Photo: Alexey Menschikov*
ANTAEUS
When I lie on the ground
I rise flushed as a rose in the morning.
In fights I arrange a fall on the ring
To rub myself with sand.
That is operative
As an elixir. I cannot be weaned
Off the earth's long contour, her river-veins.
Down here in my cave
Girded with root and rock
I am cradled in the dark that wombed me
And nurtured in every artery
Like a small hillock.
Let each new hero come
Seeking the golden apples and Atlas:
He must wrestle with me before he pass
Into that realm of fame
Among sky-born and royal.
He may well throw me and renew my birth
But let him not plan, lifting me off the earth,
My elevation, my fall.
~ Seamus Heaney
Hercules wrestling with Antaeus, 510 bceI like persona poems, including this elaboration of the Antaeus myth. Antaeus was a half-giant, the son of Gaia, the Earth, and Poseidon, god of the sea. He challenged passersby to wrestling matches — but every time they pinned him to the ground, he gained more strength from contact with the earth. He was finally defeated by Hercules, who held him aloft and crushed him.
Not really a nice story except for the idea of renewing your strength by touching Mother Earth.
Heaney is often regarded as an “earth” poet (I forget who it was who divided poets and writers according to the four elements, going by their dominant imagery: thus there are fire poets, air poets, water poets, and earth poets. Sharon Olds, a “body poet,” may be a special case of “earth.”
Still, Heaney’s epitaph is “epitaph: "Walk on air against your better judgement.” The line comes from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and is a quotation from one of his poems.
Heaney explained:
“A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. You grew up vigilant because it’s a divided society. My poetry, on the whole, was earth-hugging, but then I began to look up rather than keep down. I think it had to do with a sense that the marvelous was as permissible as the matter-of-fact in poetry. That line is from a poem called 'The Gravel Walks,' which is about heavy work—wheeling barrows of gravel—but also the paradoxical sense of lightness when you’re lifting heavy things. I like the in-betweenness of up and down, of being on the earth and of the heavens. I think that’s where poetry should dwell, between the dream world and the given world, because you don’t just want photography, and you don’t want fantasy either.”
One interpretation of “Walk on air against your better judgment” is "Dare to believe in miracles." For Heaney it was a major miracle that the conflict in Northern Ireland was peacefully resolved. I think that gave him the courage not to hug the earth so much, but also to lift up his eyes and dream.
https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/seamus-heaneys-epitaph
A PROPHETIC SCI-FI NOVEL
~ Octavia Butler’s tenth novel, “Parable of the Sower,” which was published in 1993, opens in Los Angeles in 2024. Global warming has brought drought and rising seawater. The middle class and working poor live in gated neighborhoods, where they fend off the homeless with guns and walls. Fresh water is scarce, as valuable as money. Pharmaceutical companies have created “smart drugs,” which boost mental performance, and “pyro,” a pill that gives those who take it sexual pleasure from arson. Fires are common. Police services are expensive, though few people trust the police. Public schools are being privatized, as are whole towns. In this atmosphere, a Presidential candidate named Christopher Donner is elected based on his promises to dismantle government programs and bring back jobs.
“Parable of the Sower” unfolds through the journal entries of its protagonist, a fifteen-year-old black girl named Lauren Oya Olamina, who lives with her family in one of the walled neighborhoods. “People have changed the climate of the world,” she observes. “Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.” She places no hope in Donner, whom she views as “a symbol of the past to hold onto as we’re pushed into the future.” Instead, she equips herself to survive in that future. She practices her aim with BB guns. She collects maps and books on how Native Americans used plants. She develops a belief system of her own, a Darwinian religion she names Earthseed. When the day comes for her to leave her walled enclave, Lauren walks west to the 101 freeway, joining a river of the poor that is flooding north. It’s a dangerous crossing, made more so by a taboo affliction that Lauren was born with, “hyperempathy,” which causes her to feel the pain of others.
By writing black female protagonists into science fiction, and bringing her acute appraisal of real-world power structures to bear on the imaginary worlds she created, Butler became an early pillar of the subgenre and aesthetic known as Afrofuturism. (Kara Walker cites her as an inspiration; and, as Hilton Als has pointed out, Butler is the “dominant artistic force” in Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade.”) In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Kellyanne Conway made a strong case for George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” when she used the phrase “alternative facts” and sent the novel to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list. Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” also experienced a resurgence in sales, and its TV adaptation on Hulu inspired protest costumes. But for sheer peculiar prescience, Butler’s novel and its sequel may be unmatched.
The sequel to “Parable of the Sower,” “Parable of the Talents,” published in 1998, begins in 2032. By then, various forms of indentured servitude and slavery are common, facilitated by high-tech slave collars. The oppression of women has become extreme; those who express their opinion, “nags,” might have their tongues cut out. People are addicted not only to designer drugs but also to “dream masks,” which generate virtual fantasies as guided dreams, allowing wearers to submerge themselves in simpler, happier lives. News comes in the form of disks or “news bullets,” which “purport to tell us all we need to know in flashy pictures and quick, witty, verbal one-two punches. Twenty-five or thirty words are supposed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights.” The Donner Administration has written off science, but a more immediate threat lurks: a violent movement is being whipped up by a new Presidential candidate, Andrew Steele Jarret, a Texas senator and religious zealot who is running on a platform to “make American great again.”
In Butler’s prognosis, humans survive through an intricate logic of interdependence. Soon after leaving her family’s walled neighborhood, Lauren discerns that her natural allies are other people of color, including mixed-race couples, since they are likely to become targets of white violence. Several of the migrants who join Lauren’s pack and the community she later establishes, Acorn, turn out to also be “sharers,” the term for people with hyperempathy.
But Butler is not making a sentimental case for the value of empathy. In the day to day of the Parable books, hyperempathy is a liability that makes moving through the world more complicated and, for tactical reasons, requires those who have it to behave more ruthlessly. When defending herself against attackers, Lauren often must shoot or stab to kill, or else risk being immobilized by the pain she inflicts. In one particularly dark manifestation of the syndrome, she is raped and experiences both her own pain and the pleasure of her rapist.
In 1995, Butler became the first science-fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur fellowship. The grant, she hoped, would enable her to finish four more books she had planned for the Parable series. But the story, she found, was “too depressing.” She changed course and wrote a vampire novel, her last book, “Fledgling,” which came out in 2005. The following year, Butler died unexpectedly, at the age of fifty-eight, when she fell and hit her head outside her home, north of Seattle. In her lifetime, Butler insisted that the Parable series was not intended as an augur. “This was not a book about prophecy,” she said, of “Talents,” in remarks she delivered at M.I.T. “This was a cautionary tale, although people have told me it was prophecy. All I have to say to that is: I certainly hope not.” ~
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/octavia-butlers-prescient-vision-of-a-zealot-elected-to-make-america-great-again
photo: Alexey Menschikov**
TRUMP AND THE BUDDHIST HELL REALM
~ “The conspicuous absence of love in Trump’s behavior and speech betrays an emotional condition Buddhists refer to as “a hell realm.” While it seems to be a pre-ordained state for which there is little hope of recovery, one thinks of Dickens’ transformation of Scrooge from a similar infernal character into a penitent benefactor. But Scrooge had a salvific dream in which he allowed himself to be terrified by the prospect of perdition, despite the fact he knew the ghost in his dream wasn’t real. So Scrooge must at least have had enough imagination to discern the ominous arc of his behavior. But Trump doesn’t read by his own admission, much less entertain fictive models of self-improvement.” ~ Chard deNiord
Oriana:
Scrooge became afraid that no one would come visit him in his old age, and that no one would come visit his grave. These days the custom of visiting graves has ceased to exists in America, so we can discard that factor. And rich old men can pay others to come visit and flatter them (I don’t foresee any visits from Melania). As for “place in history,” delusional thinking can erase reality. No, Trump will never become a good person, a “penitent benefactor.”
[True, he will have a place in history — probably as the worst president ever. But he's likely to remain too delusional to become aware of that, much less become motivated to change. Hitler, just before killing himself, dictated his "Last Testament," in which he announced, "The German people have proved unworthy of me.”]
Still, the observation about the absence of love and the Buddhist hell realm remains accurate. There is a hell of “hungry ghosts” for whom nothing is ever enough. Nothing can feed their hunger. They are sometimes depicted as seated around a sumptuously set banquet table — and yet they are starved. They always want more. Why? They are totally self-concerned.
As Adrienne Rich said, “Without tenderness, we are in hell.”
~ “In a sequel to Crazy Rich Asians, Kwan has a scion of one of his Chinese dynasts observe that his parents and their crowd have “always been racist and elitist to the extreme.” When he decided to marry an Indian woman, he relates, his father told him, “If you don’t care about your own future, think about the children you will have with that woman. For eleven generations, the blood will never be pure.” When it comes to entrenching ethnic difference, there are ways and there are ways.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/singapore/568567/
Oriana:
I am not planning to see the sequel. This movie was quite enough, even though I can't quite make up my mind about it. I found it more annoying than funny. At some points, I found it downright nauseating. But my main verdict is “not very funny” — though the female friend (the bleached blonde) was quite funny, as was the too-brief bible study scene, and an occasional line (“I'm the rainbow sheep of the family”; “Eat more; don't forget all the starving children in America” — the latter comic in its inversion, not if taken seriously).
The family drama part was fairly interesting: the two mothers, for instance, each one a tigress, similar yet so different — one modern, the other a tradition-enforcing tyrant (until her off-screen change of heart, that is). But the crazy wealth part got on my nerves, especially those parties that are shown in exhausting, noisy detail. And more than anything, the movie was about the crazy wealth. I would prefer to see a lot more of the street life and street food — to see the variety of people who live in Singapore, rather than just the boring rich, and especially the mindless, crass young adult children of the rich.
The movie doesn’t linger on anything (the wedding is perhaps the one exception, but it’s another display of tremendous wealth), and it certainly doesn’t delve into anything in depth. It doesn’t worry about stereotypes and clichés. The pace is rushed and the movie feels overloaded. Since it’s supposed to be a comedy, the viewer is supposed to be forgiving. And I would be if it were more funny. But it’s not all that funny. And I can’t quite believe that this kind of marriage would work out — he seems quite “liberated” and Americanized, but I emphasize “seems.”
The movie has been positively reviewed by a huge majority of critics, so this review below came as a surprise. Yet it make some excellent points:
~ “One of the main problems is reflected in the second word of its title. Crazy Rich Asians, a film that luxuriates in decadence, claims to cast a critical eye on the old-money wealth of the Young family — the expansive Singaporean enclave that main character Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) is placed in unwitting opposition with — yet takes every single moment to delight in the extravagance on display. Whether it be the enormous wealth of the Youngs — the heir, Nick (Henry Golding), is deeply in love with Rachel in spite of the heavy, cruel disapproval of the family, especially mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh) — or simply the still-immensely comfortable living of the family of Peik Lin (Awkwafina) — which, as the movie takes great pains to demonstrate, is supposedly self-effacing or tasteless enough to be funny and therefore acceptable — the film finds itself breathless in its pursuit of the next speeding drone shot, the next opportunity to ogle the supposedly easy living of Singapore. Even a night market scene, one of the few sequences that seems to have something approaching a soul, is wrapped up and summarily forgotten so quickly that it feels like a deliberate act of misdirection.
Crazy Rich Asians otherwise has no time or inclination to explore anything traditional in Asian culture unless it is explicitly related to the plot in a way intended to draw out the nigh-villainous qualities of the Youngs. The movie’s most fundamental and detrimental demerit is its frequent flattening of characters and centuries-old practices into one-dimensional stereotypes, conflating so many different attributes so as to create something muddled and more than a little offensive.
Of course, the idea of a parent being unreasonably hostile to a child’s partner is nothing new in Hollywood film. But that very reason is why the use of an Asian culture — and pointedly an exotic Asian setting outside of America, held conveniently at a distance — feels like little more than window dressing. Asian signifiers are used almost as a form of Othering, setting apart the American-raised Rachel at every juncture from her potential in-laws. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a scene of dumpling-making where Rachel has to be taught the method. In dialogue, Eleanor explicitly connects this storied task with the labor of love that she gave throughout Nick’s childhood, something that would be perfectly valid if it was not so immediately and obviously used to denigrate Rachel’s station in life.
Yet Crazy Rich Asians obstinately refuses to abandon the trappings of the rich, and many characters are shown as positively indulging in these pleasures — pleasures that are explicitly modern and consumerist. From the requisite makeover that Rachel undergoes in order to show up Eleanor — a moment of self-actualizing through materialism — to the lavish wedding centerpiece, which features a church converted into a jungle, complete with drifting water that accompanies the bride’s procession, these are depicted in the most cloyingly fawning of ways, as if fairy tales could be achieved if only one had the right number of zeroes at the end of their bank account. There’s even a completely pointless, extensive subplot with Nick’s charity-fashion icon cousin, Astrid (Gemma Chan), who has to reckon with her husband’s attention-getting affair and which ends with her defiantly donning a pair of $1.2 million earrings, as if to suggest that rampant consumption is, in certain circumstances, the unequivocal moral high ground.
Numerous other (at best) tone-deaf moments abound, including one atrocious “comedic” beat involving the unspoken menace of the Young family estate’s Sikh guards, but the one that most sticks out in my head is the introduction of (Korean-American) Ken Jeong’s character, the father of Peik Lin. He is first introduced speaking English with a conspicuous Cantonese accent, something that would be utterly ordinary for someone living in Singapore. But then he drops the act, explaining his education at Cal State Fullerton to the laughter of Rachel and his family.
Such a moment would play as stereotypical but pointed if directed at a white figure. But in context, with Jeong’s character playing the joke on a fellow Asian-American, it comes off as bizarre, pointless, and so indicative of this film’s muddled and confused perspective on the milieu it attempts to depict. Which begs the question: who is this film for? Is it directed at Asian-Americans who, despite the vast gap in both wealth and living style, desire representation? Is it aimed at general American (read: white) audiences who can thus claim to be “helping out” and laugh at the sort of joke described above? Most disquietingly, there seems to be no definable answer.” ~
https://thefilmstage.com/reviews/review-crazy-rich-asians-is-a-muddled-shallow-and-empty-step-backwards-for-asian-american-representation/
Oriana:
One rhetorical question I have is rather obvious: if the movie happened to be about “crazy rich white Americans” and set in Florida, say, would the reviews be positive?
I agree about the shallowness and materialism — this movie is about money, money, money — the “vulgar excess” that used to be associated with America, not China, but some things are universal, never mind the superficial patina of “local color” (e.g. grandma announces that Rachel has an “auspicious nose”). Still, the way the domineering mother abandons her rigid, preachy position (again, I wish the bible study scene had been given more development) did touch me (I don’t think this is a spoiler — we expect a happy ending, and it arrives predictably enough), and the symbolism of the beautiful emerald ring works well. It’s arguably that most tasteful thing in a movie that tosses the idea of good taste down the grand stairways that it features with careless abandon — or rather, to update the imagery, out of private jets and helicopters.
And Astrid, with her million-dollar earrings and her supposed devotion to charitable causes, did manage to touch me as well — a reminder that the rich aren’t necessarily loved and happy. Though Rachel, the female lead, is a sufficient portrayal of the independent woman, Astrid isn’t a superfluous character — and not just because in the end she breaks away from the tradition of suffering in silence for the sake of the family. She injects some heartbreak into the plot — and, strange to say, the movie could use even more heartbreak, which lurks just under the surface. It’s as if the spoiled little boy’s deliberate muddying of the lobby floor of the fancy hotel foreshadowed some serious “dirt” that’s not dealt with.
Astrid suffers, and that gives the movie some moments of depth — but those 1.2 million-dollar earrings, really. This money could do so much good in the world. But the characters live in a bubble and have zero compassion. The little boy who muddies the floor of the hotel sets the tone — sure, arguably the hotel managers “deserve” this for being bigoted, but the nasty kid lets us know: that's how we treat those who are not “our kind.” We are so rich, we can away with anything. And there are always those who will clean up afterwards, at a minimum wage.
Mary:
Considering the discussion of "Crazy Rich Asians" brought me up against my own feelings about wealth and the wealthy, which have always been both negative and unforgiving. This is from the very earliest times, not due to any conscious political or ideological stance, and always seemed like an automatic response, the kind you have when encountering bitter tastes, noxious smells, or a snake on the sidewalk. This may have been partly due to a particular Aunt, with aspirations and pretensions to those both wealthy and of a "higher" social class She was a master of the snooty putdown, resented and scorned because we knew these pretensions were without foundation, all a concoction of her envy and desire. Did this vain pretension, and its essential assumption of superiority, morph into scorn for all the actual rich, something that approaches repulsion? Maybe. But I know anyone who is rich, or "acts rich," immediately wins my rejection.
Recently I received a copy of "Town and Country" magazine. (I don’t know why, I am certainly not a subscriber.) This was the “philanthropy issue” devoted to celebrating the charitable “work” of the very very rich. All the accolades and articles were embedded in a matrix of ads for luxury goods. Reading this magazine filled me with repulsion, an almost visceral disgust — all these things: purses, watches, earrings, etc. with prices higher than the yearly salaries of many, certainly of most folks I know.
And absolutely no sense of irony, or even awareness, of the violent disjunction demonstrated so clearly here between the "crazy rich" and charity. Or maybe, it's the crazy rich who create the need they claim to be answering.
Am I being unjust here? Or is the truth of it as ugly as I think?
I don’t think I'll be seeing that movie.
**
Oriana: ASTRID’S EARRINGS
It’s one of those movies that leave you in two minds. I could say: No one needs to see, but I could as well say, “Everyone needs to see it.” It’s precisely the point the point you raise regarding the “charity” issue of Town and Country.”
Though Astrid has been called a superfluous character who just clutters up an already overstuffed cast, I’ve come to think of her as the most important character in the movie — the one who delivers a hidden, ironic (some might even see it as “sarcastic”) message about wealth and the so-called “charity work.” The million-dollar earrings, which she at first hides from her commoner husband, sensing he’d find them morally obscene, could stand for the whole movie — except that until her “liberation,” symbolized by her putting them on, Astrid is an exception in that completely insensitive, totally materialistic family. I'm grateful to you for making me see that with greater clarity — the earrings as a symbol of hypocrisy.
Of course the earrings are just a small part of what she owns. Add her other jewelry, cars, clothes, handbags, shoes, watches, and other luxurious toys, and we are talking about twenty-thirty million (I'm so ignorant of luxury goods that this could be a wild underestimate). Imagine that money put into reforestation (even on a small scale), or a water reclamation project, or solar energy, organic farming, health programs, schools and teachers’ salaries — just one enterprise of this sort that would benefit the lives of so many — if not in Singapore, than in nearby countries where the need is overwhelming.
THE NAZI NUREMBERG LAWS WERE MODELED ON RACIST US LAWS
~ “In the late 1920s, Adolf Hitler declared in "Mein Kampf" that America was the "one state" making progress toward the creation of a healthy race-based order. He had in mind U.S. immigration law, which featured a quota system designed, as Nazi lawyers observed, to preserve the dominance of "Nordic" blood in the United States.
The American commitment to putting race at the center of immigration policy reached back to the Naturalization Act of 1790, which opened citizenship to "any alien, being a free white person." But immigration was only part of what made the U.S. a world leader in racist law in the age of Hitler.
Then as now, the U.S. was the home of a uniquely bold and creative legal culture, and it was harnessed in the service of white supremacy. Legislators crafted anti-miscegenation statutes in 30 states, some of which threatened severe criminal punishment for interracial marriage. And they developed American racial classifications, some of which deemed any person with even "one drop" of black blood to belong to the disfavored race. Widely denied the right to vote through clever devices like literacy tests, blacks were de facto second-class citizens. American lawyers also invented new forms of de jure second-class citizenship for Filipinos, Puerto Ricans and more.
This is the background to a disturbing story: the story of the American influence on the Nuremberg Laws, the notorious anti-Jewish legislation proclaimed amid the pageantry of the Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg in September of 1935.
At a crucial 1934 planning meeting for the Nuremberg system, the Minister of Justice presented a memorandum on American law. According to a transcript, he led a detailed discussion of miscegenation statutes from all over the United States. Moreover it is clear that the most radical Nazis were the most eager advocates of American practices. Roland Freisler, who would become president of the Nazi People's Court, declared that American jurisprudence "would suit us perfectly."
And the ugly irony is that when the Nazis rejected American law, it was often because they found it too harsh. For example, Nazi observers shuddered at the "human hardness" of the "one drop" rule, which classified people "of predominantly white appearance" as blacks. To them, American racism was sometimes simply too inhumane.
That may sound implausible — too awful to believe — but in their early years in power, the Nazis were not yet contemplating the "final solution." At first, they had a different fate in mind for the German Jewry: Jews were to be reduced to second-class citizenship and punished criminally if they sought to marry or engage in sexual contact with "Aryans." The ultimate goal was to terrify Germany's Jews into emigrating.
And for that program, America offered the obvious model — even if, as one Nazi lawyer put it in 1936, the Americans had "so far" not persecuted their Jews. Of course the Nazis did not simply do a cut-and-paste job, in part because much of American law avoided open racism. (Laws intended to keep blacks from the polls did not explicitly name their target.) But American antimiscegenation law was frankly racist, and the Nazi criminalization of intermarriage followed the American lead.
And we must not forget how tenaciously the racist rulebook that the Nazis admired held on in the United States. Antimiscegenation laws were only struck down at the tail end of the civil rights era, in 1967. Race-based immigration policies did not fully end until 1968 — long after the Greatest Generation stormed the beaches of Normandy and liberated Nazi death camps.” ~
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-whitman-hitler-american-race-laws-20170222-story.html
~ Lutherans who believed that God manifested himself in history not once, in the person of Christ, but repeatedly, were, as one critic put it, “Painfully exposed to the euphoria of the hour.” “Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler,” said one. ~ (cited by Peter Watson, “Nazi Religions of the Blood”)
Oriana: ~ that puzzling confusion between Christ and anti-Christ. You'd think it would be easy to tell the difference. You'd think. But apparently it was all about the euphoria of making Germany great again, and the millennia-old capacity to divinize the ruler.
~ “Trump supporters aren't just supporters. They're Trump wannabes attracted primarily if not solely to his appearance of invincibility. He has the allure of a gangster, someone who can do plenty of wrong without consequences.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
This reminded me of what to me is the most frightening statement that T ever made: that he could shoot somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose any votes.
What is the source of that “appearance of invincibility”? His supporters see him as “one of us” — a champion of both white supremacy and male supremacy, of the “purity” of the tradition that might makes right. As long as he’s perceived as an unwavering champion of racism and sexism, he can lie non-stop, launder money for the Russian Mafia, fondle his daughter in public, disrespect the parents of fallen soldiers — he can simply do no wrong.
T’s admiration for Putin is also highly disturbing, given Putin’s preference for silencing his critics by having them assassinated. This doesn’t seem to bother T in the least — for all we know, he’d love to follow in Putin’s footsteps (he also praised Saddam Hussein as a “strong leader”). When confronted by an interviewer with the statement, “Putin is a killer,” T replied that this country is not innocent either. But that is a false equivalence. The U.S. is not a dictatorship where the head of state eliminates critics by having them shot, poisoned, or thrown out the window. While not a “shining city on the hill” and beset with serious problems, America remains a symbol of freedom and democracy, however imperfect.
“SEE NO GOOD, HEAR NO GOOD, SPEAK NO GOOD”
“I look at the twentieth century, which in many ways was a secular humanist century… in that very century, the emancipation of women occurred, colonial domination of the less developed third world nations was largely ended, the civil rights movement broke the back of segregation, and homosexuals began to overcome the prejudice that has prevented them from achieving full membership and justice in the social order. Each of these is a powerful achievement….” ~ Bishop John Shelby Spong
There is more to this quotation, but I want to stop right there — just to thank Bishop Spong for enumerating some of those achievements. There is a toxic tendency among some to “see no good, hear no good, speak no good” when it comes to the collective human accomplishments. And his list is of course just a beginning. Science (especially physics and biology), technology, and medicine really took off in the twentieth century. The progress continues to stun me.
Of course there is no denying the two world wars and other atrocities. But positive achievements need to be acknowledged as well. For instance, starting in the last decades of the twentieth century, there has been a lot more questioning and free discussion. The literal belief in Bronze-Age mythologies has continued its decline. Ecological awareness began to emerge. Global poverty has decreased, along with infant mortality.
And on and on. There is so much GOOD that could be said about the twentieth century that those who utterly omit that good, always dwelling on the dark side, are in my eyes guilty of prejudiced perception. They seem to take secret joy in describing evil and in constant lamenting and complaining. Maybe it’s not so much a psychological quirk as simply a bad habit, like chewing one’s nails or hair pulling. Maybe it can be stopped. Gently. Gentleness has also been one of the developments of the twentieth century, especially when it comes to child rearing, but also in how people treat one another, recognizing the dignity of simply being human as never before.
*
KARL POPPER: “IN OUR INFINITE IGNORANCE WE ARE ALL EQUAL.”
~ “Karl Popper, 1902-1994, railed against dogmatism in all forms. He is best-known for the principle of falsification, a means of distinguishing pseudo-scientific theories, like astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis, from genuine ones, like quantum mechanics and general relativity. The latter, Popper pointed out, make predictions that can be empirically tested. But scientists can never prove a theory to be true, Popper insisted, because the next test might contradict all that preceded it. Observations can only disprove a theory, or falsify it.
Popper’s falsification principle has been used to attack string and multiverse theories, which cannot be empirically tested. Defenders of strings and multiverses deride critics as “Popperazzi.”
Popper, like the logical positivists before him, believed that a scientific theory can be “absolutely” true. In fact, he had “no doubt” that some current theories are true (although he refused to say which ones). But he rejected the positivist belief that we can ever know that a theory is true. “We must distinguish between truth, which is objective and absolute, and certainty, which is subjective.”
But Popper disagreed with the positivist view that science can be reduced to a formal, logical system or method. A scientific theory is an invention, an act of creation, based more upon a scientist's intuition than upon pre-existing empirical data. “The history of science is everywhere speculative,” Popper said. “It is a marvelous history. It makes you proud to be a human being.” Framing his face in his outstretched hands, Popper intoned, “I believe in the human mind.”
Popper opposed determinism, which he saw as antithetical to human creativity and freedom. “Determinism means that if you have sufficient knowledge of chemistry and physics, you can predict what Mozart will write tomorrow,” he said. “Now this is a ridiculous hypothesis.” Popper realized long before modern chaos theorists that not only quantum systems but even classical, Newtonian ones are unpredictable. Waving at the lawn outside the window he said, “There is chaos in every grass.”
Popper was proud of his strained relationship with his fellow philosophers, including Wittgenstein, with whom he had a run-in in 1946. Popper was lecturing at Cambridge when Wittgenstein interrupted to proclaim the “nonexistence of philosophical problems.” Popper disagreed, saying there were many such problems, such as establishing a basis for moral rules. Wittgenstein, who was sitting beside a fireplace toying with a poker, thrust it at Popper, demanding, “Give me an example of a moral rule!” Popper replied, “Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers,” and Wittgenstein stormed out of the room. [For other accounts of this famous episode, see the book Wittgenstein’s Poker.]
Popper abhorred philosophers who argue that scientists adhere to theories for cultural and political rather than rational reasons. Such philosophers resent being viewed as inferior to genuine scientists and are trying to “change their status in the pecking order.” Popper was particularly contemptuous of postmodernists who argued that “knowledge” is just a weapon wielded by people struggling for power. “I don't read them,” Popper said, waving his hand as if at a bad odor. He added, “I once met Foucault.”
I suggested that the postmodernists sought to describe how science is practiced, whereas he, Popper, tried to show how it should be practiced. To my surprise, Popper nodded. “That is a very good statement,” he said. “You can't see what science is without having in your head an idea what science should be.” He admitted that scientists invariably fall short of the ideal he set for them. “Since scientists got subsidies for their work, science isn't exactly what it should be. This is unavoidable. There is a certain corruption, unfortunately. But I don't talk about that.”
Popper then plunged into a technical critique of the big bang theory. “It's always the same,” he summed up. “The difficulties are underrated. It is presented in a spirit as if this all has scientific certainty, but scientific certainty doesn't exist.”
Popper scoffed at scientists’ hope that they can achieve a final theory of nature. “Many people think that the problems can be solved, many people think the opposite. I think we have gone very far, but we are much further away. I must show you one passage that bears on this.” He shuffled off and returned with his book Conjectures and Refutations. Opening it, he read his own words with reverence: “In our infinite ignorance we are all equal.”
I slipped in a final question: Why in his autobiography did Popper say that he is the happiest philosopher he knows? “Most philosophers are really deeply depressed,” he replied, “because they can’t produce anything worthwhile.” Looking pleased with himself, Popper glanced over at Mrs. Mew [his assistant], who wore an expression of horror. Popper’s smile faded. “It would be better not to write that,” he said to me. “I have enough enemies, and I better not answer them in this way.” He stewed a moment and added, “But it is so.” ~
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-paradox-of-karl-popper/
TRIBAL VERSUS OPEN SOCIETY
“This civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or “enclosed society,” with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man.” ~ Karl Popper
Oriana:
This conflict is playing itself out acutely right now -- the forces of nationalism and religion ("God and fatherland") against globalism and secularism and a more urban vs rural population. Perhaps we'll never be free of the God-and-fatherland crowd, but the long-term trend is toward more worldliness.
I marvel at having felt vaguely nauseous when in my childhood I came across a "God and Fatherland" postcard going back to just before WW2. Though a phrase like "the spirit of Hitlerism" was at that point too sophisticated for me, I sensed that it was a pro-war slogan, and it went with bishops blessing the cannons.
I still went to church back then — I remember this well because my grandmother was still alive — but I sensed a tension between the teachings of Jesus and the way that throughout history the church aligned itself with pro-war factions.
Wiki: ~ “Popper extols Plato's analysis of social change and discontent, naming him as a great sociologist, yet rejects his solutions. This is dependent on Popper's reading of the emerging humanitarian ideals of Athenian democracy as the birth pangs of his coveted "open society". Plato's hatred of democracy led him, says Popper, "to defend lying, political miracles, tabooistic superstition, the suppression of truth, and ultimately, brutal violence." Popper feels that Plato's historicist ideas are driven by a fear of the change that liberal democracies bring about. Also, as an aristocrat and a relative of one-time Athenian dictator Critias, Plato according to Popper was sympathetic to the oligarchs of his own day and contemptuous of the common man. Popper also suspects that Plato was the victim of his own vanity, and had wished to become the supreme Philosopher King of his vision.
The last chapter of the first volume bears the same title as the book, and conveys Popper's own philosophical explorations on the necessity of direct liberal democracy as the only form of government allowing institutional improvements without violence and bloodshed.
In volume two, "The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath", Popper criticises Hegel and Marx, tracing their ideas to Aristotle, and arguing that they were at the root of 20th century totalitarianism.
In the fifth section of his chapter on Hegel he deals with Hegel's influence on 20th century fascism explicitly focusing on the historicist elements of fascism rather than its totalitarianism.[
The next principal enemy of the open society, according to Popper, is Karl Marx. Popper concedes that, unlike Hegel, Marx deeply cared about the plight of ordinary people and the injustices that prevailed in his own day in capitalist societies. As well, Marx's writings offer keen economic, sociological, and historical insights. However, even where Popper considers Marx's views has value Popper considers Marx's historicism to have lead Marx into overstating his case - for instance the importance of class struggle. Popper rejects outright, however, Marx's historicist, anti-rational, and totalitarian outlook.
The philosopher Joseph Agassi credits Popper with showing that historicism is a factor common to both fascism and Bolshevism.” ~
Oriana:
Historicism is the tendency to see everything as determined (and pre-determined) by the forces of history; thus, the talk about being “on the right side of history” — much the way god used to be invoked: “Gott mit uns.” To this day, some believe that there are inalterable “laws of history” and “historical cycles” that cannot be changed: thus, world war three is inevitable so that a new order can be born (for fascist thinkers, it’s actually the restored old order, with white supremacy and the subjugation of women).
Marx was, alas, overly influenced by the historicist views of Hegel. Thus, though interested in the welfare of workers, Marx was appalled by the success of the labor unions, which he saw as delaying the inevitable revolution. This is quasi-religious thinking: revolution acquired the character of the Second Coming.
Both Communism and fascism are often called secular religions, which I think is correct.
Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, 1831**
RELIGIONS WERE CREATED DURING THE AGE OF IGNORANCE
We simply can't get into the mentality of the people who created the major religions (be it not in the form in which those are now practiced). Their world was populated by supernatural beings, chiefly demons. Disease was thought to be caused by demons. Earthquakes, floods, and other “acts of god” were seen as punishment. “Sacred Scriptures” were written by men who had no idea where the sun went for the night. Not that we can blame them for not knowing that the sun didn’t “go” anywhere — rather, the earth rotates.
No, we cannot blame our ancestors for having been profoundly ignorant. They were slowly making all sorts of discoveries, making inventions that would eventually reduce ignorance (e.g. the printing press). The problem is that the various ancient texts arising from the cruelties and terrors of the archaic mentality are still with us, still being taken literally by some — and the results can be lethal. Now, in the twenty-first century, when we are beginning to talk of self-driving cars and other wonders, those texts are mostly a millstone at humanity’s neck. 9/11 really opened our eyes: it was the revenge of the Age of Ignorance.
“The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in "Israel in the Desert" (1819)
**
"Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure," Oliver Sacks wrote shortly before dying on August 30, 2015. Sometimes you know right away you're in the presence of an extraordinary mind, extraordinary personality.
NORMAL BODY TEMPERATURE ISN’T 98.6
~ “Forget everything you know about normal body temperature and fever, starting with 98.6. That’s an antiquated number based on a flawed study from 1868 (yes, 150 years ago). The facts about fever are a lot more complicated.
First, there’s no single number for normal. It’s slightly higher for women than men. It’s higher for children than adults. And it is lowest in the morning.
"A temperature of 99 at six o’clock in the morning is very abnormal, whereas that same temperature at four o’clock in the afternoon can be totally normal," says Jonathan Hausmann, a rheumatologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who gathered 11,458 temperatures in crowdsourced research using an iPhone app called Feverprints.
The study, published online this month in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, refutes the age-old benchmark of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, Hausmann and his colleagues found an average normal temperature in adults of 97.7 degrees, as measured with an oral thermometer. (The published study uses results from 329 healthy adults.) As for fever, Hausmann found that it begins at 99.5 degrees, on average.
But that doesn’t mean you should shift to a lower benchmark for normal. Hausmann wants body temperature to be a flexible concept, viewed in context with age, gender, time of day, and other factors—much in the way weight is evaluated based on height, and how the thresholds for normal blood pressure differ based on age.
Our internal thermostat lies in the hypothalamus, an almond-sized area of the brain that induces us to sweat when we need to cool down and shiver when we need to warm up. Body temperature rises with exercise, in hot weather, and after taking some types of drugs, including some antibiotics and antihistamines. Women also run higher temperatures during ovulation and pregnancy.
In the body’s first response to pathogens, proteins called pyrogens flow through the bloodstream to the hypothalamus, which responds by ramping up the heat. Fever helps your body fight infection by stimulating the immune system, sending a kind of alert to the body’s defenses. It also creates a more hostile environment for bacteria and viruses, making it more difficult for them to replicate. Though parents often worry when their young children spike a fever, a high temperature is the vanguard, not the enemy.
This study isn't the first to challenge the idea of one standard temperature, yet our culture has remained stuck on 98.6 degrees. That number was the work of Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich, a 19th-century German physician who wrote a seminal text using data from 25,000 patients. He concluded that 98.6 degrees is the body’s normal "physiologic point," and that fever begins at 100.4 degrees.
Philip Mackowiak, an infectious disease physician who is now a medical historian at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, admired Wunderlich’s work but doubted the validity of 98.6 degrees. He analyzed the temperatures of 148 healthy volunteers and found an average of 98.2. There was nothing special about 98.6 degrees. It wasn’t the most frequent reading or the midpoint between the highest and lowest. In fact, only 8 percent of the volunteers had a temperature of 98.6.
His "aha" moment came when he learned that one of Wunderlich’s thermometers was at the Mutter Museum, in Philadelphia. Tests showed that the thermometer, a mercury-filled glass instrument about nine inches long, ran 2.9 to 3.2 degrees higher than modern digital thermometers. It was even calibrated higher than other thermometers of the same period in the museum’s collection. Wunderlich took patients’ temperatures under the arm, a method that produces readings that are lower (and less reliable) than temperatures taken orally, offsetting some of the disparity.
Mackowiak published his findings in 1992 and 1994 and began giving medical talks on the subject. But the 98.6 benchmark persisted. "Here’s the reason I think this concept has lasted for so long, that 98.6 just won’t die: People don’t want a complicated answer [about fever]," he says. "You want yes or no and give me a number."
Now Hausmann has taken up the cause, and found an even lower normal temperature than Mackowiak did. In the next phase of his Feverprints work, he plans to study whether fever-reducing medicines actually prolong illness, a subject of medical debate. He also hopes to learn how fever differs based on its cause—bacterial, viral, or fungal infections, some types of cancer, hormonal disorders, or inflammatory diseases. Although crowdsourced data has its limitations—in this case, only iPhone users can install the app, which was created using Apple’s ResearchKit framework—Hausmann says his initial study shows it can produce reliable results.
To answer these questions, he intends to pair his app with wearable thermometers, which can send continuous readings to the app and collect higher quality data as a result. "If we have enough people wearing those gadgets," Hausmann adds, "we could understand fever patterns of different illnesses." That is why he coined the term "feverprint"—to recast the antiquated idea of one standard, and to discover the unique "fingerprint" of a disease's fever.” ~
https://www.wired.com/story/98-degrees-is-a-normal-body-temperature-right-not-quite/
Carl August Wunderlich, 1815-1877. He wrote a treatise on "medical thermometry." Oriana:
First of all, we need to understand that there is no single “normal” body temperature. It’s a cycle: lowest in the morning, rising during the day to a high around 6 pm, dropping again near bedtime. Most healthy people don’t reach 98.6 — 98.2 is now accepted as the new average — not the “new normal,” but the new AVERAGE — with the understanding that it depends on the time of day and activity level.
OLDER IS COLDER
Older people run lower, generally never reaching 98.6, or even 98.2. And that’s normal. 95 might be a cause for concern (except for the truly elderly, whose morning temperature may be as low as 94) — but certainly not 97.
Older people have a less pronounced diurnal cycle, with the oldest old staying “cold” throughout the day.
Are women colder than men? Their skin temperature is lower, but not the core temperature. Also, women’s body temperature varies with the menstrual cycle, being higher in the second, post-ovulation, high-progesterone phase (progesterone, an androgen, raises the resting metabolic rate). Race is also a factor, but not a very pronounced one.
Poor Dr. Wunderlich! He tried so hard — 25,000 subjects! — but his thermometer was inaccurate, at least by modern standards. And he seemed not to understand the circadian temperature cycle.
from Web MD:
For a typical adult, body temperature can be anywhere from 97 F to 99 F. Babies and children have a little higher range: 97.9 F to 100.4 F.
Your temperature doesn’t stay same all day, and it will vary throughout your lifetime, too. Some things that cause your temperature to move around during the day include:
How active you are
What time of day it is
Your age
Your sex
What you’ve eaten or had to drink
(If you’re a woman) where you are in your menstrual cycle
Your temperature reading changes based on where on your body you measure it. Underarm readings can be a degree lower than what you’d find from your mouth. Rectal temperatures usually are up to a degree higher than mouth readings.
Adults over 65 have lower body temperature.” ~
https://www.webmd.com/first-aid/normal-body-temperature#1
LOWER BODY TEMPERATURE MAY PROMOTE LONGEVITY
~ “Conti says the findings show it is the lowering of body temperature – and not necessarily the consumption of fewer calories – that plays the most important role in extending lifespan.
This may be because the body burns less fuel when it is at a lower temperature, which results in the production of fewer free-radical compounds that damage cells and promote the wear and tear of aging. Previous studies have shown that worms and fish that have decreased body temperatures live longer.
Conti says that in the future people might be able to take a drug that specifically targets the preoptic “thermostat” area in their brains to trick the body into cooling down slightly. Coming up with such a drug “will be very challenging”, but he hopes it would allow people to live longer without cutting back on the calories.” ~
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10437-cool-down-you-may-live-longer/
BEING MILDLY HYPOTHYROID LINKED TO LONGEVITY
~ “Intriguingly, thyroid hypofunction, as well as elevated thyrotropin (TSH) levels may contribute to the extended lifespan. A potential contribution of TSH and thyroid hormones to lifespan regulation was observed in the studies performed on thyroid disease-free population of Ashkenazi Jews, characterized by exceptional longevity (centenarians). For example, the higher serum TSH level in these individuals in comparison with the control groups was observed [9]. Thus, increased serum TSH level seems to be associated with extreme longevity [9]. Moreover, two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in TSH receptor (TSHR) gene (namely rs10149689 and rs12050077) were associated with increased TSH level in Ashkenazi Jewish centenarians and their offspring [10]. Also, an inverse correlation between FT4 and TSH levels in centenarians was reported [9] which may suggest a potential role of decreased thyroid function in lifespan regulation, leading to extended longevity. The findings obtained in the Leiden Longevity Study actually show the associations between low thyroid activity and exceptional familial longevity.” ~
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480281/
Oriana: THE GENETIC LOTTERY
While much has been made of androgens (testosterone and progesterone) raising metabolism and thus body temperature, the main hormone that accomplishes this is the active thyroid hormone, T3 (triiodothyronine). Calorie restriction lowers T3 levels, and the average body temperature becomes lower. It’s been hypothesized that increased longevity is associated with lower T3 levels because of lower metabolic and lower free radical production. But the metabolic rate hypothesis has been questioned — long-flying birds have very high metabolic rates but live much longer for their body size than mammals. It’s time to admit that so many factors are involved in aging (and some individuals do age at a faster rate than others) that there is no simple answer.
Don’t smoke, don’t eat junk food, have a purpose in life (the pursuit of usefulness, not happiness), get moderate exercise, don’t sweat the small stuff, eat your broccoli — that’s sound advice. But nothing beats coming from a long-lived family. The rate of aging is, above all, genetic. Not fair? That’s life.
ending on beauty:
LEAR
Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon ’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies.
~ Shakespeare, King Lear, Act V, Scene 3
Lear is deluded, of course, in imagining this prison idyll, but the enchantment of poetic language makes us imagine this too. It’s interesting that daughters play an important role several of the Bard’s plays. Whether it’s Cordelia, Perdita, Marina, or Miranda, they are figures of grace and reconciliation.
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