Anomie in the UK

(h/t to the Sex Pistols for the title, natch)



According to the BBC's Mark Easton, these twinned maps provide "a measure of people's sense of - or lack of - belonging to where they live." Since the early 1970's, it would seem, people's sense of connection to their physical homes has been deteriorating, at least in the UK. It would be fascinating to see how this data compared to other countries: I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if a similar phenomenon were evident in the US. And what about other countries? Is it a Continental affliction, as well? What about the developing world?

Now, I don't doubt that this is a bad thing. But as with so much in the way of modern social change, it seems to me that we've traded one very large good for another very large good. That is, we've exchanged communities defined by geographical proximity (and the sense of place, history, tradition, safety, security, and stability that they connote) for communities defined by interests and personal identity (and all the freedom to define one's own social experience that they connote). So it's true that a disaffected or socially isolated Liverpudlian may have less of a local community in which to root her sense of self (that is, she would report a high level of anomie); but she surely has more opportunities to escape whatever stultifying or socially arid conditions are responsible for her disaffection in the first place.

It's a real dilemma, with probably no certain answer. Still, those maps are a reminder that one of the characteristic sensations of being alive in the post-industrial Western world is a subtle but inescapable feeling of loss.

Or, to quote a keen observer of contemporary social conditions:

Every time I think of her
It brings back memories
I remember how it used to be
Oh baby, can't you see?
Oh baby, come back to me.

I'm a lonely boy
I'm a lonely boy
I'm a lonely boy
I'm a lonely boy

Radio Aporee

Wow, this site is amazing. "Radio Aporee" has Google Earth-type satellite imagery of the whole world and, like Google Earth, allows you to like thumbtack certain locations. But the brilliant idea is: users can upload sounds tied to any given spot on Earth. There are currently more than 3,000 uploads, all across the globe. A lot of them are sounds of the given place. Click on the marker over the Brooklyn Bridge, for instance, and you hear a recording of the rattle and ting of its vibrating steel cables, coupled with the ghostly whoosh of passing cars - the effect is absolutely haunting. Others have chosen to upload rather more abstract representations of place, and users can also make phone calls - literally - to record messages (a lot of people have chosen literary selections) tied to any place on Earth.

It's Google Earth with an avant-garde soundtrack. Really cool.

Nuclear Armageddon and You

Well, here's a useful tool!



It's a Google Maps Mashup that lets you see the damage radius of nuclear strikes on given locations. It also lets you select by size of weapon - from Hiroshima's "Little Boy" to the 50-megaton "Tsar Bomba" of lore, the most powerful nuke ever detonated.

Yrs. truly would be a sure goner if anything above about 100 kilotons made a direct hit on my local downtown. That's actually a little better than I would have expected to do - I'm not far from downtown, and I would have thought any sort of nuclear direct hit would vaporize me instantly. It makes me wonder, actually, if the post-War move towards suburbanization in the U.S. was actually motivated by nuclear fear to a greater degree than I'd realized. I had sort of assumed that if you lived in a major metro area, any sort of large-scale nuclear war would do you in. But this makes it look like even your inner-ring suburbanites would have at least a fighting chance - especially if they'd made prudent investments in those backyard bomb shelters that were all the rage back then.

Here's a Wired write-up of the "mapplet."

The Incredible Shrinking Nation

Palestine, from 1917-present.




If I were Palestinian? This would irk me.

(Here's the link to see large (actually readable) versions of these maps.)

UPDATE: Lest anyone think there's an anti-Israeli cartographic conspiracy, here's a pertinent article: Israel says map shows Hamas puts Gaza civilians at risk.

Abrahamic vs. Dharmic Religions

This is interesting. I don't usually think of world religions in these sorts of binomial terms. (Purple indicates areas where the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam predominate; yellow represents the Dharmic religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, etc.)



Sometimes, late in the broadcast of a sporting event, the sportscasters, feeling themselves bereft of things to say, will latch onto a notion. They will repeat this notion, over and over, each reinforcing the other's expression of this notion, in a sort of self-catalyzing reaction that causes them rapidly to take the originally reasonable idea in a decidedly ad absurdum vector. Such a phenomenon was in progress when I tuned into the last ten minutes of the college football championship the other night.

Turns out there's a football player by the name of Tim Tebow who was playing that night. And, according to Fox's sportscasters, Tim Tebow is a Good Man. They were very impressed at how Good a man he was and, they assured the audience, we all would be likewise impressed. Astounded even. In fact, they quickly led themselves into reporting, he might well be one of the finest young men in the world. He had been home-schooled. He was deeply religious. At one point during their encomium, this Tebow made sort of a churlish gesture toward an opposing player, and one of the announcers was moved to speculate that "that might have been the first bad thing he's ever done!" Now, I've never met this Tebow guy. But I feel comfortable in asserting that, if he is indeed a human being, that that was not the first bad thing Tebow'd ever done. I mean, by this point, by the sheer fervor of their moral judgment about the kid - positive though the judgment was - the announcers had pretty thoroughly deprived the poor kid (who had 'John 3:16' marked in white against the black of his smeared-on eyeshade) of his humanity.

One of their main bits of evidence that Tebow was of unmitigatedly hearty moral fiber was that he'd been on several missions to convert the natives of various countries around the world. So now my question is: really? Is missionary work still considered morally righteous by a mainstream-enough slice of the American public that Fox sports announcers can take such a view for granted on the air? Why, these announcers were acting as if they weren't even remotely familiar with postcolonial theory!

Now, I'll grant that if your are a Christian Dominionist or absolutist, then obviously you'd view (Christian) missionary work as morally righteous. But such a moral worldview is also antithetical to living in a plural society and, indeed, a plural world; whereas, if you believe that other cultures and religions have their own unique integrity, and the diversity of humanity's religious expressions is a part of our legacy that ought to be treasured, it's hard for me to see how you can regard missionaryin' the heathens as a worthy pursuit.

In other words, it seems like we still have a ways to go until the values of pluralism and cosmopolitanism can really be considered ascendant in this society.

This Wikipedia page has some more fun religion maps.

Happiness

Speaking of national happiness...



This map shows levels of "subjective well-being" around the world - i.e., how happy people say they are. A couple of thoughts on this:

First, just from eyeballing this map, it looks like there is a correlation between national wealth and general happiness, but not an exceptionally strong one. Most developed countries rate quite happy, while many poor countries, especially in Africa, rate relatively unhappy. But still - Guatemalans are happier than the French; Mongolians are happier than the Japanese; Kyrgyzstanis are happier than Russians. (And notice our Bhutanese friends seem pretty content - their GNH policy must be working.)

Second, I've long felt that once an individual (or a society) reaches a certain degree of wealth at which their basic needs - food, shelter, medical care, maybe education (i.e., everything that's fairly low on Maslow's hierarchy of needs) - that all further wealth has relatively low marginal utility. That is, if your basic needs are taken care of and you don't have to worry about them much, then non-wealth factors will have a much greater effect on your overall level of happiness. I think this map bears that out. While some regions, such as much of Africa and South Asia, are clearly unhappier than others, these are regions where basic needs are oftentimes not being met. (Most of the former Soviet Union also appears to be in a grim mood, as well, though this might be attributable to their particular sociohistorical legacy.) But if you look only at middle- and upper-income nations, I don't really see a discernible difference. Countries like Malaysia, Costa Rica, and Saudi Arabia are among the happiest in the world; Thailand and Colombia are comparable to France and Germany; etc. So if I were a nation, what I'd be trying to do is encourage economic growth to the point of achieving middle-income status, and once that goal is achieved, devoting additional resources to ensuring that the basic needs of all my citizens are met. (Of course, the premise of such a policy would be that happiness is inherently more valuable than pure economic power, and some might disagree with that.)

Third, though: I wonder how seriously any of this ought to be taken. People are not necessarily entirely reliable when it comes to reporting their own mental states. Depending on the methodology by which this data was compiled, it seems possible that cultural conditions or expectations influenced the way people reported their own feelings, regardless of what their actual feelings were. For instance, Anglophone countries all reported fairly high levels of happiness. Is this because Anglophone people are happier - or did the wording of the question have a particular connotation in English which was different from other languages? Or is there a legacy of the peculiarly Anglo "stiff upper lip" such that Anglophone peoples felt they ought to say they were happy, regardless of how they actually felt? Similarly, most Buddhist countries scored relatively high (again, including Bhutan). This could be because Buddhists tend to be happier - or it could be because Buddhists feel it's more important to report that they're happy. Because I think it's impossible to know which it is for sure, I would take this map with a medium-large grain of salt.

On the other hand - the French are the grumpiest people in Western Europe? Sounds about right to me.

UPDATE: Here's a snippet from a BBC article on the map:

Adrian White, from the UK's University of Leicester, used the responses of 80,000 people worldwide to map out subjective wellbeing.

Denmark came top, followed closely by Switzerland and Austria. The UK ranked 41st. Zimbabwe and Burundi came bottom.

A nation's level of happiness was most closely associated with health levels.

Prosperity and education were the next strongest determinants of national happiness.

Bhutan: World's Most Economically Sophisticated Nation

Bhutan - a cuddly little egg of a Buddhist kingdom tucked obscurely into the Himalayan Mountains - makes for a rather exciting topographical map, no?

But I bring it up here to raise a point: Bhutan is the most economically sophisticated country in the world. Oh, I don't mean they're wealthy - suited men in lower Manhattan have been known to sneeze out more than their GDP of about $1.3 billion. But the thing is, Bhutan has a policy of promoting Gross National Happiness:

Gross National Happiness (GNH) is an attempt to define quality of life in more holistic and psychological terms than Gross National Product.

The term was coined by Bhutan's former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck in 1972 soon after the demise of his father King Jigme Dorji Wangchuk who has opened up Bhutan to the age of modernization. It signaled his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values. Like many moral goals, it is somewhat easier to state than to define. Nonetheless, it serves as a unifying vision for the Five Year planning process and all the derived planning documents that guide the economic and development plans of the country.

While conventional development models stress economic growth as the ultimate objective, the concept of GNH claims to be based on the premise that true development of human society takes place when material and spiritual development occur side by side to complement and reinforce each other. The four pillars of GNH are the promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance.

Now compare this to the 'developed' world's GDP, which is purely a measure of economic activity. The goal of any economy, we all are told, ad infinitum by our political leaders, the media, and the vast majority of economists, is to promote growth. This is how economic health is defined. So: a child breaks her arm? Good! More money going into the health care system. An enormous flood of toxic coal ash obliterates the Tennessee countryside? Good! Much economic activity will result from the clean-up and possible civilian population relocations. We drain the last drops of oil from our nation's bedrock? Good! Oil can be sold for money. (Never mind that a deduction from one's nation's resources ought to be considered by any reasonable measure a reduction of national wealth.) And war? Well...

But consdier the most intractable problems we face: poverty; malnutrition; deforestation; climate change. In all these cases, simple economic calculation doesn't provide the incentives to solve the problems. But the economic growth paradigm is sacrosanct - no politician dares to challenge it.

But Bhutan has. And here's the thing: until we start thinking in terms of GNH, rather than GDP, we're not going to be able to solve any of those problems. We're just not.

The Polar Ice Caps

Here's a link to what the polar ice caps look like today.

Tick tock.

Speaking of Human Civilization as a Metastasizing Cancer...

Here's a fun look at the spread of Wal-Mart since its humble inception.



I mean, they didn't have to choose the color of gangrene...

Actually, you know what would have been even more terrifying? If they'd used those bland little yellow smiley faces Wal Mart uses in ads when it's having a sale. Imagine them popping up all across the continent like some narcotized but insatiable horde...

The Human Footprint

We wears some big shoes!







If, all Matrix-style, you see humanity as a corrosive parasite, a life-destroying succubus on Mama Gaia, then this is a picture of the damage we've wrought: the colors towards the alarming end of the spectrum indicate areas where we've thoroughly obliterated the legacy of nature. Think landfills; parking lots; acres of homogenous monoculture bending off towards the horizon.

I, for one, don't have quite such a dire view of things, mainly because I figure most of what we've built and continue to build is likely to prove impermanent - the proverbial blip on the geological record.. Picture what the human footprint will look like 10,000 years after we're gone: a few pale dots here and there to indicate piles of rubble - our erstwhile great cities. Over the long run, our species' motto might well ought to be: "Humanity: No Big Whoop."

In the meantime, though...

Open Letter

Dear Internets,

You know what you need? A blog that updates with one new bitchin map every goddamn day.

Oh, there are some nice map blogs out there. There's this, for instance. And this guy puts up some nice maps.

But really. One a day. You know?

Sincerely,
Chachy B. Terwilliger