10 Practical Ways to Improve Happiness

10 Practical Ways to Improve Happiness by Arthur C. Brooks Jan Buchczik April 21, 2022 “How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life. In 2020, an international team of scholars tried to find out. They came up with 68 ways that people are commonly counseled to raise their own happiness, then asked 18 of the most distinguished and prolific academic experts on the science of happiness to rate them in terms of effectiveness and feasibility. In other words, according to the experts, these ways to get happier both work and are workable. Here are the top 10, in order, with my own assessments as a happiness researcher added in for good measure. 1. Invest in family and friends. The research is clear that though our natural impulse may be to buy stuff, we should invest instead in improving our closest relationships by sharing experiences and freeing up time to spend together. Read: How to buy happiness 2. Join a club. The “social capital” you get from voluntarily and regularly associating with other people, whether or not you do so through a formal club, has long been known to foster a sense of belonging and protect against loneliness and isolation. 3. Be active both mentally and physically. You can make this advice as complicated and expensive as you want. But if you like to keep things simple, just try to walk for an hour and read for an hour (not for work!) each day. Read: Go for a walk 4. Practice your religion. This might sound impractical if you don’t have a traditional faith or practice it traditionally. However, for the purposes of happiness, religion can be understood more broadly, as a spiritual or philosophical path in life. Search for transcendent truths beyond your narrow day-to-day life. 5. Get physical exercise. This is a slightly souped-up version of No. 3 above: Your daily walk should be supplemented with a purposive exercise plan. This is consistent with the research showing that regular exercise of all different types enhances mood and social functioning. Read: Sedentary pandemic life is bad for our happiness 6. Act nicely. Agreeableness is consistently found to be highly and positively correlated with happiness, and it can be increased relatively easily. 7. Be generous. Behaving altruistically toward others rewards the brain with happiness-enhancing boosts of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. 8. Check your health. Of all health issues, those that create the greatest unhappiness are typically chronic pain and anxiety. Don’t neglect your visits to the doctor and the dentist, and seek mental-health assistance if your emotions are interfering with your work, relationships, or social activities. 9. Experience nature. Studies have shown that, compared with urban walking, walking in a woodland setting more dramatically lowers stress, increases positive mood, and enhances working memory. Read: How microdosing on nature can help with stress 10. Socialize with colleagues outside of work. Data have shown that work friendships increase employee engagement, which is associated with both happiness and productivity for workers. I believe that the move to remote work during the pandemic has inadvertently lowered the true compensation of work for millions, explaining in part the so-called Great Resignation. Bonding with your co-workers is a way to take it back. This list is quite similar to the advice routinely dispensed by top academics writing for popular audiences, such as the UC Riverside psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky (who was also one of the 18 experts in the study), and by nonacademics who write about the science of happiness, such as Gretchen Rubin. “These ideas are terrific—and familiar,” Rubin told me recently. What impressed her wasn’t their originality (your grandmother might’ve told you most of them); rather, it was the fact that they were both effective and practical. “For many of us, the bigger challenge isn’t knowing what actions would make us happier, but actually doing those things,” she said. Other common happiness advice is ineffective, infeasible, or both. In the 2020 study, the lowest-ranked ideas included working part-time (infeasible for many people) and building wealth (wealth explains only about 1 percent of happiness differences). The 18 experts also weren’t fans of creating a “pride shrine”—an area of your home devoted to mementos to your successes and accomplishments. That isn’t surprising: As I show in my recent book From Strength to Strength, reminding yourself of your own past greatness is actually a very good way to lower your current satisfaction. Read: How to succeed at failure Debunking common-but-bad happiness guidelines could be a full-time job. Beyond those mentioned above, my favorites are “If it feels good, do it” (which can lure us toward bad habits and away from deep purpose) and “Let your anger out” (which research clearly shows leads to more anger, not relief). In my experience as a researcher, nearly all advice to let yourself be managed by your emotions and desires is bad. If one thing bothers me about the list of happiness ideas above, it is that they are incomplete, insofar as they are disconnected tactics. If you really want to get happier, you need a full-on integrated strategy. A happiness strategy has three parts to it. First, you need to commit yourself to understanding happiness. That can mean many things, whether it’s learning about the science of happiness, studying philosophy, or immersing yourself in a faith practice. Second, you need to practice good happiness hygiene. That’s where the ideas on the list above come in. Treat them as systematic habits, not occasional hacks, and think consciously about whether each action is consistent with your understanding of happiness. Finally, share your knowledge and progress with others. Beyond being an ethical thing to do, teaching will cement your philosophy and habits into your consciousness. Read: Don’t wish for happiness. Work for it. The most important thing to remember is this: You don’t have to leave your happiness up to chance. No matter where you live or what you do, you can manage your own joy and share it with others. Arthur C. Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School. He’s the host of the podcast series How to Build a Happy Life and the author of From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.

Religion

A Little History of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) by Richard Holloway P. 223: In 1925 the State of Tennessee outlawed the teaching of evolution in its schools. It became a punishable offence to teach “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The Scopes trial, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Clarence Darrow’s argument: John Thomas Scopes got himself arrested for teaching his students about evolution, and trying to show how foolish it was to disprove evolution by quoting Genesis. He was fined $100. P. 224: It wasn’t until 1968 that the law banning the teaching of evolution in schools was overturned by the US Supreme Court. Fundamentalism is a tantrum. It’s a screaming fit, a refusal to accept new realities. …if scientific change and the new knowledge is hard for the fundamentalist mind to accept, even harder is change in the way we run society. The most revolutionary change that hit the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was the liberation of women. …History shows that the men in charge never volunteer to give up their privileges. P. 225: Just as they learned to adapt to Darwin, liberal religions are learning to adapt, however painfully, to the liberation of women. But time does not stand still and they now have to deal, even more painfully, with the emancipation of gay people. …fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, and Jews share a common problem. P. 226: The Monkey Trial We are right and you are wrong because the Bible [or the Qur’an, or revelations from God] tells us so. P. 227: Religion is certainly no stranger to violence. P. 231: Religion has caused and continued to cause some of the most violence in history. And yes, it has used God to justify it. P.233: The mottoof the Enlightenment was “Dare to Know.” The authority of religious leaders should be confined to their own faith communities Only in the USA that this principle was ever strictly enforced. Building a wall of separation between Church and State became one of the founding principles of the USA. Pp. 235-236: Secular humanism helps men and women live good lives on principles humans have worked out for themselves. Humanity takes responsibility for itself. Secular humanists are happy to work with any group that want to make the world a better place. Humanists do not believe in any religious doctrines. Secular spirituality finds meaning and beauty in this life. It is the only life we’ll ever have, so we should be grateful and use it well. p. 237: it is religion without the supernatural; it’s human religion.

To fight climate change, and now Russia

To fight climate change, and now Russia, too, Zurich turns off natural gas https://www.npr.org/2022/04/20/1092429073/to-fight-climate-change-and-now-russia-too-zurich-turns-off-natural-gas April 20, 20225:10 AM ET Dan Charles The city of Zurich, Switzerland, is shutting down the gas supply to some neighborhoods. Originally aimed at fighting climate change and saving money, it's also a step to cut gas imports from Russia. Edwin Remsburg/VW Pics via Getty Images European officials are debating whether they can stop buying natural gas imports from Russia. Many say it can't be done. But the biggest city in Switzerland – Zurich – is already taking ambitious steps to wean itself off gas. It's shutting down the flow of gas to whole parts of the city. Zurich started down this path a decade ago in order to save money and fight climate change. The plan provoked controversy at first. Today, as the city's residents install alternatives to gas heating, there appears to be broad support for the switch – in part because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. About half of Switzerland's natural gas supply currently comes from Russia. "Attitudes have changed once again, dramatically," says Rainer Schöne, a spokesman for Energie 360°, Zurich's city-owned gas utility. "Today, it's clear; people want to, and have to, move away from fossil gas." Zurich's experience may offer lessons to other cities around the world that are encouraging residents to switch away from natural gas appliances – but are not, so far, shutting down the infrastructure that delivers it. A rocky start, but then, wide acceptance Zurich's move to abandon gas was driven in part by economics. The city wanted to expand a "district heating" system that uses excess heat from a waste incinerator on the edge of the city, a modern plant outfitted with the latest pollution control technology. The incinerator – supplemented by other facilities that burn wood or gas – heats water, and that hot water or steam circulates through underground pipes to homes and businesses that tap it as a heat source. It made little sense for the city to maintain both hot water and gas pipelines side-by-side, says Zurich's energy commissioner, Silvia Banfi Frost. "It's quite clear that we don't want to have parallel networks for supplying heat," she says. In 2011, city officials announced that they would start shutting down gas service within five years in one part of the city that's well-served by district heating. This area, historically dominated by industry and apartment buildings, is home to 93,000 people. But protests erupted. The plan "was indeed a shock" to many people who relied on gas, says Schöne. Residents argued that they'd received too little notice, and that they were being forced to buy costly replacements for their gas appliances. So officials backed off, promising to compensate people who had to replace gas furnaces that were less than 20 years old. Zurich also delayed the start of the gas shutdown to 2021. Now, however, it's underway. Some residents of Zurich, especially those in single-family homes, can't easily connect to the district heating system, and have to find other alternatives. Ernst Danner is a member of Zurich's City Parliament from the centrist Evangelical People's Party. He lives in a single-family home, and he installed an electric heat pump that draws warmth from water circulating through pipes that go deep underground. It cost him just over $40,000 after tax breaks and city subsidies, but it also cut his heating bill in half. Over the lifetime of the system, he says, "I pay a bit more, but it's not that much more, and it's more ecological." Many of his neighbors, Danner says, have installed less-costly "air-source" heat pumps that draw heat from the air outside. "Those I know are very happy with their heat pumps. It's very good!" he says. Zurich is expanding its district heating system, which delivers hot water and steam through underground pipes. With more buildings relying on this system for heat, there's less demand for natural gas. City of Zurich Some complaints linger but other cities draw lessons Mohamed Ali, the chef at a Lebanese restaurant called SimSim, isn't quite as pleased. "Actually, gas is nice," he says. "You know, to cook, to feel, to give power." Ali is replacing his stoves with electric induction versions. Unlike old-style electric stoves, induction allows precise control of cooking, similar to gas. These stoves work fine, Ali says, but they cost $40,000, and for him, few city subsidies were available. "I was so angry, because you have to pay a lot of money, and the city is not helping," he says. Last year, when the appointed time arrived to shut down gas service to the first neighborhood, city officials had to delay it for several months because a few people weren't yet ready. One landlord, in particular, simply refused to replace his gas furnace with new equipment to provide heat to his tenants. "He just didn't want to take care of the problem," Schöne says. "We had to visit the landlord himself, in his workplace, and tell him how serious this is." Year by year, Zurich plans to expand its district heating system and shut down gas service in additional neighborhoods. Within twenty years, according to the long-term plan, the burning of what city officials call "fossil gas" will end. Gas pipelines may remain in the historic city center, Banfi Frost says, but she expects they will carry "biogas" captured from animal manure or similar sources. Rainer Schöne, from Energie 360°, says most residents of Zurich now support the switch, mainly because of concerns about the effects of greenhouse emissions from burning fossil fuels. "There is a broad consensus in Zurich that [gas] is not, and cannot, be the future," he says. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has only strengthened those views. "I think we should stop buying gas from Russia," Danner says. "We would have a supply problem, but we could survive without it." The trail that Zurich is blazing could become a guide to other cities around the world. Many are encouraging people to switch from gas to electric appliances, but primarily on an individual basis. "We are very much promoting switching from natural gas," says Kerrie Romanow, director of environmental services for San Jose, California. But she says the city is focused on the appliances that consume the most gas. "We're not so worried about your gas cooktop, or your gas clothes dryer, as we are about heating and water heating, because those are much bigger uses," she says. If San Jose succeeds in this effort, though, it could end up in a situation similar to Zurich's, with an expensive gas system that serves fewer and fewer customers. The financial burden of maintaining that system could fall on low-income residents who are least able to pay for new electric replacements, like heat pumps. In addition, aging pipelines are prone to leaks, releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which is the main ingredient in natural gas, into the air. Romanow says it would be up to the gas company – in this case Pacific Gas and Electric – to decide when shutting down gas pipelines makes economic sense. A spokesperson for PG&E, Ari Vanrenen, declined to say whether the company is thinking about such a possibility. In an email to NPR, he wrote that "a multi-faceted approach is needed to cost-effectively achieve California's greenhouse-gas reduction objectives. This includes both electrification and decarbonizing the gas system with renewable natural gas and hydrogen." https://www.npr.org/2022/04/20/1092429073/to-fight-climate-change-and-now-russia-too-zurich-turns-off-natural-gas https://www.npr.org/2022/04/19/1093613413/climate-change-hurricane-rainfall Climate change fueled extreme rainfall during the record 2020 hurricane reason April 19, 20224:16 PM ET Rina Torchinsky Philadelphia firefighters walk through a flooded neighborhood on Aug. 4, 2020, after Tropical Storm Isaias moved through. Matt Slocum/AP Human-induced climate change fueled one of the most active North Atlantic hurricane seasons on record in 2020, according to a study published in the journal Nature. The study analyzed the 2020 season and the impact of human activity on climate change. It found that hourly hurricane rainfall totals were up to 10% higher when compared to hurricanes that took place in the pre-industrial era in 1850, according to a news release from Stony Brook University. Too Many Storms, Not Enough Names It's not too late to stave off the climate crisis, U.N. report finds. Here's how "The impacts of climate change are actually already here," said Stony Brook's Kevin Reed, who led the study. "They're actually changing not only our day-to-day weather, but they're changing the extreme weather events." There were a record-breaking 30 named storms during the 2020 hurricane season. Twelve of them made landfall in the continental U.S. These powerful storms are damaging and the economic costs are staggering. Hurricanes are fueled in part by moisture linked to warm ocean temperatures. Over the last century, higher amounts of greenhouse gases due to human emissions have raised both land and ocean temperatures. Reed, associate professor and associate dean of research at Stony Brook's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, says the findings show that human-induced climate change is leading to "more and quicker rainfall," which can hurt coastal communities. "Hurricanes are devastating events," Reed said. "And storms that produce more frequent hourly rain are even more dangerous in producing damage flooding, storm surge, and destruction in its path." The research was based on a "hindcast attribution" methodology, which is similar to a weather forecast but details events in the past rather than the future. The publication of the study follows the release of a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a United Nations body — that found that nations are not doing enough to rein in global warming. Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and one of the hurricane study's co-authors, said the increases in hurricane rainfall driven by global warming is not shocking. "What is surprising is that the amount of this human caused increase is so much larger than what is expected from increases in humidity alone," Wehner said in the release from Stony Brook. "This means that hurricane winds are becoming stronger as well."

Mt. Everest

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220407-how-tall-will-mount-everest-get-before-it-stops-growing?utm_source=pocket-newtab How tall will Mount Everest get before it stops growing? Arching over 8,849 metres (29,032ft) into the sky, Everest is the world’s tallest mountain. But will it always be?

Aurora Elmore was approaching Mount Everest's South Base Camp in Nepal. But rather than taking the traditional 12-day hiking route, she was soaring between the frozen peaks, the rotor blades of her helicopter slicing through the thin air with a whap, whap, whap. It was April 2019, and she was delivering supplies to a team of scientists working on the slopes of the world's tallest mountain. Her reward was a spectacular view: the day was crystal clear, exposing the entire Himalayan range. Over the next two months, researchers on the National Geographic and Rolex expedition she helped to organise would study the effects of climate change on this part of the Himalayas. Elmore, a geologist and at the time senior programme manager of the National Geographic Society in the US, supported the team installing the world's highest weather station on the flanks of Mount Everest. During the course of their expedition, her colleagues discovered the world's highest evidence of microplastic pollution in snow and stream water close to the summit. Gliding closer to Everest's iconic peak, Elmore got a bird's-eye view of them. A miniature city of green and yellow tents, each sheltering mountaineers headed for the top, had formed at Everest Base Camp more than 5km (3 miles) above sea level. Thousands flock to Everest every spring to make an attempt to reach the roof of the world. And while few of the climbers would have noticed, Everest grew a tiny bit bigger during their time on the mountain. Mount Everest, along with the rest of the Himilayas, inches further skyward every year. It raises an interesting question – with enough time, just how tall can Mount Everest grow? There are mountains on other planets in our Solar System that dwarf those on our own, so are there limits to how big a mountain can get on Earth? At more than 8,848m (29,032ft) tall, Mount Everest towers over the other giants in the Himalayas (Credit: Getty Images)

Mount Everest towers 8,848.86m (29,032ft) above sea level, according to the most recent official joint survey by China and Nepal, whose borders run across its summit. But it isn't the only giant in these lands – 10 of the world's 14 peaks higher than 8,000m (26,247ft) above sea level can be found in the Himalayan range. Everest, Elmore says, is among friends. "If you've ever flown over Greenland or the Canadian Rockies you can see big mountains, but [the Himalayas] are just on another level," she says. Surrounded by so many other enormous peaks, is it possible to discern just what a monster Everest is? Elmore hesitates before answering. "It's kind of like trying to tell the tallest person on a basketball team," she says finally. "They're all tall, but which one is the teeny [bit taller]?" You might also like: • How the next supercontinent will form • The Himalayan village powered by pine needles • The problem with Everest's 200+ bodies The history of measuring the tallest mountain in the world stretches back to 1852. In Europe, Charles Dickens was publishing serialised instalments of his novel Bleak House. North America had started testing its first steam-powered fire engine. In Asia, the height of Mount Everest was a mystery. It is known only as "Peak XV". Radhanath Sikdar, an Indian mathematician, had been employed by the British to work on their Great Trigonometrical Survey. They wanted to gather a more accurate geographical picture of the territory they were occupying so they could control it more effectively, be it for trade or military purposes. Sikdar used trigonometry. He measured the horizontal and vertical angles of Everest's summit from other mountaintops whose positions and heights were already known. In doing so he made a momentous discovery: the tallest mountain ever recorded. According to his calculations, the mountain stood at 8,839.8m (29,002ft) tall. Though the technology behind measuring mountains has advanced since the 1850s, his figure was astonishingly accurate, just nine metres off the latest official height. Despite Sikdar's findings, the mountain eventually was named after his previous boss, British surveyor Sir George Everest, who had retired several years before Sikdar's discovery. The main routes up Mount Everest have now become so popular with climbers that long queues can form (Credit: Lakpa Sherpa/AFP/Getty Images)

Since then, teams have continued to work to understand Mount Everest's height. In 1954 an Indian survey determined Mount Everest to be 8,848m (29,029ft) tall, a figure which was accepted by the Nepalese government. But then, in 2005, the Chinese measured it at 8,844.43m (29,017ft) – nearly four metres (13ft) lower. In 2020, teams from China and Nepal jointly agreed upon a new officially accepted height that was 0.86m (2.8ft) higher than the Survey of India's original calculation. While these changes in the measured height are partly due to improvements in the measuring technology available to surveyors, there has also been some politics involved. China and Nepal historically have argued over whether the snow cap on the summit should be included in the measurement or not. But we mustn't ignore that Everest also grows a tiny little bit taller every year too. Once, the craggy limestone peaks that skim the sky of Everest were on the ocean floor. Scientists believe it all began to change about 200 million years ago – at around the time the Jurassic dinosaurs were beginning to emerge – when the supercontinent of Pangea cracked into pieces. The Indian continent eventually broke free, journeying north across the vast swathe of Tethys Ocean for 150 million years until it smacked into a fellow continent – the one we now know as Asia – around 45 million years ago. The crushing force of one continent hitting another caused the plate beneath the Tethys Ocean, made of oceanic crust, to slide under the Eurasian plate. This created what is known as a subduction zone. Then the oceanic plate slipped deeper and deeper into the Earth’s mantle, scraping off folds limestone as it did so, until the Indian and Eurasian plates started compressing together. India began sliding under Asia, but because it's made of tougher stuff than the oceanic plate it didn't just descend. The surface started to buckle, pushing the crust and crumples of limestone upwards. Weather stations installed on Mount Everest were damaged by rocks the size of cricket balls that were picked up by the wind And so the Himalayan mountain range began to rise skyward. By around 15-17 million years ago, the summit of Everest had reached about 5,000m (16,404ft) and it continued to grow. The collision between the two continental plates is still happening today. India continues to creep north by 5cm (2in) a year, causing Everest to grow by about 4mm (0.16in) per year (although other parts of the Himalayas are rising at around 10mm per year [0.4in]). But understanding how and why Everest's height changes is more complex than just this. While plate tectonics push the summit higher into the sky, erosion claws away at it. To understand this process better, scientists studied another mountain some 8,700km (5,405 miles) away from Mount Everest, in Alaska. Rachel Headley, an associate professor of geosciences at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, was part of a scientific expedition to Mount Saint Elias on the border of Alaska and Canada between 2005-2008. The mission intended to understand the complex roles of tectonics and erosion in how mountains grow and shrink. The second largest mountain in both Canada and the US, Saint Elias faces the same effects as Everest, from tectonic activity to erosion, but across a far smaller, more manageable area. "In that region, Alaska, there were very particular weather patterns that had helped these large glaciers grow," Headley says. "And then both glaciers and rivers, landslides, and avalanches were all kind of the processes that connected to tear them down." Headley's role on the team was to understand the thickness of the Steward Glacier, which runs through the Saint Elias mountains, and how fast it was moving. Both can impact the rate of erosion, which can affect how quickly a mountain's height is worn away. "If we have a thinner glacier, and it's moving super fast… we know there has to be some sliding, which we think is really important for erosion," she says. "Sliding" can cause glacial abrasion, which is when the glacier drags rock fragments across the surface as it moves, creating a sandpapering effect. Weather can also cause significant erosion to a mountain. Elmore describes one of the weather stations she helped install during the 2019 Mount Everest expedition as being "damaged by rocks the size of cricket balls that were picked up by the wind and thrown at it". Buffetting by debris and ice picked up by the wind takes its toll after a while. Whatever its official height is, Mount Everest inspires awe in most who stand in its shadow (Credit: Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images)

Many of the highest peaks in the world, including Everest, have permanent snow caps that help protect them from this wind-blown barrage. Rock covered in a soft blanket of snow suffers less weathering and erosion than bare rock, says Headley. It also protects the rock from chemical reactions with the air that can gradually degade the minerals in the limestone that comprises much of the uppermost parts of Mount Everest. But there are still places where the rock is exposed to the elements. "For a tall mountain range, you can basically get to such a steep angle in the rock that it can't actually support ice, and snow, and then you start to get avalanches, and you get bare rock," says Elmore. Rock falls and land slides – a constant hazard on Everest and the surrounding area – both play a role in shaving away at Everest's height, and rivers too. They have been estimated to be cutting gorges into the rock at a rate of between 4-8mm (0.2-0.3in) a year. But the exact impact erosion has on a mountain's height is still to be understood. Some scientists believe that reducing the weight of a mountain (by taking away the snow, ice and rock it's made of) might actually allow the tectonic plates to push the, now lighter, mountain even further into the sky. Headley's colleague Terry Pavlis, who was the lead investigator on the St Elias Erosion Tectonics Project (Steep), explains that, on a large scale, "erosion attacking a landscape allows it to rise up". In some parts of the world, entire landmasses are still rearing up after the last ice age – something known as isostatic rebound. Parts of North America and northern Europe, including Scotland, are rebounding after the rocky crust there was squashed by enormous continental ice sheets that waxed and waned during the Pleistocene. According to one study by researchers at Germany's University of Postdam, up to 90% of the uplift in the European Alps can be explained by this surprisingly elastic response to the end of the ice age. Experts believe similar glacial isostatic rebound may have taken place on the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalaya as the ice age glaciers receeded – contributing between 1-4mm (0.04-0.16in) a year to the uplift. "But there's some kind of equilibrium between how fast that landscape can erode and how high those peaks can get," adds Pavlis. The exact details of this equilibrium are still being explored. In a region like the Appalachians in north-eastern North America, or the Scottish Highlands, erosive forces like rivers and landslides are cutting mountains down lower and lower, Headley says. "But in regions with tectonic activity, the tectonic force can be driving the mountains up slower, faster, or at around the same rate as the erosion is cutting it down. We don't fully understand all the drivers in those types of systems." The most recent official height for Mount Everest was agreed following Chinese and Nepalese surveying expeditions to the summit (Credit: VCG/Getty Images)

So how are mountains actually measured nowadays? One of the most common instruments used is the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), which records the precise position of the mountain peak using a network of satellites. GNSS can "measure heights to the millimetre," according to Pavlis. The challenge, for a mountain like Everest, has always been the weight of the equipment. "It's hard enough to get to the peak – try adding a 30lb (13kg) instrument," he says. A helicopter taxi to the top with the heavy luggage is out of the question – the thin air around Everest's summit means the engine can't produce enough power and there's too much drag from the rotor blades to operate safely. The strong winds and jagged creeks also make touching down anywhere near the summit dangerous. One helicopter pilot did set a world record by touching down briefly on top of Mount Everest in 2005, but only after the manufacturer stripped it bare of every unessential item to make it feather light. Luckily, GNSS systems have gotten smaller over the years. Now they weigh more like 1.2kg (2.6lbs) and are "about the size of a lunchbox, maybe a little smaller", says Pavlis. But the devices still need batteries, which can struggle in cold temperatures. The average temperature at the summit of Everest during the summer monsoon months is a balmy -19C. And there are other complications too. "There's an antenna that's about, you know, half a metre in diameter. And those have to be set up somehow so that they are absolutely stationary," Pavlis explains. To gather millimetre-accurate results the instrument then has to record for several hours. In the thin air of Everest's "death zone", operating these instruments can be hazardous for surveyors. Members of a Nepalese expedition to take GNSS measurements on Everest in 2019 spent two hours on the summit – far longer than most who make their way there – after arriving at 03:00 in the pitch black and biting cold. Another option, often used in addition to GNSS for the most accurate readings, is Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). "GPR uses radar pulses to image below the surface, so it can tell us the thickness and internal structure of snow and ice overlying the rocks on Everest's summit," says Elmore. "There's something like 4m (13ft) of snow and ice on the top of Mount Everest, but that can change depending on the climate." The mountain that measures the greatest distance from the centre of Earth to its peak is Chimbarozo in Equador, at 10,920m (35,826ft) While Elmore and her team were conducting their own scientific experiments on Everest they leant the Nepalese expedition a GPR device so they could take measurements from the summit. "It had to be a specific design of GPR, one that was super lightweight so [it could be carried] to the top of Everest, but that also had the right transmitter and receiver to measure the ice," says Elmore. The device had recently been used at the summit of Denali, the tallest mountain in the US, so they knew it was up to the job. Despite the many hurdles they faced, the Nepalese team's expedition to measure the height of Everest was successful. They had hoped to answer questions about whether a deadly 7.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Nepal in April 2015 had affected Mount Everest's height. Initial reports indicated the mountain had shifted 3cm (1.9in) to the south-west by the large earthquake, which killed 9,000 people and damaged hundreds of thousands of homes, but had not changed its height. The project, however, soon became muddied with international politics. A few months later a team of Chinese surveyors conducted their own measurements during an expedition from the other side of the mountain. They had their own figure, which didn't include the snow cap. The Nepalese figure, on the other hand, did. In October 2019, the two countries decided to combine their data and in December 2020 they released the figure for the new official height – 8,848.86m (29,032ft), including the snow on top. As China and Nepal found, deciding exactly what you measure, and how you measure, is fundamental to establishing a mountain's height. For example, to agree upon how tall a mountain is, we must first agree on where the bottom is. But that's not as easy as it might sound. For centuries mountains have been measured using sea level as the base from where their height is calculated. But the Earth is not perfectly round: it bulges along the equator. And sea level isn't static, it is pulled and changed by our planet's gravity. Plus, Everest isn't sticking out of the ocean, it's nestled among a landscape of other mountains. Many complex calculations have to be done to establish where sea level would actually be, and Everest's relative height to it. When that starting point is changed, everything changes. The Himalayas began rising around 45 million years ago as the Indian and Eurasian continental plates collided (Credit: Rik Olde Engberink/Alamy) https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1600x900/p0c037gk.webp

But let's say scientists started their measurements from the core of the planet instead. Everest would no longer be considered the tallest mountain on Earth. The mountain that measures the greatest distance from the centre of Earth to its peak is Chimbarozo, in Equador at 10,920m (35,826ft). What about starting from the seabed? The accolade of tallest mountain would then go to Mauna Kea, a volcano in Hawaii that arches 10,000m (32,808ft) from the ocean floor. Looking beyond our own planet, we can see examples of just how enormous mountains can become. Olympus Mons, a volcano on Mars, towers 21km (19.2 miles) into the sky and stretches 624km (388 miles) wide. It is roughly the size of the state of Arizona. Because gravity on Mars is weaker than on Earth, and because Mars doesn't have tectonic plates shifting and colliding beneath the surface, the ooze of lava that flowed out of the Martian volcano in the planet's past was able to grow to monstrous proportions. Could Everest become a similar giant? In the 1980s, a researcher at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, UK, attempted to estimate what such a limit might be on Earth, taking into account the strength of gravity and the strength of the rock underlying the mountain. The calculations, which made "no presensions to serious geophysics" estimated the theoretical maximum height of a mountain range with a granite base – as Mount Everest largely has – to be 45km (28 miles) on Earth. But there are a number of barriers – apart from our planet's relentless weather – that might stand in the way of this, according to Headley. For starters, "you would eventually run out of your tectonic forces, and then it would stop growing", she says. Scientists believe that eventually the Earth's mantle will cool to such a degree that the planet-wide dance of plate tectonics will end. Until then, earthquakes and landslides will also erode away the mountain too. "At some point, [the mountain] becomes so steep that it's unstable and chunks start falling off," Elmore says. With the wind, snow and ice buffeting, cracking and splitting the rock, Everest is unlikely to ever reach the sizes seen on Mars. "We have our weather systems, and weather is really good at creating erosional forces," Headley says. "Basically, the fact that we have water, whether in the form of ice or snow, or just rain, is what really can limit mountain growth." For now, Everest keeps edging, bit by bit, into the sky as other forces try to tear it down. Elmore's 2019 team discovered global warming was yet another of these, driving considerable thinning of the snow and ice on the upper reaches of the mountain in recent decades and revealing more bare rock to the erosive impacts of weather. Olympus Mons, a volcano on Mars, towers 21km (19.2 miles) into the sky and stretches 624km (388 miles) wide Everest is also far from being the fastest-growing mountain on our planet. Others, such as those in the Swiss Alps, are growing more rapidly thanks to an imbalance in the amount of erosion taking place. Scientists found that uplift is more than 50 times faster than any negative effects from erosion here. But the Swiss Alps are far shorter than Mount Everest and most studies suggest the mountains there are currently growing at 2-2.5mm (0.08-0.1 inches) per year. The closest contender for the top spot is perhaps Nanga Parbat, a neighbour to Everest located in the Pakistani Himalayan range, which is 8,126m (26,660ft) tall and growing at 7mm (0.27in) per year. In 241,000 years it could overtake Everest to be the tallest mountain on Earth, provided rates of erosion don't change. Meanwhile, Everest retains its allure as a mountain at the extreme of what can be found and endured here on Earth. Its reputation as the highest peak on our planet continues to attract climbers from all over the world, even as its height continues to shift. Over a video call I ask Billi Bierling, a mountaineering journalist who hiked Everest herself in 2009, whether an extra millimetre, metre or mile higher matters to people like her. She is relaxing on the sofa at her mother's house in Germany, preparing to head back to Nepal for the summer season in March. "The exact measurement doesn't matter," she says, laughing warmly at my question. "What matters is that it's the highest, and that you go to the highest point. If you're having a bad day, or someone is not very nice to you, or they put you down, you can think to yourself, you know what? I've climbed Everest." For most who reach the summit, it is simply being there that counts.

Understanding Vladimir Putin

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/09/understanding-vladimir-putin-the-man-who-fooled-the-world?utm_source=pocket-newtab “…Decades in office can cause a leader to succumb to megalomania or paranoia. The elimination of checks and balances, the centralisation of power and the promotion of a cult of personality make it more likely that a leader will make a disastrous mistake. For all these reasons, strongman rule is an inherently flawed and dangerous model of government…. The unofficial goal of western policy is clearly to force Putin from power. But the endgame may not come as swiftly as we would like. Deeply entrenched in his decades-long mission, Putin is now even less likely to give up power voluntarily, since his successors might repudiate his policies, or even put him on trial. The prospects for popular uprising are equally poor, despite the many brave Russians who have indicated their disgust over the war. Any protests are likely to be swiftly crushed with violence and imprisonment, as they were in neighbouring Belarus in 2020 and 2021. A third scenario – the possibility of an enlightened group within the elite seizing power – seems out of reach, too. Organising a palace coup against Putin will be very difficult: all dissenters were purged from the Kremlin long ago. Putin also takes his personal security very seriously: several of his former bodyguards have become rich in their own right. While there will be many within Russia who are dismayed by the course that events have taken, orchestrating that diffuse discontent into a coherent plot looks like a formidable challenge. The difficult truth is that Putin’s strongman style has defined his rule over Russia – and despite his many crimes and misdemeanours, those same strongman tactics may preserve him in power for years to come.” Full Text: Understanding Vladimir Putin, the man who fooled the world The Russian president has always shown us exactly who he is. So why did it take the invasion of Ukraine for us to believe him? by Gideon Rachman Sat 9 Apr 2022 03.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 9 Apr 2022 05.18 EDT Vladimir Putin was annoyed – or maybe just bored. The Russian leader had been patiently fielding questions from a small group of international journalists in the restaurant of a modest hotel in Davos. Then one of the queries seemed to irritate him. He stared back at the questioner, an American, and said slowly, through an interpreter: “I’ll answer that question in a minute. But first let me ask you about the extraordinary ring you have on your finger.” All heads in the room swivelled. “Why is the stone so large?” Putin continued. A few of the audience began to giggle and the journalist looked uncomfortable. Putin took on a tone of mock sympathy and continued: “You surely don’t mind me asking, because you wouldn’t be wearing something like that unless you were trying to draw attention to yourself?” There was more laughter. By now, the original question had been forgotten. It was a masterclass in distraction and bullying. Sign up to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a curated list of our weekly highlights. The year was 2009, and Putin had already been in power for almost a decade. But this was my first encounter with him in the flesh, during his visit to the World Economic Forum. Putin’s ability to radiate menace, without raising his voice, was striking. But so was the laughter of his audience. Despite the violence of his Russian government – as demonstrated in Chechnya and Georgia – western opinion-formers were still inclined to treat him as a pantomime villain. I was reminded of this just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a televised meeting at the Kremlin with his closest advisers, Putin toyed with Sergei Naryshkin, the head of his foreign intelligence service – making the feared securocrat look like a stuttering fool. The pleasure he took in humiliating somebody in front of an audience was once again on display. But this time, nobody was laughing. Putin was about to plunge Europe into its biggest land war since 1945. Russian troops launched a full-scale invasion on 24 February. Within a month, more than 10 million Ukrainians had fled their homes, thousands of troops and civilians had been killed and the coastal city of Mariupol had been destroyed. Even though western intelligence services had warned for months that Russia was poised to attack, many experienced Putin-watchers, both in Russia and the west, refused to believe it. After more than 20 years of his leadership, they felt that they understood Putin. He was ruthless and violent, no doubt, but he was also believed to be rational, calculating and committed to Russia’s integration into the world economy. Few believed he was capable of such a reckless gamble. Looking back, however, it is clear that the outside world has consistently misread him. From the moment he took power, outsiders too often saw what they wanted and played down the darkest sides of Putinism. In fact, the outside world’s indulgence of Putin went much further than simply turning a blind eye to his excesses. For a rising generation of strongman leaders and cultural conservatives outside Russia, Putin became something of a hero and a role model. As his admirers saw it, the Russian leader had inherited a country humiliated by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Through strength and cunning, he had restored its status and global power, and even regained some of the territory lost when the USSR broke up. And he had delighted nationalists and populists the world over by successfully defying self-righteous American liberals such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, was not simply spouting propaganda when he said in 2018: “There’s a demand in the world for special, sovereign leaders, for decisive ones … Putin’s Russia was the starting point.” The Putin fanclub has had numerous members in the west over the years. Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s close adviser and lawyer, expressed admiration for Putin’s annexation of Crimea, remarking: “He makes a decision and he executes it, quickly. That’s what you call a leader.” Nigel Farage, the former leader of Ukip and the Brexit party, and a friend of Donald Trump, once named Putin the world leader he most admired, adding: “The way he played the whole Syria thing. Brilliant. Not that I approve of him politically.” Matteo Salvini, the leader of the populist right Northern League party and a former deputy prime minister of Italy, flaunted his admiration for the Russian leader by being photographed in a Putin T-shirt in Red Square. Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, has said, “My favourite hero is Putin.” Most important of all, Xi Jinping is also a confirmed admirer. A week after being appointed as president of China in early 2013, Xi made his first state visit overseas – choosing to visit Putin in Moscow. On 4 February 2022, just 20 days before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin met Xi in Beijing for their 38th summit meeting. Shortly afterwards, Russia and China announced a “no limits” partnership. As the joint Russian-Chinese statement made clear, the two leaders are united in their hostility to American global power and to the pro-democracy “colour revolutions” they accuse Washington of stirring up around the world – from Ukraine to Hong Kong. Putin and Xi are both strongman rulers who have centralised power around themselves and encouraged a cult of personality. They are, as Alexander Gabuev, a Russian academic, puts it, “the tsar and the emperor”. Whether this partnership of strongmen will survive the Russian invasion of Ukraine is now one of the most important questions in international politics. Putin was sworn into office as president of Russia on 31 December 1999. But at first it was not obvious that he would last very long in the job, let alone that he would emerge as the most aggressive challenger to the western liberal order and the pioneer of a new model of authoritarian leadership. As the chaotic Yeltsin era of the 1990s drew to a close, Putin’s ascent to the top job was eased by his former colleagues in the KGB. But he also had the approval of Russia’s richest and most powerful people, the oligarchs, who saw him as a capable administrator and “safe pair of hands” who would not threaten established interests. Viewed from the west, Putin looked relatively reassuring. In his first televised speech from the Kremlin, given on New Year’s Eve 1999, just a few hours after taking over from Yeltsin, Putin promised to “protect freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the mass media, ownership rights, these fundamental elements of a civilised society”. In March 2000, he won his first presidential election and proudly asserted: “We have proved that Russia is becoming a modern democratic state.” When Bill Clinton met Putin in the Kremlin for the first time, in June 2000, he declared his Russian counterpart “fully capable of building a prosperous, strong Russia, while preserving freedom and pluralism and the rule of law”. In his first year in office, he moved to assert the authority of the state and to use warfare to bolster his personal position Yet while Putin may initially have found it convenient to use the rhetoric of liberal democracy, his early actions as president told a different story. In his first year in office, he moved immediately to rein in independent sources of power, to assert the central authority of the state and to use warfare to bolster his own personal position – all actions that were to become hallmarks of Putinism. The escalation of the war in Chechnya made Putin seem like a nationalist hero, standing up for Russian interests and protecting the ordinary citizen from terrorism. In an early move that alarmed liberals, the new president reinstated the old Soviet national anthem. His promises to protect media freedom turned out to be empty: Russia’s few independent television networks were brought under government control. As Putin established himself in office, the image-makers got to work crafting a strongman persona for him. Gleb Pavlovsky, one of Putin’s first spin doctors, later described him as a “quick learner” and a “talented actor”. Key images were placed in the Russian media and around the world: Putin on horseback, Putin practising judo, Putin arm-wrestling or strolling bare-chested by a river in Siberia. These photographs attracted mockery from intellectuals and cynics. But the president’s handlers were clear-eyed. As Pavlovsky later told the Washington Post, the goal was to ensure that “Putin corresponds ideally to the Hollywood image of a saviour-hero”. In any case, Russians were more than ready for a strongman to ride to their rescue. The collapse of the Soviet system in 1991 had allowed for the emergence of democracy and freedom of speech. But as the economy atrophied and then fell apart, many experienced a severe drop in living standards and personal security. By 1999, life expectancy for Russian men had fallen by three and a half years to below 60. A UN report attributed this to a “rise in self-destructive behaviour”, which it linked to “rising poverty rates, unemployment and financial insecurity”. Under those circumstances, a decisive leader who promised to turn back the clock had real appeal. Long before Trump promised to “make America great again”, Putin was promising to bring back the stability and pride of the Soviet era to those Russians who had lost out in the 1990s. But his nostalgia was not restricted to the social cohesion of Soviet times. Putin also yearned to restore some of the USSR’s lost international clout. In a speech in 2005, Putin labelled the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. As the years have passed, he has become increasingly preoccupied by Russian history. In the summer of 2021, he published a long essay entitled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians – which, even at the time, some saw as a manifesto for invasion. Delving through centuries of history, Putin attempted to prove that Ukraine was an artificial state and that “Russia was robbed, indeed” when Ukraine gained independence in 1991. Fyodor Lukyanov, an academic who is close to the Russian leader, told me in 2019 that one of Putin’s enduring fears was the loss of Russia’s status as one of the world’s great powers for the first time in centuries. His resentment at what he regarded as American slights and betrayals set Putin on a collision course with the west. A landmark moment came with a speech he gave at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. The Russian president had put the west on notice that he intended to fight back against the US-led world order That speech was a direct challenge to the west and an expression of cold fury. He accused the US of an “almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts”. The Putin of 2000, who had expressed pride at Russia’s transformation into a modern democracy, had given way to a man who denounced western talk of freedom and democracy as a hypocritical front for power politics. The Munich speech was not just an angry reflection on the past. It also pointed the way to the future. The Russian president had put the west on notice that he intended to fight back against the US-led world order. It foreshadowed a lot of what was to come: Russia’s military intervention in Georgia in 2008, its annexation of Crimea in 2014, its dispatch of troops to Syria in 2015, its meddling in the US presidential election of 2016. All of these actions burnished Putin’s reputation as a nationalist and a strong leader. They also made him an icon for strongmen throughout the world who rejected western leadership and the “liberal international order”. This indictment of the west goes back to the 1990s. It is argued repeatedly in Moscow that the expansion of Nato to take in countries of the former Soviet empire (including Poland and the Baltic states) was a direct contradiction of promises made after the end of the cold war. Nato’s intervention in the Kosovo war of 1998 9 added to the list of grievances proving, in the Kremlin’s eyes, both that Nato is an aggressor and that western talk of respecting sovereignty and state borders was nothing but hypocrisy. Russians were not reassured by the western riposte that Nato was acting in response to ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses by Serbia. As one liberal Russian politician put it to me in 2008, in a moment of frankness: “We know we have committed human rights abuses in Chechnya. If Nato can bomb Belgrade for that, why could they not bomb Moscow?” Putin’s case against Nato also takes in the Iraq war launched by the US and many of its allies in 2003. For him, the massive bloodshed in Iraq was proof that the west’s self-proclaimed pursuit of “democracy and freedom” only brings instability and suffering in its wake. If you mention the brutal behaviour of Russian forces in Chechnya or Syria in Moscow, you will always have the Iraq war thrown back in your face. Crucially, the west’s promotion of democracy has posed a direct threat to Putin’s own political and personal survival. From 2003 to 2005, pro-democracy “colour revolutions” broke out in many of the states of the former Soviet Union – including Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. If demonstrators in Independence Square in Kyiv could bring down an autocratic government in Ukraine, what was to stop the same happening in Red Square? In Russia, many believed it was a “fairytale” that these were spontaneous uprisings. As a former intelligence operative whose entire professional career had involved running “black operations”, Putin was particularly inclined to see the CIA as pulling the strings. The goal, as the Kremlin saw it, was to install pro-western puppet regimes. Russia itself could be next. The shock of the Iraq war and the colour revolutions were the recent experiences that informed Putin’s Munich speech in 2007. And, as the Kremlin saw it, this pattern of western misdeeds continued. Putin points to the western powers’ 2011 intervention in Libya that resulted in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi – something he believes they had promised they would not do. The overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi is a particularly sore point for Putin That episode is a particularly sore spot for Putin, since it took place during the four years from 2008 to 2012 when he was serving in the lesser job of prime minister, having stepped aside as president in favour of his acolyte Dmitry Medvedev. As Putin’s supporters see it, a naive Medvedev was duped into supporting a UN resolution that allowed for a limited intervention, only for western powers to exceed their mandate in order to overthrow and kill Gaddafi. They have no time for the response that the Libyan intervention was made on human rights grounds, but that events then took on a life of their own, as the Libyan rebellion gained steam. Medvedev’s alleged naivety in allowing the Libyan intervention proved useful for Putin, however: it established the idea that he was indispensable as Russia’s leader. Any substitute, even one chosen by Putin, would leave the country vulnerable to a scheming and ruthless west. In 2011, Putin announced that he intended to return as president, after the potential presidential term had been extended to two consecutive periods of six years. This announcement provoked rare public demonstrations in Moscow and other cities, which again fanned Putin’s fears about western schemes to undermine his power. I was in Moscow in January 2012 and witnessed the marches and banners, some of which carried pointed references to Gaddafi’s fate. Putin understood the parallels. He commented publicly about how disgusted he had been by the footage of Gaddafi’s murder – which perhaps reflected a certain concern about his own potential fate. The fact that Hillary Clinton, then America’s Secretary of State, expressed public support for the 2012 demonstrations was deeply resented by Putin and may have justified, in his mind, Russia’s efforts to undermine Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. Putin secured his re-election, but his sense that the west remained a threat to Russia was further stoked by events in Ukraine in 2013-14. The prospect of that country signing an association agreement with the European Union was seen as a serious threat in the Kremlin, since it would pull Russia’s most important neighbour – once an integral part of the USSR – into the west’s sphere of influence. Under pressure from Moscow, the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych reversed course. But this provoked another popular uprising in Kyiv, forcing Yanukovych to flee. The loss of a compliant ally in Kyiv was a major geopolitical reverse for the Kremlin. Putin’s response was to dramatically raise the stakes, by crossing the line into the use of military force. In February 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, a region that was part of Ukraine but had belonged to Russia until 1954 and was populated largely by Russian-speakers. It was also, by agreement with the Ukrainians, the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. In the west, the annexation of Crimea, along with Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine, was seen as a flagrant violation of international law that many feared could be the prelude to further acts of aggression. But in Russia, the annexation was widely greeted as a triumph – it represented the nation’s fightback. Putin’s approval ratings in independent opinion polls soared to over 80%. In the immediate afterglow, he came closer to achieving the ultimate goal of the strongman ruler: the complete identification of the nation with the leader. Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian parliament, exulted: “If there’s Putin, there’s Russia. If there’s no Putin, there’s no Russia.” Putin himself crowed that Crimea had been taken without a shot being fired. The west’s response was to slap economic sanctions on Russia. But western indignation did not last long. Four years later, Russia hosted a successful World Cup. At the final, Putin sat with the presidents of France and Croatia, two EU nations, in the VIP box in Moscow. The ease with which Putin annexed Crimea – and the swiftness with which the west seemed prepared to forgive – may have laid the ground for an unjustified confidence that led to the invasion of Ukraine. His overreach is also a reminder of the flaws in the strongman model of leadership. Decades in office can cause a leader to succumb to megalomania or paranoia. The elimination of checks and balances, the centralisation of power and the promotion of a cult of personality make it more likely that a leader will make a disastrous mistake. For all these reasons, strongman rule is an inherently flawed and dangerous model of government. Tragically, that lesson is being learned all over again – in Russia and Ukraine. An invasion that was meant to secure Russia’s place as a great power and Putin’s place in history has clearly gone wrong. Putin is now involved in a brutal war of attrition. Western sanctions will see the Russian economy shrink dramatically this year, and the Russian middle-class is witnessing the disappearance of many of the consumer goods and travel opportunities that emerged with the end of the cold war. The unofficial goal of western policy is clearly to force Putin from power. But the endgame may not come as swiftly as we would like. Deeply entrenched in his decades-long mission, Putin is now even less likely to give up power voluntarily, since his successors might repudiate his policies, or even put him on trial. The prospects for popular uprising are equally poor, despite the many brave Russians who have indicated their disgust over the war. Any protests are likely to be swiftly crushed with violence and imprisonment, as they were in neighbouring Belarus in 2020 and 2021. A third scenario – the possibility of an enlightened group within the elite seizing power – seems out of reach, too. Organising a palace coup against Putin will be very difficult: all dissenters were purged from the Kremlin long ago. Putin also takes his personal security very seriously: several of his former bodyguards have become rich in their own right. While there will be many within Russia who are dismayed by the course that events have taken, orchestrating that diffuse discontent into a coherent plot looks like a formidable challenge. The difficult truth is that Putin’s strongman style has defined his rule over Russia – and despite his many crimes and misdemeanours, those same strongman tactics may preserve him in power for years to come. ----- Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times. His new book, The Age of the Strongman, is published by Vintage (£20). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. https://www.bbc.com/vietnamese/forum-61066677 Châu Âu: Người Việt cần những nhận thức mới về Nga qua chuyện Ukraine • Nguyễn Xuân Thọ, Cologne, Đức 12 tháng 4 2022 Lviv đón người tỵ nạn nội địa Ukraine trên đường sang Ba Lan: Lần đầu tiên từ năm 1939, chiến tranh do một nước châu Âu gây ra đẩy hàng triệu người lên đường lánh nạn Cuộc xâm lăng Ukraine của Putin đặt thế giới trước một cục diện mới, với nguy cơ chiến tranh hạt nhân bỗng trở nên hiện thực, dù người ta chỉ nói đến vũ khí hạt nhân chiến thuật. Những gì cường quốc hạt nhân Nga đã làm tại Ukraine là hết mức vô trách nhiệm. Một Putin vô trách nhiệm với cả nước Nga Vladimir Putin không chỉ vô trách nhiệm với nhân loại khi cho quân đánh vào Chernobyl và nhà máy điện hạt nhân Zaporizhzhia, mà còn coi sinh mạng binh sỹ Nga như rác. Sau khi quân Nga rút khỏi Chernobyl cùng các con tin Ukraine, người ta tìm thấy các công sự của lính Nga đào trong cát trắng đầy chất phóng xạ. Trong các thức ăn và đồ vật lính Nga để lại, người ta kinh ngạc vì lượng phóng xạ đo được. Không phải Putin không biết gì về phóng xạ, mà tính mạng của những người lính Nga không quan trọng bằng lời đe dọa hạt nhân ông ta muốn gửi đi từ đó. Bên cạnh các thảm họa: phá hủy sinh thái, nạn diệt chủng, nạn đói do thiếu lúa mỳ, khủng hoảng năng lượng toàn cầu, cuộc chiến này đã thay đổi nhận thức của chúng ta về thế giới. Người ta không còn tin vào trật tự thế giới được lập ra từ năm 1945, sau Đại chiến Thế giới II nữa. Trật tự này chia thế giới ra làm hai phe: Dân chủ và Độc tài toàn trị. Kẹp vào giữa đó là các quốc gia nhỏ không liên kết, chịu ảnh hưởng của bên này hay bên kia. Cuộc chạy đua vũ trang của hai phe xảy ra cho đến cuối 1989 không nhằm thôn tính bên kia, mà chủ yếu mang tính răn đe. Các cường quốc hạt nhân đều từng gây chiến hoặc tham chiến ở Triều Tiên, Việt Nam, Trung Đông, Nam Tư, nhưng chưa bao giờ người ta tính đến khả năng một cuộc đại chiến hạt nhân. Chính cái cơ chế mà các siêu cường hạt nhân khóa nhau và trung hòa nhau đã duy trì sự cân bằng mong manh đó. Những tội ác của Nga tại Ukraine và vai trò phủ quyết của nó tại LHQ, với tiềm lực hạt nhân của nó và nguy hiểm hơn nữa, với thể chế của nó, có thể đưa thế giới vào hỗn loạn. Giáo sư sử học Timothy Snyder, Đại học Yale nhận định: „Bước chuyển sang chủ nghĩa chuyên quyền cực hữu có lẽ là bậc thang cuối cùng của Chủ nghĩa Cộng sản, dù mới nghe có vẻ rất quái gở."[1]. Nước Nga hậu Xô viết còn hơn cả nền chuyên chế (autocracy), thành một chế độ độc tài (dictatorship). Các nhà nước XHCN trước kia, tuy chuyên chế nhưng vẫn có luật chơi. Nhờ đó mà tập thể Bộ Chính Trị có thể kéo phanh vào những lúc khẩn cấp để tránh sự sụp đổ. Từ Khruschev đến Gorbachov ở Liên Xô, từ Gomulka đến Gierek ở Ba-Lan hay Ulbricht và Honecker ở Đông Đức, luật chơi đó luôn giữ cho đoàn tầu không đổ ụp. Nhờ vậy mà tai họa không xảy ra và sự cân bằng mong manh cho trật tự thế giới tồn tại. Nhưng ở nước Nga hậu cộng sản (thậm chí đa đảng), cái phanh đó nằm trong tay một người duy nhất, lại đang mắc bệnh hoang tưởng. TT Hoa Kỳ John F Kennedy và Chủ tịch Hội đồng Bộ trưởng Liên Xô Nikita Khrushchev ở Vienna năm 1961. Thời Chiến tranh Lạnh hai phe đối đầu nhưng vẫn có đối thoại và 'luật chơi' để ngăn thảm họa cùng hủy diệt, nay thì không Đế quốc Nga luôn lo sợ sự thay đổi trong nền chính trị của các nước nằm trong vùng ảnh hưởng của nó. Khi lãnh đạo các đảng Cộng sản ở Hungary và Tiệp Khắc muốn cách tân chế độ, Liên Xô đã ra tay lật đổ. Năm 1968, Liên Xô dù đủ sức đưa 500.000 quân vào chiến dịch lật đổ ông Dubček, nhưng vẫn phải mượn ngọn cờ khối Warzawa để hợp thức hóa ván bài. Ngày nay Putin đưa quân vào lật đổ chính quyền Kiew mà không cần một sự đồng thuận quốc tế nào. Thuộc hạ duy nhất là Lukashenko ở Belaruss cũng ậm à ậm ừ. Nhiều người từng học ở Liên Xô, vốn có những kỷ niệm tốt về thời kỳ XHCN ở đó, nay bỗng nhận ra rằng, nước Nga đâu còn là XHCN nữa, ngược lại đang bị lãnh đạo bởi một kẻ chống cộng gian ngoan. Ở nước Nga Xô viết, quyền lực tuy bị thao túng bởi một nhóm người nhân danh giai cấp công nông, nhưng đối tượng bị chuyên chính luôn là giai cấp tư sản và những kẻ giầu có. Ngày nay giới tư bản cá mập (Oligarch) kiểu mafia đang lũng đoạn toàn bộ nền kinh tế và chính trị ở Nga, trong khi người lao động đang mất đi những quyền cơ bản nhất. Khi can thiệp vào các quốc gia khác, Liên Xô XHCN luôn ca ngợi Chủ nghĩa Quốc tế Vô sản và biện hộ hành đông đó bằng việc „bảo vệ quyền tự quyết của các dân tộc anh em". Putin ngày nay xóa sổ Chủ nghĩa Quốc tế, coi „Ukraine không phải là một quốc gia đáng tồn tại độc lập". Trong vụ Hungary 1956, lãnh tụ Liên Xô Nikita Khrushev đồng ý với nhiều cải cách của thủ tướng Hungary là Imre Nagy đưa ra. Ông chỉ ra tay khi Nagy đòi ra khỏi khối Warzawa. Những hình ảnh của vụ tàn sát ở Hungary khiến Liên Xô lo sợ và cách duy nhất họ chống lại là bưng bít mọi thông tin phát đi từ Budapest. Ngày nay Putin không cần che đậy hay biện bạch. Mọi hình ảnh tố cáo tội ác của Nga đều được bộ máy tuyên truyền Nga sử dụng để đổ tội cho đối phương. Từ những xác chết ở Butscha, nhà hộ sinh ở Mariupool, nhà ga ở Kramatorsk bị đánh bom, tất cả đều là do phía Ukraine gây ra. Thậm chí việc mất điện làm nguội cho lò hạt nhân ở Zaporizhzhia và ở Chernobyl đều là âm mưu của Ukraine. Người có đầu óc bình thường thừa hiểu: Nếu thảm họa xảy ra thì thủ phạm chính là những kẻ tấn công vào các nhà máy điện này. Putin phát động một cuộc chiến tranh tuyên truyền bằng lý lẽ của Alexandr Dugin: "Sự thật chỉ là việc anh có tin vào cái gì dó hay khôngmà thôi… Nếu chúng ta tin vào điều chúng ta làm, chúng ta tin vào điều chúng ta nói, thì đó là cách duy nhất để định nghĩa sự thật. Chúng tôi có sự thật kiểu Nga mà các vị cần phải chấp nhận" [2]. Người Pháp biểu tình ở Paris, mang hình ông Putin như một 'tội phạm chiến tranh' Đây chính là định nghĩa về sự thật của Goebbel, trùm tuyên truyền của phát xít Đức [3]. Chế độ Hitler nguy hiểm vì nó đã làm mù quáng cả một dân tộc văn minh, khiến cả một quốc gia hùng mạnh chống lại loài người. Dugin, chỗ dựa về lý luận của Putin, là cha đẻ của học thuyết Eurasianism, coi dân tộc Nga là tâm điểm, là trục xoay của nền văn minh Á-Âu, là dân tộc lãnh đạo các dân tộc Slavơ khác. Đó chính tư tưởng dân tộc thượng đẳng, sặc mùi chủng tộc. So sánh năm 1939 và 2022 Những gì đang xảy ra ở Đức 1933 lại đang xảy ra ở Nga. Đó là một nhận thức mới. 22 năm cầm quyền của Putin đã thành công trong việc trấn áp và cô lập các lực lượng tiến bộ ở Nga. Từ Nemzov, Nawalny, Karpov hay Politovskaya, tất cả đều trả giá đắt cho những phê phán của họ. Quan trọng hơn cả là Putin và các chiến lược gia kiểu Dugin đã ngộ độc được một phần lớn dân chúng bằng các tư tưởng đại Nga của họ. Đám đông bị ngộ độc này đã kết tinh ra tầng lớp tinh hoa mới, khiến cho những người Nga có lương tâm như cô nhà báo Marina Ovsyannikova trở nên cô đơn[4]. Hàng chục nghìn người Nga bị bắt vì phản đối chiến tranh không thay đổi được bức tranh 75% dân chúng ủng hộ đường lối của Putin. Ông Ascher Tscherkasskij (52 t) và cậu con trai David (20 t), người Do Thái ở Ukraine, đã từ bỏ cơ hội sang Israel tránh chiến tranh. Họ hy sinh cuộc sống an bình, quyết định ở lại chiến đấu với quân Nga vì không chịu nổi rằng kẻ như Putin lại vu cho họ là phát xít.[5] Người Nga 'chỉ được nghe từ Putin' về cuộc chiến Ukraine Toàn văn phát biểu: Putin chê trách Lenin, lên án Ukraine thậm tệ Nina Khrushcheva nói về hai nước Nga-Ukraine và cuộc chiến của Putin Chứng kiến những tội ác quân Nga gây ra, ông Ascher nói: „Không phải Putin là kẻ chĩa đại bác bắn vào các thành phố. Putin không bóp cò, không phóng những quả tên lửa vào bệnh viện ở Mariupol hay sân bay ở Dniepro. Đó là các công dân Nga và hình như họ hứng thú khi làm điều đó." Đáng buồn là rất nhiều người Ukraine, dù gốc Nga, Ukraine, Tarta hay Do Thái đều chia sẻ nhận định này. Người Đức vẫn còn may mắn để từ đống đổ nát nhận ra tội ác mà cha ông họ đi theo Hitler gây ra. Họ đã sám hối và xin lỗi 77 năm qua. Vụ phóng tên lửa của Nga hôm 5/7/2019 gây lo ngại cho châu Âu Nhưng liệu dân tộc Nga (và một phần thế giới) có sống sót để làm lành, một khi trót để cho Putin động đến chiếc va ly hạt nhân? Có một thực tế là: Các „sự thật kiểu Nga" đang làm chính Putin bị mù. Thói quen thích nghe các báo cáo lọt tai đã khiến Putin mắc phải các sai lầm chết người trên mặt trận. Nga đang thua cả về quân sự, chính trị, kinh tế và đạo đức. Putin chỉ thoát khỏi một phiên tòa nếu thắng cuộc chiến này. Hơi bị khó! Sự thất vọng đã hiện rõ trong cuộc họp báo hôm thứ năm 7/04 vừa rồi của Peskov, cái lưỡi của Putin, khi ông ta công nhận rằng „tổn thất đáng kể quân số và một thảm kịch của chúng tôi". Nga sẽ không coi việc Phần Lan, Thụy Điển gia nhập NATO là mối đe dọa đến an ninh của mình. Nếu điều đó xảy ra, Nga sẽ phải tăng cường sườn phía tây của mình- Peskov nói.[6] Mong rằng đó cũng là nhận thức mới của Putin sau sáu tuần bầm dập? Bài thể hiện quan điểm riêng của ông Nguyễn Xuân Thọ ở Cologne, Đức. Trích dẫn từ các nguồn sau: [1] https://www.facebook.com/tho.nguyen.9231/posts/6772520612765954 [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37766688 [3]"Lời nói dối được nhắc đi nhắc lại hàng ngàn lần rồi sẽ có người tin", được cho là phát biểu của Goebbels, bộ trưởng tuyên truyền Đức Quốc xã [4]https://www.theguardian.com/.../russian-journalist-who... [5] https://www.bild.de/.../ukraine-juedische-familie-kaempft... [6) https://www.nordbayern.de/.../kreml-viele-russische-tote...

Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun.

April 8, 2022 By David Brooks Opinion Columnist I’m from a fortunate generation. I can remember a time — about a quarter-century ago — when the world seemed to be coming together. The great Cold War contest between communism and capitalism appeared to be over. Democracy was still spreading. Nations were becoming more economically interdependent. The internet seemed ready to foster worldwide communications. It seemed as if there would be a global convergence around a set of universal values — freedom, equality, personal dignity, pluralism, human rights. We called this process of convergence globalization. It was, first of all, an economic and a technological process — about growing trade and investment between nations and the spread of technologies that put, say, Wikipedia instantly at our fingertips. But globalization was also a political, social and moral process. In the 1990s, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens argued that globalization is “a shift in our very life circumstances. It is the way we now live.” It involved “the intensification of worldwide social relations.” Globalization was about the integration of worldviews, products, ideas and culture. This fit in with an academic theory that had been floating around called Modernization Theory. The idea was that as nations developed, they would become more like us in the West — the ones who had already modernized. In the wider public conversation, it was sometimes assumed that nations all around the world would admire the success of the Western democracies and seek to imitate us. It was sometimes assumed that as people “modernized,” they would become more bourgeois, consumerist, peaceful — just like us. It was sometimes assumed that as societies modernized, they’d become more secular, just as in Europe and parts of the United States. They’d be more driven by the desire to make money than to conquer others. They’d be more driven by the desire to settle down into suburban homes than by the fanatical ideologies or the sort of hunger for prestige and conquest that had doomed humanity to centuries of war. This was an optimistic vision of how history would evolve, a vision of progress and convergence. Unfortunately, this vision does not describe the world we live in today. The world is not converging anymore; it’s diverging. The process of globalization has slowed and, in some cases, even kicked into reverse. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine highlights these trends. While Ukraine’s brave fight against authoritarian aggression is an inspiration in the West, much of the world remains unmoved, even sympathetic to Vladimir Putin. The Economist reports that between 2008 and 2019, world trade, relative to global G.D.P., fell by about five percentage points. There has been a slew of new tariffs and other barriers to trade. Immigration flows have slowed. Global flows of long-term investment fell by half between 2016 and 2019. The causes of this deglobalization are broad and deep. The 2008 financial crisis delegitimized global capitalism for many people. China has apparently demonstrated that mercantilism can be an effective economic strategy. All manner of antiglobalization movements have arisen: those of the Brexiteers, xenophobic nationalists, Trumpian populists, the antiglobalist left. There’s just a lot more global conflict than there was in that brief holiday from history in the ’90s. Trade, travel and even communication across political blocs have become more morally, politically and economically fraught. Hundreds of companies have withdrawn from Russia as the West partly decouples from Putin’s war machine. Many Western consumers don’t want trade with China because of accusations of forced labor and genocide. Many Western C.E.O.s are rethinking their operations in China as the regime gets more hostile to the West and as supply chains are threatened by political uncertainty. In 2014 the United States barred the Chinese tech company Huawei from bidding on government contracts. Joe Biden has strengthened “Buy American” rules so that the U.S. government buys more stuff domestically. The world economy seems to be gradually decoupling into, for starters, a Western zone and a Chinese zone. Foreign direct investment flows between China and America were nearly $30 billion per year five years ago. Now they are down to $5 billion. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote in a superb essay for Bloomberg, “geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization — toward a world dominated by two or three great trading blocs.” This broader context, and especially the invasion of Ukraine, “is burying most of the basic assumptions that have underlain business thinking about the world for the past 40 years.” Sure, globalization as flows of trade will continue. But globalization as the driving logic of world affairs — that seems to be over. Economic rivalries have now merged with political, moral and other rivalries into one global contest for dominance. Globalization has been replaced by something that looks a lot like global culture war. Credit...Tim Lahan Looking back, we probably put too much emphasis on the power of material forces like economics and technology to drive human events and bring us all together. This is not the first time this has happened. In the early 20th century, Norman Angell wrote a now notorious book called “The Great Illusion” that argued that the industrialized nations of his time were too economically interdependent to go to war with one another. Instead, two world wars followed. The fact is that human behavior is often driven by forces much deeper than economic and political self-interest, at least as Western rationalists typically understand these things. It’s these deeper motivations that are driving events right now — and they are sending history off into wildly unpredictable directions. First, human beings are powerfully driven by what are known as the thymotic desires. These are the needs to be seen, respected, appreciated. If you give people the impression that they are unseen, disrespected and unappreciated, they will become enraged, resentful and vengeful. They will perceive diminishment as injustice and respond with aggressive indignation. Global politics over the past few decades functioned as a massive social inequality machine. In country after country, groups of highly educated urban elites have arisen to dominate media, universities, culture and often political power. Great swaths of people feel looked down upon and ignored. In country after country, populist leaders have arisen to exploit these resentments: Donald Trump in the United States, Narendra Modi in India, Marine Le Pen in France. Meanwhile, authoritarians like Putin and Xi Jinping practice this politics of resentment on a global scale. They treat the collective West as the global elites and declare their open revolt against it. Putin tells humiliation stories — what the West supposedly did to Russia in the 1990s. He promises a return to Russian exceptionalism and Russian glory. Russia will reclaim its starring role in world history. China’s leaders talk about the “century of humiliation.” They complain about the way the arrogant Westerners try to impose their values on everybody else. Though China may eventually become the world’s largest economy, Xi still talks about China as a developing nation. Second, most people have a strong loyalty to their place and to their nation. But over the past few decades many people have felt that their places have been left behind and that their national honor has been threatened. In the heyday of globalization, multilateral organizations and global corporations seemed to be eclipsing nation-states. In country after country, highly nationalistic movements have arisen to insist on national sovereignty and to restore national pride: Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in Britain. To hell with cosmopolitanism and global convergence, they say. We’re going to make our own country great again in our own way. Many globalists completely underestimated the power of nationalism to drive history. Third, people are driven by moral longings — by their attachment to their own cultural values, by their desire to fiercely defend their values when they seem to be under assault. For the past few decades, globalization has seemed to many people to be exactly this kind of assault. After the Cold War, Western values came to dominate the world — through our movies, music, political conversation, social media. One theory of globalization was that the world culture would converge, basically around these liberal values. The problem is that Western values are not the world’s values. In fact, we in the West are complete cultural outliers. In his book “The WEIRDest People in the World,” Joseph Henrich amasses hundreds of pages of data to show just how unusual Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic values are. He writes: “We WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles.” It’s completely possible to enjoy listening to Billie Eilish or Megan Thee Stallion and still find Western values foreign and maybe repellent. Many people around the world look at our ideas about gender roles and find them foreign or repellent. They look at (at our best) our fervent defense of L.G.B.T.Q. rights and find them off-putting. The idea that it’s up to each person to choose one’s own identity and values — that seems ridiculous to many. The idea that the purpose of education is to inculcate critical thinking skills so students can liberate themselves from the ideas they received from their parents and communities — that seems foolish to many. With 44 percent of American high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, our culture isn’t exactly the best advertisement for Western values right now. Despite the assumptions of globalization, world culture does not seem to be converging and in some cases seems to be diverging. The economists Fernando Ferreira and Joel Waldfogel studied popular music charts in 22 countries between 1960 and 2007. They found that people are biased toward the music of their own country and that this bias has increased since the late 1990s. People don’t want to blend into a homogeneous global culture; they want to preserve their own kind. Every few years the World Values Survey questions people from around the globe about their moral and cultural beliefs. Every few years, some of these survey results are synthesized into a map that shows how the different cultural zones stand in relation to one another. In 1996 the Protestant Europe cultural zone and the English-Speaking zone were clumped in with the other global zones. Western values were different from the values found in say, Latin America or the Confucian zone, but they were contiguous. But the 2020 map looks different. The Protestant Europe and English-Speaking zones have drifted away from the rest of the world cultures and now jut out like some extraneous cultural peninsula.

Credit...World Values Survey Association In a summary of the surveys’ findings and insights, the World Values Survey Association noted that on issues like marriage, family, gender and sexual orientation, “there has been a growing divergence between the prevailing values in low-income countries and high-income countries.” We in the West have long been outliers; now our distance from the rest of the world is growing vast. Finally, people are powerfully driven by a desire for order. Nothing is worse than chaos and anarchy. These cultural changes, and the often simultaneous breakdown of effective governance, can feel like social chaos, like anarchy, leading people to seek order at all costs. We in the democratic nations of the world are lucky enough to live in societies that have rules-based orders, in which individual rights are protected and in which we get to choose our own leaders. In more and more parts of the world, though, people do not have access to this kind of order. Just as there are signs that the world is economically and culturally diverging, there are signs it is politically diverging. In its “Freedom in the World 2022” report, Freedom House notes that the world has experienced 16 consecutive years of democratic decline. It reported last year: “The countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began in 2006. The long democratic recession is deepening.” This is not what we thought would happen in the golden age of globalization. In that heyday, democracies appeared stable, and authoritarian regimes appeared to be headed to the ash heap of history. Today, many democracies appear less stable than they did and many authoritarian regimes appear more stable. American democracy, for example, has slid toward polarization and dysfunction. Meanwhile, China has shown that highly centralized nations can be just as technologically advanced as the West. Modern authoritarian nations now have technologies that allow them to exercise pervasive control of their citizens in ways that were unimaginable decades ago. Autocratic regimes are now serious economic rivals to the West. They account for 60 percent of patent applications. In 2020, the governments and businesses in these countries invested $9 trillion in things like machinery, equipment and infrastructure, while democratic nations invested $12 trillion. If things are going well, authoritarian governments can enjoy surprising popular support. What I’m describing is a divergence on an array of fronts. As scholars Heather Berry, Mauro F. Guillén and Arun S. Hendi reported in a study of international convergence, “Over the last half century, nation-states in the global system have not evolved significantly closer (or more similar) to one another along a number of dimensions.” We in the West subscribe to a series of universal values about freedom, democracy and personal dignity. The problem is that these universal values are not universally accepted and seem to be getting less so. Next, I’m describing a world in which divergence turns into conflict, especially as great powers compete for resources and dominance. China and Russia clearly want to establish regional zones that they dominate. Some of this is the kind of conflict that historically exists between opposing political systems, similar to what we saw during the Cold War. This is the global struggle between the forces of authoritarianism and the forces of democratization. Illiberal regimes are building closer alliances with one another. They are investing more in one another’s economies. At the other end, democratic governments are building closer alliances with one another. The walls are going up. Korea was the first major battleground of the Cold War. Ukraine could the first battleground in what turns out to be a long struggle between diametrically opposed political systems. But something bigger is happening today that is different from the great power struggles of the past, that is different from the Cold War. This is not just a political or an economic conflict. It’s a conflict about politics, economics, culture, status, psychology, morality and religion all at once. More specifically, it’s a rejection of Western ways of doing things by hundreds of millions of people along a wide array of fronts. To define this conflict most generously, I’d say it’s the difference between the West’s emphasis on personal dignity and much of the rest of the world’s emphasis on communal cohesion. But that’s not all that’s going on here. What’s important is the way these longstanding and normal cultural differences are being whipped up by autocrats who want to expand their power and sow chaos in the democratic world. Authoritarian rulers now routinely weaponize cultural differences, religious tensions and status resentments to mobilize supporters, attract allies and expand their own power. This is cultural difference transmogrified by status resentment into culture war. Some people have revived Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory to capture what’s going on. Huntington was right that ideas, psychology and values drive history as much as material interests. But these divides don’t break down on the neat civilizational lines that Huntington described. In fact, what haunts me most is that this rejection of Western liberalism, individualism, pluralism, gender equality and all the rest is not only happening between nations but also within nations. The status resentment against Western cultural, economic and political elites that flows from the mouths of illiberal leaders like Putin and Modi and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil sounds quite a lot like the status resentment that flows from the mouths of the Trumpian right, from the French right, from the Italian and Hungarian right. There’s a lot of complexity here — the Trumpians obviously have no love for China — but sometimes when I look at world affairs I see a giant, global maximalist version of America’s familiar contest between Reds and Blues. In America we’ve divided along regional, educational, religious, cultural, generational and urban/rural lines, and now the world is fragmenting in ways that often seem to mimic our own. The paths various populists prefer may differ, and their nationalistic passions often conflict, but what they’re revolting against is often the same thing. How do you win a global culture war in which differing views on secularism and gay rights parades are intertwined with nuclear weapons, global trade flows, status resentments, toxic masculinity and authoritarian power grabs? That’s the bind we find ourselves in today. I look back over the past few decades of social thinking with understanding. I was too young to really experience the tension of the Cold War, but it must have been brutal. I understand why so many people, when the Soviet Union fell, grabbed onto a vision of the future that promised an end to existential conflict. I look at the current situation with humility. The critiques that so many people are making about the West, and about American culture — for being too individualistic, too materialistic, too condescending — these critiques are not wrong. We have a lot of work to do if we are going to be socially strong enough to stand up to the challenges that are coming over the next several years, if we are going to persuade people in all those swing countries across Africa, Latin America and the rest of the world that they should throw their lot in with the democracies and not with the authoritarians — that our way of life is the better way of life. And I look at the current situation with confidence. Ultimately, people want to stand out and fit in. They want to feel that their lives have dignity, that they are respected for who they are. They also want to feel membership in moral communities. Right now, many people feel disrespected by the West. They are casting their lot with authoritarian leaders who speak to their resentments and their national pride. But those leaders don’t actually recognize them. For those authoritarians — from Trump to Putin — their followers are just instruments in their own search for self-aggrandizement. At the end of the day, only democracy and liberalism are based on respect for the dignity of each person. At the end of the day, only these systems and our worldviews offer the highest fulfillment for the drives and desires I’ve tried to describe here. I’ve lost confidence in our ability to predict where history is headed and in the idea that as nations “modernize” they develop along some predictable line. I guess it’s time to open our minds up to the possibility that the future may be very different from anything we expected. The Chinese seem very confident that our coalition against Putin will fall apart. Western consumers won’t be able to tolerate the economic sacrifice. Our alliances will fragment. The Chinese also seem convinced that they will bury our decadent systems before too long. These are not possibilities that can be dismissed out of hand. But I have faith in the ideas and the moral systems that we have inherited. What we call “the West” is not an ethnic designation or an elitist country club. The heroes of Ukraine are showing that at its best, it is a moral accomplishment, and unlike its rivals, it aspires to extend dignity, human rights and self-determination to all. That’s worth reforming and working on and defending and sharing in the decades ahead. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/opinion/globalization-global-culture-war.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DJDm4SiOMNAo6B_EGKaq5kbdI33iaSWN5GNvogQPt4x-saNFFpVxSyr96bkY5DIzkwrcj7eFIK6K_3fOJy9y72PC7-If1jxba7slXfbGm7X6Pchmkmc11lvZdmcFu10XZcwLOWE-Ajj9F7jfslD5tqVHxXMnnxyvrrDxV7PMzXLU2Pr1lrBJwKHG3bjtWe6LkfcQhNCFKgTHx342o06Ng0K8pAde-kbEZmIJyi9O1XXm94L46pBIkzQ5zWn9hptr3MrR-Py6mm1tE9f5YlqJkvf08B8UzxKtg&smid=url-share David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author of “The Road to Character” and, most recently, “The Second Mountain.” @nytdavidbrooks A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2022, Section SR, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: The Culture Wars Have Gone Global.

SEN NỞ TRONG LÒ LỬA VẪN TƯƠI

SEN NỞ TRONG LÒ LỬA VẪN TƯƠI Nguyễn Thế Đăng Diệu tánh trống không chẳng thể vin Tánh Không tâm ngộ khó khăn gì Ngọc cháy trên non màu thường thắm Sen nở trong lò lửa vẫn tươi. Diệu tánh hư vô bất khả phan Hư vô tâm ngộ đắc hà nan Ngọc phần sơn thượng sắc thường nhuận Liên phát lô trung thấp vị càn. Thiền sư Ngộ Ấn (1020-1088) “Diệu tánh trống không chẳng thể vin”: Tánh trống không (hư vô) là tánh Không. Tánh Không thì không có tướng (vô tướng), không có ý tưởng (vô niệm), nên nếu dùng tướng, dùng niệm để thấy, để suy nghĩ nó thì không thể được. Chẳng thể vịn níu, chẳng thể cầm nắm, chẳng thể thấy bằng tướng, chẳng thể biết bằng suy nghĩ. Chính vì không có tướng, không có niệm nên không có tướng nào, niệm nào có thể phá hoại tánh Không được. Tánh Không là sự không có tự tánh của tất cả các hiện tượng, nên nơi nào có hiện tượng, nơi đó có tánh Không. Như thế tánh Không thì ở khắp tất cả, như không gian, nhưng không có cái gì có thể phá hoại tánh Không được. “Tánh Không tâm ngộ khó khăn gì”: Tánh Không là vô tự tánh, không thể vịn níu, không thể thấy, không thể cầm nắm, nhưng tại sao lại “tâm ngộ chẳng khó khăn gì”? Chẳng khó khăn vì sự vô tự tánh của tánh Không lại ở ngay nơi tướng, ngay nơi niệm, như đại dương tuy không có hình tướng, màu sắc lại ở ngay nơi các làn sóng. Chẳng khó khăn vì tánh Không là vô tự tánh, vô sở hữu, bất khả đắc và tánh Không ấy chính là bản tánh của tất cả mọi sự, của tất cả mọi hiện tượng của tâm thức, nên người ta có thể tìm thấy nó nơi mọi sự, mọi hiện tượng của tâm thức. Như Bát Nhã Tâm Kinh nói, “Sắc tức là Không, Không tức là sắc. Thọ tưởng hành thức, thanh hương vị xúc pháp cũng lại như vậy”. “Ngọc cháy trên non màu thường thắm Sen nở trong lò lửa vẫn tươi”. Ngọc trên núi cháy nhưng nó không bị cháy mà màu của nó vẫn thắm, không hư hoại. Hoa sen ở trong lò lửa mà vẫn tươi mát. Ngọc và hoa sen tượng trưng cho bản tánh bất khả hoại của tất cả sự vật. Bản tánh ấy là tánh Không. Tánh Không không sanh không diệt, không dơ không sạch, không tăng không giảm ấy được kinh điển hệ Pali nói như sau trong Kinh Phật tự thuyết phẩm Pataligamiya, Tiểu Bộ Kinh: “Này các Tỳ kheo, có cái không sanh, không trở thành, không được làm ra, không bị điều kiện hóa. Này các Tỳ kheo, nếu không có cái không sanh, không trở thành, không được làm ra, không bị điều kiện hóa ấy thì ở đây không thể có sự giải thoát cho cái sanh, trở thành, được làm ra, bị điều kiện hóa. Nhưng bởi vì có cái không sanh, không trở thành, không được làm ra, không bị điều kiện hóa, thế nên các ông biết có sự giải thoát cho cái sanh, trở thành, được làm ra, bị điều kiện hóa”. Cái không sanh, không trở thành, không được làm ra, không bị điều kiện hóa ấy trong kinh điển hệ Sanskrit gọi là tánh Không. Đồng thời cũng nói Không giải thoát môn, Vô tướng giải thoát môn, Vô tác giải thoát môn, nghĩa là ba cửa giải thoát là Không, Vô tướng, và Vô tác. Trong kinh điển hệ Sanskrit cũng thường nói đến “vào nước không chìm, vào lửa không cháy, các độc chẳng thể làm hại…”, như phẩm Quán Thế Âm Bồ tát Phổ Môn trong kinh Pháp Hoa chúng ta thường tụng. Đây là nói đến tánh Không và người đã hoàn toàn chứng đắc tánh Không, nên những hiện tượng của thế gian sanh tử chẳng thể làm gì được. Về phương diện con người, cái “tâm ngộ tánh Không” được Kinh điển gọi là Bản Tâm, Bản tánh của tâm, Tâm Không, Phật tánh…, và thường được ví như viên ngọc, hoa sen. Lục Tự Đại Minh Chân Ngôn, tâm chú của Bồ tát Quán Thế Âm, hiện được trì tụng rất nhiều trong thế giới ngày nay. Trong thần chú sáu âm ấy, có hai từ chính yếu là mani (viên ngọc) và padme (hoa sen). Ngọc và hoa sen để nói lên tánh Không hợp nhất với từ bi trong tâm của Bồ tát Quán Thế Âm. Trong kinh Pháp Hoa có nói chúng ta đang ở trong nhà lửa. Lửa cụ thể là lửa chiến tranh, ngày nào cũng có người chết vì bom đạn. Lửa chiến tranh do từ lửa tham, sân, mê mờ, kiêu mạn, đố kỵ, nghi ngờ, tà kiến… mà bùng phát. Có lửa chiến tranh thì có người tạo nghiệp nhân và có người trả nghiệp quả. Nghiệp nhân và nghiệp quả cũng là lửa, người đốt lửa và người bị cháy. Để khỏi bị lửa thiêu cháy thì chỉ có cách an trụ trong tánh Không và lòng bi, viên ngọc và hoa sen, đó là chỗ giải thoát cho tất cả những gì hạn hẹp, được sanh ra, được trở thành, được làm ra, bị điều kiện hóa và chính những cái này tạo ra vô số khổ đau không dứt của thân phận con người. Viên ngọc và hoa sen Phật tánh là cái không thể hư hoại, dầu trong lửa phiền não cháy mãi của thế gian sanh tử này. Con đường để thấy và sống với viên ngọc và hoa sen Phật tánh này là con đường Khai Thị Ngộ Nhập của Kinh Pháp Hoa. Source: https://thuvienhoasen.org/a37536/sen-no-trong-lo-lua-van-tuoi