Julia and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind) discuss his moral foundations theory and argue about whether liberals should “expand their moral horizons” by learning to think like conservatives. Julia solicits Jon’s help in understanding her disagreement with philosopher Michael Sandel, in episode 247, over the morality of consensual cannibalism. (February 17, 2020)
21 September 2021
Aeon: Who counts as a victim?
Jackson’s approach proved to be fatally prophetic. Ever since, governments of most stripes countenance inflicting enemy civilian casualties rather than endangering their military forces. Bombing enemies into submission – conceived as entire societies – has been the preferred means, from the US flattening of North Korea in the early 1950s, and later in Vietnam, and the Russian shelling of Grozny, Chechnya, in the 1990s, to the serial Israeli attacks on Gaza, the Syrian government’s barrel-bombing of Aleppo and other localities, and the Saudi-led destruction of Yemen. While more accurate than shelling and saturation bombing, continuous US drone strikes also causes civilian deaths. Together, these actions have killed millions. Trumping them all is the largest post-Second World War civilian casualty case: the some 45 million ordinary Chinese who perished in the Great Leap Forward famine between 1958 and 1962. But who remembers these people and their suffering besides their families and some academics? They’re excluded from the contemporary image of authentic victimhood because they aren’t victims of genocide.[...]
Second, Allied bombing killed almost a million German and Japanese civilians: again, enemy civilians couldn’t be iconic victims. Although Germans and Japanese militaries had started the practice of bombing undefended cities, the Allies perfected it. This is why, at Nuremberg, Germans weren’t indicted for their aerial bombing campaigns. [...]
The image of the largely agentless and innocent Jewish victim represents the ‘ideal’ victim: that socially constructed status by which sympathy and legitimacy are conferred on certain objects of violence and not on others. Because of the Holocaust memory’s omnipresence, its Jewish victims represent the archetypal and universal form of this status. This status becomes what the writer Alex Cocotas in 2017 called a ‘sacred altar’ that ‘foster[s] identification with victimhood’, even though – or perhaps because – most people are likely to be perpetrators rather than victims because they aren’t members of minorities.
The New Yorker: A Pennsylvania Lawmaker and the Resurgence of Christian Nationalism
Throughout U.S. history, a combination of Christianity and patriotism often served as a rallying cry against a common enemy. Following the Second World War, many Christians came to believe, as Mastriano did, that the battle against communism was a religious struggle, in part as a result of the Soviet Union’s massacres of clergy members. President Dwight Eisenhower encouraged the pastor Billy Graham to stoke this fervor. Matthew Avery Sutton, a professor of history at Washington State University, told me, “From President Truman to Ronald Reagan, American Presidents allied with the Vatican and orthodox Christian leaders to frame the crusade against communism and atheism in hyper-religious terms.”[...]
The election of Donald Trump intensified certain strains of Christian nationalism. He fanned fears of pluralism with Islamophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric. He often invoked Christianity, albeit in terms that were largely about ethnic identity rather than faith. “The greatest ethnic dog whistle the right has ever come up with is ‘Christian,’ because it means ‘people like us,’ it means white,” Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma and co-author of “Taking America Back For God,” told me. In 2019, Trump hosted Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s right-wing Prime Minister, at the White House, and praised him for building a border fence to keep immigrants out, saying, “You have been great with respect to Christian communities. You have really put a block up, and we appreciate that very much.”
Those who espouse Christian-nationalist ideas also appeared to grow more militant during this period. In the early years of Trump’s term, membership in white-supremacist militias grew rapidly, but the backlash to the Charlottesville rally, in 2017, proved damaging. “Since then, there has been a major shift among far-right groups, white nationalists, and militias toward espousing Christian nationalism, much like the Ku Klux Klan did,” Alexander Reid Ross, a geography lecturer at Portland State University, said. Beginning in 2018, white supremacists donned suits and appeared at conferences held by the N.A.R. and similar groups. “The tactic has been to use Christian nationalism to cool down the idea of fascism without losing the fascism,” Ross said. For example, after the white-nationalist organization Identity Evropa was dissolved, a former leader aligned himself with America First, a movement to make America a “white Christian nation.” (America First was one of the most prominent groups at the Capitol insurrection.)[...]
Many who hold Christian-nationalist beliefs think that God’s will should determine America’s course. “Christian nationalists take the view that because America is a ‘Christian nation,’ any party or leader who isn’t Christian in the ‘right’ way, or who fails to conform to their agenda, is illegitimate,” Katherine Stewart, the author of “The Power Worshippers,” told me. “Legitimacy derives not from elections or any democratic process but from representing an alleged fidelity to their version of the American past and what they believe is the will of God.” As a result, overthrowing an election, if it seems to have subverted God’s will, would be justified. “That kind of anti-democratic ideology made it very easy for these radicals to imagine they were being patriotic, even while they were attacking the most basic institutions of democracy: the U.S. Congress and the election process.”
CityLab: How the 1964 Olympic Games Changed Tokyo Forever
The 1964 Olympics were a rare chance for officials to implement the kind of rapid, sweeping changes that would disrupt lives and require cultural sacrifices. Visitors found not a war-scarred city but a modernizing metropolis, with state-of-the-art transportation whizzing between an upgraded airport and smart new hotels. More than that, the enormous footprint of military facilities in Tokyo’s southwest became the city’s new economic and cultural center—emblems of a peaceful, prosperous future. [...]
The government accelerated work on roads including the Metropolitan Expressway, which weaves between buildings, balances over rivers and ducks underground—a cheaper and quicker building method than buying up private land. It improved water systems and expanded the subway. Buildings sprouted up like weeds and luxury hotels—such as the 17-story Hotel New Otani, Japan’s largest building at the time—were built to accommodate foreign guests. Western-style flush toilets, then uncommon, were promoted.[...]
The games attracted young people to Shibuya, Yoyogi and Harajuku—neighborhoods that today remain ground zero for Japanese youth culture. National broadcaster NHK built new headquarters nearby, drawing in other networks, businesses and shops. Eventually the Olympic Village was converted into Yoyogi Park, one the few large city parks suited to activities like jogging and picnicking, and hugely popular for its proximity to Shibuya and Harajuku. Luxury hotels also helped turn the area into a destination for leisure and business travelers. [...]
Tokyo’s unprecedented urban transformation in the lead-up to 1964 provided a roadmap for rising cities like Seoul and Beijing, Olympic hosts in 1988 and 2008 respectively, that sought out the games for economic benefits and an introduction to the world stage. As criticisms about Olympic-related development mount—from the costs to gentrification—organizers have been looking for a new model. The Japanese capital seems to have missed its chance to provide that vision this time around, and strengthened questions about the games’ value for mature cities.
CityLab: When Monuments Go Bad
The centennial monument and 40 others are now under the equally critical gaze of the Chicago Monuments Project, an advisory committee of civic leaders, artists, designers, academics, and culture workers (including X) tasked with re-evaluating how the city handles its stock of monuments (which Schneider says he supports). The city formed the committee in the wake of the uprisings against racist police violence in July 2020. During a demonstration at Grant Park against a monument to Christopher Columbus, police assaulted journalists and activists; within days, Mayor Lori Lightfoot had statues of Columbus in Grant Park and Little Italy removed “temporarily.” To come up with long-term policies for monumentalization, the advisory committee began meeting in September and tentatively hope to release a set of recommendations by late June. [...]
No other American city has opened up this sort of wide-ranging dialogue about how cities make monuments. Swept up in this inquiry are five statues of Abraham Lincoln, as well as monuments to George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Italian Fascist Italo Balbo. The 41 items under discussion are just a small percentage of the hundreds of monuments in the city, but committee co-chair Bonnie McDonald, president of Landmarks Illinois, says the work of the committee is just a start. She’s asking for public participation on how current memorials should be handled, as well an in the commissioning of new monuments. [...]
The Chicago Torture Justice Memorials (CTJM) Project arranged several exhibitions calling for public input, uniting survivors, activists and South Side residents through a radically democratic process. “That process of stepping back and inviting everyone to contribute their creativity, their imagination, the desire to work for justice really opened up a process,” says Joey Mogul, CTJM co-founder. “It invited different members of the public beyond lawyers, legal workers and organizers.” The task for CTJM is to communicate “the horror and the pain and the generational trauma that occurred, while also [making] sure we acknowledge people’s agency and resistance,” says Mogul.
Social Europe: Belarus: toughness towards the regime, solidarity with the people
As long as Russia, in particular, but also Ukraine, Kazakhstan, China, India and/or Brazil do not join, it cannot be assumed that the sanctions will lead to changes in Lukashenka’s behaviour. They represent a punishment for the regime and a signal of moral support for the opposition. They are right and important in view of the escalation Lukashenka is pursuing: his provocations require a firm response. But a continuous tightening of the sanctions screw will not change the balance of power, at least in the short term.[...]
The sanctions also have some undesirable side-effects. The disruption of air links makes it more difficult for ordinary people, including opposition members, to have contacts with foreign countries. Land routes to Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Ukraine were already largely closed for private citizens, under the pretext of Covid-19.[...]
As long as Lukashenka denies Belarusians the right to vote, Europe should give them the opportunity to vote with their feet. Nothing delegitimises a government more than when it loses its people. The exodus of specialists and skilled workers is also likely to have a greater and more lasting impact on the Belarusian economy than any other economic sanctions. At the same time, such an opportunity would offer protection to those living in constant fear of the security forces persecuting everybody who protests against Lukashenka.
Social Europe: Tourism in Europe: a new model
Many skilled workers are leaving the industry, which risks emerging from the shutdown only to face the challenge of inadequate staffing. In France alone, nearly 100,000 employees are expected to be missing when business reopens. In the United Kingdom, one in ten hospitality workers are believed to have left in the last year. In countries, such as Spain, which rely extensively on tourism, temporary employment schemes have helped avert massive job destruction. [...]
EFFAT has asked EU member states to place hospitality tourism at the heart of their National Recovery and Resilience Programmes—to secure maximum jobs, support the sector and strive for swift, co-ordinated and safe travel. We call on the European Commission to assess these plans not just with an administrative mindset but with a strategic, 360-degree view, which recognises the recovery of tourism as functional to the revival of other sectors (including agriculture, food and beverages) and the economy at large.[...]
We must strive for a new model based on decent and secure employment, investment in human resources and reinvestment of profits, to ensure sustainable growth, visitor loyalty, diversification of the offer and a reduction of seasonality. We should promote proximity-based and domestic tourism—especially in countries, regions and cities where the sector upholds many jobs and businesses, offering a principal avenue for recovery, allied to lower environmental impact and support for communities and workers.
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