) reviews “In Praise of Walking,” by Shane O’Mara. I wonder do the cognitive benefits from walking map to any other physical activities such as cycling and swimming? Some quotes from the review:
Studies show that regular walking mobilizes changes in the structure of our brain that can increase volume in the areas associated with learning and memory.
We have two main modes of thought: active mode and mind-wandering. It’s the latter that walking can stimulate, allowing our minds to drift and “integrate our past, present, and future, interrogate our social lives, and create a largescale personal narrative.”
It’s O’Mara’s opinion that doctors should prescribe walking as a treatment for improving health because, as he puts it, movement is medicine. His prescription: Don’t bother going to the gym, just take really long walks, preferably in nature
Why did premature births fall during lockdown?
Great News About Births During Covid-19 by Andreas Kluth
See the quote below for one speculative but interesting answer. The key question here of course is how many other unmeasured costs there are due to elevated levels of economic activity. This is a very visible and immediately observable cost — but what about the effect on long-term creativity or cognition for example?
Quote:
One explanation for fewer premature births may be the decreases in air pollution during the lockdowns, as fewer people drove or flew and factories belched less. Another factor could be that the moms-to-be had fewer infections generally — and thus less inflammation in their bodies — as we reduced contact with people and germs and obsessively washed hands. But the most obvious and plausible reason appears to be that for many expecting moms, though decidedly not all, the lockdowns reduced stress.
Religious substitution and the power of meaning
The Spiritual Species by Clay Routledge
The underlying thesis of this article is that falling belief in mainline Christianity is compensated by rising belief in non-rational entities and phenomena. This has costs, because belief in religion is linked to an enhanced sense of freedom and agency.
This reminds me of the premise of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, whereby people with a strong sense of meaning are far more likely to survive difficult circumstances. From this, I would infer that they would also be more courageous in undertaking difficult tasks and high risks, such as starting a comany or resisting an oppressive regime. I will discuss how this insight can be integrated into Metasophism in Chapter 12.
Some interesting quotes and statistics from the article:
Just in the last decade, according to Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as Christian has decreased from 77% to 65%, while the number of religiously unaffiliated is up from 17% to 26%.
A 2003 Gallup survey found that around three-fourths of Americans endorse some type of paranormal belief — in other words, they believe in such things as ghosts, witchcraft, reincarnation, astrology, telepathy, or clairvoyance. What's more, the less people are engaged in traditional religious practices, the more inclined they are to hold alternative supernatural and paranormal beliefs. For instance, Pew found that people who do not frequently attend church are twice as likely to believe in ghosts as are regular churchgoers.
Such trends are not confined to the United States. A survey of Canadians found that though young adults are less likely than older adults to believe in God and Jesus Christ as the son of God, they are equally or more likely than older adults to believe in life after death, the existence of angels, and people's ability to communicate with the spiritual realm. Surveys in the United Kingdom and Sweden also show that belief in ghosts has been rising in recent decades.
Among Americans with aspirations to start a business, the more they believed in their ability to live a meaningful life (existential agency), the more they felt motivated to pursue their entrepreneurial ambitions. More broadly, we found that greater existential agency was positively associated with greater support for economic freedom.
Harvard and Managerialism
Harvard Creates Managers Instead of Elites by @saffronhuang
I don’t think you can rely on a top-down hierarchical institution to select and train creative elites consistently — and if this view is correct the problem at Harvard can’t be fixed. You need to have diversity across multiple dimensions to have an effective elite, and that includes behavioral and ideological diversity. Standardised selection and education procedures tend to militate against that, and even if not, people at the bottom of a hierarchy will tend to emulate those at the top — to flatter them, so as to be favoured by them. But creativity requires going against the status quo, and that won’t be favoured by a top-down hierarchy.
Note: hierarchy is probably necessary, and my issue is where the process of selection is controlled by those at the top. You could have a hierarchy where selection is more algorithmic, based for example on peer assessment. That could prevent a great deal of unproductive polticking and sycophancy within an organisation. But this idea is untested, so perhaps there are other problems it may introduce.
Some interesting quotes from the article:
The lack of meaningful guidance and substantive vision, the insular bubble students live in, and the nudges towards marginal optimization kill innovative, interesting, and socially beneficial ambition. This molds the supposed rising strategic elite into the mindset of an upper-middle class striver
The Pavlovian response of racking up points at the margin sets students up perfectly for careers as mid-level managers looking for small wins, laser-focused on keeping the books balanced. Not only does marginal thinking mean that the American elite trained this way don’t have their eye on the bigger picture, but it makes them more risk-averse and conservative.
Students flock to career-oriented campus organizations only to learn how to manage structures that already exist, or execute a task that others have done hundreds of times before. Very few clubs create a generative and imaginative vision for your future self at work, or for what you should be working on. Although this is the stated purpose of a Harvard liberal arts education, campus culture has elevated managerialism above creation.
Observations on Kazakhstan
Authoritarian Development Has Rebuilt Kazakhstan into a Eurasian Power by @lijukic
I quite liked this essay I just came across, even though it was published last year. Here are some of the key quotes I found surprising:
“Alexander Solzhenitsyn—who himself spent years in prison in Soviet Kazakhstan—called for a new Russian state to annex the northern provinces of Kazakhstan populated by Russians. “
“Russians now only make up about 20% of the country, while Kazakhs are a healthy majority of around 65%. This is not only thanks to Russian out-migration, but also to the high birth rate in Kazakhstan, which heavily skews towards ethnic Kazakh families. In fact, while birth rates plummet across the developed world, Kazakh birthrates have steadily risen and are now higher than they ever have been in the country’s post-Soviet history, with the rate hovering around 2.7 births per woman from 2014 onward.“
“98% of ethnic Kazakhs identify as Muslim, even if most of them aren’t answering the calls to prayer. Instead, you can find them in the many fashionable bars and restaurants knocking back beers and vodkas and smoking their lungs out well into the night with their non-Muslim countrymen.“
“Part of the Russian colonial program of the 18th and 19th centuries in Kazakhstan was actually encouraging Kazakhs to be more Muslim. This was a move to ‘civilize’ the nomads who were seen as savage due to their clearly non-Muslim, traditional nomadic beliefs.“
“Islam has experienced a revival in recent years across the Muslim world, and Kazakhstan is no exception. Even if it has been far more controlled than elsewhere, in the 1990s hundreds of mosques were opened, mostly with funding from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.“
“Considering Kazakhs are an ever increasing ethnic majority, a more homogeneous Kazakhstan could lead to a more assertive Kazakh national ideology, which would be in direct conflict with Nazarbayev’s Eurasianist ideology and undermine his entire geopolitical strategy for Kazakhstan.“
The Vatican and China
Link: The Vatican Is Said to Be Hacked From China Before Talks With Beijing (New York Times) by @SangerNYT @ewong and @jasondhorowitz
For some time, the Vatican has been trying to establish a modus operandi with the CCP. As part of these efforts, the CCP has a role in the appointment of bishops, and the Vatican remains silent on injustice within China itself. This seemingly dovish approach may be partly influenced by the gerontocratic governance of the Vatican — in the sense that for people in their seventies and eighties, they may still have an image of China as being a poor country that makes gimmicky toys, instead of the formidable technological and geopolitical force it is quickly becoming.
It’s worth noting however that the Holy See is only joined by 14 other countries in having diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
Quote: “The revelations are certain to anger the Vatican as its relationship with the Chinese government has been enormously delicate, especially over China’s crackdown on Hong Kong. When the Vatican issued prepared remarks on July 5 for Pope Francis’s blessing at St. Peter’s Square, it included a message to the people of Hong Kong, saying the current standoff “requires courage, humility, nonviolence and respect for the dignity and rights of all. I hope that social and especially religious life may be expressed in full and true liberty, as indeed several international documents foresee. But in the end, the pope did not deliver those words when he spoke.” (my emphasis)