Remembering the victims of 9/11 *
REVERSE GRAVITY
I always meet someone who
waves his hand and says,
“I grew up here,” and I stare
at arrested houses and lawns,
pyramids of porches, frozen sky,
streets leading to themselves.
I don’t wave toward anything.
I pack suitcases until it hurts:
practical clothes in neutral colors,
the unforgotten toothbrush.
The past is trickier, it has to fold
along the creases in the mind:
swans and their reflections,
the guardian pigeon
on the statue’s head.
In Milwaukee I met people
who had never left Milwaukee.
My leaving for California
startled them more than the moonshot.
They stared at me with disbelief.
Out of politeness, someone asked,
“So what’s the weather like in Europe?”
How could they know
there is no answer?
They never had to ask themselves.
“Here it is,” they say,
not having learned the past tense.
The house. The church. The high school.
The parking lot of the first kiss.
I want to ask,
“How can you remember?
You haven’t left.”
They wave but it’s not goodbye,
hands thinning out
like winter’s ghosts of breath.
The pigeon on the statue’s head
never flies away.
~ Oriana
Mary:
Indeed “the past is trickier.” In memory that pigeon still sits on the statue's head, but in real time that pigeon's long gone, and maybe the statue with it. There is of course that great distance between those exiled, by choice or force, from their homelands, and those who live where they grew up. For those who never left have witnessed the changes as they came through the years, as both they and their city changed. So the old buildings, the landmarks, the places, are still there, though they may have been repurposed, transformed, neglected, or even torn down and replaced. For the native, the geography is the same, like the foundation and framework of a house...still home no matter how many times it's been repainted.
Both those who leave home and those who don't experience loss and nostalgia, a homesickness for the past of their (tricky and unfaithful) memories, but for the uprooted this is of a whole different order...more comprehensive, more absolute, and more painful. I, who lived in the same city my whole life until the past 3 years, can point to a place and say.."that's where the theater was, where we saw Ravi Shankar play.” That's the street I lived on once, that's where I went to school though it's not a school now"...The changes become as much a part of the story as the time before the changes, because you lived through them. Your “neighborhood” doesn't look or feel at all like it did before, and you miss all that it used to be, but it's still there, all the recognizable bones, there below all the changes. So you see your home through the layers of time, the years that passed both for you and that place, both anchored in the flux of time.
For an exile, there is a qualitative difference: the home becomes separated from time, the changes it undergoes not seen or experienced by the exile..who remembers it always as it once was for them. The distance is not simply in space but in time. The exile can't go back, because that place no longer exists. This loss is in addition to the pain of separation from one's home language and culture, and for many, from family. The exile goes forward, because there is no going back — that place is frozen and separated from time, like the image of that pigeon who never leaves the statue's head.
Oriana:
You got it perfectly, and indeed you hear it all the time from those who grew up elsewhere: “The England I left doesn’t exist anymore, except in my memory.” But that, I discovered, is only a partial truth — fortunately the historical parts of the city are under protection, preserved, and it’s there that, when you eventually visit, you realize the place is even more beautiful than you remembered it.
And no, as long as England remains England, no one is going to demolish the Houses of the Parliament to build skyscrapers, no matter how valuable the real estate. Some places we’ve had the sanity to declare holy.
Yes, over time we all become exiles from the past, so even people who’ve never left their hometown have a bit of understanding what it must be like to have lost one’s country, a tiny taste of it. There is a particular kind of trauma (it's not too strong a word) that’s called “the loss of the familiar.” The first two years or so you cry yourself to sleep. But life demands that we move forward, and we do, counting our blessings so we don’t die of the losses.
Monet: Houses of the Parliament, 1904*
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES: POET-PHYSICIAN WHO URGED DOCTORS TO WASH THEIR HANDS
Doctors practicing in the elite teaching hospitals of this era often began their day by conducting autopsies on the women who died the day before, usually of childbed fever. They would then examine laboring women with no rubber gloves or any other means to keep deadly bacteria from spreading from corpse to expectant mother.
Five years ago, I celebrated the anniversary of Ignaz Semmelweis’s revolutionary plea to the physicians and surgeons of the Vienna General Hospital to please wash their hands before attending to their patients — especially important doctors who helped women to deliver their babies.
But this was only the European half of the story, and it is high time we recognize the American physician, anatomist, poet and author Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894), who was born on Aug. 29, 211 years ago. His son Oliver Jr., of course, was the famed American Supreme Court justice.
In 1833, Holmes traveled abroad to study in the prestigious Paris Medical School. Among his teachers at the La Pitié Hospital was Pierre Louis, who used a new method of measurement called statistical analysis to disprove the efficacy of bloodletting, once a common treatment for pneumonia. Holmes returned to Boston and was awarded his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1836. He quickly rose in the ranks at Harvard and the Boston Dispensary, and became an active member of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement, along with several other colleagues who had the same training.
Holmes was also a superb literary stylist and the author of hundreds of poems, essays and stories under the byline “the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.” In 1846, he coined the word “anesthesia” to refer to the power of ether to induce “insensibility—more particularly—to objects of touch.” In his 1860 essay, “Currents and Countercurrents in Medicine,” he made one of his most famous observations on the futility of most medications then prescribed to patients:
Throw out opium, which the Creator himself seems to prescribe, for we often see the scarlet poppy growing in the cornfields, as if it were foreseen that wherever there is hunger to be fed there must also be a pain to be soothed; throw out a few specifics which our art did not discover, and it is hardly needed to apply; throw out wine, which is a food, and the vapors which produce the miracle of anaesthesia, and I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica [the medications prescribed by doctors], as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind — and all the worse for the fishes.
Holmes became interested in childbed fever after attending a lecture in 1842, and then spent the next year studying the medical literature on the topic. The following year, he presented his research to the Boston Society for Medical Improvement and published his findings, “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever,” in the New England Quarterly of Medicine and Surgery, which had a tiny circulation and ceased to exist after one year of publication.
Sadly, the paper barely made a dent in the doctor’s lexicon until it was republished more than 10 years later, in 1855 as a small booklet entitled “Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence.” This was a few years after Semmelweis’s famous 1850 lecture on the topic, but a few years before the Hungarian obstetrician’s 1861 book, “The Etiology, the Concept, and the Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever”, was published. Holmes’s conclusion included the admonition for all physicians who treated women who succumbed to puerperal fever to burn the clothing they wore while attending them, destroy their surgical instruments, and stop seeing obstetric patients for, at least, six months, on both moral and safety grounds.
Holmes’ study, like Semmelweis’, was so remarkable because it predicted the contagiousness of what we now understand as a streptococcal infection. Both studies appeared decades before Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur demonstrated the germ theory of disease. In fact, Holmes’ work was denigrated by many prominent American physicians who refused to believe they might be the cause of their patients’ deaths, let alone his theory of a contagious etiology. The Philadelphia gynecologist and obstetrician Charles Meigs, for example, ridiculed Holmes’s paper as the “jejune and fizzenless dreamings” of a young and inexperienced doctor who was simply unlucky when it came to the proper treatment of female patients.
It would take many more years for doctors to routinely wash their hands before attending any patient, which, of course, is now standard operating procedure.
The debate of who ultimately gets credit for telling doctors to wash their hands is best left to squabbling medical historians. In my humble opinion, both were brilliant observers and deserve dual credit and kudos.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/why-you-can-thank-oliver-wendell-holmes-sr-for-doctors-washing-their-hands?fbclid=IwAR06OoyznuTKMnXapDvc48kExJwJ2bWuIFfuSyG3osEyKQ4y85M5zS2AXtQ
Oriana:
An argument used against Holmes was “Doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen’s hands are clean.”
But Holmes knew better. If I were to put a label on him, it would be "more stately mansions, and clean hands." But the "stately mansions" stood for spiritual growth, while "clean hands" were to be literally clean thanks to soap and water.
Soap and water have probably saved more lives than all the antibiotics combined.
As for the stately mansions, here are two stanzas from my favorite poem by Holmes, The Chambered Nautilus:
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
*
“History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.” ~ Edna O’Brien
*
HOW CATHOLIC IDEAS OF MARRIAGE AND FAMILY CHANGED THE WEST
~ Around 597 a.d., Pope Gregory I dispatched an expedition to England to convert the Anglo-Saxon king of Kent and his subjects. The leader of the mission, a monk named Augustine, had orders to shoehorn the new Christians into Church-sanctioned marriages. That meant quashing pagan practices such as polygamy, arranged marriages (Christian matrimony was notionally consensual, hence the formula “I do”), and above all, marriages between relatives, which the Church was redefining as incest. Augustine wasn’t sure who counted as a relative, so he wrote to Rome for clarification. A second cousin? A third cousin? Could a man marry his widowed stepmother?
He could not. Pope Gregory wrote back to rule out stepmothers and other close kin not related by blood—another example was brothers’ widows. He was lax about second and third cousins; only the children of aunts and uncles were off-limits. By the 11th century, however, you couldn’t get engaged until you’d counted back seven generations, lest you marry a sixth cousin. The taboo against consanguineous family had expanded to include “spiritual kin,” who were, mostly, godparents. (It went without saying that you had to marry a Christian.) Pope Gregory and Augustine’s letters document a moment in a prolonged process—begun in the fourth century—in which the Church clamped down, and intermittently loosened up, on who could marry whom. Not until 1983 did Pope John Paul II allow second cousins to wed.
You might assume that this curious story of how the Church narrowed the criteria for marriageability would be relegated to a footnote—a very interesting footnote, to be sure—but Joseph Henrich puts the tale at the center of his ambitious theory-of-everything book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Consider this the latest addition to the Big History category, popularized by best sellers such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The outstanding feature of the genre is that it wrangles all of human existence into a volume or two, starting with the first hominids to rise up on their hind legs and concluding with us, cyborg-ish occupants of a networked globe. Big History asks Big Questions and offers quasi-monocausal answers. Why and how did humans conquer the world? Harari asks.
Cooperation. What explains differences and inequalities among civilizations? Diamond asks. Environment, which is to say, geography, climate, flora and fauna. Henrich also wants to explain variation among societies, in particular to account for the Western, prosperous kind.
Henrich’s first cause is culture, a word meant to be taken very broadly rather than as referring to, say, opera. Henrich, who directs Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, is a cultural evolutionary theorist, which means that he gives cultural inheritance the same weight that traditional biologists give to genetic inheritance. Parents bequeath their DNA to their offspring, but they—along with other influential role models—also transmit skills, knowledge, values, tools, habits. Our genius as a species is that we learn and accumulate culture over time. Genes alone don’t determine whether a group survives or disappears. So do practices and beliefs. Human beings are not “the genetically evolved hardware of a computational machine,” he writes. They are conduits of the spirit, habits, and psychological patterns of their civilization, “the ghosts of past institutions.”
One culture, however, is different from the others, and that’s modern WEIRD (“Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic”) culture. Dealing in the sweeping statistical generalizations that are the stock-in-trade of cultural evolutionary theorists—these are folks who say “people” but mean “populations”—Henrich draws the contrasts this way: Westerners are hyper-individualistic and hyper-mobile, whereas just about everyone else in the world was and still is enmeshed in family and more likely to stay put. Westerners obsess more about personal accomplishments and success than about meeting family obligations (which is not to say that other cultures don’t prize accomplishment, just that it comes with the package of family obligations). Westerners identify more as members of voluntary social groups—dentists, artists, Republicans, Democrats, supporters of a Green Party—than of extended clans.
In short, Henrich says, they’re weird. They are also, in the last four words of his acronym, “educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.” And that brings us to Henrich’s Big Question, which is really two linked questions. Starting around 1500 or so, the West became unusually dominant, because it advanced unusually quickly. What explains its extraordinary intellectual, technological, and political progress over the past five centuries? And how did its rise engender the peculiarity of the Western character?
Henrich’s ambition is tricky: to account for Western distinctiveness while undercutting Western arrogance. He rests his grand theory of cultural difference on an inescapable fact of the human condition: kinship, one of our species’ “oldest and most fundamental institutions.” Though based on primal instincts— pair-bonding, kin altruism—kinship is a social construct, shaped by rules that dictate whom people can marry, how many spouses they can have, whether they define relatedness narrowly or broadly.
Throughout most of human history, certain conditions prevailed: Marriage was generally family-adjacent—Henrich’s term is “cousin marriage”—which thickened the bonds among kin. Unilateral lineage (usually through the father) also solidified clans, facilitating the accumulation and intergenerational transfer of property. Higher-order institutions—governments and armies as well as religions—evolved from kin-based institutions. As families scaled up into tribes, chiefdoms, and kingdoms, they didn’t break from the past; they layered new, more complex societies on top of older forms of relatedness, marriage, and lineage. Long story short, in Henrich’s view, the distinctive flavor of each culture can be traced back to its earlier kinship institutions.
The Catholic Church changed all that. As of late antiquity, Europeans still lived in tribes, like most of the rest of the world. But the Church dismantled these kin-based societies with what Henrich calls its “Marriage and Family Program,” or MFP. The MFP was really an anti-marriage and anti-family program.
Why did the Church adopt it? From a cultural evolutionary point of view, the why doesn’t matter. In a footnote, Henrich skates lightly over debates about the motivations of Church leaders. But his bottom line is that the “MFP evolved and spread because it ‘worked.’ ” (Henrich’s indifference to individual and institutional intentions is guaranteed to drive historians nuts.)
Forced to find Christian partners, Christians left their communities. Christianity’s insistence on monogamy broke extended households into nuclear families. The Church uprooted horizontal, relational identity, replacing it with a vertical identity oriented toward the institution itself. The Church was stern about its marital policies. Violations were punished by withholding Communion, excommunicating, and denying inheritances to offspring who could now be deemed “illegitimate.” Formerly, property almost always went to family members. The idea now took hold that it could go elsewhere. At the same time, the Church urged the wealthy to ensure their place in heaven by bequeathing their money to the poor—that is, to the Church, benefactor to the needy. In so doing, “the Church’s MFP was both taking out its main rival for people’s loyalty and creating a revenue stream,” Henrich writes. The Church, thus enriched, spread across the globe.
Loosened from their roots, people gathered in cities. There they developed “impersonal prosociality”—that is, they bonded with other city folk. They wrote city charters and formed professional guilds. Sometimes they elected leaders, the first inklings of representative democracy. Merchants had to learn to trade with strangers. Success in this new kind of commerce required a good reputation, which entailed new norms, such as impartiality. You couldn’t cheat a stranger and favor relatives and expect to make a go of it.
By the time Protestantism came along, people had already internalized an individualist worldview. Henrich calls Protestantism “the WEIRDest religion,” and says it gave a “booster shot” to the process set in motion by the Catholic Church. Integral to the Reformation was the idea that faith entailed personal struggle rather than adherence to dogma. Vernacular translations of the Bible allowed people to interpret scripture more idiosyncratically. The mandate to read the Bible democratized literacy and education. After that came the inquiry into God-given natural (individual) rights and constitutional democracies. The effort to uncover the laws of political organization spurred interest in the laws of nature—in other words, science. The scientific method codified epistemic norms that broke the world down into categories and valorized abstract principles. All of these psychosocial changes fueled unprecedented innovation, the Industrial Revolution, and economic growth.
If Henrich’s history of Christianity and the West feels rushed and at times derivative—he acknowledges his debt to Max Weber—that’s because he’s in a hurry to explain Western psychology. The bulk of the book consists of data from many disciplines other than history, including anthropology and cross-cultural psychology, to which he and colleagues have made significant contributions. Their Kinship Intensity Index, for instance, helps them posit a dose-response relationship between the length of time a population was exposed to the Catholic Church’s Marriage and Family Program and the WEIRDness of its character.
Henrich gets amusingly granular in his statistics here. “Each century of Western church exposure cuts the rate of cousin marriage by nearly 60 percent,” he writes. A millennium of the MFP also makes a person less likely to lie in court for a friend—30 percentile points less likely. Henrich anticipates a quibble about what he calls “the Italian enigma”: Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year.
To go further afield: While Europe was first compiling its legal codes, China was punishing crimes committed against relatives more harshly than those against nonrelatives; especially severe penalties were reserved for crimes against one’s elders. As recently as the early 20th century, Chinese fathers could murder sons and get off with a warning; punishments for patricide, by contrast, were strict. Asymmetries like these, Henrich writes, “can be justified on Confucian principles and by appealing to a deep respect for elders,” even if the WEIRD mind finds them disturbing.
Henrich’s most consequential—and startling—claim is that WEIRD and non-WEIRD people possess opposing cognitive styles. They think differently. Standing apart from the community, primed to break wholes into parts and classify them, Westerners are more analytical. People from kinship-intensive cultures, by comparison, tend to think more holistically. They focus on relationships rather than categories.
Henrich defends this sweeping thesis with several studies, including a test known as the Triad Task. Subjects are shown three images—say, a rabbit, a carrot, and a cat. The goal is to match a “target object”—the rabbit—with a second object. A person who matches the rabbit with the cat classifies: The rabbit and the cat are animals. A person who matches the rabbit with the carrot looks for relationships between the objects: The rabbit eats the carrot.
You have to wonder whether the Triad Task really reflects fundamentally different cognitive bents or differences in subjects’ personal experience. Henrich cites a Mapuche, an indigenous Chilean, who matched a dog with a pig, an “analytic” choice, except the man then explained that he’d done so for a “holistic” reason: because the dog guards the pig. “This makes perfect sense,” Henrich muses. “Most farmers rely on dogs to protect their homes and livestock from rustlers.” Exactly! A Western undergraduate, probably not having grown up with dogs protecting her pigs, sees dogs and pigs as just animals.
Henrich is more persuasive when applying his theory of cumulative culture to the evolution of ideas. Democracy, the rule of law, and human rights “didn’t start with fancy intellectuals, philosophers, or theologians,” Henrich writes. “Instead, the ideas formed slowly, piece by piece, as regular Joes with more individualistic psychologies—be they monks, merchants, or artisans—began to form competing voluntary associations” and learned how to govern them. Toppling the accomplishments of Western civilization off their great-man platforms, he erases their claim to be monuments to rationality: Everything we think of as a cause of culture is really an effect of culture, including us.
Perhaps some comfort lies in Henrich’s dazzling if not consistently plausible supply of unintended consequences. Who would have imagined that the Catholic Church would have spawned so many self-involved nonconformists? What else might our curious history yield? Henrich’s social-scientist stance of neutrality may also relieve Westerners of some (one hopes not all) of their burden of guilt. “By highlighting the peculiarities of WEIRD people, I’m not denigrating these populations or any others,” he writes. WEIRDos aren’t all bad; they’re provincial. Henrich offers a capacious new perspective that could facilitate the necessary work of sorting out what’s irredeemable and what’s invaluable in the singular, impressive, and wildly problematic legacy of Western domination. ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-henrich-weird-people/615496/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Growing up Catholic, I got the distinct impression that marriage was inferior to celibacy, especially when celibacy meant becoming a priest or a monastic. Thus, against a virtual cult of the family, the church introduced a radical idea that not getting married was more desirable.
The saints weren’t married. Never mind that St. Francis would have probably been a wonderful dad (as would Pope Francis, no doubt). St. Jeanne de Chantal entered a convent soon after becoming a widow, against the vehement pleas of her son. Celibacy, particularly in the context of serving the church, was a “higher calling.” “It’s better to marry than to burn” was a concession to the need for marriage, but at the same time it degraded marriage to a remedy for lust. The ideal was to devote all your being to a “higher cause.”
It seems that it’s not so much marriage as child care that impedes achievement. Here the church got itself into a trap, since it was also against birth control. But on the whole, I agree that striking down the “idolatry of family” (I'm putting this in quotation marks since I'm quoting a priest), the church facilitated the growth of individualism — and, indirectly, its consequences, both beneficial and harmful.
On a personal note, I remember a woman poetry teacher whose advice to me was, “If you want to be a writer, you must become a nun. That’s spelled “n-o-n-e.” She meant men, but down the line I understood it to be children. And that’s a pity, because children and parenting can be a wonderful material. One can imagine different social arrangements where such drastic choices would not be necessary, especially if you are a woman, but . . . Dream on.
“The church has always advocated the most effective form of birth control: abstinence” is another quotation from the same priest. But the problem then is trying to resist the forces of nature. The difficult answer lies somewhere in trying to find balance between the pull of “nature” — and I'm against identifying “nature” with mere lust, as if we weren’t attracted to the person’s soul as well — and the pull of other causes.
Nevertheless, monogamy itself deserves more study as a crucial cultural factor.
Mary: THE NORM IS TO GROW UP AND LEAVE, NOT TO BECOME AN ADULT MEMBER OF THE GROUP
Fostering the nuclear family as the basic unit of society prepared us for that peculiar Western "weirdness" by severing the web of traditional kinship, replacing its authority, and creating the extreme individuality and mobility we see today. The norm is not connection and loyalty to family and custom, but to your own self..to "find" and follow your own path. The norm is to grow up and leave, not to grow up and become an adult member of the group. Most families are widely scattered geographically, divided into splinters consisting of that basic nuclear family. Families of more than two generations living together are rare enough to be remarkable when economic pressures require them, and you find grandparents as well as parents in the same home with the children, a not uncommon situation in Europe. This fragmentation fostered individualism, individual achievement, the ideas of freedom and individual rights. All part of the march of progress, but not without problems.
Take our present situation, where containing the pandemic requires social distancing and the wearing of masks..but many are vehemently resisting and refusing to comply, citing their individual rights and freedoms. These folks see responsibility only for themselves — they are not inclined to cooperate with anything that might benefit the community if it poses any discomfort to themselves. And like young children, they find it very uncomfortable to have any sense of "being told what to do" and will answer any such instructions with vehement defiance. This can be just as destructive as behaviors fostered by kin group societies when the sense of "honor" and loyalty lead to the oppression of individuals and the extreme of “honor killings.”
Oriana:
Again and again, we see that nothing is all bad or all good . . . There is a price for individualism, and there is a price for staying entangled with the family clan.
*
THE REASONS FOR THE FEROCIOUS HEAT WAVES IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
An intense heat wave broiled large swaths of California this Labor Day weekend, shattering numerous records, causing thousands to lose power and fueling several brush fires that were threatening communities from Yucaipa to the Sierra foothills.
September heat waves are nothing new for Southern California, said climatologist Bill Patzert. But they’ve become hotter, longer-lasting and more frequent, a trend that’s all but certain to persist, he said.
“This is definitely a trailer of the feature,” he said.
Over the last century, the average temperature in Los Angeles over the entire year has increased by about 5 degrees, Patzert said. But the average temperature for the months of August and September has increased by 8 to 9 degrees, he said.
“That’s not warming up, that’s heating up,” he said.
He attributes the rise to a combination of a slow increase in global temperatures and a faster heating of Southern California due to the buildup of heat-absorbing infrastructure, with a population that’s quadrupled since the 1950s.
“We created this great megalopolis from the San Fernando Valley to the Inland Empire to the ocean, and what we’ve done is cram 20 million people into it, and we’ve created an awful lot of infrastructure that tends to absorb the heat,” he said. “So not only are we living in a warmer world due to global heating, we’re creating our own heat.”
On top of that, he said, while one- to two-day heat waves were the norm in the middle of the century, “now we see one-week heat waves.” And they’re hotter, as evidenced by the falling records.
“You never read very much about low temperature records, they’re, like, in the rearview mirror,” Patzert said. “Whenever there’s a record, it’s always a new high.”
The triple-digit temperatures coincide with Labor Day weekend, which is typically one of the busiest beach days of the summer even absent a record-breaking heat wave.
In the Mojave Desert town of Baker, home to the world’s tallest thermometer, the temperature ticked up from 117 to 118 degrees just after 2 p.m.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-09-05/heres-where-record-breaking-heat-is-forecast?fbclid=IwAR1dp3aMPFTPLdZk1osi6Ux7leaTu5D-CdCOfWP6vE3jLDV82aVpk30Ee_8
“MORE PEOPLE ARE KILLED ON AVERAGE BY HEAT THAN TORNADOES, HURRICANES, FLOODS AND LIGHTNING COMBINED”
~ Between June and August, Phoenix reported 50 days with a high temperature of at least 110 degrees (43 Celsius), surpassing the record of 33 days set in 2011, and July and August were the hottest months ever in the nation’s fifth largest city.
Heat is the top weather-related cause of death in the United States. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show more people are killed on average by heat than tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and lightning combined.
The CDC notes that community cooling centers help protect the public during heat emergencies, but this summer they also increased the risk of coronavirus by gathering groups of at-risk people.
In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, authorities reported 55 confirmed heat-associated deaths as of Aug. 29, up from 38 all of last year.
The record heat wasn’t just in Phoenix, as several desert cities across the Southwest saw triple-digit temperatures and new records, including Las Vegas; El Centro, California; and El Paso, Texas. Temperatures reached a record 115 degrees (46 Celsius) in Phoenix, 116 degrees (46 Celsius) in Las Vegas and 121 degrees (49 Celsius) in El Centro over the weekend. ~
*
WHY THE RATE OF ECONOMIC GROWTH WILL CONTINUE FALLING
~ Robert Gordon has written a magnificent book on the economic history of the United States over the last one and a half centuries. His study focuses on what he calls the “special century” from 1870 to 1970—in which living standards increased more rapidly than at any time before or after. The book is without peer in providing a statistical analysis of the uneven pace of growth and technological change, in describing the technologies that led to the remarkable progress during the special century, and in concluding with a provocative hypothesis that the future is unlikely to bring anything approaching the economic gains of the earlier period.
The message of Rise and Fall is this. For most of human history, economic progress moved at a crawl. According to the economic historian Bradford DeLong, from the first rock tools used by humanoids three million years ago, to the earliest cities ten thousand years ago, through the Middle Ages, to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1800, living standards doubled (with a growth of 0.00002 percent per year). Another doubling took place over the subsequent period to 1870. Then, according to standard calculations, the world economy took off.
Gordon focuses on growth in the United States. Living standards, as measured by GDP per capita or real wages, accelerated after 1870. The growth rate looks like an inverted U. Productivity growth rose from the late nineteenth century and peaked in the 1950s, but has slowed to a crawl since 1970. In designating 1870–1970 as the special century, Gordon emphasizes that the period since 1970 has been less special. He argues that the pace of innovation has slowed since 1970 (a point that will surprise many people), and furthermore that the gains from technological improvement have been shared less broadly (a point that is widely appreciated and true).
A central aspect of Gordon’s thesis is that the conventional measures of economic growth omit some of the largest gains in living standards and therefore underestimate economic progress. A point that is little appreciated is that the standard measures of economic progress do not include gains in health and life expectancy. Nor do they include the impact of revolutionary technological improvements such as the introduction of electricity or telephones or automobiles. Most of the book is devoted to describing many of history’s crucial technological revolutions, which in Gordon’s view took place in the special century. Moreover, he argues that the innovations of today are much narrower and contribute much less to improvements in living standards than did the innovations of the special century.
*
Rise and Fall represents the results of a lifetime of research by one of America’s leading macroeconomists. Gordon absorbed the current thinking on economic growth as a graduate student at MIT from 1964 to 1967 (where we were classmates), studying the cutting-edge theories and empirical work of such brilliant economists as Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Dale Jorgenson, and Zvi Griliches. He soon settled in at Northwestern University, where his research increasingly focused on long-term growth trends and problems of measuring real income and output.
Here is the basic thesis:
“The century of revolution in the United States after the Civil War was economic, not political, freeing households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation, and early death. Only one hundred years later, daily life had changed beyond recognition. Manual outdoor jobs were replaced by work in air-conditioned environments, housework was increasingly performed by electric appliances, darkness was replaced by light, and isolation was replaced not just by travel, but also by color television images bringing the world into the living room…. The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.”
The last two chapters are about the fall in Rise and Fall. This book differs from the Spenglerian “decline of the West” genre in an important respect. As the mathematicians might say, Gordon moves up a derivative. In other words, he is not predicting that living standards in the US will decline; rather he views it as likely that the growth rate of living standards will decline from its very rapid pace in the special century.
Gordon sees two sources for his pessimistic outlook. The first is that the long list of “only once” social and economic changes cannot be repeated. A second source is what he calls “headwinds.” These are structural changes in the economy that reduce actual output below the country’s technological potential and provide another reason for slow growth in living standards in the decades ahead.
Productivity growth slowed sharply after 1970, with little variability from decade to decade. The slowdown has been puzzling scholars for four decades. My own view is that it is a decline from one thousand cuts. Important ones are rising energy prices, growing regulatory burdens, a structural shift from high- to low-productivity growth sectors (such as from manufacturing to services), as well as the source that Gordon emphasizes, the decline of fundamentally important inventions.
So Gordon’s basic hypothesis looks rock solid: there has been a substantial slowdown in productivity growth since the end of the special century in 1970.
*
Gordon has a fascinating chapter on the sharp “only once” improvements in health and life expectancy:
“A consistent theme of this book is that the major inventions and their subsequent complementary innovations increased the quality of life far more than their contributions to market-produced GDP…. But no improvement matches the welfare benefits of the decline in mortality and increase in life expectancy.”
The last chapter of the book suggests that the US faces major “headwinds” that will continue to drag down living standards relative to underlying productivity growth. In Gordon’s account, these headwinds are rising inequality, poor-quality education, the aging population, and rising government debt. Gordon forecasts that average growth in real income per person over the next quarter-century will be 0.7 percent per year—even lower than the 1.3 percent per year in the 2000–2015 period. If inequality continues to grow, this might lead to declining incomes of the bottom part of the distribution—and therefore to true Spenglerian decline. I emphasize that these forecasts are highly speculative and contingent on many economic, fiscal, and demographic forces.
What of the future of economic growth? Here Gordon is a leading proponent of the view emphasizing the likelihood of “secular stagnation.” There are actually two variants of the stagnation. The first, emphasized by Lawrence Summers, is “demand-side”: a global savings glut along with low inflation is leading to weak aggregate demand in the high-income regions. This syndrome is consistent with zero or negative interest rates in Europe and Japan.
Gordon’s view of stagnation is “supply-side”—referring to a slackening in the growth of productivity rather than persistent weakness caused by the business cycle and high unemployment. His pessimism does not involve the neo-Malthusianism of groups like the Club of Rome, which foretold resource exhaustion, or concerns of those like Nicholas Stern, who sees future climate-driven catastrophes. Rather, Gordon’s concept of stagnation comes from his view about the slow future pace of technological change. He recognizes the perils of forecasting technological futures. But in the end he sees the slow growth of decades since 1970, not those of the special century—as the norm for the years to come. He does not argue that returning to rapid growth is impossible. Instead, he thinks that we have exhausted the major society-changing “only once” inventions, and he sees no prospect that we will find a similar set of inventions of such breadth and depth in the near future. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-growth-will-fall?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Floor Planers by Gustave Caillebotte, 1875Mary:
On economic growth and living standards. Are the two eternally entwined?? Does increased living standards always equal more wealth and more stuff, more time and less work?? Are there other possibilities, other ways to organize societies? All the wealth and invention of the past century or so has garnered advantage for some, while sealing many into hopeless drudgery and poverty. Is that the direction we must continue? Fewer and fewer with all the wealth and freedom, perpetually farther and farther from more and more who are trapped and enslaved by poverty and brute labor?
I think I would first argue with the idea that all the important "firsts" have already been accomplished in terms of invention. I would say that we are not at the dead end of our capacity to invent, but at the very beginning, and that predicting the shape invention will take is and always has been unsuccessful. We can't imagine the next big thing except in small flashes, until its time is ripe and change is all around us. Can we imagine what cheap digital printers will mean, for instance?? No more than we could have imagined, in the 60's, the potential for room-size computers to exponentially increase in capacity and shrink in both size and price, so that just about everyone carries a powerful computer around small enough to fit in a pocket — not to mention the development of the internet and all the changes it brought, for better or worse.
Oriana:
You brought back a peculiar memory: I attended one of Adrianne Rich’s last poetry readings. She did lament various current evils, including “unimportant developments like the Internet.” The audience (in the hundreds) audibly gasped at this inane remark, showing how much Rich seemed to be from another planet. She gave us many excellent poems at her peak, but then almost ceased to connect with reality.
Still, the thesis of the article might be correct: the RATE of economic progress may never again equal what it was between 1870 and 1970. But it’s the quality of life that matters more. Progress in medical technology, for instance, will mean little if health care becomes more and more dehumanized.
*
Just eight super-rich men hold the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population, according to an analysis from the charity Oxfam.
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/income-inequality-oxfam_n_58792e6ee4b0b3c7a7b13616?ri18n=true&fbclid=IwAR3BDlE4F1l3gCGkUi0YS8CbG8fmxytcpdPXlPgNplaq50cpOlUGTf5n9Lk
*
E-ESTONIA: A COUNTRY OF THE FUTURE?
~ Taavi Kotka, who spent four years as Estonia’s chief information officer, is one of the leading public faces of a project known as e-Estonia: a coördinated governmental effort to transform the country from a state into a digital society.
E-Estonia is the most ambitious project in technological statecraft today, for it includes all members of the government, and alters citizens’ daily lives. The normal services that government is involved with—legislation, voting, education, justice, health care, banking, taxes, policing, and so on—have been digitally linked across one platform, wiring up the nation. A lawn outside Kotka’s large house was being trimmed by a small robot, wheeling itself forward and nibbling the grass.
“Everything here is robots,” Kotka said. “Robots here, robots there.” He sometimes felt that the lawnmower had a soul. “At parties, it gets close to people,” he explained.
“We had to set a goal that resonates, large enough for the society to believe in,” Kotka went on.
It was during Kotka’s tenure that the e-Estonian goal reached its fruition. Today, citizens can vote from their laptops and challenge parking tickets from home. They do so through the “once only” policy, which dictates that no single piece of information should be entered twice. Instead of having to “prepare” a loan application, applicants have their data—income, debt, savings—pulled from elsewhere in the system. There’s nothing to fill out in doctors’ waiting rooms, because physicians can access their patients’ medical histories. Estonia’s system is keyed to a chip-I.D. card that reduces typically onerous, integrative processes—such as doing taxes—to quick work. “If a couple in love would like to marry, they still have to visit the government location and express their will,” Andrus Kaarelson, a director at the Estonian Information Systems Authority, says. But, apart from transfers of physical property, such as buying a house, all bureaucratic processes can be done online.
Estonia is a Baltic country of 1.3 million people and four million hectares, half of which is forest. Its government presents this digitization as a cost-saving efficiency and an equalizing force. Digitizing processes reportedly saves the state two per cent of its G.D.P. a year in salaries and expenses. Since that’s the same amount it pays to meet the NATO threshold for protection (Estonia—which has a notably vexed relationship with Russia—has a comparatively small military), its former President Toomas Hendrik Ilves liked to joke that the country got its national security for free.
Other benefits have followed. “If everything is digital, and location-independent, you can run a borderless country,” Kotka said. In 2014, the government launched a digital “residency” program, which allows logged-in foreigners to partake of some Estonian services, such as banking, as if they were living in the country. Other measures encourage international startups to put down virtual roots; Estonia has the lowest business-tax rates in the European Union, and has become known for liberal regulations around tech research. It is legal to test Level 3 driverless cars (in which a human driver can take control) on all Estonian roads, and the country is planning ahead for Level 5 (cars that take off on their own). “We believe that innovation happens anyway,” Viljar Lubi, Estonia’s deputy secretary for economic development, says. “If we close ourselves off, the innovation happens somewhere else.”
“It makes it so that, if one country is not performing as well as another country, people are going to the one that is performing better—competitive governance is what I’m calling it,” Tim Draper, a venture capitalist at the Silicon Valley firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and one of Estonia’s leading tech boosters, says. “We’re about to go into a very interesting time where a lot of governments can become virtual.”
Previously, Estonia’s best-known industry was logging, but Skype was built there using mostly local engineers, and countless other startups have sprung from its soil. “It’s not an offshore paradise, but you can capitalize a lot of money,” Thomas Padovani, a Frenchman who co-founded the digital-ad startup Adcash in Estonia, explains. “And the administration is light, all the way.” A light touch does not mean a restricted one, however, and the guiding influence of government is everywhere.
As an engineer, Kotka said, he found the challenge of helping to construct a digital nation too much to resist. “Imagine that it’s your task to build the Golden Gate Bridge,” he said excitedly. “You have to change the whole way of thinking about society.” So far, Estonia is past halfway there.
The openness is startling. Finding the business interests of the rich and powerful—a hefty field of journalism in the United States—takes a moment’s research, because every business connection or investment captured in any record in Estonia becomes searchable public information. (An online tool even lets citizens map webs of connection, follow-the-money style.) Traffic stops are illegal in the absence of a moving violation, because officers acquire records from a license-plate scan. Polling-place intimidation is a non-issue if people can vote—and then change their votes, up to the deadline—at home, online. And heat is taken off immigration because, in a borderless society, a resident need not even have visited Estonia in order to work and pay taxes under its dominion.
So far, twenty-eight thousand people have applied for e-residency, mostly from neighboring countries: Finland and Russia. But Italy and Ukraine follow, and U.K. applications spiked during Brexit. (Many applicants are footloose entrepreneurs or solo venders who want to be based in the E.U.) Because eighty-eight per cent of applicants are men, the United Nations has begun seeking applications for female entrepreneurs in India.
“There are so many companies in the world for whom working across borders is a big hassle and a source of expense,” Siim Sikkut, Estonia’s current C.I.O., says. Today, in Estonia, the weekly e-residency application rate exceeds the birth rate. “We tried to make more babies, but it’s not that easy,” he explained.
In the U.S., it is generally assumed that private industry leads innovation. Many ambitious techies I met in Tallinn, though, were leaving industry to go work for the state. “If someone had asked me, three years ago, if I could imagine myself working for the government, I would have said, ‘Fuck no,’ ” Ott Vatter, who had sold his own business, told me. “But I decided that I could go to the U.S. at any point, and work in an average job at a private company. This is so much bigger.”
The bigness is partly inherent in the government’s appetite for large problems. In Tallinn’s courtrooms, judges’ benches are fitted with two monitors, for consulting information during the proceedings, and case files are assembled according to the once-only principle. The police make reports directly into the system; forensic specialists at the scene or in the lab do likewise. Lawyers log on—as do judges, prison wardens, plaintiffs, and defendants, each through his or her portal. The Estonian courts used to be notoriously backlogged, but that is no longer the case.
Instead of setting up prisoner transport to trial—fraught with security risks—Estonian courts can teleconference defendants into the courtroom from prison.
*
From time to time, Russian military jets patrolling Estonia’s western border switch off their G.P.S. transponders and drift into the country’s airspace. What follows is as practiced as a pas de deux at the Bolshoi. NATO troops on the ground scramble an escort. Estonia calls up the Russian Ambassador to complain; Russia cites an obscure error. The dance lets both parties show that they’re alert, and have not forgotten the history of place.
Since the eleventh century, Estonian land has been conquered by Russia five times. Yet the country has always been an awkward child of empire, partly owing to its proximity to other powers (and their airwaves) and partly because the Estonian language, which belongs to the same distinct Uralic family as Hungarian and Finnish, is incomprehensible to everyone else. Plus, the greatest threat, these days, may not be physical at all. In 2007, a Russian cyberattack on Estonia sent everything from the banks to the media into chaos. Estonians today see it as the defining event of their recent history.
The chief outgrowth of the attack is the NATO Coöperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, a think tank and training facility. It’s on a military base that once housed the Soviet Army. Upstairs, the center’s director, Merle Maigre, formerly the national-security adviser to the Estonian President, said that the center’s goal was to guide other NATO nations toward vigilance.
Not all of Estonia’s digital leadership in the region is as openly rehearsed. Its experts have consulted on Georgia’s efforts to set up its own digital registry. Estonia is also building data partnerships with Finland, and trying to export its methods elsewhere across the E.U. “The vision is that I will go to Greece, to a doctor, and be able to get everything,” Toomas Ilves explains. Sandra Roosna, a member of Estonia’s E-Governance Academy and the author of the book “eGovernance in Practice,” says, “I think we need to give the European Union two years to do cross-border transactions and to recognize each other digitally.” Even now, though, the Estonian platform has been adopted by nations as disparate as Moldova and Panama. “It’s very popular in countries that want—and not all do—transparency against corruption,” Ilves says.
Beyond X-Road, the backbone of Estonia’s digital security is a blockchain technology called K.S.I. A blockchain is like the digital version of a scarf knitted by your grandmother. She uses one ball of yarn, and the result is continuous. Each stitch depends on the one just before it. It’s impossible to remove part of the fabric, or to substitute a swatch, without leaving some trace: a few telling knots, or a change in the knit.
In a blockchain system, too, every line is contingent on what came before it. Any breach of the weave leaves a trace, and trying to cover your tracks leaves a trace, too. “Our No. 1 marketing pitch is Mr. Snowden,” Martin Ruubel, the president of Guardtime, the Estonian company that developed K.S.I., told me. (The company’s biggest customer group is now the U.S. military.)
Popular anxiety tends to focus on data security—who can see my information?—but bits of personal information are rarely truly compromising. The larger threat is data integrity: whether what looks secure has been changed. (It doesn’t really matter who knows what your blood type is, but if someone switches it in a confidential record your next trip to the emergency room could be lethal.) The average time until discovery of a data breach is two hundred and five days, which is a huge problem if there’s no stable point of reference. “In the Estonian system, you don’t have paper originals,” Ruubel said. “The question is: Do I know about this problem, and how quickly can I react?”
The blockchain makes every footprint immediately noticeable, regardless of the source. (Ruubel says that there is no possibility of a back door.) To guard secrets, K.S.I. is also able to protect information without “seeing” the information itself. But, to deal with a full-scale cyberattack, other safeguards now exist. Earlier this year, the Estonian government created a server closet in Luxembourg, with a backup of its systems. A “data embassy” like this one is built on the same body of international law as a physical embassy, so that the servers and their data are Estonian “soil.” If Tallinn is compromised, whether digitally or physically, Estonia’s locus of control will shift to such mirror sites abroad.
“If Russia comes—not when—and if our systems shut down, we will have copies,” Piret Hirv, a ministerial adviser, told me. In the event of a sudden invasion, Estonia’s elected leaders might scatter as necessary. Then, from cars leaving the capital, from hotel rooms, from seat 3A at thirty thousand feet, they will open their laptops, log into Luxembourg, and—with digital signatures to execute orders and a suite of tamper-resistant services linking global citizens to their government—continue running their country, with no interruption, from the cloud.
Estonian folklore includes a creature known as the kratt: an assembly of random objects that the Devil will bring to life for you, in exchange for a drop of blood offered at the conjunction of five roads. The Devil gives the kratt a soul, making it the slave of its creator.
“Each and every Estonian, even children, understands this character,” Kaevats said. His office now speaks of kratt instead of robots and algorithms, and has been using the word to define a new, important nuance in Estonian law. “Basically, a kratt is a robot with representative rights,” he explained. “The idea that an algorithm can buy and sell services on your behalf is a conceptual upgrade.” In the U.S., where we lack such a distinction, it’s a matter of dispute whether, for instance, Facebook is responsible for algorithmic sales to Russian forces of misinformation. #KrattLaw—Estonia’s digital shorthand for a new category of legal entity comprising A.I., algorithms, and robots—will make it possible to hold accountable whoever gave a drop of blood.
I asked Kaevats what he saw when he looked at the U.S. Two things, he said. First, a technical mess. Data architecture was too centralized. Citizens didn’t control their own data; it was sold, instead, by brokers. Basic security was lax. “For example, I can tell you my I.D. number—I don’t fucking care,” he said. “You have a Social Security number, which is, like, a big secret.” He laughed. “This does not work!” The U.S. had backward notions of protection, he said, and the result was a bigger problem: a systemic loss of community and trust. “Snowden things and whatnot have done a lot of damage. But they have also proved that these fears are justified.
“To regain this trust takes quite a lot of time,” he went on. “There also needs to be a vision from the political side. It needs to be there always—a policy, not politics. But the politicians need to live it, because, in today’s world, everything will be public at some point.” ~
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-digital-republic?mbid=social_facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_brand=tny&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1dp3aMPFTPLdZk1osi6Ux7leaTu5D-CdCOfWP6vE3jLDV82aVpk30Ee_8
Mary:
The discussion of E-Estonia itself seems to me a refutation of Gordon's ideas. Production is not always production of goods, but of ideas and systems. The kind of transformations in E-Estonia weren't due to a new thing, but a new way of organizing and using something already there. Even though I believe prediction is rarely fulfilled, I think invention in the future will come largely in medicine and the life sciences, as well as in digital technology ( which is already promising to become quantum technology). I also think these things will make possible a better standard of living for the many, not a rapidly shrinking few.
Old Town Tallinn, the capital of Estonia*
“A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy,
and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position,
has to be thought of as infallible.
But since, in practice, no one is infallible,
it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events
in order to show that this or that mistake
was not made, or that this or that imaginary
triumph actually happened.”
~ George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature
Oriana:
Yes, the terrible problem of pretending you are infallible. The Catholic church is easy to mock, but it seems to me that pretty much all church leaders want to come across as infallible prophets.
Admitting fallibility is not something a prophet can afford — it's dangerous close to admitting that we humans are alone, make mistakes and will make more mistakes, and have only other humans to rely on — not an infallible Answer in the Sky.
*
NOVELTY: WHY WE REMEMBER SO WELL THE EXPERIENCES WE HAD BETWEEN THE AGES 15 AND 25
~ What the social sciences might simply call “nostalgia” psychologists have termed the “reminiscence bump” and, Hammond argues, it could be the key to why we feel like time speeds up as we get older:
. . . The key to the reminiscence bump is novelty. The reason we remember our youth so well is that it is a period where we have more new experiences than in our thirties or forties. It’s a time for firsts — first sexual relationships, first jobs, first travel without parents, first experience of living away from home, the first time we get much real choice over the way we spend our days. Novelty has such a strong impact on memory that even within the bump we remember more from the start of each new experience.”
But does time seem to speed up as we grow older? Routine.
“Among the most intriguing illustrations of “mind time” is the incredible elasticity of how we experience time. (“Where is it, this present?,” William James famously wondered. “It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”) For instance, Hammond points out, we slow time down when gripped by mortal fear — the cliche about the slow-motion car crash is, in fact, a cognitive reality.
As we grow older, we tend to feel like the previous decade elapsed more rapidly, while the earlier decades of our lives seem to have lasted longer. Similarly, we tend to think of events that took place in the past 10 years as having happened more recently than they actually did. (Quick: What year did the devastating Japanese tsunami hit? When did we love Maurice Sendak?) Conversely, we perceive events that took place more than a decade ago as having happened even longer ago. (When did Princess Diana die? What year was the Chernobyl disaster?)
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/15/time-warped-claudia-hammond/?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer901a9&utm_medium=twitter
Oriana:
Thinking about the best-remembered stage of life, I'd have to agree with the late teens; then it was my late twenties. Both the happiest year of my youth and the worst. And in fact I don't remember my early twenties as well as my late twenties, the years of perdition, the years I don't really want to remember. My ideas about America, love, marriage, and career all went belly up. But I did learn a lot the hard way.
And I remember my thirties, when I became a poet, more vividly than my early twenties, which seem a strange monotony of college routine . . .
*
”Undoubtedly I should have gone mad if not for music. Music is indeed the most beautiful of all heaven's gifts to humanity wandering in the darkness. Alone it calms, enlightens, and stills our souls. It is not the straw to which the drowning man clings but a true friend, refuge, and comforter, for whose sake life is worth living.” ~ Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky
*
THE ANTIOXIDANT CONUNDRUM
Antioxidant vitamins don’t stress us like plants do—and don’t have their beneficial effect.
~ “In the mid-20th century, as modern medicine seemed poised to vanquish the infectious diseases, some scientists turned to the degenerative diseases associated with aging. Attention fell on a class of molecules called “reactive oxygen species,” or ROS. These volatile substances could damage DNA. Degenerative diseases, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease, often showed evidence of “oxidative stress,” suggesting that ROS spurred disease.
Oddly, our mitochondria, the energy factories of our cells, emitted ROS naturally. So degenerative disease seemed to stem in part from our own metabolic function: Your mitochondria “burned” fuel, emitted this toxic exhaust, and inadvertently set the limits on your existence. That was the working hypothesis, at any rate.
Experiments on rats and worms showed that reactive oxygen species, such as hydrogen peroxide, tear atoms from other molecules, destroying them in the process. That can be problematic when those molecules are DNA, our cellular instruction manual. We produce native antioxidants, such as the molecule glutathione, to counteract this pro-oxidant threat. They react with ROS, neutralizing the pro-oxidants before they can damage important cellular machinery.
When scientists blocked rodents’ ability to manufacture these protective molecules, lifespan declined. Observational studies, meanwhile, suggested that people who regularly ate vitamin-laden fruits and vegetables were healthier. So were people with higher levels of vitamins E and C in their blood.
Vitamins were strongly antioxidant in test tubes. So the ROS theory of aging and disease rose to prominence. You could slow aging, it followed, by neutralizing free radicals with antioxidant pills. A supplement industry now worth $23 billion yearly in the U.S. took root.
But if those ROS were so harmful, some scientists asked—and the basic design of our cells was over 1 billion years old—why hadn’t evolution solved the ROS problem? At the same time, scientists began finding that exercise and calorie restriction increased lifespan in animals. Both elevated ROS. According to the ROS model of aging, animals that exercised and fasted should have died younger. But they lived longer.
For Michael Ristow, a researcher of energy and metabolism at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, the inconsistencies became impossible to overlook. In worms, he found that neutralizing those allegedly toxic ROS reduced lifespan, so he designed a similar experiment in humans.
He had 39 male volunteers exercise regularly over several weeks; half took vitamin supplements before working out. The results, published in 2009, continue to reverberate throughout the field of exercise physiology, and beyond. Volunteers who took large doses of vitamins C and E before training failed to benefit from the workout. Their muscles didn’t become stronger; insulin sensitivity, a measure of metabolic health, didn’t improve; and increases in native antioxidants, such as glutathione, didn’t occur.
Exercise accelerates the burning of fuel by your cells. If you peer into muscles after a jog, you’ll see a relative excess of those supposedly dangerous ROS—exhaust spewed from our cellular furnaces, the mitochondria. If you examine the same muscle some time after a run, however, you’ll find those ROS gone. In their place you’ll see an abundance of native antioxidants. That’s because, post-exercise, the muscle cells respond to the oxidative stress by boosting production of native antioxidants. Those antioxidants, amped up to protect against the oxidant threat of yesterday’s exercise, now also protect against other ambient oxidant dangers.
Contrary to the ROS dogma, Ristow realized, the signal of stress conveyed by the ROS during exercise was essential to this call-and-response between mitochondria and the cells that housed them. To improve health, he figured, perhaps we shouldn’t neutralize ROS so much as increase them in a way that mimicked what happened in exercise. That would boost native antioxidants, improve insulin sensitivity, and increase overall resilience.
Ristow called this idea “mitohormesis.” The term “hormesis” came from toxicology (“mito” was for mitochondrion). It describes the observation that some exposures generally considered toxic can, in minute amounts, paradoxically improve health. For instance, minuscule quantities of X-ray radiation, a known carcinogen, increases the lifespan of various insects.
Hormesis may be most easily grasped when considering exercise. Lift too much weight or run too long, and you’ll likely tear muscle and damage tendons. But lift the right amount and run a few times a week, and your bones and muscles strengthen. The intermittent torque and strain increases bone mineralization and density. Stronger bones may better tolerate future shocks that might otherwise cause fractures.
In his experiment, Ristow saw that vitamin supplements interrupted this sequence of stress followed by fortification, probably because they neutralized the ROS signal before it could be “heard” elsewhere in the cell. By interfering in the adaptive response, vitamins prevented the strengthening that would have otherwise followed the stress of physical exertion.
Antioxidant supplementation paradoxically left you weaker.
Vitamins are necessary for health. And supplements can help those who are deficient in vitamins. Insufficient vitamin C, for instance, causes scurvy, which results from defective collagen, a protein in connective tissue. Among other functions, vitamin C aids collagen synthesis.
But the primary role of vitamins in our body, according to Ristow and others, may not be antioxidant. And the antioxidant content of fruits and veggies does not, he thinks, explain their benefits to our health. So what does?
*
Mark Mattson, Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, has studied how plant chemicals, or phytochemicals, affect our cells (in test tubes) for years. The assumption in the field has long been that, like vitamins, phytochemicals are directly antioxidant. But Mattson and others think they work indirectly. Much like exercise, he’s found, phytochemicals stress our bodies in a way that leaves us stronger.
Plants, Mattson explains, live a stationary life. They cannot respond to pathogens, parasites, and grazers as we might—by moving. To manage the many threats posed by mobile life, as well as heat, drought, and other environmental stresses, they’ve evolved a remarkable number of defensive chemicals.
We’re familiar with many components of their arsenal. The nicotine that we so prize in tobacco slows grazing insects. Beans contain lectins, which defend against insects. Garlic’s umami-like flavor comes from allicin, a powerful antifungal. These “antifeedants” have evolved in part to dissuade would-be grazers, like us.
Mattson and his colleagues say these plant “biopesticides” work on us like hormetic stressors. Our bodies recognize them as slightly toxic, and we respond with an ancient detoxification process aimed at breaking them down and flushing them out.
Consider fresh broccoli sprouts. Like other cruciferous vegetables, they contain an antifeedant called sulforaphane. Because sulforaphane is a mild oxidant, we should, according to old ideas about the dangers of oxidants, avoid its consumption. Yet studies have shown that eating vegetables with sulforaphane reduces oxidative stress.
When sulforaphane enters your blood stream, it triggers release in your cells of a protein called Nrf2. This protein, called by some the “master regulator” of aging, then activates over 200 genes. They include genes that produce antioxidants, enzymes to metabolize toxins, proteins to flush out heavy metals, and factors that enhance tumor suppression, among other important health-promoting functions.
In theory, after encountering this humble antifeedant in your dinner, your body ends up better prepared for encounters with toxins, pro-oxidants from both outside and within your body, immune insults, and other challenges that might otherwise cause harm. By “massaging” your genome just so, sulforaphane may increase your resistance to disease.
In a study on Type 2 diabetics, broccoli-sprout powder lowered triglyceride levels. High triglycerides, a lipid, are associated with an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. Lowering abnormally elevated triglycerides may lessen the risk of these disorders. In another intervention, consuming broccoli sprout powder reduced oxidative stress in volunteers’ upper airways, likely by increasing production of native antioxidants. In theory, that might ameliorate asthmatics’ symptoms.
Elevated free radicals and oxidative stress are routinely observed in diseases like cancer and dementia. And in these instances, they probably contribute to degeneration. But they may not be the root cause of disease. According to Mattson, the primary dysfunction may have occurred earlier with, say, a creeping inability to produce native antioxidants when needed, and a lack of cellular conditioning generally.
Mattson calls this the “couch potato” problem. Absent regular hormetic stresses, including exercise and stimulation by plant antifeedants, “cells become complacent,” he says. “Their intrinsic defenses are down-regulated.” Metabolism works less efficiently. Insulin resistance sets in. We become less able to manage pro-oxidant threats. Nothing works as well as it could. And this mounting dysfunction increases the risk for a degenerative disease.
Implicit in the research is a new indictment of the Western diet. Not only do highly refined foods present tremendous caloric excess, they lack these salutary signals from the plant world—“signals that challenge,” Mattson says. Those signals might otherwise condition our cells in a way that prevents disease.
Another variant of the hormetic idea holds that our ability to receive signals from plants isn’t reactive and defensive but, in fact, proactive. We’re not protecting ourselves from biopesticides so much as sensing plants’ stress levels in our food.
Harvard scientist David Sinclair and his colleague Konrad Howitz call this xenohormesis: benefitting from the stress of others. Many phytonutrients trigger the same few cellular responses linked to longevity in eukaryotic organisms, from yeasts to humans. Years of research on Nrf2 [a protein that regulates antioxidant proteins] in rodents suggest that activating this protein increases expression of hundreds of health-promoting genes, including those involved in detoxification, antioxidant production, control of inflammation, and tumor suppression.
Sinclair studies another class of native proteins, called sirtuins, associated with health. They’re triggered by exercise and also, Sinclair contends, a molecule called resveratrol, found in grape skins and other plants. “It’s too coincidental that time and time again these molecules come out of nature that have the surprising multifactorial benefit of tweaking the body just the right way,” Sinclair says.
They’re not all antifeedants, he argues. Plants churn these substances out when stressed, prompting further adaptations to the particular threat, be it drought, infestation by grazing insects, or excessive ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
For grazers, these stress compounds in plants may convey important information about environmental conditions. So grazers’ ability to “perceive” these signals, Sinclair argues, likely proved advantageous over evolutionary time. It allowed them to prepare for adversity. A grape vine stressed by fungi churns out resveratrol to fight off the infection. You drink wine made from those grapes, “sense” the harsh environmental conditions in the elevated tannins and other stress compounds, gird your own defenses, and, in theory, become more resistant to degenerative disease.
One implication is that modern agriculture, which often prevents plant stress with pesticides and ample watering, produces fruits and vegetables with weak xenohormetic signals. “I buy stressed plants,” Sinclair says. “Organic is a good start. I choose plants with lots of color because they are producing these molecules.” Some argue that xenohormesis may explain, at least in part, why the Mediterranean diet is apparently so healthful. It contains plants such as olives, olive oil, and various nuts that come from hot, dry, stressful environments. Eating food from plants that have struggled to survive toughens us up as well.
Philip Hooper, an endocrinologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, points out that plant-animal relationships are often symbiotic, and communication goes both ways. One example of direct plant-to-animal, biochemical manipulation comes from the coffee bush. Flowering plants compete with one another for the attention of pollinators, such as bees. Coffee bushes seem to gain advantage in this “marketplace” by using caffeine. The drug excites pollinators’ neurons, etching the memory of the plant’s location more deeply in their brains. Some think that biochemical tweaking increases the probability that the pollinator, which faces a panoply of flower choices, will return to that particular coffee bush.
In the dance between animals and plants, says Hooper, “I think there’s true mutualism. We’re in this together, the plants and us.”
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While xenohormesis is a compelling idea, it remains unproven. Barry Halliwell, a biochemist at the National University of Singapore, and an expert on antioxidants, has seen the dietary fads, from vitamins to fiber, come and go. He says the hormetic and xenohormetic ideas are plausible, but not certain. Various studies suggest that people who consume a lot of fruits and vegetables have healthier lifestyles generally. Those people probably go easy on the junk food, which alone may improve health.
Even within the hormetic idea, Halliwell sees the attempts to bore down on the individual chemicals as problematic. “That’s worked very well in pharmacology, but it hasn’t worked at all well in nutrition,” he says. He doesn’t think any single phytonutrient will explain the apparent health-promoting benefits of fruits and veggies. “Variety seems to be good,” he says. That critique speaks to a larger problem: It’s often unclear how lab research on simple organisms or cell cultures will translate, if at all, into recommendations or therapies for genetically complex, free-living humans.
The science on the intestinal microbiota promises to further complicate the picture; our native microbes ferment phytonutrients, perhaps supplying some of the benefit of their consumption. All of which highlights the truism that Nature is hard to get in a pill.
These caveats aside, research into xenohormesis reminds us that we are not at the complete mercy of our genetic inheritance. Genes matter, but health depends in large part on having the right genes expressed at the right time—and in the right amount. If our genome is a piano, and our genes are the keys, health is the song we play on the piano. The science on hormesis, the stresses that may keep us strong, provides hints about what kind of song we should play. Keep the body conditioned with regular exercise. Keep your cells’ stress-response pathways intermittently engaged with minimally processed, plant-based food.
These recommendations end up sounding rather grandmotherly—if your grandmother was a spartan, no-nonsense peasant who lived off the land. But the underlying thrust contradicts assumptions about the need to protect oneself from hardship. Certain kinds of difficulty, it turns out, may be required for health. That’s because health doesn’t result solely from the instructions your genome contains, but from your relationship with the wider world. Resilience isn’t completely inherent to your body; it’s cultivated by outside stimuli. And some of those stimuli just happen to be mildly noxious, slightly stressful chemicals in plants. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/fruits-and-vegetables-are-trying-to-kill-you?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
In the main I agree with the article. But there is still an unresolved problem: with aging, the inflammation associated with stress (such as strenuous exercise) may be triple what it is in a healthy young person. We know that excessive inflammation is harmful; aging in general has been called "inflam-aging." Nor is the production of repair proteins adequate. This may be a part of the "aging clock": nature has not granted us, nor any complex species, immortality. You could say that past a certain age we are deliberately killed off, and neither taking antioxidant supplements nor eating lots of eating broccoli sprouts is going to significantly prolong our genetic life span.
Nevertheless, even ten extra years of healthy life seem worth any effort and expense. But s with the covid virus, we are learning the hard way. Vitamin K2, for instance, may be the most important anti-aging factor, since it prevents the deposition of calcium in the arteries rather than in our bones and teeth. This has been known for at least ten years before I came across this information and finally responded to it (I vaguely knew about vitamin K from the start, but its importance didn't register on me until recently, when I read an article on how vitamin K from natto protects from covid). l suspect it will be another ten years before the general health-conscious public catches on: "Oh, so you don't have to have calcified arteries as you age."
We are constantly learning things that would have been heresy decades ago: avocados and coconut oil are good for you; up to a point, the more extra-virgin olive oil, the better; grass-fed beef and butter are health foods; the most reliable way to lose weight is to consume a lot of good fats; our main poison is sugar, not saturated fat. We also know that our health depends to a huge extent on the composition of our microbiome; we can encourage the good bacteria by eating a lot of fiber, resistant starch (green bananas, chilled rice and potatoes) and fermented foods.
And I wouldn't be surprised if more surprises were in store.
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ending on beauty:
SO, HOW ARE YOU?
So, how are you? friends ask, all kindness and concern,
heads cocked, eyes locked in mine.
and, just like that, I’m his again:
his wife, his widow: the one whose name
was hyphenated to his —and I’m oddly
happy to speak about
myself, coupled to him again, finally
say I’m okay, better, but won’t say
his name out loud yet because I know
I’d throw a shadow over the conversation —
all kindness & concern — and over him also,
who no longer has a shadow.
~ Laure-Anne Bosselaar
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