Aeon: Evangelicals bring the votes, Catholics bring the brains

Catholics make up a disproportionate share of the intelligentsia of the religious Right in the United States. Although they constitute only a fifth of the US population (and white Catholics make up less than 12 per cent of the US population), they maintain a high profile among conservative think tanks, universities and professional organisations. On the US Supreme Court, four out of five Republican-appointed justices are Catholic, despite evangelicals making up a substantial portion of Republican Party support. [...]

Of course, many American Catholics regularly ignored these prohibitions. And some American clergy believed that Catholicism should adapt to the values of its new homeland. But the Catholic hierarchy and especially the Vatican remained opponents of liberalism. In his encyclical Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (1899), Pope Leo XIII even condemned ‘Americanism’, warning that it was wrong to desire ‘the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world’. Fear of republicanism and secularism partly drove American Catholics to set up separate institutions for themselves – separate social clubs, separate unions and separate charities. [...]

When evangelicals mobilised politically in the 1970s and declared a ‘culture war’ against the menace of secularism, they put aside their longstanding anti-Catholicism and reached out to Catholic conservatives. Catholics proved to be perfect partners. Unlike evangelicals, conservative Catholics could draw on research universities, law schools, medical schools, business schools and other intellectual-producing institutions in the fight against secularism. Evangelicals’ suspicion of higher education since at least the days of the 1925 Scopes trial over teaching evolution meant that they had built few institutions of higher learning. Their bible colleges and seminaries were meant to create believers and converts, not intellectuals.

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The Guardian: Now Brexit really is threatening to tear the UK apart

If anything, May has been even more churlish in her handling of the union with Scotland. In her relations with Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish government, she has been an uncompromising centraliser. Scotland’s 62% vote for remain has been consistently ignored. So have Sturgeon’s various ideas – some of which were moderate and reasonable – about mitigating Brexit in Scotland. Instead, some Scottish devolution powers have been suspended and the UK government has fought a court case against the Scots: a curiously tough form of love.

To be fair to May, dealing with this Scottish government is not easy. The SNP wants out of the union altogether. It uses any and every issue to leverage the case for separation. To make a Brexit deal with a party trying to use Brexit to advance the separatist cause would test even a skilful negotiator, which May is not.

Nevertheless, Sturgeon made a telling point on Tuesday when she compared the receptivity of the EU to Ireland’s special concerns in the Brexit negotiations with the hostility of the UK government to the special concerns of Scotland. May has been unbending towards a part of the UK that – never forget – voted decisively in 2016 to remain in the EU. The result, as Brown put it in June, is that there will be “long-term consequences” from May’s approach. And those consequences directly threaten the stability of the UK.[...]

May’s approach to Brexit has never had space for compromise with the 48% of the UK that voted remain. But she has consistently made compromises with a section of the Tory party that cultivates a particularly reactionary form of Anglo-Britishness, and which regards Brexit as much more important than the preservation of the union. Polling this week showed that 77% of English Tory members would rather see Scottish independence than abandon Brexit; much the same proportion of May’s party say they would sacrifice the Irish peace process too.  

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Nautilus Magazine: So Can We Terraform Mars or Not?

Musk, the CEO and lead designer of SpaceX, wants to “make life multiplanetary,” starting with Mars. The red planet is relatively close to the Earth and once harbored surface seas and rivers, and it still has ice and a subsurface lake. Its weather is surprisingly workable, too. Mars’ surface temperature range (–285 to 88 degrees Fahrenheit) isn’t too far off from Earth’s (–126 to 138 degrees Fahrenheit). The problem is Mars’ atmosphere now has 0.006 bar of pressure, where one bar is the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level on Earth. Not only does this mean that dangerous levels of radiation reach the surfaced unchecked, but humans need at least 0.063 bar to keep our bodily liquids from boiling (this is called the Armstrong limit). [...]

No—not any time soon. At least, that’s according to the latest look at the idea from NASA’s principal investigator for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, Bruce Jakosky, a space scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He says the growing popularity of terraforming—driven in part by Musk—persuaded him and Christopher Edwards, a geologist also at Boulder, to gauge whether it was feasible. Their answer: No, it “is not possible using present-day technology.” In their July Nature Astronomy paper, they mention Musk directly, shooting down his idea of terraforming by nuking Mars’ polar ice caps. The amount of frozen CO2 released would not be enough to induce a runaway greenhouse effect, they argue. On July 30, Discover magazine singled out Musk in a tweet linking to the headline: “Sorry, Elon. There’s Not Enough CO2 to Terraform Mars.” [...]

If Jakosky is wrong, and Mars really does have multiple bar-equivalent of buried CO2 that we can access, we could potentially terraform Mars rapidly. “To judge from how quickly our greenhouse emissions are warming Earth, we could shift Mars into a warm climate state within 100 years,” McKay explained in his Nautilus feature. “The most efficient technique would be to produce supergreenhouse gases such as chlorofluorocarbons or, better, perfluorinated compounds, which are not toxic, do not interfere with the development of an ozone layer, and resist destruction by solar ultraviolet radiation. Curiosity has recently confirmed the presence of fluorine in the rocks on Mars, so the ingredients are all there.”

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Nautilus Magazine: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

But when it comes to culture we tend to believe not that the future will be very different than the present day, but that it will be roughly the same. Try to imagine yourself at some future date. Where do you imagine you will be living? What will you be wearing? What music will you love? [...]

In one experimental example, people were asked how much they would pay to see their favorite band now perform in 10 years; others were asked how much they would pay now to see their favorite band from 10 years ago. “Participants,” the authors reported, “substantially overpaid for a future opportunity to indulge a current preference.” They called it the “end of history illusion”; people believed they had reached some “watershed moment” in which they had become their authentic self.2 Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay, “The End of History?” made a similar argument for Western liberal democracy as a kind of endpoint of societal evolution. [...]

The result is that we begin to wonder how life was possible before some technology came along. But as the economist Robert Fogel famously noted, if the railroad had not been invented, we would have done almost as well, in terms of economic output, with ships and canals.3 Or we assume that modern technology was wonderfully preordained instead of, as it often is, an accident. Instagram began life as a Yelp-style app called Burbn, with photos an afterthought (photos on your phone, is that a thing?). Texting, meanwhile, started out as a diagnostic channel for short test messages—because who would prefer fumbling through tiny alphanumeric buttons to simply talking? [...]

The historian Lawrence Samuel has called social progress the “Achilles heel” of futurism.8 He argues that people forget the injunction of the historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee: Ideas, not technology, have driven the biggest historical changes. When technology changes people, it is often not in the ways one might expect: Mobile technology, for example, did not augur the “death of distance,” but actually strengthened the power of urbanism. The washing machine freed women from labor, and, as the social psychologists Nina Hansen and Tom Postmes note, could have sparked a revolution in gender roles and relations. But, “instead of fueling feminism,” they write, “technology adoption (at least in the first instance) enabled the emergence of the new role of housewife: middle-class women did not take advantage of the freed-up time ... to rebel against structures or even to capitalize on their independence.” Instead, the authors argue, the women simply assumed the jobs once held by their servants.

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The New York Review of Books: The Red Baron

What drove him was his sense that class hierarchies would resist the reforms he helped implement. He explained how it would happen in a 1958 satire, his second best seller, entitled The Rise of the Meritocracy. Like so many phenomena, meritocracy was named by an enemy. Young’s book was ostensibly an analysis written in 2033 by a historian looking back at the development over the decades of a new British society. In that distant future, riches and rule were earned, not inherited. The new ruling class was determined, the author wrote, by the formula “I.Q. + effort = merit.” Democracy would give way to rule by the cleverest—“not an aristocracy of birth, not a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meritocracy of talent.” This is the first published appearance of the word “meritocracy,” and the book aimed to show what a society governed on this principle would look like. [...]

Americans, unlike the British, don’t talk much about working-class consciousness; it’s sometimes said that all Americans are, by self-conception, middle class. But this, it turns out, is not currently what Americans themselves think. In a 2014 National Opinion Research Center survey, more Americans identified as working-class than as middle-class. One (but only one) strand of the populism that tipped Donald Trump into power expressed resentment toward a class defined by its education and its values: the cosmopolitan, degree-laden people who dominate the media, the public culture, and the professions in the US. Clinton swept the fifty most educated counties, as Nate Silver noted shortly after the 2016 election; Trump swept the fifty least. Populists think that liberal elites look down on ordinary Americans, ignore their concerns, and use their power to their own advantage. They may not call them an upper class, but the indices that populists use to define them—money, education, connections, power—would have picked out the old upper and upper-middle classes of the last century. [...]

Because, Young believed, the problem wasn’t just with how the prizes of social life were distributed; it was with the prizes themselves. A system of class filtered by meritocracy would, in his view, still be a system of class: it would involve a hierarchy of social respect, granting dignity to those at the top, but denying respect and self-respect to those who did not inherit the talents and the capacity for effort that, combined with proper education, would give them access to the most highly remunerated occupations. This is why the authors of his fictional Chelsea Manifesto—which, in The Rise of the Meritocracy, is supposed to serve as the last sign of resistance to the new order—ask for a society that “both possessed and acted upon plural values,” including kindliness, courage, and sensitivity, so all had a chance to “develop his own special capacities for leading a rich life.” Even if you were somehow upholding “I.Q. + effort = merit,” then your equation was sponsoring a larger inequality.[...]

The ideal of meritocracy, Young understood, confuses two different concerns. One is a matter of efficiency; the other is a question of human worth. If we want people to do difficult jobs that require talent, education, effort, training, and practice, we need to be able to identify candidates with the right combination of aptitude and willingness, and provide them incentives to train and practice.

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The Atlantic: Ukraine’s Spiritual Split From Russia Could Trigger a Global Schism

At the core of this issue is a fundamental question of both religious and territorial identity, as Russian actions in eastern Ukraine aimed to undermine the country’s very independence. The Ukrainian Church had sought independence from the Russian one for decades, but it only became “inevitable after the Russian military excursion in eastern Ukraine, no question about it,” said Aristotle Papanikolaou, a co-chair of Orthodox Christian studies at Fordham University. Ukraine will join several other countries that have their own independent national Churches, among them Serbia, Greece, and Romania. [...]

In 2014, Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. In a speech at the Kremlin, Putin argued that Crimea belongs in Russia, since ethnic Russians form a majority there. His reasoning also extended beyond Crimea: He seemed to declare that Ukraine and Russia (and Belarus, a smaller player in the ongoing geopolitical tensions) have always been joined together as “one people” through the Church. “Kiev”—the Ukrainian capital city, in the middle of the country, far from Crimea and Russia—“is the mother of Russian cities,” Putin said. All of this, he explained, stemmed from Prince Vladimir’s “spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy” more than a millennium ago. [...]

A spokesperson for the Moscow Church, Vladimir Legoyda, said last month that Russia “will break the Eucharistic communion” with the Church’s central body in Istanbul if Ukraine receives independence. Despite Russia’s stern warnings, Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou, the Fordham professors, don’t think it will take that severe step. Instead, they believe the other independent Churches will slowly line up to recognize Ukraine’s Church, even though it might take Moscow several generations. “You have to understand,” Demacopoulos said, “that this is a 2,000-year-old Church, so that’s not that much time.”

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The Atlantic: Congress Is Forcing a Confrontation With Saudi Arabia

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of 22 senators sent a letter to President Donald Trump, which will force the administration to investigate Khashoggi’s disappearance. The letter invoked a law, the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, that allows Congress to order an investigation by the executive branch into human-rights violations—including torture, abduction, and extrajudicial killing—“against an individual exercising freedom of expression.” The lawmakers called on Trump to impose sanctions on “any foreign person responsible for such a violation related to Mr. Khashoggi,” including “the highest ranking officials in the Government of Saudi Arabia.” The law gives Trump 120 days to conduct an investigation, identify the culprits, and determine whether sanctions are justified.

It’s unlikely that the Trump administration would blame the crown prince for Khashoggi’s fate, which would trigger sanctions against the most senior Saudi royals. But by invoking the Magnitsky Act, senators are sending a signal to Trump and Saudi leaders that they will not let this matter go. The letter was orchestrated by Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the committee’s ranking member. Before sending it to Trump, Corker reportedly examined classified U.S. intelligence files on Khashoggi’s case, and said he had determined that the Turkish narrative was relatively reliable. “We need to take some type of action,” he said, “and there are some things we can do congressionally.” In an interview with CNN on Thursday, he went even further, saying: “My instincts say that there’s no question the Saudi government did this, and my instincts say that they murdered him.” [...]

Other lawmakers who have been supportive of the Saudis are also taking a hard line on Khashoggi’s case. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a member of the Armed Services Committee and a Trump ally, said that if the Saudis were found responsible for the journalist’s death, there would be “hell to pay.” He added, “If this man was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, that would cross every line of normality in the international community.”

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Quartz: Automation will force us to realize that we are not defined by what we do

Civilization has absorbed economic shocks driven by technology in the past, turning hundreds of millions of farmers into factory workers over the 19th and 20th centuries. However, these structural changes didn’t arrive as quickly as the breakneck pace we’re currently experiencing with AI. Based on current trends in technology advancement and adoption, I predict that within 15 years, AI will theoretically be able to replace 40% to 50% of jobs in the United States. Actual job losses may end up lagging behind by an additional decade, but the disruption to job markets will be very large, very real, and very soon. [...]

We’re already seeing evidence of this. According to study by Gallup, 20% of Americans who have been unemployed for over a year have been treated for depression. The Center for Disease Control has also called the unemployment rate among emerging adults a “public-health concern” after it found that unemployed people aged 18-25 were three times more likely to have depression than their employed counterparts. [...]

One of the books I read during my illness was Bronnie Ware’s The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, which is about the regrets of people on their deathbeds. She found that no one wished they’d worked harder or spent more time at the office or accumulated more possessions. People’s top wish was that they had spent more time sharing love with their loved ones. [...]

You might be skeptical: Do we need so many “service” jobs? But in the post-AI world, we will need many more social workers to help people make the transition. We will need many more compassionate caregivers who use AI for medical diagnosis and treatment, but wrap the cold data engine with the warmth of human love. We will need 10 times as many teachers to help children thrive in the brave new world (in fact, we need these teachers in the existing one, too). And with so much wealth created in the AI age, we will be able to make careers out of humanistic labors of love such as being there for our elderly, and homeschooling our children.

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IFLScience: The Key To A Happy Sex Life Sounds Pretty Unsexy, According To This Study

A new study published in The Journal of Sex Research has looked at what personality traits and partner types tend to create a happy sex life. They came to the unlikely conclusion that people who are conscientious, typically associated with planning and organization, report fewer problems and higher satisfaction with their sex lives.

Psychotherapists from Ruhr University in Germany reached this conclusion by quizzing 964 German couples – caveat: 98 percent of whom were in heterosexual relationships – about their sex life and satisfaction. The questions asked them about intimate details, such as how easily they were aroused, how inhibited they were, and how they thought they performed sexually. [...]

Although they were looking for some correlations between personality traits and sex lives, they were not expecting these results. However, the researchers speculate that people who display the Conscientious trait might actually make more thoughtful lovers as they are more likely to carefully engage with their partners, make sure they are fulfilled, and remain focused on resolving any hiccups in the relationship.

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