The best reading list algorithm ever involves some very simple math. 

World population: roughly 7-8 bn with 7 traditions with at least a billion each: 

• Christians: 2 bn
• Muslims: 1.0 bn
• Chinese: 1.3 bn
• Hindus: 1.0 bn
• Communists: 1 bn
• Secular Non-Communists:  1 bn

If for members of each tradition there is one book that is overwhelmingly more important than any other, well there are the 7 most important texts ever written.

One measure of the tragedy of the American educational system is that few university faculty members at leading institutions have read all seven.

Many if not most can not even name all seven.

What are the seven texts?

• The Bible
• The Koran
• The Analects
• The Bhagavad Gita
• The Communist Manifesto
• The US Constitution and Declaration of Independence (the basis for hundreds of constitutions from around the world)

Students are forced to read hundreds of books by the time they graduate from college. But rarely if ever are all of these 7 texts numbered among them.

This is an anomaly that needs fixing.

Discussions of these books should focus on the handful of passages in each that matter the most to members of each tradition.

Which passages are these? The ones that are learned by heart and recited on a regular basis.

Examples: from the Bible – the “Our Father,”  from the Koran, “Al Fatihah.”  from the Communist Manifesto “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” and “Proletarians and Communists,” from the Constitution: The “Preamble” and the “Bill of Rights.

Yes and No.

All great religions tell three stories:

1.) the cosmological story of the beginning and the end of times – the fancy names of which are etiology and eschatology.

2.) the ethical story of how to live,

3.) the ethnic history of when, how, and why the truth was revealed to a particular people.

The historical and cosmological accounts vary. The ethical story is the same. The similarity reflects our shared genetic code. The differences reflect geography and chance. The similarities make cooperation, peace, and justice possible. The differences both make life more interesting and make communication difficult.

The common ethical core can be reduced to six principles: two injunctions, three warnings, and a plan.

Two injunctions

1.) Gratitude, also called piety: be thankful.

2.) Kindness: be nice.

Three warnings: following the two injunctions can be very, very difficult owing to three factors:

1.) Other people are mean to you

2.) Bad stuff happens (think Job)

3.) You wake up in a bad (greedy, angry, envious) mood

The plan: how to stay on the straight and narrow path of gratitude and kindness:

1.) Pray x times per day, y times per week, month, year.

2.) Obey your priest, mullah, teacher, guru.

3.) Donate as much as possible to your church, mosque, temple.

Religion in Practice: A common pattern

The history of all great religions traces the same path: a history of noble deeds, the cynical abuse of power, and resistance to the encroachments of science.

The human law that all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely applies to religions as to all human institutions. There is no power more absolute than the power over the human soul.

In the words of Seneca, “Religion is true to the people, false to philosophers, and useful to politicians.”

Or in the words of Eric Hoffer:

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and degenerates into a racket.”

Or in the words of Karl Marx, “Religion is the opium of the people.”

More people have been killed in the name of “God” than in the name of anyone else.

And more children abused.

A good person does the right thing. But what is the right thing? Right doing begins with a right attitude in everything you do. What are the qualities of a right attitude? There are seven. Imagine an oak leaf with seven lobes.

Gratitude comes first. As Cicero wrote: gratitude is not only the first of the virtues but the parent of all the others. In religious terms, first comes love of God then love of neighbor. If you are not feeling thankful, you are unlikely to be kind to others.

My favorite analogy here is the security message at the beginning of airplane flights. When the oxygen masks drop, you are told, make sure to put your own on first. Gratitude is your oxygen mask.

Courage comes next. Aristotle even put it first. Courage is the first of the virtues because it makes the others possible,he wrote. Well, I’m sticking with Cicero, but I can see Aristotle’s point.

Kindness is to me courage’s twin. Confidence and self-respect must be paired with respect and empathy for others. Politeness is the natural expression of kindness.

Beneath the trinity of gratitude, courage, and kindness come a pair of virtues: self-knowledge and self-control. Socrates nailed the first of these.  And as the classics have said the truly powerful is the person who can control himself.

Completing the leaf are two lobes: diligence and excellence. More mundane than the first five but indispensable in a complete picture of virtue. If the first five harken back to the virtues of the warrior and priestly castes, so these final two recall those of the craftsman and yeoman farmer.

Too often “being a good person” is reduced to “being nice.” Goodness is not one dimensional. It has at least seven components. Each must be nurtured.

Beauty delights the mind, body, heart, and soul. Beauty can be measured by the intensity of the delight. Extreme beauty takes your breath away and stops you in your tracks.

Put differently the true measure of beauty is love. And love can be measured in units of time. The power of love can be measured in terms of time spent thinking about its object.

A practical measure of the beauty of a poem then is the number of people who have memorized it and cherished it throughout their lives. Similarly, the relative beauty of a song could be the number of artists who have covered it.

By this metric, perhaps the most beautiful poem of all time is “Night Thoughts” by Li Bai. Written in 720 Ad during the Tang Dynasty, it is known by heart by every child born in China – whether north, south, east or west, Taiwan of mainland.

In the words of one Chinese woman “Even Mao couldn’t kill it.”

Another measure of beauty is the universality of its appeal across cultures and across time. By this metric, certainly, the music of Beethoven and the Beatles would rank very highly.

Yet another measure of beauty is economy. In the case of poetry this would mean saying more in fewer syllables. “Night Thoughts” by Li Bai scores highly here too – it is only twenty syllables. Mozart’s “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and, further afield,

Einstein’s E = mc2” are also noteworthy highlights of human culture.

The reading lists in elementary school, high school and college should consist of the most beautiful texts ever written because they are keys to hearts, minds, and souls of all those who have loved them. And they are models of economy.

This is far from the case.

Another item on the agenda for educational reformers.