Plan Be - The Beatitudes And The Be-Attitude Revolution » be.informed

Aid – Broken Promises & Public Opinion

dave — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:04:10 +0000

According to a Brisbane survey we did some time back, ‘two thirds of the Aussie public still want to increase our overseas aid to countries that are poor, have poor social services, poor health standards or who are suffering from a natural disaster or post-conflict trauma’.

I undertook the in-depth survey of 140 people in Browns Plains, Indooroopilly, Chermside, and the CBD of Brisbane with the help of staff from the Department Of Social Sciences at UQ for the Make Poverty History campaign, and the results were ‘an exciting discovery’ for advocates of more poverty-focused overseas aid.

Not one single person said Australia shouldn’t give aid to poor countries.
Almost 90% (89.7%) said it was ‘important’ or ‘very important’ to give aid.
Two thirds (66.9%) of the people were actually in favour of increasing our aid.
And almost 80% of these (76.9%) were in favour of increasing the amount of aid to meet the goal proposed by UN of 0.5% or more of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

A majority of people (54%) would prefer aid to be distributed through Aussie NGOs.
Where nongovernment agencies are not an option, then people would prefer that aid be distributed through governments rather than businesses. A majority say govern-ments needn’t be democratic but should be stable (52.8%) and transparent (59.2%).

While people recognise giving aid improves Australia’s international image (86.7%) and international relations (82.9%), the majority do not think that aid should be used as a high-profile public relations gimmick but as genuine low-profile poverty reduction.

An overwhelming majority of people said aid should be directed towards countries that are poor (87.6%), have poor social services (91.5%) and poor health standards (89.8%) or suffering from natural disaster (94.7%) and post-conflict trauma (85.1%).

Meet the Need - Public perception, knowledge and opinion of Australia’s foreign aid to devel-oping countries – A survey commissioned by the Micah Action Group (Queensland) and the United Nations Association of Australia (Queensland Branch) – is available from the Micah Action Group (Queensland) which is a part of the Make Poverty History Coalition.

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

dave — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 22:12:27 +0000

By Stephen Marche

May 2012

SOCIAL MEDIA—FROM FACEBOOK TO TWITTER—HAVE MADE US MORE DENSELY NETWORKED THAN EVER. YET FOR ALL THIS CONNECTIVITY, NEW RESEARCH SUGGESTS THAT WE HAVE NEVER BEEN LONELIER (OR MORE NARCISSISTIC)—AND THAT THIS LONELINESS IS MAKING US MENTALLY AND PHYSICALLY ILL. A REPORT ON WHAT THE EPIDEMIC OF LONELINESS IS DOING TO OUR SOULS AND OUR SOCIETY.

Image credit: Phillip Toledano

YVETTE VICKERS, A FORMER Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role inAttack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.

The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.

Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

At the forefront of all this unexpectedly lonely interactivity is Facebook, with 845 million users and $3.7 billion in revenue last year. The company hopes to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering later this spring, which will make it by far the largest Internet IPO in history. Some recent estimates put the company’s potential value at $100 billion, which would make it larger than the global coffee industry—one addiction preparing to surpass the other. Facebook’s scale and reach are hard to comprehend: last summer, Facebook became, by some counts, the first Web site to receive 1 trillion page views in a month. In the last three months of 2011, users generated an average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments every day. On whatever scale you care to judge Facebook—as a company, as a culture, as a country—it is vast beyond imagination.

Despite its immense popularity, or more likely because of it, Facebook has, from the beginning, been under something of a cloud of suspicion. The depiction of Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network, as a bastard with symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, was nonsense. But it felt true. It felt true to Facebook, if not to Zuckerberg. The film’s most indelible scene, the one that may well have earned it an Oscar, was the final, silent shot of an anomic Zuckerberg sending out a friend request to his ex-girlfriend, then waiting and clicking and waiting and clicking—a moment of superconnected loneliness preserved in amber. We have all been in that scene: transfixed by the glare of a screen, hungering for response.

When you sign up for Google+ and set up your Friends circle, the program specifies that you should include only “your real friends, the ones you feel comfortable sharing private details with.” That one little phrase, Your real friends—so quaint, so charmingly mothering—perfectly encapsulates the anxieties that social media have produced: the fears that Facebook is interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer.

FACEBOOK ARRIVED IN THE MIDDLE of a dramatic increase in the quantity and intensity of human loneliness, a rise that initially made the site’s promise of greater connection seem deeply attractive. Americans are more solitary than ever before. In 1950, less than 10 percent of American households contained only one person. By 2010, nearly 27 percent of households had just one person. Solitary living does not guarantee a life of unhappiness, of course. In his recent book about the trend toward living alone, Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, writes: “Reams of published research show that it’s the quality, not the quantity of social interaction, that best predicts loneliness.” True. But before we begin the fantasies of happily eccentric singledom, of divorcées dropping by their knitting circles after work for glasses of Drew Barrymore pinot grigio, or recent college graduates with perfectly articulated, Steampunk-themed, 300-square-foot apartments organizing croquet matches with their book clubs, we should recognize that it is not just isolation that is rising sharply. It’s loneliness, too. And loneliness makes us miserable.

We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing. Solitude can be lovely. Crowded parties can be agony. We also know, thanks to a growing body of research on the topic, that loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state. A 2005 analysis of data from a longitudinal study of Dutch twins showed that the tendency toward loneliness has roughly the same genetic component as other psychological problems such as neuroticism or anxiety.

Still, loneliness is slippery, a difficult state to define or diagnose. The best tool yet developed for measuring the condition is the UCLA Loneliness Scale, a series of 20 questions that all begin with this formulation: “How often do you feel …?” As in: “How often do you feel that you are ‘in tune’ with the people around you?” And: “How often do you feel that you lack companionship?” Measuring the condition in these terms, various studies have shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent history. A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45 were chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade earlier. According to a major study by a leading scholar of the subject, roughly 20 percent of Americans—about 60 million people—are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness. Across the Western world, physicians and nurses have begun to speak openly of an epidemic of loneliness.

The new studies on loneliness are beginning to yield some surprising preliminary findings about its mechanisms. Almost every factor that one might assume affects loneliness does so only some of the time, and only under certain circumstances. People who are married are less lonely than single people, one journal article suggests, but only if their spouses are confidants. If one’s spouse is not a confidant, marriage may not decrease loneliness. A belief in God might help, or it might not, as a 1990 German study comparing levels of religious feeling and levels of loneliness discovered. Active believers who saw God as abstract and helpful rather than as a wrathful, immediate presence were less lonely. “The mere belief in God,” the researchers concluded, “was relatively independent of loneliness.”

But it is clear that social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants—that is, in quality social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant.

In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers. As Ronald Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 paper for the Hoover Institution, in the late ’40s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of 2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients in therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. This raft of psychic servants is helping us through what used to be called regular problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.

We need professional carers more and more, because the threat of societal breakdown, once principally a matter of nostalgic lament, has morphed into an issue of public health. Being lonely is extremely bad for your health. If you’re lonely, you’re more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier age than a similar person who isn’t lonely. You’re less likely to exercise. You’re more likely to be obese. You’re less likely to survive a serious operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. You are at greater risk of inflammation. Your memory may be worse. You are more likely to be depressed, to sleep badly, and to suffer dementia and general cognitive decline. Loneliness may not have killed Yvette Vickers, but it has been linked to a greater probability of having the kind of heart condition that did kill her.

And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different. They did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it as the price of their autonomy. The cowboys who set off to explore a seemingly endless frontier likewise traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect. The ultimate American icon is the astronaut: Who is more heroic, or more alone? The price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price.

Today, the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely. The great American poem is Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The great American essay is Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” The great American novel is Melville’s Moby-Dick, the tale of a man on a quest so lonely that it is incomprehensible to those around him. American culture, high and low, is about self-expression and personal authenticity. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called individualism “the great watchword of American life.”

Self-invention is only half of the American story, however. The drive for isolation has always been in tension with the impulse to cluster in communities that cling and suffocate. The Pilgrims, while fomenting spiritual rebellion, also enforced ferocious cohesion. The Salem witch trials, in hindsight, read like attempts to impose solidarity—as do the McCarthy hearings. The history of the United States is like the famous parable of the porcupines in the cold, from Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism—the ones who huddle together for warmth and shuffle away in pain, always separating and congregating.

We are now in the middle of a long period of shuffling away. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam attributed the dramatic post-war decline of social capital—the strength and value of interpersonal networks—to numerous interconnected trends in American life: suburban sprawl, television’s dominance over culture, the self-absorption of the Baby Boomers, the disintegration of the traditional family. The trends he observed continued through the prosperity of the aughts, and have only become more pronounced with time: the rate of union membership declined in 2011, again; screen time rose; the Masons and the Elks continued their slide into irrelevance. We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We have made ourselves lonely.

The question of the future is this: Is Facebook part of the separating or part of the congregating; is it a huddling-together for warmth or a shuffling-away in pain?

WELL BEFORE FACEBOOK, digital technology was enabling our tendency for isolation, to an unprecedented degree. Back in the 1990s, scholars started calling the contradiction between an increased opportunity to connect and a lack of human contact the “Internet paradox.” A prominent 1998 article on the phenomenon by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon showed that increased Internet usage was already coinciding with increased loneliness. Critics of the study pointed out that the two groups that participated in the study—high-school journalism students who were heading to university and socially active members of community-development boards—were statistically likely to become lonelier over time. Which brings us to a more fundamental question: Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?

The question has intensified in the Facebook era. A recent study out of Australia (where close to half the population is active on Facebook), titled “Who Uses Facebook?,” found a complex and sometimes confounding relationship between loneliness and social networking. Facebook users had slightly lower levels of “social loneliness”—the sense of not feeling bonded with friends—but “significantly higher levels of family loneliness”—the sense of not feeling bonded with family. It may be that Facebook encourages more contact with people outside of our household, at the expense of our family relationships—or it may be that people who have unhappy family relationships in the first place seek companionship through other means, including Facebook. The researchers also found that lonely people are inclined to spend more time on Facebook: “One of the most noteworthy findings,” they wrote, “was the tendency for neurotic and lonely individuals to spend greater amounts of time on Facebook per day than non-lonely individuals.” And they found that neurotics are more likely to prefer to use the wall, while extroverts tend to use chat features in addition to the wall.

Moira Burke, until recently a graduate student at the Human-Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon, used to run a longitudinal study of 1,200 Facebook users. That study, which is ongoing, is one of the first to step outside the realm of self-selected college students and examine the effects of Facebook on a broader population, over time. She concludes that the effect of Facebook depends on what you bring to it. Just as your mother said: you get out only what you put in. If you use Facebook to communicate directly with other individuals—by using the “like” button, commenting on friends’ posts, and so on—it can increase your social capital. Personalized messages, or what Burke calls “composed communication,” are more satisfying than “one-click communication”—the lazy click of a like. “People who received composed communication became less lonely, while people who received one-click communication experienced no change in loneliness,” Burke tells me. So, you should inform your friend in writing how charming her son looks with Harry Potter cake smeared all over his face, and how interesting her sepia-toned photograph of that tree-framed bit of skyline is, and how cool it is that she’s at whatever concert she happens to be at. That’s what we all want to hear. Even better than sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in. “People whose friends write to them semi-publicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness,” Burke says.

On the other hand, non-personalized use of Facebook—scanning your friends’ status updates and updating the world on your own activities via your wall, or what Burke calls “passive consumption” and “broadcasting”—correlates to feelings of disconnectedness. It’s a lonely business, wandering the labyrinths of our friends’ and pseudo-friends’ projected identities, trying to figure out what part of ourselves we ought to project, who will listen, and what they will hear. According to Burke, passive consumption of Facebook also correlates to a marginal increase in depression. “If two women each talk to their friends the same amount of time, but one of them spends more time reading about friends on Facebook as well, the one reading tends to grow slightly more depressed,” Burke says. Her conclusion suggests that my sometimes unhappy reactions to Facebook may be more universal than I had realized. When I scroll through page after page of my friends’ descriptions of how accidentally eloquent their kids are, and how their husbands are endearingly bumbling, and how they’re all about to eat a home-cooked meal prepared with fresh local organic produce bought at the farmers’ market and then go for a jog and maybe check in at the office because they’re so busy getting ready to hop on a plane for a week of luxury dogsledding in Lapland, I do grow slightly more miserable. A lot of other people doing the same thing feel a little bit worse, too.

Still, Burke’s research does not support the assertion that Facebook creates loneliness. The people who experience loneliness on Facebook are lonely away from Facebook, too, she points out; on Facebook, as everywhere else, correlation is not causation. The popular kids are popular, and the lonely skulkers skulk alone. Perhaps it says something about me that I think Facebook is primarily a platform for lonely skulking. I mention to Burke the widely reported study, conducted by a Stanford graduate student, that showed how believing that others have strong social networks can lead to feelings of depression. What does Facebook communicate, if not the impression of social bounty? Everybody else looks so happy on Facebook, with so many friends, that our own social networks feel emptier than ever in comparison. Doesn’t that make people feel lonely? “If people are reading about lives that are much better than theirs, two things can happen,” Burke tells me. “They can feel worse about themselves, or they can feel motivated.”

Burke will start working at Facebook as a data scientist this year.

JOHN CACIOPPO, THE director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, is the world’s leading expert on loneliness. In his landmark book, Loneliness, released in 2008, he revealed just how profoundly the epidemic of loneliness is affecting the basic functions of human physiology. He found higher levels of epinephrine, the stress hormone, in the morning urine of lonely people. Loneliness burrows deep: “When we drew blood from our older adults and analyzed their white cells,” he writes, “we found that loneliness somehow penetrated the deepest recesses of the cell to alter the way genes were being expressed.” Loneliness affects not only the brain, then, but the basic process of DNA transcription. When you are lonely, your whole body is lonely.

To Cacioppo, Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy. “Forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need,” he writes. “But surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” The “real thing” being actual people, in the flesh. When I speak to Cacioppo, he is refreshingly clear on what he sees as Facebook’s effect on society. Yes, he allows, some research has suggested that the greater the number of Facebook friends a person has, the less lonely she is. But he argues that the impression this creates can be misleading. “For the most part,” he says, “people are bringing their old friends, and feelings of loneliness or connectedness, to Facebook.” The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another. For the most part, Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either.

In one experiment, Cacioppo looked for a connection between the loneliness of subjects and the relative frequency of their interactions via Facebook, chat rooms, online games, dating sites, and face-to-face contact. The results were unequivocal. “The greater the proportion of face-to-face interactions, the less lonely you are,” he says. “The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.” Surely, I suggest to Cacioppo, this means that Facebook and the like inevitably make people lonelier. He disagrees. Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. “If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,” he says, “it increases social capital.” So if social media let you organize a game of football among your friends, that’s healthy. If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however, that’s unhealthy.

“Facebook can be terrific, if we use it properly,” Cacioppo continues. “It’s like a car. You can drive it to pick up your friends. Or you can drive alone.” But hasn’t the car increased loneliness? If cars created the suburbs, surely they also created isolation. “That’s because of how we use cars,” Cacioppo replies. “How we use these technologies can lead to more integration, rather than more isolation.”

The problem, then, is that we invite loneliness, even though it makes us miserable. The history of our use of technology is a history of isolation desired and achieved. When the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company opened its A&P stores, giving Americans self-service access to groceries, customers stopped having relationships with their grocers. When the telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neighbors’ doors. Social media bring this process to a much wider set of relationships. Researchers at the HP Social Computing Lab who studied the nature of people’s connections on Twitter came to a depressing, if not surprising, conclusion: “Most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view.” I have to wonder: What other point of view is meaningful?

LONELINESS IS CERTAINLY not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around. Every time I shop at my local grocery store, I am faced with a choice. I can buy my groceries from a human being or from a machine. I always, without exception, choose the machine. It’s faster and more efficient, I tell myself, but the truth is that I prefer not having to wait with the other customers who are lined up alongside the conveyor belt: the hipster mom who disapproves of my high-carbon-footprint pineapple; the lady who tenses to the point of tears while she waits to see if the gods of the credit-card machine will accept or decline; the old man whose clumsy feebleness requires a patience that I don’t possess. Much better to bypass the whole circus and just ring up the groceries myself.

Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society—the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall.

But the price of this smooth sociability is a constant compulsion to assert one’s own happiness, one’s own fulfillment. Not only must we contend with the social bounty of others; we must foster the appearance of our own social bounty. Being happy all the time, pretending to be happy, actually attempting to be happy—it’s exhausting. Last year a team of researchers led by Iris Mauss at the University of Denver published a study looking into “the paradoxical effects of valuing happiness.” Most goals in life show a direct correlation between valuation and achievement. Studies have found, for example, that students who value good grades tend to have higher grades than those who don’t value them. Happiness is an exception. The study came to a disturbing conclusion:

Valuing happiness is not necessarily linked to greater happiness. In fact, under certain conditions, the opposite is true. Under conditions of low (but not high) life stress, the more people valued happiness, the lower were their hedonic balance, psychological well-being, and life satisfaction, and the higher their depression symptoms.

The more you try to be happy, the less happy you are. Sophocles made roughly the same point.

Facebook, of course, puts the pursuit of happiness front and center in our digital life. Its capacity to redefine our very concepts of identity and personal fulfillment is much more worrisome than the data-mining and privacy practices that have aroused anxieties about the company. Two of the most compelling critics of Facebook—neither of them a Luddite—concentrate on exactly this point. Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, was one of the inventors of virtual-reality technology. His view of where social media are taking us reads like dystopian science fiction: “I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.” Lanier argues that Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, to his mind, is the site’s crucial and fatally unacceptable downside.

Sherry Turkle, a professor of computer culture at MIT who in 1995 published the digital-positive analysis Life on the Screen, is much more skeptical about the effects of online society in her 2011 book, Alone Together: “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.” The problem with digital intimacy is that it is ultimately incomplete: “The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy,” she writes. “We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in ‘real time.’”

Lanier and Turkle are right, at least in their diagnoses. Self-presentation on Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a phony nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity. (“Look how casually I threw up these three photos from the party at which I took 300 photos!”) Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the Australian study “Who Uses Facebook?” found a significant correlation between Facebook use and narcissism: “Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers,” the study’s authors wrote. “In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual’s need to engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior.”

Rising narcissism isn’t so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends. In preparation for the 2013 edition of its diagnostic manual, the psychiatric profession is currently struggling to update its definition of narcissistic personality disorder. Still, generally speaking, practitioners agree that narcissism manifests in patterns of fantastic grandiosity, craving for attention, and lack of empathy. In a 2008 survey, 35,000 American respondents were asked if they had ever had certain symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Among people older than 65, 3 percent reported symptoms. Among people in their 20s, the proportion was nearly 10 percent. Across all age groups, one in 16 Americans has experienced some symptoms of NPD. And loneliness and narcissism are intimately connected: a longitudinal study of Swedish women demonstrated a strong link between levels of narcissism in youth and levels of loneliness in old age. The connection is fundamental. Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness, and either condition is a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other people.

A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. The new isolation is not of the kind that Americans once idealized, the lonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic, or that of the astronaut who blasts into new worlds. Facebook’s isolation is a grind. What’s truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume—750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekend—but the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users—and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user—log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee. Yvette Vickers’s computer was on when she died.

Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn’t being served: everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/

Wealthy More Likely To Be Unethical

dave — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 19:25:21 +0000

Maybe, as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested, the rich really are different. They’re more likely to behave badly, according to seven experiments that weighed the ethics of hundreds of people.

The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take sweets from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work, researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Taken together, the experiments suggest at least some wealthier people “perceive greed as positive and beneficial,” probably as a result of education, personal independence and the resources they have to deal with potentially negative consequences, the authors wrote.

While the tests measured only “minor infractions,” that factor made the results, “even more surprising,” said Paul Piff, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a study author.

One experiment invited 195 adults recruited using Craigslist to play a game in which a computer “rolled dice” for a chance to win a $50 gift certificate. The numbers each participant rolled were the same; anyone self reporting a total higher than 12 was lying about their score. Those in wealthier classes were found to be more likely to fib, Piff said.

“A $50 prize is a measly sum to people who make $250,000 a year,” he said in a telephone interview. “So why are they more inclined to cheat? For a person with lower socioeconomic status, that $50 would get you more, and the risks are small.”

Community standards

Poorer participants may be less likely to cheat because they must rely more on their community to get by, and thus are more likely adhere to community standards, Piff said. By comparison, “upper-class individuals are more self-focused, they privilege themselves over others, and they engage in self-interested patterns of behavior,” he said.

To be sure, Piff and his colleagues also said the associations they found were likely to have exceptions, pointing to Warren Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway, who has pledged the majority of his holdings to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other charities, and the whistle-blowing of Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins, former officials of Worldcom Inc. and Enron Corp., respectively.

Less wealthy individuals also can behave badly, they wrote, noting the relationship between poverty and violent crime in previous research. They urged further study to determine the “boundaries” of bad behavior spurred by greed.

Visual evidence

The studies Piff and his colleagues completed weren’t meant to measure the ties between socioeconomic status and violent crime, but rather simple bad behavior, he said.

Some of the experiments offered visual evidence, for instance determining whether people with more expensive cars observed traffic laws in the San Francisco Bay Area, yielding to cars and pedestrians at an intersection, or whether individuals took candy identified as being set aside for kids. Others polled people on what decision they might make in a given situation.

In the traffic tests, about one-third of drivers in higher- status cars cut off other drivers at an intersection watched by the researchers, about double those in less costly cars. Additionally, almost half of the more expensive cars didn’t yield when a pedestrian entered the crosswalk while all of the lowest-status cars let the pedestrian cross. These experiments involved 426 vehicles.

Salary negotiation

Another test asked 108 adults found through Amazon.com’s work-recruiting website Mechanical Turk to assume the role of an employer negotiating a salary with someone seeking long-term employment.

They were told several things about the job, including that it would shortly be eliminated. Upper-class individuals were more likely not to mention to the job-seeker the impermanence of the position, the research found.

Meredith McGinley, an assistant professor at Chatham University in Pittsburgh who wasn’t involved in the study, was critical of how some of the experiments were designed.

The design of the car experiments complicates the picture because having a flashy car doesn’t necessarily mean the driver is wealthy, said McGinley, who studies positive social behavior.

Lolly test

In the experiment involving sweets, the participants were told they could have it even though the children were waiting for it. They may have felt they were doing nothing wrong, she said.

In the test, 129 undergraduates were manipulated to view themselves as wealthy or poor. They were then presented with a jar of individually wrapped sweets, which researchers said would go to children in a nearby lab, though they could take some if they wanted.

The undergraduates believing themselves to be upper income took more than those believing themselves to be low income, the study found.

The research indicates that valuing greed leads to unethical behavior, not necessarily that income class causes bad behavior, McGinley said, adding, “greediness seems like a much more substantial predictor than income.”

The study builds on previous research that has shown wealthy people are worse at recognizing how others feel and are more likely to be disengaged during social interactions than others, the authors wrote in the paper.

That seems to be the case even in primates, said Piff, who describes his status growing up as being “relatively comfortable, middle-class.” Because of his education, he’s now “probably upper-middle class,” he said.

Fitzgerald wrote his view, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me,” in his short story “The Rich Boy,” which appeared in “All the Sad Young Men,” a collection initally published in 1926.

“It’s not that the rich are innately bad, but as you rise in the ranks – whether as a person or a nonhuman primate – you become more self-focused,” Piff said.

“You can change that by reminding upper-class people of the needs of others. That may not be their default, but have them do it is sufficient to increase their patterns of altruistic behavior.”

February 28, 2012

Bloomberg

http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/luxury/wealthy-more-likely-to-lie-or-cheat-study-finds-20120228-1tzn7.html#ixzz1oJhj7bQK

What Jesus said about Capitalism

dave — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 19:13:24 +0000

April 9, 2012

Most churchgoers see no great conflict between their beliefs and life in a market economy such as ours. But proponents of the little-known ”sabbath economics” argue Christ’s teachings have been reinterpreted over the centuries to make them fit with modern capitalism.

All I know about sabbath economics comes from the little book, The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics, by the Californian theologian and teacher Ched Myers. I’ll give you my summary of the book provided you don’t presume I’m an advocate. It’s an interesting topic for an Easter Monday.

The name sabbath (the seventh day) is a reference to the biblical injunction – mainly honoured in the breach – that the Jews practice ”jubilee”. Every 50th year (the year following the passing of seven times seven years), slaves were to be freed, people were to be released from their debts and land returned to its original owners.

So sabbath economics involves an ”ethic of regular and systematic wealth and power redistribution”. You can see why this is an uncomfortable topic (for me as much as anyone else).

Many Christians would argue this Old Testament stuff was superseded by the New Testament, but Myers counters that the New Testament reveals Jesus as preoccupied with jubilee ideas.

”There is no theme more common to Jesus’s storytelling than sabbath economics,” he says. ”He promises poor sharecroppers abundance, but threatens absentee landowners and rich householders with judgment.”

It’s certainly true that Jesus was always blessing the poor, challenging the rich, mixing with despised tax-gatherers and speaking of a time when the social order is overturned and ”the last shall be first”.

It’s also true, as Myers reminds us, that many of Jesus’s parables deal with clearly economic concerns: farming, shepherding, being in debt, doing hard labour, being excluded from banquets and the houses of the rich.

Myers alleges that many churches handle the parables ”timidly, and often not at all”. ”Perhaps we intuit that there is something so wild and subversive about these tales that they are better kept safely at the margins of our consciousness,” he says.

”Most churches that do attend to gospel parables spiritualise them tirelessly, typically preaching them as ‘earthly stories with heavenly meanings’. Stories about landless peasants and rich landowners, or lords and slaves, or lepers and lawyers are thus lifted out of their social and historical context and reshaped into theological or moralistic fables bereft of any political or economic edge – or consequence.”

Myers devotes a chapter to the incident of Jesus meeting the rich man, who asks ”what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus neither welcomes him into the club nor outlines the things he must believe to gain admission.

Rather, he tells the man to go and sell everything he has, give the money to the poor and then come back and follow him. But the man, unwilling to give up his wealth, rejects discipleship and goes away.

Jesus responds, ”how difficult it is for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God … It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

”The clarity of this text has somehow escaped the church through the ages, which instead has concocted a hundred ingenuous reasons why it cannot mean what it says,” Myers says.

His interpretation? Jesus is simply saying the kingdom of God is a social condition in which there are no rich and poor. So, by definition, the rich cannot enter – not with their wealth intact.

Myers says that in first century Palestine, the basis of wealth wasn’t possession of consumer durables, but land. And the primary means of acquiring land was through debt-default. Small agricultural landholders groaned under the burden of rent, tithes, taxes, tariffs and operating expenses.

”If they fell behind in payments, they were forced to take out loans secured by their land. When unable to service these loans, the land was lost to the lenders. These lenders were in most cases the large landowners,” he says.

This is how socio-economic inequality had become so widespread in the time of Jesus. It’s almost certainly how the rich man ended up with ”many properties”, according to Myers. And these are just the circumstances the jubilee is intended to correct.

”Jesus is not inviting this man to change his attitude towards his wealth, nor to treat his servants better, nor to reform his personal life,” he says. ”He is asserting the precondition for discipleship: economic justice.”

Myers offers his explanation of a much-quoted saying from which today’s prosperous Christians derive comfort: Jesus’s observation that ”the poor will always be with you”.

This doesn’t mean Christ accepted poverty as an inevitable characteristic of the economy, or part of the divine plan. Rather, he says, the divine vision is that poverty be abolished, but as long as it persists, God and God’s people must always take the side of the poor – and be among them.

”Privately controlled wealth is the backbone of capitalism,” Myers says, ”and it is predicated upon the exploitation of natural resources and human labour. Profit maximisation renders socio-economic stratification, objectification and alienation inevitable.

”According to the gospel, however, those who are privileged within this system cannot enter the kingdom. This is not good news for first-world Christians – because we are the ‘inheritors’ of the rich man’s legacy.

”So the unequivocal gospel invitation to repentance is addressed to us. To deconstruct our ‘inheritance’ and redistribute the wealth as preparation to the poor – that is what it means for us to follow Jesus.”

Ross Gittins is the economics editor.

What Jesus said about capitalism

www.smh.com.au

Kony 2012 and the Failed Fantasy of Firepower in Libya, Syria, Uganda…

dave — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:51:40 +0000

Lisa Schirch

Posted: 03/10/2012 8:45 am

Echoes of victims call out to us over television or even twitter with bloodied images of civilians suffering. Those with empathy want to stop it. There is vast appeal for a fast fantasy of firepower solution. I sing along with Canadian Bruce Cockburn’s song “If I had a rocket launcher” with Syria’s President Assad and Uganda’s warlord Joseph Kony in mind too.

But in Libya, Syria, Uganda, not to mention Afghanistan, Iraq and Colombia, firepower solutions have already or will bring even more suffering for civilians. You don’t have to be a pacifist to understand the failed strategic logic of killing civilians to save them.

The fantasy of firepower rests on a faulty assumption that “evil” resides in a group of people that need to be killed in order to restore peace. A realist understands the civil wars in Libya, Syria and Uganda are far more complex than killing some ‘bad guys.” Like pouring toxic chemicals into an oil spill, the solution of pouring weapons into a civil war just doubles the agony for civilians and prolongs instability.

Appealing as firepower may be, wars require political solutions to reach a sustainable peace that ends civilian suffering. The shortest way to get there is not dropping bombs, selling rocket launchers, or guns to rebels in Libya or Syria to fight their government.

Military victory rarely leads to democracy or peace. Victory only ends a tiny percentage of wars. Far more wars end by peace agreements and power sharing, with military forces used only in peacekeeping roles. The history of successful transitions from brutal regimes to democratic governments illustrates that nonviolent civil society-based movements, like the one in Egypt today, have been far more successful. Peaceful protests worked even against brutal dictators like Chile’s Pinochet who for decades systematically tortured and killed any citizen who uttered a word against his iron fist. Violent rebel movements like the one in Syria are less likely to bring about positive change and result in more civilian deaths compared with nonviolent civilian movements, regardless of the level of repression against them.

Success in Syria, Uganda and elsewhere requires vast international pressure on repressive governments, rebels and warlords alike, a peace process with robust diplomacy by skilled mediators, and on-the-ground peacekeepers who don’t hand out weapons, but take a defensive stance between civilians and those firing on them.

Libya is hailed as a success story for international military intervention. There were thousands of casualties in the Libyan conflict by all sides. Gadafi’s forces killed many civilians in Libya. But the New York Times’ account details the untold numbers of civilian casualties from NATO forces. We’ll never know how many civilians died resulting from NATO’s 7,700 bombs or missiles dropped on Libya. We also won’t know how many civilians Libyan rebels killed. We do know weapons sold to the rebels were handed out to 7 year old boys. We also know that some rebels carried out horrific massacres against anyone of African decent, accusing every African of being a mercenary.

The long term consequences of shipping arms to rebels are well known. And now that small arms and weapons are spread throughout Libya, interethnic violence is on the rise and the future is not assuredly peaceful.

This week the viral video to increase the notoriety of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony faced criticism from the very people who have spent their lives trying to address the root causes of Kony’s violence in Uganda. As CNN commentator notes, the Kony 2012 video basically supports the status quo in Uganda by making the case to fight Kony’s violence with more violence, to support the violent Ugandan government which creates the fuel for Kony in the first place, and to “dismiss intricate steps of social change and make a narrow ideology mass-compatible by having millions of unquestioning people raise their fists in support.”

Local Ugandan organisations working to end violence have largely decried the presence of US troops supporting the Ugandan government’s fight against Kony. But it seems nobody in the US government or the makers of Kony 2012 thought to ask Uganda civil society democracy experts working to support peace in their own country. Instead of just decrying Kony, foreign governments and NGOs could do much more to support the peace process in Uganda and to stop working with and supporting the repressive Ugandan army.

Likewise, as we watch the carnage in Syria continue, it is hard not to fall back on the fantasy of firepower. But Western finger pointing at Syrian President Assad is ironic, given the amount of US weapons sold to similar Middle Eastern dictators over the last decades. Assad’s bullets and rockets have the same effect on civilians as the bullets sold to these regimes by the US that are now landing in the bodies of democracy activists in Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt, not to mention the atrocities by US allies killing human rights activists in Colombia and elsewhere.

There is an important step those of us in the West can do to stop civilian suffering in Syria, Uganda, and elsewhere. But it isn’t supporting a military intervention.

Instead of calling for airstrikes, call for an end to the weapons trade. Instead of falling for simplistic analysis of “good guys versus bad guys”, look for a political process to address the root causes fueling violence. Instead of hoping for a quick solution, look for long term sustainability. Instead of just pointing fingers at these regimes, look at how Western policies in these regions have too often perpetuated rather than lessened violence.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-schirch/kony-2012-and-the-failed-_b_1336574.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

‘We Did Exactly What Al-Qaida Wanted Us to Do’

dave — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 19:57:33 +0000

Former FBI agent Ali Soufan successfully interrogated captured Islamist terrorists after 9/11 without resorting to “enhanced’ techniques. In a SPIEGEL interview, he revealed how he got jihadists to talk using tea and trucker magazines and explained how 9/11 could have been prevented… Most of the people who went to Iraq to fight against us in Iraq, their motivation were the pictures of Abu Ghraib. …After 183 sessions of waterboarding, 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed still lied about the so-called Kuwaiti, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the courier who finally led us to bin Laden this May. KSM claimed that he was a low-level guy and not important. We now know this was not true.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,785558,00.html#ref=nlint

A Call To Christians At Christmas

dave — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 19:47:51 +0000

Virginia Tilley

14 December 2011

The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned that the Arab Spring is  threatening the safety of Christian communities in the Middle East.[1] He  did not realise it, but this public warning—much as President Obama’s UN  speech in September[2] struck the death knell for US credibility in the  Middle East—has dealt another fatal blow to a central Middle East actor: the  world’s Christian Churches, already suffering from a wobbly posture  regarding ethnic and religious relations in the Middle East. For those  within the faith, it impels a collective “j’accuse” to Christian leaderships  and an unqualified call for principled action. For it must now be said  plainly, and confronted honestly: it is morally unacceptable for the Christian  churches to continue to dither and wander morally on sectarian relations  in the Middle East by ducking the question of Palestine.

Anyone familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict knows the painful back  story to the Archbishop’s concerns. The Middle East is a pastiche of  religions and sects which have coexisted mostly peacefully through the  millennia, except when some exogenous factor stirred things up. Invading  empires and crusades occasionally have done so, from the Persians through  the infamous US interventions in Iran (1953) and Iraq. But one such sin has  stood for the past century as a seeping sore, aggravating sectarian tensions  and provoking religious polarisation throughout the region. That is the  creation of Israel as an ethnic state in the Levant and the resulting  Palestinian-Israeli conflict which springs from explicitly religious bigotry.  For a Church leader of the Archbishop’s stature to pretend that this conflict  does not enter the Arab Spring equation is both disingenuous and  unacceptable.  For decades, it has been a quiet scandal that individual Christians and  Christian projects regarding the Palestine-Israel conflict, labouring on  doggedly with courage and principle, have been consistently crippled by  pabulum statements, strategic over-caution or sheepish silence by the major  Church leaderships. This silence has not reflected any lack of information.  It’s certainly no secret to Christian Palestinians, and therefore the Church  leaders to whom they report, that Israel has deliberately sabotaged the  ancient Christian axis of pilgrimage between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.  Thus shattering Christian community and impoverishing the old Christian  mercantile sectors, Israel has also systematically and deliberately stoked  tensions between Muslim and Christian Palestinians over the years. The  combination has impelled steady Christian emigration in recent decades,  reducing the once-formidable and culturally rich Christian community from  some nineteen percent of Jerusalem’s population in 1944 to just over two  percent today. As a package, Israel’s policies have indeed brought Christian  Palestinians in the occupied territories under a sense of local siege and  threat they have not experienced for centuries, while aggravating sectarian  tensions with their Muslim neighbours in ways that have polarised and  poisoned sectarian sentiments throughout the Middle East. Cries of alarm  about this trend have issued from Christians in Palestine for decades and  with increasing alarm.

It has further agonised those faithful who treasure Palestine’s  awe-inspiring biblical landscape to see the Christian Churches stand silent  while Israeli settlements and security installations pave that landscape  over. Just twenty years ago, Christian pilgrims could still walk to the old  city of Jerusalem or Rachel’s Tomb on ancient trails laid down over five  thousand years among the rocky hills of Judea, following the footpaths of  prophets and disciples that wove among the springs and valleys of biblical  legend. Just twenty years ago, shepherds still tended their flocks by night  around the hills of Bethlehem, playing on wooden flutes. Now these sacred  landscapes[3] are paved over, blocked off, and the West Bank is an uglified  mess of four-lane highways, broken up by hideous concrete barriers and  electrified fences, the old olive terraces crushed and buried under acres of  monolithic Jewish-only apartment blocs. The shepherds are arrested,  harassed and gone. The ancient trails are gone forever. Millennia of  humanity’s historical heritage, razed and effaced in a scant few decades, to  serve not natural population growth but an artificial state-sponsored project  to take over land in the name of an exclusive ethnic nationalism. The loss  is heartbreaking on so many levels that it cannot be expressed.

And the world’s great Churches, whose cathedrals are nested in all this? To  Israeli authorities, quiet pleas, in stiff meetings behind closed doors,  tactical manoeuvres to keep privileges and access. To the world, silence or  token gestures, even as Israel’s construction and archaeological excavations  press up against their churches’ very walls.  Some may quickly protest that the Christian Churches have not been silent.  The World Council of Churches has regularly met, denounced, and called for  action on Palestine. The Catholic Church has expressed concern in various  ways. The Presbyterian Church launched some broad discussions. The  Evangelical Lutheran Church has called for prayer, investment and education.  Yes, yes. But a close read of Church statements finds in most of them a  disturbing vagueness, language calculated not to offend, punches  consistently pulled. The net effect? Complicity, and a spiritual crisis.

Examples of this net effect are myriad, but two will illustrate the problem:  first, a small one, the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum’s It’s Time[4], which,  despite a bold title, manages never to bruise the toes of the Israeli  government. Take, for example, its gentle idea that “It’s time to assist settlers  in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to make their home in Israel” while  not saying why or how. Or, “It’s time for people who have been refugees for  more than 60 years to regain their rights and a permanent home,” yet  carefully not specifying where those homes should be. At some point, It’s  Time slips into morally offensive symmetry that also violates common sense:  e.g., “It’s time for both sides to release their prisoners and give those  justly accused a fair trial.” While adopting the profile of a call for action, the whole piece leaves one spiritually anaesthetised and bemused, as the  illusion of real spiritual fortitude is derailed into vaporous ideals amounting  to non-action. Over-all, the effect is like reading one of those pastel  Sunday-school pamphlets.

Or, for a far more influential example, take the 2009 Kairos Palestine[5],  which has drawn thousands of Christian signatures and the endorsement of  some Christian world leaders, including Archbishop Tutu. Composed by  a formidable line-up of theologians, it does offer some firm statements: e.g.,  “the military occupation of our land is a sin against God and humanity”. But  the first warning flag arises in the first sentence of the preface, which refers  blandly to “difficult times that we still experience in this Holy Land” and  other vapid calls to “stand by” the Palestinians without saying much about  how. Otherwise, it gives the bad impression of a co-written document whose  moral momentum was curtailed by some timid gatekeepers. The bulk of  Kairos Palestine is a recital of Israeli human rights abuses and a long-winded  theological treatise on “hope”, “love” and “mission”. Alas, the journey  thus suggested never gets anywhere. For example, under the subsection,  “word to the Churches of the world”, we find an appeal: “We ask our sister  Churches not to offer a theological cover-up for the injustice we suffer,  for the sin of the occupation imposed upon us.” But instead of a clear call for  action and an incisive statement of principle, this passage then waffles  away to drain all but the mildest energy: “Our question to our brothers and  sisters in the Churches today is: Are you able to help us get our freedom  back, for this is the only way you can help the two peoples attain justice,  peace, security and love?” The call to “Jewish and Muslim religious leaders”  is equally void: “Let us together try to rise up above the political positions  that have failed so far and continue to lead us on the path of failure and  suffering.” But “rise up” how? And what action is urged regarding  Jerusalem, which is affirmed to be “the foundation of our vision and our  entire life”? None at all, except to urge that Jerusalem be “the first issue to  be negotiated”. After a page or two of this fog, the mind numbs over  and moral energy fades and turns inward to prayer circles and polite  discussion groups.

Lest it seem rude to denounce so well-meaning an effort, consider that the  1985 Kairos[6], composed by Archbishop Tutu among others, targeted  precisely this kind of slippery religious language as deployed by the major  South African churches and the South African state to defend apartheid. For  real Christian inspiration regarding Palestine, this famous Christian  document from South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle should be reread in  full, but a selection is worth reproducing here just to show just how  clear-headed Christian activism can get when it truly girds its loins. The  1985 Kairos had no truck with empty talk of “peace”, “reconciliation” and  “dialogue” and its reasoning on this point is worth quoting at length  (readers are encouraged to substitute “Palestinians” for “South Africans” to  suggest the comparison):

In a limited, guarded and cautious way [mainstream Church Theology  in South Africa] is critical of apartheid. Its criticism, however, is  superficial and counter-productive because instead of engaging in an  in-depth analysis of the signs of our times, it relies upon a few stock  ideas derived from Christian tradition and then uncritically and  repeatedly applies them to our situation. The stock ideas used by almost  all these Church leaders that we would like to examine here are:  reconciliation (or peace), justice and non-violence. …  Church Theology’ takes ‘reconciliation’ as the key to problem resolution.  It talks about the need for reconciliation between white and black,  or between all South Africans. ‘Church Theology’ often describes the  Christian stance in the following way: “We must be fair. We must listen  to both sides of the story. If the two sides can only meet to talk and  negotiate they will sort out their differences and misunderstandings,  and the conflict will be resolved.” On the face of it this may sound very  Christian. But is it?

The fallacy here is that ‘Reconciliation’ has been made into an absolute  principle that must be applied in all cases of conflict or dissension.  But not all cases of conflict are the same. We can imagine a private  quarrel between two people or two groups whose differences are based  upon misunderstandings. In such cases it would be appropriate to talk  and negotiate to sort out the misunderstandings and to reconcile  the two sides. But there are other conflicts in which one side is right and  the other wrong. There are conflicts where one side is a fully armed  and violent oppressor while the other side is defenseless and oppressed.  There are conflicts that can only be described as the struggle between  justice and injustice, good and evil, God and the devil. To speak of  reconciling these two is not only a mistaken application of the Christian  idea of reconciliation, it is a total betrayal of all that Christian faith has  ever meant. Nowhere in the Bible or in Christian tradition has it ever  been suggested that we ought to try to reconcile good and evil,  God and the devil. We are supposed to do away with evil, injustice,  oppression and sin–not come to terms with it. We are supposed to  oppose, confront and reject the devil and not try to sup with the devil.

In our situation in South Africa today it would be totally un-Christian to  plead for reconciliation and peace before the present injustices have  been removed. Any such plea plays into the hands of the oppressor by  trying to persuade those of us who are oppressed to accept our  oppression and to become reconciled to the intolerable crimes that are  committed against us. That is not Christian reconciliation, it is sin.  It is asking us to become accomplices in our own oppression, to become  servants of the devil. No reconciliation is possible in South Africa  without justice.

The 1985 Kairos Declaration is especially clear-headed about the true meaning  of peace: “It would be quite wrong to try to preserve ‘peace’ and ‘unity’  at all costs, even at the cost of truth and justice and, worse still, at the cost of  thousands of young lives. As disciples of Jesus we should rather promote  truth and justice and life at all costs, even at the cost of creating conflict,  disunity and dissension along the way.” And where Kairos-Palestine, It’s Time  and other Christian Church resolutions skid around in “both sides’  language, the 1985 Kairos explicitly rejects any false symmetries and focuses  on the central issue of oppression: It would be quite wrong to see the present conflict as simply a racial  war. The racial component is there but we are not dealing with two  equal races or nations each with their own selfish group interests. The  situation we are dealing with here is one of oppression. The conflict  is between an oppressor and the oppressed. The conflict between two  irreconcilable causes or interests in which the one is just and the other is  unjust. … This is our situation of civil war or revolution. The one side  is committed to maintaining the system at all costs and the other side is  committed to changing it at all coasts [sic]. There are two conflicting  projects here and no compromise is possible. Either we have full and  equal justice for all or we don’t.

With this noble language before us, we must finally see the truth and drop  the charade. Most Christian Church statements regarding Palestine are  embarrassing fluff by comparison.

Why the weak and woolly stance by Church leaderships in Palestine, where  the moral issues are so stark and Christian concerns so keen? The reasons  are too well known. The world’s major Churches have long walked on eggs  with Israel. Some of this caution reflects well-warranted (if confused) guilt  about centuries of anti-Semitism. Local churches may restrain themselves  out of kindly and principled concern not to offend and ruffle relations with  Jewish neighbours. Less noble motives include conservative concerns to  preserve Church real estate and privileges in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the  Galilee and other Biblical sites, where an irate Israel can sever Christian  access in an instant. It is also Not Done to criticise other Christian  denominations, so even those Churches who view Israel’s practices as  abhorrent will still avoid challenging the whole Zionist project, as this  would insult the Zionist theology of evangelical churches that have fallen  for Israel’s (cynically deployed) story of collective Jewish redemption of the  Holy Land. Given that actual Christian life in Palestine is being graphically  destroyed, however, one does not have to be a 666-er to see that Zionist  propaganda has “led Christians astray” by successfully attaching Jewish  state-building in Palestine to misty visions of Jewish life in a Biblical  landscape and confusing Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (even  Christian ones) with messianic prophecies about the End Times.

Some historically minded cynics might object here that Christian timidity  and confusion about the conflict in Palestine should not be singled out.  Courageous priests and Christian activists have always stood forth in the  world’s conflict zones in selfless and sometimes martyred defence of the  weak, and do so in Palestine, but the uncomfortable truth is that these heroic  figures and groups have always been outliers. Overwhelmingly, over  past centuries the major Christian churches have either linked their futures  and finances to whatever states they operated within or simply operated in  an illusory sphere of detached spiritual practice where they absolved  themselves of moral responsibility for the suffering around them, except by  offering spiritual solace to endure it. Here one might recall the old state- church alliance in Latin America, a system of totalitarian social control that  has stood for five centuries as the edifice glowering over those grassroots  liberation-theologians whose courage is always cited as the Church’s  redeeming example, yet whose noble work the last Pope outlawed. Hence,  for long-time observers of the conflict, it has been no surprise but still a  bitter pill that the Archbishop of Canterbury, like most Church leaders, has  been conspicuously silent, vague or reserved about Israel’s physical ruin  of the Holy Land landscape and its progressive decimation of Christian  community in Palestine.

Yet it is really too much that this same Archbishop now blames the Arab  Spring, of all things, for an anti-Christian tilt that his own Church has,  through neglect and caution of the Palestinian problem, systematically  aggravated. For it is indeed a bitter scandal that the official Churches in  Palestine, with their great properties embedded in the Jewish state and their  slumbering but immense moral authority on the world stage, who could  delegitimize and end Israel’s occupation overnight with one unified public  denunciation, instead have opted—from timidity, caution, conservatism,  internecine rivalries or merely a sloppy moral compass—to enable it. That  this choice has fed heavily into the present sectarian mess in the Middle East  is a given. The Archbishop may well worry that Christians in Egypt and  elsewhere now feel “exposed and uncertain”, but he would do well to  consider how much responsibility for those fears traces to his own desk.

It is up to the entire Christian community to end this confusion, abandon  feeble caution and unintended hypocrisy, and reconsider the example of  Jesus as set forth in the 1985 Kairos and in the Gospels themselves. The tasks  in Palestine have long been plain. The evangelical Christian right must be  approached about its gullible equation of a modern military state with  spiritual rebirth. Israel’s instrumental deceit about Jewish life in the Holy  Land constituting a path to Christian salvation must be exposed. The sins of  ethnic cleansing and state-sponsored bigotry must be confronted. The  malevolent whispers circulated by Zionist plants in Jerusalem and Palestine,  which attempt to demonise Islam for Christians and Christianity for  Muslims, must be openly and unanimously denounced. In the spirit of the  1985 Kairos, the true meaning of Christian love must show its moral fist to  reject false symmetry and the sinful notion of reconciliation with oppression.

Each Christmas, it has become a seasonal ritual for Christians to call for new  care and action on Palestine. Each subsequent year, the same empty,  circumscribed, ineffectual gestures result. The courage of the Arab Spring  exposes this shameful ritualised cycle of moral failure as a spiritual  imperative. This year’s Christmas must be a time for spiritual renewal,  frank self-examination, fresh insight, and new courage to set aside sanitised  pleas and empty prayers, stop listening to the internal gatekeepers, reject  Israel’s manipulation of Christian theology to serve militaristic ends,  and demand that all Church leaderships, with one clarion voice, call for true  justice in Palestine. If the teachings of Jesus mean anything today, surely  they mean this: the salvation of all three Abrahamic faiths from the false  gods of mutual fear and the scourge of oppression. The alternative is to  stand before the Cross at Christmas 2012 with a deepening and well-earned  sense of shame.

Links 1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/12/arab-spring-christians-archbishop-canterbury  2. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/09/21/remarks-president-obama-address-united-nations-general-assembly 3. http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520234222 4. http://tinyurl.com/84z5y93 5. http://www.kairospalestine.ps/?q=content/document 6. http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/kairos-document-1985-0

Virginia Tilley is a former professor of political science and international  relations in the US. In 2005, she took leave to conduct research in South Africa  and in 2006 was appointed Chief Research Specialist at the Human Sciences  Research Council of South Africa. In that capacity she led the inquiry which  examined whether Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories  had assumed characteristics of colonialism and apartheid. It produced  the 2009 report “Occupation, Colonialism Apartheid?: A Re-assessment of  Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian Territories under International  Law.” She is author of “The One-State Solution” (London Review of Books,  Nov. 6, 2003)* and The One-State Solution (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2005) and  numerous articles and essays on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Email:  virginia.tilley@gmail.com

Where You There When They Crucified My Lord?

dave — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:19:09 +0000

By Chris Hedges, December 06, 2011 “Truth Dig” -

Chris Hedges gave an abbreviated version of this talk Saturday morning in Liberty Square in New York City as part of an appeal to Trinity Church to turn over to the Occupy Wall Street movement an empty lot, known as Duarte Square, that the church owns at Canal Street and 6th Avenue. Occupy Wall Street protesters, following the call, began a hunger strike at the gates of the church-owned property. Three of the demonstrators were arrested Sunday on charges of trespassing, and three others took their places.

The Occupy movement is the force that will revitalize traditional Christianity in the United States or signal its moral, social and political irrelevance. The mainstream church, battered by declining numbers and a failure to defiantly condemn the crimes and cruelty of the corporate state, as well as a refusal to vigorously attack the charlatans of the Christian right, whose misuse of the Gospel to champion unfettered capitalism, bigotry and imperialism is heretical, has become a marginal force in the life of most Americans, especially the young. Outside the doors of churches, many of which have trouble filling a quarter of the pews on Sundays, struggles a movement, driven largely by young men and women, which has as its unofficial credo the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God.
Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

It was the church in Latin America, especially in Central America and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, which provided the physical space, moral support and direction for the opposition to dictatorship. It was the church in East Germany that organized the peaceful opposition marches in Leipzig that would bring down the communist regime in that country. It was the church in Czechoslovakia, and its 90-year-old cardinal, that blessed and defended the Velvet Revolution. It was the church, and especially the African-American church, that made possible the civil rights movements. And it is the church, especially Trinity Church in New York City with its open park space at Canal and 6th, which can make manifest its commitment to the Gospel and nonviolent social change by permitting the Occupy movement to use this empty space, just as churches in other cities that hold unused physical space have a moral imperative to turn them over to Occupy movements. If this nonviolent movement fails, it will eventually be replaced by one that will employ violence. And if it fails it will fail in part because good men and women, especially those in the church, did nothing.

Where is the church now? Where are the clergy? Why do so many church doors remain shut? Why do so many churches refuse to carry out the central mandate of the Christian Gospel and lift up the cross?

Some day they are going to have to answer the question: “Where were you when they crucified my Lord?”

Let me tell you on this first Sunday in Advent, when we celebrate hope, when we remember in the church how Mary and Joseph left Nazareth for Bethlehem, why I am in Liberty Square. I am here because I have tried, however imperfectly, to live by the radical message of the Gospel. I am here because I know that it is not what we say or profess but what we do. I am here because I have seen in my many years overseas as a foreign correspondent that great men and women of moral probity arise in all cultures and all religions to fight the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. I am here because I have seen that it is possible to be a Jew, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu or an atheist and carry the cross. The words are different but the self-sacrifice and thirst for justice are the same. And these men and women, who may not profess what I profess or believe what I believe, are my brothers and sisters. And I stand with them honoring and respecting our differences and finding hope and strength and love in our common commitment.

At times like these I hear the voices of the saints who went before us. The suffragist Susan B. Anthony, who announced that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God, and the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who said, “The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.” Or Henry David Thoreau, who told us we should be men and women first and subjects afterward, that we should cultivate a respect not for the law but for what is right. And Frederick Douglass, who warned us: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” And the great 19th century populist Mary Elizabeth Lease, who thundered: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.” And Gen. Smedley Butler, who said that after 33 years and four months in the Marine Corps he had come to understand that he had been nothing more than a gangster for capitalism, making Mexico safe for American oil interests, making Haiti and Cuba safe for banks and pacifying the Dominican Republic for sugar companies. War, he said, is a racket in which newly dominated countries are exploited by the financial elites and Wall Street while the citizens foot the bill and sacrifice their young men and women on the battlefield for corporate greed. Or Eugene V. Debs, the socialist presidential candidate, who in 1912 pulled almost a million votes, or 6 percent, and who was sent to prison by Woodrow Wilson for opposing the First World War, and who told the world: “While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” And Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who when he was criticized for walking with Martin Luther King on the Sabbath in Selma answered: “I pray with my feet” and who quoted Samuel Johnson, who said: “The opposite of good is not evil. The opposite of good is indifference.” And Rosa Parks, who defied the segregated bus system and said “the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” And Philip Berrigan, who said: “If enough Christians follow the Gospel, they can bring any state to its knees.”

And the poet Langston Hughes, who wrote:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The DallasMorning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

How To Feed The Hungry Faster

dave — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:18:37 +0000

NOVEMBER 1, 2011, 9:15 PM

How to Feed the Hungry, Faster

By TINA ROSENBERG

On Friday, I wrote about how people in Dhobley, Somalia, are getting emergency food despite a guerrilla war that is keeping out aid workers ― and food. Instead of trucking in sacks of food, World Concern and its partner, the African Rescue Committee, distribute vouchers that people in Dhobley use to buy what they need from local merchants.

Many countries that donate emergency food aid are moving away from shipping bags of food and toward using vouchers or other methods for local purchase. (The World Concern program is financed by Canada Foodgrains Bank and the Canadian government.) The United NationsWorld Food Program is also using cash, vouchers and electronic transfers ― often by cell phone ― when circumstances allow. Vouchers solve many of the serious problems that have always plagued in-kind food aid: food can get to the hungry quickly; there are no transport or storage costs; it works in dangerous situations; it allows recipients to buy the food they want and increases the welcome for refugees and contributes to the local economy. Aid is multiplied as it helps not only recipients, but merchants. For example, Catholic Relief Services responded to floods in Benin with a program that gives villagers vouchers they can use to buy grains, legumes and oil from local small vendors ― usually women who sell tiny quantities of goods in outdoor markets. Without the voucher business, these women would be almost as poor as their new customers.
Reader DMH (4) pointed out a familiar parallel: “It mirrors the Red Cross and Salvation Army’s requests that people donate cash to help after disasters. There are appropriate places and times for donating used or new goods, but as the article points out logistical costs can make it inefficient.”

While vouchers are a creative solution, there are projects that go further. Cash for Work not only feeds people in an emergency, it can improve local agricultural conditions so that fewer emergencies happen. In 2007, for example, World Concern began to use Cash for Work in refugee camps in Chad that housed people fleeing Darfur and eastern Chad. The program hires thousands of people to plant trees and build small dams and rock walls on hills to slow the runoff of water. Such projects can transform land from desert to arable in a few years. “It was a way to pay back the community for the environmental damage wreaked by refugees, who cut down trees,” said Tracy Stover, the emergency coordinator in Dadaab, Kenya, of World Concern, who worked on the project. On pay day, World Concern organizes a market ― merchants bring their wares to the camps for people to buy.

Derek Sciba/World ConcernMohamed Yagouv, a 21-year-old refugee from Darfur, helped build a wall for better irrigation in a camp in Goz Geida, Chad. He earned food vouchers to purchase goods at a local market through a World Concern program, Cash for Work.

Cash for Work has many variations. The government of Ethiopia runs a large-scale program that employs the most destitute ― mostly women ― in projects in their community that improve agriculture or build roads, schools or clinics. They are paid in cash where there is food to be bought, bags of grain and cans of oil where there is none. This program, called the Productive Safety Net Program, is helping some 8 million people. In the Philippines, where a cellphone can cost as little as $10 and 80 percent of the people have access to one, the W.F.P. is experimenting with using text messages to give people vouchers they can spend at thousands of different stores. They earn the money through labor in projects that rebuild their communities after typhoon damage.

Cash, vouchers and cash-for-work are not feasible in every emergency, but most organizations and governments are moving toward using them where they can. The United States indirectly finances some of these alternatives to in-kind food aid: “Even the United States has supported the efforts of W.F.P. and others to engage in the use of cash transfers and vouchers, as well local and regional purchases of food for distribution as aid,” wrote FuzzyR from Floyds Knobs, Ind. (22)

But America is the world’s largest direct donor of food aid, and the vast majority of it still comes in the form of sacks of grain ― a policy protected by entrenched interests. The Bush administration tried to challenge them ― it asked Congress to give more flexibility to as much as a quarter of the food aid budget. “They tried through the appropriations process and the farm bill,” said Gawain Kripke, the director of policy and research at Oxfam America. “But they didn’t put the full force of their lobbying effort behind it, and it got stomped on by industry. It was never really seriously considered by Congress.”

In the 2008 farm bill, the Bush administration managed to get money for a pilot project testing alternative forms of aid (which don’t really need more testing). The numbers were small ― $60 million over four years. Kripke called it “a small divot ― hardly enough to even do a pilot.”

Last year, the Obama administration allowed $300 million of the State Department’s disaster assistance budget to be used for alternative forms of emergency food aid. It has helped people in Pakistan after floods there, in Somalia and Niger, among other places. The White House is requesting the same sum for next year.

“The thinking has always been that the U.S. government needs to have as many tools in its tool box as possible to meet emergency food needs of people in crisis,” said Jon C. Brause, the Agency for International Development’s deputy assistant administrator for democracy, conflict and humanitarian assistance. “I’ve been in this business for 20 years and it’s always been something we’ve wanted.”

But Brause said the administration will not try to liberate any of the $1.69 billion it requested for Food for Peace in the 2012 farm bill.

America’s biggest food aid program sits in the farm bill because the program was originally designed as a way to get rid of surplus agricultural products to keep prices high. But seeing food aid through the lens of domestic agricultural means there has never been serious consideration of how to make food aid more effective.

The loudest voice for in-kind food aid is that of the shipping industry, which has even managed to get a requirement that 75 percent of food aid shipped must go on American carrier ships. Kristine Grow, a spokesperson for USA Maritime, a group of carriers and maritime unions, argues that ocean freight is responsible for only 10.6 percent of the Food for Peace appropriation. But there are other costs associated with the requirement of buying food in America ― higher prices and the cost of shipping grain over land to and from ports.

Many humanitarian aid groups themselves back in-kind food aid. This is in part because they are allowed to sell some of the food they get on the open market, and use the profits to fund their operations. Some groups, like CARE, have stopped this practice, which is called monetization of food aid. But others continue ― Catholic Relief Services, for example, is the second largest distributor of American food aid in the world after the World Food Program. It is also raises money through monetization ― this year, $30 million of its $817 million budget. Monetization helps humanitarian organizations finance important work. But it also gives them added incentive to support a system that is inefficient at best and counterproductive at worst.

American food aid to the starving is imperiled ― for Congress, it’s an easy cut. That’s an argument for shifting to a more efficient delivery system. “You get 100 percent more assistance for the money if you make these reforms,” said Kripke. But because the current system does serve influential American interests, changing practices is politically risky. “My concern is if you do it most economically efficient way will you maintain level of support at that funding?” said Stephanie Mercier, a former staff member of the Senate Agriculture committee who is now a consultant on agricultural policy issues. “If you don’t, and you get $500 million instead of $1.5 billion for food aid, that’s not a positive outcome. You talk to the folks who deliver food aid and they say it’s probably more efficient if we had cash to do it. But they’re willing to accept inefficiencies in order to have the program.”

Join Fixes on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/nytimesfixes.

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book is “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World.”

Tickets To Survival In Famine

dave — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:12:56 +0000

OCTOBER 27, 2011, 9:35 PM

In Famine, Vouchers Can Be Tickets to Survival

By TINA ROSENBERG

The town of Dhobley, Somalia, sits at the gateway of hell. Just west of Dhobley is the border with Kenya, and the road to Dadaab, which hosts a giant complex of refugee camps; Dhobley has become the last stop in Somalia for a growing stream of desperate, starving people in flight from famine. In Dhobley, as well, drought has ruined crops and felled cows. There is no government to help. The town is a battleground; control of Dhobley has teetered between the Shabaab Islamist militant group and government forces. Shabaab has blocked food aid from entering Dhobley and burned a food truck, but soldiers from all sides have stolen food meant for the destitute. The usual street life of an African village — children playing, women laughing together — has vanished. Gunshots are a constant background noise — “like birds singing,” said Tracy Stover, the emergency coordinator in Dadaab for the humanitarian group World Concern.

It is too dangerous for aid workers to come to Dhobley. Food aid is not getting through. Yet some in Dhobley are eating.

World Concern, TEAR Australia’s Seattle-based Christian humanitarian partner, and its Somali partner, the African Rescue Committee, provide 1,800 families every two weeks with rice, beans, cooking oil, salt and sugar for their tea. The recipients are both residents and families from elsewhere in Somalia who have fled to Dhobley. Another 800 families a week, mostly the displaced who have come to Dhobley, get goods such as mosquito nets, pots, spoons, jerry cans for water, sleeping mats and plastic sheeting.

People are getting these goods very much like they always have: they go shopping. With money from the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, an association of churches, World Concern provides people with vouchers they can use in the shops of selected local merchants. The merchants were carefully chosen, representing all the clans in Dhobley. The African Rescue Committee distributes the vouchers. When the merchants can travel to the border, they present the vouchers they have collected, which are matched against their duplicates. Each merchant gets a promissory note. The actual reimbursement comes through an electronic transfer from Nairobi to an account the merchants set up in a bank in Dhobley.

Providing hungry people with money, obviously, is no solution if there is no food to be bought. But in Dhobley, the market is working — or would be, if people could afford to buy anything. Although every foodstuff except salt is imported, neither war nor famine has interrupted the supply chain of commercial goods reaching Dhobley. “If they have 3 or 4 days notice, merchants have no difficulty meeting supply,” said Stephen Houston, the disaster manager for World Concern. “We’ve been able to keep the vouchers flowing through almost this whole period.”

For decades, emergency food aid has meant sacks of grain or legumes and huge cans of cooking oil. The United States, by far the world’s largest donor of food aid, began large food donations because the government was buying up surplus crops to keep prices high for producers; sending the grain abroad was a way to keep it off the market. What became the Food for Peace program started in 1954 as the Agricultural Trade Development Assistance Act.

Shipping food abroad may have been an effective way to support grain prices, but as aid to the hungry, it has always been a deeply flawed idea. It is slow. Once an emergency is recognized, the government must solicit bids, gather the food and put it on a ship. It can take from 4 to 6 months to get food into the mouths of people who need it. Now the United States Agency for International Development and other groups are saving time by shipping food to storage facilities in key places — for example, in Mombasa, Kenya. But even from there, it can take weeks to arrive where it is needed.

Arthur NazaryanA Somali woman with her two children, who recently arrived in Liboi, Kenya from Dhobley, Somalia. She holds a voucher for food issued by an aid organization in Dhobley.

Sending food from the United States is also expensive. The U.S. food aid program requires that food be shipped from America, and 75 percent of it must sail on American ships. Half or more of the cost of food aid goes to transport, storage and handling. That percentage is rising as the price of oil goes up and because emergencies increasingly take place inland, in places that are expensive to reach, such as Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia.

Then there is the security problem. Like Dhobley, many places are no-go zones for aid workers for long stretches. When the food trucks do arrive, the crowd that surges around them is chaotic and often violent. The people who need the food most are not the ones likely to succeed in pushing themselves to the front of the line.

Waiting in line for sacks of grain is also demeaning. Since the choice of food sent is largely determined by agribusiness in the United States, the food may not be the most nutritious or familiar to the people who will eat it.

Finally, food aid, while helping individuals, can hurt the economy around them. Tensions between the displaced and the people who host them usually run high — some families in Dhobley are hosting 20 people in their houses, said a Dhobley resident interviewed by Arthur Nazaryan, a photographer who is documenting the crisis in the region. Food aid makes these tensions worse — farmers find their market undercut by free food; local merchants are bypassed. This is a big problem; refugees need communities to host them, and none will do so if they will so clearly lose in the process.

Except for the United States, most nations around the world that donate food for emergencies are moving towards giving cash or vouchers. The change solves many of the problems that affect in-kind food aid. Using cash or vouchers is faster and cheaper. Nothing has to physically move: indeed, as Africa moves to banking by cell phone, the whole process can be accomplished by text. It is more dignified and gives families greater choice. And it is a form of aid that helps a whole village. “One thing you accomplish by using local merchants and splitting the distribution between (the displaced) and the host community is that the benefits get spread around,” says Houston.

In Dhobley, World Concern’s program adds to the town’s economy in two ways. Vouchers go to the displaced and also to local families in the greatest need, with the names chosen by the community. This is also possible with bags of food, of course, but it is less flexible. Just as important, merchants are selling the goods and the money is circulating in the village.

Vouchers and cash payments are not free of logistical headaches. Fraud is a big concern. So far, World Concern has seen none in Dhobley. Vouchers are numbered and duplicates held; the voucher needs to match its twin for the merchant to get paid. Another possible problem is that merchants may not give buyers full value. The solution is careful monitoring, but this has become a casualty of the security problems in Dhobley. Houston said that World Concern is hiring secret shoppers to provide some level of vigilance.

Vouchers and cash don’t work in every circumstance — there must be food available to begin with, whether locally grown or not. Also, people who are severely malnourished need specific high-nutrition foods, which are unlikely to be available in the local market. Nor will it work when the market is so small that the vouchers would cause inflation, which would damage the purchasing power of those who don’t receive vouchers.

The increasing use of cash or vouchers in emergency aid parallels a similar shift in how countries provide long-term help to their poor. In the past few years, traditional methods of fighting poverty have been upended by a new idea: give the poor cash — conditioned on behaviors such as keeping their children in school that will help the next generation stay out of poverty. Led by Mexico and Brazil, dozens of countries around the world are now abandoning the subsidy of tortillas or milk and giving the poor money instead. They are finding it is more efficient, less prone to politicization and corruption and more secure, as transfers can be done with banking cards. Studies show that payments of this kind help lift everyone in a village, whether they are direct beneficiaries or not.

In emergency aid, the United States is the big holdout; grain shipments make up all but a tiny percentage of American emergency food aid. On Wednesday I’ll examine another creative way to provide food aid, and look at why American food aid has been so inefficient — and why that might be changing.

Arthur Nazaryan provided reporting assistance.

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Is the world any safer?

dave — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:07:23 +0000

American civilians killed in 9/11: 2,977

Afghan civilians killed in the War On Terror over 8,800

Iraqi civilians killed in the War On Terror estimates range from over 150,000 (WHO) to over 650,000 (The Lancet) to over 1.1 million (IIACSS/ORB) to as high as 1.45 million (extrapolation) The Lancet’s estimate 2.5% of the country’s population

Refugees created as a direct result of the War on Terror over 6.7 million. (UNHCR)

-Is the world any safer or more peaceful?

Believers are Nicer

dave — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 09:55:14 +0000

Simon Smart

September 9, 2011

I’m getting ready to duck, but don’t shoot the messenger. The results are in: religious people are nicer. Or so says Robert Putnam, professor of public policy at Harvard.

Described by London’s Sunday Times as the most influential academic in the world today, Putnam is not a religious believer. Best known for Bowling Alone, the book that made ”social capital” a key indicator of a healthy society, Putnam, with his co-author David Campbell (a Mormon), has waded into the debate about religion in the public square with his latest offering, American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us. The book emerges out of two massive and comprehensive surveys into religion and public life in America.

Their most conspicuously controversial finding is that religious people make better citizens and neighbours. Putnam and Campbell write that ”for the most part, the evidence we review suggests that religiously observant Americans are more civic, and in some respects simply ‘nicer’ ”.

On every measurable scale, religious Americans are more generous, more altruistic and more involved in civic life than their secular counterparts.

They are more likely to give blood, money to a homeless person, financial aid to family or friends, a seat to a stranger and to spend time with someone who is ”a bit down”.

Putnam and his team interviewed 3000 people twice over two years, asking a range of questions about people’s religious lives as well as their civic involvement, social relationships, political beliefs, economic situation and demographic profile.

The religious landscape is very different in Australia, but what information we do have suggests similar results here. A 2004 report by the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Research and Philanthropy in Australia, found that people who said they were religious were more likely to volunteer, and for more hours, than others. The Australian Bureau of Statistics data suggests the same. Nonetheless, a study here as in-depth and wide-ranging as Putnam’s would be fascinating.

Putnam says religious people don’t like everything about his book, but they do like this material.

Yet, despite what I’m writing here, I’m not really claiming that people of faith are better people than non-believers.

Many of my friends have no faith and would outdo me on measures used in these surveys.

In the church, just like any area of life, it’s a mixed bag of the good, the not so good and the, well, nutty.

But this research is in stark contrast to claims by prominent authors such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. After reading their works, you’d swear that religion makes you immediately abandon rationality to become an inward-looking extremist. What Putnam’s book does at the very least is to bring a bit of balance into the conversation.

A sobering note for believers is that this study reveals that the content of a person’s belief isn’t what matters so much as their level of involvement in a religious community.

An atheist who comes to church to support her partner will rate as well as any believer on these scores.

What can’t be denied, according to Putnam and Campbell, is that there is something unique about a religious community, that has an impact on people for good.

So next time a removalist truck delivers a bunch of God-botherers into your neighbourhood, don’t despair. It might be reason to celebrate.

Simon Smart is a director of the Centre for Public Christianity.