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LAST JUDGMENT IN THE INITIAL C
In these dark times
so distant from your own
your illuminated page
becomes both
window and mirror
Though you worked alone,
anonymous,
in a cold room,
often hungry
from scarcity
or dedicated fast,
dressed in the humble robes
of your drab order,
you made a brilliant splendor
on blank parchment
taking endless care
with each mark
each pattern
each drop of precious blue
burnishing it with gold leaf
to honor the gift —
the hope of redemption
beyond the sufferings of flesh.
Inside the great initial C
drawn like a circle
with an open gate,
like a vessel set to pour
a stream of water, wine, or grace
onto a world of dry thirst,
fulfilling the promise of completion —
you painted judgement day
not full of fire and demons
but of men pulled up
through broken earth,
re-embodied, whole,
looking for rescue,
forgiveness, and relief
from the calm figure of a god
more sad than vengeful
who might not lift them
to higher ground
but will not consume them
in obliterating fire.
And in my time
so far from yours
this page shines out
with a defiant shout
against the dark —
making beauty
to defy the press of death —
reminding us that always
and everywhere,
against any odds
we draw our own way
to salvation.
~ Mary McCarthy
Oriana:
"Making beauty to defy the press of death" summarizes this poem. And during the Middle Ages, that press of death could hardly be forgotten. But self-forgetfulness in creative work is an effective way to create joy — especially if we can use exquisite ultramarine, carmine, purple, silver and gold. These pigments were very costly, and yet the beauty was seen as worth it.
One interesting feature of the poem is that it speaks of our times as arguably darker. We in particular need the solace of beauty, the joy it immediately creates and the happiness it seems to promise. Beauty is allied with the good. A beautiful Jesus forgives; he doesn't condemn.
WHY DID THIS MEDIEVAL NUN HAD LAPIS LAZULI IN HER TEETH?
~ What Anita Radini noticed under the microscope was the blue—a brilliant blue that seemed so unnatural, so out of place in the 1,000-year-old dental tartar she was gently dissolving in weak acid.
It was ultramarine, she would later learn, a pigment that a millennium ago could only have come from lapis lazuli originating in a single region of Afghanistan. This blue was once worth its weight in gold. It was used, most notably, to give the Virgin Mary’s robes their striking color in centuries of artwork. And the teeth that were embedded with this blue likely belonged to a scribe or painter of medieval manuscripts.
Who was that person? A woman, first of all. According to radiocarbon dating, she lived around 997 to 1162, and she was buried at a women’s monastery in Dalheim, Germany. And so these embedded blue particles in her teeth illuminate a forgotten history of medieval manuscripts: Not just monks made them. In the medieval ages, nuns also produced the famously laborious and beautiful books. And some of these women must have been very good, if they were using pigment as precious and rare as ultramarine.
If pigments can be preserved in tartar—the gunky yellow stuff on teeth that dental plaque hardens into—that means that fibers, metals, and other dyes could be, too. “This is genuinely a big deal,” says Mark Clarke, a technical art historian at Nova University Lisbon who was not involved in the new study. You could imagine identifying metalworkers, carpenters, and other artisans from the particles embedded in tartar, Clarke says. “It’s opening up a new avenue in archaeology.”
“Can you imagine the kind of cold calls we had to make in the beginning?” says Warinner. “‘Hi, I’m working with this thing on teeth, and it’s about 1,000 years old, and it has blue stuff in it. Can you help me?’ People thought we were crazy. We tried reaching out to physicists, and they were like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ We tried reaching out to people working in art restoration, and they were like, ‘Why are you working with plaque?’” She eventually reached physicists at the University of York who helped confirm the blue did indeed come from the mineral lazurite, derived from lapis lazuli.
But art experts were still skeptical. Some dismissed the idea that a woman could have been a painter skilled enough to work with ultramarine. One suggested to Warinner that this woman came into contact with ultramarine because she was simply the cleaning lady.
Warinner eventually reached out to Alison Beach, a historian at Ohio State University who studies female scribes in 12th-century Germany. Over the past couple of decades, Beach and other scholars have cataloged the overlooked contributions of women to medieval book production. The challenge, Beach says, is that while most manuscripts with signatures are signed by men, the vast majority of manuscripts are unsigned. But a small number of surviving manuscripts are signed by women, and scholars have found correspondence between monks and nuns about book production.
Beach even came across a letter dated to the year 1168, in which a bookkeeper of a men’s monastery commissions sister “N” to produce a deluxe manuscript using luxury materials such as parchment, leather, and silk. The monastery where sister “N” lived is only 40 miles from Dalheim, where the teeth with lapis lazuli were found. Beach also identified a book using lapis lazuli that was written by a female scribe in Germany around a.d. 1200. The pigment would have traveled nearly 4,000 miles from Afghanistan to Europe via the Silk Road. All the evidence suggests that female scribes were indeed making books that used lapis lazuli pigment in the same area and around the same time this woman was alive.
The team considered a number of alternative ways lapis lazuli could have gotten into the woman’s dental plaque. Could the particles have come from repeated kissing of an illuminated manuscript? This practice didn’t become popular until three centuries after this woman likely died. Could it have come from lapis ingested as medicine, as suggested in Greek and Islamic medical texts? There’s little evidence that prescription was followed in 12th-century Germany. The lapis lazuli particles were also especially fine, which requires a laborious grinding process. This detail in particular suggests that the stones were purposefully made into pigment.
The team concluded that two scenarios are most likely: The woman was a painter who could have ingested ultramarine paint while licking her brush to a point, or she breathed in the powder while preparing pigment for herself or someone else. You can almost begin to picture her, Beach says, sitting by herself laboring over a manuscript day after day. “For a medieval historian,” she adds, “this kind of clear material evidence of something from the life of an individual person is so extraordinary.”
Cynthia Cyrus, a professor at Vanderbilt who has also studied medieval scribes, told me that reading the paper was “the highlight of my day.” Like many monasteries, she noted, the one where this woman was buried was eventually destroyed in a medieval fire. There’s little evidence of what life was like there. But the woman’s teeth suggest that it could have been a site of highly skilled book production.
Warinner is continuing to study the particles embedded in old tartar. She and others have found everything from insect parts and the pollen of exotic ornamental flowers to opium, bits of wool, and milk proteins—all of which tell stories about what people ate and how they lived. The detritus of everyday life accumulates in the gunk that modern dentists are so vigilant about scrubbing off. “They aren’t thinking of future archaeologists,” Warinner jokes.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-a-medieval-woman-had-lapis-lazuli-hidden-in-her-teeth?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Three women at the tomb of Christ
Mary:
The story of the woman with lapis lazuli in her teeth resonates on many levels. We forget so much of history, but it's significant in what we choose to forget and what to remember. I love looking at illuminations from these early manuscripts, and have noted quite a few picturing women producing art — painting usually, but one shows a lady sculptress. The illuminations are full of myths and stories, biblical and classical tales, and love stories from the cult of courtly love. They also contain many many images of daily life, tasks of farming and gardening, weaving, dyeing cloth, shearing sheep, making pottery, playing musical instruments, and the odd pictures of people bathing in rows of tubs while also feasting at long tables. It seems to me these images are not fanciful, but recordings of well known activities, and women who draw, write, and paint are a familiar part of the world. 
Nuns, especially ones from wealthy families, had access to learning and often more freedom and influence than married women. They could study, travel, write, even , like Hildegarde of Bingen, sermonize and teach. That it was so hard to see and accept the skull as of a female painter of illuninations says more about the limits of our thinking and our assumptions than about that long ago woman and her labors.
I am reminded of the recent discovery of a Viking burial, where the female skeleton was obviously, as the site, the bones, and the burial objects revealed, a female warrior of high rank. The actual discovery of this ancient female warrior was greeted with great excitement, but mostly with a kind of thunderstruck surprise...as though such a find went against all expectations, was almost impossible to believe.
Perhaps all that shows us is how very much we have forgotten about historical women and their activities and social roles. And leaves us with the question: "Why was it important for us to forget these powerful and creative women? How did their existence challenge our assumptions and the limits we set on women in our society? Why was it dangerous to remember them? Who or what do they threaten?"
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MY BROTHER USED TO ASK THE BIRDS TO FORGIVE HIM
“My brother used to ask the birds to forgive him;
that sounds senseless but it is right;
for all is like the ocean,
all things flow and touch each other;
a disturbance in one place
is felt at the other end of the world.”
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
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~ The poems to which I have, all my life, been most ardently drawn are poems of the kind I have described, poems of intimate selection or collusion, poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator. “I’m nobody!” Dickinson says. “Are you nobody, too?/Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!” Or Eliot: “Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table…” Eliot is not summoning the boy scout troop. He is asking something of the reader. As opposed, say, to Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”: Shakespeare is not comparing me to a summer’s day. I am being allowed to overhear dazzling virtuosity, but the poem does not require my presence. ~
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/01/14/louise-gluck-nobel-lecture-poet-and-reader/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Nobel%20lecture%20Judd%20Washington%20public%20health&utm_content=NYR%20Nobel%20lecture%20Judd%20Washington%20public%20health+CID_1de6b829a0527c24d515b9fc55942f71&utm_source=Newsletter
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FAMOUS WRITERS PUTTING DOWN THE WORK OF OTHER FAMOUS WRITERS
Virginia Woolf on Ulysses
Wednesday, August 16th, 1922:
I should be reading Ulysses, and fabricating my case for and against. I have read 200 pages so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first two or three chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
Wednesday, September 6th, 1922:
I finished Ulysses and think it a mis-fire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts. I’m reminded all the time of some callow board school boy, full of wits and powers, but so self-conscious and egotistical that he loses his head, becomes extravagant, mannered, uproarious, ill at ease, makes kindly people feel sorry for him and stern ones merely annoyed; and one hopes he’ll grow out of it; but as Joyce is 40 this scarcely seems likely. . . I feel that myriads of tiny bullets pepper one and spatter one; but one does not get one deadly wound straight int he face—as from Tolstoy, for instance; but it is entirely absurd to compare him with Tolstoy. ~
Charlotte Brontê on Pride and Prejudice
In a letter to G.H. Lewes (lover of George Eliot), January 12th, 1848:
Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say you would rather have written Pride and Prejudice or Tom Jones’ than any of the Waverly Novels? I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerrotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with near borders and delicate flowers—but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy—no open country—no fresh air—no blue hill—no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in they elegant but confined houses.These observations will probably irritate you, but I shall run the risk.
Now I can understand admiration for George Sand—for though I never saw any of her works which I admired throughout…yet she has a grasp of mind which if I cannot fully comprehend I very deeply respect; she is sagacious and profound; Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant. Am I wrong—or were you hasty in what you said?
on Emma (in a letter to W. S. Williams, April 12th, 1850):
She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well. There is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood. Even to the feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition—too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress. Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands, and feet. What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushed through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores. . . . Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete, and rather insensible (not senseless) woman. If this is heresy, I cannot help it.
Mark Twain on Pride and Prejudice
In a letter to Joseph Twichell, September 13th, 1898:
I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
Aldous Huxley on On the Road
As quoted in Nicholas Murray’s Aldous Huxley: A Biography:
I got a little bored after a time. I mean, the road seemed to be awfully long.
Mary:
Authors criticizing other authors is hilarious. They each object to a style and substance, a purpose, at odds with their own. What Joyce was attempting with all that tricksy brilliance, all that showmanship, was distasteful and vulgar to Woolf, who wants to use language in very different ways to accomplish very different ends..not to dazzle and impress, to "play" the way Joyce does, but to explore, unearth the layers of mind and experience, so that the surface becomes a way to realize the depths. And of course Brontë, passionate, fearless, daring, seen as breaking the taboos of propriety, finds Austen insipid, who works entirely within the bounds of that propriety. Twain imagining giving Austin a good drubbing is hilarious, and pure Twain. Each of these artists can be seen as having their own genius but those geni are of very different kinds....which is great good luck for us, their intrepid readers, who may enjoy them each and all, some more or less than others, but who wants to argue with such a variety of riches??
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MASS SUICIDES IN GERMANY AFTER WORLD WAR II
~ What happened to Germany immediately after World War II? This question is often overshadowed by the liberation of the concentration camps and the onset of the Cold War. In Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945, German historian Florian Huber sheds light on a darkly fascinating period. His book, which received its first American printing last month, offers a gripping account of the “suicide epidemic” that swept the Third Reich in its final days. Huber also provides a revealing look into the minds and souls of ordinary Germans forced to confront the reality of Nazism.
Through diaries, memoirs, and public records, Huber follows ordinary Germans through the Reich’s last days, which were, for many, the last days of their lives. We meet the elderly couples who hung themselves together, the fathers who shot their families before taking their own lives, and the mothers who marched to their fate in icy rivers, dragging their children behind them. After detailing these grim scenes, Huber looks back to 1926, tracing the rise of the Nazis and analyzing how ordinary Germans came under their spell. He shows how even those who joined the Nazi Party for reasons of expediency or youthful ignorance were corrupted by the Reich’s twisted morality.
Huber ultimately understates the significance of the German mass suicides. For him, Germans who killed themselves in 1945 did so either to avoid the fate that awaited them at the hands of the Allies—like the citizens fearful of the brutality of Russian soldiers, as was Hitler himself—or to escape the guilt that would overwhelm them once imminent defeat revived their dormant consciences. Whatever the reasons, the sheer number of Germans who chose to take their own lives is remarkable.
As Huber notes, the Christian prohibition on suicide still held great power in Germany. In a sermon in March of that year, a Berlin vicar attempted to dissuade his congregants—many of whom had confessed thoughts of suicide—from ending their lives.
Huber notes, however, that “the power of this taboo” faded “against the backdrop of the physical, emotional, and mental horrors of Germany’s downfall.” As the Red Army advanced, “social conventions . . . no longer seemed to apply,” as suicide transformed from a sin to “a last resort before total surrender [and] a consolation to the desperate.”
Attributing the suicides to a change in norms misses a subtle, yet crucial, point. To the extent that social norms changed, they did so as a result of the moral collapse that Nazism wrought in Germany. One influential explanation of this collapse was offered by Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish political theorist. Huber relies on Arendt’s 1950 report The Aftermath of Nazi Rule to capture the inability or unwillingness of Germans who survived past 1945 to grapple with their country’s actions. But a key to understanding the German suicides may actually lie in Arendt’s controversial 1963 work, Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, where she explores “the totality of the moral collapse” ushered in by Nazism. She observes that “just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody ‘Thou shalt not kill’ . . . so the law of Hitler’s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: ‘Thou shalt kill.’”
Mass suicide sprang from a similar inversion of moral imperatives, one that transformed self-harm from a sin into a necessity. In a sense, it was the logical conclusion of the twisted morality that Arendt described: standing face-to-face with the abyss, thousands of Germans followed Nazism’s commandment to kill—one last time. Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself offers important historical insight for any theoretical analysis of Nazism. By cataloguing the self-inflicted carnage of 1945, Huber offers another way of understanding the human cost of political evil. ~
https://www.city-journal.org/germany-mass-suicides-after-world-war-2
Oriana:
I think the fear of what the Red Army might do to them was also an important factor. That fear kept being inflamed by the official Nazi propaganda that kept functioning until the end (and after the end kept lingering in the paramilitary “Werewolf” cells).
Some committed suicide out of fear that the Allies would hold them responsible. This photo shows The Deputy Mayor of Leipzig and his wife and daughter, who committed suicide in the Neues Rathaus as American troops were entering the city on 20 April 1945.
from Wiki:
Cyanide capsules were one of the most common ways that people killed themselves in the last days of the war. On 12 April 1945, members of the Hitler Youth distributed cyanide pills to audience members during the last concert of the Berlin Philharmonic. Prior to his own suicide in the Führerbunker, Hitler ensured all his staff had been given poison capsules.
In March 1945, the British printed a German-language black propaganda postcard, supposedly issued by the Nazi government, giving detailed instructions on how to hang oneself with the minimum amount of pain. There are numerous documented cases where parents killed their children before they killed themselves.
Members of the German armed forces often used weapons to end their lives. For example, SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst-Robert Grawitz killed himself and his family with a grenade, Wehrmacht generals Wilhelm Burgdorf and Hans Krebs shot themselves in the head with their pistols, and Josef Terboven, the Reichskommissar for Norway, blew himself up in a bunker by detonating 50 kg (110 lb) of dynamite.
STATE ENCOURAGEMENT:
The willingness to commit suicide before accepting defeat was a key Nazi idea during the Second World War. Adolf Hitler declared his preference for suicide over defeat in a speech he gave in the Reichstag during the invasion of Poland in 1939, saying, "I now wish to be nothing other than the first soldier of the German Reich. Therefore I have put on that tunic which has always been the most holy and dear to me. I shall not take it off again until after victory is ours, or I shall not live to see the day!"
When it became apparent that the Nazis were about to lose the war, Germany's leaders (including Goebbels and Hitler) spoke publicly in favor of suicide as an option. Hitler declared on 30 August 1944 during a military briefing, “It’s only [a fraction] of a second. Then one is redeemed of everything and finds tranquility and eternal peace.” Many supporters of Nazi ideology and party shared the apocalyptic message of National Socialism and looked forward to ending their lives. Years of exposure to Nazi propaganda also led many Germans to assume that suicide was the only way out.
The glorification of violent death is believed to have originated with the post-World War I Nazi struggle for power and the early deaths of Nazi activists such as Horst Wessel. In the same way, the suicides of leading Nazis were meant to be seen as heroic sacrifices. In a radio speech on 28 February 1945 (circulated in most newspapers in the Reich on 1 March), Joseph Goebbels declared on public radio that, if Germany were to be defeated, he would "cheerfully throw away his life" as Cato the Younger did. On 28 March of the same year, the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter published an article titled "Risk of One's Life" by Wilhelm Pleyer, which called on Germans to fight to the death.
The suicidal atmosphere was enhanced by the Nazis' report of numerous Soviet mass graves and other atrocities committed by the NKVD and Red Army towards the end of the war. A Nazi leaflet distributed in February 1945 in Czech territories warned German readers about the "Bolshevik murderer-pack" whose victory would lead to "incredible hatred, looting, hunger, shots in the back of the neck, deportation and extermination" and appealed to German men to "save German women and girls from defilement and slaughter by the Bolshevik bloodhounds".
These fears, and the portrayal of "Soviet Bolsheviks" as sub-human monsters, led to a number of mass suicides in eastern Germany. One female clerk in the city of Schönlanke within Pomerania said, "Out of fear of these animals from the east, many Schönlankers ended their lives (around 500 of them). Whole families were wiped out in this way." The fear of Soviet occupation was so great that even people living far from Soviet lines, including a pensioner in Hamburg, killed themselves in fear of what Soviet soldiers would do to them. The behavior of Soviet troops also played a role, as many Germans committed suicide to avoid rape or out of shame at having been raped. In addition, many suicides are believed to have occurred due to depression caused or exacerbated by living in a war zone among ruins.
Some high-ranking military also committed suicide, including Walter Dönicke. Note the torn portrait of Hitler.
Mary:
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~ The confederacy was completely destroyed on the field of battle. Not one confederate army survived. They all surrendered totally. Yet 155 years later these fools still wave the flag of slave-owning traitor losers as if it was something to be proud of. Reminds me of the nazi “we didn't lose WW1 — we were stabbed in the back” lie. ~ David Bolt
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REINHOLD NIEBUHR: IN PRAISE OF REALISM
~ Why do idealists get all the kudos? Rebels and revolutionaries have statues in their honor, they’re worn on T-shirts and are held up as heroes. As for the realists, who has a poster of WT Cosgrave, John Major or Angela Merkel pinned up in their student digs – even though these are the sorts of characters who have been the backbone of our democracies?
Yes, it’s the relatively drab and ideologically hazy – the Joe Bidens of this world – who we call upon to clean up the mess created by dreamers and romantics. Idealists may shake things up but, to adapt a line of Alan Bennett’s, history is realists following behind with a bucket.
Perhaps the greatest champion of realism among political theorists was Reinhold Niebuhr. The American theological and social critic is credited with composing the Serenity Prayer, that paean to ancient wisdom which begins “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change”. But his political message deserves similar fame, according to Dr Luke Cahill, lecturer in international relations at the University of Bath.
Niebuhr advocates that we should act with humility and caution on the grounds that humans are inherently flawed, utopia will never be achieved, and the road to unintended consequences is paved with good intentions. “This was not an excuse to accept the status quo, but at the same time he rejected simplistic notions of progress,” Cahill explains.
To Niebuhr, we are all capable of sin but the “children of light” can maintain the upper hand, and protect democracy, if they avoid starry-eyed thinking and acquire some of the wisdom of the children of darkness.
Luke Cahill: “In a now famous 2007 interview in the New York Times, then-senator Barack Obama praised Reinhold Niebuhr. ‘I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.’
“In these few lines, Obama neatly summarised why we need Niebuhr now more than ever. In a world of political and economic extremes, of quick fixes and social media, few public figures have a sense of the limitations. They promise simple solutions to complex problems. Using a Niebuhrian framework, they should be stressing how what they can do may help the issue, not resolve it.
“Niebuhr was not afraid to change his mind and did so throughout his life. He was a believer in the liberal Social Gospel at the beginning the 20th century. After the first World War he became a tepid pacificist, a ‘Marxian’ and eventually reluctant follower of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
“As the cold war began, he opposed communism and was labelled by some as a ‘Cold War warrior’. Yet even this label did not fit easily. He spoke out against the Vietnam War as American involvement increased.
“Fundamental to this is not just the ability to change his mind but the sense of doubt he held that led him to these various, and varied, positions... As we live in our respective echo chambers, we need Niebuhr now more than ever.”
Who are the children of light and who are the children of darkness in Niebuhr’s framework? Can we identify who exactly is which today?
“The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, crucially subtitled A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense, was written during the second World War.
“For Niebuhr, the children of light were those liberals like his contemporary John Dewey. He criticized Dewey for his belief in the triumph of liberal reason, how every problem can be solved through reasoned, and reasonable, debate.
“Niebuhr excoriated those who thought that the divergence between self-interest and the general interest could be easily resolved. Conversely, Niebuhr warned how the children of darkness were aware of power and self-interest. He gave examples such as Machiavelli and Hobbes. He criticized the latter as having a ‘purely pessimistic analysis of man’s nature’.
“This tension led to one of Niebuhr’s famous phrases, ‘Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary’. By this he meant grand theories of democracy were not totally realistic, but our capacity for evil and the checks it brings makes it necessary.
“Modern comparisons are difficult. It is perhaps easier to see who the children of darkness might be, those who understand self-interest and the will to power: Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro. It is harder to clearly see who the contemporary children of light are. Jacinda Ardern, [UN secretary general] António Guterres, Nicola Sturgeon?
“Are they pretending to be children of light but acting like children of darkness in ultimate defense of democracy, as he recommends? Or are they the naïve optimists with a belief in man’s ultimate goodness that he warns us against? We cannot know at this time.
“Niebuhr suggests that Christian hope is needed to fulfil ‘the highest human striving’ but without this we alternate between ‘sentimentality and despair; trusting human powers too much in one moment and losing all faith in the meaning of life when we discover the limits of human possibilities’.”
Can Niebuhr really be a unifying figure when he insists at heart on a Christian outlook?
“His own beliefs were complicated, to say the least. Though he was a minister of the German Evangelical Synod of North America, he could not be called an orthodox theologian. He believed in the meaningfulness of life and how God would have the final word. Yet, a biographer has suggested how Niebuhr’s faith is closer to that of Nietzsche’s striving for human excellence.
“Moreover, Niebuhr seemed to doubt core Christian tenets such as transforming the world, as well as the Incarnation [the idea that the son of God was ‘made flesh’ in Jesus]. So, Niebuhr’s Christianity is not the Christianity that many think they know. One friend of his called him a ‘Platonist’. Consequently, he has a broader appeal.”
Niebuhr argues we must make do with “proximate justice”, but is it reasonable to ask people who are oppressed or discriminated against to accept that?
“It is unlikely that Niebuhr would accept the premise. It is doubtful that he would simply accept oppression and discrimination. Yet he would have probably been aware what Jesus said, ‘The poor you will always have with you’. So Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s plans for a War on Poverty would perhaps have been met with support, but ultimate skepticism.”
Where would Niebuhr stand on the political spectrum in the US, or in Ireland, today?
“Niebuhr is hard to equate with a single party or ideology today. Ultimately, he may be politically homeless. In the 1920s he was close to the British Labour Party, seeing it as embodying noble elements of the mixing of religion and politics.
“At various times he admired the US progressive and socialist parties. Yet, as time passed he would later deride politicians, some on the left, for their naivete, hubristic faith in reason and not understanding human nature.
“Niebuhr might be on the broad left, seeking justice and equality. Yet, as ever, he would be wary of grand promises to end injustice or eradicate suffering. He may also have found an uneasy home in the classical conservatism of Burke, Scruton or Oakeshott, where
prudent reform is framed through a sense of limitations.”
Question: What’s the ultimate goal?
Reinhold Niebuhr replies: “The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.”
Niebuhr’s most lasting contribution is probably his Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
True, not many people know that Niebuhr is the author of the Serenity Prayer, but that’s not what matters — only that those words live on.
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MEDIEVAL SCHOLARS KNEW THE EARTH WAS A SPHERE
~ If students—who could often join the foundational Arts Faculty aged as young as fourteen—struggled to know where to start with shelves of impenetrable Aristotelian prose, help was at hand. Like today’s undergraduates, they had textbooks. Pithy summaries of the great philosophers made their ideas accessible, and the clearest of these became bestsellers. Even as the curriculum of the Arts Faculty was completely remodeled in the image of Aristotle’s works—accommodating the “three philosophies” of natural and moral philosophy and the more fundamental metaphysics alongside the old trivium and quadrivium—these summaries became the set texts for the masters’ lecture series.
So before the students dived into Aristotle’s Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorology, On the Soul, On Animals, and his shorter works on psychology, respiration and aging, all required as part of the natural philosophy course, they could warm up with the two introductory manuals of astronomy and cosmology: De Sphera (On the Sphere ) and Computus. Each of these was allotted eight days by the Oxford timetablers. The Computus covered all the calendrical calculation we tried in the last chapter. It came in various versions, each adopted and updated as the science of the cycles developed. There were multiple texts called The Sphere too, but one was head and shoulders above the others for its accessibility and popularity. It was written in about 1230 by John of Sacrobosco.
Nothing much is known about this John. Forty years after his time, Robertus Anglicus, whom we last met chronicling the inventions of clockmakers, wrote an extensive commentary on Sacrobosco’s Sphere for his students at the university of Montpellier. Near the beginning he asserted that Sacrobosco was, like him, English, but his claim has not been proved. The wandering antiquary John Leland (who, on his scholarly travels in the 1530s, was the last person to describe the St Albans clock before its destruction) tried to pin down the name—”Sacrobosco”—holy wood—to a location. Failing to find settlements named Holywood on the map of England (though they existed in Northern Ireland and south-west Scotland), Leland opted to claim Sacrobosco for the Yorkshire town of Halifax—rather implausibly, since Halifax actually means “holy hair.”
While we cannot know where Sacrobosco was born, we do know where he was buried: in the de facto University church of Paris, in a tomb adorned with an astrolabe. Evidently, by his death he was an established university master. He wrote a brief introduction to algorismus, drawing on the Arithmetic of Boethius, and his Computus was a commonly set text on that subject. But his Sphere was by far his best-known work, and still survives in hundreds of handwritten medieval copies. Monk-students, who arrived at university rather older and better educated than other undergraduates, were often exempted from the initial arts course. But it is clear from the number of monastic manuscripts which include the Sphere that canons and monks like John Westwyk were keen to work through this carefully arranged primer anyway.
In a beautifully simple text, Sacrobosco set out the basics of medieval knowledge of the universe. He drew on a range of sources, especially Ptolemy and al-Farghani (Alfraganus)—another Abbasid astronomer whose work Gerard of Cremona had translated—but also quoted classical poets like Ovid and Virgil. He began with Euclid’s geometry, defining what a sphere is, and then described the spheres of the heavens and Earth. A consummate teacher, he built up layer on layer of complexity, explaining the varied motions of the stars and planets, the ways that day-lengths and stellar visibility depended on your location and the season, and how eclipses work.
Students and masters read Sacrobosco’s Sphere avidly for hundreds of years after his time. In Oxford’s oak-paneled halls lecturers worked through it systematically, expounding Sacrobosco’s succinct prose for the benefit of their fascinated pupils. Some wrote up their lectures as extended written commentaries on the core text, so we have a good idea of the ground they covered. Let us take a moment to imitate those scholars and have a closer look at one part of the treatise. We shall focus on Sacrobosco’s explanation that the Earth is round.
Today it is widely assumed that medieval scholars thought the world was flat, but that is a myth largely invented in the 19th century. It was popularized in a work by Washington Irving that can be charitably called “imaginative history,” The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, published in 1828. Irving pictured his hero, inspired by “natural genius,” arguing that it was possible to sail westward to the Indies, against fierce objections from ignorant churchmen at the Spanish court.
Irving’s story was picked up by anti-religious writers and used as an emblem of a general conflict that they imagined was being waged between science and religion, in which a few brave individuals struggled against the suffocating power of the Church. No such simplistic conflict existed. In fact, Columbus’ geographical assumptions were based on the work of a contemporary of John Westwyk, the Paris master and later cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, who himself drew heavily on Sacrobosco’s Sphere.
Sacrobosco explains that the heavens are a huge sphere, with the planets set in smaller spheres nested one inside another (like a Russian doll). Beyond the seven planets—which, you will recall, included the Sun and the Moon—were two outer spheres: the fixed stars and the “first moved,” the engine of the daily rotation of the heavens. The innermost planetary sphere, with the shortest cycle, was the Moon. Citing Aristotle’s Meteorology, Sacrobosco placed four more spheres within the sphere of the Moon, for the four elements: first fire, then air, then water, and finally, the heaviest element, earth, at the center of everything.
As evidence for the earth’s roundness, Sacrobosco pointed out that the stars rise and eclipses occur at different times as you travel east or west. And as you travel north or south, he added, you see different stars altogether. If the earth was flat, he explained, the same stars would rise at the same time for all observers. It only seems flat, he said, “because of its great size.” Yet compared to the firmament, it must be infinitesimally small, since exactly half of the sky and stars are always above the horizon.
The seas, like the earth, must also be round, since a lookout stationed at the top of a ship’s mast can see further than someone standing on deck. Also, Sacrobosco suggested logically, just as water droplets form beads on leaves, so the seas “naturally seek a round shape.” Aristotle had one more argument, which Sacrobosco did not use: whenever we watch a lunar eclipse, the Earth’s shadow on the Moon is always round.
The next question, for a consummate geometer like Sacrobosco, was obvious: if the Earth is a sphere, we can easily work out its size. The oldest estimate of the Earth’s size appears in Aristotle’s treatise On the Heavens, written in the fourth century bce. There the Philosopher notes that “those mathematicians who try to calculate the size of the Earth’s circumference arrive at the figure 400,000 stades.” Aristotle only mentions this to support his arguments that the Earth must be round—otherwise it would not have a circumference at all—and that it is small relative to the stars.
A stadion was the length of a stadium—rather like journalists’ habit of estimating areas in terms of today’s football fields—but that length could vary, between about an eighth and a tenth of a mile. Aristotle’s estimate thus came to 40,000 or 50,000 modern miles. The true circumference is about 25,000 miles, so Aristotle’s figure was of the right order of magnitude, albeit not particularly close.
Aristotle was rarely interested in numbers—his specialism was explaining causes, answering “how” and “why” questions. So it is hardly surprising that he didn’t explain the methods “those mathematicians” had used. Towards the end of the following century, however, another Greek philosopher named Eratosthenes did explain how he had found the Earth’s size. When Sacrobosco described, with his characteristic pithy clarity, how any student could carry out the calculation on a clear starry night, he cited Eratosthenes as an authority for his own estimate: 252,000 stades.
Those 252,000 stades are extremely close to the correct value. Where did they come from? Not from precise measurement, but by a chain of educated guesses—that was all the Greek astronomers wanted. Eratosthenes observed that at the ancient city of Syene, on the Nile in southern Egypt, the Sun was directly overhead at noon on the summer solstice. In other words, Syene lay on the tropic of Cancer. At the same time in Alexandria, the Sun was not quite overhead. If, looking up at the sky, he imagined a vertical circle which ran down from that zenith to the southern horizon, kept descending to a point directly below his feet, and came back up the other side to rise above the northern horizon and reach all the way to the zenith once more, the Sun was just a fiftieth of the way round that circle.
So, since the Earth was a sphere, the distance from Syene to Alexandria must be a fiftieth of the way round the Earth. Here Eratosthenes assumed that Alexandria, where the winding River Nile fanned out into the Mediterranean Sea, was due north of Syene. He took the distance between the two cities to be 5,000 stades. If one fiftieth of the Earth’s circumference was 5,000 stades, the full circumference must be about 250,000.
Later astronomers adjusted it to 252,000 stades, simply because that number is easily divisible by 60 and 360. With that convenient rounding, Sacrobosco could say that, for every degree of the Earth’s circumference, the distance is 252,000 ÷ 360 = 700 stades. (A rather smaller—and less accurate—estimate of 500 stades per degree, reported by Ptolemy and Alfraganus, was seized on by Columbus to boost the feasibility of his proposed voyage west to the Indies.)
Neither Eratosthenes nor Sacrobosco saw any need to measure these distances. Eratosthenes’ figures of a fiftieth of a circle for the Sun’s zenith distance at Alexandria, and 5,000 stades to Syene, are clearly just round numbers. He certainly did not hire someone to pace out the distance step by step, as some fanciful retellings have claimed. His point—echoed by Sacrobosco—is simply that the Earth could be measured, with knowledge of its sphericity and the basic techniques of geometry. ~
https://lithub.com/the-medieval-philosopher-who-outlined-the-basics-of-the-universe/?fbclid=IwAR0M4expik18p-Gaop8FxrUszPZBkVu-fm4zoifIJTXSGTxUc_QRya10rtI
Sacrobosco's De Sphaera. Note that earth is in the middle, orbited by the sun along with other known planets.
Oriana:
Sailors apparently knew that the earth was a sphere because they observed that the tip of the tallest mast was the first to appear when a ship was emerging over the horizon.
Dante knew that the earth was a sphere. He assumed that the other half of that sphere was entirely covered by the ocean — except for the peak of Mt. Purgatory.
**
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MANY AMERICANS WON’T BE ABLE TO AFFORD TO RETIRE
~ “The U.S. bounced back from falling fertility once before, in the late 1980s. But as economist Lyman Stone has written, there are reasons why history may not repeat itself. High and increasing costs of housing, child care and education show no sign of reversing. The need for ever-higher levels of education in order to thrive in the U.S. job market is causing families to delay childbirth, which results in fewer children. Stone projects that U.S. fertility rates could fall as low as 1.5 or 1.4 — the levels that prevail in Japan and some European countries.
There is one more source of population growth that the U.S. has traditionally depended on — immigration. Low-skilled immigrants make it easier to raise kids by providing cheap child-care services. High-skilled immigrants earn more and pay a lot of taxes, while using few government services themselves, meaning that their fiscal contribution is enormously positive.
But low-skilled immigration to the U.S. has declined, meaning that more expensive child care is on the horizon. And high-skilled immigration may soon taper off.
The U.S. may soon find itself without its two big long-term population boosters, and wind up as a graying, shrinking nation, with young people burdened with supporting ever-more old people, and the elderly themselves forced to work long into what used to be the golden years.” ~
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-23/america-needs-more-young-workers-to-support-aging-population?fbclid=IwAR1gecRr1ZO7XteSEG4W_jiZPxxKrD4D65MDBf7ZmR7wmQymjIuNEFjGaK4
I've lost track of how many people I've met who said they can't afford to retire. This is real. Not a big deal for those who love their job (e.g. college professors, who can usually shift to part-time or on-line), but very sad for those who dislike their job and couldn't wait to retire — and now have to wait longer and longer, sometimes indefinitely.
You'd think that a "country of immigrants" has had plenty of time — centuries, in fact — to learn about the benefits of encouraging immigration. Yet the forces of bigotry are stunningly strong, with the same clichés applied to each new group.
Of course eventually one’s capacity to work declines and eventually ceases — but so does the capacity to enjoy leisure. The phrase “the golden years” may indeed become incomprehensible.
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THE PERMIAN EXTINCTION (before the dinosaurs)
~ "Welcome to the Black Triangle," said paleobiologist Cindy Looy as our van slowed to a stop in the gentle hills of the northern Czech Republic, a few miles from the German and Polish borders. The Black Triangle gets its name from the coal burned by nearby power plants. Decades of acid rain generated by power-plant emissions have devastated the region's ecosystems. Yet the treeless hills looked healthy and green.
I tried to hide my surprise. For months I'd been on the trail of the greatest natural disaster in Earth's history. About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, something killed some 90 percent of the planet's species. Less than 5 percent of the animal species in the seas survived. On land less than a third of the large animal species made it. Nearly all the trees died. Looy had told me that the Black Triangle was the best place today to see what the world would have looked like after the Permian extinction. This didn't look like apocalypse.
We saw the first signs of death as we walked into the hills—hundreds of fallen timbers lay hidden in the undergrowth. A forest once grew here. Half a mile (0.8 kilometers) uphill we found the trunks of a stand of spruce, killed by acid rain. No birds called, no insects hummed. The only sound was the wind through the acid-tolerant weeds.
"The forest that grew here a few decades ago contained dozens of species of plants," said Looy. "Now there are only a few grassy species."
Looy picked up a spruce cone. Pollen from the trees around us might be preserved inside. She believes that the Permian extinction was caused by acid rain following a massive release of volcanic gases. She wants to compare tree pollen from a modern forest killed by acid rain with fossil pollen found in Permian rocks.
Like a homicide detective at a crime scene, Looy sealed the cone in a plastic bag for later lab work. "You could say we're working on the greatest murder mystery of all time," she said.
Looy is one of many scientists trying to identify the killer responsible for the largest of the many mass extinctions that have struck the planet.
The most famous die-off ended the reign of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. Most researchers consider that case closed. Rocks of that age contain traces of an asteroid that struck Earth, generating catastrophic events from global wildfires to climate change. But the Permian detectives are faced with a host of suspects and not enough evidence to convict any of them.
"The forest that grew here a few decades ago contained dozens of species of plants," said Looy. "Now there are only a few grassy species."
Looy picked up a spruce cone. Pollen from the trees around us might be preserved inside. She believes that the Permian extinction was caused by acid rain following a massive release of volcanic gases. She wants to compare tree pollen from a modern forest killed by acid rain with fossil pollen found in Permian rocks.
To understand this extinction, I wanted first to get a sense of its scale. That's difficult—sediments containing fossils from the end of the Permian are rare and often inaccessible. One site that preserves the extinction's victims lies about a half day's drive inland from Cape Town, South Africa, in a scrubland known as the Karoo.
"The Karoo is the kind of place where people fall asleep at the wheel," said Roger Smith, a paleontologist at the South African Museum, as we drove across the treeless land. "But it may be the best place to see the terrestrial realm's transition from the Permian to the Triassic period."
If we had driven here before the extinction, we would have seen animals as abundant and diverse as those of today's Serengeti, except most would have belonged to a group known as synapsids. Often called mammal-like reptiles—they looked like a cross between a dog and a lizard—the synapsids were Earth's first great dynasty of land vertebrates.
"We've found fossils of many kinds of synapsids in these rocks, especially tortoise-beaked dicynodonts, which likely lived in herds and browsed on vegetation along the riverbanks," said Smith. "There were also a lot of smaller grazers and root grubbers, like Dictodon, a dachshund-shaped dicynodont that probably dug up roots and shoots. They were preyed upon by gorgonopsians—fleet-footed synapsid carnivores with needle-sharp teeth."
The late Permian rocks we passed as we neared Lootsberg Pass capture the synapsids at the height of their reign. For more than 60 million years they were Earth's dominant land vertebrates, occupying the same ecological niches as their successors, the dinosaurs.
Smith slowed at a switchback, rolled down the window, and pointed to a horizontally banded cliff. "See that road cut?" he asked. "That's your Permo-Triassic transition zone. Brace yourself, you're about to go through the extinction." The fossils embedded in this road cut suggest that synapsids took a savage hit at the end of the Permian.
Plants were also hit by the extinction. Evidence for the scale of damage to the world's forests comes from the Italian Alps. I joined a research team led by Henk Visscher of the University of Utrecht at the Butterloch gorge, where exposed fossil beds cover the transition from the Permian to the Triassic. The beds lie high on a cliff, accessible only by climbing piles of debris. I anxiously followed veteran climber Mark Sephton up a slope of loose rocks to a ledge.
Sephton used his hammer to chip bits of rock from the layers that chronicle the extinction. Each fragment contains microscopic fossils—pieces of plants and fungi. The lower layers, dating from prior to the extinction, contain lots of pollen, typical of a healthy conifer forest. But in rocks from the Permo-Triassic boundary the pollen is replaced by strands of fossilized fungi—as many as a million segments in some golf-ball-size rocks.
All that fungi in boundary rocks may represent an exploding population of scavengers feasting on an epic meal of dead trees. "We think it's a wood-decaying fungus," says Looy, who works with Visscher. "When a tree dies, it falls. As it decays, fungi grow into it from spores on the ground, decomposing it."
An enormous asteroid impact is the prime suspect of Gregory Retallack, a geologist at the University of Oregon. The collision would have sent billions of particles into the atmosphere, he explains. They would have spread around the planet, then rained down on land and sea.
I asked Retallack what an impact would be like if we had been standing a few hundred miles from ground zero. "You'd feel a shudder," he replied. "Clouds of noxious gases would billow in and block out the sun for months. Temperatures would drop, and corrosive acid snow and rain would fall. After the clouds cleared, the atmosphere would be thick with carbon dioxide from fires and decaying matter. CO2 is a greenhouse gas; it would have contributed to global warming that lasted millions of years.”
The short-term effects alone—cold, darkness, and acid rain—would kill plants and photosynthetic plankton, the base of most food chains. Herbivores would starve, as would the carnivores that fed on the plant-eaters.
Other Permian detectives suspect the killer oozed up from the sea. For years scientists have known that the deep ocean lacked oxygen in the late Permian. But most life is concentrated in shallow water, in places like reefs. In 1996 English geologists Paul Wignall and Richard Twitchett of the University of Leeds reported the first evidence of oxygen depletion, or anoxia, in rocks that formed under shallow water at the time of the extinction.
Pollution sometimes turns waters anoxic today in regions that lack good circulation. Local die-offs of marine life can result. But Wignall suspects that the entire ocean may have stagnated in Permian times. What could still the currents that oxygenate the ocean? Perhaps a lack of ice caps during the late Permian led to the stagnation. Normally temperature differences between polar and equatorial waters create convective currents. Without those currents, anoxic water could have built up, spilling into shallow water as sea levels rose and smothering marine life.
Permian oceans also might have been poisoned with CO2, according to Andrew Knoll, a paleobiologist at Harvard. Oceanic bacteria eat organic matter, producing bicarbonate as a digestive by-product. Without currents, the load of bicarbonate could have grown in the deep ocean. Knoll thinks something big—he's not sure what—disturbed the seas. Bicarbonate-laden water rose from below, he suggests. As it did, it depressurized. Dissolved bicarbonate was released as CO2, making the seas bubble at times like a glass of soda.
The crisis for marine animals would have started when toxic levels of CO2 entered the shallows. Fish would have grown lethargic and slowly fallen asleep. "Perhaps the Permian ended with a whimper and not a bang," said Knoll.
Another suspect—a deadly epoch of volcanic eruptions—left a million-square-mile (2.6-million-square-kilometer) fingerprint in Siberia. Below the town of Norilsk lies a two-and-a-half-mile-thick (four-kilometer-thick) pile of lava, overgrown by conifers. Geologists call this vast lava field the Siberian Traps. It wasn't produced by one volcano. "Thick, pulsing flows of glowing magma gushed out from numerous broad, flat volcanoes," said geologist Paul Renne of the Berkeley Geochronology Center. "Hundreds of cubic miles spread across Siberia—enough to cover the Earth to a depth of about 20 feet (6 meters).”
But the Siberian Traps volcanoes didn't cause the extinction by swamping the world with lava. As volcanic gases poured into the skies, they would have generated acid rain, and sulfate molecules would have blocked sunlight and cooled the planet. Glaciation would have reduced the volume of water in the ocean, storing it as ice. Sea level would have dropped, killing marine life in the shallows and severely reducing diversity. Lowering sea level can also release the ocean's methane, which, combined with CO2 from the eruptions and decaying organic matter, would likely produce greenhouse conditions. "In 1783 a volcano called Laki erupted in Iceland," said Renne. "Within a year global temperature dropped almost two degrees. Imagine a Laki erupting every year for hundreds of thousands of years."
Each scientist I met left me thinking that he or she was a clue or two away from solving the crime. But as Doug Erwin of the Smithsonian cautioned me, "the truth is sometimes untidy." The Permian extinction reminds him of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, in which a corpse with 12 knife wounds is discovered on a train. Twelve different killers conspired to slay the victim. Erwin suspects there may have been multiple killers at the end of the Permian. Maybe everything—eruptions, an impact, anoxia—went wrong at once.
Death creates opportunity. Survivors occupy vacant niches. Within a million years synapsid diversity recovered. One lineage produced our ancestors, the first mammals. Now we are creating a new mass extinction, wiping out countless species. Will life be as resilient this time? I remembered the acid-tolerant plants of the Black Triangle, where we've done so much to destroy an ecosystem. If life can survive the Permian extinction, it can survive anything. ~
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/prehistoric-world/permian-extinction/?fbclid=IwAR0JCdv0Mj3-zKHjoyC13v17pYhzjJupi-ofo_wePflKY9pwjqC9BBrk9YY
the skull of a dinogorgon, a late Permian species; by the way, the prevailinig current view is that synapsids were early mammals, not reptiles.
*
THE WOMAN BEHIND THE COVID VACCINE
~ “Redemption! … I was grabbing the air, I got so excited I was afraid that I might die or something.”
Katalin Karikó laughs as she recounts her reaction to the news that the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, which is based on research she pioneered and risked her career for, was 90 per cent effective in protecting against Covid-19.
For the Hungarian-born scientist the breakthrough goes beyond the hope that the new vaccine will help turn the tide of the pandemic. It is a validation of her career-long belief in the therapeutic potential of synthetic messenger RNA (mRNA), a technology that could open the door to a new generation of medical treatments and cures.
For more than four decades, Prof Karikó has relentlessly explored how the single-stranded molecules of genetic code could be used to treat conditions from strokes and cancer to influenza. Despite demotions, countless grant rejections and, at points, deep skepticism from fellow scientists, she plowed on.
“When I am knocked down I know how to pick myself up,” she said, speaking to The Telegraph from her home in Philadelphia. “But I always enjoyed working... I imagined all of the diseases I could treat.”
Prof Karikó first began work on mRNA at a lab in Hungary in 1978, before moving to the US after her position at the Biological Research Centre in Szeged was terminated in 1985. A decade later, when at the University of Pennsylvania, Prof Karikó was again demoted when her focus on mRNA failed to attract financial backing.
But determination runs in the family – Prof Karikó's daughter, Susan Francia, won a gold medal for the American rowing team during the 2012 London Olympics – and the scientist persisted.
mRNA
mRNA molecules are single-stranded slithers of genetic code formed of nucleosides which instruct the human cells to produce certain proteins. The idea was that if you synthesize mRNA code in a lab you could instruct the body to better fight a wide range of diseases.
However, for years there was a stumbling block: mRNA caused an inflammatory reaction when injected. It wasn't until 2004 that Prof Karikó and her colleague Drew Weissman found that, by using a slightly altered nucleoside in the mRNA string, the potentially fatal problem could be overcome.
That was the “big 'oh!' moment”, she said; “at that moment I felt okay, this is very, very important.”
Their paper, published in 2005, paved the way not just for the coronavirus vaccine developed by BioNTech – the German company Prof Karikó joined in 2013 – but the candidate from American firm Moderna, whose phase three trial data has shown 100 per cent efficacy.
The stakes now could hardly be higher. The total recorded case count – widely considered a vast underestimate due to patchy testing – now exceeds 60 million globally, according to the World Health Organization.
Despite the potential roadblocks, Prof Karikó is optimistic the vaccine will work and help end the pandemic.
Her confidence rests in the power of mRNA itself. She said that trial volunteers were entirely clear of the virus, even in their noses, suggesting the vaccine would work to stop transmission as well as symptoms.
Prof Karikó believes that the mRNA vaccine could be “the safest” available. Although the technology is untested it is said by experts to be “cleaner” than conventional vaccine technologies as the mRNA code quickly degrades, leaving nothing behind.
Prof Karikó agrees. “Everything disappears, the viral protein disappears, leaving only the antibody,” she said.
“This is a vindication of the mRNA approach, it's the first positive phase three result for any RNA product, ever,” said Dr Richard Hatchett, chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi).
“It opens up a whole new class of therapies and vaccines… as the world grapples with how to reduce the risk of future epidemics or pandemics, these are going to be critical, critical, tools,” he said.
Others have added that Prof Karikó, along with her colleague Prof Weissman, deserve a Nobel Prize in chemistry for their all important breakthrough in the mid-2000s.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/redemption-one-scientists-unwavering-belief-mrna-gave-world/?fbclid=IwAR0ELN4TBv18kY5E1WuFSapvos9Vp6BtYgX4Ij1VIcifShJrPFbHDUTU-Ss
*
OUR AMAZING BODIES
The strongest muscle is the tongue? That works metaphorically as well . . .
~ The Human Body is a treasure trove of mysteries, one that still confounds doctors and scientists about the details of its working. It's not an overstatement to say that every part of your body is a miracle. Here are some facts about your body, some of which will leave you stunned...
1. It's possible for your body to survive without a surprisingly large fraction of its internal organs. Even if you lose your stomach, your spleen, 75% of your liver, 80% of your intestines, one kidney, one lung, and virtually every organ from your pelvic and groin area, you wouldn't be very healthy, but you would live.
2. During your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill two swimming pools. Actually, Saliva is more important than you realize. If your saliva cannot dissolve something, you cannot taste it.
3. The largest cell in the human body is the female egg and the smallest is the male sperm.
The egg is actually the only cell in the body that is visible by the naked eye.
4. The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue and the hardest bone is the jawbone.
5. Human feet have 52 bones, accounting for one quarter of all the human body's bones.
6. Feet have 500,000 sweat glands and can produce more than a pint of sweat a day.
7. The acid in your stomach is strong enough to dissolve razor blades. The reason it doesn't eat away at your stomach is that the cells of your stomach wall renew themselves so frequently that you get a new stomach lining every three to four days.
8. The human lungs contain approximately 2,400 kilometers (1,500 mi) of airways and 300 to 500 million hollow cavities, having a total surface area of about 70 square meters, roughly the same area as one side of a tennis court. Furthermore, if all of the capillaries that surround the lung cavities were unwound and laid end to end, they would extend for about 992 kilometers. Also, your left lung is smaller than your right lung to make room for your heart.
9. Sneezes regularly exceed 100 mph, while coughs clock in at about 60 mph.
10. Your body gives off enough heat in 30 minutes to bring half a gallon of water to a boil.
11. Your body has enough iron in it to make a nail 3 inches long.
12. Earwax production is necessary for good ear health. It protects the delicate inner ear from bacteria, fungus, dirt and even insects. It also cleans and lubricates the ear canal.
13. Everyone has a unique smell, except for identical twins, who smell the same.
14. Your teeth start growing 6 months before you are born. This is why one out of every 2,000 newborn infants has a tooth when they are born.
15. A baby's head is one-quarter of its total length, but by the age of 25 will only be one-eighth of its total length. This is because people's heads grow at a much slower rate than the rest of their bodies.
(more in a future blog)
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PUTTING PURPOSE BACK INTO BIOLOGY
~ Animal immune systems depend on white blood cells called macrophages that devour and engulf invaders. The cells pursue with determination and gusto: under a microscope you can watch a blob-like macrophage chase a bacterium across the slide, switching course this way and that as its prey tries to escape through an obstacle course of red blood cells, before it finally catches the rogue microbe and gobbles it up.
But hang on: isn’t this an absurdly anthropomorphic way of describing a biological process? Single cells don’t have minds of their own – so surely they don’t have goals, determination, gusto? When we attribute aims and purposes to these primitive organisms, aren’t we just succumbing to an illusion?
Indeed, you might suspect this is a real-life version of a classic psychology experiment from 1944, which revealed the human impulse to attribute goals and narratives to what we see. When Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel showed people a crudely animated movie featuring a circle and two triangles, most viewers constructed a melodramatic tale of pursuit and rescue – even though they were just observing abstract geometric shapes moving about in space.
Yet is our sense that the macrophage has goals and purpose really just a narrative projection? After all, we can’t meaningfully describe what a macrophage even is without referring to its purpose: it exists precisely to conduct this kind of ‘seek and destroy’ manoeuvre.
One of biology’s most enduring dilemmas is how it dances around the issue at the core of such a description: agency, the ability of living entities to alter their environment (and themselves) with purpose to suit an agenda. Typically, discussions of goals and purposes in biology get respectably neutered with scare quotes: cells and bacteria aren’t really ‘trying’ to do anything, just as organisms don’t evolve ‘in order to’ achieve anything (such as running faster to improve their chances of survival). In the end, it’s all meant to boil down to genes and molecules, chemistry and physics – events unfolding with no aim or design, but that trick our narrative-obsessed minds into perceiving these things.
Yet, on the contrary, we now have growing reasons to suspect that agency is a genuine natural phenomenon. Biology could stop being so coy about it if only we had a proper theory of how it arises. Unfortunately, no such thing currently exists, but there’s increasing optimism that a theory of agency can be found – and, moreover, that it’s not necessarily unique to living organisms. A grasp of just what it is that enables an entity to act as an autonomous agent, altering its behavior and environment to achieve certain ends, should help reconcile biology to the troublesome notions of purpose and function.
A bottom-up theory of agency could help us interpret what we see in life, from cells to societies – as well as in some of our ‘smart’ machines and technologies. We’re starting to wonder whether artificial intelligence systems might themselves develop agency. But how would we know, if we can’t say what agency entails? Only if we can ‘derive complex behaviors from simple first principles’, says the physicist Susanne Still of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, can we claim to understand what it takes to be an agent. So far, she admits that the problem remains unsolved. Here, though, is a sketch of what a solution might look like.
One of the most determined efforts to insulate biology from the apparent teleology that life awakens in matter came from the biologist Ernst Mayr, in his book What Makes Biology Unique? (2004). He acknowledged that biology can’t avoid speaking in terms of function. Our eyes evolved so that we can better navigate our environment; the function of the lactase enzyme is to break down lactose sugars; and so on. Goal-directed actions seem almost axiomatically biological: molecular and cell biologists, neuroscientists and geneticists can barely do their work without employing this mode of thinking. Yet they’re often quick to insist that it’s just a figure of speech – an interpretive stance, and nothing more. Organisms do what they do only because they’re genetically programmed via natural selection to do so.
Even in the human sciences, there’s been resistance to notions of true agency. Under the doctrine of radical behaviorism – initiated by the American psychologist B F Skinner in the 1930s, and which was a prominent strand in psychology until the 1980s – animal behavior was just learned (‘conditioned’) actions, trained into initially blank-slate minds. Even today, there’s a widespread reluctance to accept that other animals’ cognitive processes add up to genuinely autonomous choices.
A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of action, but is a phantom evoked by our genetic and evolutionary history.
But this framing doesn’t explain agency; it simply tries to explain it away. Individual genes have no agency, so agency can’t arise in any obvious way from just gathering a sufficient number of them together. Pinning agency to the genome doesn’t tell us what agency is or what makes it manifest.
Besides, genes don’t fully specify behavioral outcomes in any given situation – not just in humans, but even in very simple organisms. Genes can imbue dispositions or tendencies, but it’s often impossible to predict precisely what an organism will do even when it’s mapped down to the last cell and gene. If all behavior were hardwired, individual organisms could never find creative solutions to novel problems, such as the ability of New Caledonian crows to shape and use improvised tools to obtain food.
This reveals a crucial dimension of agency: the ability to make choices in response to new and unforeseen circumstances. When a hare is being pursued by a wolf, there’s no meaningful way to predict how it will dart and switch this way and that, nor whether its gambits will suffice to elude the predator, who responds accordingly. Both hare and wolf are exercising their agency.
No one should suppose that macrophages are acting in the rich cognitive environment available to a wolf, but sometimes it’s hard to decide where the distinctions lie. Confusion can arise from the common assumption that complex agential behavior requires a concomitantly complex mind. In the ordinarily sedate waters of plant biology, for example, a storm is currently raging over whether or not plants have sentience and consciousness. Some things that plants do – such as apparently selecting a direction of growth based on past experience – can look like purposeful and even ‘mindful’ action, especially as they can involve electrical signals reminiscent of those produced by neurons.
Carnivorous plants in AlabamaBut if we break down agency into its constituents, we can see how it might arise even in the absence of a mind that ‘thinks’, at least in the traditional sense. Agency stems from two ingredients: first, an ability to produce different responses to identical (or equivalent) stimuli, and second, to select between them in a goal-directed way. Neither of these capacities is unique to humans, nor to brains in general.
The first ingredient, the ability to vary a response to a given stimulus, is the easiest to procure. It requires mere behavioral randomness, like a coin flip. Such unpredictability makes evolutionary sense, since if an organism always reacted to a stimulus in the same way, it could become a sitting duck for a predator. This does actually happen in the natural world sometimes: a certain species of aquatic snake triggers a predictable escape maneuver in fish that takes the fish directly into the snake’s jaws.
An organism that reacts differently in seemingly identical situations stands a better chance of outwitting predators. Cockroaches, for example, run away when they detect air movements, moving in more or less the opposite direction to the airflow – but at a seemingly random angle. Fruit flies show some random variation in their turning movements when they fly, even in the absence of any stimulus; presumably that’s because it’s useful (in foraging for food, say) to broaden your options without being dependent on some signal to do so. Such unpredictability is even enshrined in an aphorism known as the Harvard Law of Animal Behavior: ‘Under carefully controlled experimental circumstances, the animal behaves as it damned well pleases.’
One type of single-celled aquatic organism called a ciliate – a microscopic, trumpet-shaped blob that attaches to surfaces, anemone-like – offers a striking example of randomness in a simple, brainless organism. When researchers fired a jet of tiny plastic beads at it, mimicking the encroachment of a predator, it sometimes reacted by contracting, and sometimes by detaching and floating away, with unpredictable 50:50 odds. Evidently, you don’t even need so much as a nervous system to get random.
Generating behavioral alternatives isn’t the same as agency, but it’s a necessary condition. It’s in the selection from this range of choices that true agency consists. This selection is goal-motivated: an organism does this and not that because it figures this would make it more likely to attain the desired outcome.
In humans, this selection process often entails some hefty cogitation by dedicated neural circuitry, notes the cognitive scientist Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. For us, ‘free’ choice is typically effortful, involving the conscious contemplation of imagined future scenarios based on past experience. It demands an ability to construct an image of the self within our environment: a ‘rich cognitive representation’ that allows those scenarios to be imagined in sufficient detail to reliably predict outcomes. It also requires an ability to maintain a focus on our goal in the face of distractions and disturbances.
None of this need be uniquely human, Hills says – we know that other animals ‘selectively replay patterns of neural activation associated with past experience’, for example, as if preparing for similar encounters in the future. But it might, he says, demand a specific ‘architecture’ of mind.
However, if we’re going to ascribe agency to cells and ciliates, we can’t make it depend on cognitive resources this elaborate. But these simple biological entities aren’t alone in showing an ability to choose among behavioral alternatives; such an ability appears to be present in systems that have no explicit biology in them at all.
To get to the nub of agency, we need to leave biology behind. Instead, we can look at agency through the prism of the physics of information, and reflect on the role that information processing plays in bringing about change.
This isn’t a new approach. In the mid-19th century, physical scientists figured that all change in the Universe is governed by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the change must lead to an increase in entropy – loosely speaking, in the overall amount of disorder among particles. It’s because of the second law that heat moves spontaneously from hot regions to colder ones.
In 1867, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell dreamt up a loophole in the law. He imagined an ingenious microscopic being, later dubbed Maxwell’s demon, that has a box full of gas particles, divided into two compartments. The demon operates a mechanism that sifts ‘hot’ from ‘cold’ particles by letting them pass selectively through a trapdoor in the dividing wall between the chambers. As a result, the hot (faster-moving) particles would gather on one side, and the cold (slower) in the other. Normally, the second law dictates the opposite: that heat spreads and dissipates until the gas has a uniform temperature throughout.
The demon in the thought experiment conquers this thermodynamic decree by having access to microscopic information about the particles’ motion – information we could never hope to perceive. Tellingly, the demon exhibits agency in making use of this information. It has a goal, to attain which it chooses to open the trapdoor for some particles and not for others – depending not just on their energy, but on which compartment they’re in.
To try to understand if Maxwell’s hypothetical demon really undermined the second law, later scientists replaced the ill-defined and capricious demon with a hypothetical mechanism. You could manage it with a fairly simple electronically controlled trapdoor, say, coupled with devices that can sense the particles’ speed or energy. This amounts to putting in purpose and agency by intentional design: specifying how the information gathered from the environment will be used to decide on the course of action (to open the trapdoor or not). The demon then becomes an ‘information engine’: a mechanism that harnesses information to do its work (here, building up a reservoir of hot gas).
It was by automating the demon in this way that it was finally tamed. In the 1960s, the physicist Rolf Landauer showed that the demon-machine would ultimately have to reimburse the entropy losses it racks up as it segregates hot and cold molecules. To use the information it gathers about particles’ motions, the device has to first record them in a memory of some kind. But any real memory has a finite capacity – and a box of gas contains a lot of molecules. So the memory has to be wiped every so often to make room for new information. And that erasure, Landauer showed, has an unavoidable entropic overhead. All the entropy lost by separating hot from cold is recouped by resetting the memory.
Landauer’s analysis revealed a deep link between thermodynamics and information. Information – more specifically, the capacity to store information about the environment – is a kind of fuel that must be constantly replenished.
What the demon achieves is precisely the characteristic of living organisms identified in the 1940s by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger: it creates and sustains order in the face of the tendency of the second law to erode it. Though he wasn’t the first to do so, Schrödinger pointed out that organisms too must ultimately pay for their internal organization and order by increasing the entropy of their surroundings – that’s why our bodies generate heat. His seminal little book What Is Life? (1944), based on a series of lectures, had a big impact on several scientists who turned from physics to consider how life operates – including Francis Crick, who, with James Watson, discovered the structure of DNA in 1953.
Schrödinger believed that the apparent agency of life was sustained entirely by encoded instructions that specify its responses to the environment. And it’s certainly true that the mechanical readout of instructions shaped by evolution and stored in some molecular form – which Schrödinger called an ‘aperiodic crystal’, and which Crick and Watson identified as DNA – explains a great deal about how living things work. But that view leaves no room for the contingent, contextual and versatile operation of real agency, whereby the agent has a goal but no prescribed route to attaining it.
It’s one of the great missed opportunities in science that Schrödinger failed to connect his view of life as organization maintained against entropic decline with the work his fellow physicists were doing on Maxwell’s demon. This is the missing link that could release biology from having to pretend that agency is just a convenient fiction, a mirage of evolution. ‘What is needed to fully understand biological agency,’ say the complex-systems theorist Stuart Kauffman and the philosopher Philip Clayton, ‘has not yet been formulated: an adequate theory of organization.’
This link between organization, information and agency is finally starting to appear, as scientists now explore the fertile intersection of information theory, thermodynamics and life. In 2012, Susanne Still, working with Gavin Crooks of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and others, showed why it’s vital for a goal-directed entity such as a cell, an animal or even a tiny demon to have a memory. With a memory, any agent can store a representation of the environment that it can then draw upon to make predictions about the future, enabling it to anticipate, prepare and make the best possible use of its energy – that is, to operate efficiently.
‘Most real systems, especially biological ones, have “perception filters”,’ says Still, ‘which means they can’t access the underlying true state of reality, but only can measure some aspects thereof. They are forced to operate on partial knowledge and need to make inferences.’
By considering how real-world ‘information-engines’ might cope with the fact that the world can’t be observed in its entirety, Still, Crooks and their colleagues found that efficiency depends on an ability to focus only on information that’s useful for predicting what the environment is going to be like moments later, and filtering out the rest. In other words, it’s a matter of identifying and storing meaningful information: that which is useful to attaining your goal. The more ‘useless’ information the agent stores in its memory, the researchers showed, the less efficient its actions. In short, efficient agents are discerning ones.
How, though, does an agent ever find the way to achieve its goal, if it doesn’t come preprogrammed for every eventuality it will encounter? For humans, that often tends to come from a mixture of deliberation, experience and instinct: heavyweight cogitation, in other words. Yet it seems that even ‘minimal agents’ can find inventive strategies, without any real cognition at all. In 2013, the computer scientists Alex Wissner-Gross at Harvard University and Cameron Freer, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, showed that a simple optimization rule can generate remarkably lifelike behavior in simple objects devoid of biological content: for example, inducing them to collaborate to achieve a task or apparently to use other objects as tools.
Wissner-Gross and Freer carried out computer simulations of disks that moved around in a two-dimensional space, a little like cells or bacteria swimming on a microscope slide. The disk could follow any path through the space, but subject to a simple overarching rule: the disk’s movements and interactions had to maximize the entropy it generated over a specified window of time. Crudely speaking, this tended to entail keeping open the largest number of options for how the object might move – for example, it might elect to stay in open areas and avoid getting trapped in confined spaces. This requirement acted like a force – what Wissner-Gross and Freer dubbed an ‘entropic force’ – that guided the object’s movements.
Oddly, the resulting behaviors looked like intelligent choices, made to secure a goal. In one example, a large disk ‘used’ a small disk to extract a second small disk from a narrow tube – a process that looked remarkably like tool use. In another example, two disks in separate compartments synchronized their movements to manipulate a larger disk into a position where they could interact with it – behavior that looked like social cooperation.
Here, then, is a possible story we can tell about how genuine biological agency arises, without recourse to mysticism. Evolution creates and reinforces goals – energy-efficiency, say – but doesn’t specify the way to attain them. Rather, an organism selected for efficiency will evolve a memory to store and represent aspects of its environment that are salient to that end. That’s what creates the raw material for agency.
Meanwhile, an organism selected to avoid predation or to forage efficiently will evolve an ability to generate alternative courses of action in response to essentially identical stimuli: to create options and flexibility. At first, the choice among them might be random. But organisms with memories that permit ‘contemplation’ of alternative actions, based on their internal representations of the environment, could make more effective choices. Brains aren’t essential for that (though they can help). There, in a nutshell, is agency.
At the very least, the latest research suggests that it’s wrong to regard agency as just a curious byproduct of blind evolutionary forces. Nor should we believe that it’s an illusion produced by our tendency to project human attributes onto the world. Rather, agency appears to be an occasional, remarkable property of matter, and one we should feel comfortable invoking when offering causal explanations of what we’re observing.
‘Agents are causes of things in the Universe,’ says the neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell of Trinity College Dublin.
A genuine theory of agency might finally help to clarify what science can say about free will. For that’s arguably little more than agency plus consciousness: a capacity to make decisions that influence the world in a purposive manner, and to be aware of ourselves doing it. On this view, the problem of free will adds no new hurdles to the (admittedly daunting) problem of consciousness. Moreover, bringing in agency allows free will to be considered from an evolutionary and a neuroscientific point of view, distinct from philosophical problems of determinism.
The crucial point of all this is that agency – like consciousness, and indeed life itself – isn’t just something you can perceive by squinting at the fine details. Nor is it some second-order effect, with particles behaving ‘as if’ they’re agents, perhaps even conscious agents, when enough of them get together. Agents are genuine causes in their own right, and don’t deserve to be relegated to scare quotes. Those who object can do so only because we’ve so far failed to find adequate theories to explain how agency comes about. But maybe that’s just because we’ve failed to seek them in the right places – until now.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-biological-research-putting-purpose-back-into-life?utm_source=pocket-newtab
to watch a macrophage engulf bacteria, click on this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZYLeIJwe4w
Mary:
ending on beauty:
THE COMING OF LIGHT
Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.
~ Mark Strand
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