 What do you value? What are European values? To hear the continent’s leaders describe them, they include a commitment to human rights, the rule of law, democracy, and freedom of speech. Israel’s war in Gaza has laid bare the differences on the continent over how these values should be applied, though: Ireland, for example, has criticized Israel far more loudly than, say, Germany — yet both countries would be regarded as part of broader “Western Europe,” the Indian journalist Pallavi Aiyar notes in The Global Jigsaw. The countries of Europe will increasingly have to “learn to live with differences,” Aiyar — a former China correspondent for The Hindu, now based in Spain — writes. More challenging than that, she adds, Europeans will have to “accept their place among equals, when they have become used to the false narrative of being the moral saviors of a corrupt and immoral world, in need of the freedoms that only European values can bring.” No laughing matter The world can sometimes feel so grim — war, disease, climate change — that laughter seems far off. Yet that’s sometimes where the best humor can be found. “Outsized emotions giving way to slapstick comedy,” the writer Lyz Lenz wrote in Men Yell at Me. “The contrast of light and dark make for a moment of chiaroscuro more dramatic than a Renaissance master could imagine.” “I used to be so afraid that the rapture would come while I was on the toilet and Jesus would take me up into the sky and everyone left behind would see my butt,” Lenz writes. “And maybe some poop would come out and even though I was saved, I’d be humiliated.” The relationship between sorrow or fear and humor works the other way, too: Not only can one use the former to fuel the latter, but as Lenz notes, the latter can wield power over the former. Mountains out of Moloch hills Fighting climate change is just an array of Moloch Traps: Participants all compete for a single outcome, but by competing, make everyone — including themselves — worse off in the process. Moloch Traps are legion in other sectors and industries. No professional cyclist wanted to use performance-enhancing drugs, but many did because their rivals did, besmirching the sport in the process. Online photo-beauty filters drive more and more users to apply them, because no one wants to risk falling short of expectations of how one should look online. As the environmental scientist Hannah Ritchie notes, however, combating temperature rises and environmental decline appears particularly prone to Moloch Traps: People overfish because if they don’t maximize their catch, they may be left with nothing; the same applies to cutting down forests or depleting water resources. “I struggled to think of one [problem] that doesn’t fall into this camp,” she wrote in Sustainability by numbers. |
