19 September 2021
UnHerd: The danger of fetishising foreign lands
When I first arrived here, I tried to focus on foreign reporting, by challenging hysterical Western perspectives of Poland. The Government and, sometimes, the people here are often portrayed as being backwards and xenophobic — and I objected to such characterisations. To the extent that Poles are more right-wing than Western Europeans, moreover, I argued, they have the right to be. A lot of American and British commentary appeared to embody what the social scientist Richard Hanania calls “woke imperialism” — the aggressive promotion of progressive pet causes in countries where there is little appetite for them.
I take none of my criticisms back. But on the flip side, it would be unfair of me to obscure the existence of Polish progressives, who have more right to make prescriptive judgements about their homeland than I, an immigrant, do. On the fringes of Right-wing Western opinion there is a caricature of Poland as an ever-strengthening, “BASED”, traditionalist Catholic idyll — leading one conservative commentator from the USA to claim that “the mood [in Warsaw] is unmistakably buoyant”, as if Polish public opinion is not as divided as anywhere else — and I have no wish to feed such clichés. To be a valuable observer you must tell the whole truth and not just part of it. [...]
An outsider’s perspective can be valuable, inasmuch as if offers a sideways look at familiar problems. And of course, observers can become participants, visitors settlers. It would be wrong to think that a migrant cannot — like a native — love and criticise a country simultaneously. Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, for example, combines social criticism with a deep affection for the people and culture of the mafia-assailed island, to beautiful effect.
Nautilus Magazine: Existential Comfort Without God
Research in psychology and the cognitive science of religion offers some answers, but they’re not without nuance. For example, there’s evidence that scientific beliefs can deliver some of the benefits of religion,2 but there’s also evidence that some scientific beliefs—such as human evolution—are widely seen as a threat to human values.3 There’s evidence that people use language differently when reporting religious beliefs versus other commitments about the world4 (e.g., people believe in God, but think there are atoms, with analogs in other languages5), but there’s also evidence that religious and scientific beliefs reflect common psychological mechanisms.6 [...]
But the most striking results emerged when participants were asked to generate existential explanations that offered comfort and peace of mind. These instructions made participants most likely to generate explicitly religious or spiritual explanations—the proportion of such explanations jumped from 34 percent in the baseline condition to over 56 percent in the comfort condition. Yet participants without explicit religious commitments readily constructed “natural” (as opposed to supernatural) explanations that offered comfort, as well. In fact, natural sources of existential comfort were offered almost as often (about 36 percent of the time) as their explicitly supernatural counterparts (about 42 percent of the time). [...]
Just because people could generate natural sources of existential comfort, it doesn’t follow that those sources were just as comforting as their religious and supernatural counterparts. We also asked our participants to rate how successfully their explanations fostered positive emotions and buffered against negative ones, and we found that the explanations with only natural sources of comfort were judged significantly less successful than those that included only supernatural sources of comfort. Living on in people’s memories wasn’t quite as good as eternal life—at least when it came to emotional comfort, which is admittedly only one aspect of a valuable and meaningful system of beliefs.
Social Europe: Catalonia: a fraught dialogue begins
The date for the dialogue between the president of the Generalitat and the prime minister of Spain was organised in June, following the pardons issued by Sánchez to former political prisoners. It symbolised the start of what both sides describe as a transition towards progressive deliberation between Spain and Catalonia. [...]
Aragonès has consistently championed two main objectives for the dialogue: amnesty for exiles and former political prisoners and another referendum for Catalan independence. Sánchez, referencing the Spanish constitution (a clause about Spain’s ‘indivisibility’) and consistent with his dialogue throughout this year, said ‘neither amnesty nor a referendum are possible’ and suggested the two sides need to talk about ‘closer issues’. [...]
Controversy was sparked the day before the dialogue when the Catalan president rejected proposed attendees for the meeting from Junts—the other half of the ruling Catalan coalition. Aragonès justified his decision by saying that the attendees should only consist of members of the government.
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