Adam Victor Brandizzi

As we watch the fighters of the Islamic State (Isis) rampaging through the Middle East, tearing apart the modern nation-states of Syria and Iraq created by departing European colonialists, it may be difficult to believe we are living in the 21st century. The sight of throngs of terrified refugees and the savage and indiscriminate violence is all too reminiscent of barbarian tribes sweeping away the Roman empire, or the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan cutting a swath through China, Anatolia, Russia and eastern Europe, devastating entire cities and massacring their inhabitants. Only the wearily familiar pictures of bombs falling yet again on Middle Eastern cities and towns – this time dropped by the United States and a few Arab allies – and the gloomy predictions that this may become another Vietnam, remind us that this is indeed a very modern war.

The ferocious cruelty of these jihadist fighters, quoting the Qur’an as they behead their hapless victims, raises another distinctly modern concern: the connection between religion and violence. The atrocities of Isis would seem to prove that Sam Harris, one of the loudest voices of the “New Atheism”, was right to claim that “most Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith”, and to conclude that “religion itself produces a perverse solidarity that we must find some way to undercut”. Many will agree with Richard Dawkins, who wrote in The God Delusion that “only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people”. Even those who find these statements too extreme may still believe, instinctively, that there is a violent essence inherent in religion, which inevitably radicalises any conflict – because once combatants are convinced that God is on their side, compromise becomes impossible and cruelty knows no bounds.

Despite the valiant attempts by Barack Obama and David Cameron to insist that the lawless violence of Isis has nothing to do with Islam, many will disagree. They may also feel exasperated. In the west, we learned from bitter experience that the fanatical bigotry which religion seems always to unleash can only be contained by the creation of a liberal state that separates politics and religion. Never again, we believed, would these intolerant passions be allowed to intrude on political life. But why, oh why, have Muslims found it impossible to arrive at this logical solution to their current problems? Why do they cling with perverse obstinacy to the obviously bad idea of theocracy? Why, in short, have they been unable to enter the modern world? The answer must surely lie in their primitive and atavistic religion.

But perhaps we should ask, instead, how it came about that we in the west developed our view of religion as a purely private pursuit, essentially separate from all other human activities, and especially distinct from politics. After all, warfare and violence have always been a feature of political life, and yet we alone drew the conclusion that separating the church from the state was a prerequisite for peace. Secularism has become so natural to us that we assume it emerged organically, as a necessary condition of any society’s progress into modernity. Yet it was in fact a distinct creation, which arose as a result of a peculiar concatenation of historical circumstances; we may be mistaken to assume that it would evolve in the same fashion in every culture in every part of the world.

We now take the secular state so much for granted that it is hard for us to appreciate its novelty, since before the modern period, there were no “secular” institutions and no “secular” states in our sense of the word. Their creation required the development of an entirely different understanding of religion, one that was unique to the modern west. No other culture has had anything remotely like it, and before the 18th century, it would have been incomprehensible even to European Catholics. The words in other languages that we translate as “religion” invariably refer to something vaguer, larger and more inclusive. The Arabic word din signifies an entire way of life, and the Sanskrit dharma covers law, politics, and social institutions as well as piety. The Hebrew Bible has no abstract concept of “religion”; and the Talmudic rabbis would have found it impossible to define faith in a single word or formula, because the Talmud was expressly designed to bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred. The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly states: “No word in either Greek or Latin corresponds to the English ‘religion’ or ‘religious’.” In fact, the only tradition that satisfies the modern western criterion of religion as a purely private pursuit is Protestant Christianity, which, like our western view of “religion”, was also a creation of the early modern period.

Traditional spirituality did not urge people to retreat from political activity. The prophets of Israel had harsh words for those who assiduously observed the temple rituals but neglected the plight of the poor and oppressed. Jesus’s famous maxim to “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” was not a plea for the separation of religion and politics. Nearly all the uprisings against Rome in first-century Palestine were inspired by the conviction that the Land of Israel and its produce belonged to God, so that there was, therefore, precious little to “give back” to Caesar. When Jesus overturned the money-changers’ tables in the temple, he was not demanding a more spiritualised religion. For 500 years, the temple had been an instrument of imperial control and the tribute for Rome was stored there. Hence for Jesus it was a “den of thieves”. The bedrock message of the Qur’an is that it is wrong to build a private fortune but good to share your wealth in order to create a just, egalitarian and decent society. Gandhi would have agreed that these were matters of sacred import: “Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”

The myth of religious violence

Before the modern period, religion was not a separate activity, hermetically sealed off from all others; rather, it permeated all human undertakings, including economics, state-building, politics and warfare. Before 1700, it would have been impossible for people to say where, for example, “politics” ended and “religion” began. The Crusades were certainly inspired by religious passion but they were also deeply political: Pope Urban II let the knights of Christendom loose on the Muslim world to extend the power of the church eastwards and create a papal monarchy that would control Christian Europe. The Spanish inquisition was a deeply flawed attempt to secure the internal order of Spain after a divisive civil war, at a time when the nation feared an imminent attack by the Ottoman empire. Similarly, the European wars of religion and the thirty years war were certainly exacerbated by the sectarian quarrels of Protestants and Catholics, but their violence reflected the birth pangs of the modern nation-state.

Before the modern period, religion was not a separate activity, it permeated all human undertakings

It was these European wars, in the 16th and 17th centuries, that helped create what has been called “the myth of religious violence”. It was said that Protestants and Catholics were so inflamed by the theological passions of the Reformation that they butchered one another in senseless battles that killed 35% of the population of central Europe. Yet while there is no doubt that the participants certainly experienced these wars as a life-and-death religious struggle, this was also a conflict between two sets of state-builders: the princes of Germany and the other kings of Europe were battling against the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and his ambition to establish a trans-European hegemony modelled after the Ottoman empire.

If the wars of religion had been solely motivated by sectarian bigotry, we should not expect to have found Protestants and Catholics fighting on the same side, yet in fact they often did so. Thus Catholic France repeatedly fought the Catholic Habsburgs, who were regularly supported by some of the Protestant princes. In the French wars of religion (1562–98) and the thirty years war, combatants crossed confessional lines so often that it was impossible to talk about solidly “Catholic” or “Protestant” populations. These wars were neither “all about religion” nor “all about politics”. Nor was it a question of the state simply “using” religion for political ends. There was as yet no coherent way to divide religious causes from social causes. People were fighting for different visions of society, but they would not, and could not, have distinguished between religious and temporal factors in these conflicts. Until the 18th century, dissociating the two would have been like trying to take the gin out of a cocktail.

By the end of the thirty years war, Europeans had fought off the danger of imperial rule. Henceforth Europe would be divided into smaller states, each claiming sovereign power in its own territory, each supported by a professional army and governed by a prince who aspired to absolute rule – a recipe, perhaps, for chronic interstate warfare. New configurations of political power were beginning to force the church into a subordinate role, a process that involved a fundamental reallocation of authority and resources from the ecclesiastical establishment to the monarch. When the new word “secularisation” was coined in the late 16th century, it originally referred to “the transfer of goods from the possession of the church into that of the world”. This was a wholly new experiment. It was not a question of the west discovering a natural law; rather, secularisation was a contingent development. It took root in Europe in large part because it mirrored the new structures of power that were pushing the churches out of government.

These developments required a new understanding of religion. It was provided by Martin Luther, who was the first European to propose the separation of church and state. Medieval Catholicism had been an essentially communal faith; most people experienced the sacred by living in community. But for Luther, the Christian stood alone before his God, relying only upon his Bible. Luther’s acute sense of human sinfulness led him, in the early 16th century, to advocate the absolute states that would not become a political reality for another hundred years. For Luther, the state’s prime duty was to restrain its wicked subjects by force, “in the same way as a savage wild beast is bound with chains and ropes”. The sovereign, independent state reflected this vision of the independent and sovereign individual. Luther’s view of religion, as an essentially subjective and private quest over which the state had no jurisdiction, would be the foundation of the modern secular ideal.

But Luther’s response to the peasants’ war in Germany in 1525, during the early stages of the wars of religion, suggested that a secularised political theory would not necessarily be a force for peace or democracy. The peasants, who were resisting the centralising policies of the German princes – which deprived them of their traditional rights – were mercilessly slaughtered by the state. Luther believed that they had committed the cardinal sin of mixing religion and politics: suffering was their lot, and they should have turned the other cheek, and accepted the loss of their lives and property. “A worldly kingdom,” he insisted, “cannot exist without an inequality of persons, some being free, some imprisoned, some lords, some subjects.” So, Luther commanded the princes, “Let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisoned, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel.”

Dawn of the liberal state

By the late 17th century, philosophers had devised a more urbane version of the secular ideal. For John Locke it had become self-evident that “the church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable.” The separation of religion and politics – “perfectly and infinitely different from each other” – was, for Locke, written into the very nature of things. But the liberal state was a radical innovation, just as revolutionary as the market economy that was developing in the west and would shortly transform the world. Because of the violent passions it aroused, Locke insisted that the segregation of “religion” from government was “above all things necessary” for the creation of a peaceful society.

Hence Locke was adamant that the liberal state could tolerate neither Catholics nor Muslims, condemning their confusion of politics and religion as dangerously perverse. Locke was a major advocate of the theory of natural human rights, originally pioneered by the Renaissance humanists and given definition in the first draft of the American Declaration of Independence as life, liberty and property. But secularisation emerged at a time when Europe was beginning to colonise the New World, and it would come to exert considerable influence on the way the west viewed those it had colonised – much as in our own time, the prevailing secular ideology perceives Muslim societies that seem incapable of separating faith from politics to be irredeemably flawed.

The reign of terror plunged France into an irrational bloodbath, in which 17,000 men, women and children were executed

This introduced an inconsistency, since for the Renaissance humanists there could be no question of extending these natural rights to the indigenous inhabitants of the New World. Indeed, these peoples could justly be penalised for failing to conform to European norms. In the 16th century, Alberico Gentili, a professor of civil law at Oxford, argued that land that had not been exploited agriculturally, as it was in Europe, was “empty” and that “the seizure of [such] vacant places” should be “regarded as law of nature”. Locke agreed that the native peoples had no right to life, liberty or property. The “kings” of America, he decreed, had no legal right of ownership to their territory. He also endorsed a master’s “Absolute, arbitrary, despotical power” over a slave, which included “the power to kill him at any time”. The pioneers of secularism seemed to be falling into the same old habits as their religious predecessors. Secularism was designed to create a peaceful world order, but the church was so intricately involved in the economic, political and cultural structures of society that the secular order could only be established with a measure of violence. In North America, where there was no entrenched aristocratic government, the disestablishment of the various churches could be accomplished with relative ease. But in France, the church could be dismantled only by an outright assault; far from being experienced as a natural and essentially normative arrangement, the separation of religion and politics could be experienced as traumatic and terrifying.

During the French revolution, one of the first acts of the new national assembly on November 2, 1789, was to confiscate all church property to pay off the national debt: secularisation involved dispossession, humiliation and marginalisation. This segued into outright violence during the September massacres of 1792, when the mob fell upon the jails of Paris and slaughtered between two and three thousand prisoners, many of them priests. Early in 1794, four revolutionary armies were dispatched from Paris to quell an uprising in the Vendée against the anti-Catholic policies of the regime. Their instructions were to spare no one. At the end of the campaign, General François-Joseph Westermann reportedly wrote to his superiors: “The Vendée no longer exists. I have crushed children beneath the hooves of our horses, and massacred the women … The roads are littered with corpses.”

Ironically, no sooner had the revolutionaries rid themselves of one religion, than they invented another. Their new gods were liberty, nature and the French nation, which they worshipped in elaborate festivals choreographed by the artist Jacques Louis David. The same year that the goddess of reason was enthroned on the high altar of Notre Dame cathedral, the reign of terror plunged the new nation into an irrational bloodbath, in which some 17,000 men, women and children were executed by the state.

To die for one’s country

When Napoleon’s armies invaded Prussia in 1807, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte similarly urged his countrymen to lay down their lives for the Fatherland – a manifestation of the divine and the repository of the spiritual essence of the Volk. If we define the sacred as that for which we are prepared to die, what Benedict Anderson called the “imagined community” of the nation had come to replace God. It is now considered admirable to die for your country, but not for your religion.

As the nation-state came into its own in the 19th century along with the industrial revolution, its citizens had to be bound tightly together and mobilised for industry. Modern communications enabled governments to create and propagate a national ethos, and allowed states to intrude into the lives of their citizens more than had ever been possible. Even if they spoke a different language from their rulers, subjects now belonged to the “nation,” whether they liked it or not. John Stuart Mill regarded this forcible integration as progress; it was surely better for a Breton, “the half-savage remnant of past times”, to become a French citizen than “sulk on his own rocks”. But in the late 19th century, the British historian Lord Acton feared that the adulation of the national spirit that laid such emphasis on ethnicity, culture and language, would penalise those who did not fit the national norm: “According, therefore, to the degree of humanity and civilisation in that dominant body which claims all the rights of the community, the inferior races are exterminated or reduced to servitude, or put in a condition of dependence.”

The Enlightenment philosophers had tried to counter the intolerance and bigotry that they associated with “religion” by promoting the equality of all human beings, together with democracy, human rights, and intellectual and political liberty, modern secular versions of ideals which had been promoted in a religious idiom in the past. The structural injustice of the agrarian state, however, had made it impossible to implement these ideals fully. The nation-state made these noble aspirations practical necessities. More and more people had to be drawn into the productive process and needed at least a modicum of education. Eventually they would demand the right to participate in the decisions of government. It was found by trial and error that those nations that democratised forged ahead economically, while those that confined the benefits of modernity to an elite fell behind. Innovation was essential to progress, so people had to be allowed to think freely, unconstrained by the constraints of their class, guild or church. Governments needed to exploit all their human resources, so outsiders, such as Jews in Europe and Catholics in England and America, were brought into the mainstream.

Yet this toleration was only skin-deep, and as Lord Acton had predicted, an intolerance of ethnic and cultural minorities would become the achilles heel of the nation-state. Indeed, the ethnic minority would replace the heretic (who had usually been protesting against the social order) as the object of resentment in the new nation-state. Thomas Jefferson, one of the leading proponents of the Enlightenment in the United States, instructed his secretary of war in 1807 that Native Americans were “backward peoples” who must either be “exterminated” or driven “beyond our reach” to the other side of the Mississippi “with the beasts of the forest”. The following year, Napoleon issued the “infamous decrees”, ordering the Jews of France to take French names, privatise their faith, and ensure that at least one in three marriages per family was with a gentile. Increasingly, as national feeling became a supreme value, Jews would come to be seen as rootless and cosmopolitan. In the late 19th century, there was an explosion of antisemitism in Europe, which undoubtedly drew upon centuries of Christian prejudice, but gave it a scientific rationale, claiming that Jews did not fit the biological and genetic profile of the Volk, and should be eliminated from the body politic as modern medicine cut out a cancer.

When secularisation was implemented in the developing world, it was experienced as a profound disruption – just as it had originally been in Europe. Because it usually came with colonial rule, it was seen as a foreign import and rejected as profoundly unnatural. In almost every region of the world where secular governments have been established with a goal of separating religion and politics, a counter-cultural movement has developed in response, determined to bring religion back into public life. What we call “fundamentalism” has always existed in a symbiotic relationship with a secularisation that is experienced as cruel, violent and invasive. All too often an aggressive secularism has pushed religion into a violent riposte. Every fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation, convinced that the liberal or secular establishment is determined to destroy their way of life. This has been tragically apparent in the Middle East.

Very often modernising rulers have embodied secularism at its very worst and have made it unpalatable to their subjects. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded the secular republic of Turkey in 1918, is often admired in the west as an enlightened Muslim leader, but for many in the Middle East he epitomised the cruelty of secular nationalism. He hated Islam, describing it as a “putrefied corpse”, and suppressed it in Turkey by outlawing the Sufi orders and seizing their properties, closing down the madrasas and appropriating their income. He also abolished the beloved institution of the caliphate, which had long been a dead-letter politically but which symbolised a link with the Prophet. For groups such as al-Qaida and Isis, reversing this decision has become a paramount goal.

Ataturk also continued the policy of ethnic cleansing that had been initiated by the last Ottoman sultans; in an attempt to control the rising commercial classes, they systematically deported the Armenian and Greek-speaking Christians, who comprised 90% of the bourgeoisie. The Young Turks, who seized power in 1909, espoused the antireligious positivism associated with August Comte and were also determined to create a purely Turkic state. During the first world war, approximately one million Armenians were slaughtered in the first genocide of the 20th century: men and youths were killed where they stood, while women, children and the elderly were driven into the desert where they were raped, shot, starved, poisoned, suffocated or burned to death. Clearly inspired by the new scientific racism, Mehmet Resid, known as the “execution governor”, regarded the Armenians as “dangerous microbes” in “the bosom of the Fatherland”. Ataturk completed this racial purge. For centuries Muslims and Christians had lived together on both sides of the Aegean; Ataturk partitioned the region, deporting Greek Christians living in what is now Turkey to Greece, while Turkish-speaking Muslims in Greece were sent the other way.

The fundamentalist reaction

Secularising rulers such as Ataturk often wanted their countries to look modern, that is, European. In Iran in 1928, Reza Shah Pahlavi issued the laws of uniformity of dress: his soldiers tore off women’s veils with bayonets and ripped them to pieces in the street. In 1935, the police were ordered to open fire on a crowd who had staged a peaceful demonstration against the dress laws in one of the holiest shrines of Iran, killing hundreds of unarmed civilians. Policies like this made veiling, which has no Qur’anic endorsement, an emblem of Islamic authenticity in many parts of the Muslim world.

Following the example of the French, Egyptian rulers secularised by disempowering and impoverishing the clergy. Modernisation had begun in the Ottoman period under the governor Muhammad Ali, who starved the Islamic clergy financially, taking away their tax-exempt status, confiscating the religiously endowed properties that were their principal source of income, and systematically robbing them of any shred of power. When the reforming army officer Jamal Abdul Nasser came to power in 1952, he changed tack and turned the clergy into state officials. For centuries, they had acted as a protective bulwark between the people and the systemic violence of the state. Now Egyptians came to despise them as government lackeys. This policy would ultimately backfire, because it deprived the general population of learned guidance that was aware of the complexity of the Islamic tradition. Self-appointed freelancers, whose knowledge of Islam was limited, would step into the breach, often to disastrous effect.

Many regard the west’s devotion to the separation of religion and politics as incompatible with democracy and freedom

If some Muslims today fight shy of secularism, it is not because they have been brainwashed by their faith but because they have often experienced efforts at secularisation in a particularly virulent form. Many regard the west’s devotion to the separation of religion and politics as incompatible with admired western ideals such as democracy and freedom. In 1992, a military coup in Algeria ousted a president who had promised democratic reforms, and imprisoned the leaders of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which seemed certain to gain a majority in the forthcoming elections. Had the democratic process been thwarted in such an unconstitutional manner in Iran or Pakistan, there would have been worldwide outrage. But because an Islamic government had been blocked by the coup, there was jubilation in some quarters of the western press – as if this undemocratic action had instead made Algeria safe for democracy. In rather the same way, there was an almost audible sigh of relief in the west when the Muslim Brotherhood was ousted from power in Egypt last year. But there has been less attention to the violence of the secular military dictatorship that has replaced it, which has exceeded the abuses of the Mubarak regime.

After a bumpy beginning, secularism has undoubtedly been valuable to the west, but we would be wrong to regard it as a universal law. It emerged as a particular and unique feature of the historical process in Europe; it was an evolutionary adaptation to a very specific set of circumstances. In a different environment, modernity may well take other forms. Many secular thinkers now regard “religion” as inherently belligerent and intolerant, and an irrational, backward and violent “other” to the peaceable and humane liberal state – an attitude with an unfortunate echo of the colonialist view of indigenous peoples as hopelessly “primitive”, mired in their benighted religious beliefs. There are consequences to our failure to understand that our secularism, and its understanding of the role of religion, is exceptional. When secularisation has been applied by force, it has provoked a fundamentalist reaction – and history shows that fundamentalist movements which come under attack invariably grow even more extreme. The fruits of this error are on display across the Middle East: when we look with horror upon the travesty of Isis, we would be wise to acknowledge that its barbaric violence may be, at least in part, the offspring of policies guided by our disdain. •

• Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence is published today by Bodley Head. She will be appearing on 11 October at the London Lit Weekend at Kings Place

Meaghan Lewis is an imposter, and so are you. If you’re afflicted with Imposter Syndrome, as 70% of successful people are, you might feel like a fraud because your accomplishments are inadequate. Many people with Imposter Syndrome attribute their success to luck or timing, instead of their own hard work. They report “waiting to be found out.”

Ironically, imposters are the ones who are most likely to be high achievers.

In March 2014, ThoughtWorker and Quality Assurance Analyst Meaghan Lewis presented on the Imposter Syndrome and how it affects women of color at the National Society of Black Engineers. While our fellow imposters come from different races, genders, and socioeconomic classes, it does disproportionately affect women of color, especially in a male-driven industry like technology.

I sat down with Meaghan  to discuss the phenomenon and ways to overcome the false feeling of being a fake.

Fiona Lee: What inspired you to give your talk on the Imposter Syndrome?

Meaghan Lewis: I never felt like I was good enough growing up. In school, I didn’t feel like I was being supported at times. I really just wanted to be good at whatever I applied myself to. At a time when I just wanted to fit in, I somehow felt different and that I wasn’t quite good enough. I discovered a few years back that there is a term for this feeling: the Imposter Syndrome.

It was important to open a discussion up with women and minority groups who felt the symptoms of the Imposter Syndrome. Some of us begin to feel like “imposters” because we don’t happen to look like our peers and colleagues. 

FL: Do you think the Imposter Syndrome disproportionately affects women and minorities?

ML: I would say so. While it’s certainly not something that applies to any one gender, traditionally it’s held women back more than men. Just to be clear: anyone can have these feelings of inadequacy, but I think it’s safe to say that women have had different challenges than men. Minority groups have been affected in the same way.

FL: What are some of the specific challenges women and minorities face?

ML:  The way men and women are viewed differently. For example, women are sometimes referred to as being “bossy,” whereas men may not feel the same sort of push-back when they try to demonstrate leadership qualities. The confidence gap starts at a very early age. I also believe it is something that can be combated even before kids start elementary school by showing girls that they are empowered and that they do have a voice.

FL: How do people internalize the effects of the Imposter Syndrome?

ML: The feelings I was discussing earlier tend to pop up when you come across new and unfamiliar situations. For example a new job or promotion, where you’re not entirely sure how to respond to new responsibilities can cause anxiety. You may start to feel like people are looking up to you and expecting a lot out of you, and you’re not sure that you can live up to these perceived expectations. I felt particularly impacted by Imposter Syndrome in school, where I was the only female in the engineering program. I began to feel like the men in my program were smarter and more on the ball than I was, which was completely illogical.

FL: How would you bridge this confidence gap?

ML: One thing that really helps is finding support systems inside your community. For example, a group of friends or people that you trust to share your feelings with. Just talking and getting it out there helps immensely. A big part of the Imposter Syndrome is that it takes place on an internal level and you keep these really negative thoughts to yourself. When you start talking to others about Imposter Syndrome, you can begin to share methods used to overcome it.

Having groups of people you can confide in is the key to bridging the confidence gap and helping to grow as an individual. You can find this alliance in friends, colleagues, meetup groups, or conferences. Whatever feels most comfortable to you. Just a couple weeks ago, ThoughtWorks hosted a breakfast for women of color in tech. We discussed topics that have affected us in their own ways. For example, one topic was 'How you want to be perceived in the workplace and if you are really perceived that way or not'. It was great for us to know other women out there feel the same way and interesting to see how they handled this challenge.

It’s also important to stress the power of positive thinking. There are always going to be times when you’re uncertain and there are always going to be times when you think you’re going to fail. It’s how you react to these feelings that will ultimately impact the outcome.

Check out Meaghan's presentation on the Imposter Syndrome here.

At Velocity NY, Daniel Espeset of Etsy gave a great talk about how Etsy profiles their JavaScript parse and execution time. Even better, after the talk, they released the tool on GitHub.

Daniel shared a few examples in his deck, but I couldn’t wait to take Daniel’s tool and fire it up on a bunch of random browsers and devices that I have sitting around.

For this test, I decided to profile just jQuery 2.1.1, which weighs in at 88kb when minimized. jQuery was selected for its popularity, not because it’s the worst offender. There are many libraries much worse (hey there Angular and your 120kb payload). The results above are based on the median times taken from 20 tests per browser/device combination.

The list of tested devices isn’t exhaustive by any means—I just took some of the ones I have sitting around to try and get a picture of how much parse and execution time would vary.

As you can see from the table above, even in this small sample size the parsing and execution times varied dramatically from device to device and browser to browser. On powerful devices, like my Macbook Air (2014), parse and execution time was negligible. Powerful mobile devices like the iPhone 5s also fared very well.

But as soon as you moved away from the latest and greatest top-end devices, the ugly truth of JS parse and execution time started to rear its head.

On a Blackberry 9650 (running BB6), the combined time to parse and execute jQuery was a whopping 725ms. My UMX running Android 2.3.6 took 652ms. Before you laugh off this little device running the 2.3.6 browser, it’s worth mentioning I bought this a month ago, brand new. It’s a device actively being sold by a few prepaid networks.

Another interesting note was how significant the impact of hardware has on the timing. The Lumia 520, despite running the same browser as the 920, had a median parse and execution time that was 46% slower than the 920. The Kindle Touch, despite running the same browser as the Paperwhite, was 71% slower than it’s more powerful replacement. How powerful the device was, not just the browser, had a large impact.

This is notable because we’re seeing companies such as Mozilla and Google targeting emerging markets with affordable, low-powered devices that otherwise run modern browsers. Those markets are going to dominate internet growth over the next few years, and affordability is a more necessary feature than a souped up device.

In addition, as the cost of technology cheapens, we’re going to continue seeing an incredibly diverse set of connected devices. With endless new form factors being released (even the Android Wear watches quickly got a Chromium based browser), the adage about not knowing where our sites will end up has never been more true.

The truly frightening thing about these parse and execution times is that this is for the latest version of jQuery, and only the latest version of jQuery. No older versions. No additional plugins or frameworks. According to the latest run of HTTP Archive, the median JS transfer size is 230kb and this test includes just a fraction of that size. I’m not even asking jQuery to actually do anything. Basically, I’m lobbing the browsers a softball here—these are best case results.

This re-affirms what many have been arguing for some time: reducing your dependency on JS is not healthy merely for the minor percentage of people who have JS disabled—it improves the experience for everyone. When anything over 100ms stops feeling instantaneous and anything over 1000ms breaks the users flow, taking 700ms to parse your JavaScript cripples the user experience before it really has a chance to get started.

So what’s a web developer to do?

1. Use less JavaScript. This is the simple one. Anything you can offload onto HTML or CSS, do it. JavaScript is fun and awesome but it’s also the most brittle layer of the web stack and, as we’ve seen, can seriously impact performance.

2. Render on the server If you’re using a client-side MVC framework, make sure you pre-render on the server. If you build a client-side MVC framework and you’re not ensuring those templates can easily be rendered on the server as well, you’re being irresponsible. That’s a bug. A bug that impacts performance, stability and reach.

3. Defer all the scripts. Defer every bit of JavaScript that you can. Get it out of the critical path. When it makes sense, take steps to defer the parsing as well. Google had a great post a few years back about how they reduced startup latency for Gmail. One of the things they did was initially comment out blocks of JavaScript so that it wouldn’t be parsed during page load. The result was a 10x reduction in startup latency. That number is probably different on today’s devices, but the approach still stands.

4. Cut the mustard. I’m a big fan of “cutting the mustard”, an approach made popular by the BBC. This doesn’t solve the problem of low-end devices with modern browsers, but it will make a better experience for people using less capable browsers. Better yet, by consciously deciding not to overwhelm less capable browsers with excess scripts you not only provide a better experience for those users, but you reduce the need for extra polyfills and frameworks for modern browsers as well. On one recent project where we did this, the entire JavaScript for the site was about 43% of the size of jQuery alone!

There are certainly cases to be made for JS libraries, client-side MVC frameworks, and the like, but providing a quality, performant experience across a variety of devices and browsers requires that we take special care to ensure that the initial rendering is not reliant on them. Frameworks and libraries should be carefully considered additions, not the default.

When you consider the combination of weight, parse time and execution time, it becomes pretty clear that optimizing your JS and reducing your site’s reliance on it is one of the most impactful optimizations you can make.

30 de setembro de 2014 por mansueto

Aqueles que moram em Brasilia poderão participar de um debate interessante para o lançamento do livro do economista Marcos Mendes: “Por que o Brasil cresce pouco?”.

O evento será será no dia 06 de outubro e, além da palestra do próprio autor, haverá um debate com os economistas Raul Velloso, Marcos Lisboa e Samuel Pessoa. Para tornar o evento ainda mais interessante a audiência poderá participar do debate. Abaixo os detalhes do evento e, por favor, compareçam e participem do debate.

Palestrante: Marcos Mendes, doutor em economia pela USP, Consultor do Senado e autor da obra Por que o Brasil cresce pouco? Editora Elsevier.

Abertura: Presidente do TCU, Ministro Augusto Nardes

Debatedores confirmados: Dr. Marcos Lisboa, doutor em economia pela Penn University, Dr. Raul Velloso, doutor em economia pela Yale University e Dr. Samuel Pessôa, doutor em economia pela USP.

Data: 06.10.2014 (segunda-feira)
Abertura: 14 horas
Local: auditório do edifício sede do TCU
Público alvo: servidores do TCU e do Senado/Câmara dos Deputados e demais convidados.

Pedro França/Ag. Senado

“Já tenho argumentos suficientes para ver que é preciso, sim, aproveitar o poder medicinal que essa erva tem", diz Cristovam

O debate sobre a legalização do uso da maconha para fins medicinais e recreativos vem sendo feito na Comissão de Direitos Humanos (CDH) e é fruto de uma sugestão popular apresentada por meio do Portal e-Cidadania que recebeu mais de 20 mil assinaturas de apoio. Para Cristovam, uma coisa já ficou clara com os debates de até agora.

“A proposta que aqui chegou trazia a discussão em torno do uso para fins recreativos e para fins medicinais. Com o debate feito até aqui, eu já tenho argumentos suficientes para ver que é preciso, sim, aproveitar o poder medicinal que essa erva tem. Não dá para deixar tanta gente sofrendo por causa de um preconceito sobre o uso de uma droga”, afirmou o senador.

O uso medicinal, entretanto, levanta uma série de questões que ainda precisam ser esclarecidas, segundo o relator da proposta. “Vai ser produzida em uma farmácia, como o remédio que se toma para dor, que veio do ópio, que é proibido como droga, mas que é usado como matéria-prima? E aqueles que usam maconha para se proteger durante os tratamentos de quimioterapia, que têm de tomar o chá? A gente vai deixá-los produzir ou não? Mas, se deixá-los produzir, como é que vai limitar o tamanho?”

Cristovam explicou que a CDH vai fazer mais duas audiências públicas. Aí ele terá condições de apresentar o relatório sobre a sugestão de regulamentação da maconha. “Eu, hoje, não tenho posição sobre se a regulamentação é um caminho melhor ou pior do que o proibitismo de hoje. Mas tenho uma conclusão, sim: o proibitismo não está funcionando.

Pesquisadores, membros do governo, Ministério Público, Judiciário, polícia, representantes da ONU, psicólogos e psiquiatras, além de dezenas de pessoas que tiveram oportunidade de usar da palavra, participaram dos debates até o momento.

Nas reuniões já realizadas, apesar da falta de consenso sobre a liberação da droga para uso recreativo, houve forte apoio à liberação da maconha para fins medicinais. O uso terapêutico de substâncias como o canabidiol (CBD) tem se mostrado eficiente em pacientes que sofrem de condições como epilepsia grave, esclerose múltipla, esquizofrenia e mal de Parkinson.

Leia ainda: Senado estuda proposta de legalização da maconha

Mais sobre drogas

Assine a Revista Congresso em Foco

Docker has rapidly become “the new thing” for computing in 2014. Why did that happen so quickly, and how has a Linux application container become so popular? Broadly, I think Docker is a great example of how to build a viral, developer-oriented product.

1. A developer can figure out what Docker does, install it and do something useful with it in 15 minutes. I first heard this “rule” from Marten Mickos when talking about why MySQL was so successful: low friction to try it out, a simple concept, and useful functionality.
2. Docker is a great name and it has a cute logo It resonates with what the product does and is easy to remember. Engineering-oriented founders sometimes seem to think that names and logos don’t matter if the product is good enough, but a great name can turbocharge adoption and build a valuable brand.
3. The Docker product came from a non-threatening source, a small startup (DotCloud) that was able to broadly partner across the whole industry. If the same product had come from an established enterprise technology player, there would have been much more push-back from that player’s competitors, and the market would probably have split into several competing technologies.

The rapid adoption rate took everyone by surprise, and now it’s too late to build a competitor. So everyone is having to cooperate around a single container solution. This is great for the developers and end users, but means that several platform as a service (PaaS) vendors have lost control of their destiny somewhat as Docker did an end-run around their strategy.

Even if you don’t know or care what Docker is, I think it offers a very relevant playbook for how to build a developer-led business model.

Get ubiquity first, become the category leader, then convert that into business value and revenue opportunities later.

That leaves the remaining question of, what does Docker do that is interesting, and who might it compete with? I have four separate answers:

1. Portability: Docker is a portable container that packages any Linux application or service. A package that is created and tested on a developer’s laptop using any language or framework can run unmodified on any public cloud, any private cloud or a bare-metal server. This is a similar benefit to the Java “write once, run anyware” idea but is more robust and is generalized to “build anything once, run anywhere”.
2. Speed: Start-up time for a container is around a second. Public cloud virtual machines (VMs) take from tens of seconds to several minutes because they boot a full operating system every time, and booting a VM on a laptop can take minutes. To counter this advantage, VMware has just announced (but not shipped) a technology called Fargo that clones an existing VM in a second or so.
3. Configuration: The Docker container captures the exact configuration of a version of an application. To upgrade the application in production, the container is usually replaced with a new version, which takes a few seconds. The layers of components that go into the configuration are kept separate and can be inspected and rebuilt easily. This changes configuration management to be largely a build- time activity, so for example a Chef recipe might be used to build a Docker container, but at runtime there is no need to use the Chef services to create many identical copies of a Docker container. Used in this way, Docker removes much of the need to use tools like Cfengine, Puppet, Chef, Ansible or Saltstack.
4. Docker Hub App-store: Docker containers are shared in a public registry at hub.docker.com. This is organized similarly to Github, and already contains tens of thousands of containers. Because containers are very portable, this provides a very useful cross platform “app store” for applications and component micro-services that can be assembled into applications. Other attempts to build “app stores” are tied to a specific platform (e.g. the AWS Marketplace or Ubuntu’s Juju Charms) or tool (e.g. the Chef Supermarket) and it seems likely that Docker Hub will end up as a far bigger source of off-the-shelf software components, and monetization opportunities.

One reason Docker is interesting is that all four answers are each individually useful, but can be used in combination. This causes cross-pollination of ideas and patterns. For example, someone might start using Docker because they like the speed and portability, but find that they end up adopting the configuration and Docker hub patterns as well.

The Docker technology is still fairly new; work is underway to add missing features, and a large ecosystem of related projects and companies is forming around it. There’s a lot of interest in the technology from the VC community, as we try to figure out whom to fund to do what, and how the story will play out in the longer term.

Adrian Cockcroft is a technology fellow at Battery Ventures.

Feature image via Flickr Creative Commons.

"Eu já quebrei paradigmas, pois sou negra, nordestina e de uma cidade do interior. Mesmo assim consegui ficar entre os finalistas desse concurso fora do meu país. Para mim, já é uma vitória". A frase é da jovem de Feira de Santana (a 109 km da capital) Geórgia Gabriela da Silva Sampaio, 18, que participa de um concurso da Universidade de Harvard, nos Estados Unidos, junto com estudantes do mundo todo.

Foram 40 trabalhos inscritos,  16 do Brasil, sendo o dela o único da Bahia. Uma votação na internet escolheu os 15 melhores trabalhos como finalistas, o de Geórgia foi o quinto mais votado. "Foi difícil chegar até aqui, pois os trabalhos podem ser feitos em grupo ou individualmente. Estou concorrendo com alguns grupos e isso não deixa de ser um ponto a menos para mim, que estou sozinha. Mas creio que chego lá", diz a estudante.

Geórgia sonha  cursar engenharia em uma universidade no exterior. O trabalho selecionado para o concurso é a criação de um kit para diagnosticar de forma rápida e barata a endometriose, doença que atinge nada menos que seis milhões de mulheres no Brasil e 170 milhões no mundo. A ideia surgiu com a experiência obtida com uma tia, que passou pelo problema.

"Comecei a pesquisar e notei que a falta de um diagnostico precoce é que aumenta o risco da doença e de outros estágios dela. Como o sintoma principal é a dor durante a menstruação, as mulheres passam muito tempo sem procurar tratamento", disse. "A média de atraso na busca de tratamento é sete anos. Enquanto isso, a endometriose avança e pode atingir outros órgãos. O tratamento e o diagnóstico são muito caros", explica.

De família humilde, a estudante conta que desenvolveu o trabalho pensando nas pessoas com menor poder aquisitivo. Dessa forma, investiu num kit que pudesse ser barato e acessível aos serviços públicos.

Questão social

"É uma questão social mesmo. Muitas mulheres não conseguem pagar o tratamento e correm risco de piorar a situação. O objetivo é fazer algo que possa dar a elas o direito a um diagnóstico e um tratamento adequado", frisa Geórgia.

Filha do comerciante Jorge Luiz dos Santos Sampaio e da cabeleireira Sidney da Silva Sampaio, a estudante sempre se destacou nos estudos e, por esse motivo,  era sempre convidada a participar de competições estudantis.

"Ela sempre se destacou. Em toda escola que ela passava era elogiada pelos professores. Até que fez um teste para um boa escola aqui e foi selecionada entre os primeiros candidatos, ganhando uma bolsa de estudos. Temos  orgulho do caminho que está seguindo", contou a mãe.

Sem conter a alegria, Jorge Luiz lembra que a filha foi aprovada em quatro vestibulares, nas universidades Estadual de Feira de Santana (Uefs) e Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

"Ela não quis cursar, pois  o sonho dela é estudar fora do Brasil. Enquanto em outros lares os pais brigam para que os filhos estudem, aqui a briga é para que ela aceite cursar uma universidade aqui no país. A educação é a maior riqueza que podemos dar aos nossos filhos, e esse é o sonho dela. Então, vamos fazer o que for possível para que seja realizado", diz o pai.

Com o ensino médio concluído no ano passado, Geórgia agora se prepara para concorrer em outros vestibulares no Brasil e tentar uma vaga em universidades fora do país. "Quero fazer um curso no exterior, pela abertura maior que eles nos oferecem", diz ela.

Engenharia

Geórgia Gabriela destaca que pode cursar engenharia e, ao mesmo tempo, desenvolver as pesquisas ligadas ao projeto científico.

"Tentei ser selecionada em duas universidades no exterior, mas, até o momento, não consegui. Acredito que esta participação no concurso em Harvard possa ajudar de alguma forma a realização do meu sonho", assinala.

A próxima etapa da seleção é ser entrevistada por uma banca examinadora (pela internet). O resultado final deve sair na primeira quinzena de outubro. "Estamos na torcida. Amo pesquisar e é interessante me ver produzindo conhecimento. A pesquisa dá a oportunidade de criação, e isto me estimula", diz ela.

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With popular posts titled “On My Butchness” and the brilliant “Dirtbag Teddy Roosevelt,” the Toast is not your typical blog.

Needless to say, you won’t find the 118th recap of one of the “Real Housewives” installments. You also won’t find contrived outrage. Instead, the Toast tackles everything from literature to “Columbo” to the perils of the natural world, in a tone which is at turns humorous and earnest. It is a publication that’s different mostly because it doesn’t underestimate its readers’ intelligence.

For example, when Vanity Fair published its 20th annual “News Disrupters” feature, replete with the usual names and white faces, the Toast responded in kind with “A List of One’s Own,” a list of female writers and editors whom the Toast’s co-editor Mallory Ortberg believes deserved the spotlight alongside Vanity Fair’s disrupters. The site is as comfortable riffing on “Galaxy Quest” as it is on sending up every Canadian novel ever.

Only a year old, it averages 600,000 global uniques per month, according to Quantcast, and it has 15,600 Twitter followers and 12,600 Facebook likes. It may be dwarfed by women’s blog Jezebel, which commands 8 million average uniques, according to comScore, and The Hairpin, with 900,000 monthly global uniques, but it has already carved out a niche for itself as a publication that serves the needs of its very particular audience.

Toast co-editor Mallory Ortberg spoke with Digiday about what disruption really means, and how it fits within the Toast’s editorial mission. Excerpts:

What were your thoughts on the Vanity Fair piece?
Every couple of months, a list like this comes out, and they’re usually pretty predictable: It will be people you already know, people who have impressive jobs at big corporations, people who are generally white men. Occasionally, there will be one or two white women thrown in there for a smattering of diversity. There were so many women and queer people and women of color that I could think of in five minutes off the top of my head who were doing more interesting, innovative, disruptive things. It just seemed so lazy to me.

So what is media or news disruption, then?
Somebody made a super-good point about what disruption wasn’t, which was to start your job at a huge media concern, and then spin off your own blog under that umbrella or get a ton of VC funding. Anyone who’s starting their own project, like Mikki Kendall and Jamie Nesbitt starting Hood Feminism with their own money, on their own time, without anybody overseeing them — that, to me, looks more like disruption than “The New York Times gave me a lot of money to make this.”

How does your list fit in with The Toast’s editorial mission?
Part of The Toast’s mission is talking about women who are doing interesting things that they care a lot about. We’re not the kind of blog that covers everything that’s going on in the news, but when there’s a big enough story or something we missed, we do like to talk about it.

What prompted you and your co-editor, Nicole Cliffe, to start Toast?
It was very much between the two of us. We really got each other, and we thought it would be really fun to do a project together, but at the time, I had a full-time job and she had a full-time job. We were really inspired by Choire Sicha and Alex Balk at The Awl. We thought, “Well they just said that. If they can do it, other people can; so why not take them at face value?”

How does The Toast monetize?
It’s pretty standard ads, and we get enough traffic on a daily basis that we started turning a profit pretty early. We were able to pay our writers right away, which meant so much to us.

Why?
Writing is work, and that work deserves payment in our capitalist society. So we just thought, “Yeah, let’s pay everybody,” and if it failed, it failed. People seemed really happy that we were up front [about our budget]. Sometimes people would take their pieces elsewhere, and that’s wonderful. I think everyone should be getting as much money as they possibly can. But a lot of people appreciated that we were just making a gesture, even if it was $25 or $50. It’s not nothing, and that was our goal: to offer people not nothing.

You’ve also dabbled in sponsored content.
We did for JSTOR and for Warby Parker. It totally worked because cute glasses and reading academic articles are exactly what The Toast is about. There’s not a lot that’s off the table with us when it comes to different ways of making money. We would always have a conversation about it and we just go from there. We occasionally have readers sponsor pieces; we have a donate page. We will often do a little blurb at the beginning of the piece, “Here’s the person who sponsored this; here’s the reason why they did it. Let us know if you want to be part of this series.”

Can a niche site survive in the long term?
Because the Internet is fragmented, there are so many different communities and fandoms and special-interest sites that it’s built up in such a way that people want to seek out what they’re already interested in. It was sort of like, there was a community already in place, and we found it, and they found us. It just really clicked.

How would you characterize the average Toast reader?
Fucking delightful! I was so surprised when our publisher told us that a little over 30 percent of our readers are male. We do not actively cultivate men at all. So I’m amazed and delighted that so many men want to read our site. Obviously, the majority are women in their 20s and 30s; they are in college or graduate school, young professionals, generally living in cities but not always. They love to read, they love to talk about what they’re reading, they’re very engaged with politics, they’re very engaged in learning about the world of science and technology, they’re really intellectually curious and they’re very thoughtful. Really cool bunch of weirdoes.

As The Toast grows, how do you see its publishing offerings changing?
Right now, we have plenty of the sort of pieces you can see on a blog. We can afford that. We would love to see more long, reported pieces.