An abandoned salt mine, Yekaterinburg, Russia*
THE WOMAN WHO VOWED TO KILL
SEVEN GERMANS
(told to my mother by a stranger on the train, Poland, 1945)
Screams died quickly in winter’s
knife air. Frost lilies shrouded the windows.
Her husband’s broken body thrust
against the electric fence.
She dressed in black, lit a candle
in church, and swore:
seven Germans, by her own hand.
The days grew. The caw of crows
hung in hoarse, nagging echoes.
One afternoon, a knock on her door:
two German soldiers,
returning home on foot,
without food, without sleep.
She let them in.
They slumped down on the chairs.
In the bedroom, in top dresser drawer,
a loaded revolver pressed hard angles
into satin slips and brassieres.
She stared at their frost-red,
fear-eaten young boys’ faces,
flecks of snow on their coats and hair —
then turned toward
the kitchen, and made them tea.
They cupped numb fingers
around the porcelain,
and swallowed small sips of heat.
A salvo of shooting
ricocheted far-off in the street.
She glanced outside at the shivering
linden trees, touched her hand to her mouth.
They nodded and hurried out,
turning into footsteps, then silence.
Sunday, she felt like lighting
two more candles in church,
but didn’t dare.
~ Oriana
SOLZHENITSYN: AN ANECDOTE FROM THE GULAG
~ “In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream – and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.
The magazine no doubt astonished its small audience with the news of how successfully the flesh of fish could be kept fresh in a frozen state. But few, indeed, among its readers were able to decipher the genuine and heroic meaning of this incautious report.
As for us, however – we understood instantly. We could picture the entire scene right down to the smallest details: how those present broke up the ice in frenzied haste; how, flouting the higher claim of ichthyology and elbowing each other to be first, they tore off chunks of the prehistoric flesh and hauled them over to the bonfire to thaw them out and bolt them down.
We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of people as those present at that event. We, too, were from that powerful tribe of *zeks,* unique on the face of the earth, the only people who could devour prehistoric salamander with relish.
And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent – an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the *zek* people.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Preface to The Gulag Archipelago
"zek" = an inmate of a slave labor camp
*
*
BLAME VALENTINE’S DAY ON CHAUCER
~ “We all know that St. Valentine was a third-century Roman martyr, whose saint’s day is February 14.
However, according to Professor Lisa Bitel, no fewer than three (3) different martyrs named Valentinus died on February 14th, all of them during a two-year period towards the end of the third century. Jack B. Oruch reports that the name was so popular that over 30 Valentines, not to mention “a few Valentinas,” ultimately achieved sainthood.
However, no matter which Valentine you look at, their traditions and texts have nothing to do with love or courtship. As Oruch has noted, despite the claims of some critics, there is no evidence of any “Valentine convention” (as we understand it today) in “literary or social customs, before Chaucer.” Instead, St. Valentine became known in the centuries after his (their) death(s) as the patron saint of epilepsy. And beekeepers. And as a matter of simplicity (and research) the three obviously became one.
And that was that, just bees and seizures, until one Geoffrey Chaucer stuck his pen in.
The earliest known suggestion that Valentine’s Day was a day for lovers comes from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th-century poem “The Parliament of Fowls,” in which “Seynt Valentynes day” is the day “whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make” (i.e. when birds come to choose their mates). Considering Chaucer was basically the equivalent of a Kardashian in his day, the people—starting with his friends, of course, notably poets Oton de Granson III and John Gower—followed his lead and began to use the feast of St. Valentine for their romantic purposes. The earliest surviving explicit “Valentine” we have is from about a hundred years later—in February 1477, Margery Brews wrote to her fiancé John Paston, calling him her “right well-beloved valentine.”
Why Chaucer thought spring was in mid-February is another matter. Possibly it was due to the fact that “the date of the beginning of spring was far from being set firmly in the 14th century,” Oruch writes. Calendars were wildly different from each other, and in Chaucer’s day, if you looked at a calendar, you “probably would have found the beginning of spring marked at February 7 or 22 or (much more likely) at both.”
At the very least, Chaucer’s February 14th would have been more like our February 23rd, which at least gets us within spitting distance of March. So was Chaucer was just really ahead of his time on the whole global warming idea, or is this really is when birds choose their mates? (What’s the bird equivalent of cuffing? Ruffing? I don’t know about birds.) According to Oruch, “quite a few birds do pair during February in England, including the missel thrush, raven, partridge, rook, heron, grebe, lapwing, and blackbird.” Okay, then. Ruffing it is.
Poets like William Shakespeare and John Donne continued Chaucer’s tradition in their poetry, Bitel explains, further cementing St. Valentine’s reputation as a patron of romantic love. And, she writes, “by the 19th century, English consumers were ready and eager for cards with poems already printed on them, preferably decorated with love birds, hearts and Cupid (rather than the image of a headless Roman bishop).
The London Journal of 1858 supported the custom of exchanging observance love tokens on Valentine’s Day, declaring that it was both “natural” and “proper” that, at the start of spring, “the predominating sentiment in the human mind should be the sentiment of love; and to this accordingly the anniversary of our saint is directed.” However, the publication preferred home-made cards to mass-produced Valentines, about which the editors opined: “If we were to give a general character, we would say they are very trashy and not a little vulgar; and . . .the production of mercenaries for hire.”
So whatever your hippie parents say, rebelling against the corporate nature of Valentine’s Day isn’t exactly new. But now at least you can blame all the lovey-dovey stuff on Chaucer—whether that makes you ignore it or celebrate it depends entirely on your own temperament.” ~
https://lithub.com/you-can-blame-geoffrey-chaucer-for-valentines-day/?fbclid=IwAR0Ye9xsDfn8SHhtzKOtOP-UncUhrcw8hKbb9PM_MMvWSEIVXU3YFrBxQCU
*
TOLSTOY: WITHOUT PROSTITUTES, WHAT WOULD BECOME OF DECENCY AND MORALITY?
~ “Should we permit promiscuous sexual intercourse, as many liberals wish to do? Impossible! It would be the ruin of family life. To meet the difficulty, the law of development has evolved a “golden bridge” in the form of the prostitute. Just think of London without its 70,000 prostitutes! What would become of decency and morality, how would family life survive without them? How many women and girls would remain chaste? No. I believe the prostitute is necessary for the maintenance of the family.” ~ Lev Tolstoy, in an anthology of articles denouncing women’s rights.
Oriana:
No, this is not satire in the mode of “A Modest Proposal.” Tolstoy is in earnest when he exclaims: “Just think of London without its 70,000 prostitutes!” It would be the end of civilization — since civilization is based on the sanctity of the family, and prostitutes, strangely enough, are apparently the guardians of that sanctity.
By contrast, Emerson was shocked by the British acceptance of prostitution (though I wonder where Tolstoy got his “golden bridge” metaphor). Emerson thought men too should be virgins until their wedding night. We know that Tolstoy wasn’t.
*
SCIENCE DOESN’T REFUTE FREE WILL
~ “According to the skeptics, human actions aren’t the result of conscious choices but are caused by physical processes in the brain and body over which people have no control. Human beings are just complex physical machines, determined by the laws of nature and prior physical conditions as much as steam engines and the solar system are so determined. The idea of free will, the skeptics say, is a holdover from a naïve worldview that has been refuted by science, just as ghosts and spirits have been refuted. You have as little control over whether to continue to read this article as you have over the date of the next total solar eclipse visible from New York. (It is due to take place on May 1, 2079.)
Such free-will skepticism may not yet be embraced by the general public. Nor is it new; the philosophical debate about whether free will is compatible with determinism stretches back centuries, and the modern scientific debate has been roiling at least since the famous neuroscience experiments on the alleged neural causes of voluntary actions conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s. Still, this skepticism makes trouble for some deeply held views about ourselves. The idea of free will is central to the way we understand ourselves as autonomous agents and to our practices of holding one another responsible.
Lawyers, for example, are well aware of that, and the questions that neuroscience raises for the law have become a growing area of study in legal scholarship. How, for instance, could we blame and punish people for something they did not do out of their own free will? When an avalanche harms someone, it would not occur to us to blame the avalanche: unlike you and me (at least as most people see it), it is not a moral agent capable of responsibility. When a person harms another, we hold that person responsible. If the skeptics are right, this is a mistake. In both the human case and the avalanche, the skeptics say, the harm results from physical processes inside a heap of atoms and molecules.
Some free-will skeptics—including Harris and Coyne but also the philosophers Derk Pereboom and Gregg Caruso—welcome these implications. They point out that, as a society, we are far too obsessed with responsibility, punishment, and retribution. Many of the world’s criminal justice systems are inhumane as well as counterproductive. The skeptics have a point here, but one can support criminal justice reform while holding on to one’s belief in free will. Human dignity and restorative justice should be reasons enough to focus more on rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders and on tackling the social background conditions of crime.
Giving up on the idea of free will, by contrast, would have other unsettling implications, independently of anything to do with blame and punishment. For example, how could we sincerely deliberate about important choices if we didn’t take ourselves to be free in making those choices? The philosopher Immanuel Kant already understood this problem when he noted that we must view ourselves as free when we engage in practical reasoning.
It is important to ask, then, whether free will can be defended against the skeptical voices, or whether, instead, its defenders are clinging to a superstition. I think that science has not refuted free will, after all. In fact, it actually offers arguments in its defense.
*
Contemporary free-will skepticism—at least of the kind that appeals to science—is part and parcel of a reductionistic worldview, according to which everything is reducible to physical processes. If we look at the world from the perspective of fundamental physics alone, then we will see only particles, fields, and forces, but no human agency, choice, and free will. Human beings, like everything else, will look like subsystems of a large impersonal physical universe. Of course, skeptics say that this is, in fact, what science implies. To suggest that human beings are anything beyond physical systems would be to revert to seventeenth-century metaphysics, the sort of mind-body dualism endorsed by René Descartes from which modern science has moved on.
But it is a mistake to equate science with reductionism. Science does not force us to think of humans as nothing more than heaps of interacting particles. To the contrary, in the sciences of human behavior—from anthropology and psychology to economics and sociology—it is standard practice to think of people as intentional agents with a capacity for making choices and responding intelligently to their environments. Scholars in these fields explain human actions by depicting people as choice-making agents with beliefs and desires, goals and plans, on the basis of which they decide which actions to pursue.
Different academic fields spell out the details in different ways—with different levels of emphasis on, for instance, the relationship between individual and structural factors influencing human actions—but the general supposition of intentional agency is nonetheless present in all of them. This explanatory practice does not assume anything supernatural. It just reflects the fact that agency, intentionality, and choice are essential postulates if we wish to make sense of human behavior. So, the first point to note is that science would have a hard time explaining human behavior if it didn’t view people as choice-making agents.
To illustrate, think about how we answer familiar questions about humans. Why does someone who has made an appointment normally show up? Why does a taxi driver take you to your specified destination? Why do consumers respond to price changes? Why do people support the political movements they do? In each case, the picture of humans as choice-making agents helps us to give the answer. The behaviors in question are readily intelligible if we think of people as having agency, intentionality, and choice. They are faced with different options, look at these options from their perspective, and select one of the options in a goal-directed and more or less intelligible manner, even if the resulting choices are not always fully rational.
If we thought of people as mere physical machines, we would miss the intentional, goal-directed nature of their actions and get overwhelmed with physical details. We wouldn’t see the forest for the trees. It would be like trying to explain investors’ market transactions, voters’ electoral choices, or people’s cultural activities from the perspective of particle physics. Physics and even physiology are not the right approaches for explaining human behavior in its full range—holistically, we might say. At most, they can give us some insights into the mechanisms by which agency is generated in physical organisms.
This is not to belittle those insights. Human agency and choice are among the most remarkable phenomena the physical world has produced, and as scientists and philosophers will acknowledge, there is much more to be explained. But this does not justify a reductionistic approach according to which the phenomena themselves are overlooked and get to be discounted.
Now, once we think of human beings in this nonreductionistic way, we are actually presupposing some form of free will, though liberated from supernatural undertones. That there is such a presupposition in our explanations of human behavior is seldom acknowledged, perhaps because free will is such a controversial concept and the practitioners of the relevant sciences may be reluctant to get drawn into metaphysical debates unless strictly necessary. However, free will, soberly speaking, can be defined as the capacity for intentional agency, choice among alternative possibilities, and control over the resulting choices. This capacity—it should be clear—is presupposed when scientists depict people as choice-making agents, whether in anthropology, psychology, economics, or sociology.
*
The skeptics will object that all this is at best a useful fiction, at worst a harmful one. At any rate, they will say, the free-will presupposition is not literally true. But consider how scientists settle questions about what is and is not real.
Why do scientists accept gravity and electromagnetism as real, but not ghosts and spirits? The answer is that science must refer to gravity and electromagnetism to explain physical phenomena, and these properties are indispensable ingredients of a coherent theory of the world, while postulating ghosts and spirits is not only useless but also prone to introducing all sorts of incoherencies.
Generally, to figure out whether some entity or property is real, scientists ask two questions: first, is postulating the entity or property necessary for explaining the world, and second, is it coherent with the rest of our scientific worldview? If the answer to both questions is “yes,” then the entity or property meets the reality check, and scientists feel ready to include it in their inventory of the world, at least provisionally.
This test, a version of Occam’s Razor, can be applied not just to physics. It also supports the reality of “higher-level” entities and properties such as ecosystems, institutions, and poverty. These, too, must be accepted as real if we wish to explain our world, and they are ingredients of a coherent scientific worldview, even if fundamental physics does not speak about them. When we think about free will through the lens of this test, we get a new perspective. If the human and social sciences must postulate intentional agency and choice to explain human behavior, then those properties pass the first part of the scientific reality test: they are explanatorily indispensable.
What about the second part—coherence with the rest of our scientific worldview? Here, the skeptics will object that if the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic—like the mechanisms of a precise clockwork—then there is no hope of rendering the notion of choice-making coherent. At any point in time, there will be only one possible future sequence of events, given the physical past. Traditionally, physical theories—from Isaac Newton’s classical mechanics to Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity—have tended to represent the world this way.
Furthermore, even though indeterminism and randomness seemed to enter physics with the emergence of quantum mechanics (at least on the well-known Copenhagen interpretation), it is still an open question whether future, more advanced theories will retain this indeterminism. Einstein was famously unconvinced by the idea of indeterministic physical laws when he said, “God does not play dice.” Given that determinism has not been conclusively ruled out by science, therefore, we can’t count on quantum mechanics to defend free will—not to mention that quantum indeterminacies would probably be a farfetched source of free will anyway. Indeed, hard determinist skeptics insist that we never have any real choices. When you appeared to make a choice about whether to read this essay, only one option was genuinely available (reading it, as you are doing right now); the other option never existed.
These are subtle issues, but deterministic physical laws arguably do not preclude forks in the road within human agency. An agent’s future choices can be open at a psychological level even if the underlying physics is deterministic. Though this may sound counterintuitive, the distinction between determinism and indeterminism cannot be drawn independently of the level of description at which we are looking at the world. A system can behave deterministically at one level—say, the microphysical one—and indeterministically at another—say, the level associated with some special science: chemistry, biology, meteorology, and so on.
At a macro level, then, the Earth’s atmosphere can be thought of as indeterministic, despite being deterministic at a micro level. As the philosopher of physics Jeremy Butterfield puts it, a system’s micro- and macro-dynamics need not “mesh.” And, I would argue, such “emergent indeterminism” is not just apparent. It is best interpreted not as “epistemic”—due to incomplete information about the world—but as “ontic”: a feature of what the world is like. So, to cut a long story short, the sciences give us the resources to show that forks in the road in human decision-making can co-exist with determinism in physics. Of course, the openness of human choices is not just a phenomenon of statistical mechanics; it comes from option availability as described by our best explanatory theories of human decision-making.
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For the time being, then, the hypothesis of free will is corroborated by the sciences of human behavior. Free will, for the purposes of the human and social sciences, boils down to agency, intentionality, and choice, which are well-supported and indeed explanatorily indispensable ideas. Denying free will would be warranted only if these ideas weren’t needed for explaining human behavior or if they were somehow incoherent, which they aren’t.
To be sure, future science might vindicate a reductionistic approach and explain human behavior without representing people as choice-making agents. But science doesn’t seem to be heading that way. So far, psychology, broadly speaking, has resisted reduction and has been augmented but not replaced by neuroscience. Just as we wouldn’t deny the reality of ecosystems, institutions, and poverty merely because fundamental physics doesn’t refer to them, so there is no reason to deny the reality of agency, choice, and free will either. The skeptics’ mistake is to assume a reductionistic picture of humans that is neither mandated by science, nor adequate for understanding human behavior.
http://bostonreview.net/science-nature-philosophy-religion/christian-list-science-hasnt-refuted-free-will?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=5fe2460ced-MC_Newsletter_2_12_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-5fe2460ced-40729829&mc_cid=5fe2460ced&mc_eid=97e2edfae1
If, starting in early childhood, you were taught to adore Stalin, what would it take for you to fall out of love with him? Facts, we know, are usually not sufficient.*
Oriana: LESS IS MORE, OR WHY I LOVE FUNERALS
On the one hand, we have those who deny the existence of free will; what looks like choice is determined by factors beyond our control. The best quip on this is: “I can do what I want, but I can’t choose what I want.” On the other hand, we have plenty of studies in the field that could be loosely called “how people make choices.” One interesting result: less choice is better and usually makes people happier. Too many options can result in paralysis (inaction) and downright misery.
The advice is not only to limit one’s options, but also to make the choice irreversible. If there is no going back, you stop thinking about it, and move forward, trying to make the best of whatever you ended up with.
A friend of mine gave the example of his marriage. For years, he kept regretting not having married another woman when he had a chance. And then he came to his senses: his wife was a fine woman, wise and supportive, and he’d made exactly the right choice. He told me his life improved dramatically after that.
Now, perhaps he was kidding himself, just rationalizing. That’s not the point. There is no way to ascertain the “truth” of the situation: perhaps the other woman would have made him happier. But at the pragmatic level, he did the right thing by fully committing himself to his actual marriage and dropping the fantasy of an alternate one.
Please listen to this entertaining TED talk (for one thing, this lecturer certainly didn’t agonize over how to dress):
https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choice?referrer=playlist-how_we_make_choices#t-826629
I don’t think we’ll ever be able to predict human (or even animal) behavior with complete accuracy — as with the weather, there are just too many variables. Besides, every human is a bundle of contradictions — or, to put it in a more dignified and scientific-sounding way, our brain has a number of competing neural pathways. If a single one doesn’t gain clear dominance, we resort to the excellent traditional method of tossing a coin. I hope coins never fall out of use, or I’d be lost.
One reason I love funerals is that you wear black. No choice, no stress!
And you speak only the good about the deceased person. Again, you don’t have to think — “She was such a wonderful person.”
And you know you are supposed to appear somber — but at the last funeral I attended, I couldn’t help but notice that underneath that somber surface people seemed basically happy to be there — not trying to be well-dressed or clever, but just glad to be around others, enjoying the basic human connection.
True, we don’t always have rituals or social protocols to guide us. Sooner or later, the stress of making a choice will catch up with us. The difficult part is figuring out whether a given matter deserves some rumination — in other words, is it really important?
“Limit your choices” is a paradoxical piece of advice born of the misery of having too many choices. And this piece of advice wouldn’t be around if our behavior happened to be completely automatic.
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In literature, there are some famous instance of choice. We witness one of them when the lowly governess, Jane Eyre, suddenly asserts herself:
“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
On a closer look, Jane Eyre is actually limiting her choices. She will do only that which is not degrading to herself. Though neither rich nor beautiful, she will not marry the first man who will have her — nor will she become anyone’s mistress and thus a social pariah. She eliminates those options, and anything not in accord with her self-respect and her moral values.
And we admire her strength, and find her a role model. But note: she is strong because her mind is not divided. The surprising benefit of closing options is greater self-confidence and peace of mind. “Less is more” applies to life, not just art.
(A shameless digression: I apologize for bringing it up so often, but again I'm reminded of my decision not to be depressed anymore. One of the crucial steps toward that decision was reading a statement: "You can practice falling apart, or you can practice being strong.")
Charlotte Brontê, who gave us the perennially inspiring, magnificently dignified Jane EyreMary: INTENT AND CHOICE
The reductionist arguments for determinism seem to me long outdated..a clockwork universe no longer fits what we know scientifically about the world of physics or biology. Intentionality and choice are not only necessary for understanding human behavior, but also the behavior of many animals.
We are not the only animals who have a sense of individual identity, who can think in original ways to solve problems, who play, have unique personalities, live in social groups and engage in behaviors that maintain those groups, mourn our losses, and, most remarkably, are capable of individual acts that are surprisingly outside the usual and expected, "normal" limits of behavior. Think of interspecies friendships, of recent instances of members of one species assisting or even "adopting" a member of another, as recently seen in whales. Think of the octopus exploring and exploiting the potentials of his environment, who may carry about a found coconut shell as a portable shelter, who is notorious for figuring out how to escape any tank, who can seem as curious about the world as we are.
When behavior surprises, as it so often and profoundly does, it speaks against the reductionist, deterministic view. If we could know all the elements involved in any situation, any chosen act, we might be better able to understand it...but where we will always fail is in predicting.
I would argue that physics may predict...although the quantum universe remains a challenge...but as soon as mind enters the scene you are dealing with intent and choice, with a world that won't sit still to conform to prediction, no matter how careful and deeply informed. We will always be surprised first...then go back for understanding.
It seems the modern view is not a clockwork universe, a machine of any sort, no matter how sophisticated, but more like an organism, a living system, intimately and infinitely connected in ways we are just beginning to see.
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WHY YOU CAN’T WIN AN ARGUMENT ON THE INTERNET
Intuitively, most people recognize that emotions motivate opinions, and behave accordingly.
We use rhetorical techniques, such as verbal flourishes and confident mannerisms, to help convince others of our views. And we know that angry reactions to, for example, evidence showing that children of same-sex parents fare just as well as those raised by heterosexual parents, are grounded in emotional prejudice rather than a deep-seated desire for the facts.
Studies reinforce these instincts about the importance of emotions. For example, patients who have brain damage in areas responsible for processing emotions also struggle to make decisions, pointing to the importance of emotions in deciding between two options. And chartered psychologist Rob Yeung, whose book How to Stand Out emphasizes the effectiveness of emotions, rather than logic, in convincing others to agree with you, points to research showing that use of metaphors motivate people to make decisions.
Online, when we can’t see others’ faces or their moods, it’s easy to lose sight of these emotional instincts. Instead of engaging with and respecting others’ feelings, there can be a tendency to bombard those with opposing views with “facts.” But even seemingly solid points of information, such as the periodic table, are often grounded in subjective perspectives; a broad philosophical theory called “social constructivism” argues that facts are always a reflection of socially constructed values. There are often multiple ways of interpreting a single point of information and so, much though some people might like to think they’re right about everything, there are surprisingly few issues to which there’s an unequivocally correct opinion.
Perhaps there’s little hope of convincing others on the internet to change their minds. But, as Saunders notes, Mill does point to another approach.
He states that instead of seeking to convince others, we can be open to changing our own minds, and seek out information that contradicts our own steadfast point of view. Maybe it’ll turn out that those who disagree with you actually have a solid grasp of the facts. There’s a slight possibility that, after all, you’re the one who’s wrong.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/150-years-ago-a-philosopher-showed-why-it-s-pointless-to-start-arguments-on-the-internet?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
As someone said, “It is impossible to use reason to refute a position that has not been arrived at through reason.”
It could be argued that that religion's greatest advantage is precisely that it's not rational, so reason is powerless against it. To say that the Universe was created by Yahweh is just as absurd as saying “the Universe was created by Fred” — but a believer, like a Trump voter, is not bothered by absurdities. What counts is “what's in the heart.”
And yet Dante, our supreme infernologist, took this literally.
“Dante, I think, committed a crude blunder when, with a terror-inspiring ingenuity, he placed above the gateway of his hell the inscription, 'I too was created by eternal love’ — at any rate, there would be more justification for placing above the gateway to the Christian Paradise...the inscription 'I too was created by eternal hate'...” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Beatrice before the Eagle of Justice *
THE CULT OF SKULLS IN NAPLES
~ “One of Borrelli’s plays, Opera Pezentella, delves into the history of the somewhat cult-ish Neapolitan tradition of “adopting” a dead skull, praying for its soul, and, in return, asking for a favor.
Naples is dotted with ancient crypts where one can find these centuries-old skulls, the most famous being the Fontanelle cemetery and the church Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio ad Arco. In both, visitors can see the skulls and bones of people who died in the 1600s—a century full of devastations, including the Black Plague and the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano—and didn’t receive a proper burial. (“Because they couldn’t pay for one,” Borrelli told me.) In line with Dante’s Divine Comedy, a lack of a proper burial meant these souls were doomed to spend eternity in purgatory—that is, unless someone prayed for them.
So, Neapolitans opted to make use of this undead dilemma. They pray for the dead to get to heaven, but expect something in return. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
Among the thousands of skulls in the ad Arco church are ghost celebrities—or, rather, skulls that have answered more prayers than not. (If a certain skull doesn’t satisfy your needs, you move on to the next one. Because why waste time with those who don’t reciprocate?) The most famous one is Lucia, and is known for helping love-stricken individuals. While some of the skulls in the crypt were placed lazily next to others, Lucia had her own shrine, overflowing with hand-written love letters and fading photographs.
When I met Borrelli, he took me straight to the church and crypt, which served as the set of his 2014 play on the “purgatory souls.” He and the church’s administrative director Daniela d’Acunto told me stories of middle-aged women who would visit the skulls during WWII and ask for their sons to return from the war unharmed.
“They prayed to these skulls because it was something they could touch and feel,” said Borrelli. “It was somehow more real and believable than praying to saints they couldn’t physically see. It’s as if the skulls were their therapists, someone they could talk to.”
Today, the practice hasn’t gone anywhere. I watched a family with two small children pay their respects. A woman in her thirties came alone, left a note in Lucia’s altar, and left. There are thousands of rustic coins dropped in the corner designated for students to leave a little something and, in return, do well on their exams.
For generations, Neapolitans have grown up with death—and the dead—as an integral part of everyday life. In the early 20th century, before the Fontanelle cemetery became a tourist site, children would play with the skulls lying about the cave. And this relationship—this constant, almost theatrical and mystical communication with the other world—eventually made its mark on popular culture and art.
The 1940 theater play Non ti Pago, written by one of Naples’s most famous playwrights Eduardo De Filippo, is a testament to the importance Neapolitans give to dreams. It tells the story of a man who is “robbed” of winning the lottery because his father appears in the dream of another man giving him the winning numbers. A family feud ensues that questions various things: the connection between the world of the living and the world of the dead, the authenticity of dreams, and the Catholic Church’s attitude towards these “pagan” beliefs. (The Church says only saints can answer prayers.)
Anthropologist Gianluca Mastrocinque says that, in Naples, the dead live alongside the living. “They’re like part of the family,” he says. “There’s a familiarity with death, but at the same time, there’s a juxtaposing sentiment towards it. Because you want death close, you want it to be your friend, so that it doesn’t catch you.”
It’s a city that has been full of tragedies. Mastrocinque points to the Vesuvius, which has destroyed entire communities (one only has to take a 30-minute train ride to Pompeii to be reminded), but at the same time has given the surrounding area extremely fertile soil. There have been devastating earthquakes—including one in 1980 that killed thousands. There have been bombings from the two world wars. There have been murders by the mafias, and the police.
“There’s a lot of precariousness and instability,” says Mastrocinque. “And that has made us very close to death.” ~
https://lithub.com/what-neapolitans-understand-about-death-better-than-most/?fbclid=IwAR09ys7afFN-dj_3dB4xAVeFxZQpnocnbgil2C38V-eSJTHZD_3fVA3BpTY
Naples cryptOriana:
Adopting an anonymous skull, praying for the soul that used to occupy it, and expecting favors in return for those prayers, doesn’t strike me as altogether bizarre. In some countries cemeteries still play a large part in the culture. Poland happens to be one of those countries where graves are visited at least once a year, but in practice more often, since out-of-town visitors are often taken for a walk to the cemetery. The dead are still, to a degree, part of the family.
In the U.S., I saw that hardly any people visited the graves of their “dearly departed.” I missed the custom, and kept visiting cemeteries whenever there was a chance. For once thing, I found them interesting: the art, the inscriptions, trying to imagine the lives of the dead. Even the trees and other vegetation was different somehow, a bit mysterious.
For a few years I even harbored a fantasy of “adopting” someone’s grave, so I’d have a grave to visit at the cemetery that happens to be nearest to me. I wasn’t too clear just what I’d do to “tend” the grave — but I knew I didn’t want the name to fade and be erased by lichen. And I wasn’t thinking of someone with a Polish name. I felt the right grave would somehow “call” to me.
Eventually my fantasy faded. There were always other, more pressing things to do. Life mercilessly carries us on, and the grave that was supposed to call to me remains unvisited, the name on it faded and forgotten. But that’s just reality, to which we bow helplessly, knowing we are next — except there won’t even be a grave, given the prevalence of cremation and the emergence of eco-burial (I’m all for it).
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“The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.” ~ Denis Diderot
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CONCRETE AND ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION
~ “After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on Earth. If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest carbon dioxide emitter in the world with up to 2.8bn tonnes, surpassed only by China and the US.
Concrete is how we try to tame nature. Our slabs protect us from the elements. They keep the rain from our heads, the cold from our bones and the mud from our feet. But they also entomb vast tracts of fertile soil, constipate rivers, choke habitats and – acting as a rock-hard second skin – desensitize us from what is happening outside our urban fortresses.
Our blue and green world is becoming grayer by the second. By one calculation, we may have already passed the point where concrete outweighs the combined carbon mass of every tree, bush and shrub on the planet. Our built environment is, in these terms, outgrowing the natural one. Unlike the natural world, however, it does not actually grow. Instead, its chief quality is to harden and then degrade, extremely slowly.
All the plastic produced over the past 60 years amounts to 8bn tonnes. The cement industry pumps out more than that every two years. But though the problem is bigger than plastic, it is generally seen as less severe. Concrete is not derived from fossil fuels. It is not being found in the stomachs of whales and seagulls. Doctors aren’t discovering traces of it in our blood. Nor do we see it tangled in oak trees or contributing to subterranean fatbergs. We know where we are with concrete. Or to be more precise, we know where it is going: nowhere. Which is exactly why we have come to rely on it.
At times an unyielding ally, at times a false friend, concrete can resist nature for decades and then suddenly amplify its impact. Take the floods in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and Houston after Harvey, which were more severe because urban and suburban streets could not soak up the rain like a floodplain, and storm drains proved woefully inadequate for the new extremes of a disrupted climate.
Concrete is a thirsty behemoth, sucking up almost a 10th of the world’s industrial water use. This often strains supplies for drinking and irrigation, because 75% of this consumption is in drought and water-stressed regions. In cities, concrete also adds to the heat-island effect by absorbing the warmth of the sun and trapping gases from car exhausts and air-conditioner units – though it is, at least, better than darker asphalt.
It also worsens the problem of silicosis and other respiratory diseases. The dust from wind-blown stocks and mixers contributes as much as 10% of the coarse particulate matter that chokes Delhi, where researchers found in 2015 that the air pollution index at all of the 19 biggest construction sites exceeded safe levels by at least three times. Limestone quarries and cement factories are also often pollution sources, along with the trucks that ferry materials between them and building sites. At this scale, even the acquisition of sand can be catastrophic – destroying so many of the world’s beaches and river courses that this form of mining is now increasingly run by organized crime gangs and associated with murderous violence.
This touches on the most severe, but least understood, impact of concrete, which is that it destroys natural infrastructure without replacing the ecological functions that humanity depends on for fertilization, pollination, flood control, oxygen production and water purification.
Concrete can take our civilization upwards, up to 163 stories high in the case of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, creating living space out of the air. But it also pushes the human footprint outwards, sprawling across fertile topsoil and choking habitats. The biodiversity crisis – which many scientists believe to be as much of a threat as climate chaos – is driven primarily by the conversion of wilderness to agriculture, industrial estates and residential blocks.
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The Pantheon and Colosseum in Rome are testament to the durability of concrete, which is a composite of sand, aggregate (usually gravel or stones) and water mixed with a lime-based, kiln-baked binder. The modern industrialized form of the binder – Portland cement – was patented as a form of “artificial stone” in 1824 by Joseph Aspdin in Leeds. This was later combined with steel rods or mesh to create reinforced concrete, the basis for art deco skyscrapers such as the Empire State Building.
Rivers of it were poured after the second world war, when concrete offered an inexpensive and simple way to rebuild cities devastated by bombing. This was the period of brutalist architects such as Le Corbusier, followed by the futuristic, free-flowing curves of Oscar Niemeyer and the elegant lines of Tadao Ando – not to mention an ever-growing legion of dams, bridges, ports, city halls, university campuses, shopping centers and uniformly grim car parks. In 1950, cement production was equal to that of steel; in the years since, it has increased 25-fold, more than three times as fast as its metallic construction partner.
Le Corbusier, Church of Saint Pierre, Firminy *
Beijing’s extraordinarily rapid rise from developing nation to superpower-in-waiting has required mountains of cement, beaches of sand and lakes of water. The speed at which these materials are being mixed is perhaps the most astonishing statistic of the modern age: since 2003, China has poured more cement every three years than the US managed in the entire 20th century.
Today, China uses almost half the world’s concrete. The property sector – roads, bridges, railways, urban development and other cement-and-steel projects – accounted for a third of its economy’s expansion in 2017. Every major city has a floor-sized scale model of urban development plans that has to be constantly updated as small white plastic models are turned into mega-malls, housing complexes and concrete towers.
But, like the US, Japan, South Korea and every other country that “developed” before it, China is reaching the point where simply pouring concrete does more harm than good. Ghost malls, half-empty towns and white elephant stadiums are a growing sign of wasteful spending.
Beijing’s much-vaunted Belt and Road Initiative – an overseas infrastructure investment project many times greater than the Marshall Plan – promises a splurge of roads in Kazakhstan, at least 15 dams in Africa, railways in Brazil and ports in Pakistan, Greece and Sri Lanka. To supply these and other projects, China National Building Material – the country’s biggest cement producer – has announced plans to construct 100 cement factories across 50 nations.
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Architects believe the answer is to make buildings leaner and, when possible, to use other materials, such as cross-laminated timber. It is time to move out of the “concrete age” and stop thinking primarily about how a building looks, said Anthony Thistleton.
“Concrete is beautiful and versatile but, unfortunately, it ticks all the boxes in terms of environmental degradation,” he told the Architects Journal. “We have a responsibility to think about all the materials we are using and their wider impact.”
Arguably more important still is a change of mindset away from a developmental model that replaces living landscapes with built environments and nature-based cultures with data-driven economies. That requires tackling power structures that have been built on concrete, and recognizing that fertility is a more reliable base for growth than solidity.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-most-destructive-material-on-earth?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR2zpGZmpKM2ByG0Oob0npcBrZoSKZbmX1gILg09X7X5eHa5BxxIdpT9_lg
Concrete seawall in Yamada, Japan*
EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNES
~ “Suppose you were a fourth-century Christian woman or man,” I began. “Not a theologian or anyone special, just an ordinary, garden variety person claiming to be a Christian. All you want to know is ‘How should I live today in real time, at my job, with my family and friends, as a Christian? What does this faith I profess require of me today?’ Would either of these texts provide such a person with any practical guidance? Would reading Hilary or Athanasius help an aspiring Christian figure out how to live her or his faith more effectively and fruitfully?” No one said anything immediately, but several students began slowly shaking their heads. “I don’t think so,” one of them finally offered tentatively. And I addressed the elephant in the room: Then what is the point? Who cares? Why are we wasting our time with this?
I’m sure that Athanasius’ discussion and the niceties of doctrinal hairsplitting has meant and does mean something practical to many people over the centuries. As one of my teaching colleagues noted, in the fourth century it seemed that one’s eternal life might depend on getting this right. And maybe it does. But try selling that to eighteen college freshmen, especially when I myself am not convinced that the various distinctions really make a practical difference.
St. Peter Preaching Fortunately, passages from the Gospel of John had been assigned as well for seminar, so the students had Bibles with them. I took them to two brief passages early in the Book of Acts (not assigned for the day) and had them read descriptions of how followers of Jesus (not even called “Christian” yet) chose to organize their fledgling communities in the early years after Jesus was gone. After hearing how the members of these communities sold their property and brought the proceeds to the community leaders, who then “distributed to each as anyone had need,” I asked the students for their initial thoughts and reactions.
“They were like a bunch of Communists!” was the general reaction. After they shared some of the reasons they have been taught that an economic system built on the elimination of private property is guaranteed to fail, I asked them to consider why they supposed the followers of Jesus chose to economically organize their fledgling communities in this way.
Why did they choose to live out the directive that “each contributes according to their ability, and each receives according to their need” centuries before the phrase was coined?
Most of the members of these communities knew of Jesus only through stories told second- and third-hand; little to nothing had been written down. No one had even thought of “Christian doctrine” yet. The leaders of the communities might perhaps have met or seen Jesus in person; a few of the leaders might have been part of Jesus’ inner circle. As my students considered my question, they eventually came to an obvious possibility—these early followers of Jesus simply were asking themselves “If Jesus was here with us, how would he want us to organize our community economically? What is the most ‘Jesus-like’ way to deal with property, the things that people need, and the demands of community life?” Acts tells us the answer.
~ Now all who believed were together, and had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods, and divided them among all, as anyone had need. ~
When faced with the practical challenge of how to live a life guided by Jesus’ example, they formed communities of mutual support and sharing—because such communities seemed most in keeping with what they knew of Jesus’ teaching and life. We, two millennia later, know from the gospels—which they did not have—that they got it right. Their communities were attempts to live out what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere.
The ensuing class discussion was active and fascinating. Students began to consider what it might be like to live in a community of individuals with shared beliefs and commitments, where the needs of each member were considered to be as important as one’s own needs. Might traditional critiques of “socialism” be less effective when individual rights and self-interest were not the primary concern of community members?
Most importantly, students realized that the questions the early followers of Jesus were asking are just as relevant to persons of faith today. Rather than wondering whether our doctrinal beliefs and commitments are sufficiently pure and orthodox, we would do better to ask how we are going to live our faith out in the various circumstances and challenges that face us each day. As the author of Acts asks, how are we to follow Jesus with “gladness and simplicity of heart”?
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/freelancechristianity/is-christianity-a-system-of-belief-or-a-way-of-life/?fbclid=IwAR3FypJpaLFeZKpyzvhUv6Ws60QbwyOUzdMtmoGfz-e8_2vZ6n4Rqf7Zw0w
Meteora Monasteries, Greece Oriana:
Monastic communities still operate mostly that way. The most successful and longest-lasting communes have been those centered on religion. The “vow of poverty” is typical, but it seems to result not in poverty but in security about housing, food, and medical care.
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~ "Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish" (Portuguese: Sermão de Santo António aos Peixes)- The story goes that one day Anthony went to Rimini where there were a lot of heretics. He started to preach, but they did not want to listen to him, and they even mocked him. In a dramatic gesture, Anthony went to the seashore, saying, “Because you show yourself unworthy of God’s word, behold, I turn to the fishes so that your unbelief may be shown up more clearly”. As he spoke of God’s care for those creatures that live in the waters, a shoal of fish swam near to the bank, partly thrusting themselves out of the water and appearing to listen carefully. At the end of his sermon, the Saint blessed them and they swam away. In the meantime, so deep was the impression made upon the onlookers that many hurried back to the city imploring their friends to come and see the miracle, while others burst into tears asking forgiveness. Soon after a great multitude gathered around the Saint, who exhorted them to turn back to God. So through this sermon, the city of Rimini was purged of heresy.” ~ Teresa Adelson
ending on beauty:
I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard's arboreal plight
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God.
~ Robert Frost, "Good-by and Keep Cold”
Orchard in bloom with poplars, Van Gogh 1889
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