The Way We Live Our Lives in Stories

A Conversation with

Jonathan Gottschall
Source: Edge 

We think of stories as a wildly creative art form but within that creativity and that diversity there is a lot of conformity. Stories are very predictable. No matter where you go in the world, no matter how different people seem, no matter how hard their lives are, people tell stories, universally, and universally the stories are more or less like ours: the same basic human obsessions, and the same basic structure. The structure comes down to: stories have a character, the character has a predicament or a problem—they're always problem-focused—and the character tries to solve the problem. In its most basic terms, that's what a story is—a problem solution narrative. 

JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL is a Distinguished Research Fellow in the English Department at Washington & Jefferson College. He is the author or editor of six books, including The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (a New York Times Editor’s Choice Selection and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize). 

THE WAY WE LIVE OUR LIVES IN STORIES
There's a big question about what it is that makes people people. What is it that most sets our species apart from every other species? That's the debate that I've been involved in lately.
When we call the species homo sapiens that's an argument in the debate. It's an argument that it is our sapience, our wisdom, our intelligence, or our big brains that most sets our species apart. Other scientists, other philosophers have pointed out that, no, a lot of the time we're really not behaving all that rationally and reasonably. It's our upright posture that sets us apart, or it's our opposable thumb that allows us to do this incredible tool use, or it's our cultural sophistication, or it's the sophistication of language, and so on and so forth. I'm not arguing against any of those things, I’m just arguing that one thing of equal stature has typically been left off of this list, and that’s the way that people live their lives inside stories.
 

We live in stories all day long—fiction stories, novels, TV shows, films, interactive video games. We daydream in stories all day long. Estimates suggest we just do this for hours and hours per day—making up these little fantasies in our heads, these little fictions in our heads. We go to sleep at night to rest; the body rests, but not the brain. The brain stays up at night. What is it doing? It's telling itself stories for about two hours per night. It's eight or ten years out of our lifetime composing these little vivid stories in the theaters of our minds.

I'm not here to downplay any of those other entries into the "what makes us special" sweepstakes. I'm just here to say that one thing that has been left off the list is storytelling. We live our lives in stories, and it's sort of mysterious that we do this. We're not really sure why we do this. It's one of these questions
—storytelling—that falls in the gap between the sciences and the humanities. If you have this division into two cultures: you have the science people over here in their buildings, and the humanities people over here in their buildings. They're writing in their own journals, and publishing their own book series, and the scientists are doing the same thing.

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You have this division, and you have all this area in between the sciences and the humanities that no one is colonizing. There are all these questions in the borderlands between these disciplines that are rich and relatively unexplored. One of them is storytelling and it's one of these questions that humanities people aren't going to be able to figure out on their own because they don't have a scientific toolkit that will help them gradually, painstakingly narrow down the field of competing ideas. The science people don't really see these questions about storytelling as in their jurisdiction: "This belongs to someone else, this is the humanities' territory, we don't know anything about it."

What is needed is fusion—people bringing together methods, ideas, approaches from scholarship and from the sciences to try to answer some of these questions about storytelling. Humans are addicted to stories, and they play an enormous role in human life and yet we know very, very little about this subject. There's an important growth area here for new understanding.

Storytelling is great, we all love stories, but do we need empiricism, too, or can we let stories run away from us and lose track of empirical reality? That's certainly a danger.

One of the major problems that I dealt with in my academic career coming out of the humanities was a tremendous frustration, to the point of almost paralysis, with the lack of an empirical foundation for any of the work that gets done in the humanities.

There are all kinds of storytelling. You have a question about X, Y or Z, and it's very easy for a talented PhD-wielding, high IQ person to tell a wonderful and engaging story about it. The story is often very credible, and very plausible, and very good, but the problem is that scholar B and scholar C have their own very plausible excellent stories as well.

A great deal of my work, especially earlier on in my career, was about going into the sciences and ransacking them, and trying to hijack the methodologies that are used to help scientists choose between competing stories. Scientists are telling stories, too. That's what a hypothesis is. You have the question, and you make up a story about how to account for the phenomenon. The advantage that sciences have over the humanities (one of them) is that science has methods for helping winnow down the field of competing hypotheses.

The argument has always been that none of those methods work in the humanities. That idea is bunk. It's like saying before people went to the moon, "You can't get to the moon because no one has ever been there." But no one had ever tried really before. It's not like people had tried desperately to make empirical methods work in the humanities, and then failed, and then moved on to something easy like string theory. They didn't put their shoulder into it and give up. We just have a thought habit that this is a field where it's strictly qualitative, and quantitative methods can't work, but that's false. You can find a lot of proof of concept studies that have been done. There's empirical work in the humanities that's quite good.

The main fear people have about importing empirical methods, scientific methods into the humanities is that somehow what's special about the humanities would be vaporized. It would become just like robotic, literary scholars would come to work in lab coats or something and the field would be sterilized. But it's really easy for the two things to co-exist. You need good scholarship, you absolutely do. You need good historians, and good literary theorists, and good literary critics, and none of that work is at odds with work that is methodologically scientific. There will be certain questions that can be addressed in a fairly rigorous scientific manner, and some questions that really can't.

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I got to this place—this place between the sciences and the humanities—close to 20 years ago when I just started out in graduate school. I went to graduate school in literary studies, English. I wanted to be a scholar when I grew up, and a scholar I thought was someone who discovered things, or made some sort of small contribution to human self-understanding. Then I got into graduate school, and at the time the academic humanities were still quite firmly in the grip of postmodernism.
I would go to work as a graduate student every day, and I was told by my professors that, okay, we'll read, we'll write, but it's all kind of hopeless. The odds of us ever understanding anything are vanishingly small. It's a dog chasing its tail forever. I was frustrated by that; I wanted to try to find something like more reliable and more durable answers to the questions that I was addressing because I thought they were important questions.

I started looking around and thinking about, how do we do this? What's a good model for generating more reliable knowledge? I didn't have to think about it very hard. I said, "Well, the sciences seem to do this. The sciences seem to do a nice job. They have their mistakes, they backslide, they go in circles now and then, but most people allow that over time there's a gradual improvement in our understanding of the universe that wasn't there before." The humanities, in large part, have trouble making the same claim.

My career, especially in the early part, was about seeing how far I could get applying a more scientific model to the sorts of questions that I wanted to ask about art, those questions about literature in particular.

When I was in graduate school I saw several problems with the business model in academic literary studies: bad theory, bad method, bad attitude, bad ideology.
On the bad-theory front, what we had was a domination by Freudian theories, psychoanalytic theory, and very rigid versions of social constructivism, this idea that everything is pure nurture and no nature. I knew those models were out of date, so part of what my work was about was updating the model—the theory—to make it consistent with the best thinking in the sciences of the mind.

The other problem was a problem that I discussed a little earlier, this idea of, okay, so you have better theory to guide your research, and you will come up with ideas, but how do you know if your idea is true? I wanted to see if there were ways of quantifying some of the questions that you approach in the humanities, and submitting them to statistical analysis, and scientific testing, and falsification, and all of that stuff.

In the early days—the late ‘90s, early 2000s—I was doing things like having teams of readers, students, and together we would content-analyze folktales from all around the world. We would get a corpus of folktales from maybe 100 different cultures, hundreds of tales from every culture. This would be much easier to do now because you would have the computer tools to automate a great deal of it. We had to go out in the libraries, get the collections, scan them laboriously, and we'd ask questions that were very, very simple, and very, very basic.

For example, a question: Are female characters underrepresented in literature? Are there fewer female characters in literature? At first glance, just from your normal reading, you say, "Yes, it seems that way." And then you would say, "Well, what about in, I don't know, Elizabethan plays, and what about in folktales? What about on TV? What about in films? What about in other cultures? What about in other centuries?"

The argument had always been, yes, female characters are underrepresented because of sexism in the West. We said, "How do we find out if that idea is true?" What we did is we got this big body of folktales, and we'd look to see if we'd find the same relationship. We had a couple different ways of looking to see whether or not females were underrepresented in those samples. One thing you could do, is to read tales, and have the coders literally code: Who is the main character? How many characters are there? How many males? How many females? We also had the computer count pronouns: he/him versus her/she et cetera. We found very, very little evidence for the sort of Western patriarchy argument because what we found basically all around the world was that female characters were underrepresented across the board. We did not find cultures where you had parity. We did not find cultures where you had more leading female characters than leading male characters.

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Often times, with a very simple question like this, the response will be this is the humanities, this is about books, this is about words, and there is no way of ever knowing the answers to these questions for sure, so all we can do is argue about it forever. But this study showed that with a little bit of elbow grease and a little bit of ingenuity, there's a way to go out and get something like an answer to this question.

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The tension between the humanities and the sciences is old, and it's ongoing. So you have the "two cultures" clash that has been ameliorated in some areas, and people on the sciences side and the humanities side have all been trained to say the right things now, but the tension is still there. I'm in a somewhat interesting position to evaluate the arguments on both sides. People in the sciences are frustrated, and they think the people in the humanities are sort of thick skulled, and recalcitrant. People in the humanities think that the sciences are cocksure, and hubristic and intent on colonizing everything. They are afraid that what the sciences really want is to take over the whole shebang. They want their science building and they want the humanities building as well.

I do think that the people in the sciences, people in my camp even, could do a better job of talking about things, and dealing with some of the concerns. The humanities people are concerned with a feeling of evaporation—what science really does is it explains away magic. The humanities, and art, especially, can be viewed as the last bastion of magic, this unexplainable thing, this truly mysterious thing. We don't know how it works, we don't know why it works, we just know it works. Part of the reason humanities people haven't wanted science involved in this effort to understand art is this feeling that it would be explained, and if it's explained, it would be explained away.

Then there's a lot of misunderstanding, and it's basically an either/or mentality. You can either have scientific tools, approaches and methods, or you can have traditional scholarship where, of course, what's needed is a toolkit that has both things. You would have certain problems that would yield to this set of tools, and you had other problems that would be more appropriate for that sort of tool.

Another major concern in the humanities has to do with determinism and reductionism, the sense of reductionism, the idea, again, that something like Shakespeare would be dismissed as a drama of selfish genes, just boiled down to selfish genes. What's the answer to Shakespeare? "Oh, selfish genes". Part of what's going on there is a confusion about what the word "reductionism" means. The word has that sense of reducing—grandeur or greatness would be reduced—where that's not really what scientists mean by that. "Reduction" means explanation. It's not really such a scary concept. But I do think that there's been an effort from the science side possibly to conquer the opposition. And it hasn't gone very well. Probably a stronger diplomatic push is called for.

I was certainly in the warrior camp earlier on in my career. I wrote some angry things, "angry-young-man" type books, manifestos, and while I don't take anything back it was not a good strategy. People got their hackles up, and they got their claws out, too, and nothing really happened.

Was I too pugnacious in my earlier work? To some extent, yes, I was. The question is what do you hope to achieve? In my case what I hoped to achieve was a sea change. In the manifesto-type book that I wrote around 2008 I said that what I was aiming for was "totally disciplinary upheaval." I was going for a revolution. I argued the case just that boldly the whole way through, and with quite a lot of polemical strength. It was a very tough polemic. I'm proud of that book, but it didn't achieve much. It did not produce total disciplinary upheaval. What it did was strongly marginalize me within the field.

A few years later I wrote another book—my most recent book—about the same questions about the relationship between science and art and I just wasn't as aggressive as I was before. And it was fine. I got to make the same points, but people didn't see me as scary, people didn't see me as off-putting. I didn't sound like the type of guy that you maybe wouldn't want to have in your department because he was too aggressive. That book will do a lot more to push the sort of agenda that I'm interested in. Playing nice in that case seemed to have been a better strategy for getting what I wanted.

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If I were to build my own English department from scratch, what would that department be like?

A lot of it would be very similar to how it is now. You would still read the great authors, and the new authors, and you would still have literary criticism, literary theory. But you would also have courses in human psychology. You would have courses that would address this big question: Why do we even have literature at all? Why do we have stories at all? Why do we care so much about fiction? These are the kind of things that are so big and basic, and so obvious that most people in literary studies don't even think about them. Or if they do think about them, it's in a vague sort of way.

I would have courses that were cross-listed with the math department: basic classes on statistics, basic classes on research methods for the social sciences. A lot of the questions that literary scholars are addressing are very basic psychology questions that can be addressed in a lab.

Just to give one more example, my colleagues and I, including Joseph Carroll and a couple psychologists, were interested in some questions about how people respond to literature. There's a whole field of literary studies called reader response literary studies. Reader response is what it sounds like. It's basically how do people respond to literature? What happens? What's going on in their heads? What's going on with them emotionally? The way that work has typically been done is by a scholar sitting in an armchair and telling you the answer. This is how people respond. But it's an empirical question, it's a lab question.

What we did was we asked people. In concert with this team of psychologists, we got people, avid readers, to tell us how they responded to these literary works. We were able to get a whole bunch of data, and answer a whole bunch of questions about this basic question, what is going on with people as they read and respond to literature?

One of the big questions revolves around the question I suppose of whether or not the author is dead. This is this famous mantra, this idea that the author is dead. One thing that the mantra suggests is that the author doesn't have very much power, that power resides with the reader. In most literary theory courses you learn that response to literature is highly idiosyncratic. It's going to strongly reflect your biases, whether you're a man or a woman, how old you are, what your background is, and so on and so forth. There's a lot of truth in that. And we did find that.

But for the most part what we found in a survey of maybe 600 people, was that the main story is by far uniformity. People agree on what's going on in a story, and they agree on what a story means. They have the same sort of emotional reactions to the characters, and they hate the same characters, they like the same characters.

If you have a big group of people all reading the same book, what you're seeing is not a diversity of response, a great deal of idiosyncratic response, what you're seeing is a mental and emotional attunement among those readers.
Now, from a common sense point of view I can see a lot of people listening to this and saying, "Well, of course, I knew this already." But we didn't know it already. This was a question that was very much in dispute, and most people in the academic humanities would have voted the other way, more towards idiosyncratic response. That would be one example.

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The question, "why fiction?" has very much been on my mind lately, and it's one of these things that, again, is so big, and so obvious that most people just don't think about it. It seems obvious to people that human beings love stories. But if you think about it, it's not at all obvious that human beings should love stories, especially fictional stories. If you imagine us, as hunter-gatherers out on the savannah, life is very hard, narrow margins, and you would think that you're better off going without story. It's a lot of time and a lot of energy spent on story.
What might the benefit be to outbalance the costs? There are a whole bunch of different competing theories for this idea, and not a lot of data yet to help us decide between them. The main thing about these different theories for why we have fiction is that they are largely compatible with each other, it's not an either/or situation. If you ask yourself, "What's my hand for?" You would say, "My hand is a tool I use to grab stuff; it's a tool I use to communicate; it's a tool I use to reach out and caress people; it's a tool I use to reach out and punch people. It's a multipurpose tool; it does a whole bunch of different things." The same is probably true of story. Story has probably been shaped by different evolutionary pressures to do different things.

One of the ideas that I've been thinking about a lot is whether you can develop a hypothesis about one likely function of fiction by focusing on the form of fiction. What is fiction like formally? One of the most interesting things to me about stories is that we think of stories as a wildly creative art form, but within that creativity and that diversity there is a lot of conformity Stories are very predictable. No matter where you go in the world, no matter how different people seem, no matter how hard their lives are, people tell stories, universally, and universally the stories are more or less like ours: the same basic human obsessions, and the same basic structure. The structure comes down to: stories have a character, the character has a predicament or a problem—they're always problem-focused—and the character tries to solve the problem. In its most basic terms, that's what a story is—a problem solution narrative.

Why are stories that way? On one hand, it may be obvious to you that stories are that way, that they're problem focused. That's the first thing you would learn in your first day of creative writing class. You get there, your teacher would say, "Hey, your story has to have a problem, a crisis, a dilemma, otherwise no one's interested." But if you think about it, it's not at all obvious that stories should be that way. You might really expect to find stories that really did function as portals into hedonistic paradise. Paradises where there were no problems and pleasure was infinite. But you never, ever find that.

Why are stories so trouble-focused? You have quite a bit of convergence among scholars and scientists who are looking at this from an evolutionary point of view, and what they're saying is that stories may function as kind of virtual reality simulators, where you go and you simulate the big problems of human life, and you enjoy it, but you're having a mental training session at the same time. There's some kind of interesting evidence for this, that these simulations might help people perform better on certain tasks.

So in the same way that children's make believe helps them hone their social skills, it seems to be true of adult make believe, too. If adult make believe is novels and films, it seems they're entering into those fictional worlds and working through those fictional social dilemmas actually does, as hard as it may be to believe, enhance our social skills, our emotional intelligence, our empathy. That's kind of a neat finding. Maybe stories have a function as a simulation of the big problems of life that helps us cope better with those problems when we do experience them.

What about stories that are an exception to this rule? You will find them, but you will have to scrape your brain to find them, to find examples, and they will be very much exceptions that prove the rule. They will be extreme statistical outliers. You will find stories that don't have that structure, that character facing a problem and attempting to solve it.

You will note, though, that most of those examples, the things that will spring readily to mind are not the things that most people consume. Stories that depart from that basic structure have a tremendous amount of difficulty finding audience. They typically find an elite academic-style audience. For instance, Joyce's Finnegans Wake or something, it explodes the structure of story. But Joyce, of course, was setting out on purpose to explode the structure of story. A lot of 20th century writers realized, "Holy cow, I'm working inside a prison, I'm working inside the prison of this structure, and I'm going to blow it up, and I'm going to make everything new." These were interesting as artistic experiments, and I adore some of them, but they're exceptional, and importantly, they do not do a very good job of seizing human attention and riveting human attention. People read them when their professors force them to read them.

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I have two daughters, and the question is what would I advise them if they wanted to pursue study in the humanities? I would be for it. The more interesting question for me is, and I get this question in my e-mail box a couple times a week, from some student out there who asks, "I like your work, I'm impressed by your work and I want to do the same thing. I want to tie together humanities work and scientific work. I have these questions about literature, or about painting, or about music that I'd like to pursue from a scientific point of view. Where do I go? Where do I go for a good undergraduate degree? Who can advise me in a PhD program?"

Those are sort of heartbreaking letters to get because there's not many very good places to send them. Typically I have to say with regrets that there's a couple people I can mention, but after that, I have to say that if you are in between the humanities and the sciences, the best way to go is to go to the sciences because you will not get pushback on this path of inquiry from people in cognitive science, or people from neuroscience, or people from psychology. But you will face quite a bit of resistance probably if you try to go at this from an academic humanities program.

High/Low

Source: Al Jazeera

An emotional search for belief and identity in modern China as gamblers deal with debt and addiction.

 

Gambling has long been part of life in China, but in a society increasingly divided by rich and poor, the Chinese have become obsessed with winning easy money.

And as gambling is illegal in China, so Hong Kong and Macau have become top destinations for Chinese gamblers.

In this Witness film, four gamblers who pin their hopes on games of luck and fortune, take us on an emotional search for belief and identity in money-centric modern China.

Filmmaker's View

By Jean-Louis Schuller and Sam Blair

Jean-Louis Schuller and I became intrigued by Hong Kong’s obsession with money and wealth whilst we were making another film there.

Hong Kong is built on and bloated by banking, trade and consumer culture. We wondered how that affected the lives that we saw in the never-ending lines of tower blocks and the daily crush on the streets. We found our answer in the obsession with gambling that is endemic in the city and even more so in neighbouring Macau, which had recently overtaken Las Vegas as the casino capital of the world – discovering a deeply troubling culture of increasing speculation, addiction and debt. We were compelled to return and make a film that got beneath Hong Kong and Macau’s surface gloss and into the heart of this phenomenon.

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome in making the film was finding people willing to talk about their lives.

In China, “saving face” (maintaining personal reputation and honour) is incredibly important so opening up and telling the world about your problems is not the norm, quite the opposite. Obviously for documentary filmmakers this is problematic.

We started out by visiting the numerous church-based groups set up to try and counter the wave of gambling addiction. These churches, tucked away in true Hong Kong style on the 15th floor of a tower block, offered counselling and spiritual guidance to the increasing number of people who were in incredibly perilous situations after gambling away extraordinary amounts of money.

Michael, a taxi driver, was one such character. He had his quiet family life shattered as he gambled away tens of thousands of dollars by speculating on the stock exchange - in Hong Kong playing the stocks is simply another way to gamble for some. We were intrigued to find out how a modest man like Michael lost control and risked so much. We also wanted to find out what motivated him to act in this way. Michael’s recent religious conversion compelled him to open up to us and share his amazing story.

Our biggest challenge was finding a young character, someone who was still gambling and was willing to be filmed. After many false starts, Wu, who ran a counselling centre for gamblers, introduced us about Ji, a young man he had started to help. And fortunately for us, he agreed to be filmed.

Ji worked in a kitchen but spent most of his restless energy gambling or talking about gambling. It seemed to be his only dream, his only idea of how to escape the limits of his life. Wu tried to reason with Ji and told him to find meaning in his life away from gambling. But for Ji, like so many others in Hong Kong and Macau, the allure of gambling is in the fantasy it offers – the chance to reach for a life tantalisingly out of reach, the opportunity to be one of the lucky few.

A world built for the rich

Our cities are adapting to a new reality, from which the poor are forcibly exiled.

Yiannis Baboulias

Source: Al Jazeera

 

It's very much obvious for anyone following public discourse in economics that Thomas Piketty's best-seller Capital in the Twenty-first Century has brought the problem of inequality to the forefront, with mixed results. US President Barack Obama vowed to make it a central issue for his administration before backing down and doing absolutely nothing. The British government has been trying its best to play down the fact that it's a problem for Britain, blaming immigrants instead.

They ignore the plethora of evidence offered by, among others, the Office of National Statistics, which revealed  in May that the wealthiest 10 percent of households in the UK own 44 percent of the country's total aggregate household wealth while the least wealthy half own just nine percent.

But inequality has entered the conversation and there's very little governments can do to hide what is self-evident. As a result of this change in consciousness, a new-found awareness has grown among the public and the media, who are now very quick to pick up on, and scrutinise examples of the ever-growing income disparity across the globe.

It has also brought to light the many ways in which our societies grow hostile towards the less fortunate. There is now a vast array of ways in which social classes try their best to keep those underneath them completely out of sight, a desire hard-wired in city planning and architecture.


 Such an example was reported by the New York Post last month, the last in a chain of eyebrow-raising news on the subject. The city council gave the green light to plans for a block of luxury apartments, coming with a selection of "affordable units", a way for the developer to get some substantial tax cuts and for some lucky, less well-off families, to get houses in "a fantastic new building".

  But it also came with something else: a separate entrance for those families.

The entrance, now dubbed "the poor door", will be located in the opposite side of the building and it will basically make sure that the two categories of residents never meet.

There is a practical argument to this: It is to exempt the less well-off families from the really high maintenance costs the richer residents will be paying for the various amenities.   

While it's true that you shouldn't burden affordable apartments with high costs, essentially negating the point of them, let us ponder on the wolds "poor" and "affordable" for a second.

For a working class family, like the one I grew up in, there is nothing affordable about most affordable apartments. If the UK - where poor doors are quite widespread - is anything to go by, these properties cost 80 percent of the average rent in the area they are in, according to the latest ruling . That translates to an average of £18,000 ($30,300) per year for a three bedroom apartment, when families who consider themselves middle class in Britain make on average £43,592 ($73,000).

This is an optimistic scenario, as the bar of entry for new, "affordable" housing, is thought to be around £70,000 ($117,800) for a family, while last year, even the Conservative Westminster council warned London Mayor Boris Johnson that plans to set new rent levels at up to 80 percent of market rent would require council tenants in a three-bedroom home in the borough to have an annual income of £109,000 ($180,000) in order to be considered affordable, reported The Guardian .

Just how far have the rich pulled away from the rest of us? With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the US defining middle class as anyone with household incomes up to $250,000, our views on the issue may have become more than a little skewed.

This is not of course the only instance of something that was built to exclude. The "poor door" may enflame liberal sensibilities, but it's a distinctly middle class issue. Other dramatic changes are reshaping our environment in ways that project extreme hostility towards the less fortunate.

What goes on behind walls
 
Hail the rise of the gated community. While not as inhumane as those meant to keep people in, like the Roma ghettos in Slovakia, we have witnessed the proliferation of such developments across the globe. The rich shut themselves away in safety and luxury. They are a definitive sign of how far income inequality has taken our societies in the past three decades.

From luxurious condos resting next to the slums of Rio and other big South American cities, to the new developments in Spain, the US, India, Russia, South Africa and elsewhere, all examples of the haves removing themselves from society, declaring not only that the poor "are not like us" but that "they will never be like us". 

Even Greece, a relatively classless and overwhelmingly safe society, saw the opening of the first such community in Crete, an event that conveniently escaped the Greek media.
 
When the haves can't remove themselves due to lack of space, plans are put in place to remove the unwashed masses from sight. In Singapore, they are considering floating neighbourhoods for foreign workers only, to keep them away from their cities.

Do all of these countries face such grave security issues that require the most affluent to hide away behind walls or sending the poor away? Surely not. If not in all countries, crime is definitely on the decline in most of the world, so is poverty. But what is on the rise is inequality and the unwillingness of those who benefit from it, to cohort with those that don't.

Tom Clark, author of Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump , wrote recently : "Among those substantially hit by austerity, 62 percent told YouGov last year that they rejected the coalition's cuts as too hasty; among those not much affected, a similar majority of 65 percent felt that the cutting should be maintained or stepped up."

This change in speeds has taken hold across the spectrum and across the globe, shaping the way classes interact with public space and subsequently its evolution. It is the subtle ways in which our urban landscapes are changing that show the true cruelty born out of the slump.

Hostility as the new normal
 
In what used to be the gritty side of Southwark in South London, now newly gentrified, anti-homeless spikes were installed outside a building where homeless people took shelter at night. A picture of it was posted online and the reaction was strong enough to make the owner of the building promise to remove them.

The number of rough-sleepers has swollen since the UK introduced severe penalties, including imprisonment, for anyone squatting empty properties. In parallel, so have measures such as anti-homeless spikes. Bus stops with arm rests designed to discourage sleeping. Benches with a tilt such as those installed in London's Camden district - asymmetrical surfaces made out of small stones, disguised as decoration, pointy blocks of cement underneath bridges.

All these are weapons against the already most hard-hit category of people, the homeless, who already suffer disproportionately from addiction, mental health issues and malnutrition,in some of the richest countries in the world.

As Rowland Atkinson, co-director of the Centre for Urban Research at the University of York, told The Guardian : "If you were being a bit cynical but also realistic, it is a kind of assault on the poor, a way of trying to displace their distress. You have various processes coming together, including economic processes that are making people vulnerable in the first place, like the bedroom tax and thresholds on welfare, but the next step seems to be to say: 'We are not even going to allow you to accommodate yourself in the most desperate way possible.'"

This trend, visibly present since the 1990s, is dubbed "hostile architecture".

Where more inclusive societies, like that of Denmark, build parks and public spaces with a view to invite and be enjoyed by as many as possible, countries where extreme inequality is becoming the norm, such as the UK and the US, opt for hostile and disengaging urban scenery.

We are right to be worried about these new realities. Gated communities and hostile architecture are brushed aside as temporary issues at best, to be fixed when "times are better". But what we should be worried about is not solely if we are building a world to be enjoyed only by the rich in the short term, but also what that world might look like in the long term.

To us, such city furniture may look simply as a temporary manifestation of bad character, brought on by a prolonged economic crisis. But to those that will inherit them, they may look like no more than war zones; financial battlefields, from which humanity is totally absent.

Yiannis Baboulias is a journalist, writer and founding member of Precarious Europe, examining issues of precariousness, new nationalisms and independence movements across Europe. His work has been featured in the New Statesman, Vice and The Guardian among others.

 

President Barack Obama Weekly Address August 9, 2014 (Video/Trascript )

 
President Barack Obama
Weekly Address
The White House
August 9, 2014

This week, I authorized two operations in Iraq.  First, I directed our military to take action to protect our American diplomats and military advisors serving in the city of Erbil.  In recent days, terrorist forces neared the city.  Thursday night, I made it clear that if they attempted to advance further, our military would respond with targeted strikes.  That’s what we’ve done.  And, if necessary, that’s what we will continue to do.  We have Americans serving across Iraq, including our embassy in Baghdad, and we’ll do whatever is needed to protect our people.

Second, we’ve begun a humanitarian effort to help those Iraqi civilians trapped on that mountain. The terrorists that have taken over parts of Iraq have been especially brutal to religious minorities—rounding up families, executing men, enslaving women, and threatening the systematic destruction of an entire religious community, which would be genocide. 

The thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of Iraqi men, women and children who fled to that mountain were starving and dying of thirst.  The food and water we airdropped will help them survive.  I’ve also approved targeted American airstrikes to help Iraqi forces break the siege and rescue these families.  Earlier this week, one anguished Iraqi in this area cried to the world, “There is no one coming to help.”  Today, America is helping. 

The United States cannot and should not intervene every time there’s a crisis in the world.  But when there’s a situation like the one on this mountain—when countless innocent people are facing a massacre, and when we have the ability to help prevent it—the United States can’t just look away. That’s not who we are. We’re Americans.  We act.  We lead.  And that’s what we’re going to do on that mountain.  As one American who wrote to me yesterday said, “it is the right thing to do.”  
As Commander-in-Chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq.  American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq, because there’s no American military solution to the larger crisis there. 

What we will do is continue our broader strategy in Iraq.  We will protect our citizens.  We will work with the international community to address this humanitarian crisis.  We’ll help prevent these terrorists from having a permanent safe haven from which to attack America.  And we’ll continue to urge Iraqi communities to reconcile, come together and fight back against these terrorists so the people of Iraq have the opportunity for a better future—the opportunity for which so many Americans gave their lives in Iraq in a long and hard war.

Today, we salute our brave men and women in uniform—especially our courageous pilots and crews over Iraq.  They’re protecting our fellow Americans.  They’re helping save the lives of innocent people on a mountain—people who today know that there’s a country called America that cares for them, too, and that is willing to stand up—not just for our own security, but for the dignity and freedom that belongs to all people.

Global Missionary: John Kerry's Faltering Effort to Redefine US Foreign Policy

By Holger Stark
Source: Der Spiegel

John Kerry has spent months rushing from one conflict to the next, but has little show for it. His failures are symptomatic of an America that lacks a foreign policy identity -- and of a country that seems uncomfortable with its role as a superpower.

In the Middle East, it doesn't take much to be branded a terrorist -- even if you are the US secretary of state. The week before last, John Kerry spent several days traveling back and forth between Cairo, Jerusalem and Ramallah in an effort to establish a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. But his efforts were not universally appreciated. The Israeli daily Haaretz reported that senior officials in Jerusalem described his cease-fire proposal as a "strategic terrorist attack."

The derisive comment came after Kerry presented what was essentially a reasonable plan. It called for a temporary cessation of hostilities during which negotiations for a long-term armistice could continue. But instead of being appreciated, it was mocked. Jerusalem angrily rejected the plan, saying it only catered to demands made by Hamas.

A short time later, things got even worse. Israel's Channel 1 broadcast the alleged transcript of an antagonistic telephone conversation between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It later turned out the transcript was a fake.

When Kerry did finally manage to broker a 72-hour cease-fire at the end of last week, the resulting hope was short-lived. Just three hours into the suspension of hostilities, Hamas allegedly abducted an Israeli soldier andthe cease-fire was history. Israel later announced that the soldier had been killed rather than abducted.

In recent days, global diplomacy has seemed like an absurd form of theater, with John Kerry in the role of the tragic hero. He doesn't look like the secretary of state from a world power, Haaretz jeered, but like "an alien who just disembarked his spaceship in the Mideast." In speaking last week about the hostile atmosphere, Kerry vowed to keep trying, saying: "None of us here are stopping."

The helplessness of the world's most important foreign minister shows just how little influence the US still hasin the Middle East. And with each failure, Washington's influence in the rest of the world erodes as well. A civil war is raging in eastern Ukraine, an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program is still a long way off, Islamist terrorists now control large swaths of Iraq -- and the US doesn't appear to be in a position to do anything about it.

Searching for a Role
 
Now, as secretary of state it is his task -- exactly 10 years after he was nominated as the Democratic candidate for president, only to lose to George W. Bush -- to mediate in large conflicts from Israel to Iran. But as part of a government that is steering America away from its traditional role as global hegemon, Kerry also embodies the dilemma of the United States' global role in the 21st century: How successful can a US foreign policy be íf it depends more on strong words than it does on tanks and aircraft carriers?

On a Tuesday in spring, John Kerry appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to talk about the end of the Middle East peace talks. Behind heavy brocade curtains that blocked out the daylight, Kerry described a weekend spent waiting at home for Israel to release a handful of Palestinian prisoners. The gesture of goodwill had previously been agreed to and it was hoped the release would allow the peace negotiations to continue. Hours went by and Kerry began to get anxious. But the Israelis didn't release the prisoners; instead, they announced settlement expansion. "Poof, that was the moment," Kerry said, forming an imaginary explosion with his hands.

For a moment, Kerry seemed like a child whose toy had just broken. He saw the peace process as his own personal project; he had spent months in Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Qatar, Riyadh and Amman. He had wanted to force through a deal and reshape the Middle East. And then things went "poof."

As usual, Kerry's appearance was impeccable, with his marine-blue pinstriped suit and perfectly coiffed silver hair. The only blemishes were the conspicuous rings under his eyes and the cough he had brought home with him from one of his trips abroad. Kerry is intimately familiar with the room where the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations meets. In 1971, he spoke out in opposition to the Vietnam War after receiving a medal for bravery in recognition of his command of a boat in the Mekong River delta. Later, Kerry himself chaired the committee for four years.

But during Kerry's testimony in spring, the Republicans were not satisfied with Kerry's answer. "You can't help but get the impression our foreign policy is just spinning out of control," said a Senator from Idaho. His counterpart from Tennessee said, in reference to Syria: "You have to be disappointed by the lack of action."

Then, John McCain took the floor, the Republican Party éminence grise who sees military intervention as the solution to most problems, no matter where and against whom. McCain demanded that the US help arm Ukraine and then cited President Theodore Roosevelt's famous tenet to "speak softly and carry a big stick," an approach that helped establish the US as a global power at the beginning of the 20th century. "What you're doing is talking strongly and carrying a very small stick, in fact, a twig," McCain said.

A Divided Country
 
The conflict over where America is drifting currently counts among the greatest debates being waged in Washington. Conservatives, such as the political scientist Robert Kagan, have been the most vocal. Kagan recently warned of a "collapse of global order" in an essay in the New Republic. It was titled "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire" and argued that only American power can "keep the lid closed on ... Pandora's box." In its most recent issue, Foreign Policy magazine described the "path to national renaissance" and asks: "Have We Hit Peak America?"

The US remains the world's only superpower, but it is also on the search for a new foreign policy identity. It is a country divided, torn between what Kagan calls "world-weariness" and the craving for the powerful role it once played.

Obama is a president of "retrenchment," the word Americans use to describe their retreat from the foreign policy front. Obama didn't bomb Syria, refused to send ground troops back into Iraq and opted not to intervene when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula. "We are no longer in a Cold War. There's no Great Game to be won," Obama said last autumn in a speech to the United Nations. In a more recent address, he said: "Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail." Thus, John Kerry's mission: to construct an effective foreign policy without the help of a hammer.

"The president appreciates Kerry's tireless work ethic and willingness to take diplomatic risks," says Obama's deputy security advisor Ben Rhodes. Such qualities, he continues, are "well-suited to a time when diplomacy has moved to the forefront of our foreign policy."

Hurrying from Crisis to Crisis
 
During his first 12 months in office, Kerry flew more than 300,000 miles across the globe, more than any of his predecessors at the State Department. He made a state visit to China and traveled to Afghanistan to help resolve a dispute over election results. On the weekend of the World Cup final, he flew to Vienna for talks on the Iranian nuclear program and a meeting with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier about the espionage case that has currently been weighing on German-American relations. Soon after, he was in the Middle East in an attempt to stop the fighting.

Kerry is 70 years old. He and his wife Teresa Heinz -- an heir to part of the Heinz Ketchup fortune -- own homes in Boston and Washington D.C. in addition to a property in Pittsburgh and a summer house on Nantucket. Heinz is thought to be worth a half billion dollars. When travelling together, the couple flies in their own Gulfstream and bring along a personal chef. Kerry could easily spend his time sailing with his grandchildren and taking it easy.

Instead, he hurries from one crisis to the next, and his office now only books appointments for him at the last minute. And yet, despite the enormous workload, Kerry seems as though he has found his calling. "I don't know how he does that," says David McKean.

McKean is Kerry's director of policy planning. His office is located on the seventh floor of the State Department building; Roman columns frame the gold gilded elevator. Kerry's offices are to the right, through the security checkpoint while McKean's wing is to the left. The two have known each other since Kerry was a junior prosecutor in Massachusetts and McKean has been working for him since 1987, first as his office manager in the Senate and then in his campaign team.

The Global Missionary
 
Kerry's role is different than that of his predecessor, Hillary Clinton, McKean says. When Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, America's image in the world was at an historical nadir and her mission, McKean says, was that of making amends. Kerry, he continues, can build on that, implementing phase two after the Bush years: the attempt at influencing global politics without military interventions and waterboarding. "Kerry knows in most countries one of the key players, the head of state or the foreign minister," McKean says. "He uses these contacts. As secretary of state, he is the right man at the right time."

Kerry has always seen himself as a kind of global missionary. As a young senator, he flew to Manila to monitor elections there; in Nicaragua, he convinced the Sandinistas to make concessions; later, he investigated the involvement of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega in the drug trade. Kerry is able to convince people with a combination of charm, persistence and experience. He has an anecdote and a hug ready for each of his guests. "He thinks he can make the difference," says Douglas Frantz, one of his undersecretaries of state.

That helps explain Kerry's commitment to mediating between Israel and the Palestinians. Though Obama already failed once in the attempt four years ago, Kerry told SPIEGEL before he set off for his most recent mission to the Middle East that making an effort at mediation is "in our DNA as a country, and it's in our DNA as a friend to Israel." He doesn't regret having tried. "I think everyone also understands that someday, at some point, the parties will return to the peace process because it's the only way to ever achieve any kind of lasting peace and security and stability," Kerry says.

One of Kerry's tactics is to convince his counterparts that America is their closest ally, but since the NSA spying affair, at the latest, that approach hasn't worked particularly well. And when it comes to such entrenched conflicts as that between Israel and the Palestinians, it certainly won't suffice.

One day in May 2013, after speaking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas about the conditions for an agreement between the two sides, Kerry had a spontaneous idea: He had his delegation stop at a shawarma restaurant in Ramallah. The staff rushed to serve him amid much excitement as Kerry, dressed a dark suit with a strawberry-red tie, ordered a turkey shawarma. "Man, this is good," he exulted as he ate.

The anecdote is a perfect illustration of Kerry's way of approaching people, but the event in Ramallah causes unexpected ripples. Republicans accuse Kerry of having shown too much support of the Palestinians while Israelis say he's portraying himself as a savior. Since then, they have snidely called him the shawarma diplomat.

At the height of last year's peace negotiations, Kerry spoke with his partners in the Middle East almost every day over the phone -- often early in the mornings or late at night from his villa in Georgetown over an encrypted line. But when Kerry was travelling and under time pressure, he sometimes used a normal telephone.

Tapped Phone
 
Several sources in the intelligence community have confirmed to SPIEGEL that a large part of these discussions, which ran over satellite uplinks, were listened in on by at least two intelligence services, including that of the Israelis. The Chinese and the Russians were also probably monitoring the calls. As a result, the Israelis often knew exactly what Kerry had discussed with the other side. Kerry knew the risk, but he wanted results -- and the conversations were more important to him than his security people's concerns. Neither the Israelis nor the State Department would comment on the phone monitoring.

The recordings allowed the Israelis to see through Kerry's diplomatic balancing act. The more time he spent working as an intermediary, the stronger their attacks became. Kerry has an "incomprehensible obsession and a sense of messianism," Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon spat at the beginning of this year. "The only thing that might save us is if John Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us be."

Effective foreign policy, says Daniel Hamilton of Johns Hopkins University in Washington, involves a savvy combination of "soft power" and "hard power." Bill Clinton, he says, demonstrated this masterfully in the 1990s, but Kerry lives in his plane and spends most of his time trying to solve acute crises. "What he is lacking is a strategic vision. And he is working with a president who is primarily concerned with domestic issues."

Kerry is an old-school secretary of state. He sees America's role as that of a hegemon and global mediator, and sometimes also as that of a global policeman. But Obama has a different view of the world. He doesn't want to intervene everywhere in the world and prefers to focus on problems closer to home.

The Syria crisis has shown their contrasting worldviews in especially stark relief. On a Friday in late August 2013, Kerry made a passionate speech against Syria's use of chemical weapons in State Department. He said that he knows Americans are tired of war, but "fatigue does not absolve us of our responsibility." It's about keeping a promise, he said, that the "most heinous weapons must never again be used against the world's most vulnerable people." They were the words of a field marshal; it sounded as if Kerry had just given the order to fire off a salvo of mid-range missiles.

Deep Disappointment
 
That evening, Obama invited his advisors into the Oval Office and told them that no air strikes would take place without Congressional approval, thus taking the military option off the table. The announcement made Kerry look bad. And Obama didn't consult Kerry in reaching his verdict; he merely informed him of his decision. Even so, Kerry defended Obama's position afterwards as if it had been his own.

According to Obama advisor Ben Rhodes, the two men have a "close relationship" but for observers, it is obvious that is not a friendship. The two have, however, known each other for a long time. Indeed, one could even say Kerry discovered Obama. When Kerry was running for president 10 years ago, he asked the then widely unknown Democratic politician from Illinois to speak at the Democratic National Convention. The appearance made Barack Obama world famous, while Kerry's election loss that year was extremely difficult for him. To describe it as "deeply disappointing is an understatement," David McKean says.

Although Obama thanked Kerry for the opportunity to speak at the convention, he made Hillary Clinton his first secretary of state and had hoped to replace her with Susan Rice. Kerry only got the job because Rice made misleading statements about the attack on the American consulate in Libya in 2012, making herself politically untenable.

The relationship between the two men can be summed up in an encounter that took place in October 2012. It was the height of the presidential election campaign and Obama wanted Kerry to help him practice for a crucial debate. Kerry was supposed to play Mitt Romney, Obama's Republican rival, in a practice duel at a hotel in Virginia. Obama's advisors had asked Kerry to annoy Obama as much as possible while he spoke.

Kerry argued shrewdly, pushed the president around and cut in so many times that Obama snarled that he didn't constantly want to be interrupted. Ultimately Obama stood up and left the room, making it clear that he thought Kerry's behavior was insolent. Kerry serves a function for Obama, but he isn't part of the president's inner circle.

Because of the crisis in the Middle East, Kerry didn't have the time to meet with SPIEGEL, but offered to answer questions in writing. One of them was about whether a world could exist in which another power, like China, took over America's role.

'More Engaged, Not Less'
 
"Never," the secretary of state answered, "and no one contemplates the United States doing anything but leading." He compared the current situation to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, saying: "Back then, a lot of people thought America should just take its peace divvidend and pull back from the world." But it was a moment, he argues, that required America's leadership. The current situation, he believes, is very similar -- a time in which the world is "extraordinarily complicated" and that the US "must be more engaged, not less."

Has the renunciation of military force lessened America's international influence? Kerry rejects the premise: The US still uses force as a threat, he argues, pointing to the Syrian chemical-weapons agreement and the bombardment of Libya to save Libyans from being killed by the regime as examples.

American politics are like a Hollywood film: History is written based on results, there is always a winner and a loser. If Kerry is able to reach an agreement with Iran or broker a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he will be considered by history to be a hero. But if he doesn't accomplish anything, then he may become a symbol of the US's political decline. It's possible that the great era of American dominance has come to an end, and that a new geopolitical chapter will begin -- a possibility that even the conservatives fear.

During Kerry's appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee, he was questioned by the Republicans for an hour, but remained unruffled. In the end he turned to the right and looked directly at John McCain. The two of them have known each other for 30 years, both men have fought in Vietnam and both have run for, and failed to win, the presidency.

"Your friend Teddy Roosevelt," Kerry said to McCain, "also said the credit belongs to the people who are in the arena trying to get things done."

Climate Change & Wildfires Explained in Less Than Three Minutes

President Obama's Science Advisor, Dr. John Holdren, explains in less than three minutes how the growing number of intense wildfires are linked in part, to climate change. Learn more at http://wh.gov/climate-change

President Obama Makes a Statement on Iraq

 

State Dining Room

THE PRESIDENT:  Good evening.  Today I authorized two operations in Iraq -- targeted airstrikes to protect our American personnel, and a humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians who are trapped on a mountain without food and water and facing almost certain death.  Let me explain the actions we’re taking and why.    

First, I said in June -- as the terrorist group ISIL began an advance across Iraq -- that the United States would be prepared to take targeted military action in Iraq if and when we determined that the situation required it.  In recent days, these terrorists have continued to move across Iraq, and have neared the city of Erbil, where American diplomats and civilians serve at our consulate and American military personnel advise Iraqi forces. 

To stop the advance on Erbil, I’ve directed our military to take targeted strikes against ISIL terrorist convoys should they move toward the city.  We intend to stay vigilant, and take action if these terrorist forces threaten our personnel or facilities anywhere in Iraq, including our consulate in Erbil and our embassy in Baghdad.  We’re also providing urgent assistance to Iraqi government and Kurdish forces so they can more effectively wage the fight against ISIL.

Second, at the request of the Iraqi government -- we’ve begun operations to help save Iraqi civilians stranded on the mountain.  As ISIL has marched across Iraq, it has waged a ruthless campaign against innocent Iraqis.  And these terrorists have been especially barbaric towards religious minorities, including Christian and Yezidis, a small and ancient religious sect.  Countless Iraqis have been displaced.  And chilling reports describe ISIL militants rounding up families, conducting mass executions, and enslaving Yezidi women. 

In recent days, Yezidi women, men and children from the area of Sinjar have fled for their lives.  And thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- are now hiding high up on the mountain, with little but the clothes on their backs.  They’re without food, they’re without water.  People are starving.  And children are dying of thirst.  Meanwhile, ISIL forces below have called for the systematic destruction of the entire Yezidi people, which would constitute genocide.  So these innocent families are faced with a horrible choice:  descend the mountain and be slaughtered, or stay and slowly die of thirst and hunger.

I’ve said before, the United States cannot and should not intervene every time there’s a crisis in the world.  So let me be clear about why we must act, and act now.  When we face a situation like we do on that mountain -- with innocent people facing the prospect of violence on a horrific scale, when we have a mandate to help -- in this case, a request from the Iraqi government -- and when we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United States of America cannot turn a blind eye.  We can act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide.  That’s what we’re doing on that mountain.

I’ve, therefore, authorized targeted airstrikes, if necessary, to help forces in Iraq as they fight to break the siege of Mount Sinjar and protect the civilians trapped there.  Already, American aircraft have begun conducting humanitarian airdrops of food and water to help these desperate men, women and children survive.  Earlier this week, one Iraqi in the area cried to the world, “There is no one coming to help.”  Well today, America is coming to help.  We’re also consulting with other countries -- and the United Nations -- who have called for action to address this humanitarian crisis. 

I know that many of you are rightly concerned about any American military action in Iraq, even limited strikes like these.  I understand that.  I ran for this office in part to end our war in Iraq and welcome our troops home, and that’s what we’ve done.  As Commander-in-Chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq.  And so even as we support Iraqis as they take the fight to these terrorists, American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq, because there’s no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq.  The only lasting solution is reconciliation among Iraqi communities and stronger Iraqi security forces. 

However, we can and should support moderate forces who can bring stability to Iraq.  So even as we carry out these two missions, we will continue to pursue a broader strategy that empowers Iraqis to confront this crisis.  Iraqi leaders need to come together and forge a new government that represents the legitimate interests of all Iraqis, and that can fight back against the threats like ISIL.  Iraqis have named a new President, a new Speaker of Parliament, and are seeking consensus on a new Prime Minister.  This is the progress that needs to continue in order to reverse the momentum of the terrorists who prey on Iraq’s divisions.

Once Iraq has a new government, the United States will work with it and other countries in the region to provide increased support to deal with this humanitarian crisis and counterterrorism challenge.  None of Iraq’s neighbors have an interest in this terrible suffering or instability.

And so we’ll continue to work with our friends and allies to help refugees get the shelter and food and water they so desperately need, and to help Iraqis push back against ISIL.  The several hundred American advisors that I ordered to Iraq will continue to assess what more we can do to help train, advise and support Iraqi forces going forward.  And just as I consulted Congress on the decisions I made today, we will continue to do so going forward.

My fellow Americans, the world is confronted by many challenges.  And while America has never been able to right every wrong, America has made the world a more secure and prosperous place.  And our leadership is necessary to underwrite the global security and prosperity that our children and our grandchildren will depend upon.  We do so by adhering to a set of core principles.  We do whatever is necessary to protect our people.  We support our allies when they’re in danger.  We lead coalitions of countries to uphold international norms.  And we strive to stay true to the fundamental values -- the desire to live with basic freedom and dignity -- that is common to human beings wherever they are.  That’s why people all over the world look to the United States of America to lead.  And that’s why we do it.

So let me close by assuring you that there is no decision that I take more seriously than the use of military force.  Over the last several years, we have brought the vast majority of our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.  And I’ve been careful to resist calls to turn time and again to our military, because America has other tools in our arsenal than our military.  We can also lead with the power of our diplomacy, our economy, and our ideals.

But when the lives of American citizens are at risk, we will take action.  That’s my responsibility as Commander-in-Chief.  And when many thousands of innocent civilians are faced with the danger of being wiped out, and we have the capacity to do something about it, we will take action.  That is our responsibility as Americans.  That’s a hallmark of American leadership.  That’s who we are.

So tonight, we give thanks to our men and women in uniform  -— especially our brave pilots and crews over Iraq who are protecting our fellow Americans and saving the lives of so many men, women and children that they will never meet.  They represent American leadership at its best.  As a nation, we should be proud of them, and of our country’s enduring commitment to uphold our own security and the dignity of our fellow human beings.

God bless our Armed Forces, and God bless the United States of America.

Gaza Crisis: 'The Real Danger to Israel Comes from Within'

Interview Conducted by Julia Amalia Heyer

Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, but left behind death and destruction. Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz tells SPIEGEL that her country is gripped by fear and is becoming increasingly suspicious of democracy.

SPIEGEL: There was widespread support in Israel for the operation in the Gaza Strip, despite the huge numbers of civilian casualties and the deaths of hundreds of children. Why is that?

 Illouz: Where you see human beings, Israelis see enemies. In front of enemies, you close ranks, you unite in fear for your life, and you do not ponder about the fragility of the other. Israel has a split, schizophrenic self-awareness: It cultivates its strength and yet cannot stop seeing itself as weak and threatened. Moreover, both the fact that Hamas holds a radical Islamist and anti-Semitic ideology and the fact that there is rabid anti-Arab racism in Israel explain why Israelis see Gaza as a bastion of potential or real terrorists. It is difficult to have compassion for a population seen as as threatening the heart of your society.

SPIEGEL: Is that also a function of the fact that Israeli society has become increasingly militaristic?

Illouz: Israel is a colonial military power, a militarized society and a democracy all folded into one. The army, for example, controls the Palestinians through a wide network of colonial tools, such as checkpoints, military courts (governed by a legal system different from the Israeli system), the arbitrary granting of work permits, house demolitions and economic sanctions. It is a militarized civil society because almost every family has a father, son or brother in the army and because the military plays an enormous role in the ordinary mentality of ordinary Israelis and is crucial in both political decisions and in the public sphere. In fact, I would say that "security" is the paramount concept guiding Israeli society and politics. But it is also a democracy, which grants rights to gays and makes it possible for a citizen to sue the state.

SPIEGEL: Still, many would say that Israel has gone too far in this war with Hamas.

About Eva Illouz

 Eva Illouz, 53, was born in Morocco and grew up in Sarcelles, near Paris. She is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She researches the relationship between emotions, economy and communication and has written several books including "Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation," which was published in English last year. Illouz also regularly writes essays and columns exploring the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its consequences for Israeli society.

 Illouz: I think Israelis have lost what we can call a "humanitarian sensibility," the capacity to identify with the suffering of a distant other. In Israel, there has been a change in perception of the "Palestinian other." The Palestinian has become a true enemy in the perception of Israelis, in the sense that "they are there" and "we are here." They ceased having a face and even a name.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for the shift?

Illouz: Israelis and Palestinians used to be mixed. They worked as construction workers and as cheap, underpaid labor. Then the wall was built. Then the road blocks came, which hampered the Palestinians' freedom of movement. The massive reduction in work permits followed. And in a few years Palestinians disappeared from Israeli society. The Second Intifada put the nail in that coffin, so to speak. The nature of Israeli leadership has also changed. The messianic right has progressively gained power in Israel. It used to be marginal and illegitimate; it is now increasingly mainstream. This radical right sits in Parliament, controls budgets and has changed the nature of discourse. Many Israelis do not understand the radical nature of the right in Israel. It successfully disguises itself as "patriotic" or "Jewish."

SPIEGEL: Why is the right so strong at the moment even though there are far fewer terror attacks in Israel than there used to be?

Illouz: Entire generations have been raised with the territories, with Israel being a colonial power. They do not know anything else. You have the settlements which are highly ideological. They expanded and entered Israeli mainstream political life. Settlements were strengthened by systematic government policies: They got tax breaks; they had soldiers to protect them; they built roads and infrastructure which are much better than those inside the country. There are entire segments of the population that have never met a secular person and have been educated religiously. Some of these religious segments are also very nationalist. The reality we are faced with in Israel is that we must choose between liberalism and Jewishness, and if we choose Jewishness, we are condemned to become a religious Sparta which will not be sustainable. Whereas in the 1960s, you could be both socialist and Zionist, today it is not possible because of the policies and identity of Israel. Then you have the role which Jews who live outside Israel play in Israel. Many of these Jews have very right-wing views and contribute money to newspapers, think tanks and religious institutions inside Israel. Let's face it: the right has been more systematic and more mobilized, both inside and outside Israel.

SPIEGEL: Do Jews in the Diaspora see Israel differently than do Jews in Israel?

Illouz: Diaspora Jews have been shaped by the memory of the Shoah. They often live in societies in which their own democratic rights are guaranteed. Sometimes they are under the assault of anti-Semitism and thus feel an urge to reinforce Jewish identity. They do not understand the distress of Israelis who see democracy progressively eaten away by dark forces. Today, Diaspora Jews and Jews in Israel do not have the same interests anymore.

SPIEGEL: What will happen if democratic principles continue to erode?

Illouz: One or two years ago, the newspaper Haaretz conducted a poll which found that 40 percent of the people said they were considering leaving Israel. I don't know the actual numbers, but I have never heard as much alienation from Israel as during this period. The people who live in secular Tel Aviv have much less in common with their religious counterparts in Jerusalem than they do with people living in Berlin.

SPIEGEL: You describe a fearful, anxious country.

Illouz: Fear is deeply engrained in Israeli society. Fear of the Shoah, fear of anti-Semitism, fear of Islam, fear of Europeans, fear of terror, fear of extermination. You name it. And fear generates a very particular type of thinking, which I would call "catastrophalist." You always think about the worst case scenario, not about a normal course of events. In catastrophalist scenarios, you become allowed to breach many more moral norms than if you imagined a normal course of events.

SPIEGEL: This differing perception of threats and conflict is problematic. Whereas Israel sees itself as the victim, the rest of the world is increasingly seeing the country as a violent occupying power.

Illouz: Imagine that you were a girl raised by a very brutal father. You would develop a "healthy" suspicion of men and would become very cautious. If you were to live for a time in an environment of good and nurturing men, your suspicions would relax. But if you lived in an environment in which some men were very brutal and some were not, your healthy suspicion would turn into an obsessive incapacity to differentiate between different types of men, the brutal and the caring. That is the historical trauma of the consciousness that Jews live with. The Israeli psyche has become incapable of making these distinctions.

SPIEGEL: Does this fear justify the kind of brutal violence that has been visited upon the civilian population in the Gaza Strip?

Illouz: Of course it doesn't. I'm only saying that fear is central to the Israeli psyche. These fears are cynically used by leaders like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He makes Israelis believe that they all want to destroy us. Hamas wants to destroy us, the UN wants to destroy us, al-Qaida and Iran want to destroy us. ISIS wants to destroy us. The European anti-Semites want to destroy us. This is basically the filter through which a conflict with Hamas is interpreted by the ordinary Israeli. Another dimension of this prism is that "they" are not human beings. Palestinians are dehumanized because they put their soldiers amongst civilians, send their children to fight, spend and waste their money on building deadly tunnels rather than on building up their own society. Along with the dehumanization of the other, Israelis have a strong sense of their own moral superiority. "We ask people to get out of their houses; we call them on the phone to make sure civilians are evacuated. We behave humanly," the Israeli thinks. An army with good manners.

SPIEGEL: And nevertheless, civilians have been the primary victims, with schools, housing complexes and hospitals being bombed.

Illouz: Yes, despite this, many Israelis still hold on the view they are morally superior. They judge by the intention, whereas the world judges by the consequences.

SPIEGEL: Still, an enormous wave of hatred has become visible in Israel in recent weeks. And it's not only directed at the Palestinians, but also at segments of Israeli society.

Illouz: Some basic norms of speech have been breached by some rabbis and Knesset members, who feel no qualms expressing hatred for Arabs in ways that provide legitimation to hatred. This is very worrisome. It happened because entire generations have been raised believing in religious and ultra-nationalist views. I don't think that there is more hatred in Israel than in some racist pockets of German or French society. But when some Palestinians recently sang in the streets of Paris "Death to the Jews," the reaction of the government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls was swift and clear. The authorities sent a strong message that there are forms of speech and forms of belief that are inadmissible. What is lacking in Israeli society is that kind of very strong moral normative claim coming from its leaders.

SPIEGEL: How do you explain this paradox -- the hate on the one hand and Israel's emphasis on its liberal values on the other?

Illouz: Israel started as a modern nation. It derived its legitimacy from the fact that it had democratic institutions. But it was also building highly anti-modern institutions in wanting to create a Jewish democracy by giving power to rabbis, in creating deep ethnic inequalities between different ethnic groups such Jews of Arab countries vs. Jews of European descent; Arabs vs. Jews; Jews vs. non-Jews. It thus blocked universalist thinking.

SPIEGEL: Would you say that the Jewish character of the country has subsumed the democratic character?

Illouz: Yes, definitely. We are at the point where it has become clear that Jewishness has hijacked democracy and its contents. It happened increasingly when the school curriculum started getting changed and emphasizing more Jewish content and less universal content; when the Ministry of the Interior expelled foreign workers because Shas party members were afraid non-Jews would inter-marry with Jews; when human rights are thought of as being left-wing only because human rights presuppose that Jews and non-Jews are equal.

SPIEGEL: That doesn't sound particularly encouraging.

Illouz: The only response is to create a vast camp of people who defend democracy. The right-left divide is no longer important. There is something more urgent right now: the defense of democracy. The voice of the extreme right is much louder and clearer than it was before. That's what's new: a racist right that is not ashamed of itself, that persecutes dissenters and even people who dare express compassion for the other side. The real danger to Israel and its sustainability comes from within. The fascist and racist elements are no less a security threat than the outside enemies.

SPIEGEL: Israeli enemies have also accused the country of no longer being democratic. Does that bother you?

Illouz: With all my critique and occasional disgust at Israeli arrogance, I am also puzzled that Israel is indeed singled out. Look at what happens in Syria or in Nigeria or Iraq. Why isn't the world demonstrating in the streets in the same way it is doing for Israel? America has also a shocking record outside its own borders. Where are the intellectuals who are going to boycott America? Where are they?

SPIEGEL: Do you support the military operation in the Gaza Strip?

Illouz: No, I don't. I'm not a pacifist in the sense that I do not think that military operations are always wrong. But I'm not in favor of this operation because there was no political process beforehand. Netanyahu gave such obvious sings that he was not interested in a political process. Instead, Netanyahu constantly undermined Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. I refuse categorically the idea that our only relationship with the Palestinians is a military one. We are in a march of folly. There is an increasingly large group of people who really think that they can subdue the Palestinian population and sustain a regime where Israel keeps dominating them.

 SPIEGEL: Is that not the consequence of 47 years of occupation, this feeling of not having to make any more concessions?

Illouz: Israelis pay a price, but we are not really aware of it. We don't know how it feels to live in a peaceful society, devoted exclusively to culture, education and improving the living conditions of everyone. People don't make a connection between the bad living conditions they have and the amount of resources invested in the settlements and in the army. In psychology, they call it dissociation. Israeli society has become very insensitive. Not only to the suffering of others, but also to its own suffering.

Francis and the Nuns

Is the new Vatican all talk?

By Mary Gordon

Source: Harper’s Magazine

A year ago this month, Pope Francis gave a long interview to Antonio Spadaro, the editor in chief of an Italian Jesuit journal called La Civiltà Cattolica. Francis was just a few months into his papacy at the time, and the interview — published simultaneously by more than a dozen Jesuit outlets — was for many people around the world their introduction to the first Latin-American pontiff. The interview is long and complex, but a few words were quoted everywhere. “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” Francis told Spadaro. “When we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the Church . . . is clear and I am a son of the Church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.” 

This may not sound like much — it was, after all, a shift in emphasis, not in doctrine — but coupled with subsequent statements about the evil of inequality, the pope’s words suggested the possibility of a new era for the Church, one in which economic justice would take precedence over divisive social issues. Perhaps the most important change was tonal: the punitive, absolutist cadences of John Paul II and Benedict XVI had been replaced by gentle, openhearted language. Progressives both in the Church and outside it celebrated the development. Suddenly, the world had a new apostolic heartthrob: Francis was Time magazine’s Person of the Year and the cover boy for Rolling Stone.

Wiretapped: Israel Eavesdropped on John Kerry in Mideast Talks

New information indicates that Israeli intelligence eavesdropped on telephone conversations by US Secretary of State John Kerry. Sources told SPIEGEL the government then used the information obtained from the calls during negotiations in the Mideast conflict.

SPIEGEL has learned from reliable sources that Israeli intelligence eavesdropped on US Secretary of State John Kerry during Middle East peace negotiations. In addition to the Israelis, at least one other intelligence service also listened in as Kerry mediated last year between Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab states, several intelligence service sources told SPIEGEL. Revelations of the eavesdropping could further damage already tense relations between the US government and Israel.

During the peak stage of peace talks last year, Kerry spoke regularly with high-ranking negotiating partners in the Middle East. At the time, some of these calls were not made on encrypted equipment, but instead on normal telephones, with the conversations transmitted by satellite. Intelligence agencies intercepted some of those calls. The government in Jerusalem then used the information obtained in international negotiations aiming to reach a diplomatic solution in the Middle East.
In the current Gaza conflict, the Israelis have massively criticized Kerry, with a few ministers indirectly calling on him to withdraw from peace talks. Both the US State Department and the Israeli authorities declined to comment.

Only one week ago, Kerry flew to Israel to mediate between the conflict parties, but the Israelis brusquely rejected a draft proposal for a cease-fire. The plan reportedly didn't include any language demanding that Hamas abandon its rocket arsenal and destroy its tunnel system. Last year, Kerry undertook intensive diplomatic efforts to seek a solution in the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but they ultimately failed. Since those talks, relations between Kerry and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been tense.

Still, there are no doubts about fundamental support for Israel on the part of the United States. On Friday, the US Congress voted to help fund Israel's "Iron Dome" missile defense system to the tune of $225 million (around €168 million).

President Barack Obama Weekly Address August 2, 2014 (Video/Trascript )

President Barack Obama
Weekly Address
The White House
August 2, 2014

Hi, everybody.  My top priority as President is doing everything I can to create more jobs and more opportunities for hardworking families to get ahead. 

On Friday, we learned that our economy created over 200,000 new jobs in July.  That’s on top of about 300,000 new jobs in June.  We’re now in a six-month streak with at least 200,000 new jobs each month.  That hasn’t happened since 1997.  All told, our businesses have created 9.9 million jobs over the past 53 months.  That’s the longest streak of private-sector job creation in our history. 

Because of you – because of your hard work and determination – America has recovered faster and come farther than almost any other advanced country on Earth.  The economy is clearly getting stronger.  Things are clearly getting better.  And the decisions we make now can keep things moving in that direction. 

That’s what’s at stake right now.  Making sure our economy works for every working American.  Making sure that people who work hard can get ahead.  That’s why I’ve been pushing for common-sense ideas like rebuilding our infrastructure in a way that supports millions of good jobs and helps our businesses compete.  Raising the minimum wage.  Making it easier for working folks to pay off their student loans.  That’s why I’ve been pushing for fair pay and paid leave. 

These policies have two things in common.  All of them would help working families feel more stable and secure.  And all of them have been blocked or ignored by Republicans in Congress.

That’s why my administration keeps taking what actions we can on our own to help working families – because Congress is doing so little for working families.  House Republicans actually got together this week and voted to sue me for taking actions on my own.  And then they left town for the month without settling a bunch of unfinished business that matters to working families across America.

The bottom line is this – we’ve come a long way these past five and a half years.  Our challenges are nowhere near as daunting as they were back then.  But imagine how much farther along our economy would be – how much stronger our country would be – if Congress would do its job. 

I’ll never stop trying to work with both parties to get things moving faster for the middle class.  And I could use your help.  If you see your Member of Congress around home this month, tell him or her what’s on your mind.  Ask them why they haven’t passed bills to raise the minimum wage or help with student loans or enact fair pay for women.

And when they return from vacation next month, instead of trying to pass partisan bills on party lines, hopefully we can come together with the sense of common purpose that you expect.  And in the meantime, I will never stop doing whatever I can, whenever I can, not only to make sure that our economy succeeds, but that people like you succeed. 

Thanks, and have a great weekend.