Herons; photo by Moise Levy. “Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.” ~ Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept. Perhaps when you have enough beauty, you can bear more truth.
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TO GO TO LVOV
To go to Lvov. Which station
for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew
gleams on a suitcase, when express
trains and bullet trains are being born. To leave
in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September
or in March. But only if Lvov exists,
if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just
in my new passport, if lances of trees
—of poplar and ash—still breathe aloud
like Indians, and if streams mumble
their dark Esperanto, and grass snakes like soft signs
in the Russian language disappear
into thickets. To pack and set off, to leave
without a trace, at noon, to vanish
like fainting maidens. And burdocks, green
armies of burdocks, and below, under the canvas
of a Venetian café, the snails converse
about eternity. But the cathedral rises,
you remember, so straight, as straight
as Sunday and white napkins and a bucket
full of raspberries standing on the floor, and
my desire which wasn’t born yet,
only gardens and weeds and the amber
of Queen Anne cherries, and indecent Fredro.
There was always too much of Lvov, no one could
comprehend its boroughs, hear
the murmur of each stone scorched
by the sun, at night the Orthodox church’s silence was unlike
that of the cathedral, the Jesuits
baptized plants, leaf by leaf, but they grew,
grew so mindlessly, and joy hovered
everywhere, in hallways and in coffee mills
revolving by themselves, in blue
teapots, in starch, which was the first
formalist, in drops of rain and in the thorns
of roses. Frozen forsythia yellowed by the window.
The bells pealed and the air vibrated, the cornets
of nuns sailed like schooners near
the theater, there was so much of the world that
it had to do encores over and over,
the audience was in frenzy and didn’t want
to leave the house. My aunts couldn’t have known
yet that I’d resurrect them,
and lived so trustfully; so singly;
servants, clean and ironed, ran for
fresh cream, inside the houses
a bit of anger and great expectation, Brzozowski
came as a visiting lecturer, one of my
uncles kept writing a poem entitled Why,
dedicated to the Almighty, and there was too much
of Lvov, it brimmed the container,
it burst glasses, overflowed
each pond, lake, smoked through every
chimney, turned into fire, storm,
laughed with lightning, grew meek,
returned home, read the New Testament,
slept on a sofa beside the Carpathian rug,
there was too much of Lvov, and now
there isn’t any, it grew relentlessly
and the scissors cut it, chilly gardeners
as always in May, without mercy,
without love, ah, wait till warm June
comes with soft ferns, boundless
fields of summer, i.e., the reality.
But scissors cut it, along the line and through
the fiber, tailors, gardeners, censors
cut the body and the wreaths, pruning shears worked
diligently, as in a child’s cutout
along the dotted line of a roe deer or a swan.
Scissors, penknives, and razor blades scratched,
cut, and shortened the voluptuous dresses
of prelates, of squares and houses, and trees
fell soundlessly, as in a jungle,
and the cathedral trembled, people bade goodbye
without handkerchiefs, no tears, such a dry
mouth, I won’t see you anymore, so much death
awaits you, why must every city
become Jerusalem and every man a Jew,
and now in a hurry just
pack, always, each day,
and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all
it exists, quiet and pure as
a peach. It is everywhere.
~ Adam Zagajewski, tr Renata Gorczyński
Lvov, a prewar photoOriana:
This is a poem about a city that is both real and imagined — the one where the poet was born but left when still an infant, while his parents, native Lvovians, forever reminisced about their lost paradise while living in what to them was exile — Gliwice, a soot-laden industrial town in southwestern Poland. In an essay, Zagajewski remembers that when a friend of acquaintance of his parents died, it was not uncommon to hear that so-and-so “already returned to Lvov.”
The poem is both local and universal, addressing the nostalgia of all refugees — every city becomes Jerusalem, the Holy City to those who were forced to leave it.
Ilya Kaminsky comments:
~ It is “To Go to Lvov”—the great poem from his next collection of the same name, first published in Polish in 1985—that towers at the center of all Adam Zagajewski’s work for me. An elegy to the gone world, the poem also achieves jubilation. In the 1990s, it became a touchstone for many immigrant and refugee poets of my generation. “To go to Lvov,” a friend from the former Yugoslavia would say sometimes, and another from the former Soviet Union would quote back, “Which station / for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew / gleams on a suitcase.” The poem gave us a destination, a path forward. If you already know this poem—if you love it—you are one of us. I love it because after a century of war it allowed a way for praise to enter poetry again, decades after Celan’s “Death Fugue” and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. This poem has all the force of those monumental works, and yet it also allows tenderness in.
In “To Go to Lvov” Zagajewski attempts to step back into the city to which his refugee family could never return, a city they still saw everywhere they looked. He crafts on the page the lost world of the city’s cafés, theater, and gardens . . . Think of this poem, written in the 1980s, in a time when half of Europe was still under Soviet rule. Think of the joy it gives, composed in the shadow of a pained, disjointed requiem like Celan’s “Death Fugue.” Think of how much it took for a refugee and a child of refugees—for a man whose people died in exile—to stand up and imagine a way forward.
In “To Go to Lvov,” the city’s rhythms are in the poem’s repetitions, line breaks, and sentence patterns. At the end of twentieth century, in a postwar poem about exile we expect an elegy, a protest, a dirge, but instead receive an ode’s joyful, impossible praise.
This poem juxtaposes tonalities: humor, high lyricism, heartbreak. There is tension between description and invocation. The cathedral trembles, people bid good-bye without handkerchiefs, no tears, dry mouths, and there is too much of Lvov, it brims the container. It is a three-page epic, a dream that refuses to end, showing us what Adam Zagajewski’s exiled parents and grandparents saw, refracted through the wonder and joy of a child’s stare. “I do not believe in happiness,” Adam was fond of repeating, “but I believe in joy.” Despite everything, this insistence on wonder. Despite everything, in the age of mass murder, a lucid moment. ~
https://yalereview.yale.edu/going-lvov?fbclid=IwAR3o3JbTzP7ntFkKwhh3oXhjbToJvEf6UozlSe4-iX3bfhiZqn7iBPMK-Bg
Mary:
Zagajewski’s poem is an astonishing feat of affirmation, not denying or ignoring loss, but including it in an embrace wide and deep enough to hold the world. Here grief is acknowledged as part of the whole and still all brims with joy, more than can be contained, beauty dreamed, remembered, anticipated, boundless and irrefutable. The gesture of joyous expansion and praise reminds me of Whitman, but there is the wisdom here as well of suffering and loss, of longing for an impossible return to a world forever gone.
However, this loss does not push the poet into despair, into a landscape ruined and incomprehensible. He finds beauty and joy in abundance, a world so full it overflows with inexhaustible wonder. This is more than a nostalgic dream, it is a powerful act that sweeps you up in its trajectory, convincing you, including you, sharing with you, a vision that feels like a sacrament of grace. After reading the poem I felt thankful, as though blessed.
We won’t see it anymore, so much death between us, yet we must, we can, always,
go breathless, go to Lvov, after all
it exists, quiet and pure as
a peach. It is everywhere.
The poem is revolutionary in that it refuses despair, irony, the stance of the absurdist, those so modern attitudes, and instead " stands up" to "imagine a way forward" past pain, loss and exile to the world of beauty and joy, dreamed, remembered, created new, always and everywhere.
Oriana:
Years ago I emailed this poem to a friend of mine, and she confessed that she kept misreading “Lvov” as “Love.” And since the poem is about love, though love for a city (major European cities have always been love objects for their dedicated inhabitants), you can indeed substitute the word “love” in many passages:
and now in a hurry just
pack, always, each day,
and go breathless, go to Love, after all
it exists, quiet and pure as
a peach. It is everywhere.
These days we don’t always dare believe that love exists, but this poem opens our eyes. Love is everywhere. 
Lvov (Lviv) today
*
STEINBECK: THERE IS ONLY ONE STORY
“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one... Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil... There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?” ~ John Steinbeck
WHY WE REMEMBER MORE WHEN WE READ — ESPECIALLY PRINT — THAN FROM AUDIO OR VIDEO
~ During the pandemic, many college professors abandoned assignments from printed textbooks and turned instead to digital texts or multimedia coursework.
As a professor of linguistics, I have been studying how electronic communication compares to traditional print when it comes to learning. Is comprehension the same whether a person reads a text onscreen or on paper? And are listening and viewing content as effective as reading the written word when covering the same material?
The answers to both questions are often “no,” as I discuss in my book “How We Read Now,” released in March 2021. The reasons relate to a variety of factors, including diminished concentration, an entertainment mindset and a tendency to multitask while consuming digital content.
The benefits of print particularly shine through when experimenters move from posing simple tasks – like identifying the main idea in a reading passage – to ones that require mental abstraction – such as drawing inferences from a text. Print reading also improves the likelihood of recalling details – like “What was the color of the actor’s hair?” – and remembering where in a story events occurred – “Did the accident happen before or after the political coup?”
Studies show that both grade school students and college students assume they’ll get higher scores on a comprehension test if they have done the reading digitally. And yet, they actually score higher when they have read the material in print before being tested.
Educators need to be aware that the method used for standardized testing can affect results. Studies of Norwegian tenth graders and U.S. third through eighth graders report higher scores when standardized tests were administered using paper. In the U.S. study, the negative effects of digital testing were strongest among students with low reading achievement scores, English language learners and special education students.
My own research and that of colleagues approached the question differently. Rather than having students read and take a test, we asked how they perceived their overall learning when they used print or digital reading materials. Both high school and college students overwhelmingly judged reading on paper as better for concentration, learning and remembering than reading digitally.
The discrepancies between print and digital results are partly related to paper’s physical properties. With paper, there is a literal laying on of hands, along with the visual geography of distinct pages. People often link their memory of what they’ve read to how far into the book it was or where it was on the page.
But equally important is mental perspective, and what reading researchers call a “shallowing hypothesis.” According to this theory, people approach digital texts with a mindset suited to casual social media, and devote less mental effort than when they are reading print.
PODCASTS AND ONLINE VIDEO
Given increased use of flipped classrooms – where students listen to or view lecture content before coming to class – along with more publicly available podcasts and online video content, many school assignments that previously entailed reading have been replaced with listening or viewing. These substitutions have accelerated during the pandemic and move to virtual learning.
Surveying U.S. and Norwegian university faculty in 2019, University of Stavanger Professor Anne Mangen and I found that 32% of U.S. faculty were now replacing texts with video materials, and 15% reported doing so with audio. The numbers were somewhat lower in Norway. But in both countries, 40% of respondents who had changed their course requirements over the past five to 10 years reported assigning less reading today.
A primary reason for the shift to audio and video is students refusing to do assigned reading. While the problem is hardly new, a 2015 study of more than 18,000 college seniors found only 21% usually completed all their assigned course reading.
Audio and video can feel more engaging than text, and so faculty increasingly resort to these technologies – say, assigning a TED talk instead of an article by the same person.
MAXIMIZING MENTAL FOCUS
Psychologists have demonstrated that when adults read news stories or transcripts of fiction, they remember more of the content than if they listen to identical pieces.
Researchers found similar results with university students reading an article versus listening to a podcast of the text. A related study confirms that students do more mind-wandering when listening to audio than when reading.
Results with younger students are similar, but with a twist. A study in Cyprus concluded that the relationship between listening and reading skills flips as children become more fluent readers. While second graders had better comprehension with listening, eighth graders showed better comprehension when reading.
Research on learning from video versus text echoes what we see with audio. For example, researchers in Spain found that fourth through sixth graders who read texts showed far more mental integration of the material than those watching videos. The authors suspect that students “read” the videos more superficially because they associate video with entertainment, not learning.
The collective research shows that digital media have common features and user practices that can constrain learning. These include diminished concentration, an entertainment mindset, a propensity to multitask, lack of a fixed physical reference point, reduced use of annotation and less frequent reviewing of what has been read, heard or viewed.
Digital texts, audio and video all have educational roles, especially when providing resources not available in print. However, for maximizing learning where mental focus and reflection are called for, educators – and parents – shouldn’t assume all media are the same, even when they contain identical words.
Oriana:
For me the simple act of underlining enhances absorption. And then there is the re-reading and reviewing, going back over the material and noticing the details sometimes missed on first reading.
FAMOUS FEMALE PIRATES
~ Summer 1720
Anne Bonny made an unforgettable impression from the bow of the pirate ship, Revenge. Beautiful with fiery red hair that matched her temperament, she’d patrol the ship wearing a jacket and trousers, with a handkerchief tied around her head. Though forced to disguise herself as a man to lead the life she wanted, Anne proved herself to be just as skilled and ruthless as any pirate.
One of the crew’s newer recruits was a man named Mark Read. His backstory remained murky beyond the fact that he had previously served as a soldier and only more recently a sailor. His seamanship skills were practically unmatched by anyone onboard. During their first successful attack on another ship, Read held nothing back, fighting without fear.
Anne found herself taken with Read. His bravery and fighting skills deepened an insatiable attraction. She worked near him and engaged in witty conversation at every opportunity. Finally, one day, Anne saw her chance to express her feelings.
Read went into the storeroom alone to gather some supplies. Anne followed him and shut the storeroom door behind her. Anne unbuttoned her shirt, revealing her breasts to Read to show him she was a woman, and declared her love for him. Not missing a beat, Read unbuttoned his shirt and revealed a pair of breasts to Anne. Mark Read was Mary Read, the star sailor explained, also posing as a man in order to serve at sea. Their passionate, secret love affair began then and there. The appropriately named Revenge became the setting of their romance, their legend, and their downfalls. The particular forms of revenge sought by Anne and Mary were against a world that manipulated them based on their gender, against the men who had failed them, and against societal rules that had tried to cheat them out of their potential.
TWO YEARS EARLIER
Anne first got a taste for the pirate life when she met a man named James Bonny, a sailor and part-time plunderer. At the age of sixteen, she married James against her father’s wishes. She and James set sail and pirated at sea for several years until finally settling in Nassau, New Providence (part of present-day Bahamas) in 1718. Nassau was a curious place to choose; at the time, it was known to be the most notorious pirate haven in the Atlantic Ocean. This did not deter a young woman who had been through as many travails as Anne.
Anne was born in Ireland, the daughter of a married attorney and his servant. When her mother died, her father moved to London to avoid the family of his estranged wife and chose to raise Anne as his son. Even though his neighbors knew the child to be illegitimate, it was socially acceptable for a boy to be provided for out of wedlock, while illegitimate girls were often tossed aside. This set a precedent for Anne’s anger toward the limitations imposed on her because of gender. Her father’s wife soon discovered the truth about the secret child and cut them off from her family’s allowance. In order to limit his disgrace, her father moved them both to South Carolina to open up a new practice. Her gender presentation was flipped again when she was sent to work as a servant girl around the age of thirteen. Anne was known to be hot-tempered and was even rumored to stab a boy who insulted her, and her employment was soon terminated.
The relationship between Anne and James Bonny began to deteriorate not long after they arrived as husband-and-wife in Nassau in 1718. James Bonny seemed eager to abandon his piratical ways, to his wife’s dissatisfaction. The pirate ship was where Anne felt the freest and most powerful. Pirates were beholden to no laws. Class status didn’t exist on a pirate ship; her bravado and skills counted the most. The fact that her husband no longer wished to live that life turned her stomach.
Taking refuge in taverns, Anne sought out the intimate company of sailors and other pirates. One of those pirates was a captain named Jack Rackham, who stopped in Nassau to refresh his supplies and crew. Standing at medium height with fair hair, he donned a coat decked out with ribbons and brass buttons and wore silk stockings, despite the tropical heat, as well as buckled shoes that often adorned the wealthy. Enamored by his fine way of speaking and expensive attire — the sources of his nickname “Calico Jack” — as well as his rank and reputation in piracy, Bonny initiated a sexual relationship. This was likely further fueled by the fact that her husband James had started working for Woodes Rogers, governor of the Bahamas and a former pirate turned pirate-hunter. To pirates, Rogers was the Antichrist. Anne would rather die than stay with her turncoat husband.
Rackham fell in love with Anne and approached James to grant her a divorce. James refused. Anne pleaded with James to allow a “wife sale,” in which he could sell her to another prospective husband. Even the possibility of making money didn’t budge him. She even appealed to Governor Woodes Rogers himself, who refused to recognize the custom and threatened to whip and imprison Anne for her “loose behavior.”
Anne ran away with Rackham in the night and they married on the ship. It was not uncommon for married people to remarry at sea without a divorce or annulment, since the sanctity of land-based marriages ended at the water’s edge. Oftentimes it was the captain who would facilitate the wedding — by which custom the resourceful Rackham may have officiated his own marriage. Rackham was later heard saying, “My methods of courting a woman or taking a ship were similar — no time wasted, straight up alongside, every gun brought to play and the prize boarded.” No doubt keeping the marriage secret among the crew was expedient, leaving Anne a reason to continue to dress as a man.
James Bonny was so humiliated and furious at this turn of events that he threw himself deeper into his work as a pirate hunter. Chasing pirates was dangerous business, but James was driven by a virtually Shakespearean motivation — payback against his estranged wife and her new husband. Safe to say, James was the only pirate hunter ever to chase his pirate wife across the seas with the intent to kill.
Anne and Rackham began their joint pirating career in earnest on August 22, 1720 when they captured one of the largest and fastest vessels in the Bahamas thanks to its long hull (the watertight underside of the ship), which increased the ship’s stability and wind-resistance: the William, which Rackham promptly renamed the Revenge. Once on board their new ship with a refreshed crew that contained several new members, the pirate power couple set sail. It was on this voyage that Anne fell hard for the intriguing sailor named “Mark” — really Mary — Read.
Their sexual relationship that began in a dark, crowded storeroom would not remain secret from the captain for long. Rackham noticed how much time Anne and Read spent with each other alone. Their laughter and playful physical contact incensed Rackham. One night he walked quietly below deck to the berths where he found Read asleep. One theory is that he found Anne in bed with Read, both partially unclothed. Then he pressed the blade of his knife against Read’s throat, waking his crew member with a terrifying start.
*
Mary Read had first arrived in Nassau around the same time as Anne. Like Anne, Mary was also born illegitimate, and, most strikingly, also raised as a boy. Born and raised in England, she was the result of an affair her mother had with a sailor shortly after being widowed. When Mary’s half-brother from her mother’s previous marriage died, Mary was disguised as the legitimate son so they could continue to receive monetary support from her paternal family. She did not even know she was a girl until she was thirteen years old, when she was placed into servitude. Mary soon ran away from her employer, resumed a male presentation and began calling herself Mark.
Mary had grown into a tall woman with high cheekbones and dark, curly hair, which could easily be concealed by tying it into a ponytail, a male hairstyle at the time. Mary crossed the English Channel to join the British army in Flanders, where she fell for a soldier. They married in secret and later opened an inn together, but her husband died of illness. Overwhelmed by grief, Mary disguised herself as Mark yet again and rejoined the army. However, her depression set her back and she was soon discharged. Refusing to go back to a life of few opportunities, destitution, and servitude, she fostered her male identity and joined a series of maritime crews before ending up aboard the newly-christened Revenge.
Now with a knife to her throat in her berth, Mary faced the fury of her captain over her relationship with Anne Bonny. Rackham accused Read of illicit behavior and lust for Anne. He said he would kill Read for his indiscretions. Once again Read had to expose her secret. She undid her shirt and revealed herself to Rackham. He was so shocked that he fell backward.
At first, Rackham’s suspicions of an affair were eased. After all, they were both women. But Rackham soon recognized the truth that their relationship went far beyond friendship. Freshly inflamed by jealousy, he threatened to kill them both. He said he would spare their lives and let them continue their relationship on one condition: he had to be included into their romance. They would be a threesome. The women agreed, and both became wives of Captain “Calico” Jack Rackham.
After agreeing to Rackham’s conditions, the two women made an astounding choice: they made the decision to stop hiding genders. During the “Golden Age of Piracy,” a period in which Atlantic piracy was at its height spanning 1690 to 1726, the idea of women working at sea would have been unusual in itself. The notion of female pirates? Abhorrent. The pairing of two female pirates defied law, society, and culture in every way imaginable.
Knowing that they had the captain on their side, Anne and Mary decided that sailors’ rules be damned. They cast off their disguises and threatened to kill anyone who would dare cross them. They would go back to men’s attire when it suited them, or wear men’s garments in a way that did not hide the fact they were women. According to the testimony of a onetime hostage on their ship, the women carried a sword and pistol in each hand, and in battle they would bare their breasts for all to see and curse louder than anyone else. Tales of the two women exploded throughout the Caribbean, the North American colonies, and England. Not just female pirates, but women who exposed themselves as they fought! The Revenge met with wild success: After stealing their first ship in August 1720, they captured several more in quick succession.
James Bonny seethed as he sought out the woman who was still legally his wife, wrecking his name as quickly as she wrecked ships. He chased rumors of Anne’s whereabouts until he came upon the ship of a notorious pirate, Captain Charles Vane. Vane had the reputation of being one of the most violent outlaws in this region and his capture would yield a fortune. With this reward, James could afford a more powerful ship and crew to recapture his wife and kill Rackham. His battle against Charles Vane was vicious. James was killed. Anne was probably as sad as anyone who heard of his demise, for no doubt she would have wanted the sword that ran through him to be her own.
News continued to circulate about the scandalous marauders onboard the Revenge. Woodes Rogers, increasingly nemesis to all pirate-kind, enlisted privateers to hunt them down. He also sent a reissue of the Proclamation of the Effectual Suppression of Piracy to several prominent North American newspapers. The Proclamation promised to pardon pirates of all of their crimes if they turned themselves in and named their accomplices. This Proclamation had been issued several times by this point, but most pirates, though cutthroat, were loyal to their creed, refusing to give each other up. As a final attempt to seek their capture, Rogers issued his own proclamation and made a point to highlight the female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, to garner attention.
On September 3, 1720, Rackham, Anne and Mary successfully robbed and captured a team of seven fishing boats off the coast of Harbor Island in the Bahamas. They attacked without mercy. After a bloody fight, the fishermen lost their boats, fish, fishing tackles worth ten pounds in Jamaican currency, and all of their wares — destroying not only their goods, but their livelihoods.
A month later, on October 1, the pirates sailed toward Hispaniola where they targeted two merchant ships about three leagues off the coast of the island. Anne and Mary led the charge and immediately fired their pistols at the merchants. Within minutes the merchant ship was theirs. The pirates stole all of the cargo valued at over 1,000 British pounds, the equivalent of $183,000 (US currency) today.
Such a large prize gave Rackham confidence to the point of foolhardiness. He redoubled their efforts and commanded his crew to attack any ship that crossed their path. Anne and Mary were alarmed. Pirates were superstitious about luck and they knew that their successes could give way to disaster in a heartbeat. They cautioned Rackham to be less hasty, but to no avail. Above all else, Anne and Mary were loyal to their captain and each other, so they steeled themselves and committed to their cause.
On October 19 off the coast of Port Maria Bay, Jamaica, they captured another merchant ship captained by Thomas Spenlow. Rackham used trickery to lure the ship close, hailing it with the Union Jack, or British flag, as a disguise and shouting, “We are Englishman! Come on board and have some punch.” Encouraged and relieved by this salutation, Spenlow agreed to join Rackham’s vessel, leading his men right into a trap.
Anne and Mary killed several of the merchantmen on board. They chose to spare Spenlow’s life and allowed him and a few of his crewmen to sail away in a small boat. Then the pirates changed their minds, ending up chasing after Spenlow and taking him as a prisoner, likely to use as ransom at an opportune time. The attack yielded about twenty Jamaican pounds worth of goods, roughly $2,500 in current US value.
The next day Rackham sailed his ship around the coast of Jamaica until they came upon Dry Harbor Bay. There they captured a merchant ship called the Mary. This attack yielded three hundred Jamaican pounds worth of goods (roughly $37,000 in today’s US dollars) for the pirates. Later, the captain of the Mary described his astonishment that the women seemed to be pirates of their own free will.
By this point, Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read were feared by everyone at sea. It only took months for this trio join the ranks of the most infamous pirates in world history. Word of their exploits reached the governor of Jamaica, Sir Nicholas Lawes, who already harbored intense hatred toward pirates. Determined to bring them down, he commissioned privateers, roles similar to pirates but sanctioned by the government to attack enemy ships, to capture the Revenge. A pirate hunter named Jonathan Barnet soon caught up to Rackham’s ship.
Using his expertise and cunning as a pirate hunter, Barnet tracked down Rackham’s ship. He was able to extract gossip from sailors that Captain Rackham had holed up off the coast of Negril’s Bay in Jamaica. With a second armed ship helmed by his colleague, Captain Bonnevie, Captain Barnet set sail toward Negril’s Bay.
Across the water, Anne and Mary saw the flag and notified Rackham. He joined the women at the helm, swaying from drink, and took in the sight of Captain Barnet’s small fleet. Barnet stood at the helm with a hand in the air ready to strike the signal to load the guns.
“Jack Rackham, from Cuba!” he shouted across the water.
Rackham steadied himself and shouted that he would give no quarter, meaning that he would kill everyone. Anne and Mary urged Rackham to stand down, knowing that their ship and crew was no match for Captain Barnet. Rackham ignored their advice and ordered his crew to ready the guns. The pirates scrambled to prepare their weapons.
That was enough for Barnet. He gave the signal to fire his cannons. The shot tore into the broadside of Rackham’s vessel. In a drunken panic, Rackham ordered the men to go below deck.
Anne and Mary, disgusted with Rackham and his craven retreat, armed and readied themselves, prepared to fight to the death as a pirate crew of two. Captain Barnet and his men boarded the ship and began to engage the women in brutal combat. The battle was lost before it began. Overwhelmed by their enemy’s numbers, Anne and Mary were subdued. The ship was lost. The next day Captain Barnet turned over Anne, Mary, Rackham and the rest of the Revenge’s crew to the charge of Major Richard James, a local militia officer, who threw the pirates into jail in Spanish Town.
The crew languished in prison for the next several weeks until their trial commenced. Their cell was cold and damp, despite its tropical location of Jamaica in the West Indies. Jack Rackham and the male members of his crew were tried for their crimes on November 16, 1720 and easily convicted. Their execution was scheduled for two days later.
On the morning of the 18th, Anne Bonny and Mary Read were rudely awakened by the prison guards. They glanced at each other and steeled themselves with grim determination. Their own trial was not for another ten days, but for all they knew the hangman had come early.
The guard opened the cell and dragged Anne out, leaving Mary alone. The guard led her to another part of the jail she had not seen before. When they stopped, she looked upon the gaunt, desperate face of Rackham.
Rackham grasped the bars and told her tearfully that his day of execution had arrived. In a few hours’ time he would hang for his crimes of piracy in Jamaica’s port town and former pirate haven, Port Royal. He begged her for words of comfort to take to his grave. Anne just stared down at him without an expression on her face. Tears streamed down his face as he pleaded to her. To her, he was another man who had disappointed her, and broken the pirate code.
“I’m sorry to see you here,” she said. “But if you had fought like a man, you need not have been hanged like a dog.”
With that, she was escorted away and never saw her former husband and captain again.
She was led back to her cell and left to contemplate her own looming fate. She and Mary had much to think about. They were intelligent and resourceful women. The fate of captured pirates was not lost on them. Their fight was not over yet. With any luck, they might be able to spare their lives, at least for a little while, by doing what they had all along — outsmarting the men around them.
The Trial
With the rest of their crew hanged, Anne Bonny and Mary Read were tried together. They pled not guilty for their crimes despite several witnesses, including sea captains Thomas Spenlow and Thomas Dillon, and a former hostage named Dorothy Thomas, all of whom had been their prisoners at one point.
The most damning statements against the women came from Thomas and Dillon. Thomas gave a vivid description of their ferocious actions: “Each of them had a machete and pistol in their hands, and cursed and swore at the men that they would murder me and that they would kill me to prevent me coming against them.”
Dillon offered the final testimony. “Anne Bonny had a gun in her hand. [Anne & Mary] were both very profligate, cursing and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do anything on board.”
These two reports confirmed to the court the duo’s violent and evil behavior. There could be no reprieve at this point. After all the witnesses provided their testimony, the prosecutor turned to Anne and Mary and asked, “Do you have any defense to make, or any witnesses to be sworn on your behalf? Would you have any of the witnesses, who had already been sword [testified], cross examined? Do either of you have questions to be asked?”
Anne and Mary both replied, “We have no witnesses or questions.”
The prosecutor now granted the women a final word about their crimes. “What have you to say?” he asked them. “Whether are you guilty of the piracies, robberies, and felonies, any of them, in the said articled mention’d, which had then been read unto you? Or not guilty?”
“Not guilty,” replied Anne and Mary together.
On November 28, 1720, they were both found guilty of piracy.
The two women would not be taken easily, however. According to the trial transcription, “…both the Prisoners inform’d the Court, that they were both quick with Child, and prayed that Execution of the Sentence might be stayed.”
Dumbfounded by this turn of events, officials took the women from the court and submitted them to an examination. Sure enough, they were both pregnant, presumably by Jack Rackham. Not only were the women with child, they had fought with warlike ferocity while pregnant. This shocked and horrified the court more than their piracies.
Public executions were widely attended by local communities in England and the American colonies, especially those of pirates. But sentencing women to hang for their crimes was already controversial during the eighteenth century. Hanging two pregnant women would cause an uproar — even if the condemned women were pirates. The judge relented and offered them their stay of execution. This meant that after they each gave birth they would hang for their crimes. It was not a pardon and they were not free from the prospect of capital punishment, but they were at least given more time.
In the end, neither woman ever saw the noose, but a particularly cruel punishment was in store for the two lovers who had fallen so hard for each other and changed pirate history forever. Once the trial ended, they were led back to the jail and placed into separate cells far enough apart so they could neither see nor speak to each other again.
April 1721
Five months after her sentencing, Mary Read fell ill with a fever. After several days she died in prison. It is not known whether or not she had her child. Even her burial has never been confirmed. Some believe that she was buried in St. Catherine’s Parish in Jamaica, but her name never appeared on any official document.
Anne Bonny’s fate is more opaque. Her execution was never recorded and rumors have circulated for generations about what happened to her. She very well may have been executed, with records later lost. According to historian David Cordingly in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, other clues suggest that Anne’s father ransomed her out of prison and took her home to South Carolina. There she gave birth to Rackham’s child. In 1721, according to these scenarios, she married a man named Joseph Burleigh and had eight more children and died in 1782.
Female pirates were unique: not only did they upend the social system, they were marginalized figures who transcended their social positions, proving that women were just as brave, self-sufficient, and defiant as men, in the process inspiring generations. Their tale turned out to be extremely popular for the rest of the eighteenth century. Advertisements for the 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates listed the names of dozens of pirates profiled. Smack in the middle, the ad promised “the remarkable actions and adventures of the two Female Pyrates Mary Read and Anne Bonny,” with their names in a bold font that dwarfed all others.
No doubt the women themselves would have proudly appreciated their immortal places in the pantheon of pirate legends. When they faced the gallows, their lack of fear reflected their self-realization. “[Hanging] is no great hardship,” Mary mused. “For were it not for that, every cowardly fellow would turn pirate and so unfit the sea, that men of courage must starve.”
Mary:
After I read "Kidnapped" as a child, my imagination was full of pirates and their wild adventures. I had heard about Anne Bonny and Mary Read, without the sexual escapades of course, and that was further fuel to my fascination. It is most interesting to note how these women's lives were shaped by financial and class issues as well as gender identities. They were both illegitimate, and raised as male because only a male illegitimate child would receive some financial support, as a sort of 'possible' heir. An illegitimate female child had no economic or social worth. For both, when the ruse of male gender failed, they were sent as female servants to labor in upper class households..that was the only possible, still socially acceptable choice.
They both rebelled at this situation and quickly ran away, to reclaim the measure of freedom and activity their upbringing as male had made possible for them to imagine.Though they might have begun as a sailor or soldier, the outlaw life of piracy was the ultimate in terms of freedom and power, obligated to no law or country, to none of the stifling demands of society, with loyalty only to the captain and fellow crewmen.
Here they could break all the rules, all the confining expectations of an ordered world that held only poverty and humiliation, living always as the object of someone else's agency, with none of their own. The pirate life allowed them a heady freedom, and they took it in full measure..it is not hard to understand how intoxicating that must have been..And there must have been a lot of anger in the mix, the ship was not named Revenge on a whim. The ultimate cost of course was their capture and execution, and they knew that full well. But I think they must have thought it still a bargain they were ready to pay for.
Oriana:
All I can say is Yes, and Yes. What a story! And both of them pregnant toward the end — knowing, of course, that childbirth was also a life-threatening ordeal. 
*
THAT INNER VOICE IN OUR HEAD
~ A fundamental part of conscious experience is ‘inner speech’ – the experience of verbal thought, expressed in one’s ‘inner voice’. Your inner voice is you.
That voice isn’t the sound of anything. It’s not even physical – we can’t observe it or measure it in any direct way. If it’s not physical, then we can arguably only attempt to study it by contemplation or introspection; students of the inner voice are ‘thinking about thinking’, an act that feels vague. William James, the 19th-century philosopher who is often touted as the originator of American psychology, compared the act to ‘trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks’.
Yet through new methods of experimentation in the last few decades, the nature of inner speech is finally being revealed. In one set of studies, scans are allowing researchers to study the brain regions linked with inner speech. In other studies, researchers are investigating links between internal and external speech – that which we say aloud.
The roots of the new work trace back to the 1920s and the Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who said the human mind was shaped by social activity and culture, beginning in childhood. The self, he hypothesized, was forged in what he called the ‘zone of proximal development’, the cognitive territory just beyond reach and impossible to tackle without some help. Children build learning partnerships with adults to master a skill in the zone, said Vygotsky, then go off on their own, speaking aloud to replace the voice of the adult, now gone from the scene. As mastery increases, this ‘self-talk’ becomes internalized and then increasingly muted until it is mostly silent – still part of the ongoing dialogue with oneself, but more intimate and no longer pronounced to the world. This voice – at first uttered aloud but finally only internal – was, from Vygotsky’s perspective, the engine of development and consciousness itself.
Vygotsky’s theory of childhood development contrasted sharply with those of his Western counterparts. William James had a complete disdain for the study of inner speech, because, to him, it was a ghost: impossible to observe. The French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget insisted that private speech signified simple inability – it was the babble of a child without capacity for social communication with no relation to cognitive functioning at all. Through much of the 20th century, Piaget seized the reigns of child development, insisting that children had to reach a developmental stage before learning could occur. Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Vygotsky said that learning occurred, then the brain developed. Piaget said the brain developed, then learning occurred.
Over years of meticulous experiment behind the Iron Curtain, Vygotsky continued to make his case. One thing he did was study children in the zone of proximal development as they worked with adults to accomplish tasks. In the experiments, the child would be presented with a challenge and a tool for overcoming it. In the zone, Vygotsky observed what he called ‘private speech’ – self-talk that children between the ages of two and eight often engage in. This intermediate stage, he held, was connected on one end to a prior period when we had no thread of memory (and no inner voice) and on the other end to true inner speech so crucial to self-reflection, narrative memory, and development of cognitive skills.
Within the newly forming Soviet Union, Vygotsky’s research was stigmatised, in large part because it used intelligence testing to validate some concepts; IQ testing itself had been banned as a challenge to Marxist principles of equality. Despite the roadblocks, in 1934 (the year of his death) Vygotsky finally published his opus on inner speech and childhood development, Thought and Language. It was a potent challenge to Piaget but, shrouded by the Stalinist censor, his ideas remained under wraps.
Meanwhile, in the West, newer work in developmental psychology began to chip away at the acceptance of Piaget. When Thought and Language was finally rediscovered and published in English by MIT Press in 1962, it was the perfect moment. The book provided a rational, alternative way to conceive the development of the mind. And further translations of Vygotsky’s writings led to a plethora of hypotheses ripe for testing.
By 1970, the push to validate Vygotsky’s ideas had picked up steam. A leader of that era was the American psychologist Laura Berk, professor emeritus at Illinois State University, an expert on childhood play. Berk observed children engage in imaginative, ‘make-believe’ play, and demonstrated that the substitution of objects – say a cup for a hat – requires internal thought (and self-talk) rather than impulse. Her studies show that during imaginative play, children’s self-talk helps them guide their own thoughts and behavior and exert true self-control. She and many other child psychologists demonstrated the importance of the inner voice, beyond a doubt, elevating Vygotsky and burying Piaget for good.
With inner speech clearly established as a chisel for the young mind, many more questions remained. Do people in adulthood experience inner speech in the same way as children – or even as each other? Do most of us even have an inner voice – an internal commentator narrating our lives and experiences from one moment to the next?
These were deeply controversial and introspective questions in the 1970s, and they captured the imagination of Russell Hurlburt, an aeronautical engineer-turned-clinical-psychology graduate student at the University of South Dakota. Hurlburt had envisioned a way to accurately sample others’ random inner experiences. Today a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he’s been honing the technique ever since.
Hurlburt calls his methodology Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES), and it works by sampling the inner thoughts of a given interviewee during those moments when a beeper randomly goes off. After extracting the contents of inner experience from countless interviews, Hurlburt has defined an array of phenomena typically shared by humans – auditory and visual imagery, emotion, awareness of real stimuli and a category of thoughts that occur without words, images or symbols of any kind. The main contribution here, though, is actually DES itself. Before its inception, introspective methods had been shunned for decades, if not centuries, as being too highly influenced by bias to be taken seriously. Now, with DES, Hurlburt believes in the possibility of obtaining unbiased, accurate snapshots of inner experience that includes inner speech.
Freed from the mundane confines of a laboratory, the data come from ‘the wild’, as Hurlburt puts it. A participant wears the beeper, which can go off at any moment throughout the day. They go about their daily activities and are likely to forget its presence. When the beeper does go off, the participant makes a careful note of exactly what their inner experience was immediately beforehand. Subsequently, they are questioned by Hurlburt about that experience in a thorough but open-ended interview.
The interview process itself requires an exacting, friendly yet trial-like probe of what occurred. In one unedited transcript in Hurlburt’s book Exploring Inner Experience (2006), a participant named Sandy is quoted following a beep: ‘I was reading. I was starting with the word “life”… and I had an image in my head – it was a black and white image, by the way – of… OK, I was staring at the word “life” and I had said to myself “life” in my own tone of voice.’
Sandy was referring to inner speech using the word ‘life’. For the next six minutes Hurlburt probed her about this experience. His questions eventually helped Sandy divulge that as she was inwardly speaking the word ‘life’ she simultaneously ‘saw an image of that word in an old-courier like font – black on a white background’ and a moving image of ‘sand pouring’ from a hand of unknown agency below her face.
DES requires careful skill to capture these kinds of experiences accurately – what Hurlburt terms, ‘high-fidelity, pristine’ inner speech as it naturally occurs. He takes care not to bias the participant in any way. ‘There are a lot of people who believe that you talk to yourself all of the time, so that’s a form of external pressure to say you were inner speaking when maybe you weren’t,’ he notes. For example, noted consciousness researcher Bernard Baars has asserted that ‘overt speech takes up perhaps a tenth of the waking day; but inner speech goes on all the time’. Hurlburt’s research shows this isn’t true; he finds that inner speech consumes about 25 per cent of an average person’s day, and thus, he is careful to not communicate any assumption about what type of inner experience a DES interviewee may have had at the time of the beep.
Thanks to the accuracy of DES, Hurlburt has found thought patterns associated with various clinical populations, including those with schizophrenia, bulimia nervosa, and autism. In a sample of bulimic participants, for instance, he’s found the propensity for multiple inner voices experienced at the same time. Take ‘Jessica’, a patient watching television when the DES beep occurred. In the front of her head, Hurlburt explains, she was inwardly saying ‘blond’, ‘skinny’, ‘guys’, and ‘stare’ in what was her own, unspoken voice. At the same time, in the back part of her head, she was saying, in another, quieter inner voice, still her own: ‘Why is it that movies and TV shows always have ‘girls for’, ‘to’, and ‘at’? Importantly, such experiences are not often perceived by the experiencers themselves, let alone revealed to anyone else.
Hurlburt has found that we typically self-talk in voices we regard as our own and, though silent, we attribute to these voices sonic characteristics such as tone, pitch and pacing. We invest them with emotional qualities similar to external speech. Finally, inner speech mostly occurs in complete sentences and is nearly always actively produced rather than passively experienced.
Recently, Hurlburt teamed up with Charles Fernyhough, a leading researcher of inner speech and auditory hallucination at Durham University in the United Kingdom. To conduct their collaboration, they put DES participants into brain scanners using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which detects metabolic changes in the brain. Like other participants, these subjects were asked to record inner speech and experience occurring just prior to a beep – but this time, brains would be scanned. These scans were compared with others that were captured when participants inwardly repeated words that they read on a screen – a method for investigating inner speech that had been used in many previous studies.
The researchers found that activity increased in a brain region called Heschl’s gyrus during spontaneous inner speech, but not when the self-talk is prompted – indicating that the neural nature of pristine self-talk is unique, indeed.
*
Picking up where Vygotsky and researchers like Berk left off, Fernyhough has been investigating the role that inner speech plays in developing, evolving minds. After the private speech of childhood has finally been internalised, suggests Fernyhough, inner speech emerges in a multiplicity of ways – each comparable to speech spoken out loud.
Fernyhough calls the most familiar level of inner speech ‘expanded’ because it is basically the same as external speech – grammatical and fully formed, but not vocal. He believes this kind of inner speech is most likely engaged when we are under stress or cognitive pressure.
Imagine, for example, while traveling, that you are making an important phone call regarding a lost passport. While on hold there’s a good chance that you’ll mentally rehearse exactly what you are about to say to the official on the other end – your story about how your passport went missing – in language that is full and complete.
To date, Fernyhough and colleagues have devised clever ways of exploring expanded speech through its tight connection with out-loud speech. For example, they’ve shown that external speech can interfere with inner speech when it is required for memorization. If participants try to silently memorise a list of items – a task that requires inner speech – while they recite out loud the days of the week, they can’t do it. Speaking aloud effectively annihilates the role that expanded inner speech would otherwise play.
In another study, Fernyhough and his colleague Simon McCarthy-Jones captured fMRI images of brain activity linked with a form of expanded speech labelled ‘dialogic’ because it involves envisioning a dialogue with another. To do the experiment, the researchers had participants imagine themselves in a variety of scenarios, like going to their old school or meeting the Prime Minister. In these imaginary scenarios, they inwardly conversed with their old teacher or interviewed the Prime Minister, while the scanner recorded the active areas in their brains. These scans revealed that, in a manner similar to real communication, inner dialogues can also recruit neural regions such as the posterior temporal cortex, involved in what’s called ‘theory of mind’ – the ability to attribute mental states to others that are different from one’s own. This happens even if the dialogue is solely within the mind of the self.
The second broad category of inner speech defined by Fernyhough is considerably more mysterious and enigmatic. He calls it ‘condensed’ inner speech, borne out of Vygotsky’s belief that as speech becomes internaliszd it can undergo profound transformations that set it distinctly apart from the expanded version. Condensed inner speech is defined as a highly abbreviated and ungrammatical version of regular speech. Although possibly linguistic – comprised of words – it is not intended to be communicated or even understood by others. For example, as a habit in the winter since my younger days, I often think to myself, ‘passlockmoney’ before heading out the door to go snowboarding. For you to understand what I mean, I’m required to expand this term: Remember your ticket or pass if it is still valid, your snowboard lock, and cash or credit card for getting lunch (and après beer).
The variety of ‘condensed’ experiences people have are remarkably unique because we already know the meanings of the contents of our own thoughts – there’s simply no need for a brain to slog out a rich, grammatical format of inner thought that can be understood by others, when thinking to ourselves. Thus, beyond the abbreviation of ‘passlockmoney’, the condensation of inner speech can result in ‘thinking in pure meanings’ as originally stated by Vygotsky. Condensed inner speech can even have most of its auditory qualities stripped away, such that ‘there isn’t much speechy about it’, say Fernyhough.
Hurlburt says inner speech can indeed involve elimination of words entirely, while the linguistic experience remains intact. ‘Sometimes there are words that are missing – “holes” in your inner speech. Sometimes the whole thing [all words] are missing and yet you still experience yourself speaking,’ he states. In this case, the person reports the experience of speaking, including its production, sense of loudness, pace etc, and senses what is being said but does not experience any words in their usual sense.
He has also posited a passive form of inner speech that he calls ‘inner hearing’. ‘It’s possible to inner “hear” your own voice rather than speak your own voice,’ he tells me. Here, people listen to their own voice in their heads, perceiving the same sonic characteristics as expanded speech, but without the agency. Such experiences have been recalled by participants as their voice ‘just happening’, as ‘coming out of its own accord’, as ‘taking place’ rather than ‘being uttered’.
Some people passively experience inner speech in voices not their own – essentially as auditory hallucinations that they cannot control. Founding member of the Beach Boys Brian Wilson described the experience to Larry King in an interview on CNN in 2004: ‘I’m going to kill you. I’m going to hurt you’, an inner voice had continually repeated to him since his initial experiences with LSD in the 1960s. The value of understanding such hallucinations is self-evident: they are a hallmark of schizophrenia, a condition that affects almost 24 million people worldwide.
Of great fascination, Fernyhough has concluded that a small but significant part of the general population also experience auditory hallucinations – a phenomenon the researchers call ‘voice hearing’ to distinguish it from schizophrenia. Such voices have been reported by noted individuals throughout history, says Fernyhough. The Greek philosopher Socrates described what he called a ‘daemonic sign’, an inner voice warning him that he was about to make a mistake. Joan of Arc described hearing divine voices since childhood – the same ones that influenced her motivation to help in the siege of Orleans. The 15th-century mystic and autobiographer Margery Kempe wrote about inner conversations with God. Sigmund Freud was not immune: ‘During the days when I was living alone in a foreign city … I quite often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved voice.’
All this leads to another, confounding question: are verbal thoughts reaching awareness just the tip of a mental iceberg, offering only a glimpse of the unconscious mind? The possibility was posed by Vygotsky, but Fernyhough doesn’t like going there: ‘When we are talking about thinking, we are talking about conscious processes.’
Whatever we ultimately find, the work pioneered by Vygotsky in human development promises to illuminate more secrets of selfhood and consciousness over time. Today, the new science of inner speech is turning up the gas so fast it is lighting the dark. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-inner-voice?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
I experience "inner speech" simply as my thoughts. And thoughts arise, rather than being deliberately, consciously produced. Oh, certainly, I can force myself to think about an elephant or whatever, but it's never the same. Insight and inspiration -- these are spontaneous gifts that emerge, arise.
As are the unpleasant thoughts and imaginings, akin to brief nightmares. They can be shaken off, but if the matter is important, they'll return.
Basically, I agree that the inner voice is us. It arises from the self that is larger than the conscious mind. And perhaps it's wisest to just "go with the flow" and listen.
*
*
HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN THE EARTH SUSTAIN?
~ In 2011, when the global population hit 7 billion, economist David Lam and demographer Stan Becker made a bet. Lam predicted food would get cheaper over the next decade, despite continuing population growth. Becker predicted that food prices would go up, because of the damage humans were doing to the planet, which meant that population growth would outstrip food supply. Becker won and, following his wishes, Lam has just written out a cheque for $194 to the Vermont-based nonprofit Population Media Center, which promotes population stabilization internationally.
The FAO reports that hunger has been increasing since 2014 and 9% of the world’s population is now hungry. If hunger is defined as undernutrition – meaning that a person’s food intake falls short of their energy requirements – Asia accounts for most of it, but the fastest increases have been recorded in Africa.
The relationship between human population growth and the climate crisis is complicated – and neither the University of Washington’s nor the UN’s models take the latter into account – but the impact of the climate crisis is not equitable either. Raya Muttarak of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, gave a vivid example of that when she described how, in India, food shortages caused by floods led to many families prioritizing boys at mealtimes, meaning that the proportion of girls who experience impaired growth grew in respect to their male siblings in those periods.
But even though he leans towards pessimism himself, Bongaarts doesn’t foresee the near future of humanity as being punctuated by demographic catastrophes. Instead, he said, it will be a case of a gradual deterioration in quality of life. “Every billion people we add to the planet makes life harder for everyone else,” he said. The rich will be able to buffer themselves from the worst of it, for a while, but much of humanity will have “a terrible time” over the next few decades.
Becker cited several ecological studies that indicate that the maximum number of people the Earth can sustainably support is between 2 and 3 billion, roughly what it was in the mid-20th century. An essential part of the solution to the current predicament, he said, is “degrowth”, of which the most important element is a “small family ethic”.
The trouble is, slowing population growth may not solve the environmental problem – at least not in time. In 2014, Australian ecologists Corey Bradshaw and Barry Brook modeled various population growth scenarios and suggested, scarily, that even a hypothetical catastrophe that wiped out 2 billion people in the mid-21st century would fail to bring the global population beneath 8.5 billion by 2100. Under another scenario, assuming mortality rates continue to fall, they wrote, “even a rapid transition to a worldwide one-child policy leads to a population similar to today’s”. Other things being equal, humanity would continue to run down natural resources and any impact would be far too slow to mitigate the climate crisis.
If the policy response to these problems has been weak to date, Bongaarts says, it’s because “policymakers tend to listen to economists and economists tend to be optimistic”. They should be listening to demographers, ecologists and public health experts too, he believes.
Becker concurs, adding that individuals also need to change their behavior, particularly in rich countries where per capita consumption is highest (and even though some of those countries may be on the cusp of population contraction). Besides having fewer children, the actions that are considered to offer the largest benefits are giving up meat and cars. Both Becker and Lam walk their talk, in this respect: Lam owns a car and eats meat; Becker shares a car with his wife and is vegetarian; neither has added more than one child to the planet. ~
from another source:
Maternity wards are shuttering in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in China. Hundreds of thousands of properties in Germany have been leveled and the land turned into parks.
The world’s demographics are changing, pushing toward more deaths than births. Though some countries’ populations continue to grow, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else as women have gained more access to education and contraception. Demographers now predict that toward the middle of this century, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.
A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow
climate change and reduce burdens for women. But the data also points to
changes that are hard to fathom: Fewer workers could upend the ways
societies are organized and our ideas about family and nation. ~ New York Times daily newsletter, May 2021
*
WHY CONFEDERATE LIES LIVE ON
~ Most of the people who come to Blandford Cemetery, in Petersburg, Virginia, come for the windows—masterpieces of Tiffany glass in the cemetery’s deconsecrated church. One morning before the pandemic, I took a tour of the church along with two other visitors and our tour guide, Ken. When my eyes adjusted to the hazy darkness inside, I could see that in each window stood a saint, surrounded by dazzling bursts of blues and greens and violets. Below these explosions of color were words that I couldn’t quite make out. I stepped closer to one of the windows, and the language became clearer. Beneath the saint was an inscription honoring the men “who died for the Confederacy.”
Outside, lawn mowers buzzed as Black men steered them between tombstones draped in Confederate flags. The oldest marked grave at Blandford dates back to 1702; new funerals are held there every week. Within the cemetery’s 150 acres are the bodies of roughly 30,000 Confederate soldiers, one of the largest mass graves of Confederate servicemen in the country.
From 1866 into the 1880s, Ken told us, a group of local women organized the tracking-down and exhuming of those bodies from nearby battlegrounds. “They felt that the southern soldier had not been treated with the same dignity and honor that the northern soldiers had,” and they wanted to do something about it. Most of the bodies were not identifiable; sometimes all that was left was a leg or an arm. Nonetheless, the remains were dug up and brought here, and the ladies refurbished the old church as a memorial to their fallen husbands, sons, and brothers.
Tiffany Studios cut them a deal on the stained glass: $350 apiece instead of the usual price of about $1,700 ($51,000 today). Thirteen southern states donated funds. Ken outlined the aesthetic history of each window in meticulous detail, giving each color and engraving his thorough and intimate attention. But he said almost nothing about why the windows were there—that the soldiers memorialized in stained glass had fought a war to keep my ancestors in chains.
Almost all of the people who come to Blandford Cemetery are white. “It’s not that a Black population doesn’t appreciate the windows,” Ken, who is white, told me. “But sometimes in the context of what it represents, they’re not as comfortable.” He went on: “In most cases we try and fall back on the beauty of the windows, the Tiffany-glass kind of thing.”
But I couldn’t revel in the windows’ beauty without reckoning with what those windows represented. I looked around the church again. How many of the visitors to the cemetery today, I asked Ken, are Confederate sympathizers?
“I think there’s a Confederate empathy,” he replied. “People will tell you, ‘My great-great-grandmother, my great-great-grandfather are buried out here.’ So they’ve got long southern roots.”
We left the church, and a breeze slid across my face. Many people go to places like Blandford to see a piece of history, but history is not what is reflected in that glass. A few years ago, I decided to travel around America visiting sites that are grappling—or refusing to grapple—with America’s history of slavery. I went to plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, and historical landmarks. As I traveled, I was moved by the people who have committed their lives to telling the story of slavery in all its fullness and humanity. And I was struck by the many people I met who believe a version of history that rests on well-documented falsehoods.
For so many of them, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth. This is especially true at Blandford, where the ancestors aren’t just hovering in the background—they are literally buried underfoot.
*
As we spoke, I looked down at the counter and reached for one of the flyers stacked there. Martha’s [Ken’s boss] gaze followed my hand. Her face turned red and she thrust her hand down to flip the paper over, attempting to cover the rest of the leaflets. “Don’t even look at this. I’m sorry,” she said. “I will tell you, from a personal standpoint, I’m kind of bothered.”
I looked at the flyer again, trying to read between her fingers. It was a handout for a Memorial Day event at Blandford hosted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Paul C. Gramling Jr., then the commander in chief of the group, would be speaking. It was May 2019, and the event was just a few weeks away.
“I don’t mind that they come on Memorial Day and put Confederate flags on Confederate graves. That’s okay,” she said. “But as far as I’m concerned, you don’t need a Confederate flag on—” She stumbled over a series of sentences I couldn’t follow. Then she collected herself and took a deep breath. “If you’re just talking about history, it’s great, but these folks are like, ‘The South shall rise again.’ It’s very bothersome.”
She told me that she’d attended a Sons of Confederate Veterans event once but wouldn’t again. “These folks can’t let things go. I mean, it’s not like they want people enslaved again, but they can’t get over the fact that history is history.”
*
I walked across the street, to another burial ground, this one much smaller. The People’s Memorial Cemetery was founded in 1840 by 28 members of Petersburg’s free Black community. Buried on this land are people who were enslaved; a prominent antislavery writer; Black veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II; and hundreds of other Black residents.
There are far fewer tombstones than at Blandford. There are no flags on the graves. And there are no hourly tours for people to remember the dead. There is history, but also silence.
Many places in the South claim to be the originator of Memorial Day, and the story is at least as much a matter of interpretation as of fact. According to the historian David Blight, the first Memorial Day ceremony was held in Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1865, when Black workmen, most of them formerly enslaved, buried and commemorated fallen Union soldiers.
Confederates had converted Charleston’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison for captured Union soldiers. The conditions were so terrible that nearly 260 men died and were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. After the Confederates retreated, Black men reburied the dead in proper graves and erected an archway bearing the words martyrs of the race course. An enormous parade was held on the track, with 3,000 Black children singing “John Brown’s Body,” the Union marching song. The first Memorial Day, as Blight describes it, received significant press coverage. But it faded from public consciousness after the defeat of Reconstruction.
It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.
We know this is a lie, because the people who fought in the Civil War told us so. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world,” Mississippi lawmakers declared during their 1861 secession convention. Slavery was “the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution,” the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, said, adding that the Confederacy was founded on “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”
The Lost Cause asks us to ignore this evidence. Besides, it argues, slavery wasn’t even that bad.
The early 1900s saw a boom in Confederate-monument building. The monuments were meant to reinforce white supremacy in an era when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. They were also intended to teach new generations of white southerners that the cause their ancestors had fought for was just.
That myth tried to rewrite U.S. history, and my visit to Blandford showed how, in so many ways, it had succeeded.
Some people say that up to 100,000 Black soldiers fought for the Confederate Army, in racially integrated regiments. No evidence supports these claims, as the historian Kevin M. Levin has pointed out, but appropriating the stories of men like Poplar (Black men couldn’t serve in the Confederate Army. And an 1886 obituary suggests that Poplar was a cook for the soldiers, not someone engaged in combat) is a way to protect the Confederacy’s legacy. If Black soldiers fought for the South, how could the war have been about slavery? How could it be considered racist now to fly the Dixie flag?
One Confederate general, Patrick Cleburne, actually did float the idea of using enslaved people as soldiers, but he was scoffed at. A senator from Virginia is reported to have asked, “What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?” General Howell Cobb was even more explicit: “If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” In a desperate move just weeks before General Robert E. Lee’s surrender, the Confederacy approved legislation that would allow Black people to be used in battle. But by then it was too late.
I asked Jeff whether he thought slavery had played a role in the start of the Civil War. “Oh, just a very small part. I mean, we can’t deny it was there. We know slave blocks existed.” But only a small number of plantations even had slaves, he said.
It was a remarkable contortion of history, reflecting a century of Lost Cause propaganda.
Two children ran behind me, chasing a ball. Jeff smiled. He told me that he doesn’t call it the “Civil War,” because that distorts the truth. “We call it the ‘War Between the States’ or ‘of Northern Aggression’ against us,” he said. “Southern people don’t call it the Civil War, because they know it was an invasion … If you stayed up north, ain’t nothing would’ve happened.”
When Jeff said “nothing would’ve happened,” I wondered if he had forgotten the millions of Black people who would have remained enslaved, those for whom the status quo would have meant ongoing bondage. Or did he remember but not care?
The historian Joseph T. Glatthaar analyzed the makeup of the unit that would become Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and pointed out that “the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery.” Almost half either owned enslaved people or lived with a head of household who did, and many more worked for slaveholders, rented land from them, or had business relationships with them.
Many white southerners who did not own enslaved people were deeply committed to preserving the institution. The historian James Oliver Horton wrote about how the press inundated white southerners with warnings that, without slavery, they would be forced to live, work, and inevitably procreate with their free Black neighbors.
The Louisville Daily Courier, for example, warned nonslaveholding white southerners about the slippery slope of abolition: “Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?” The paper threatened that Black men would sleep with white women and “amalgamate together the two races in violation of God’s will.”
These messages worked, Horton’s research found. One southern prisoner of war told a Union soldier standing watch, “You Yanks want us to marry our daughters to niggers”; a Confederate artilleryman from Louisiana said that his army had to fight against even the most difficult odds, because he would “never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person.”
The proposition of equality with Black people was one that millions of southern white people were unwilling to accept. The existence of slavery meant that, no matter your socioeconomic status, there were always millions of people beneath you. As the historian Charles Dew put it, “You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”
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[In a Black memorial cemetery] Did the white visitors, I asked [the director], experience the space differently from the Black visitors? She told me that the most common question she gets from white visitors is “I know slavery was bad … I don’t mean it this way, but … Were there any good slave owners?”
She took a deep breath, her frustration visible. She had the look of someone professionally committed to patience but personally exhausted by the toll it takes.
“I really give a short but nuanced answer to that,” she said. “Regardless of how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were still sanctioning the system … You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’ How absurd does that sound?”
But so many Americans simply don’t want to hear this, and if they do hear it, they refuse to accept it. After the 2015 massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston led to renewed questions about the memory and iconography of the Confederacy, Greg Stewart, another member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told The New York Times, “You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters.”
So much of the story we tell about history is really the story we tell about ourselves. It is the story of our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. They are the stories Jeff tells as he sits watching the deer scamper among the Blandford tombstones at dusk. The stories he wants to tell his granddaughters when he holds their hands as they walk over the land. But just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true. ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/06/confederate-lost-cause-myth/618711/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Joseph Milosch: CONFEDERACY EVERY STATE FOR ITSELF; Grant & the Civil War
One reason the myth of the South continues is we don’t discuss President Grant when the Civil War is taught in high school and college. He is dismissed as a drunken General at best and an alcoholic president at worst. It is true that Grant was an alcoholic. He fought his disease throughout his life, and like many alcoholics, he went through periods of sobriety.
As a General, Grant was a methodical and practical strategist. He scouted the enemy. Then he secured his supply lines. He often was among the last men during a retreat. He planned his attacks in consultation with his staff and prioritized different attack plans. Vicksburg is a perfect example of how he tried his different plans until one worked.
If the enemy forces couldn’t force him to retreat, he remained on the front lines until he was victorious. His most undervalued realization was that the Confederacy was united only in name. Every state militia was supported only by its state, and it fought only for its state. Davis was president, yet his funds were limited by the Confederate Constitution, and he helped only the states that paid homage to him. He was Trump-like.
General Lee is an example of the weakness of “every state for itself.” When it became obvious that the South was losing, there was a plan to move the Confederacy to the west side of the Mississippi River. Not one General of any of the state militias agreed to go west and set up headquarters in Texas. Lee said he fought for his state, Virginia.
Grant knew his strongest advantage was that fighting for the United States. He didn’t have to request aid from a state, whose interested laid in its own security rather than helping another Confederate state. The Army and Navy had a unified system. Grant believed that the South wouldn’t help Vicksburg because that was the State of Mississippi’s problem.
Grant believed it was a benefit to the South and if he took Vicksburg, he’d demoralize the South, stop the export of cotton, and protect his rear and flank. Then he could isolate Tennessee and Kentucky from any support. He believed if Sherman defeated Alabama, North and South Carolina, Lee would surrender leaving Georgia as the last Eastern state.
Lee knew if he’d lost Virginia, his best option was to retreat to Texas and continue the war there. He chose to stay, and Grant forced him to Appomattox. Lee requested reinforcements and supplies from Georgia. The governor and its militia’s general refused to send troops or supplies to Lee. They wanted to keep their troops at home.
In his memoir, Grant wrote the cause of the Civil War was as follows: “The southern slave-owners believed that in some way, the ownership of slaves conferred a sort of patent of nobility — a right to govern independent of the interest or wishes of those who did not hold such property. They convinced themselves, first, of the divine origin of the institution and, next, that that particular institution was not safe in the hands of any body of legislators but themselves.”
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Oriana:
Thanks for this fascinating historical information. That the Southern slave owners managed to convinced themselves of the divine origin of the institution of slavery again shows how easy it is to distort the bible to support even the most outrageous positions and justify one’s self-interest as ordained by god himself.
But an even greater revelation was the doctrine of “every state for itself.” That doomed the South to defeat, among several other factors.
The huge problem, though, was that while the South lost the war, it appears to have won the peace, spreading its lies and glorifying its “heroes” by decorating the graves and erecting statues — and of course suppressing black men’s voting rights and other types of discrimination (Jim Crow). Only recently has there been any pushback against the lie that the war was for the Noble Cause, presumably state rights. It’s astonishing that after more than century and a half, the lying not has yet ceased.
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THE HOLY FORESKIN
~ If you were a Christian in the Middle Ages you could not enter a church without hearing a story about the saints whose relics were housed there. Everyone loved relics and there was fierce competition for possession of the remains of those closest to Jesus or most widely renowned for their holiness. Given that Jesus had ascended into heaven the closest you could get to the Savior was the body of one of his relatives or followers, right? Well, not exactly. There was one rather sensitive piece of Jesus’ body that some believed had remained on Earth: his foreskin.
Jesus was a Jewish man. He preached in synagogues, was called a rabbi, and—like other Jewish men—was circumcised eight days after his birth (Luke 2:21). There was nothing strange or unusual about this event; it was something done in fulfillment of a law handed down by God to Abraham in Genesis 17.
Strikingly, however, the Apostle Paul did not require that Gentile followers of Jesus circumcise themselves in order to join the movement. Even though many Christians today circumcise their sons it’s not a religious requirement and Paul’s sharply worded letter to the Galatians stresses that non-Jewish followers really should not do this. In fact, he accuses those who do this of mutilating themselves. Paul’s opinion won the day and it’s easy to see why: beyond the fact that circumcision is a tough sell for adult men it was viewed with suspicion by many of Paul’s contemporaries.
Dr. Isaac Soon, an assistant professor of New Testament studies at Crandall University, told The Daily Beast that “many ancient Greeks and Romans treated circumcision like a kind of disability.” “We know of some ancient Jewish men who tried to remove their circumcision, through a procedure called epispasm.” Others tried to fake it by using twine to pull the skin around the penis forward but this was not always successful. The poet Martial ridiculed a Jewish man whose fibula (twine) fell out when he was at the baths.
Over the following centuries circumcision became increasingly unpopular among mainstream Christians. Dr. Andrew Jacobs, senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School and author of Christ Circumcised: A Study in Early Christian History and Difference, told me that as the most famous marker of Jewish identity circumcision was a way for Christians to distinguish themselves from Jews and from what would later be called “heretical groups.”
Later sources, Jacobs said, refer to groups of unorthodox Christians who allegedly practiced circumcision. The fourth century theologian Epiphanius claims in his lengthy encyclopedia of heresies that at least three groups—the “Cerinthians,” the “Nazoreans,” and the “Ebionites”—practiced circumcision ‘like the Jews.’ Jacobs mentioned that Epiphanius tells us that the Cerinthians and Ebionites claimed to be following Christ's example when they were circumcised.
The difficulty is that we can’t be sure that these groups existed, much less that they did the things that Epiphanius claims they did. “Epiphanius is certainly no stranger to exaggeration (and even lying),” said Jacobs, “But other ancient sources talk about forms of Christianity that adhered to the laws of Moses… so we have to imagine at least some people who considered themselves Christian may have been circumcised, and may have claimed they were following Jesus' example.”
All of this anti-circumcision conversation, however, created a problem. For Christians who used circumcision as a means of distinguishing themselves from Jews the body of Jesus was something of a rub. “Christians had to figure out,” Jacobs told me “how and why (or even if) their savior had this paradigmatic Jewish mark on his body.” The difficulty was only exacerbated as Christian theologians began to emphasize Christ’s divinity “even as an infant he must have been aware of and in control of what happened to his person!” Why did baby Jesus let this happen?
By the middle ages Christians had worked out sophisticated arguments for why Jesus’s circumcision was not about his Jewishness. They argued that he was circumcised to prove that he was actually a human being; to put an end to the law by fulfilling it once and for all (a similar idea about sacrifice is found in the Epistle to the Hebrews); or his circumcision confirms his masculinity. The medieval bestseller The Golden Legend even claimed that the day of circumcision has salvific function as it was the day when Jesus began to shed blood for humanity. It was, Jacobs said, “anything but a concession to Jewish law!”
This theological maneuvering allowed Christians to reclaim the foreskin of Jesus as a holy relic. But there was still a problem—where was it?
The Bible doesn’t tell us, but for medieval Christians who were fascinated with the power and intimacy of relics, the idea that a piece of Jesus’ body was still on Earth was ripe with potential. One second century apocryphal story known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas tells us that the foreskin (and umbilical cord) was taken away by an “old Hebrew woman” and preserved in an alabaster box of oil. According to tradition it then somehow ended up in the bottle of perfume that the sinful woman used to anoint Jesus’ body before his death in Mark 14. This is the earliest example, Jacobs said, of Christians thinking about the kinds of unique Jesus-relics that might still be around. Other abandoned body parts like toenail clippings or hair might also be out there: one divine man’s trash, as they say, is a regular person’s treasure.
As with all relics, the holy foreskin (or prepuce as it is loftily known) began to multiply. The first example showed up at the beginning of the ninth century when Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, presented Pope Leo III with one. According to St Birgitta’s The Lord’s Foreskin, the Virgin Mary had kept Jesus’ foreskin in a leather pouch before bequeathing it to the Apostle John. It then languished for 700 years before it ended up in Charlemagne’s hands. By the 13th century it was on display at the Vatican.
Charlemagne’s relic was not the only one; during the Middle Ages at least 12 could be found in European churches. One famous example includes a holy foreskin from France that was placed in the marriage bed of Henry V of England and Catherine of Valois on their wedding night as a fertility charm (and you thought finding an old band-aid in your bed was gross). Over the centuries, however, many of the holy foreskins went missing or were stolen. The last known example was stolen out of a church in Calcata, Italy, in 1983. Interestingly, the local bishop didn’t attempt to recover it and let the whole matter slide. Some have speculated that the Vatican itself had stolen the relic in order to stop people talking about Jesus’ penis.
As a relic, the holy foreskin was the object of religious veneration. Medieval Christianity was a sensory religion in which participants communed with God in an embodied way. Somatic encounters with the remains of saints and the body of Jesus were a common occurrence and even today Catholic Eucharist services involve ingesting the body of Christ. There is a precedent, therefore, for tasting the body of Jesus. The Swedish nun St. Birgitta records a vision in which she ate the then-millennium-old holy foreskin. Chapter 37 of her Revelationes describes the experience in some detail: “Now she feels on her tongue a small membrane, like the membrane of an egg, full of superabundant sweetness, and she swallowed it down…And she did the same perhaps hundreds of times. When she touched it with her finger the membrane went down her throat of itself.”
While this might seem somewhat extreme, Harvard academic Marc Shell writes that tasting Jesus’ foreskin was one of the few ways to test the authenticity of a holy prepuce. Whereas we might perform carbon dating tests, ancient physicians, known as croques-prépuces would taste the “shrivelled leather in order to determine whether it was wholly or partly human skin.” Shell notes that the foreskin was just one of many Jesus cast offs to make a splash on the relic scene: sweat from the Garden of Gethsemane, lost baby teeth, breast milk from the Virgin Mary, and even urine and faeces made appearances. The 12th century Cistercian monk St. Bernard was famous for drinking the breast milk of the Virgin. Digestive practices like these give a whole new meaning to the phrase “cafeteria Catholic.”
Many Christians, though, were skeptical of the claims about the foreskin of Jesus. The sixth century Severus of Antioch was the first, Jacobs told me, to argue what would later become the standard view: that the foreskin rose with Jesus at the resurrection and is now in heaven. This view is not just about protecting the integrity of Jesus’ resurrection, it’s about the resurrection of everyone else as well. Early Christians worried about the aesthetics effects of people leaving bits and pieces of themselves behind after Judgment Day. They wanted to ensure that amputated limbs, hair lost through male pattern baldness, and so on all made its way to heaven. Leaving pieces of you behind presents a philosophical problem: Have “you” really been resurrected if your body—in its entirety—isn’t raised from the dead?
Even so, the holy foreskin has elicited more than its fair share of humor and criticism. Martin Luther was a skeptic; Voltaire made fun of the concepts in the 18th century; and even BuzzFeed has explored the story. The somewhat liminal view of the 17th century theologian Leo Allatius that the foreskin of Jesus left Earth only to expand and form one of the bands of Saturn has particular comic appeal. Over time, therefore, the Roman Catholic church became concerned. In 1900 the Vatican issued a ruling that anyone referring to the “true sacred flesh” could be subject to excommunication. In its 2,000-year history the foreskin of Jesus has shifted from from biological debris, to controversial identity marker, to relic, and, finally, sacred taboo. The cultural journey of this small piece of skin marks Christianity’s own passage from Jewish sect to medieval socioeconomic powerhouse to modern religion.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-happened-to-jesus-foreskin?via=newsletter&source=Weekend
Oriana:
It's amazing how literal and sensory those early Christian imaginings and practices were. But I love the idea that a bald man's lost hair will be resurrected along with the rest of his body.
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EXTRAVERTS AND CONSERVATIVES MORE LIKELY TO BECOME INFECTED WITH COVID
~ The COVID pandemic, which has killed millions across the world, is largely rooted in human social behavior. Through such processes as coughing and related respiratory acts, the virus gets itself replicated from one human body into another. It thrives on close contact between people.
In light of the human behavioral element of COVID, my research team (a subset of The New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab ) conducted a study to help us better understand the behavioral factors that underlie the spread of this virus—a virus that has turned all of our worlds upside down in so many ways.
Recent research has found that those who are relatively extraverted are less likely to follow recommended guidelines related to protection from the virus compared to those who are more introverted (see Han et al., 2021).
A straightforward hypothesis related to this issue, then is simply this: Extraverts may well be more likely to actually acquire COVID compared with introverts. Such a result would be consistent with the evolutionary framework of balancing selection (see Nettle, 2006), which suggests that evolutionary benefits of extraversion, such as increased mating opportunities and larger social circles, might be offset by such adverse outcomes as injury and early death. Following this reasoning, perhaps across the human evolutionary experience, extraverts have been more likely to be "selected out" during intermittent pandemics, which have long been a part of human history.
An additional evolutionary perspective as to why and how extraversion might relate to COVID infection proclivity pertains the behavioral-system hijacking hypothesis (see Reiber et al., 2010). This idea, which is admittedly beyond the scope of our data, suggests that the coronavirus, which has known effects on the nervous system, may actually hijack behavior and temporarily make people relatively sociable so as to increase its spread across an increased number of human hosts.
POLITICAL ORIENTATION AND COVID
Given the tendency for nearly any issue to become politicized in modern times, it is unfortunate—but not surprising—that the COVID pandemic has become highly politicized. And it makes sense that this fact has led to differentiated behaviors related to the pandemic across the political spectrum.
Gollwitzer et al. (2020) found that people who live in relatively conservative areas (based on voting patterns) have been less likely to follow social-distancing guidelines relative to those living in areas where people are more likely to vote for liberal political candidates.
In light of this basic reasoning, we predicted that people who self-identify as conservative would be more likely to wind up becoming infected with the virus relative to those who self-identify as liberal.
Our study included over 200 adults from both the US and the UK. We targeted individuals who are 40 or older, as younger people are less likely to be symptomatic. In our final sample, about 1/4 of participants reported having received, at some point, a positive COVID test or they reported having tested as positive for the anti-bodies, implying that they'd had the disease at some point.
Participants completed a simple survey that included a measure of various facets of extraversion, including the sociability facet, which was the particular sub-dimension of extraversion that was of interest to us. Participants also completed a political orientation index reporting the degree to which they self-identified as politically liberal or conservative.
Our results were relatively straightforward:
1. There was no effect for country of origin: The results came out the same in participants regardless of whether they were from the US or the UK.
2. After controlling for a broad array of other variables, the sociability facet of extraversion emerged as a significant predictor of whether someone had become infected with the coronavirus: Social extraverts were significantly more likely than were others to have had COVID .
3. Across both the US and UK samples, those who self-identified as politically conservative were more likely to have tested positive for COVID relative to their self-described liberal counterparts.
In summary:
Issues of human behavior have been at the core of the spread of the virus from the outset. The research described here explores the behavioral science of COVID. Specifically, we found that those who have been infected with COVID are more likely to (a) score as relatively sociable on indices of extraversion and (b) identify as relatively politically conservative.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/202105/extraverts-and-conservatives-are-more-likely-get-covid
Oriana:
It seems pretty obvious that introverts would adapt better to the guidelines for social distancing. My favorite pandemic joke is, "I have been social-distancing since third grade."
Joe: AMERICA MUTATED INTO A SECULAR AND A RELIGIOUS PARTY
I think it is common knowledge that Conservative-Christian ministers promote registering and voting for one party, the Republican. The majority of conservative Christians, ninety percent, belong to the GOP, and according to polls, eighty percent of the party is composed of Christians.
According to many polls — CNN, Pew, and others — seventy percent of conservative Christians refuse to wear a mask because to do so would impinge on their religious freedom. An equal number of Republicans refuse to wear a mask because it would intrude on their political rights.
Orwell wrote that when a majority no longer differentiate between free thought and political slogans, a regime becomes oppressive. The way conservative-Christians reacted to masks during the COVID 19 epidemic reveals how willing they are to accept their preacher’s religious/political slogans.
To some, it is unacceptable to commit to a community that denies knowledge developed from the wisdom of past ages. According to Joseph Campbell, one cannot pin divinity down to push a political agenda. Now, it seems that conservative-Christians believe God requires their political allegiance and that America mutated into a secular and a religious party.
Ocean Light by David Whyte. Nature lovers are more likely to be introverts.
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ending on beauty:
When Orpheus turned
and looked back and knew
that genius wasn’t enough,
I wonder which he regretted most:
the failure of will,
Eurydice lost,
or what it must mean for her
to remain
a fraction of darkness?
~ Linda Pastan, Orpheus
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