Nature: How science has shifted our sense of identity

It was in the seventh issue — 16 December 1869 — that Huxley advanced a scheme for what he called ‘practical Darwinism’ and we call eugenics. Convinced that continued dominance of the British Empire would depend on the “energetic enterprising” English character, he mused about selecting for a can-do attitude among Britons1. Acknowledging that the law, not to mention ethics, might get in the way, he nevertheless wrote: “it may be possible, indirectly, to influence the character and prosperity of our descendants.” Francis Galton — Darwin’s cousin and an outer planet of Huxley’s solar system — was already writing about similar ideas and would come to be known as the father of eugenics. When this magazine appeared, then, the idea of ‘improving’ human heredity was on many people’s minds — not least as a potent tool of empire. [...]

IQ became a measure not of what you do, but of who you are — a score for one’s inherent worth as a person. In the Progressive era, eugenicists became obsessed with low intelligence, believing it to be the root of crime, poverty, promiscuity and disease. By the time Adolf Hitler expanded eugenics to cover entire ethnic and cultural groups, tens of thousands of people worldwide had already been yanked from the gene pool, sterilized, institutionalized, or both. [...]

Even in strictly scientific terms, ‘you’ are more than the contents of your chromosomes. The human body contains at least as many non-human cells (mostly bacteria, archaea and fungi) as human ones6. Tens of thousands of microbial species crowd and jostle over and through the body, with profound effects on digestion, complexion, disease resistance, vision and mood. Without them, you don’t feel like you; in fact, you aren’t really you. The biological self has been reframed as a cluster of communities, all in communication with each other. 

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The Conversation: Fake news: emotions and experiences, not more data, could be the antidote

According to the Washington Post, Donald Trump has made more than 12,000 false or misleading statements since becoming US president. Despite this, he remains immensely popular with his own political base, which is energised by his emotional and often aggressive displays. No amount of raw data appears capable of changing their minds. [...]

Since facts and expert knowledge are frequently dismissed as “fake news” or drowned out in a deluge of “alternative facts”, simply offering more data and facts may not work against politicians and people who show resistance to facts that conflict with their prejudices or feelings. [...]

So, can qualitative social research – where the focus is not on abstract facts but on what things mean for people in their everyday lives – come to the rescue? As we argue in our new book, Embodied Research Methods, social scientists do not and cannot rely just on data. When genuinely committed to understanding everyday life, they must also craft rich, nuanced and vivid accounts that flesh out how people live and struggle with the problems they encounter. [...]

This does not mean that we should dress up findings and arguments in strongly emotional claims, but rather conduct and share research in ways that help people connect to, care about and understand the people and issues in the research. As feelings help us care about what is going on, they are an important antidote which can make us question unfounded claims, hasty conclusions and fake news.

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Failed Architecture: The Far Right’s Obsession With Modern Architecture

Today, this traditionalist tendency is gaining renewed momentum in various corners of the European Right. In the Netherlands, far-right nationalist politician Thierry Baudet frequently derides the “ugly architecture” that is, in his mind, corrupting Dutch society. And in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has spawned a movement of revivalist architecture by individual practitioners obsessed with Saxon mythology and pitted ideologically against the metropolitan built environment. Amid the rising tide of populism in Europe, Western chauvinists and white supremacists are attempting to re-valorise traditional Western architecture in order to advance their reactionary and exclusive politics. [...]

The motley crew of right-wing architecture critics owes much to the work of Roger Scruton. Scruton positions himself as part of an older conservative philosophical tradition and a stalwart supporter of all things traditional. His gentlemanly demeanour is frequently played up by the British media, including the BBC, who allowed him to host the documentary Why Beauty Matters in 2009. In the documentary, Scruton repeatedly refers to the “crime of modern architecture”, and in one scene argues sardonically that the architects of a dilapidated office block were as much vandals as those who later graffiti-tagged the place. The argument of the documentary more polemically restates the general thesis of his 1979 book The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in the Age of Nihilism — where “nihilism” may as well be an indeterminate synonym for “left-wing”. Here, Scruton argues that architecture lost its way somewhere in the early 20th century by attempting to forge a new aesthetic style less dependent on classical and gothic features.[...]

The aim of the architectural aspect of such a war is to herald a ‘return’ to aesthetic order. This can mean two things. On the more moderate edge, the ‘return’ signifies the aesthetic move to a bygone era that divorces a building from its social context. This is visible in how Scruton’s commission suggests that the housing crisis is a problem solely of aesthetics, and that we can house more people if we build in an architectural vernacular more accustomed to a specifically-conceived ‘public’. This is a ridiculous claim, which ignores the bigger, structural problems of land, wealth, inequality and systemic oppression and exploitation that right-wing governments of the day at best wish not to address and at worst actively encourage. [...]

The proposal of Baudet and other right-wing thinkers to return to vernacular building traditions is as historically ill-informed as it is deplorable. This comes across in the form of basic errors. Watson, for instance, makes no distinction between the opposing styles of modernism and postmodernism. It also manifests in their lack of understanding of why the traditionalist style they favour took hold in the first place. During the nineteenth century, neoclassical, gothic and renaissance styles frequently masked the squalid living conditions and poor construction quality of newly-erected tenement houses in Europe’s industrial cities. Meanwhile, in places like Paris, the introduction of grand, classically-influenced architecture to the city’s centres was predicated on the displacement of millions of working-class people, and the destruction of centuries-old medieval buildings, much to the chagrin of contemporary conservationists.

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Europe Elects: Portugal | Parliament Election 2019

This is the YouTube service of Europe Elects. Poll aggregation and election analysis for countries in the European Union. Europe Elects introduces the main political parties ahead of the 06 of October 2019 parliament election in Portugal.

The Guardian: Brexit is a necessary crisis – it reveals Britain’s true place in the world

Why not? One answer is that the Tories now represent the interests of a small section of capitalists who actually fund the party. An extreme version of this argument was floated by the prime minister’s sister, Rachel, and the former chancellor Philip Hammond – both of whom suggested that hard Brexit is being driven by a corrupt relationship between the prime minister and his hedge-fund donors, who have shorted the pound and the whole economy. This is very unlikely to be correct, but it may point to a more disconcerting truth. [...]

But the real story is something much bigger. What is interesting is not so much the connections between capital and the Tory party but their increasing disconnection. Today much of the capital in Britain is not British and not linked to the Conservative party – where for most of the 20th century things looked very different. Once, great capitalists with national, imperial and global interests sat in the Commons and the Lords as Liberals or Conservatives. Between the wars, the Conservatives emerged as the one party of capital, led by great British manufacturers such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. The Commons and the Lords were soon fuller than ever of Tory businessmen, from the owner of Meccano toys to that of Lyons Corner Houses. [...]

Since the 1970s things have changed radically. Today there is no such thing as British national capitalism. London is a place where world capitalism does business – no longer one where British capitalism does the world’s business. Everywhere in the UK there are foreign-owned enterprises, many of them nationalised industries, building nuclear reactors and running train services from overseas. When the car industry speaks, it is not as British industry but as foreign enterprise in the UK. The same is true of many of the major manufacturing sectors – from civil aircraft to electrical engineering – and of infrastructure. Whatever the interests of foreign capital, they are not expressed through a national political party. Most of these foreign-owned businesses, not surprisingly, are hostile to Brexit.[...]

Brexit is a necessary crisis, and has provided a long overdue audit of British realities. It exposes the nature of the economy, the new relations of capitalism to politics and the weakness of the state. It brings to light, in stunning clarity, Brexiters’ deluded political understanding of the UK’s place in the world. From a new understanding, a new politics of national improvement might come; without it we will remain stuck in the delusional, revivalist politics of a banana monarchy.

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OZY: Why This German State Says 'Jawohl' to Migrants

For an industrial hub like Baden-Württemberg — home to auto majors Porsche and Mercedes and multinational corporations like Bosch, SAP and BASF — the approach makes sense, says Gari Pavkovic, head of the Department for Integration Policy of Stuttgart. Aging Germany has an estimated shortage of more than a million skilled workers.

These integration moves also coincided with another trend that runs counter to what’s happening elsewhere. While the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is rapidly gaining support in several states, from Brandenburg and Saxony to Thuringia, in Baden-Württemberg its popularity is declining. A September poll shows support for the anti-immigrant AfD at 12 percent, down from 15 percent in 2016. As mainstream parties in Germany and beyond struggle to stop the surge of the far-right, Baden-Württemberg is showing that the answer to bridging a divide between migrants and locals might lie not just in politics, but in economics. [...]

With Germany as a whole accepting far fewer refugees than it did in 2015, the numbers entering Baden-Württemberg have declined too. Still, in 2018, the state the size of Maryland accepted 11,000 migrants, mostly from Nigeria, Syria and Turkey — the U.S. plans to admit 18,000 in all, in 2020. Twenty percent of the population has a migrant background in Baden-Württemberg, located in the southwest of the country. In Stuttgart, it’s 50 percent. In comparison, Thuringia in the east counts just over 7 percent of its population as foreign-born. [...]

Deutsche Bahn too will only take trainees with sufficient language skills who have passed a psychological test and possess technical knowledge. They need to prove they graduated from a recognized school. For refugees fleeing a war, these can be tough hurdles. That’s where organizations like Caritas — which also helps refugees navigate bureaucracy, from getting educational qualifications recognized to obtaining a driving license — come in. “There are no limits,” says Lisa Maisch, a team leader of one home that houses 146 people. “We connect them or help them figure out ways to do that.”

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