Ah! People need to rise early to see the sun in all its splendor, for his brightness seldom lasts the day through. The morning of the day and the morning of life are but too much alike. ~ Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
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I ASK MY MOTHER TO SING
She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.
I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.
But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.
Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song.
~ Li-Young Lee
If you want tears in your life, perhaps the most reliable way is to become an immigrant. Of course no one wants tears (and we are not talking of the rare tears of joy). They happen, especially when the light is turned off and it's time to sleep, not weep. But they can happen any time when something "triggers" the memories of the lost homeland. A song or a poem can be especially effective.
I don't mean that this crying oneself to sleep or tearing up when hearing a song continues all life long. The first two years are the hardest. Then, as with all grief, time really does heal. It doesn't heal completely, but enough so that the present and the future make the memories of childhood more remote, belonging as if to another lifetime.
But when it's still relatively early in the process, the tears flow the way Li-Young Lee beautifully describes:
But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.
I’m reading The Stranger again slowly. The sky is usually a malevolent thing. It quakes in the terrible heat as our indifferent hero passes beneath it. But one day he’s at the beach with a beautiful girl, and he narrates, “I had the whole sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold.” It might be the one moment of vibrant life, truly lived, in this entire, perfect book. Sometimes all people ever get is one sentence. ~ Ryan Blacketter
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SOLZHENITSYN AND THE ENGINE OF HISTORY
~ It is a conceit of the modern world that history is governed by reason. Reason is like an axe to the living, growing tree of history, with its convoluted branches, each cell and molecule emerging as a matter of sheer contingency, one building upon the next—so that great events arise from innumerable plots and threads. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a series of exhausting books, totaling thousands of pages, about unreason in history and the subsequent creation of the modern world, in which the axe of reason, as he puts it, is rare, and when it does fall sometimes creates absolute terror.
The Red Wheel, with its “discrete” “nodes” or “knots,” is composed of August 1914, November 1916, March 1917, and April 1917, with March 1917 alone accounting for several long volumes. This is the principal work of the Nobel laureate’s life, to which Solzhenitsyn dedicated several decades and into which poured all his thoughts about the senseless chaos of the modern and postmodern worlds, all told through the prism of that most contingent of events, the Russian Revolution. That signal event begins with a complex and bungled war and ends with a shaky Bolshevik coup that set in motion a death machine virtually unrivaled in history. And none of this might have happened had Russia’s resolutely effective and moderate prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, who pursued a “middle line of social development,” not been assassinated in September 1911 at the Kiev opera house.
“When things are too clear, they are no longer interesting,” says one of the author’s characters. Solzhenitsyn, far more than other writers, uses his characters to announce counterintuitive and unpopular truths. He knows that a bundle of passions can decide a seemingly clear-cut and rational action, to say nothing of the most consequential decisions that can be decided by a momentary mood.
Hindsight is lazy in this regard, Solzhenitsyn intimates, since it reduces complexity to a counterfeit clarity. He replaces hindsight with a multitude of characters thinking and acting in the moment, so that at the beginning of World War I, “The clock of fate was suspended over the whole of East Prussia, and its six-mile-long pendulum was ticking audibly as it swung from the German to the Russian side and back again.” Indeed, the life and death of whole battalions of men, as the author vividly demonstrates, can be effected by a misplaced pencil movement on a general’s dimly lit field map.
Solzhenitsyn’s dissection of the Russian defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg, which occupies much of the action of August 1914, should be studied at every military war college. Without that failure, there might well have been no Romanov abdication, no Lenin, thus no twentieth century as we know it.
Solzhenitsyn’s presentation of the battle over hundreds of pages is panoramic, immersive, and masterly, the equivalent in typewriter ink of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Fight Between Carnival and Lent. As with any writer of great epics, Solzhenitsyn knows many disparate things: the technicalities of artillery formations and field maneuvers; the mental process by which semi-starving, over-extended, and ill-led soldiers become looters; how small changes in terrain affect forced marches; as well as the placement of the stars in the night sky and the names of many Orthodox saints.
War between Russia and Germany begins in a whirlpool of emotion. Elation was general, especially in Moscow and Petrograd. After all, this was one war you “could not reject.” “Historic obligations” to Slavic brothers in Serbia were sacred. “A European war cannot be a prolonged conflict.”
Of course, the popular naïveté preceding World War I is an old story that is the stuff of many books. But Solzhenitsyn goes on to illuminate in his saga how the same innocence will carry through the entire revolutionary process in Russia, in which phrases like “war” and “revolution” meant very different things to a people whose frame of reference extended only to the end of the nineteenth century.
Thus they had no conception of how history could wildly swerve in a new technological age, so that the new military conflict would be nothing like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and the revolution to come would yield nothing like the French one of 1789, which even with its Reign of Terror was altogether benign compared to what was in store for Russia. People sleepwalked backwards into the horrors of the twentieth century, blindly slashed by its revolving blades. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t tell us this; he illustrates it through dozens of fully realized characters.
World War I on the Eastern Front begins with the uneasy specter of culture conjuring itself up. Solzhenitsyn concentrates on deterministic aspects of reality that our policy and intellectual elite want to avoid. To wit, a Russian soldier is amazed at the tidiness of the German landscape the moment he crosses the frontier: the neat regimentation of the brick houses, the pigsties, and the wellheads. The electric lighting deep in the rural interior and the well-kept roads through the clean, practically shaven forests bespeak an “inhuman cleanliness” and “parade-ground order” shocking to a Russian peasant accustomed to the filthy dreariness of his home and village.
From this flows dozens of pages of description of Russian military disorganization and slovenliness, with a chain of command and general officer corps corrupted by a thoroughly rotten czarist system. Russian generals make alcoholic toasts over heavy lunches in the middle of a campaign. A withdrawal is ordered after gaining ground in a horrific battle to protect a general’s reputation in the expectation of further loses. At the highest levels there is almost always the avoidance of risk and the rewarding of mediocrity.
Solzhenitsyn’s sympathy is rather with the middle-level officers, who “all bore the indelible impress of a similar background: army tradition, long spells of garrison service in a world isolated from the rest of society; a sense of alienation, of being despised by that society and ridiculed by liberal writers.” Throughout these pages Solzhenitsyn reveals himself as the ultimate patriot and reasoned conservative, who, with a deep belief in an Orthodox Christian God, recognizes the primacy of culture and empathizes with the military, even as he must expose every aspect of a decadent and autocratic imperial system that has failed its own people.
Solzhenitsyn’s uniqueness—that is, his greatness—rests on his deep political conservatism, married to a narrative genius akin to Tolstoy’s, encompassing, like the earlier master, just so many universes: from the horrors of the Romanian front, to the exaltations of falling in love in middle age, to the fantastic dinners in private rooms, with masses of smoked salmon and sturgeon, bouillon, sour cream, and rowanberry vodka.
Meanwhile, congeries of parties and factions within parties are left to debate among themselves. Loose, drunken talk postulates that if only the government would change, everything would become better and more humane. There is almost a romance about the future, about any fate save for the present. The author isn’t so much writing a series of novels as unloading everything he knows and thinks about pre-revolutionary Russia, and constructing a tight philosophical argument about it, which glints through multiple layers of description.
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Tyranny is inseparable from the mob. Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-Jewish Nobel laureate in literature, made this the theme of his 1960 masterwork, Crowds and Power, traumatized as he was by the mobs he had seen in Vienna in the decade prior to Hitler’s takeover. The crowd, Canetti suggests, emerges ultimately from vulnerability and the consequent need of the individual for conformity with others. Thus the lonely individual exerts dominance through participation in a crowd that speaks with one voice.
Once that crowd has achieved a sufficient size, others are coerced to join it, or at least not to interfere with it. From lockdown, to isolation, to loneliness, to explosion in the streets, that is: one contingent event leading to another, as in the expanding branches of a tree. Obviously our own society has institutional breaks and barriers that pre-revolutionary Russia utterly lacked. Think of our contemporary drama as a much subtler yet relevant deviation of Solzhenitsyn’s story.
“The crowd!” Solzhenitsyn writes. “A strange special being, both human and inhuman . . . where each individual was released from his usual responsibility and was multiplied in strength.” The psychology of the crowd, or mob, is thus: “show us who [next] to tear to pieces.”
And the mobs that are the most lethal for civilization are composed of the young. Listen to one of Solzhenitsyn’s characters:
“Idolized children despise their parents, and when they get a bit older they bully their countrymen. Tribes with an ancestor cult have endured for centuries. No tribe would survive long with a youth cult.”
The problem with youth, as the aging travel writer Paul Theroux, among others, has explained, is that there is a place where it cannot go, but which its parents and grandparents have experienced in all its vividness: the past. The young have never seen the past and therefore have no intimate realization of it. Having lived enough years in the past makes one humble, unsteady, aware of the imperfections of life and of fate, and therefore more immune to ideal solutions for society. To trust youth blindly, to see in youth the answer to our own sins and imperfections, may hold some appeal, but it is also dimwitted. Youth can break down an institutional order, but building a new one is another story, especially as the mobs seeking to ransack the dotty Romanov royal house had no idea about how technology in the twentieth century would assist repression in the new regime aborning. ~
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/2/solzhenitsyn-the-engine-of-history
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Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with those things. ~Václav Havel, playwright and former president of the Czech Republic
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LIKE A DYSTOPIAN NOVEL: NEWEST QANON CONSPIRACY THEORY
~ Currently the most popular conspiracy theory in QAnon-world is one stipulating that Donald Trump, while ensconced in Mar-a-Lago, has formed a secret government, reclaimed unlimited power over America and, having arrested members of the Biden administration, Congressional Democratic leadership, and thousands of top Deep State functionaries, is having them executed by hanging nightly in the tunnels under the White House. Purported to serve as a proof of the above, there are blurry images of actual hangings — which in fact took place in Kuwait in 2003 — circulating on countless QAnon sites.
What can one say? Yes, they are immensely ignorant and stupid and legitimately deranged — but the most disturbing part of it is the sheer intensity and the repellent gloating quality of their hatred and their undisguised bloodlust. They would not, even in theory, be satisfied with any lame peaceful, bloodless, weakly nonviolent electoral victory — no: they want to execute, to torture, to kill their perceived enemies, the enemies of Trump. They want to cause maximum amount of hurt. They hate -- limitlessly, boundlessly; and their seething hatred can never be sated.
Whether they realize it or not, they hate themselves — and it is unbearable to them. The idea that they themselves may be responsible for the real or imaginary failure of their lives is not one they can live with. And so, by transference, they hate those who, as Trump has told them over and over again, conspired to ruin their lives, by letting them know they no longer are the sole, undivided masters and owners of America: that terrible collective OTHER — their fellow Americans who don't look or love or think like them.
The simple — and awful — truth of the matter is, a very large of part the American population has never been able to accept the idea that all men and women are created equal. ~ Mikhail Iossel
Oriana:
Almost beyond insane. I wonder if a genuine paranoid schizophrenic is the source of these delusions, which then become collective schizophrenia. There is such a thing. In a cult, if a leader is psychotic, the followers accept and believe his delusions.
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MEANWHILE IN RUSSIA
~ A doctor who treated Alexei Navalny last year after the Russian opposition leader was poisoned has suddenly died, the hospital where he worked announced Thursday.
Sergey Maximishin served as deputy chief physician at the Omsk emergency hospital that immediately treated Navalny following the poison attack that the opposition leader has blamed on the Russian government. Maximishin died "suddenly" at the age of 55, the hospital said.
"[Maximishin] knew more than anyone else about Alexey's condition so I can't dismiss possibility of foul play," Leonid Volkov, Navalny's chief of staff, told CNN. “However Russia's health care system is very poor and it's not uncommon for doctors of his age to suddenly die. I doubt there will any investigation into his death.” ~
https://thehill.com/policy/international/537556-doctor-who-treated-navalny-after-poisoning-suddenly-dies?fbclid=IwAR33wzS8gXPgkTAtCx--03bQivDvmIIzdS_fQ7kaIlIiGhG1q8_TdEvvJuY
Oriana:
The Sudden Death Syndrome is not uncommon in Russia. Journalists and others have an odd tendency to fall out of windows or from balconies.
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“One day somebody will explain to me why it is that, at a time when science has never been wiser, or the truth more stark, or human knowledge more available, populists and liars are in such pressing demand.” ~ John le Carré
Oriana:
I think Hannah Arendt gave one plausible answer: Science and truth (reality) are too complex for many, who long for simple, comforting lies. Someone died of a preventable disease? At least he’s now “in a better place.” Massive fires in California? It’s the Jews (their giant space laser).
And then there's fear. Demagogues appeal to fear, e.g. Jews want to replace us (and if not Jews, then Mexicans, Muslims, or whoever can be perceived as a threat at the time); women are uppity, immigrants steal our jobs, etc.
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“A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.” ~ Henry Wallace, Vice-President, 1941-45
THE KNOW NOTHING PARTY AND QANON: WHAT HAPPENS TO CONSPIRACY-DRIVEN PARTIES
~ Though these groups had actual names, such as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, their membership at first was guarded and secretive. Asked about their views and political plans, members would reply only: “I know nothing.” The nickname was born.
Fringe movements need both oxygen and fuel. The panic over an influx of Irish-Catholics was the oxygen, and the fuel was provided by the break-up of one of the two major American political parties, the Whigs, after 1850. The Whig Party was never a coherent coalition, and when it finally cracked under the weight of North-South division over slavery, the Know Nothings suddenly emerged from the shadows to become a viable political force.
Given that there were both Northern and Southern contingents, the Know Nothing movement avoided the issue of slavery, instead directing the passions of its supporters toward laws against drinking (the Irish were seen as overly fond of drink; they were Catholics; they were in thrall to the Pope; hence alcohol was evil); laws against immigration; laws in cities such as Chicago banning any new immigrants from municipal jobs; laws to prevent immigrants from attaining citizenship.
These were not marginal moves. At their height, the Know Nothings, newly christened the Native American Party (long before that connoted the original inhabitants of North America), controlled the state legislatures and governorships of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Maine and California. They also held numerous seats in state assemblies throughout the South, and they sent more than 40 representatives to the House and several senators, all adamant.
Most of them supported stringent nativist, anti-immigrant legislation; all emerged from conspiratorial clubs that had spread theories about possible Papist aggression and plots against the sovereignty of the United States. (In their grotesque accusations about Catholic priests and nuns strangling babies and holding young women against their will, it’s not hard to see an early version of QAnon’s core obsession with imagined globalist pedophiles.) In 1856, the name was shortened to the American Party and its leaders nominated former president Millard Fillmore as their candidate for president under the slogan “Americans Must Rule America.”
And then, almost as quickly as the Know Nothings surged, they split apart. Formed from scattered groups sharing a sensibility and an animus into a loose national coalition, the party was never tightly organized, much like the Tea Party in our time. Northern and Southern branches were just as divided over the issue of slavery as was the Democratic Party in the 1850s, which also began to break apart into two distinct camps. The rise of the newly founded Republican Party in the northern states also siphoned off Know Nothing support. Fillmore managed to get 21 percent of the vote in the 1856 presidential election and win Maryland (which was then bitterly divided over slavery, which was then legal in the state). But that was not the start of national party; it was the end of one.
Though the political movement collapsed, the anti-immigrant nativism of the Know Nothings never really went away. Even during the Civil War, when all other issues were subsumed, the passions stirred by the Know Nothings were never far from the surface. The New York Draft Riots of 1863 were in part an uprising of Irish immigrants after years of discrimination, with African-Americans bearing the brunt of their rage. After the Civil War, a Republican-controlled Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned all immigration for 20 years. Those currents also worked their way into the Populist and Progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century, which ultimately became a prominent strain of both parties, the Republicans under Teddy Roosevelt and the Democrats during the Woodrow Wilson years.
There are lessons here for the Republican Party today. History doesn’t repeat itself. It does, as Mark Twain quipped, often rhyme, which means that its echoes resonate over subsequent generations in ways that can offer guidance, though never clear pathways. One lesson for 2021 Republicans is that being purely against something and someone can only take you so far. The Know Nothings needed that surge in immigration of the 1840s, and needed economic and political conditions to be perfectly aligned, to create an opening for a movement whose ideas were largely unidimensional, or at least monotonal.
In their policy goals, the Know Nothings were in part a reformist party representing working Americans against the elite; they ended up passing a variety of laws about working conditions that presaged the union and labor movements after the Civil War. But the movement was founded, and grew, purely on the strength of anger and resentment. And only because of instability in the political system — the collapse of the Whigs and the widening divisions between northern and southern Democrats — was there an opening for them in the first place.
Even then, populist outrage could only propel them to state houses and to the House of Representatives. Then, as now, those are the most fruitful avenues for grassroots and single-issue campaigns. Gaining larger blocs of support as a national movement is much more challenging and requires organization and coherence, and the ability to build and maintain some kind of coalition. Conspiracy theories, which were the core DNA of the Know Nothings, have coherence in their way, but they do best when they avoid the light of public scrutiny. As a local phenomenon, Know Nothingism thrived; as a national movement, it could only go so far before it splintered, fractured and collapsed.
That is one likely path for the Republican Party today, if the Trumpian-conspiracy wing keeps its vital place in the party. Trump reached office by loudly giving voice to undercurrents that the Republican Party had largely kept in check, and had he been re-elected, it’s of course possible that his long grip on power would have led to a more potent national movement. But even then, he never truly managed to deliver results, or to bend the government to his loose collection of ideas; a faction with one primary ethos subsumed to one primary leader could only have been viable long-term if Trump had actually managed to deconstruct the government systems in a way that he largely failed to do.
Without that kind of success to build a broader base, the QAnon wing now threatens to push Republicans much closer to the fate of Know Nothing Party, even though they don’t know it. Many Republican voters, like Know Nothing voters in the mid-1850s, have legitimate grievances about economic equity and opportunity, but the party itself rests on deeper and more exclusionary currents of conspiracy, us-versus-them, anti-immigration and nativism. Trump remains the party’s most important figurehead, even out of power, but the fervent supporters who keep him there aren’t mainstream voters but hard-to-control online cells and local parties.
That doesn’t mean that all GOP voters buy into all of that — not even close. But it means that the party itself will struggle to survive as an organizing force without that energy, and will be limited as a national party because of it. That limit is the lesson of the Know Nothings.
It’s possible that the Republicans will evolve, even though the Know Nothings couldn’t. It’s also possible that political movements have changed enough in the early 21st century that a minority party with a conspiratorial bent and a small menu of adversarial issues can consolidate power in a large and messy democracy. But the latter isn’t likely, and it wouldn’t be a good bet for the Republican Party to think that it found a viable model after four years of Trump.
A final lesson of the Know Nothings is that those voters aren’t going anywhere even if the party begins to fall apart. Some may be lost to conspiracy thinking and hence best not indulged; some may be racist (though some Democratic voters are all those things as well). Many are simply legitimately angry at a political class that has failed them, and an economy that has changed too quickly and too disruptively, and the vehicle they’ve chosen is a deeply flawed one. The task ahead is to address the plaints that are distinct from conspiracy and nativism — and to recognize that some of the voters do know something, even as their party knows nothing. ~
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/30/heres-what-happens-to-a-conspiracy-driven-party-463944?fbclid=IwAR31oZ60kiiBD8hDSlFIbPbKfvLu5SQ64epHGL3s9iBfULlOZGfchJZjqiQ
WHY SO MANY NAZIS MANAGED TO ESCAPE: THE RED CROSS AND THE VATICAN
~ The Red Cross and the Vatican both helped thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators to escape after the second world war, according to a book that pulls together evidence from unpublished documents.
The Red Cross has previously acknowledged that its efforts to help refugees were used by Nazis because administrators were overwhelmed, but the research suggests the numbers were much higher than thought.
Gerald Steinacher, a research fellow at Harvard University, was given access to thousands of internal documents in the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The documents include Red Cross travel documents issued mistakenly to Nazis in the postwar chaos. They throw light on how and why mass murderers such as Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie and thousands of others evaded capture by the allies.
By comparing lists of wanted war criminals to travel documents, Steinacher says Britain and Canada alone inadvertently took in around 8,000 former Waffen-SS members in 1947, many on the basis of valid documents issued mistakenly.
The documents – which are discussed in Steinacher's book Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's henchmen fled justice – offer a significant insight into Vatican thinking, particularly, because its own archives beyond 1939 are still closed. The Vatican has consistently refused to comment.
Steinacher believes the Vatican's help was based on a hoped-for revival of European Christianity and dread of the Soviet Union. But through the Vatican Refugee Commission, war criminals were knowingly provided with false identities.
The Red Cross, overwhelmed by millions of refugees, relied substantially on Vatican references and the often cursory Allied military checks in issuing travel papers, known as 10.100s.
It believed it was primarily helping innocent refugees although correspondence between Red Cross delegations in Genoa, Rome and Geneva shows it was aware Nazis were getting through.
"Although the ICRC has publicly apologized, its action went well beyond helping a few people," said Steinacher.
Steinacher says the documents indicate that the Red Cross, mostly in Rome or Genoa, issued at least 120,000 of the 10.100s, and that 90% of ex-Nazis fled via Italy, mostly to Spain, and North and South America – notably Argentina.
Former SS members often mixed with genuine refugees and presented themselves as stateless ethnic Germans to gain transit papers. Jews trying to get to Palestine via Italy were sometimes smuggled over the border with escaping Nazis.
Steinacher says that individual Red Cross delegations issued war criminals with 10.100s "out of sympathy for individuals … political attitude, or simply because they were overburdened". Stolen documents were also used to whisk Nazis to safety. He said: "They were really in a dilemma. It was difficult. It wanted to get rid of the job. Nobody wanted to do it."
The Red Cross refused to comment directly on Steinacher's findings but the organization says on its website: "The ICRC has previously deplored the fact that Eichmann and other Nazi criminals misused its travel documents to cover their tracks.”
It seems that the Red Cross didn’t intentionally aid Nazi war criminals. The Vatican — that’s a more complicated story. How helping the Nazis escape would bring on a Christian revival in Europe is beyond my understanding, but then logic and religion never met. And besides, that seems to have been just a rationalization, a cover-up.
John Guzlowski:
The Vatican appointed Bishop Hudal, a Nazi sympathizer, to help minister to the Nazis. He helped the commander of Treblinka and Eichmann and many others make it to South America. What was the justification?
Hudal explained in his memoir why he felt justified in doing it.
“The Allies' War against Germany was not a crusade, but the rivalry of economic complexes for whose victory they had been fighting. This so-called business ... used catchwords like democracy, race, religious liberty and Christianity as a bait for the masses. All these experiences were the reason why I felt duty bound after 1945 to devote my whole charitable work mainly to former National Socialists and Fascists, especially to so-called 'war criminals’.”
Oriana:
That furthers the Nazi lie that they were fighting the Bolsheviks, or “Judeo-Bolshevism” (the term is much more coarse in Polish, definitely anti-Semitic).
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for more details about the Nazi “ratlines,” there is this startling article from Deutsche Welle: https://www.dw.com/en/the-ratlines-what-did-the-vatican-know-about-nazi-escape-routes/a-52555068?fbclid=IwAR0xTaxXjNup05yzgyIAbnS_yrAdXnwInXIEsGlV4lLlo5hUx0d0qMepj60
Mary:
There is a thread that runs through the discussions of the Russian Revolution and world War I, of the Red Cross and the Vatican and their roles in assisting Nazis to flee justice after World War II, Christianity and its latest spawn, QAnon, as conspiracy theories — and even the question of why there is something rather than nothing. All of these issues can be seen from two diametrically opposing perspectives about how things occur. Either almost everything hangs on accidental acts, random congruences of possibility that turn history dramatically one way or another, without which there would have been, for instance, no WWI and I — or, all is determined by deliberate, and usually sinister conspiracies, that may be concocted by madmen from the grossest of prejudices and the worst intentions, but gain great power in the ways religions do, are in fact religious cults, and have dangerous and deleterious effects on the world.
Neither one of these perspectives is accurate, I think. Both are rooted in our lack of historical memory and understanding, and in our essential and most primitive fears. The idea that the events of history are determined accidentally is a frightening proposition, that, if correct, gives us little control, little power, and little choice. It also tends to discount that events and actions are not only determined but overdetermined by a multitude of previous and surrounding circumstances. Things can be understood in context; nothing comes "out of the blue”...and to some degree or another can be predictable. There is room for understanding and human agency that is neither blind nor random.
Conspiracy theories erase the existential discomfort of a "random universe" by constantly assuming and assigning meaning, usually sinister and religious in tone, to everything. Within the conspiracy theory everything is clear — this is the truth, here are your evil enemies, here is your savior; to save yourself and your chosen world, all you need do is listen and obey. Conspiracy adherents are so comforted and authenticated by their membership in the cult, they are committed to all its big lies, and as we have learned again and again, they will happily die for the cult rather than disavow it. Think Jim Jones and his Kool aid, and the Christian martyrs, think suicide bombers.
Take only one instance in the discussion...the involvement of the Red Cross and the involvement of the Vatican in assisting the escape of Nazis after WWII. How do we understand this? Certainly the Red Cross was overwhelmed with processing so many, and it seems this is judged to be largely the result of mistakes and inadvertence. The Red Cross has admitted this. On the Vatican question, there is less information, because the Vatican has refused to give it, sealing its records. This in itself is suspicious...why conceal if you have nothing to hide? Certainly what we do know about the church's actions and habitual policies regarding sexual abusers in its ranks, clung to so determinedly for so long, does not inspire much trust.
If the church does not value children I would not expect it to work hard to protect Jews, long treated as historical enemies, long subject to persecution. This is not to say individual Christians did not sometimes heroically oppose the Nazi machine of war and genocide, but to consider the position of the institution and its leadership.
The understanding of these issues is neither simple nor easy, and we may never know all about it, but either concluding all was random and accidental, or all was the result of a conspiracy, are both inadequate.
Oriana:
It seems to me that there is at times an accident that sparks what was extremely flammable, i.e. a catastrophe waiting to happen — I'm thinking chiefly of the two world wars. The driver of the Archduke’s car apparently made a wrong turn — a different route had been planned for security reasons, but the driver forgot. Still, even if Archduke Ferdinand had not been assassinated, can we really assume that WW1 would have never happened?
Likewise Hitler wasn’t entirely devoid of artistic talent and skill, even if he lacked originality. Suppose that the Vienna Art Academy had admitted him, rather than rejecting him twice. It’s possible but by no means certain that he would have contented himself with being a minor painter for the rest of his life.
Now, I agree with Milosz that it’s wrong to think that just because something DID happen, it HAD to happen. On the other hand, when we see the multitude of factors and trends that went into the making of a particular event, we realize that any number of accidents could have become a spark that set the world on fire. No, it did not absolutely had to happen, but it was a catastrophe “waiting to happen.”
As for the Church and the Nazis, there is no simple answer. One can point to this or that anti-Semitic bishop, and/or one can point to those members of the clergy who tried to save Jews, risking their lives (instant execution) or being put in a concentration camp. It’s amazing, though, that one fact emerged: male Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refused to serve in Hitler’s army, ended up in concentration camps — and had the best survival rate of all the inmates. Under extreme circumstances, religious fanaticism may be best. A minor fact, but an instructive one, teaching us humility when it comes to making any big claims. It’s all much more complicated than it looks.
Still one more thought on the Church and the Nazis, related to the idea that the molested children's suffering doesn't seem important to the church any more than the question of the Nazis having to face the consequences of their crimes: this earthly life on the whole is not that important, considering that "eternal life" is to follow. Eternity is important, not this brief moment. And besides, we are allegedly weak-minded creatures, not capable of understanding the Divine Plan, or mysteries such as the Trinity.
But when we look at the history of the church, we can plainly see an extremely clever institution that always knew how to take care of its interests, and how to conceal its missteps.
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
“One afternoon, Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau went with him [Hawthorne] skating down the [frozen] river. Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice—very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air.” Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Dec. 30, 1842
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WHY IS THERE SOMETHING RATHER THAN NOTHING?
~ Many earlier thinkers had asked why our universe is the way it is, but Leibniz went a step further, wondering why there is a universe at all. The question is a challenging one because it seems perfectly possible that there might have been nothing whatsoever – no Earth, no stars, no galaxies, no universe. Leibniz even thought that nothing would have been “simpler and easier.” If nothing whatsoever had existed then no explanation would have been needed, not that there would have been anyone around to ask for an explanation, of course, but that’s a different matter.
Leibniz thought that the fact that there is something and not nothing requires an explanation. The explanation he gave was that God wanted to create a universe – the best one possible – which makes God the simple reason that there is something rather than nothing.
In the years since Leibniz’s death, his great question has continued to exercise philosophers and scientists, though in an increasingly secular age it is not surprising that many have been wary of invoking God as the answer to it.
Quantum gods
One kind of answer is to say that there had to be something; that it would have been impossible for there to have been nothing. This was the view of the 17th century philosopher Spinoza, who claimed that the entire universe, along with all of its contents, laws and events, had to exist, and exist in the way it does. Einstein, who counted himself a follower of Spinoza’s philosophy, appears to have held a similar view.
Other scientists, such as theoretical physicist Laurence Krauss in his popular
book “A Universe from Nothing” (2012), offer a more nuanced version of this answer to Leibniz’s great question. Krauss claims that our universe arose naturally and inevitably from the operation of gravity on the quantum vacuum, empty space teeming with virtual particles that spontaneously pop into existence before disappearing again. Krauss’s theory implies that there could not have been nothing because there has always been something: first there was gravity and the quantum vacuum, and out of that was born the universe as we know it.
Other theories in cosmology also seem to presuppose that there must always have been something in existence from which our universe arose, such as strings or membranes.
The trouble with such scientific answers to the question of “why there is something and not nothing” is that it is not clear why we should think that there had to be gravity, or the quantum vacuum, or strings, or even a universe at all. It seems entirely possible that instead of these things there could have been absolutely nothing.
Another response to Leibniz’s great question is simply to deny that it has an answer. The philosopher Bertrand Russell took this line in a famous radio debate in 1948. He was asked why he thought the universe exists, and responded “I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all.”
On this account, the universe would be what philosophers call a brute fact – something that does not have an explanation. Russell’s point was not that humans hadn’t yet explained why there is something rather than nothing but that there is no possible explanation. Those who believe that our universe is part of the larger multiverse also take this line, suggesting that the multiverse – and hence our universe – has no ultimate explanation. Although it is now a popular response to Leibniz’s great question to say the universe is ultimately inexplicable, it does have the drawback of being intellectually unsatisfying (though of course that does not mean the response is false).
The most novel answer to Leibniz’s great question is to say that our universe exists because it should. The thinking here is that all possible universes have an innate tendency to exist, but that some have a greater tendency to exist than others. The idea is actually Leibniz’s, who entertained Inthe thought that there may be a struggle for existence between possible worlds, with the very best one coming out on top as if through a process of virtual natural selection. the end he did not accept the idea, and retreated instead to the more traditional view that the universe exists because God chose to make it so.
But the idea of a virtual struggle among possible universes has appealed to some modern philosophers, who have followed it to its logical conclusion and claimed that the possible universe with the greatest tendency to exist – which might be because it is the best, or because it contains some important feature such as the conditions that permit life to arise – will actually bring itself into existence.
According to this theory, our universe becomes actual not because God or anything else made it so but because it literally lifted itself out of non-existence and made itself actual. Weird? Yes. But we shouldn’t let that put us off. After all, an extraordinary philosophical question might just require an extraordinary answer. ~
https://earthsky.org/space/why-does-universe-exist?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=aea29beb9c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-aea29beb9c-394935141
Mary:
Just one thought on why there is something rather than nothing. Maybe the universe came into being not because it should, but because it could. The difference being that agency, conscious agency, is not a requirement. It is like the movement of matter to increasing complexity and connection, from single particles to molecules, to chemically bonded structures and processes, to that ultimate organization that is a living organism, and the continuing elaboration of that to all possible forms in all possible places..a process the opposite of entropy. That needs no prime mover with intent, no creative designer...the process is inherent in particulate matter itself, in how ions and electrons behave...what can happen will happen, connection by connection, complex structures develop and interact ad infinitum. The trick would be not to start it all, but to stop it.
Oriana:
This reminds me of the time when I was eight, I think, and asked my father either how the universe began or what existed before the universe – I don't have an exact memory of my question. I do remember his answer, though. He said, "Most likely, the universe has always existed."
And now we're basically back to that: a cycle of "big bangs" and successive universes, but essentially there is always something rather than nothing. It's somehow built into reality, like gravity, which we don't understand either, regardless of the lovely theories to choose from. Existence, then, becomes an elementary property of matter/energy continuum.
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Actually, most gods in human history have not been omnipotent; they were subject to fate, and, with a few exceptions, to the capricious and disruptive force of Eros.
As an aside, why does Miller refer to god as "he"? That makes me doubt Miller's discovery. I'm not saying that Miller should have said "she" – that would be equally mistaken. But there might be an "It." Most of my friends admit to believing that "there is something out there." Not someone, but *something.*
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CREATIONISM AS A CONSPIRACY THEORY
~ Many people around the world looked on aghast as they witnessed the harm done by conspiracy theories such as QAnon and the myth of the stolen US election that led to the attack on the US Capitol Building on January 6. Yet while these ideas will no doubt fade in time, there is arguably a much more enduring conspiracy theory that also pervades America in the form of young Earth creationism. And it’s one that we cannot ignore because it is dangerously opposed to science.
In the US today, up to 40% of adults agree with the young Earth creationist claim that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve within the past 10,000 years. They also believe that living creatures are the result of “special creation” rather than evolution and shared ancestry. And that that Noah’s flood was worldwide and responsible for the sediments in the geologic column (layers of rock built up over millions of years), such as those exposed in the Grand Canyon.
Such beliefs derive from the doctrine of biblical infallibility, long accepted as integral to the faith of numerous evangelical and Baptist churches throughout the world, including the Free Church of Scotland. But I would argue that the present-day creationist movement is a fully fledged conspiracy theory. It meets all the criteria, offering a complete parallel universe with its own organizations and rules of evidence, and claims that the scientific establishment promoting evolution is an arrogant and morally corrupt elite.
This so-called elite supposedly conspires to monopolize academic employment and research grants. Its alleged objective is to deny divine authority, and the ultimate beneficiary and prime mover is Satan.
Creationism re-emerged in this form in reaction to the mid-20th century emphasis on science education. Its key text is the long-time best seller, The Genesis Flood, by John C Whitcomb and Henry M Morris. This provided the inspiration for Morris’s own Institute for Creation Research, and for its offshoots, Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International.
Ken Ham, the founder and chief executive of Answers in Genesis, is also responsible for the highly lucrative Ark Encounter theme park and Creation Museum in Kentucky. As a visit to any of these websites will show, their creationism is completely hostile to science, while paradoxically claiming to be scientific.
DEMONIZING AND DISCREDITING
These are common conspiracy theory tactics at play. Creationists go to great lengths to demonize the proponents of evolution, and to undermine the overwhelming evidence in its favor.
There are numerous organizations, among them Biologos, the American Scientific Affiliation, the Faraday Institute, and the Clergy Letter Project, which describes itself as “an an endeavor designed to demonstrate that religion and science can be compatible”, that is, promoting evolution science within the context of religious belief. Even so, creationists insist on linking together the separate topics of evolution, materialist philosophy, and the promotion of atheism.
According to Answers in Genesis, evolution science is a work of Satan, while former US Congressman Paul Broun has described it as “a lie straight from the pit of hell”. When he said that, by the way, he was a member of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
Like other conspiracy theorists, creationists immunize themselves from fact-based criticism. They label the study of the past as based on unprovable assumptions, thus disqualifying in advance the plain evidence of geology.
They then attack other evidence by focusing on specific frauds, such as Piltdown man – a hoax skeleton purportedly of a missing link between humans and other apes that was debunked more than 60 years ago – or the dinosaur-bird amalgam “Archaeoraptor”, discredited by sharp-eyed scientists before ever making it into the peer-reviewed literature (although not before making it into National Geographic).
One favorite target is Ernst Haeckel, whose pictures of embryos, published in 1874, are now considered to be seriously inaccurate. However, they do correctly draw attention to what most matters here: the features shared during development by different organisms – including humans – such as gill arches, a long tail, and eyes on the side rather than the front of the head, confirming they have a common ancestry.
Haeckel’s name appears on the Answers in Genesis website 92 times. He is also the subject of a lengthy chapter in Jonathan Wells’ Icons of Evolution; Science or Myth?. This book, which even has its own high school study guide, was what first convinced me, back in 2013, that creationism was a conspiracy theory.
It is a splendid example of creationist tactics, using long-rectified shortcomings (such as those in early studies on Darwinian evolution in peppered moths, in response to changing colors following reduced pollution) to imply that the entire science is fraudulent. Wells has a real PhD in biology, a PhD acquired with the specific goal of “destroying Darwinism” – meaning evolution science – from the inside.
Wells is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank which promotes creationism under the banner of “Intelligent Design”, and is also linked to other conspiracy theories, such as claims that the consensus on climate change is bogus, and that last November’s US presidential election was stolen.
Conspiracy theories are always driven by some underlying concern or agenda. The theory that Obama’s birth certificate was a forgery, or that the 2020 US election was stolen, are about political legitimacy and will fade as the politicians promoting them fade from memory. The idea that COVID-19 does not exist is proving a little harder to dislodge, but scientists, such as those behind Respectful Insolence, are organizing to fight back on science denial and misinformation.
I fear that the creationist conspiracy theory will not be so short-lived. It is driven by a deep-seated power struggle within religious communities, between modernists and literalists; between those who regard scripture as coming to us through human authors, however inspired, and those who regard it as a perfect supernatural revelation. And that is a struggle that will be with us for a long time to come. ~
CORONAVIRUS, SLEEP, AND MELATONIN
~ The newly discovered coronavirus had killed only a few dozen people when Feixiong Cheng started looking for a treatment. He knew time was of the essence: Cheng, a data analyst at the Cleveland Clinic, had seen similar coronaviruses tear through China and Saudi Arabia before, sickening thousands and shaking the global economy. So, in January, his lab used artificial intelligence to search for hidden clues in the structure of the virus to predict how it invaded human cells, and what might stop it. One observation stood out: The virus could potentially be blocked by melatonin.
Melatonin, best known as the sleep hormone, wasn’t an obvious factor in halting a pandemic. Its most familiar role is in the regulation of our circadian rhythms. Each night, as darkness falls, it shoots out of our brain’s pineal glands and into our blood, inducing sleep. Cheng took the finding as a curiosity. “It was very preliminary,” he told me recently—a small study in the early days before COVID-19 even had a name, when anything that might help was deemed worth sharing.
After he published his research, though, Cheng heard from scientists around the world who thought there might be something to it. They noted that, in addition to melatonin’s well-known effects on sleep, it plays a part in calibrating the immune system. Essentially, it acts as a moderator to help keep our self-protective responses from going haywire—which happens to be the basic problem that can quickly turn a mild case of COVID-19 into a life-threatening scenario.
Cheng decided to dig deeper. For months, he and colleagues pieced together the data from thousands of patients who were seen at his medical center. In results published last month, melatonin continued to stand out. People taking it had significantly lower odds of developing COVID-19, much less dying of it. Other researchers noticed similar patterns. In October, a study at Columbia University found that intubated patients had better rates of survival if they received melatonin. When President Donald Trump was flown to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for COVID-19 treatment, his doctors prescribed—in addition to a plethora of other experimental therapies—melatonin.
Eight clinical trials are currently ongoing, around the world, to see if these melatonin correlations bear out. Few other treatments are receiving so much research attention. If melatonin actually proves to help people, it would be the cheapest and most readily accessible medicine to counter COVID-19. Unlike experimental drugs such as remdesivir and antibody cocktails, melatonin is widely available in the United States as an over-the-counter dietary supplement. People could start taking it immediately.
Yet Cheng emphasizes that he’s not recommending that. Like any substance capable of slowing the central nervous system, melatonin is not a trifling addition to the body’s chemistry. Its apparent benefit to COVID-19 patients could simply be a spurious correlation—or, perhaps, a signal alerting us to something else that is actually improving people’s outcomes. Cheng thinks that might be the case. He and others suggest that the real issue at play may not be melatonin at all, but the function it most famously controls: sleep.
In fact, several mysteries of how COVID-19 works converge on the question of how the disease affects our sleep, and how our sleep affects the disease. The virus is capable of altering the delicate processes within our nervous system, in many cases in unpredictable ways, sometimes creating long-term symptoms. Better appreciating the ties between immunity and the nervous system could be central to understanding COVID-19—and to preventing it.
Throughout the pandemic, the department of neurology at Johns Hopkins University has been flooded with consultation requests for people suffering from insomnia. Rachel Salas, one of the team’s neurologists, says she initially thought this surge in sleep disorders was merely the result of all the anxieties that come with a devastating global crisis: worries about health, the economic impact, and isolation. Indeed, patterns of sleep disruption have played out around the world. Roughly three-quarters of people in the United Kingdom have had a change in their sleep during the pandemic, according to the British Sleep Society, and less than half are getting refreshing sleep. “In the summer, we were calling it ‘COVID-somnia,’” Salas says.
In recent months, however, Salas has watched a more curious pattern emerge. Many people’s sleep continues to be disrupted by predictable pandemic anxieties. But more perplexing symptoms have been arising specifically among people who have recovered from COVID-19. “We’re seeing referrals from doctors because the disease itself affects the nervous system,” she says. After recovering, people report changes in attention, debilitating headaches, brain fog, muscular weakness, and, perhaps most commonly, insomnia. Many don’t seem anxious or preoccupied with pandemic-related concerns—at least not to a degree that could itself explain their newfound inability to sleep. Rather it is sometimes part of what the medical community has begun to refer to as “long COVID,” where symptoms persist indefinitely after the virus has left a person. When it comes to sleep disturbances, Salas worries, “I expect this is just the beginning of long-term effects we’re going to see for years to come.”
Her colleague Arun Venkatesan has been trying to get to the bottom of how a virus could cause insomnia. He focuses specifically on autoimmune and inflammatory diseases that affect the nervous system. Initially, Venkatesan says, the common assumption among doctors was that many post-COVID-19 symptoms were due to an autoimmune reaction—a misguided, targeted attack on cells of one’s own body. This can happen in the nervous system after infections by various viruses, in predictable patterns, such as that of Guillain-Barré syndrome. In the days after an infection, as new antibodies mistakenly attack nerves, weakness and numbness spread from the tips of the extremities inward. Disconcerting as it can be, this type of pattern is at least identifiable and predictable; doctors can tell patients what they’re dealing with and what to expect.
By contrast, the post-COVID-19 patterns are sporadic, not clearly autoimmune in nature, says Venkatesan. The symptoms can appear even after a mild case of COVID-19, and timescales vary. “We’ve seen a number of patients who were not even hospitalized, and felt much better for weeks, before worsening,” Venkatesan says. And the findings aren’t limited to the brain. At Northwestern University, the radiologist Swati Deshmukh has been fielding a steady stream of cases in which people experience nerve damage throughout the body. She has been looking for evidence that the virus itself might be killing nerve cells. Hepatitis C and herpes viruses are known to do so, and autopsies have found SARS-CoV-2 inside nerves in the brain.
Still, she believes, symptoms are most likely due to inflammation. Indeed, the leading theory to explain how a virus can cause such a wide variety of neurologic symptoms over a variety of timescales comes down to haphazard inflammation—less a targeted attack than an indiscriminate brawl. This effect is seen in a condition known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, sometimes called chronic fatigue syndrome. The diagnosis encompasses myriad potential symptoms, and likely involves multiple types of cellular injury or miscommunication. In some cases, damage comes from prolonged, low-level oxygen deprivation (as after severe pneumonia). In others, the damage to nerve-cell communication could come by way of inflammatory processes that directly tweak the functioning of our neural grids.
The unpredictability of this disease process—how, and how widely, it will play out in the longer term, and what to do about it—poses unique challenges in this already-uncertain pandemic. Myalgic encephalomyelitis is poorly understood, stigmatized, and widely misrepresented. Medical treatments and diagnostic approaches are unreliable. General inflammatory states rarely respond to a single prescription or procedure, but demand more holistic, ongoing interventions to bring the immune system back to equilibrium and keep it there. The medical system is not geared toward such approaches.
But this understanding of what is happening may also offer some hope. Although the technical details are clearly thorny, there is some reassurance in what the doctors are not seeing. When nerves are invaded and killed, the damage can be permanent. When nerves are miscommunicating—in ways that come and go—that process can be treated, modulated, prevented, and quite possibly cured. Although sleep cycles can be disturbed and damaged by the post-infectious inflammatory process, radiologists and neurologists aren’t seeing evidence that this is irreversible. And among the arsenal of ways to attempt to reverse it are basic measures such as sleep itself. Adequate sleep also plays a part in minimizing the likelihood of ever entering into this whole nasty, uncertain process.
A central function of sleep is maintaining proper channels of cellular communication in the brain. Sleep is sometimes likened to a sort of anti-inflammatory cleansing process; it removes waste products that accumulate during a day of firing. Without sleep, those by-products accumulate and impair communication (just as seems to be happening in some people with post-COVID-19 encephalomyelitis). “In the early stages of COVID-19, you feel extremely tired,” says Michelle Miller, a sleep-medicine professor at the University of Warwick in the U.K. Essentially, your body is telling you it needs sleep. But as the infection goes on, Miller explains, people find that they often can’t sleep, and the problems with communication compound one another.
The goal, then, is breaking out of this cycle, or preventing it altogether. Here the benefits of sleep extend throughout the body. “Sleep is important for effective immune function, and it also helps to regulate metabolism, including glucose and mechanisms controlling appetite and weight gain,” Miller says. All of these bear directly on COVID-19, as risk factors for severe cases include diabetes, obesity, and sleep apnea. Even in the short term, getting enough deep, slow-wave sleep will optimize your metabolism and make you maximally prepared should you fall ill. These effects may even bear on vaccination. Flu shots appear to be more effective among people who have slept well in the days preceding getting one.
All of this leads back to the basic question: Is one of the most glaring omissions in public-health guidelines right now simply to tell people to get more sleep?
The only health advice more banal than being told to wash your hands is being told to sleep more. But it’s a cliché for a reason. Sleep fortifies and prepares us for any given crisis, but especially when the days are short and cold, and people have little else they might do to empower and protect themselves. Monotonous days can slip people into depression, alcohol abuse, and all manner of suboptimal health. It may well turn out that standard pandemic advice should be to wear a mask, keep distances, and get sleep.
That’s easier said than done. Asim Shah, a psychiatry and behavioral-sciences professor at Baylor College of Medicine, believes sleep is at the core of many of the mental-health issues that have spiked over the course of the year. “There’s a complete lack of structure. That has caused a huge disturbance in the sleep cycles,” he says. “Usually everyone has a schedule. They get sunlight and they generate melatonin and it puts them to sleep. Right now we’re seeing people losing interest in things, isolating, not exercising, and then not getting sleep.” Depression and anxiety make insomnia worse, and the cycle degenerates.
This may be where melatonin—or other approaches to enhancing the potent effects of sleep—could be consequential. Russel Reiter, a cell-biology professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, is convinced that widespread treatment of COVID-19 with melatonin should already be standard practice. In May, Reiter and colleagues published a plea for melatonin to be immediately given to everyone with COVID-19.
If the world of melatonin research had a molten core, it would be Reiter. He has been studying the hormone’s potential health benefits since the 1960s, and tells me he takes 70 milligrams daily. (Most bottles at the pharmacy recommend from 1 to 10 milligrams.) After we spoke, he sent me some of the many journal articles he has published on melatonin and COVID-19, at least four of which appeared in Melatonin Research. He blithely referred to them as “propaganda” and noted that he has been studying melatonin since before I was born (without asking when that was). “I know melatonin sideways and backwards,” Reiter said, “and I’m very confident recommending it.”
The majority of sleep scientists, though, seem to agree that the most crucial interventions that facilitate sleep will not be medicinal, or even supplemental. The general recommendation is that getting your body’s melatonin cycles to work regularly is preferable to simply taking a supplement and continuing to binge Netflix and stare at your phone in bed. Now that so many people’s days lack structure, Shah believes a key to healthy pandemic sleep is to deliberately build routines. On weekends, wake up and go to bed at the same time as you do other days. Take scheduled walks. Get sunlight early in the day. Reduce blue light for an hour before bed. Stay connected with other people in meaningful ways, despite being physically distant.
Even small daily rituals can help, says Tricia Hersey, the founder of a nap-advocacy organization called the Nap Ministry. Light a candle. Have a cup of tea in a specific place at a certain time. “Repetitive rituals are part of what makes us human and ground ourselves,” she told me. They’re also perhaps the most attainable intervention there is. Wherever you are, Hersey says, “you can daydream. You can slow down. You can find small ways to stop and remember who you are.”
To her, feeling in control over sleep is important precisely because order is lacking in so many other parts of life for so many people. Year over year, there are significant sleep disparities across the U.S. population. The amount and quality of sleep we get depend on our environment as much as, if not more than, our personal behavior. Socioeconomic status and quality sleep chart on parallel lines. The most effective way to improve sleep is to ensure that people have a calm and quiet place to rest each night, free of concerns about basic needs such as food security. The pandemic has brought the opposite assurances, exacerbating the uncertainties at the root of already-stark disparities.
As the quest for sleep falls only more to individuals, many are left to think outside the box. That has included, for some, dabbling in hypnosis. Not the kind of hypnosis where you’re onstage and told to act like a chicken, but a process slightly more refined. Christopher Fitton is one of a number of hypnotherapists who have spent the pandemic creating YouTube videos and podcasts meant to help put people to sleep. Fitton’s sessions involve 30 minutes of him saying empowering things to listeners in his pleasant, semi-whispered voice. He tells me he is now getting more than 1 million listens a month.
Hypnotherapy is meant to slow down the rapid firing of our nerves. Similar to guided meditation or deep breathing, the intent is to stop people from overthinking and allow sleep to happen naturally. As you listen to Fitton saying banal things about the muscles in your back or asking you to envision a specific tree in a specific place, “the aim is to get into a relaxed, trancelike state, where your subconscious is open to more suggestion,” he says. Then, when he tells you to sleep, your brain is less likely to argue with him about how you’re too busy, or how you need to worry more about why someone read your text message but didn’t reply.
But regardless of whom you trust to help relieve you of consciousness, now seems like an ideal time to get serious about the practice. Draw boundaries for yourself, and sleep like your life depends on it. Hopefully it won’t.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/12/covid-19-sleep-pandemic-zzzz/617454/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1f7xFGuXu49-s-EMAnSwfwZc7GW70vQqZADfrf8PGFRDKUjTOT0YSGmyQ
But to us existence is still enchanted; at a hundred places
it is still beginning. A play of pure forces
no one touches who doesn’t marvel and kneel.
~ Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 2, 10
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