Scaling back

I'll be posting with less regularity for the time being.  Thanks for your past and future interest!

The contact hypothesis in a nutshell

From a Chronicle article by Tom Bartlett titled  "The Science of Hate":

Gordon Allport

One such method is called intergroup contact theory. Proposed in the 1950s by Gordon W. Allport, it sounds perfectly obvious: More contact between groups reduces prejudice. But there’s more to it than that. The contact must meet a number of conditions, according to Allport. The status of the groups must be respected as equal. Those in authority must be supportive. The contact must be more than superficial. Allport’s insight remains the foundation for a great deal of conflict research.

A meta-analysis of 515 studies involving a quarter-million subjects concluded that intergroup contact fosters “greater trust and forgiveness for past transgressions.” The effects are evident regardless of gender, age, religion, or ethnicity. They seem to hold even when the contact is indirect—that is, you are less likely to be prejudiced against a certain group if a member of your group is friends with a member of that group. A 2009 study published in American Psychologist found, somewhat incredibly, that simply thinking about positive interactions with a member of another group reduces prejudice. Imaginary contact may be better than none at all.

Previous posts on the contact hypothesis here, here, and here.

America's first nonprofit grocery store

From the New York Times.  Chester, PA had been without a grocery store since 2001....

That changed in late September when a full-fledged supermarket named Fare & Square opened in the very building that had housed the last profit-driven supermarket. Anyone driving down Ninth Street, a grimly tattered boom-to-bust boulevard, suddenly encounters Fare & Square gleaming and bustling like a mirage, like the supermarkets in the middle-class towns flourishing farther off in the Delaware Valley.

It was opened as a creative outpost, a “nonprofit supermarket” conceived by Bill Clark, executive director of Philabundance, a hunger relief organization well known to the poor and needy on the streets of Philadelphia, 15 miles northeast. Isolated and recession-battered, Chester needed “a real Phoenix story,” Mr. Clark decided — in the form of a market rooted in community pride and healthy, low-priced food. ...

Low-income shoppers can sign up for membership in the store’s Carrot Club to get store credit equal to 7 percent of what they spend, to be used for future purchases. Philabundance estimates that more than half of the population of Chester, where unemployment is about 13 percent, has already signed up in this credit system. There is a services counter for customers to learn about their eligibility and apply for federal food assistance and Social Security programs.   ...

It remains to be seen whether the Fare & Square, started with the help of private foundations and corporate donors, can survive as a nonprofit business. Mr. Clark and Mr. Messina are worried about the recent federal food assistance cuts and even greater ones likely to follow, knowing that every cut means skimpier meals for poor families. All the more reason the supermarket is here to stay in Chester, they resolve. This week, they’re offering an enticing deal for Carrot Club members: a free Thanksgiving turkey with a purchase of $50 of groceries, only at Fare & Square. 

Columbus and the natives: a family reunion

From Nature: 

DNA was taken from the boy's arm bone

The 24,000-year-old remains of a young boy from the Siberian village of Mal’ta have added a new root to the family tree of indigenous Americans. While some of the New World's native ancestry clearly traces back to east Asia, the Mal’ta boy’s genome — the oldest known of any modern human — shows that up to one-third of that ancestry can be traced back to Europe.

The results show that people related to western Eurasians had spread further east than anyone had suspected, and lived in Siberia during the coldest parts of the last Ice Age.

“At some point in the past, a branch of east Asians and a branch of western Eurasians met each other and had sex a lot,” says palaeogeneticist Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen, who led the sequencing of the boy’s genome. This mixing, he says, created Native Americans — in the sense of the populations of both North and South America that predated — as we know them. His team's results are published today in Nature¹.  ...

This new origin story helps to resolve several peculiarities in New World archaeology. For example, ancient skulls found in both North and South America have features that do not resemble those of East Asians. They also carry the mitochondrial haplogroup X, which is related to western Eurasian lineages but not to east Asian ones.

On the basis of these features, some scientists have suggested that Native Americans descended from Europeans who sailed west across the Atlantic. However, says Willerslev, “you don’t need a hypothesis that extreme”. These features make sense when you consider that Native Americans have some western Eurasian roots.

“There remains some debate about whether there was a single expansion of human groups into the Americas or more than one,” says Theodore Schurr, an anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “The data from this paper support a single-migration scenario,” he says, but still allows for several sequential ones from the same intermingled Siberian gene pool.

Harmonizing our hermeneutics

Yesterday's post illustrated the perils of interpreting ancient sacred texts.  Greg Carey, who teaches at Lancaster Theological Seminary, suggests that confessional and critical readings need not be mutually exclusive:

[M]ost evangelicals have what I would call a "devotional" relationship to the Bible. By "devotional" I mean that we read the Bible with the expectation that it will address our lives in life-giving ways. This expectation applies to naïve biblicists, who believe that every word of the Bible is the very word God dictated. It also applies to those of us who are comfortable with a more scholarly disposition. We know the Bible didn't just drop down from heaven, but we still expect to hear God speaking through it. ...

Several dangers accompany devotional approaches to the Bible, and they're too complicated for a substantial discussion. One common problem is that evangelicals tend to apply the Bible too personally. The Bible isn't just about "me." For example, we're inclined read the Abraham and Sarah stories as case studies in living faithfully -- but what if they just don't work well for that purpose? Evangelicals so personalize our faith that we often miss how Scripture speaks to communities or to society. Everyone who reads the Bible comes to it with assumptions about what it might or might not mean. Like everyone else, evangelicals have lots to learn from other readers. Evangelicals struggle in coming to terms with the Bible's ethically offensive or violent dimensions, leading us to play complicated intellectual games in order to "explain away" the problems. Finally, this direct, devotional encounter with Scripture has led too many evangelicals to fear genuine scholarship that might complicate their relationship to the Bible.

Misreading Numbers

From Religion News Service:

On a Veterans Day broadcast program, televangelist Kenneth Copeland and controversial historian David Barton told listeners that soldiers should never experience guilt or post-traumatic stress disorder after returning from military service.

Reading from Numbers 32: 20-22, Copeland said, “So this is a promise — if you do this thing, if you arm yourselves before the Lord for the war … you shall return, you’re coming back, and be guiltless before the Lord and before the nation.”

“Any of you suffering from PTSD right now, you listen to me,” Copeland said as Barton affirmed him. ”You get rid of that right now. You don’t take drugs to get rid of it. It doesn’t take psychology. That promise right there will get rid of it.”  ...

PTSD has been a recurring issue among military veterans. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs classifies PTSD as a mental health problem that can occur after a traumatic event like war, assault or disaster. In 2011, 476,515 veterans who were diagnosed with PTSD received treatment at VA medical centers and clinics.

“It is obvious that they do not have knowledge of the condition,” said Warren Throckmorton, a Grove City College psychology professor who has written on Barton. “Copeland and Barton err theologically as well by taking specific Scriptures written in relationship to Israel and apply them to American armies.”
This isn’t the first time Copeland and Barton have been “profoundly ignorant about theology and history,” said Joe Carter, an editor and communications director for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

“But for them to denigrate the suffering of men and women traumatized by war — and to claim biblical support for their callow and doltish views —  is both shocking and unconscionable,” Carter said. “Rather than downplaying the pain of PTSD, they should be asking God to heal our brothers and sisters.”

Pushing country music outside its comfort zone

A nice counterpoint to Monday's post.  Casey Quinlan writes at The Atlantic Cities:

Kacey Musgraves (l) and Brandy Clark (r)

One of the defining characteristics of modern country music is its distinctly American way of acknowledging of class and place. Country singers have long embraced their working-class roots and expressed pride in the battles they fight to make rent; the genre's everyday Joes and Janes are proud to be everyday ...  But recently, a few female country singers have stepped away from this point of view, portraying small-town narratives in a more melancholy light.

Instead of endorsing the country lifestyle, these artists question small-town living, the value of tradition, and the virtue in staying in one's place. Instead of leaving life unexamined and being happy to be to do so, Kacey Musgraves's "Merry Go ’Round" and Brandy Clark's "Pray to Jesus" ask why people continue down the same road as their parents did. And as encouraging as many of the rebellious "embrace-hick-culture" songs were, these new songs feel more appropriate for the time we're living in.  ...

In Musgraves and Clark’s narratives, there is boredom, and even worse, there are dreams that go stale. People living in urban areas aren't spared these problems, but there are more distractions available and often they have a better shot at realizing those dreams.  ...

Rural boredom is different from urban boredom: Much of the appeal of cities is rooted in the excitement of newness, of novelty, so urban boredom is a result of being surrounded by stimulation yet still feeling alone. Rural boredom, by contrast, is often exacerbated by the tendency to wonder what you’re missing out on. It comes from wondering if there is more to life than a familiar community (like the one Miranda Lambert sings of) and the limited romantic possibilities and career options a small town offers. Musgraves, Clark, and Monroe capture that suffocation perfectly, and more artists should take their lead in being honest about the limitations of small-town life. Because sometimes, even country music’s unsinkable happy-warrior protagonist needs to reflect.

Democracy in America: guaranteed neither success nor failure

David Runicam writes in The Chronicle Review that "the history of modern democracy is a tale of steady success accompanied by the constant drumbeat of anticipated failure."

In the 1830s, the prevailing view in Europe was that American democracy could not last, because it was so obviously inadequate for the serious business of politics (especially conducting war and public finance). Americans were prone to panics and busts, and they were prey to political charlatans peddling fantasies of rebirth and renewal. Compared with European monarchy, democracy looked like a petulant and childish system of government. Tocque­ville achieved instant and lasting fame by insisting that American democracy would not only last, but was in fact the wave of the future. Its energy and adaptability gave democracy the ultimate advantage over any rival system of government.  ...

[But Tocqueville's] own misgivings about democracy have often been missed by readers keen to hear only the good news about democracy's dynamism. Tocqueville had two fears for democracy. First, he believed that the restless impatience of democracy would lead it to become intolerant and impulsive. Second, he thought that the evidence of democracy's long-term advantages would lead democratic societies to become complacent about the risks they run. Underlying faith in democracy, the precondition for its functioning at all, generates unwarranted optimism.

The present predicament of American democracy is a reflection of those twin fears. On the one hand, there is plenty of impatience and intolerance, revealed in the furious claims both political parties make to speak for the silent majority. At the same time, there is a glib, unspoken assurance that democracy in America is secure and nothing can replace it. There is little push for any alternative system, certainly not for its main rival, Chinese state capitalism, whose champions in the United States are vanishingly thin on the ground. The underlying faith in the durability of the system is what allows America's angriest politicians to bluster.

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

The appeal of Appalachia's isolation

At The New Republic, Michael Washburn explains today's fascination with Appalachia:

Penns Valley in Central PA

What’s changed instead is our relationship to isolation. The very thing that made Appalachia a horror story [in 1972's Deliverance], or at least a land of dumbasses, has evolved into something that we find laudatory, charming, and most importantly, endangered. It’s in Appalachia that the invasions of the contemporary world—cell phones, ubiquitous surveillance, insidious immersion marketing, strip mall monoculture—has been, in our minds, kept in check. Everything—everything—is so abundantly available in America, but often lacking in character. In the distorted Appalachia of the cultural imaginary nothing is abundant, so what’s there feels uncompromised. And the isolated economic systems of Appalachia seem largely immune to the interconnected, seemingly omnipotent financial systems that have been malfunctioning for five years.

There has long been a confusion between simplicity and authenticity—the latter being a fraught, elastic concept. For the Williamsburgish [Brooklyn] consumption enclaves that dot the country, authenticity has become the signature paranoia of the age, hence the fascination with artisanal, small-batch anything. And "out there," in the countryside, the simple life has long been seen as the authentic America. What seems to be overlooked, at least in the popular precincts of American culture, is how much economics dictates the look of authenticity. Within (or despite) the enduring poverty and perceived backwardness, Appalachia seems to boast some pure, historically isolated bastion of this simple, authentic America. The historical and continuous mis-imagination of Appalachia has allowed the region to retain an aura. It now has on its side that fact that it’s viewed as a place that has never changed, and this lack of change seems like strength.

(via Book Forum)

Germany's love-hate relationship with America

From this week's Economist:

That alliance (many Germans no longer call it a friendship) was always complicated. Germans have yearned for America since they migrated there en masse in the 19th century. Those who stayed behind dreamed of it—as did Karl May, an author who romanticised the Wild West more than a century ago. Germans still remember the Berlin airlift of 1948-49, when American “raisin bombers” fed and saved West Berlin. This summer they enthusiastically commemorated the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s visit to Berlin. They continue to admire George Bush senior for his effort to make German unification succeed in 1990.

The desirable America stood for blue jeans, chewing gum and Elvis in German eyes, but also for democracy, freedom and rule of law—and the Germans were America’s most eager pupils. American soldiers and bombs (the nuclear B-61s are still stationed in Germany and may be updated soon) also meant protection against communism and other evils. Only under this aegis were Germans able to build their new post-war identity as pacifist Gutmenschen (good humans), says John Kornblum, a former American ambassador to Germany.

But Germans, especially on the left, always had a concomitant image of the ugly American. That America sprayed Agent Orange in Vietnam, water-boarded prisoners in the war on terror and now executes human beings by drone strike. It practises mass-incarceration at home and the unlawful sort in Guantánamo Bay. Its capitalism is ruthless, its demeanour toward allies arrogant. When ugly America eavesdrops from its embassy roof next to the Brandenburg Gate, it tells Germans that, 23 years after they formally regained their sovereignty, America remains an occupying force. When it then harangues its ally, as it just did in a badly timed report that blamed Germany’s current-account surpluses for the economic ills of Europe, Germans feel fed up.

Is empathy overrated?, part II

Sympathy is the better goal, writes Lee Siegel in The New Yorker:

Branagh's Othello

Though empathy has become something like the celebrity trait of emotional intelligence, it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the sensitivity and gentleness popularly attributed to it. Some of the most empathetic people you will ever meet are businesspeople and lawyers. They can grasp another person’s feelings in an instant, act on them, and clinch a deal or win a trial. The result may well leave the person on the other side feeling anguished or defeated. Conversely, we have all known bookish, introverted people who are not good at puzzling out other people, or, if they are, lack the ability to act on what they have grasped about the other person. ... The empathetic gift can lead to generosity, charity, and self-sacrifice. It can also enable someone to manipulate another person with great subtlety and finesse. 

Literature may well have taught me about the complex nature of empathy. There is, for example, no more empathetic character in the novel or on the stage than Iago, who is able to detect the slightest fluctuation in Othello’s emotional state. Othello, on the other hand, is a noble and magnanimous creature—if vain and bombastic as well—who is absolutely devoid of the gift of being able to apprehend another’s emotional states. If he were half as empathetic as Iago, he would be able to recognize the jealousy that is consuming his treacherous lieutenant. The entire play is an object lesson in the emotional equipment required to vanquish other people, or to protect yourself from other people’s machinations. But no one—and no study—can say for sure whether the play produces more sympathetic people, or more Iagos. 

Indeed, what neither of the two studies did was to measure whether the empathetic responses led to sympathetic feeling. Empathetic identification with the ordeals suffered by Apuleius’s golden ass, Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Shakespeare’s King Lear—a play Dr. Johnson wanted to be performed with a revised, happy ending because he said its spectacle of suffering was too much to endure—Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Alyosha, or Prince Myshkin, Emma Bovary, not to mention the protagonists of misanthropic modernists like Céline, Gide, Kafka, Mann, et al.—empathetic sharing of these characters’ emotions could well turn a person inward, away from humanity altogether. Yet even if empathy were always the benign, beneficent, socially productive trait it is celebrated as, the argument that producing empathy is literature’s cardinal virtue is a narrowing of literary art, not an exciting new expansion of it.

(via ArtsJournal)

The cultural origins of today's gun debate

Excerpted from Colin Woodard's article in Tufts Magazine:

The 11 "nations" of North America

Why is violence so much more prevalent in some American nations than in others? It all goes back to who settled those regions and where they came from. ... [Richard] Nisbett argued that the violent streak in [initial southern] culture...was intensified by the “major subsequent wave of immigration . . . from the borderlands of Scotland and Ireland.” These immigrants, who populated what I call Greater Appalachia, came from “an economy based on herding,” which, as anthropologists have shown, predisposes people to belligerent stances because the animals on which their wealth depends are so vulnerable to theft. Drawing on the work of the historian David Hackett Fisher, Nisbett maintained that “southern” violence stems partly from a “culture-of-honor tradition,” in which males are raised to create reputations for ferocity—as a deterrent to rustling—rather than relying on official legal intervention.  ...

But it’s not just herding that promoted a culture of violence. Scholars have long recognized that cultures organized around slavery rely on violence to control, punish, and terrorize—which no doubt helps explain the erstwhile prevalence of lynching deaths in Deep South and Tidewater. But it is also significant that both these nations, along with Greater Appalachia, follow religious traditions that sanction eye-for-an-eye justice, and adhere to secular codes that emphasize personal honor and shun governmental authority. As a result, their members have fewer qualms about rushing to lethal judgments.

The code of Yankeedom could not have been more different. Its founders promoted self-doubt and self-restraint, and their Unitarian and Congregational spiritual descendants believed vengeance would not receive the approval of an all-knowing God. This nation was the center of the nineteenth-century death penalty reform movement, which began eliminating capital punishment for burglary, robbery, sodomy, and other nonlethal crimes. None of the states controlled by Yankeedom or New Netherland retain the death penalty today.

(via Micah Mattix)

A few reforms

Joe Nocera lists some of the most common recommendations:

The gerrymandered Illinois 4th

Move elections to the weekend. Do you know why elections fall on a Tuesday in early November? I didn’t either. According to a group called Why Tuesday?, it goes back to the 1840s, when “farmers needed a day to get to the county seat, a day to vote, and a day to get back, without interfering with the three days of worship.” Today, of course, casting your ballot on a Tuesday is an impediment: lines in urban areas are long, people have to get to work, etc. It is especially difficult for blue-collar workers...who don’t have the same wiggle room as white-collar employees. 

Open primaries. Why are so many extremist Republicans being elected to Congress? A large part of the reason is that highly motivated, extremist voters dominate the current Republican primary system. Mickey Edwards, the former [GOP] congressman who is now at the Aspen Institute, wrote a book last year called “The Parties Versus The People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans.” At the top of his list of reforms is open primaries — which would allow anybody to vote for any candidate. Indeed, California has already adopted an open primary system, in which the top two vote-getters run against each other in the general election — even if they are from the same party. As Adam Nagourney wrote in The Times a few weeks ago, this reform is one of the reasons California’s Legislature has become less partisan and more productive. Chances are good that the same reform at the federal level would produce the same result.  

End gerrymandering. As a tool to entrench the party in power, few maneuvers can beat gerrymandering. It’s another reason that the Tea Party Republicans can pursue an agenda that most citizens disagree with: thanks to gerrymandering, their districts could not be safer. Here, again, California offers a better model. It has a 14-person commission made up of five Democrats, five Republicans and four people unaffiliated with either party. In 2011, the new commission redrew lines in a way that broadened the diversity of many districts. That is exactly what should happen everywhere.

Europe's tea party(ish) moment

Interesting report from the NYT's Andrew Higgins on the unique blend of anti-immigrant, pro-welfare sentiments among Europe's populists:

All over [Europe], established political forces are losing ground to politicians whom they scorn as fear-mongering populists. In France, according to a recent opinion poll, the far-right National Front has become the country’s most popular party. In other countries — Austria, Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland and the Netherlands — disruptive upstart groups are on a roll. 

This phenomenon alarms not just national leaders but also officials in Brussels who fear that European Parliament elections next May could substantially tip the balance of power toward nationalists and forces intent on halting or reversing integration within the European Union.  ...

In some ways, this is Europe’s Tea Party moment — a grass-roots insurgency fired by resentment against a political class that many Europeans see as out of touch. The main difference, however, is that Europe’s populists want to strengthen, not shrink, government and see the welfare state as an integral part of their national identities. 

The trend in Europe does not signal the return of fascist demons from the 1930s, except in Greece, where the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn has promoted openly racist beliefs, and perhaps in Hungary, where the far-right Jobbik party backs a brand of ethnic nationalism suffused with anti-Semitism. 

But the soaring fortunes of groups like the Danish People’s Party, which some popularity polls now rank ahead of the Social Democrats, point to a fundamental political shift toward nativist forces fed by a curious mix of right-wing identity politics and left-wing anxieties about the future of the welfare state. ...

The platform of France’s National Front promotes traditional right-wing causes like law and order and tight controls on immigration but reads in parts like a leftist manifesto. It accuses “big bosses” of promoting open borders so they can import cheap labor to drive down wages. It rails against globalization as a threat to French language and culture, and it opposes any rise in the retirement age or cuts in pensions.  

Similarly, in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam leader of the Party for Freedom, has mixed attacks on immigration with promises to defend welfare entitlements. “He is the only one who says we don’t have to cut anything,” said Chris Aalberts, a scholar at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and author of a book based on interviews with Mr. Wilders’s supporters. “This is a popular message.”

N.T. Wright is not a fan of Fox News

... or the political tribalism of American evangelicals.  He recently offered these observations in an interview with Read the Spirit:

I’m not talking about Fox News in any detailed way and I’m not claiming that everything they tell you is wrong. I’m just referring to the well-known political viewpoint that comes through Fox News and I’m saying: We should be careful about listening to that point of view exclusively. There is a striking, radical polarization between your Left and Right [in America] that I have to say is really disturbing because it distorts so many issues. This Left-Right polarization forces people to say: We are all on this side now! We must check off every box on this slate! We must keep in line!

In your country, for example, there seem to be Christian political voices saying that you shouldn’t have a national healthcare system. To us, in Britain, this is virtually unthinkable. Every other developed country from Norway to New Zealand has healthcare for all of its citizens. We don’t understand all of this opposition to it over here in the U.S. ... To hear people standing up in your political debate and saying—“If you are followers of Jesus, you must reject universal healthcare coverage!”—and that’s unthinkable to us. 

At Euangelion, Australian evangelical Michael Bird echoes Wright on health care: 

When it comes to the American  evangelical opposition to universal health care, global evangelicals look at them with a mix of disbelief and disgust. Its not just N.T. Wright, ask someone at the Lausanne Congress or at the World Evangelical Alliance or at the Tyndale Fellowship what they think about American evangelicals howling protests against Obamacare! We are mystified as to how can good Christian men and women oppose – in some cases in the name of religion — providing health care for it citizens.  

(via Fred Clark)

I’m not talking about Fox News in any detailed way and I’m not claiming that everything they tell you is wrong. I’m just referring to the well-known political viewpoint that comes through Fox News and I’m saying: We should be careful about listening to that point of view exclusively. There is a striking, radical polarization between your Left and Right that I have to say is really disturbing because it distorts so many issues. This Left-Right polarization forces people to say: We are all on this side now! We must check off every box on this slate! We must keep in line!
In your country, for example, there seem to be Christian political voices saying that you shouldn’t have a national healthcare system. To us, in Britain, this is virtually unthinkable. Every other developed country from Norway to New Zealand has healthcare for all of its citizens. We don’t understand all of this opposition to it over here in the U.S. And, we should remember: In the ancient world, there wasn’t any healthcare system. It was the Christians, very early on, who introduced the idea that we should care for people beyond the circle of our own kin. Christians taught that we should care for the poor and disadvantaged. Christians eventually organized hospitals. To hear people standing up in your political debate and saying—“If you are followers of Jesus, you must reject universal healthcare coverage!”—and that’s unthinkable to us. Those of us who are Christians in other parts of the world are saying: We can’t understand this political language. It’s not our value in our countries. It’s not even in keeping with traditional Christian teaching on caring for others. We can’t understand what we are hearing from some of your politicians on this point. Yet, over here, some Christians are saying that it’s part of the list of boxes we all should check off to keep in line.
- See more at: http://www.readthespirit.com/explore/nt-wright-interview-why-left-right-lewis-get-it-wrong/#sthash.wIwTIw90.dpuf

I’m not talking about Fox News in any detailed way and I’m not claiming that everything they tell you is wrong. I’m just referring to the well-known political viewpoint that comes through Fox News and I’m saying: We should be careful about listening to that point of view exclusively. There is a striking, radical polarization between your Left and Right that I have to say is really disturbing because it distorts so many issues. This Left-Right polarization forces people to say: We are all on this side now! We must check off every box on this slate! We must keep in line!
In your country, for example, there seem to be Christian political voices saying that you shouldn’t have a national healthcare system. To us, in Britain, this is virtually unthinkable. Every other developed country from Norway to New Zealand has healthcare for all of its citizens. We don’t understand all of this opposition to it over here in the U.S. And, we should remember: In the ancient world, there wasn’t any healthcare system. It was the Christians, very early on, who introduced the idea that we should care for people beyond the circle of our own kin. Christians taught that we should care for the poor and disadvantaged. Christians eventually organized hospitals. To hear people standing up in your political debate and saying—“If you are followers of Jesus, you must reject universal healthcare coverage!”—and that’s unthinkable to us. Those of us who are Christians in other parts of the world are saying: We can’t understand this political language. It’s not our value in our countries. It’s not even in keeping with traditional Christian teaching on caring for others. We can’t understand what we are hearing from some of your politicians on this point. Yet, over here, some Christians are saying that it’s part of the list of boxes we all should check off to keep in line.
- See more at: http://www.readthespirit.com/explore/nt-wright-interview-why-left-right-lewis-get-it-wrong/#sthash.wIwTIw90.dpuf

Why AA hasn't caught on in Russia

A fascinating piece in the Boston Globe:

The country’s leaders have tried over the years to stanch the problem by making alcohol harder to buy, most recently in 2009, when then-president Dmitry Medvedev declared alcoholism a “national disaster” and ordered a raft of new regulations. But historically, nothing has really worked. ...

Why has Russia proven so inhospitable to AA’s ideas? Certainly, the history of distrust between our two countries hasn’t helped. But there have been other obstacles as well—some religious, some medical, some cultural. It turns out that what looks like a benign and effective social movement in one country can start to look very different when it arrives on a new shore. Together, the difficulties AA has faced in Russia point to a fundamental obstacle to transplanting ideas across borders: Some solutions, even successful ones, may not be nearly as universal as the problems they are supposed to solve.  ...

The reasons why, according to people who have devoted years to understanding alcoholism in Russia, are multiple and complex. The most important, perhaps, is that the Russian idea of “alcoholism” is very different from the American one: According to medical anthropologist Eugene Raikhel, the popular definition of a “drinking problem” in Russia is what happens at “the endpoint of chronic alcohol use,” not the drinking itself, which is considered perfectly normal. “They think alcoholism is when a person is homeless, lying in a ditch,” said Moseeva. “That’s an alcoholic. That a person can be more or less successful and still be an alcoholic doesn’t really register.” ...

Russians do get treated for alcohol abuse—but it tends to happen when someone is trying to dry out after an acute bender, and usually just means seeing a doctor, going through detox, and submitting to so-called coding, during which the patient is hypnotized into believing he can never drink again. There are also drugs, like Antabuse, designed to induce headaches and nausea if the patient drinks; not long ago, it was much more common for Russian doctors to implant such substances under people’s skin with so-called torpedoes than to refer them to AA.

A further obstacle to AA’s growth in Russia is something more philosophical: At a basic level, its premise of sobriety through mutual support just doesn’t make sense to a lot of Russians. In the past, this has taken the form of anti-Western suspicion—“What are the Americans trying to get out of this?” is a question Moseeva used to hear regularly. But more fundamentally, the group-therapy dynamic collides with a skepticism about the possibility of ordinary people curing each other of anything. “The idea that another drunk can help you is asinine to most Russians,” said Alexandre Laudet, a social psychologist who has researched Russian alcoholism.

Then there’s the problem of opening up to strangers. The AA method works in part through trust in people you’ve never met before, and coming clean to them about one’s most shameful secrets. “It is much harder for a Russian person to talk about himself than it is for an American,” said a Russian AA member named Mikhail. “And there are a lot of reasons why, including that the generation of my parents—and my own, I’m 55—couldn’t speak the truth at all, because it was possible to get arrested for it.

(via Marginal Revolution)

Keep this in mind next time you look up at the stars

From yesterday's New York Times:

The known odds of something — or someone — living far, far away from Earth improved beyond astronomers’ boldest dreams on Monday. 

Astronomers reported that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable Earth-size planets in the galaxy, based on a new analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. 

One out of every five sunlike stars in the galaxy has a planet the size of Earth circling it in the Goldilocks zone — not too hot, not too cold — where surface temperatures should be compatible with liquid water, according to a herculean three-year calculation based on data from the Kepler spacecraft by Erik Petigura, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Mr. Petigura’s analysis represents a major step toward the main goal of the Kepler mission, which was to measure what fraction of sunlike stars in the galaxy have Earth-size planets. Sometimes called eta-Earth, it is an important factor in the so-called Drake equation used to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe. Mr. Petigura’s paper, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, puts another smiley face on a cosmos that has gotten increasingly friendly and fecund-looking over the last 20 years. 

“It seems that the universe produces plentiful real estate for life that somehow resembles life on Earth,” Mr. Petigura said. 

Over the last two decades, astronomers have logged more than 1,000 planets around other stars, so-called exoplanets, and Kepler, in its four years of life before being derailed by a mechanical pointing malfunction last winter, has compiled a list of some 3,500 more candidates. The new result could steer plans in the next few years and decades to find a twin of the Earth — Earth 2.0, in the argot — that is close enough to here to study. 

The nearest such planet might be only 12 light-years away. “Such a star would be visible to the naked eye,” Mr. Petigura said.

The emotional insanity of party attachment

Marginal Revolution spotlights a new study:

Pierce, Rogers and Snyder find that political partisans are more upset about an election loss than a random sample of parents were upset by the Newtown shootings.

Partisan identity shapes social, mental, economic, and physical life. Using a novel dataset, we study the well-being consequences of partisan identity by examining the immediate hedonic impact of electoral loss and victory. We employ a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity model that minimizes many of the inferential biases associated with surveys. First, we find that elections strongly affect the well-being of partisan losers (for about a week), but minimally impact partisan winners. This is consistent with research on the goodbad  hedonic asymmetry. Second, the well-being consequences to partisan losers are intense.  To illustrate, we show that partisans are affected two times more intensely by their party losing the U.S. Presidential Election than both respondents with children were to the Newtown Shootings and respondents living in Boston were to the Boston Marathon Bombings. We discuss implications regarding the centrality of partisan identity to the self and its well-being, and the methodological contribution.

The authors suggest that the happiness effects of political losses are surprisingly large but they would have done better to compare elections with something people really care about, sports (and here). Sports and politics share the same irrational attachment to a team, the only difference being that the rivalries and hatreds of the former rarely lead to as much death and destruction as the latter.

Amazon as the new Sears, Roebuck & Co.

From an article by Derek Thompson in the latest issue of The Atlantic:

In the late 19th century, soon after a network of rail lines and telegraph wires had stitched together a rural country, mail-order companies like Sears built the first national retail corporations. Today the Sears catalog seems about as innovative as the prehistoric handsaw, but in the 1890s, the 500-page “Consumer’s Bible” popularized a truly radical shopping concept: the mail would bring stores to consumers.

But in the early 1900s, as families streamed off farms and into cities, chains like J. C. Penney and Woolworth sprang up to greet them. Sears followed, building more than 300 stores between 1925 and 1929 that specialized in “hard” goods like household appliances and spare parts for a mobile technology revolutionizing retail: the rapidly proliferating automobile. The company’s focus on the emerging middle-class market paid off so well that by mid-century, Sears’s revenue approached 1 percent of the entire U.S. economy. But its dominance had deflated by the late 1980s, after more competitors arose and as the blue-collar consumer base it had leaned on collapsed.

Now that Internet cables have replaced telegraph wires, American consumers are reverting to their turn-of-the-century shopping habits. The car is fading in the American imagination. Malls are shutting down. Families, meanwhile, have rediscovered the Consumer’s Bible while sitting on their couches, and this time, it’s in a Web browser. E‑commerce has nearly doubled in the past four years, and Amazon now takes in revenue of more than $60 billion annually. The Internet means to the 21st century what the postal service meant to the late 1800s: it welcomes retailers like Amazon into every living room.

“Sears took advantage of the U.S. postal system and railways in the early 20th century just as transportation costs were falling,” says Richard White, a historian at Stanford, “and Amazon has done the same with the Web.”

The new states’ rights movement

Peter Harkness, founder of Governing, writes that the fight over Obamacare is only one part of a broader battle about the meaning of federalism:

Federal boots may not be on the ground—there haven’t been riots and no one has been hurt—but the level of resistance by a number of states in the South and Midwest to federal policy on a wide range of issues has not been this pronounced in almost a half century.

The central issue is Obamacare, but there are plenty of other issues to oppose: rules for who is allowed to vote or immigrate, rules for environmental emissions from power plants, rules for common education standards and rules for a wide array of social issues like guns, gay marriage, abortion, pot and so on. But health care is the centerpiece, and the resistance in some states is as strident as it is in the U.S. Congress.

At last count, 21 states have refused to expand their Medicaid systems to accommodate new enrollees even though the feds are paying all of the costs for the first three years, and 34 have refused to operate their own online insurance exchanges. A number of states have even enacted rules inhibiting so-called “navigators” from helping to enroll people in insurance plans or banning their city and county officials from helping in any way to phase in the new program.

Paul Posner, a federalism scholar at George Mason University, agrees that the current tension between the states and the feds mirrors the 1960s, but this time, he notes, it’s “to the states’ fiscal detriment. Money is overshadowed by ideology and the need for state leaders to make a statement about their positions.” While “passive resistance is not unprecedented,” he says, “several states have gone beyond that to become active resisters to the health reform law.”

That’s the key difference. Fifty years ago, some of the Southern governors were active resisters on the issue of desegregation, but on most others they were more mainstream. Now on a broad array of issues, the states’ rights movement is highly organized, heavily funded and uncompromising. In some cases, its tactics verge on sabotage of federal efforts. This isn’t so much a policy disagreement about health care as it is a no-holds-barred war for the future direction of domestic policy in the country.

The best movie about America's original sin?

David Simon, the creator and writer of The Wire, agrees with the critical consensus that Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave is now the definitive film on American slavery:

I’m fresh out of a theater in Santa Monica, California where I’ve watched 12 Years A Slave for the second time, having seen it several days ago on a laptop screen through a dedicated download.  I’ll be honest.  I wanted to write something after absorbing the narrative and the imagery the first time, but I was so wrought that I didn’t trust myself.

Had an American film actually addressed the original sin of our nationhood so bluntly, so honestly?  Was the film really as careful and delicate and dispassionate with the historical reality?  Was the restraint that I felt in the telling really there, or had the punches been carefully loaded as Hollywood is so apt to do?
On first viewing, I was simply startled by how genuinely fair the storytelling had been with the subject matter.  Sadism and soullessness was balanced by moments of regret and conscience on the part of white characters.  Accommodation and supplication on the part of Southern slaves was punctuated by instants of desperate courage and dignity.

On second viewing — with me in a darkened theater with a big screen, looking for the rough seams and filmic dishonesties — I emerged thinking precisely the same about this remarkable act of storytelling.  This film didn’t cheat our national history.  It didn’t allude to horror, nor did it revel in it.  It marks the first time in history that our entertainment industry has managed to stare directly at slavery and maintain that gaze.

(via The Browser)

How smartphones are making us less empathetic

From a Christine Rosen piece in the Wall Street Journal:

... Another recent attack, on a blind man walking down the street in broad daylight in Philadelphia, garnered attention because security footage later revealed that many passersby ignored the assault and never called 911. Commenting to a local radio station, Philadelphia's chief of police Charles Ramsay said that this lack of response was becoming "more and more common" and noted that people are more likely to use their cellphones to record assaults than to call the police. 

Our use of technology has fundamentally changed not just our awareness in public spaces but our sense of duty to others. Engaged with the glowing screens in front of us rather than with the people around us, we often honestly don't notice what is going on. Adding to the problem is the ease with which we can record and send images, which encourages those of us who are paying attention to document emergencies rather than deal with them ...

The problem with many of our new gadgets, as the San Francisco shooting suggests, is that they often keep us from experiencing these face-to-face situations and the unspoken obligations that go with them. Most of these duties—to be aware of others, to practice basic civility—are not onerous. But on rare occasions, we are called upon to help others who are threatened or whose lives are in danger. At those moments, we should not be anticipating how many views we will get on YouTube if we film their distress; we should act. To do otherwise is to risk becoming a society not just of apathetic bystanders but of cruel voyeurs.

 (via Prufrock)

Why are there castle-like armories throughout New York City?

To keep the people down!  From the "FYI" archives at the NYT: 

Squadron A Armory

After the Civil War, a number of armories were built around the city to assuage the fears of middle- and upper-class New Yorkers who had seen Civil War draft riots and the Tompkins Square Riots of 1873. A growing immigrant population and a depression begun by the panic of 1873 fueled concern over unrest. Between 1880 and 1913, New York and Brooklyn sponsored the construction of 29 armories, including the Bedford-Atlantic Armory, built for the 23rd Regiment in Brooklyn.

The armory was designed by Isaac G. Perry, chief architect of the State Capitol in Albany. Construction began in 1889 and was completed in 1902 on a building whose 50,000-square-foot drill hall provided open space for training recruits. The vast space also allowed for functions like dances and dog shows.

The five-story armory, though owned by the state, is operated by the city, which made it a homeless shelter in 1982.

Bedford-Atlantic Armory (l), Amsterdam Castle (r)

14th Regiment Armory

7th Regiment Armory

Churches shouldn't be conservative or liberal

Kevin Daughtery is in the process of planting a church in western PA.  He offers these observations at his blog:

... What I realize now is that I do not really want a progressive church, just as I do not want a conservative church.

• I want an inclusive church. I want a church where people of different theological, social, and political opinions can come together and worship.
• I want a church where people recognize with humility that they might just be wrong, and with the recognition of the ability to be wrong comes the ability to dialogue.
• I do not want to attend a church that is an ego trip where the same opinions are just recycled and confirmed.

Church is supposed to be family. It is not supposed to be progressive, moderate, conservative, or whatever label you would like. Church is a word that literally means community, and communities are diverse. Communities are composed of many individuals with their many flaws, opinions, and talents. Christian community, or church, is supposed to be especially unique in that not only are we supposed to be a community, but we are supposed to unconditionally love one another. We are supposed to be able to love our enemies and go two miles when someone only requests that we go one with them. We are supposed to come together to break bread, whether Jew or Gentile, rich or poor, male or female, progressive or conservative.

(via Sojourners)

The original meaning of Adam and Eve

The BBC's Kenan Malik explains how Jews and Christians interpret the story of Adam and Eve:

Blake's Temptation and Fall of Eve

The story of Adam and Eve, and of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, was, of course, originally a Jewish fable. But Jews read that story differently to Christians. In Judaism, Adam and Eve’s transgression creates a sin against their own souls, but it does not condemn humanity as a whole, and nor does it fundamentally transform either human nature or human beings’ relationship to God. In the Christian tradition, God created humanity to be immortal. In eating the apple, Adam and Eve brought mortality upon themselves. Jews have always seen humans as mortal beings.

In the Garden, Adam and Eve were as children. Having eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they had to take responsibility for themselves, their decisions and their behaviour. This is seen not as a ’fall’ but as a ‘gift’ – the gift of free will. As the Hertz Chumash, the classic Hebrew-English edition of the Pentateuch and Haftorahs, observes, ‘Instead of the Fall of man (in the sense of humanity as a whole), Judaism preaches the Rise of man: and instead of Original Sin, it stresses Original Virtue, the beneficent hereditary influence of righteous ancestors upon their descendants’.

The story of Adam and Eve was initially, then, a fable about the attainment of free will and the embrace of moral responsibility. It became a tale about the corruption of free will and the constraints on moral responsibility. It was in this transformation in the meaning of the Adam and Eve’s transgression that Christianity has perhaps secured its greatest influence.  The true legacy of the doctrine of Original Sin is not as an explanation of evil, but rather as a description of human nature, a description that came to dominate Western ethical thinking as Christianity became the crucible in which that thinking took place.

(via The Dish)

Why partisan media is so appealing

From Pacific Standard:

Outraged!

As we embark on yet another political crisis, many Americans will be getting their information from sources with a strong ideological bias. While this is hardly a new phenomenon, the proliferation of cable networks and websites that refract the news through a left- or right-leaning lens has made it easier than ever to avoid opinions that differ with your own.

What, exactly, is the appeal of these programs, which are so often driven by real or faux outrage? Psychological research has generally pointed to our desire to avoid cognitive dissonance—that is, information that conflicts with our strongly held (and emotionally based) convictions. But in a recently published paper, a trio of Tufts University researchers led by sociologist Sarah Sobieraj provides an alternative analysis.

“The data suggests to us that outrage-based programming offers fans a satisfying political experience,” they write in the journal Poetics. “These venues offer flattering, reassuring environments that make audience members feel good. Fans experience them as safe havens from the tense exchanges that they associate with cross-cutting political talk they may encounter with neighbors, colleagues, and community members.”

In other words, being a part of, say, the community of Rush Limbaugh listeners—an identification talk-show hosts regularly attempt to instill in their fans—is a comforting social experience. It’s a way of feeling like part of a community that shares your values (or, perhaps, prejudices).

(via Book Forum)

The rise and fall of the New Israel metaphor

Robert E. Brown reviews American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War by Eran Shalev:

As historians have long observed, the new political realities of the [founding] American experiment — individual equality and autonomy, secularism and religious pluralism, and representative democracy — created anxieties for all concerned. 

In pre-monarchical Israel they found a state that existed as a federation of territories (the twelve tribes) ruled by democratic consensus (no central monarchy) centered upon a written constitution (the Law). The recasting of the American experiment in biblical terms helped to relieve anxieties over the inherent risks of an egalitarian society by showing that such an arrangement had divine sanction. Perhaps more importantly clothing the structures and values of republicanism in biblical dress was pivotal for disseminating and inculcating those ideals among the masses, whose exposure to classical Greek and modern political thought was not widespread.  ...

Curiously, the flowering of political biblicism came to an abrupt end by mid-century. Shalev attributes this rapid decline to the rises of evangelicalism and individualism and to the controversy over slavery. Evangelicalism centered its conversionist spirituality on Jesus. Calvinism had made the Old Testament the pivot-point of early American religious and-political reflection. But a new focus on Jesus (and the New Testament) displaced the reigning Calvinist theology of covenant and its view of the people of God (Israel) as a spiritual template. At the expense of communalism, American polity created societal values that emphasized individualism, making the Israel metaphor less and less compelling. Finally, the controversy over slavery radically undermined the moral authority — and so the mythic power — of the Old Testament. Pro-slavery apologists repeatedly trumpeted that the Old Testament sanctioned slavery, and abolitionists responded by fashioning interpretive methods that privileged the moral vision of the New Testament at the expense of the Old. The mythology of an ideal Hebrew polity that could be held out for modern emulation was substantially eroded. The Civil War dealt a final, crushing blow to American self-identity as a renewed Israel. Like the old Israel, its unity was shattered by insurmountable dissension.

Slowly lowering the suburban drawbridge

Berkeley professor David Kirp writes up a study of affordable housing in suburban New Jersey:

Low-income housing complex in Mount Laurel

Suburbia beckons many poor and working-class families with the promise of better schools, access to non-dead-end jobs and sanctuary from the looming threat of urban violence. But many suburbanites balk at the prospect of affordable housing in their midst.

They fear that when poor people move next door crime, drugs, blight, bad public schools and higher taxes inevitably follow. They worry that the value of their homes will fall and the image of their town will suffer. It does not help that the poor are disproportionately black and Latino. The added racial element adds to the opposition that often emerges in response to initiatives designed to help poor families move to suburbs from inner cities. 

Are the fears supported by facts? A comprehensive new analysis of what has transpired in Mount Laurel, N.J., since 140 units of affordable housing were built in that verdant suburb in 2000, answers with a resounding “no.” 

Families with incomes as low as $8,150 — one-third of the poverty level — have been living in a town where the median income is 10 times higher for a family of four. “Climbing Mount Laurel,” co-written by the Princeton sociologist Douglas S. Massey and several colleagues, concludes that this affordable housing has had zero impact on the affluent residents of that community — crime rates, property values and taxes have moved in step with nearby suburbs — while the lives of the poor and working-class families who moved there have been transformed. ...

The woes of the inner cities cannot be solved by opening up the suburbs. Many urban dwellers, embedded in networks of kith and kin, wouldn’t dream of swapping the spiciness of the city for the white-bread pleasures of suburbia. And as “Climbing Mount Laurel” points out, “those mired in substance abuse, criminality, family violence and household instability” need more support than simply “a decent home in a peaceful neighborhood with good schools.” Still, millions of families, trapped in terrible neighborhoods, would jump at the chance to move to a place like Mount Laurel. 

“I wish other places could learn from our example,” says Mr. McCaffrey, the former mayor, but that hasn’t happened. Affordable housing is still too rare in suburbia, as zoning laws continue to segregate poor and working-class families. Despite the track record in Mount Laurel and the promise it holds for neighborhoods around the country, it’s hard to imagine that the suburban drawbridge will be lowered anytime soon.

Jonathan Franzen, literary Luddite

From a Mark Tapson article at Acculturated:

Jonathan Franzen is serious about literature. “Serious writers and readers, these are my people,” he reportedly said at a Tulane talk. In recent interviews he has expressed contempt for technological shifts affecting those writers and readers, shifts he finds deeply unserious, from social media to the self-publishing boom being facilitated by Amazon.com.

Franzen is one of America’s most accomplished contemporary novelists. In 2010 the New York Times called his number one bestseller Freedom a “masterpiece of American fiction.” Oprah Winfrey crowned it one of her Book Club picks. He also made the cover of Time magazine in 2010, the first living novelist in a decade to do so. His 2001 novel The Corrections won the National Book Award for Fiction and was a Pulitzer finalist.

He didn’t earn those kudos by screwing around on the worldwide web. Franzen disables his internet connection when he writes, and has contempt for the time-sucking, narcissistic ephemera of social media. Twitter he calls “unspeakably irritating,” and Facebook he slams as a “private hall of flattering mirrors.”

As you might guess, Franzen is very Old School about ebooks too, which he finds unsettling: “A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”

As for the technology that now enables anyone to self-publish, not just “serious writers,” that too disturbs Franzen’s literary sensibility. In an article for the Guardian Review, he sharply criticized Amazon.com’s dominance as an online platform for self-published writers. He came close to likening head honcho Jeff Bezos to the anti-Christ for the changes his company has wrought for writers and readers alike: “Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion.”