Category Politics

Auto Added by WPeMatico

How to live a good life in difficult times: Yuval Noah Harari, Rory Stewart and Maria Ressa in conversation

From superintelligent AI to the climate and democracy, three leading thinkers discuss how to navigate the future

What happens when an internationally bestselling historian, a Nobel peace prize-winning journalist and a former politician get together to discuss the state of the world, and where we’re heading? Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli medieval and military historian best known for his panoramic surveys of human history, including Sapiens, Homo Deus and, most recently, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Maria Ressa, joint winner of the Nobel peace prize, is a Filipino and American journalist who co-founded the news website Rappler. And Rory Stewart is a British academic and former Conservative MP, writer and co-host of The Rest Is Politics podcast. Their conversation ranged over the rise of AI, the crisis in democracy and the prospect of a Trump-Putin wedding, but began by considering a question central to all of their work: how to live a good life in an increasingly fragmented and fragile world?

YNH People have been arguing about this for thousands of years. The main contribution of modern liberalism and democracy was to try to agree to disagree; that different people can have very different concepts of what a good life is, and they can still live together in the same society, agreeing on some very basic rules of conduct. And the challenge was always that people who think they have the absolute answer to what is a good life try to impose it on others, partly because, unfortunately for many ideologies, an inherent part of the good life is attempting to make everybody live it. And even more unfortunately, in many cases, it seems that it is easier to impose it on others than to do it ourselves. If we take the original crusade in medieval Christian Europe, you have all these people who can’t live a Christian life of modesty and compassion and love your neighbour, but they are able to travel thousands of kilometres to kill people and try to force them to live according to these principles. And what we are witnessing in the world right now is more of the same.

Continue reading...

Between the Waves by Tom McTague review – the long view on Brexit

An ambitious history of Britain’s volatile relationship with Europe, culminating in the 2016 referendum

Next year marks a decade since Britain voted to leave the EU. A whole 10 years of turmoil, and still the country can’t seem to agree exactly why it happened or what should happen next, with both leavers and remainers increasingly united in frustration about what the referendum has delivered. How did we end up here?

In Between the Waves, New Statesman editor Tom McTague makes an ambitious attempt to answer that question by zooming out and putting Brexit in its broader historical context. The result is a great big entertaining sweep of a book, tracing the roots of Britain’s ambiguous relationship with its neighbours back to the end of the second world war, and will be joyfully inhaled by any reader who loves the kind of podcasts that invariably feature two men talking to each other. It charts the path from a time when membership was seen as an antidote to British decline – the chance for “a nation that lost an empire to gain a continent”, as the Sun put it in 1975 – to a time when it was singled out as the cause of it.

Continue reading...

Should we ban opinion polls?

They claim to reflect public sentiment. But they’re better thought of as just another species of misinformation

Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, opinion polls predicted a win for Hillary Clinton. She lost, and the polling industry went through one of its regular spasms of self-criticism and supposed reform. Alas, it did not vote itself entirely out of existence. France and Spain ban the publication of opinion polls in the days leading up to an election, but we should go one better and ban their publication at any time.

No doubt it adds much to the gaiety of the British nation to see the Conservative party slip to third or fourth in the polls, but any poll asking who you would vote for if there were a Westminster election tomorrow, held at a time when there almost certainly will not be an election for another four years, is meaningless as a guide to the makeup of the next Parliament.

Continue reading...

The big idea: should we give babies the right to vote?

Strange as it may seem, it’s hard to refute the arguments for truly universal suffrage

Two years ago, Alisa Perales sued California and the US government because they wouldn’t let her vote. The academically gifted Perales, who was eight years old at the time, argued that the rule excluding under-18s from democracy, which is enshrined in the US constitution, amounted to age discrimination.

Her case was thrown out, but it wasn’t the first time the voting age was challenged and it won’t be the last. The issue of whether the limit should be removed entirely has been raised periodically since at least the 19th century, and the ageless voting movement has been gaining momentum since political philosopher John Wall wrote a manifesto for it in 2021. More recently, children’s author and education researcher Clémentine Beauvais published a short tract in her native France making the case for it.

Continue reading...