Tom Holland

The English writer, not the actor. Interviewed by Tyler Cowen (transcript available).  I liked this section

COWEN: Are there religious reasons why America is more pro-technology than Europe?

HOLLAND: That’s a very good question. I think there are generally religious reasons in almost everything in America.

[laughter]

HOLLAND: I suspect that it’s more to do with the fact that it is easy to bring home improvements into a house that’s just been built than it is to do home improvements in a house that’s 500 years old. European states, if you imagine them as houses — they’re very old. They have all kinds of dodgy wiring, botched jobs.

Everyone knows that the worst kind of DIY is when you yourself have botched it over many, many years. It makes it much harder to do. It’s much easier just to rip everything out and put it back in again. I think that is the kind of attitude that people in America tend to have. I don’t know, I have no stats on this, but I would guess that it would be easier to import wholesale technology into a house on the outskirts of Houston than it would be in downtown Manhattan.

COWEN: Or an English country home.

HOLLAND: Absolutely. One of the things that always strikes me when I go to New York is, actually, it’s an old city. In Europe, we’re accustomed to thinking of America as modern and new, but New York is not a modern city. Boston — not modern cities. I remember going to Boston. I’d go for maybe over 10 years. Every time I’d go, there’d be this massive, great hole in the middle of Boston. They were, I think, trying to develop a subway system. Every time I’d go, it got bigger. [laughs]

COWEN: They called it the Big Dig.

HOLLAND: The Big Dig. A Big Dig, I would guess, is much easier to do in — I don’t know — Vegas or Houston than in Boston because Boston is just a very old city, in exactly the way that Manchester is in Britain, or Lyon or somewhere. 

His discussion of the differing accounts of Moses and the Ten Commandments fit nicely with my understanding of the Talmudic approach to laws in the Pentateuch: if something is mentioned only once, it applies only to that case. If a law is mentioned twice (many are), then it is understood to have wider application.  If it is mentioned three times, then it is understood to apply to all similar situations. That is not the Christian understanding, but I think it can inform ours when looking at the Biblical accounts. The largest stories are told twice, and not the same way. There are two creation accounts; there are two accounts of the commandments; Kings and Chronicles tell the same stories differently. If this is to emphasise that A) the stories are of huge importance, and B) can only be understood in conjunction with each other, and thus in dialogue with other believers, then one other story is told multiple times, and that is the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, which is told four times.