The Digested Twenty-first Century

by John Crace

  Digested read, digested: Antimatter.

  Manuscript Found in Accra

  by Paulo Coelho (2013)

  In 1945, two brothers in Egypt found discarded biblical texts. In 1982, Paolo di Canio found a further manuscript in the same area. He gave it to me, Paulo di Coelho, last year. This is what it said.

  Today is July 14th, 1089, and the town of Jerusalem, in which both Jews and Muslims live, will tomorrow be attacked by the Christians. All of us are so afraid and have gathered in the square. Behold! A bald Brazilian man with a neatly cropped beard descends from a cloud.

  A man asks him: ‘Speak to us about defeat.’ And the Brazilian answers: ‘Defeat is not so bad, for everything is part of the Divine Energy. Remember the Circle of Life. The gazelle may be eaten by the lion, but the gazelle eats the grass. Such is God’s way.’

  Another man asks him: ‘Speak to us about platitudes.’ And the Brazilian answers: ‘If I can get away with this drivel, then there is hope for all of us. Even the most useless of you can appreciate the shining of the sun. Unless it is raining. Learn to take pride in all your achievements, however small. If you have stayed at home in bed, delight in the fact you have not driven your car and knocked over a pedestrian.’

  Another man asks him: ‘Speak to us about fear.’ And the Brazilian says: ‘None of us can escape the Unwanted Visitor of Death. So learn to chill out. A mountain is not afraid to stay in the same place. A man who has had one leg amputated is not so fearful of having the other one hacked off. You have nothing to lose but your limbs. Difficulty is the name of an ancient tool that was created purely to help us define who we are. Chisel is another.’

  Another man asks him: ‘Speak to us about beauty.’ And the Brazilian says: ‘Do not believe those who say it is only Inner Beauty that counts. Otherwise why would God have made me so handsome? Ugliness is a mask worn by hideous people who are too afraid to allow themselves to feel the Divine Energy and be loved. True Love, though, is the Love that Seduces and will never allow itself to be Seduced.’

  Another man says: ‘That’s the biggest load of bollocks I’ve ever heard. Surely anyone Seduced by True Love cannot Experience True Love?’ And the Brazilian gave him a withering look of contempt before replying: ‘The rest is silence, Grasshopper.’

  A woman asks him: ‘Speak to us of sex.’ And the Brazilian says: ‘It is when two rivers meet to become a more beautiful, more powerful river. And if my meaning is still unclear, email me at holdmylovepump@gmail.com.’

  Another man asks him: ‘Why are some men poets and some men labourers?’ And the Brazilian says: ‘One day a man shall come who will write, ‘Close your eyes, yet do not sleep/For I will take you to the Deepest Deep.’ And that man will be me. Do not chastise yourself for being quite dim. For if you were bright, you would not buy this book and I would not be loaded.’

  Another man asks him: ‘Tell us what the future holds.’ And the Brazilian says: ‘The Unwanted Visitor may arrive at any moment. So always have clean underwear and take heed that one man went to mow, went to mow a meadow. Listen to the wind, but do not forget your horse. Or your lawn mower. Think also of a shelf that collapses and breaks an array of painted vases. But do not ask why. Do not fear failure. Each day is a new beginning, so treat it as if it were your last.’

  With that the Rabbi, the Imam and the Priest cry ‘Good idea’ and kill themselves rather than each other, before a final man asks: ‘Speak to us of miracles.’ And the Brazilian says: ‘You’ve carried on reading till the end.’

  Digested read, digested: Manuscript Found in Adustbin.

  David and Goliath

  by Malcolm Gladwell (2013)

  In the heart of ancient Palestine stood a six-foot-nine-inch giant. Against him was a five-foot-nothing midget. No one gave the midget a prayer. The giant’s name was Goliath. The midget’s name was David. You might have read about their battle in the Old Testament. But the Bible got it wrong. David was not the underdog.

  Most people make assumptions about power and jump to ridiculous conclusions. Who does not think the country with the most men and weaponry will automatically win a war? Not counting those of you who lived through Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Take the American invasion of Grenada. Although Grenada was much the smaller country, it actually held all the aces. Had Grenada played its cards just a little better, the US would have been wiped off the face of the earth.

  Vivek Ranadive decided to coach his daughter’s basketball team. Vivek realised that most coaches had made the simple error of packing their teams with players who were at least 6ft 7in. His daughter’s friends were 5ft 3in. Vivek understood his team could run through the legs of the opposition before climbing on to each other’s shoulders to score a slam dunk. They beat the Boston Celtics 89–12. In their dreams.

  Can you have too much money? Personally, I don’t think you can, or I would have stopped chancing my arm with counterintuitive anecdotes long ago. But research shows you can. Jim was very happy when he didn’t have much money. Now he’s a top Hollywood producer and not very happy. See what I mean?

  Richard is dyslexic. Most people would consider it to be a disadvantage. But Richard worked very hard, got a bit lucky and founded his Virgin empire. Richard could not have done this had he not been dyslexic. Having dyslexia is actually a blessing and anyone who has the condition and has not become a billionaire should be ashamed.

  Learning to understand when your disadvantage is an advantage and not a disadvantage can be tricky. Katy was devastated when her entire family was wiped out in an air crash. Then she realised that at least she was alive and would inherit all the money. She went on to become a moderately successful real-estate agent in Florida.

  Terry was a large trout in a North American lake. After graduating top of the class from the lake’s high school, Terry decided to travel to the ocean to make his fortune. He got gobbled up by Thomas the tuna. Sometimes, it really is better to be a big fish in a little pond, rather a little fish in a big pond.

  In 1963, Martin Luther King went to Birmingham, Alabama. Martin Luther King was black. Birmingham, Alabama, was known to be the most racist city in the USA. Therefore, Birmingham, Alabama, was not a safe place for Martin Luther King. But Martin Luther King went anyway. If Martin Luther King had been white, no one would have noticed his presence in Birmingham, Alabama. But because Martin Luther King had the courage to be black and he did go to Birmingham, Alabama, the civil rights movement made significant progress.

  Less is sometimes more. And more is sometimes less. It’s all a question of perception. Bobby was a career criminal. When California introduced a three strikes and you go to jail policy, Bobby went on a killing spree. The penalties for murder were so severe, they made no difference to him. But when California reduced the maximum sentence from 238 years to 110 years, Bobby decided to go straight. Bobby went to Harvard and became a traffic cop in Iowa.

  There was once a boy who looked a bit different. We’ll call him Leo Sayer. Because that’s his name. Some people laughed at Leo because he had silly hair. Others didn’t want to be his friend because he was always telling them that he was right and they were wrong. Leo decided to use his odd hair and off-putting mannerisms to his advantage and changed his name to Malcolm. Malcolm wrote a book telling people how everything they knew was wrong. It became a bestseller. So Malcolm wrote another book just the same. And another. He even rewrote Aesop’s Fables. Still no one noticed. Malcolm cultivated a persona of being an outsider while earning huge amounts of money from banks, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies. Malcolm earns more for a one-hour talk than you will earn in a year. So who is laughing now?

  Digested read, digested: You make me feel like snoring.

  SCIENCE/HISTORY/RELIGION

  Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

  by Niall Ferguson (2003)

  It has long been fashionable to decry the British empire as a relic of imperial repression, and while it is not my intention to excuse its worst excesses, it is i
mportant for a good-looking historian to take a contrary position. So I contend it was also a considerable force for good.

  Every iconoclast needs a neologism; mine is Anglobalisation. Other empire builders were little more than pirates, exploiting resources for their own end while seeking to impose their culture and religion on the local inhabitants. Britain, of course, was not entirely exempt in this respect but her interests lay far more in establishing a world free-trade market.

  Stroll down the elegant boulevards of old Philadelphia and think of all the things that would not have existed had the world not had the benefit of my, sorry our, munificence. Sydney, Freetown, Bombay, Calcutta: all founded and built by the British. Would they have been created anyway, you might ask? Well, yes, but not nearly so well.

  In 1897, the year of her Diamond Jubilee, Queen Victoria reigned supreme over 25% of the world’s surface; informally, through her economic activities in Latin America, her imperial reach extended still further. Wondrous times. In a spirit of unflinching altruism Britain exported its peoples and its capital to all corners of the globe, often at significant cost to itself. And where’s the gratitude, that’s what I want to know.

  I have now reached the most solemn point of the story. It was the British Empire that alone stood up to two of the most evil empires in history in 1940 and singlehandedly saved the world from the thousand-year Reich. No greater love hath any empire than it lays down its life for its friends. In an act of Judas-like betrayal, it was the Americans, whose anti-colonial ideals sit uneasily with its own history both within and without its borders, who brought about our collapse. Britain was almost bankrupted saving the world, and America sought to expedite it in the late 1940s to acquire our markets for itself. Blame the Americans for the bloodbath of decolonisation. And what has the US given the world in return? Nothing.

  All things considered, both Britain and myself can look ourselves in the mirror and be pretty damned pleased with what we see.

  Digested read, digested: Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.

  A Briefer History of Time

  by Stephen Hawking (2005)

  The title of this book differs by only two letters from A Brief History of Time that I wrote in 1988. That book stayed on the bestseller list for 237 weeks; a remarkable feat for a book that no one understood. Three years ago, I attempted to simplify my ideas in The Universe in a Nutshell, but I now gather that no one understood that, either. So, I’m now giving you a third and final chance. At the very least, you will begin to grasp the concept of circular time.

  So pay attention. As Einstein points out, time may be relative, but mine’s more valuable than yours. We’re searching for a grand unified theory, but haven’t got one, because general relativity and quantum mechanics are inconsistent with one another. So let’s start with Newton, who gave us the three laws of motion, which describe how bodies react to forces, and the theory of gravity.

  Newton refused to accept the lack of absolute space, even though his laws implied it, but he believed wholeheartedly in absolute time. This was a mistake, as everyone has their own four-dimensional spacetime. Einstein’s theory of general relativity is based on the revolutionary suggestion that gravity is not a force like other forces, but a consequence of the fact that spacetime is curved. Light rays, too, must follow geodesics in spacetime, as relativity predicts light will be bent by gravitational fields.

  Thanks to the Doppler effect, we know that the universe is expanding as the light-shifts of stars veer towards the red end of the spectrum. If you listen carefully, you can also pick up cosmic noise, which is, in fact, the glow of microwave radiation from the early formation of the universe. So how did the universe start? All solutions to Einstein’s equations point to the fact that at some time in the past the universe was squashed into a single point with zero size. At this point, which we call big bang, the density of the universe and the curvature of spacetime would have been infinite, so unfortunately all theories of cosmology break down.

  Still with me? Probably not. But never mind. I shall carry on regardless. One second after big bang, the universe would have contained mostly photons, electrons and neutrinos, and their anti-particles, together with some protons and neutrons.

  Colliding photons might produce an electron and a positron; if they met up they would annihilate each other, but the reverse process is not so easy. Eventually, when the temperature had fallen to allow the strong force to take effect we’d begin to see the nuclei of deuterium. From then on it was downhill through supernovae and black holes to the present day.

  But how do we resolve the problem of singularity? Through supersymmetry? String theory? 10-dimensional space? These are only partial explanations. All we can say for certain is that it is possible to write five sentences that make sense on their own, but when put together in a paragraph are intelligible only to God. And me.

  Digested read, digested: Third Time Unlucky.

  God is Not Great

  by Christopher Hitchens (2007)

  If the intended reader of this book should want to go beyond disagreement with its author and try to identify the sins that animated him to write it, he or she will not just be quarrelling with the ineffable creator who made me this way, they will also be defiling the memory of a simple, pious woman called Mrs Jean Watts.

  It was Mrs Watts’ task, when I was a boy of about nine, to instruct me in lessons of nature and scripture, and there came a day when she said, ‘So you see children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made the grass to be green, which is exactly the colour that is most restful to our eyes.’

  I was appalled by this. Even though it was to be several months before I was to fully comprehend the subtleties of Darwinian evolution and to unlock the secrets of the genome, I simply knew my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in two sentences. The eyes were adjusted to nature, not the other way round.

  I do not believe it is arrogant of me to say that I had uncovered the four irreducible objections to religious faith – its misrepresentations of the origins of man and the cosmos, its combination of servility and solipsism, its dangerous sexual repression and its wishful-thinking – before my boyish voice had broken. Everyone knows I have always been right about everything, even when I have later changed my mind, and there is at least one other person conceited enough to make similar claims. My brother.

  Religious friends – I use both words guardedly – often call me a seeker because I have studied the world’s sacred texts in greater depth than any scholar. Like almost everything else, this irritates me immensely. I read these books because I am, by nature, tolerant and wish to engage with the idiocies many hold dear. The difference between me and them is that while I would not try to convert others to atheism, they feel obliged to save my soul. This is an important distinction. The purpose of this book is not to prove God does not exist; it is to prove I am cleverer than Richard Dawkins.

  Sheltered as my life normally is within the rarefied sanctuary of the Washington intellectual elite, I have always made it my business to give comfort to the world’s conflict zones by blessing them with a visit – often accompanied by my dear friend, Salman Rushdie. And I ask you this: if the express purpose of religion is to make you happy, then why is every zealot a psychopathic paedophile?

  Yes, more people have died in the name of religion than ... Oh, you’ve already heard this somewhere before, have you? Well let me tell you something you don’t know. The reason that Jews and Muslims don’t eat pork has nothing to do with the meat’s cleanliness. It comes from their Freudian repression of their lust for pigs.

  Religion serves only the self-satisfied and the conceited; it dates back to a period of prehistory when nobody – not even the mighty Democritus – had the faintest clue what was going on and God was needed not just as an explanation but as an instrument of social repression...

  But I can see that I am again in danger of losing you in the radicalism and unfamiliarity of my discourse, so let me devote the ne
xt 150 pages to a brutal deconstruction of the evils of the Bible and the Qur’an – though they hardly merit the attention of my intellect. I could talk about the weakness of evidence by revelation, but suffice it to say that the Bible is a catalogue of lies compiled by ruthless, amoral, sexually perverted liars and that the Qur’an is a catalogue of lies borrowed from the Bible.

  I must also talk about the tawdriness of the miraculous, the priapism of blood sacrifice, the molestation of children and the empty concept of heaven which are endemic in every believer, but I should also like to counter the case against the secularists. Were not Hitler and Stalin the biggest mass-murderers in modern history, say the vicious religious apologists such as Mother Teresa? I say only this. All the Nazis were Catholics and Stalin was a theocrat.

  The time for the new Enlightenment has come. Cast aside your false gods and know one thing and one thing only. There is no God but me.

  Digested read, digested: Our Christopher, who art in Washington, hallowed be my name.

  The Case for God

  by Karen Armstrong (2007)

  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart make Dawkins and Hitchens burn in Hell, O Lord my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen.

  Much of what we say about God these days is facile. The concept of God is meant to be hard. Too often we get lost in what Greeks called logos (reason) rather than interpreting Him through mythoi – those things we know to be eternally true but can’t prove. Like Santa Claus. Religion is not about belief or faith; it is a skill. Self-deceit does not always come easily, so we have to work at it. Our ancestors, who were obviously right, would have been surprised by the crude empiricism that reduces faith to fundamentalism or atheism. I have no intention of rubbishing anyone’s beliefs, so help me God, but Dawkins’s critique of God is unbelievably shallow. God is transcendent, clever clogs. So we obviously can’t understand him. Duh!