Gustave Doré: Christmas Eve*
COLD FIRES
My last Christmas Eve in Warsaw —
the gray, uncertain day dying into the early dark,
we wait for the first star, then light
the twelve skinny candles on the tree
and break the wishing wafer.
Holding a jagged shard of a wish,
mother intones:
“Health and success,
fulfillment of all dreams.”
Kissing on both cheeks,
we break the wafer each with each.
So begins Wigilia, the supper of Christmas Eve.
The number of the dishes
has to be odd: spicy red borscht
with uszka, “little ears” —
pierogi with cabbage and wild mushrooms
soaked back to dark flesh
from the pungent wreaths;
fish — the humble carp;
potatoes, a compote from dried fruit,
and poppy-seed cake.
Father counts: “If it doesn’t
come out right, we can always
include tea.”
He drops a pierog
on the starched tablecloth.
I stifle laughter as he picks it up
solemnly like a communion host.
On the fragrant, flammable tree,
angel hair trembles in silver drafts.
Then we turn off the electric lights.
Now only candles in the dusky hush.
Father sets a match to the
“cold fires.” Icy starbursts hiss
over the staggered pyramid of gifts:
slippers and scarves, a warm skirt,
socks and more socks
a book I will not finish.
We no longer sing carols,
mother playing the piano —
the piano sold by then,
a TV set in its place.
Later, unusual for a Christmas Eve,
we go for a walk. The streets are empty;
a few passers-by
like grainy figures in an old movie.
It begins to snow.
I never saw such tenderness —
snowflakes like moths of light
soothing bare branches,
glimmering across
hazy halos of street lamps.
Each weightless as a wish,
snowflakes kiss our cheeks.
They settle on the benches and railings,
on the square roofs of kiosks —
on the peaceful,
finally forgiven city.
~ Oriana
**
I don’t celebrate Christmas anymore, or any other holidays. It’s a liberation tinged with melancholy. Not that I ever especially liked the holidays — what I liked best was being by myself, reading books. Only now I can appreciate the beauty of waiting for the first star, the special Christmas Eve food (I never found out why the number of dishes had to be odd), or how magical it was when we still sang carols while my mother played the piano (not very well, I should add — but it only enhanced the “live” nature of the experience). Now I feel grateful that long ago I had those Christmases — rarely white, but real.
*
NEITHER MAD NOR MOTHERLESS: DICKINSON’S SELF-CREATION
~ “ . . . And then she uttered something that was even odd for a sibyl. She asked Higginson if he could tell her what “home” is. “I never had a mother,” she said. “I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” (Letter 342b) She was thirty-nine years old. And in not one of her previous letters—to Higginson or any other correspondent—had she ever spoken of herself as a motherless child.
Nor had she said anything unkind about her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson—Emily Sr., as some scholars call Mrs. Dickinson to distinguish her from her poet daughter. She appears in one of Dickinson’s very first letters, where she helps save Austin’s sick rooster from oblivion. She’s a whirlwind of activity—cooking, sewing, gardening, and going off to “ramble” with her neighbors, bringing them crullers or another delight, and “she really was so hurried she hardly knew what to do.” (Letter 52, September 23, 1851) Sometimes she suffers from neuralgia, where one side of her face freezes up. And in 1855, after Edward Dickinson moved his family back to the Homestead, his father’s former house, she fell into a funk that lasted four years. But her daughter was just as uneasy about the move. “…I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” (Letter 182, about January 20, 1856)
Both mother and daughter had frequent bouts of melancholy. Both took part in Amherst’s most publicized event, the annual Cattle Show, where they baked pies and bread and served on committees. And even after her sibyl-like remark to Higginson, she still recognized the presence of her mother, as she wrote to her cousins Louise and Frances Norcross: “…Mother drives with Tim [the stableman] to carry pears to settlers. Sugar pears, with hips like hams, and the flesh of bonbons.” (Letter 343)
Then, in 1874, she wrote to Higginson:
I always ran Home to Awe when a child, if anything befell me. He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none. (Letter 405)
Here she was doubly unkind. Not only didn’t she have an anthropomorphic mother, but the mother she did have—Awe—had a male identity. She was now forty-three, long past her most productive period, as most Dickinson scholars believe. And why did she suddenly parade in front of Higginson with one of her letter bombs and annihilate her own mother? But it wasn’t only Mrs. Dickinson who was in her line of fire. In 1873, while both her parents were still alive, she wrote to Mrs. J.G. Holland, one of her most trusted friends:
I was thinking of thanking you for the kindness to Vinnie. She has no Father and Mother but me and I have no Parents but her. (Letter 391)
It had to have been more than some momentary crisis. She adored her father—and feared him. He was constantly present in her mental and material life. She’d become a creator in her father’s house, in that corner room, with her Lexicon, her lamp, and her minuscule writing desk.
Sweet hours have perished here, This is a timid [mighty] room—
But the two biting remarks to Higginson about her mother would have a scattergun effect. In 1971, psychoanalyst and Dickinson scholar John Cody published After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson, a five-hundred-page study that presents Dickinson as a mental case whose only manner of survival was writing her cryptic and very private poems. Cody argues that Dickinson could never have become a poet without her delinquent mother—she was indeed a motherless child, emotionally abandoned by a woman who was “shallow, self-centered, ineffectual, conventional, timid, submissive, and not very bright.” Mrs. Dickinson was utterly responsible for her daughter’s “infantile dependence . . . and compulsive self-entombment.” And, says Cody, “one is led to conclude that all her life there smoldered in Emily Dickinson’s soul the muffled but voracious clamoring of the abandoned child.”
A loss of something ever felt I—
The first that I could recollect
Bereft I was—of what I knew not
Too young that any should suspect
A Mourner walked among the children
I notwithstanding went about
As one bemoaning a Dominion
Itself the only Prince cast out—
And it was as “the only Prince cast out” that she lived her life, searching for the “Delinquent Palaces” of her childhood—and her art. Self-born, self-tutored, she had to tear apart all ties to her mother, the one creature who had done the most to shape her sensibility. Emily Dickinson’s own elliptical songs are like a hymn to her mother’s repeated silences and melancholy. But who was Emily Norcross Dickinson and why do we know so little about her?
Part of it is Emily Sr.’s own fault. She suffered all her life from logophobia, a fear—and distrust—of the written word. Vinnie, the daughter who was closest to her, who could knit and sew and clean the house like a dervish, suffered from a bit of the same fear.
. . . though I’ve always had a great aversion to writing, I hope, by constant practice, the dislike will wear away, in a degree, at least.
But Vinnie wasn’t shy, the way her mother was. Vinnie loved to flirt. She was also a mime and a reader of books. And she overcame her word blindness enough to write seventeen poems that still survive.
Vinnie has almost a kind of fictional glow; we can imagine her fat little fingers, her brown hair and brown eyes, her plump arms, her growing army of cats, her waspish tongue—she assumes mythical proportions and powers in the eyes of her poet sister. Vinnie could be “full of Wrath, and vicious as Saul—” (Letter 520, September 1877)
And during the presidential campaign of 1880, Emily wrote to Mrs. Holland:
Vinnie is far more hurried than Presidential Candidates—I trust in more distinguished ways, for they have only the care of the Union, but Vinnie the Universe— (Letter 667, 1880)
. . . In 1975, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg published a controversial essay, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” which revealed that women had their own remarkable and secret history. Smith-Rosenberg believes they “did not form an isolated and oppressed sub-category in male society. Their letters and diaries indicate that women’s sphere had an essential integrity that grew out of women’s shared experiences and mutual affection. . . Continuity, not discontinuity, characterized this female world.”
Women had their own signs and symbols, their own love codes. “Girls routinely slept together, kissed and hugged each other,” and they continued to kiss and hug even after they were married. Men made “but a shadowy appearance” in this landscape of women, if they ever appeared at all. But Smith-Rosenberg seems to oversimplify the almost mystical power that women shared among themselves. Men intruded everywhere, before and after marriage. “Women of Dickinson’s class and century existed in a legal and financial state of dependence on their fathers, brothers, or husbands, that psychologically mutilated them,” according to Susan Howe. After their father died, Emily and her sister went around like paupers and could hardly make a purchase without Austin’s approval. They were wards of a male world.
But there’s another distortion in Smith-Rosenberg’s study of female friendship and ritual. She writes about women who were highly literate and could articulate their wishes and their woes, thus giving them a power and a perspective that many men and women did not have. There must have been a far greater unwritten record—of women who never mastered the art of writing. They might have been part of the same society that Smith-Rosenberg writes about, kissing, exchanging secrets, and trooping from home to home in an endless social knot as they presided over births and deaths. But they cannot share their pain, their joy, and their melancholy with us. They are the invisible ones, and Emily Norcoss is among them.
She was born on July 3, 1804, in Monson, a rural community twenty miles south of Amherst. Her father, Joel Norcross, was a rich farmer who helped found Monson Academy, a school that admitted females as well as males. Joel believed in the education of his daughters—he had three of them and six sons, several wiped out by consumption, a disease that plagued the family. His wife, Betsy Fay, would die of it at fifty-one. Emily was the eldest daughter. She was attached to her one surviving sister, Lavinia, born in 1812, a feisty girl who loved to scribble letters and poems.
Rich as her father was, Emily Norcross didn’t have an easy time at home. Joel had only one servant to care for an enormous barnlike house that had once been a tavern. Most of the chores fell on Emily. Joel took in boarders, and Emily also had to care for them. Her mother couldn’t do very much; she was sick a good part of the time. And we can imagine how erratic Emily’s schooling must have been. She still managed to attend a fancy girls’ boarding school in New Haven for several months when she was nineteen. There’s no record of her having met Edward Dickinson, who was also in New Haven at the time, about to graduate from Yale.
Emily returned to Monson, her education over. She would meet Edward three years later at a “Chemical” lecture on January 1, 1828—it happened to be his birthday. Edward had just turned twenty-five; she was twenty-three, practically an old maid in Monson. Edward was a law student who had to struggle, since his father couldn’t seem to juggle his own accounts. Samuel Fowler Dickinson was still one of the most prominent men in Amherst. Cofounder of Amherst College, he had run—unsuccessfully—for Congress. He wanted to bring a law school to Amherst. He would claim that Edward had been the valedictorian of his class at Yale. It was a bald lie. Samuel had to yank his boy more than once from New Haven, and Edward barely had enough time and money to graduate. The “Squire,” as Samuel was called, continued to remain involved with Amherst College, and he sank whatever small fortune he had into paying the school’s bills. He lived on loan after loan, until there was little left to borrow.
Meanwhile, Edward was now a major in the Massachusetts militia And he hadn’t come to Monson to study chemistry, but to preside over a military court. He had to pass judgment over a reckless lieutenant colonel who had vanished from camp. And we have to wonder if Edward was wearing his uniform, with it ceremonial sword and sash, at the lecture. Is that what caught Emily’s eye? And what did Edward see in this silent girl? He must have been bewitched by her. He wrote his first letter to her on February 8 and never stopped writing. But he realized soon enough that Emily Norcross wasn’t much of a correspondent. She didn’t answer him until March. He had made her aware that he was looking for a bride. He proposed marriage on June 4—marriage by mail. He received no reply. He wrote to her father, who was just as silent. Joel Norcross wasn’t that eager to relinquish a daughter who had become the workhorse of his family. This accumulation of silences couldn’t discourage Edward, who continued to press his case, like a lawyer and militiaman. But Emily wasn’t unmoved. She must have been fond of her suitor’s red hair and barrage of long letters. Finally, at the end of October, she agreed to marry him, more or less.” ~
https://lithub.com/neither-mad-nor-motherless-on-emily-dickinsons-self-creation/?fbclid=IwAR01Sb1TRL0Ehfmh2_0OJ3hmFuxDGXRAFkwB1WxbWjqTY-OvQ_umhKkVxTk
Though Emily Dickinson’s mother sounds more interesting and complex than we used to think when all we had was the labels “depressed” and “disabled,” I don’t think any daughter would state, “I never had a mother” unless she deeply felt that it was true.
Not that Emily Norcross (i.e. Emily Dickinson’s mother) had sufficient mother either, with her own mother being sick and Emily’s being expected to do a lot of chores. So she became good at housekeeping, not at showing affection.
I'm fascinated by Dickinson’s definition of a mother: “I suppose a mother is one who to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” The world is just too frightening if there is no one to run to when you need help, especially in childhood. In the past, though, the isolated nuclear family was rare; there was the extended family, usually with more than one “mother figure.”
But “mother figures” don’t have the kind of investment in a child that is natural for a biological mother. The child doesn’t belong to them, so they may come and go, leaving the child feeling insecure. It is indeed interesting to re-read Emily’s poems from the point of view of “not enough maternal love.” It’s definitely not the sole perspective from which to interpret Dickinson’s work, but it is a perspective worth bearing in mind. The yearning for “one to whom you hurry when you are troubled” is so fundamental that it can never be extinguished.
Edvard Munch: Love and Pain, 1895*
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” Marcus Aurelius said this two thousand years ago. Nietzsche wasn’t the first to realize that there is no truth, only perception.
But let’s not forget the other side of “the grandeur that was Rome”: a bronze statue of a seated boxer (“Terme boxer”), 3rd century bc
Terme Boxer*
WHY PUNISHMENT DAMAGES CHILDREN
~ “After years of studying the psychology of parenting — and through my own experience of being a mother — I’ve learned that punishment doesn’t work.
According to Alan Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center, while punishment might make a parent feel better, it won’t change a child’s behavior.
“Parents might start out reasoning, but they’re likely to escalate to something a little bit more, like shouting, touching, firmly dragging their child — even if they’re well-intentioned,” he said in an interview with The Atlantic. “Even wonderful, gentle punishments like a time-out or reasoning — those don’t work.”
Kazdin isn’t alone in this theory. Many researchers agree that, instead of teaching anything helpful, this is what punishment can do to kids:
Cause resentment. Punishment only appears to work in the short run. In the long run, however, it could make your child less likely to cooperate because they’ve learned to resent you. In other words, it erodes your close connection with your child.
Cause psychological damage. Multiple studies have found that children who are physically punished (e.g., spanking) by their parents are more likely to attribute hostile intentions and behave aggressively in social interactions. Harsh verbal discipline (e.g., yelling) can also be harmful later on, increasing the risk of misbehavior at school, lying to parents, stealing and fighting.
Encourage self-centered behavior. Punishment teaches children to focus on the consequences they suffer, rather than on how their behavior affects someone else. This prevents them from developing essential emotional intelligence skills, such as empathy and social-awareness.
Encourage dishonesty. When kids are incentivized to avoid punishment in the future, they’re more likely to be dishonest in order to avoid getting in trouble (e.g., lying to their parents about getting detention). In fact, psychologists have found that fear of punishment can turn kids into better liars.
Prevent them from developing their inner moral compass. One of the biggest problems with punishment is that it doesn’t teach children to do the right thing. A child might try to mimic a “dominating” type of behavior, for example, and use their power over those who are more vulnerable. As a result, they don’t learn to think about the needs of their own, the needs of others, or how those needs can be met with fairness and respect.
So how do we hold boundaries without punishing? The key is to communicate with your children and help them understand why their behavior is unacceptable. But you must put careful consideration into the words you use, and how you use them.
Let’s say your kid just left a messy pile of toys all over the living room floor, after you both agreed that he or she could play with them — only if they clean everything up after they’re done.
Here’s what not to say:
“Pick these up right now. I don’t want you leaving a mess like that again.” When children are given an order, they’re more likely to resist being told what to do. (Imagine how you’d feel if you were given an avalanche of orders every day. It can get pretty overwhelming.)
“If you don’t pick these up immediately, I’m going to take away your screen time.” Threats cause a similar resistance. They can make a child feel coerced and manipulated. While it may work in the moment, it’s still likely to cause resentment and make them less likely to cooperate in the future.
“You should know better.” Blaming is a put-down, and it can easily cause children to feel guilty, unloved and rejected. Even worse, it prevents you from developing a positive relationship with them.
Instead, invite your kid to make changes from the inside out. Gently, without exhibiting any signs of anger, explain how their unacceptable behavior makes you feel. Always start with the word “I” (e.g., “I feel disappointed when I see this big mess.”).
Next, help them understand how their behavior affects you both: “With all these toys on the ground, we can’t stretch out our legs like this” — and then lay down on the floor with your arms and legs expanded. When you lighten the mood and inject some humor, feelings of resentment, anger and guilt are less likely to take place.
Model the language you want your kids to use
A conflict can be resolved peacefully when you speak with kindness and show that your true intention is to get everyone’s underlying needs met.
Before responding to your child’s bad behavior, it may help to ask yourself: How can I demonstrate that, with a little more effort and understanding, there are ways for us all to win?
Remember, this is a more mindful alternative to punishment — and the goal is to coach, not control.” ~
Hunter Clarke-Fields is also the author of “Raising Good Humans: A Mindful Guide to Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Parenting and Raising Kind, Confident Kids”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/11/the-common-yet-parenting-mistake-that-psychologically-damages-kids-according-to-expert.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
HOW CONSERVATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANS DEFENDED HITLER
~ “While it often gets glossed over today, Adolf Hitler was a popular figure in American politics back in the 1930s. He was seen as a person who brought order and stability — two things conservative Americans have always valued more than freedom and individual liberty — to Germany after a liberal Weimar period.
Men like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Father Coughlin all lined up to support Hitler, and Americans loved him. It was a love affair that didn’t last, and it’s one that Americans run from today. We want to paint ourselves as the heroes of this world narrative, after all. It’s a bit hard to do that after fawning all over one of the most despised people in human history.
Consider this letter to the editor purportedly published in Moody Monthly, a magazine put out by the Moody Bible Institute, back in October of 1933:
To the Editor:
After much prayer to our Saviour, I send you this word. I thank you very much for your article in June about our brethren in Germany. God bless you that you give justice to Adolf Hitler, that you do not misjudge him. He tries as best he knows how to help Germany. You know that he was a Roman Catholic and he still knows little about the Bible. But he studies the New Testament, and we who know Christ as God and Saviour who died for our sins on the cross, love him, and we have to pray for him and not to believe everything his enemies speak about him.
I am a German. Two years ago I was on a visit in Germany for three months. All my relatives live in Germany. They are Christians that believe in the shed blood of Christ for our sins. They praise Hitler. They have full freedom to preach Christ crucified for our sins. We believe that Christ will come soon and that He will be merciful to Hitler too. Hitler’s father was a drinker, but Adolf lives with his mother and is a very good son. I am an old woman and pray for the coming of the Lord.
Sincerely yours,
Hedwig Nabholz
What I want to call attention to, though, is the language used by Ms. Nabholz: “He tries as best he knows how to help Germany” and “he still knows little about the Bible” but “he studies the New Testament” are directly parallel to some of the justifications that right-wing Christians gave for Trump.
As this letter shows, justifying strongmen is a long and storied human tradition — a long and storied human tradition because we’re too stupid to learn from it, even though the rhetoric barely changes at all, as we deftly demonstrated in 2016.
http://www.gopocalypse.org/check-out-how-evangelical-christians-defended-hitler/
American Nazis before WW2*
Let's detox with beautiful music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tId6ePj7Zpo
*
A HUGE AMOUNT OF WATER IS SINKING THROUGH THE EARTH’S TECTONIC FAULT LINES
~ And for water in the Earth, what goes down must come up. Sea levels have remained relatively stable over geologic time, varying by less than 1,000 ft. This means that all of the water that is going down into the Earth at subduction zones must be coming back up somehow, and not continuously piling up inside the Earth. ~
“Three times more water is being sucked into Earth’s interior through its subduction zones than was previously thought, scientists have discovered. These huge fissures that scar the planet’s surface appear at the boundaries of tectonic plates. When they collide, they drag water down miles and miles, locking it up inside the rocks in the plates.
Slow-motion collisions of tectonic plates under the ocean drag about three times more water down into the deep Earth than previously estimated, according to a first-of-its-kind seismic study that spans the Mariana Trench.
The observations from the deepest ocean trench in the world have important implications for the global water cycle, according to researchers in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
To conduct this study, researchers listened to more than one year's worth of Earth's rumblings — from ambient noise to actual earthquakes — using a network of 19 passive, ocean-bottom seismographs deployed across the Mariana Trench, along with seven island-based seismographs. The trench is where the western Pacific Ocean plate slides beneath the Mariana plate and sinks deep into the Earth's mantle as the plates slowly converge.
Rock can grab and hold onto water in a variety of ways.
Ocean water atop the plate runs down into the Earth's crust and upper mantle along the fault lines that lace the area where plates collide and bend. Then it gets trapped. Under certain temperature and pressure conditions, chemical reactions force the water into a non-liquid form as hydrous minerals — wet rocks — locking the water into the rock in the geologic plate. All the while, the plate continues to crawl ever deeper into the Earth's mantle, bringing the water along with it.
Previous studies at subduction zones like the Mariana Trench have noted that the subducting plate could hold water. But they could not determine how much water it held and how deep it went.
The seismic images that Cai and Wiens obtained show that the area of hydrated rock at the Mariana Trench extends almost 20 miles beneath the seafloor — much deeper than previously thought.
The amount of water that can be held in this block of hydrated rock is considerable.
For the Mariana Trench region alone, four times more water subducts than previously calculated. These features can be extrapolated to predict the conditions under other ocean trenches worldwide.
"If other old, cold subducting slabs contain similarly thick layers of hydrous mantle, then estimates of the global water flux into the mantle at depths greater than 60 miles must be increased by a factor of about three," Wiens said.
And for water in the Earth, what goes down must come up. Sea levels have remained relatively stable over geologic time, varying by less than 1,000 ft. This means that all of the water that is going down into the Earth at subduction zones must be coming back up somehow, and not continuously piling up inside the Earth.
Scientists believe that most of the water that goes down at the trench comes back from the Earth into the atmosphere as water vapor when volcanoes erupt hundreds of miles away. But with the revised estimates of water from the new study, the amount of water going into the earth seems to greatly exceed the amount of water coming out.
"The estimates of water coming back out through the volcanic arc are probably very uncertain," said Wiens, who hopes that this study will encourage other researchers to reconsider their models for how water moves back out of the Earth. "This study will probably cause some re-evaluation."
Moving beyond the Mariana Trench, Wiens along with a team of other scientists has recently deployed a similar seismic network offshore in Alaska to consider how water is moved down into the Earth there.
"Does the amount of water vary substantially from one subduction zone to another, based on the kind of faulting that you have when the plate bends?" Wiens asked. "There's been suggestions of that in Alaska and in Central America. But nobody has looked at the deeper structure yet like we were able to do in the Mariana Trench.”
https://www.geologyin.com/2018/12/oceans-are-being-sucked-into-earths.html#tQPa9QUYBUhW0ojf.99
Mariana Trench*
Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator. ~ Confucius
IF THERE IS NO GOD, THEN EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED?
~ “Nobel prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz:
If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother's keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother
By saying there is no God.
What we've got today is people who, because they believe in God think everything is permitted to them. So in reply to Milosz:
If there is a God,
Not everything is permitted to man
He is still his brother’s keeper
And he is not to permitted to sadden his brother
with cruelty in the name of God.”
~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
Actually Dostoyevski never quite put it that way. This passage from The Brothers Karamazov is likely the source:
"'But what will become of men then?' I asked him, 'without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, they can do what they like?’
But it’s become customary to quote this particular statement Dostoyevski in the abbreviated form, and . . . why not. Close enough.
The real problem is of course the obvious falsehood of that statement. The non-existence of god doesn’t mean that “everything is permitted.” Secular law has existed as long as any form of secular government existed. Even before then, there have been rules of conduct — simply because man is a social animal, and social animals need to behave in a cooperative way for the group to survive and thrive.
Slavoy Zizek’s response: IF THERE IS A GOD, THEN EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED
~ . . . for those who refer to "god" in a brutally direct way, perceiving themselves as instruments of his will, everything is permitted. These are, of course, the so-called fundamentalists who practice a perverted version of what Kierkegaard called the religious suspension of the ethical.
So why are we witnessing the rise of religiously (or ethnically) justified violence today? Precisely because we live in an era which perceives itself as post-ideological. Since great public causes can no longer be mobilized as the basis of mass violence - in other words, since the hegemonic ideology enjoins us to enjoy life and to realize our truest selves - it is almost impossible for the majority of people to overcome their revulsion at the prospect of killing another human being.
Most people today are spontaneously moral: the idea of torturing or killing another human being is deeply traumatic for them. So, in order to make them do it, a larger "sacred" Cause is needed, something that makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial.
Religion or ethnic belonging fit this role perfectly. There are, of course, cases of pathological atheists who are able to commit mass murder just for pleasure, just for the sake of it, but they are rare exceptions. The majority needs to be anaesthetized against their elementary sensitivity to another's suffering. For this, a sacred Cause is needed: without this Cause, we would have to feel all the burden of what we did, with no Absolute on whom to put the ultimate responsibility.
Religious ideologists usually claim that, true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people to do some good things. From today's experience, however, one should rather stick to Steven Weinberg's claim: while, without religion, good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things.
No less important, the same also seems to hold for the display of so-called "human weaknesses." Isolated extreme forms of sexuality among godless hedonists are immediately elevated into representative symbols of the depravity of the godless, while any questioning of, say, the link between the more pronounced phenomenon of clerical pedophilia and the Church as institution is rejected as anti-religious slander. The well-documented story of how the Catholic Church has protected pedophiles in its own ranks is another good example of how if god does exist, then everything is permitted. What makes this protective attitude towards pedophiles so disgusting is that it is not practiced by permissive hedonists, but by the very institution which poses as the moral guardian of society.
But what about the Stalinist Communist mass killings? What about the extra-legal liquidations of the nameless millions? It is easy to see how these crimes were always justified by their own ersatz-god, a "god that failed" as Ignazio Silone, one of the great disappointed ex-Communists, called it: they had their own god, which is why everything was permitted to them.
In other words, the same logic as that of religious violence applies here. Stalinist Communists do not perceive themselves as hedonist individualists abandoned to their freedom. Rather, they perceive themselves as instruments of historical progress, of a necessity which pushes humanity towards the "higher" stage of Communism - and it is this reference to their own Absolute (and to their privileged relationship to it) which permits them to do whatever they want.
This is why, as soon as cracks appear in this ideological protective shield, the weight of what they did became unbearable to many individual Communists, since they have to confront their acts as their own, without any alibi in a higher Logic of History. This is why, after Khrushchev's 1956 speech denouncing Stalin's crimes, many cadres committed suicide: they did not learn anything new during that speech, all the facts were more or less known to them - they were simply deprived of the historical legitimization of their crimes in the Communist historical Absolute.
This is why, as soon as cracks appear in this ideological protective shield, the weight of what they did became unbearable to many individual Communists, since they have to confront their acts as their own, without any alibi in a higher Logic of History. This is why, after Khrushchev's 1956 speech denouncing Stalin's crimes, many cadres committed suicide: they did not learn anything new during that speech, all the facts were more or less known to them - they were simply deprived of the historical legitimization of their crimes in the Communist historical Absolute.
Stalinism - and, to a greater extent, Fascism - adds another perverse twist to this logic: in order to justify their ruthless exercise of power and violence, they not only had to elevate their own role into that of an instrument of the Absolute, they also had to demonize their opponents, to portray them as corruption and decadence personified.
*
And, last but not least, one should note here the ultimate irony: although many of those who deplore the disintegration of transcendental limits present themselves as Christians, the longing for a new external/transcendent limit, for a divine agent positing such a limit, is profoundly non-Christian. The Christian God is not a transcendent God of limitations, but the God of immanent love: God, after all, is love; he is present when there is love between his followers.
No wonder, then, that Lacan's reversal - "If there is a God, then everything is permitted!" - is openly asserted by some Christians, as a consequence of the Christian notion of the overcoming of the prohibitive Law in love: if you dwell in divine love, then you do not need prohibitions; you can do whatever you want, since, if you really dwell in divine love, you would never want to do something evil.
This formula of the "fundamentalist" religious suspension of the ethical was already proposed by Augustine who wrote, "Love God and do as you please" (or, in another version, "Love, and do whatever you want." - from the Christian perspective, the two ultimately amount to the same, since God is love). The catch, of course, is that, if you really love God, you will want what he wants - what pleases him will please you, and what displeases him will make you miserable. So it is not that you can just "do whatever you want" - your love for God, if authentic, guarantees that, in what you want to do, you will follow the highest ethical standards.
It is a rather like the proverbial joke, "My fiancée is never late for an appointment, because when she is late, she is no longer my fiancée." If you love God, you can do whatever you want, because when you do something evil, this is in itself a proof that you do not really love God. However, the ambiguity persists, since there is no guarantee, external to your belief, of what God really wants you to do - in the absence of any ethical standards external to your belief in and love for God, the danger is always lurking that you will use your love of God as the legitimization of the most horrible deeds.
Furthermore, when Dostoyevsky proposes a line of thought, along the lines of "If there is no God, then everything is permitted," he is in no way simply warning against limitless freedom - that is, evoking God as the agency of a transcendent prohibition which limits human freedom: in a society run by the Inquisition, everything is definitely not permitted, since God is here operative as a higher power constraining our freedom, not as the source of freedom. The whole point of the parable of the Great Inquisitor is precisely that such a society obliterates the very message of Christ: if Christ were to return to this society, he would have been burned as a deadly threat to public order and happiness, since he brought to the people the gift (which turns out to be a heavy burden) of freedom and responsibility.
The implicit claim that "If there is no God, then everything is permitted" is thus much more ambiguous - it is well worth to take a closer look at this part of The Brothers Karamazov, and in particular the long conversation in Book Five between Ivan and Alyosha. Ivan tells Alyosha an imagined story about the Grand Inquisitor. Christ comes back to earth in Seville at the time of the Inquisition; after he performs a number of miracles, the people recognize him and adore him, but he is arrested by inquisition and sentenced to be burnt to death the next day. The Grand Inquisitor visits him in his cell to tell him that the Church no longer needs him: his return would interfere with the mission of the Church, which is to bring people happiness. Christ has misjudged human nature: the vast majority of humanity cannot handle the freedom which he has given them - in other words, in giving humans freedom to choose, Jesus has excluded the majority of humanity from redemption and doomed it to suffer.
In order to bring people happiness, the Inquisitor and the Church thus follow "the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction" - namely, the devil - who alone can provide the tools to end all human suffering and unite under the banner of the Church. The multitude should be guided by the few who are strong enough to take on the burden of freedom - only in this way will all mankind live and die happily in ignorance. These few who are strong enough to assume the burden of freedom are the true self-martyrs, dedicating their lives to keep choice from humanity.
This is why Christ was wrong to reject the devil's temptation to turn stones into bread: men will always follow those who will feed their bellies. Christ rejected this temptation by saying "Man cannot live on bread alone," ignoring the wisdom which tells us: "Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!" Instead of answering the Inquisitor, Christ, who has been silent throughout, kisses him on his lips; shocked, the Inquisitor releases Christ but tells him never to return ... Alyosha responds to the tale by repeating Christ's gesture: he also gives Ivan a soft kiss on the lips.
The point of the story is not simply to attack the Church and advocate the return to full freedom given to us by Christ. Dostoyevsky himself could not come up with a straight answer. One should bear in mind that the parable of the Grand Inquisitor is part of a larger argumentative context which begins with Ivan's evocation of God's cruelty and indifference towards human suffering, referring to the lines from the book of Job (9.22-24):
"He destroys the guiltless and the wicked. If the scourge kills suddenly, He mocks the despair of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; He covers the faces of its judges. If it is not He, then who is it?"
Alyosha's counter-argument is that all that Ivan has shown is why the question of suffering cannot be answered with only God the Father. But we are not Jews or Muslims, we have God the Son, Alyosha adds, and so Ivan's argument actually strengthens Christian, as opposed to merely theist, belief: Christ "can forgive everything, all and for all, because He gave his innocent blood for all and everything." It is as a reply to this evocation of Christ - the passage from Father to Son - that Ivan presents his parable of the Great Inquisitor, and, although there is no direct reply to it, one can claim that the implicit solution is the Holy Spirit: "a radically egalitarian responsibility of each for all and for each."
One can also argue that the life of the Elder Zosima, which follows almost immediately the chapter on the Grand Inquisitor, is an attempt to answer Ivan's questions. Zosima, who is on his deathbed, tells how he found his faith in his rebellious youth, in the middle of a duel, and decided to become a monk. Zosima teaches that people must forgive others by acknowledging their own sins and guilt before others: no sin is isolated, so everyone is responsible for their neighbor's sins.
Is this not Dostoyevsky's version of "If there is no God, then everything is prohibited"? If the gift of Christ is to make us radically free, then this freedom also brings the heavy burden of total responsibility." ~
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/if-there-is-a-god-then-anything-is-permitted/10100616
Oriana:
The closest I can come to an answer is to invoke humanism (or call it humanitarianism) and the Social Contract. We want to live in a world where we can trust others not to steal from us, and especially not to kill us. Though the great majority of people do not have any “innate” desire to steal and kill, we do need strong law enforcement to insure that this basic social contract is not broken — or, if is broken, harsh consequences follow for the evil-doer.
And yes, we are waking up to the fact that religion can be dreadfully misused, inventing a “sacred cause” in the name of which it is permitted to kill and commit all manner of evil. As Zizek points out, ideologies that also provide a “sacred cause” that justifies violence are religion in another guise.
I think we need a broader definition of religion to account for the terrifying similarities between traditional religions and charismatic-authoritarian ideologies. As Jeremy Sherman points out elsewhere, what happens is that extreme idealism fails when it comes to putting ideals into practice, and then psychopaths help themselves to its slogans in order to gain power and stay in power. This has happened again and again, but we humans still can’t seem to learn the ancient Greek wisdom about moderation in all things, and the humbling knowledge that we are not as smart as we think we are, and reality is always more difficult and complex than it seems.
This complexity doesn’t mean that we should just stop thinking about ethics. But it does imply that we should be suspicious of extreme solutions. Instead, we should think in terms of compassion or even just simple decency. That is a better guide than any “sacred cause.”
Mary:
It seems to me God and religion were invented not so much as a means of imposing social control — living in groups as social animals doesn't require a deity to impose its own ethic and order, and we are no different than other social animals in that respect — but because of our need for meaning, for reasons, for an explanation, especially for a way to understand suffering. This may have been the need met by creating gods, or one powerful god, responsible, but not necessarily kind, loving or forgiving. Suffering, especially the suffering of the innocent and the just, is perhaps the most impossible thing we try to make sense of. It is what Ivan Karamazov and the biblical Job found impossible to accept or forgive.
And the arguments of God, in Job's terrible Yaweh and Dostoevsky's Father Zosima, are interesting in their differences. The Old Testament god of Job basically says, I am all powerful and beyond question, I need no reasons, I punish and reward as I will and you cannot either judge nor comprehend. Father Zosima's God is the one who sacrificed himself for humankind against the righteous power of that terrible Father-god, seeming to offer love, and the freedom to choose rather than blindly obey.
And truly, neither of these Gods are adequate answers to the problem of suffering...both remain, in my mind, unforgivable. No idea of God is enough to make the kind of sense out of suffering that is reasonable and acceptable. The invention of religion in all its forms is a solution that solves little while creating terrible evils of its own, including what is and is not permitted, and to whom, the "sinners" and the "elect," the “faithful" and the "infidel." In the attempt to contain/explain/combat “evil," which is grounded in our experience of pain, God and religion create more of it.
Oriana:
The majority of Europeans see religion as having caused more harm than good; Americans lean to “good influence.” I'm glad I’ve lived long enough to see religion dwindle, but I also had to accept the idea that religion will never disappear completely. It will keep cropping up, at least as a fringe phenomenon, and it will keep causing some degree of harm — and stuffing children’s heads with nonsense is already harmful, especially presenting eternal torture in hell as a supreme example of justice. And, as Zizek reminds us, the greatest “suspension of the ethical” takes place only when sanctioned by religion, traditional or secular (e.g. hyper-nationalism).
But as you say, humans have such a need for answers — and, as I was recently reminded, life is so terribly fragile and full of pain — that I'm no longer surprised that billions believe. Ideally, human love should be enough, and I think we’ve gone a long way toward becoming kinder and friendlier to one another. But the way ahead is also long, and we know there will be setbacks.
Jeremy Sherman would say that that’s the price we pay for language. Language can be used to create the unreal, and those figments of imagination and horrible lies (e.g. “Jews caused all the wars”) gain incredible power. Alas, that’s the way it is. All we can do is keep pushing back, since it’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
*
THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA
~ “It is generally believed by scholars that the ancient Iranian prophet Zarathustra (known in Persian as Zartosht and Greek as Zoroaster) lived sometime between 1500 and 1000 BC. Prior to Zarathustra, the ancient Persians worshipped the deities of the old Irano-Aryan religion, a counterpart to the Indo-Aryan religion that would come to be known as Hinduism. Zarathustra, however, condemned this practice, and preached that God alone – Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom – should be worshipped. In doing so, he not only contributed to the great divide between the Iranian and Indian Aryans, but arguably introduced to mankind its first monotheistic faith.
The idea of a single god was not the only essentially Zoroastrian tenet to find its way into other major faiths, most notably the ‘big three’: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The concepts of Heaven and Hell, Judgment Day and the final revelation of the world, and angels and demons all originated in the teachings of Zarathustra, as well as the later canon of Zoroastrian literature they inspired. Even the idea of Satan is a fundamentally Zoroastrian one; in fact, the entire faith of Zoroastrianism is predicated on the struggle between God and the forces of goodness and light (represented by the Holy Spirit, Spenta Manyu) and Ahriman, who presides over the forces of darkness and evil.
While man has to choose to which side he belongs, the religion teaches that ultimately, God will prevail, and even those condemned to hellfire will enjoy the blessings of Paradise (an Old Persian word).
How did Zoroastrian ideas find their way into the Abrahamic faiths and elsewhere? According to scholars, many of these concepts were introduced to the Jews of Babylon upon being liberated by the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great. They trickled into mainstream Jewish thought, and figures like Beelzebub emerged. And after Persia’s conquests of Greek lands during the heyday of the Achaemenid Empire, Greek philosophy took a different course. The Greeks had previously believed humans had little agency, and that their fates were at the mercy of their many gods, whom often acted according to whim and fancy. After their acquaintance with Iranian religion and philosophy, however, they began to feel more as if they were the masters of their destinies, and that their decisions were in their own hands.
Though it was once the state religion of Iran and widely practiced in other regions inhabited by Persian peoples (eg Afghanistan, Tajikistan and much of Central Asia), Zoroastrianism is today a minority religion in Iran, and boasts few adherents worldwide. The religion’s cultural legacy, however, is another matter. Many Zoroastrian traditions continue to underpin and distinguish Iranian culture, and outside the country, it has also had a noted impact, particularly in Western Europe.
The Iranian prophet appears holding a sparkling globe in Raphael’s 16th Century School of Athens. Likewise, the Clavis Artis, a late 17th/early 18th-Century German work on alchemy was dedicated to Zarathustra, and featured numerous Christian-themed depictions of him. Zoroaster “came to be regarded [in Christian Europe] as a master of magic, a philosopher and an astrologer, especially after the Renaissance," says Ursula Sims-Williams of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
Written in the mid-18th Century by none other than Voltaire, Zadig tells the tale of its eponymous Persian Zoroastrian hero, who, after a series of trials and tribulations, ultimately weds a Babylonian princess. Although flippant at times and not rooted in history, Voltaire’s philosophical tale sprouted from a genuine interest in Iran also shared by other leaders of the Enlightenment. So enamored with Iranian culture was Voltaire that he was known in his circles as ‘Sa’di’. In the same spirit, Goethe’s West-East Divan, dedicated to the Persian poet Hafez, featured a Zoroastrian-themed chapter, while Thomas Moore lamented the fate of Iran’s Zoroastrians in Lalla Rookh.
It wasn’t only in Western art and literature that Zoroastrianism made its mark; indeed, the ancient faith also made a number of musical appearances on the European stage.
In addition to the priestly character Sarastro, the libretto of Mozart’s The Magic Flute is laden with Zoroastrian themes, such as light versus darkness, trials by fire and water, and the pursuit of wisdom and goodness above all else. And the late Farrokh Bulsara – aka Freddie Mercury – was intensely proud of his Persian Zoroastrian heritage. “I’ll always walk around like a Persian popinjay,” he once remarked in an interview, “and no one’s gonna stop me, honey!”
When it comes to music, though, perhaps no single example best reflects the influence of Zoroastrianism’s legacy than Richard Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which famously provided the booming backbone to much of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The score owes its inspiration to Nietzsche’s magnum opus of the same name, which follows a prophet named Zarathustra, although many of the ideas Nietzsche proposes are, in fact, anti-Zoroastrian. The German philosopher rejects the dichotomy of good and evil so characteristic of Zoroastrianism – and, as an avowed atheist, he had no use for monotheism at all.
One could [also] argue that the cosmic battle between the Light and Dark sides of the Force in Star Wars has, quite ostensibly, Zoroastrianism written all over it.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170406-this-obscure-religion-shaped-the-west
Zarathustra by Raphael, in The School of Athens, 1511*
HOW THERAPY WORKS
~ “Numerous studies over the past few decades have reached what seems a counterintuitive conclusion: that all psychotherapies have roughly equal effects. This is known as the ‘dodo bird verdict’ – named after a character in Alice in Wonderland (1865) who declares after a running contest: ‘Everybody has won and all must have prizes.’
That no single form of therapy has proved superior to others might come as a surprise to readers, but it’s mightily familiar to researchers in the field. ‘There is so much data for this conclusion that if it were not so threatening to specific theories it would long ago have been accepted as one of psychology’s major findings,’ writes Arthur Bohart, professor emeritus at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and author of several books on psychotherapy.
For a lot of researchers, the deeper reason why no single psychotherapy seems to provide unique advantages over any other is that they all work because of shared elements. Chief among these is the therapeutic relationship, connected to positive outcomes by a wealth of evidence. The emotional bond and the collaboration between client and therapist – called the alliance – have emerged as a strong predictor of improvement, even in therapies that don’t emphasize relational factors. Until recently, most studies of this alliance could show only that it correlates with better mental health in clients, but advances in research methods now find evidence for a causal link, suggesting that the therapy relationship might indeed be healing. Similarly, research into the traits of effective therapists has revealed that their greater experience with or a stricter adherence to a specific approach do not lead to improved outcomes whereas empathy, warmth, hopefulness and emotional expressiveness do.
All of this suggests a tantalizing alternative to both the medical professional’s and the layperson’s view of therapy: that what happens between client and therapist goes beyond mere talking, and goes deeper than clinical treatment. The relationship is both greater and more primal, and it compares with the developmental strides that play out between mother and baby, and that help to turn a diapered mess into a normal, healthy person. I am referring to attachment. To push the analogy further, what if, attachment theory asks, therapy gives you the chance to reach back and repair your earliest emotional bonds, correcting, as you do, the noxious mechanics of your mental afflictions?
*
Research on attachment theory suggests that early interactions with caregivers can dramatically affect your beliefs about yourself, your expectations of others, the way you process information, cope with stress and regulate your emotions as an adult. For example, children of sensitive mothers – the cooing, soothing type – develop secure attachment, learn to accept and express negative feelings, lean on others for help, and trust their own ability to deal with stress.
By contrast, children of unresponsive or insensitive caregivers form insecure attachment. They become anxious and easily distressed by the smallest sign of separation from their attachment figure. Harsh or dismissive mothers produce avoidant infants, who suppress their emotions and deal with stress alone. Finally, children with abusive caregivers become disorganized; they switch between avoidant and anxious coping, engage in odd behaviors and self-harm.
If the anxious among us crave connection, avoidant people strive for distance and control. They detach from strong emotions (both positive and negative), withdraw from conflicts and avoid intimacy. Their self-reliance means that they see themselves as strong and independent, but this positive image comes at the expense of maintaining a negative view of others. As a result, their close relationships remain superficial, cool and unsatisfying. And while being emotionally numb can help avoidant people weather ordinary challenges, research shows that, in the midst of a crisis, their defenses can crumble and leave them extremely vulnerable.
It isn’t hard to see how such attachment patterns can undermine mental health. Both anxious and avoidant coping have been linked to a heightened risk of anxiety, depression, loneliness, eating and conduct disorders, alcohol dependence, substance abuse and hostility. The way to treat these problems, say attachment theorists, is in and through a new relationship. On this view, the good therapist becomes a temporary attachment figure, assuming the functions of a nurturing mother, repairing lost trust, restoring security, and instilling two of the key skills engendered by a normal childhood: the regulation of emotions and a healthy intimacy.
After a while, clients internalize the warmth and understanding of their therapist, turning it into an internal resource to draw on for strength and support. A new, compassionate voice flickers into life, silencing that of the inner critic – itself an echo of insensitive earlier attachment figures. But this transformation doesn’t come easy. As the poet W H Auden wrote in The Age of Anxiety (1947): ‘We would rather be ruined than changed …’ It is the therapist’s job, as a secure base and safe haven, to guide clients as they journey into unfamiliar waters, helping them stay hopeful and to persist through the pain, sadness, anger, fear, anxiety and despair they might need to face.” ~
https://aeon.co/essays/how-attachment-theory-works-in-the-therapeutic-relationship?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*“Psychoanalysis was probably more useful to me as a writer than as a neurotic.” ~ Philip Roth
Philip Roth, by R. B. Kitajending on beauty:
One leaf left on a branch
and not a sound of sadness
or despair. One leaf left
on a branch and no unhappiness.
One leaf left all by itself
in the air and it does not speak
of loneliness or death.
One leaf and it spends itself
in swaying mildly in the breeze.
~ David Ignatow (photo by Simon Matzinger)
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