Neptune's Cave, stalactite cave near Alghero, Sardinia“MUSIC SAYS FREEDOM EXISTS”
If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
~ a Yiddish proverb
In a dream he heard a voice:
Socrates, make music —
and Socrates the unmusical, the mortal,
wrote poems while awaiting execution.
He denied he wanted to publish; he was only
obeying his dream. Do we believe
him, we who also write in ordered
stanzas as we wait for our execution,
deny we crave to publish and be
immortal; we’re only obeying our dream.
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And when the angels come for us,
when time is ended, the trumpet’s blast,
they’ll say there’s Hitler in all of us —
Yet we make music beyond the noise,
song will survive, look at my poise:
reciting palm trees under my breath,
the platinum sheen of the Pacific
before the syntax shifts to gold —
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If God is Hitler we need to know,
the Tree of Knowledge obliges us,
don’t tell me poets lie too much,
do not tell God he has the right
to remain silent. Love, can I borrow
your clarinet, that gurgling joy I dedicate
to the survivor who sings and laughs,
dances to live, for all of us.
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But modern music favors dissonance.
Imagine the percussive sound:
tossed on a pile of corpses,
arm against thigh, pelvis against
a shoulder blade; clavicle,
clavecin, it will take
a thousand years to hose the blood
off those musical Nazis.
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Why would God bother
with the Last Judgment:
bone joining bone, putting on flesh,
just to be judged? Redeemer,
where? She is among us,
the one-time ballerina
behind the electric wire —
listen, she laughs, having survived
dancing for Doctor Mengele.
Her name is Edith, it means “blessed” —
like dancing naked in a glass house,
safe from the stones that people throw,
thinking it’s God’s house. They shout
Heil Hitler and who could blame them,
they want to break his windows —
and those bones
dancing, and those bones
turning into stars.
~ Oriana
In honor of Edith Eger, survivor of Auschwitz, whom I had the honor of meeting
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The title comes from the poem “Allegro” by Tomas Tranströmer
Edith Eger (born 1927) and her twin sister were 16 when they were taken to Auschwitz. She was too young to be a professional ballerina, but she already had years of training — and someone told Mengele that she'd been a ballerina in Hungary. So he wanted to see her perform. Close to liberation (in a different camp, in Germany), she ended up being tossed on a pile of corpses. Fortunately one of the soldiers who entered the camp noticed a slight movement. She eventually became a therapist and a peace activist. Dancing is still a powerful metaphor for her.
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Mary: FREEDOM LIES IN ACTS OF CREATION
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THE PROPHETIC FICTION OF KATHRINE KRESSMANN TAYLOR PREDICTED HITLER’S RISE TO POWER
~ Kathrine Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown is not a historical novel. She was born in 1903 in Portland, Oregon, and she was writing about the present, about what she observed and understood in the world around her. The rapturous reception the novel received when it was published in 1938, under the name Kressmann Taylor, suggests that she was not alone in her awareness of what was happening in Europe, but few, if any, American novelists were writing about Hitler’s rise to power.
There are certain novels that have the remarkable quality of being both timely and prophetic. Think of Kafka’s The Trial, Orwell’s 1984, Ellison’s Invisible Man and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Each creates a very particular world that simultaneously holds up a mirror to the present and suggests possibilities for the future.
Address Unknown has this Janus-like quality. The novel consists entirely of letters (and one cablegram) written between two German friends, Max Eisenstein and Martin Schulse, who own a successful art gallery in San Francisco. Their correspondence begins in the autumn of 1932, when Martin moves back to Munich, and ends in the spring of 1934. What makes the novel still feel so timely are the confounding questions at the heart of the narrative: How do we know what we know, and when do we know it? Why does a good person become a bad person? What power does a citizen have against the state?
These questions felt urgent to Kressmann Taylor 83 years ago, and they feel urgent now. In 2015, in Iowa City, I taught Ellison’s Invisible Man, which was published in 1952. I remember beginning the class by writing on the board statistics for Black and white Americans: the mortality rates, the incarceration rates, the levels of education and income. The inequities Ellison had addressed were still, sadly, very much with us. After class I went out to dinner with my students, Black, Asian, Hispanic and white, all of us sitting around the table. Despite what I’d written on the board, I found myself thinking how fortunate we were to live in a time and place where we could work and talk as equals. Only later did I learn that afterward, walking home, my Black students carefully crossed the road to avoid the crowds of white people spilling out of the bars.
When I went to investigate my mother’s claim that the adults around her were ignorant of the camps, I discovered that on June 25, 1942, the Daily Telegraph in London published a story with the headline ‘Germans murder 700,000 Jews in Poland: Travelling Gas Chambers’. The article lists the numbers killed in various towns and cities, and describes the murder of children, pensioners and hospital patients. It was published on page five of a six-page issue of the paper and disappeared without a trace. No other newspapers took up the story.
Key to the success of the prophetic novel is that it is not a sermon. The reader wants to be informed but she longs to be entertained. Kressmann Taylor fulfills this longing by her gripping, fast-moving plot and her brilliant choice of the epistolary form. She may have come to the latter, as we learn in the afterword, almost accidentally, but she could scarcely have chosen a better way to explore her moral questions. One of the signal advantages of the form is that it banishes the narrator’s voice and moral stance; the letters represent only the point of view of the characters.
It also allows for a useful compression. Readers have a sense of eavesdropping; they don’t expect to understand everything, or to learn every detail. Their assumption is that the letter writer has something important to communicate, and too much explaining can make a letter seem contrived. Kressmann Taylor makes excellent use of these attributes, particularly in the deft introduction of her third main character, Max’s sister, Griselle, an actress who still lives in Europe and who, after years of struggle, is having great success on the stage in Vienna.
The voices of the two friends are pleasingly distinct—Max in San Francisco a little more colloquial, Martin in Munich a little more formal—but at the beginning of the novel they seem united in their attitudes. Max describes himself as selling the paintings Martin is sending over from Germany “at an appalling profit” and delights in getting an indecent price for an ugly Madonna from old Mrs. Fleshman.
“You speak of the poverty there,” he writes. “Conditions have been bad here this winter, but of course we have known nothing of the privations you see in Germany.”
From the 30-room house he’s been able to buy so cheaply, Martin responds, “The old despair has been thrown aside like a forgotten coat. No longer do the people wrap themselves in shame; they hope again.” The bad Jew-baiting, he writes, is only “the little surface scum when a big movement boils up.” For many of Kressmann Taylor’s contemporary readers, these words would have held no irony.
A few years after Address Unknown appeared, she went on to write a second novel, Day of No Return. It was based on interviews with a theological student who had been forced to flee Germany because he opposed Hitler’s takeover of the Lutheran Church. In her introduction, Kressmann Taylor describes Hitler’s plan to have the powerful church become a tool to disseminate Nazi doctrine. The Nazis succeed in taking over the church, “but gradually,” she writes, “they became aware that something was wrong… A force was resisting them, something they could not put their hands on—a belief.” The novel was published shortly before Pearl Harbor brought America into the war.
Good novels, as the name promises, keep bringing us the news, and we read them with both our outer and our inner eyes. We bring to them the swirling chaos of the world around us and the seemingly endless negotiations between the forces of good and evil, and we bring to them our deep-seated, long-lasting preoccupations. Address Unknown satisfies both kinds of reading and offers the additional delights of a piercingly good story. ~
https://lithub.com/how-the-prophetic-fiction-of-kathrine-kressmann-taylor-exposed-the-dangers-of-nazism-and-the-rise-of-hitler/?fbclid=IwAR3IH-MiFi1SFQMKtx1AWgD9oMYe-D_0bWMboBSeHE4-cON94jkFJBemd1I
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BAD NEWS FOR THE HIGHLY INTELLIGENT: HYPER BRAIN/HYPER BODY
~ In a study just published in the journal Intelligence, Pitzer College researcher Ruth Karpinski and her colleagues emailed a survey with questions about psychological and physiological disorders to members of Mensa. A “high IQ society,” Mensa requires that its members have an IQ in the top 2 percent. For most intelligence tests, this corresponds to an IQ of about 132 or higher. (The average IQ of the general population is 100.) The survey of Mensa’s highly intelligent members found that they were more likely to suffer from a range of serious disorders.
The survey covered mood disorders (depression, dysthymia and bipolar), anxiety disorders (generalized, social and obsessive-compulsive), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism. It also covered environmental allergies, asthma and autoimmune disorders. Respondents were asked to report whether they had ever been formally diagnosed with each disorder or suspected they suffered from it. With a return rate of nearly 75 percent, Karpinski and her colleagues compared the percentage of the 3,715 respondents who reported each disorder to the national average.
The biggest differences between the Mensa group and the general population were seen for mood disorders and anxiety disorders. More than a quarter (26.7 percent) of the sample reported that they had been formally diagnosed with a mood disorder, while 20 percent reported an anxiety disorder—far higher than the national averages of around 10 percent for each. The differences were smaller, but still statistically significant and practically meaningful, for most of the other disorders. The prevalence of environmental allergies was triple the national average (33 percent vs. 11 percent).
To explain their findings, Karpinski and her colleagues propose the hyper brain/hyper body theory. This theory holds that, for all of its advantages, being highly intelligent is associated with psychological and physiological “overexcitabilities,” or OEs. A concept introduced by the Polish psychiatrist and psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski in the 1960s, an OE is an unusually intense reaction to an environmental threat or insult. This can include anything from a startling sound to confrontation with another person.
Psychological OEs include a heightened tendency to ruminate and worry, whereas physiological OEs arise from the body’s response to stress. According to the hyper brain/hyper body theory, these two types of OEs are more common in highly intelligent people and interact with each other in a “vicious cycle” to cause both psychological and physiological dysfunction. For example, a highly intelligent person may overanalyze a disapproving comment made by a boss, imagining negative outcomes that simply wouldn’t occur to someone less intelligent. That may trigger the body’s stress response, which may make the person even more anxious.
The results of this study must be interpreted cautiously because they are correlational.
Showing that a disorder is more common in a sample of people with high IQs than in the general population doesn’t prove that high intelligence is the cause of the disorder. It’s also possible that people who join Mensa differ from other people in ways other than just IQ. For example, people preoccupied with intellectual pursuits may spend less time than the average person on physical exercise and social interaction, both of which have been shown to have broad benefits for psychological and physical health.
All the same, Karpinski and her colleagues’ findings set the stage for research that promises to shed new light on the link between intelligence and health. One possibility is that associations between intelligence and health outcomes reflect pleiotropy, which occurs when a gene influences seemingly unrelated traits. There is already some evidence to suggest that this is the case. In a 2015 study, Rosalind Arden and her colleagues concluded that the association between IQ and longevity is mostly explained by genetic factors.
From a practical standpoint, this research may ultimately lead to insights about how to improve people’s psychological and physical well-being. If overexcitabilities turn out to be the mechanism underlying the IQ-health relationship, then interventions aimed at curbing these sometimes maladaptive responses may help people lead happier, healthier lives. ~
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bad-news-for-the-highly-intelligent/
Oriana:
This sounds very similar to Elaine Aron’s Highly Sensitive Person — the innate personality type that causes come people to be easily overwhelmed by strong stimuli. The remedy is getting plenty of “down time” — peace and quiet and solitude.
It's also worth emphasizing that a high IQ is the best predictor of longevity, which this article mentions in passing. Highly intelligent people can use their intelligence to arrange their life so that they may thrive, with time to pursue intellectual and creative interests.
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Argyroxiphium, The flower of Patience. It opens every 7 years, and lasts 7 days.*
LIVING ON A SCI-FI PLANET: Three-Quarters of a Century of Nuclear Follies
Yes, once upon a time I regularly absorbed science fiction and imagined futures of wonder, but mainly of horror. What else could you think, if you read H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds under the covers by flashlight while your parents thought you were asleep? Of course, that novel was a futuristic fantasy, involving as it did Martians arriving in London to take out humanity.
Sixty-odd years after secretly reading that book and wondering about the future that would someday be mine, I’m living, it seems, in that very future, however Martian-less it might be. Still, just in case you hadn’t noticed, our present moment could easily be imagined as straight out of a science-fiction novel that, even at my age, I’d prefer not to read by flashlight in the dark of night.
I mean, I was barely one when Hiroshima was obliterated by a single atomic bomb. In the splintering of a moment and the mushroom cloud that followed, a genuinely apocalyptic power that had once rested only in the hands of the gods (and perhaps science-fiction authors) became an everyday part of our all-too-human world. From that day on, it was possible to imagine that we — not the Martians or the gods — could end it all. It became possible to imagine that we ourselves were the apocalypse. And give us credit. If we haven’t actually done so yet, neither have we done a bad job when it comes to preparing the way for just such a conclusion to human history.
Let’s put this in perspective. In the pandemic year 2020, 76 years after two American atomic bombs left the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in ashes, the world’s nuclear powers actually increased spending on nuclear weapons by $1.4 billion more than they had put out the previous year. And that increase was only a small percentage of the ongoing investment of those nine — yes, nine — countries in their growing nuclear arsenals. Worse yet, if you happen to be an American, more than half of the total 2020 “investment” in weaponry appropriate for world-ending scenarios, $37.4 billion to be exact, was plunked down by our own country. (A staggering $13.3 billion was given to weapons maker Northrop Grumman alone to begin the development of a new intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, the one thing our thoroughly troubled world obviously needs.) In all, those nine nuclear powers spent an estimated $137,000 a minute in 2020 to “improve” their arsenals — the ones that, if ever used, could end history as we know it.
In the Dust of the History of Death
Imagine for a second if all that money had instead been devoted to creating and disseminating vaccines for most of the world’s population, which has yet to receive such shots and so be rescued from the ravages of Covid-19, itself a death-dealing, sci-fi-style nightmare of the first order. But how could I even think such a thing when, in the decades since this country dropped that first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, it’s learned its atomic lessons all too well? Otherwise, why would its leaders now be planning to devote at least $1.7 trillion over the next three decades to “modernizing” what’s already the most modern nuclear arsenal on the planet?
Let me just add that I visited Hiroshima once upon a time with a Japanese colleague who had been born on an island off the coast of atomically destroyed Nagasaki. In 1982, he took me to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which, despite exhibiting a carbonized child’s lunchbox and permanently imprinted human shadows, can obviously offer a visitor only a hint of what it was actually like to experience the end of the world, thanks to a single bomb. And yet I found the experience so deeply unsettling that, when I returned home to New York City, I could barely talk about it.
Admittedly, though nine countries now possess nuclear weapons, most of them significantly more powerful than the single bomb that turned Hiroshima into a landscape of rubble, not one has ever been used in war. And that should be considered a miracle on a planet where, when it comes to weapons and war, miracles of any sort tend to be few and far between. After all, it’s estimated that, in 2020, this country alone had more than 5,000 nuclear weapons, at least 1,300 of them deployed and ready to use — enough, that is, to destroy several worlds.
Consider it an irony of the first order, then, that U.S. leaders have spent years focused on trying to keep the Iranians from making a single nuclear weapon, but not for a day, not for an hour, not for a second on keeping this country from producing ever more of them and the delivery systems that would distribute them anywhere on this planet. In that light, just consider, for instance, that, in 2021, the U.S. is preparing to invest more than $100 billion in producing a totally new ICBM, whose total cost over its “lifespan” (though perhaps the correct word would be “deathspan”) is already projected at $264 billion — and that’s before the cost overruns even begin. All of this for a future that… well, your guess is as good as mine.
Or consider that, only recently, the American and Russian heads of state, the two countries with by far the biggest nuclear arsenals, met in Geneva, Switzerland, and talked for hours, especially about cyberwar, while spending little appreciable time considering how to rein in their most devastating weaponry and head the planet toward a denuclearized future.
And keep in mind that all of this is happening on a planet where it’s now commonplace scientific knowledge that even a nuclear war between two regional powers, India and Pakistan, could throw so many particulates into the atmosphere as to create a nuclear winter on this planet, one likely to starve to death billions of us. In other words, just one regional nuclear conflict could leave the chaos and horror of the Covid-19 pandemic in the unimpressive dust of the history of death.
A Slow-Motion Hiroshima?
And yet, here’s perhaps the strangest thing of all: we’re still convinced that, since the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no matter how much world-ending weaponry has been stockpiled by China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, none has been used. Unfortunately, that should increasingly be seen as a Martian-less fantasy of the first order.
While it’s seldom thought of that way, climate change should really be reimagined as the equivalent of a slow-motion nuclear holocaust. Hiroshima took place in literally seconds, a single blinding flash of heat. Global warming will prove to be a matter of years, decades, even centuries of heat.
That all-too-apocalyptic phenomenon was set off in the nineteenth century via the coal-burning that accompanied the industrial revolution, first in Great Britain and then elsewhere across the planet. It’s only continued over all these years thanks to the burning, above all, of fossil fuels — oil and natural gas — and the release of carbon (and methane) into the atmosphere. In the case of climate change, there are no ICBMs, no nuclear-missile-armed submarines, no nuclear bombers. Instead, there are oil and natural gas companies, whose CEOs, regularly abetted by governments, have proven all too ready to destroy this planet for record profits. They’ve been perfectly willing to burn fossil fuels in a criminal fashion until, quite literally, the end of time. Worse yet, they generally knew just what kind of harm they were causing long before most of the rest of us and, in response, actively supported climate denialism.
No, there was no mushroom cloud, but rather a “cloud” of greenhouse gases forming over endless years beyond human vision. Still, let’s face it, on this planet of ours, not in 2031 or 2051 or 2101 but right at this very moment, we’re beginning to experience the equivalent of a slow-motion nuclear war.
In a sense, we’re already living through a modern slo-mo version of Hiroshima, no matter where we are or where we’ve traveled. At this moment, with an increasingly fierce megadrought gripping the West and Southwest, the likes of which hasn’t been experienced in at least 1,200 years, among the top candidates for an American Hiroshima would be Phoenix (118 degrees), Las Vegas (114 degrees), the aptly named Death Valley (128 degrees), Palm Springs (123 degrees), and Salt Lake City (107), all record temperatures for this season.
A recent report suggests that temperatures in famed Yellowstone National Park are now as high or higher than at any time in the past 20,000 years (and possibly in the last 800,000 years). And temperatures in Oregon and Washington are already soaring in record fashion with more to come, even as the fire season across the West arrives earlier and more fiercely each year. As I write this, for instance, California’s Big Sur region is ablaze in a striking fashion, among growing numbers of western fires. Under the circumstances, ironically enough, one of the only reasons some temperature records might not be set is that sun-blocking smoke from those fires might suppress the heat somewhat.
You should know that you’re on a different planet when even the most mainstream of news sources begins to put climate change in the lead in environmental pieces, as in this recent first sentence of a CNN report: “The incredible pictures of a depleted Lake Mead, on the Nevada-Arizona border, illustrate the effects of drought brought on by climate change.”
You could also imagine our modern Hiroshimas in the Florida Keys, where inexorably rising sea levels, due in part to the massive melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, are already threatening that especially low-lying part of that southern state. Or perhaps the Gulf Coast would qualify, since the heating waters of the Atlantic are now creating record tropical-storm and hurricane seasons that, like the heat and fires in the West, seem to arrive earlier each year. (One Florida city, Miami, is already contemplating building a massive seawall to protect itself against devastating future storm surges.)
In this desperately elongated version of nuclear war, everything being experienced in this country (and in a similar fashion around the world, from Australia’s brutally historic wildfires to a recent heat wave in the Persian Gulf, where temperatures topped 125 degrees) will only grow ever more extreme, even if, by some miracle, those nuclear weapons are kept under wraps.
Once upon a time, who could have imagined that humanity would inherit the kinds of apocalyptic powers previously left to the gods or that, when we finally noticed them, we would prove eerily unable to respond? Even if another nuclear weapon is never used, we stand capable, in slow-motion fashion, of making significant parts of our world uninhabitable — or, for that matter, if we were to act soon, keeping it at least reasonably habitable into the distant future.
Imagine, just as a modest start, a planet on which every dollar earmarked for nuclear weapons would be invested in a green set of solutions to a world growing by the year ever warmer, ever redder, ever less inhabitable.
Mary: SLOW-MOTION HIROSHIMA
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BISHOP BERKELEY AS A DEFENDER OF SLAVERY
~ George Berkeley is known for his doctrine of immaterialism: the counterintuitive view that there’s no material substance underlying the ideas perceived by the senses. We tend to think of a horse-drawn coach as a thing, but Berkeley tells us it’s really a set of ideas – the sound of the coach in the street, the sight of it through a window, the feel of it as we get in. We regularly perceive these ideas going along with each other, but there’s no material thing, beyond the ideas, that supports or holds them together – the ideas are all there is. It’s a hard view for a present-day reader to stomach. It was hard on the stomachs of readers even in Berkeley’s day in the early 1700s. He acknowledged that ‘it sounds very harsh to say we eat and drink ideas’ but insists that nourishment is nothing more than various ideas of the senses.
Nevertheless, Berkeley is clear on this: such things as coaches don’t exist independently of being perceived, because they consist of ideas and perceptions. Without there being a perceiver, they simply can’t exist. Do things exist when not perceived by any human mind? Here Berkeley gives a positive answer in the notebooks he kept while he was developing this new doctrine, as he called it: the horses are in the stable, the books are in the study despite no one being there to see, smell, hear or touch them. That is, even when I’m not there to perceive these things, they exist. How so? After all, things exist only when perceived by a mind.
Here, God comes in: because God wills things into existence when she (Berkeley would have said ‘he’) perceives them, then anything that God creates has an existence in her mind. Because God knows and perceives all, those things that are at any given time unperceived or unconsidered by any finite mind have an existence through the infinite mind. God comes into this picture as a savior, preventing Berkeley from having to say that objects enter and leave existence continually as they’re perceived and then not perceived and then perceived again by particular finite minds.
It is for these reasons that Berkeley said that the visual world was a universal language ‘whereby we are instructed how to regulate our actions’, that the phenomenal world was designed by God to demonstrate his grandeur and show us how to behave. Berkeley’s purpose in writing was to convince his readers that we have a ‘most absolute and immediate dependence’ on God.
This is where I think we should start, with a legible world dictated by God, when interpreting Berkeley today. Such a reading will give us a philosopher who is not just or even foremost an immaterialist, but rather a social and religious philosopher who is constantly emphasizing the need for subordination, the following of rules and laws, and the necessity of obedience. His immaterialism, indeed, somewhat surprisingly, serves that end. That is why Berkeley conceived of his immaterialism as part of his lifelong struggle against what he variously called atheism, skepticism or free-thinking – the challenge to religious authority over the social world.
Berkeley was a thoroughly religious philosopher, and his religion implied a politics. That politics was of a conservative cast, and included (disappointingly) the defense of slavery, as well as some more progressive or emancipatory forms of conservatism such as the promotion of education and economic development. Appreciating the role of God-given laws in his outlook unlocks a fuller understanding of his immaterialism. Without this, it’s very hard to appreciate why immaterialism is so relevant to some of his other somewhat eclectic concerns, including economic development, the swearing of oaths, and slavery.
In a text built up from three discourses delivered in the Chapel at Trinity College Dublin as part of his duties as a fellow, and published in 1712 under the controversial title Passive Obedience, Berkeley asked ‘what relation is there more extensive and universal than that of subject and law?’ He was talking about humans living under human laws, but just a few paragraphs earlier he’d made a case for the comparability of natural and moral laws. The laws of nature are ‘nothing else but a series of free actions produced by the best and wisest Agent’. The natural and moral worlds are to be conceived of as the free actions of God, and binding as laws for all other spirits. We should recognize both the kinds of law that govern events beyond our wills, such as those of gravity, and also those that require us to exercise our wills, such as the absolute negative moral law against rebellion that Berkeley elaborated in this short book. This conception of the human relationship to God as conforming to the will of a superior should remain central to our understanding of Berkeley’s philosophical project. We’re under an obligation to conform to natural and moral laws because a superior agent wills them, and wills that we conform to them.
Conformity brings spiritual rewards. It also brings temporal privileges. As Berkeley said in an early sermon on zeal: ‘As we are Christians we are members of a Society which entitles us to certain rights and privileges above the rest of mankind.’ In his ‘Address on Confirmation’, Berkeley said that, while the whole world might be understood as the kingdom of Christ, the phrase also had a more restrictive sense and applied to ‘a Society of persons, not only subject to his power, but also conforming themselves to his will, living according to his precepts, and thereby entitled to the promises of his gospel.’ That is, when Berkeley talked about the phenomenal world of ideas forming an instructive discourse directed to us by God, the God he had in mind requires conformity to his will. Greater or lesser degrees of conformity result in privileges expressed in the social and religious hierarchy of this world.
All classes of people have responsibilities to God that are in part expressed through their behavior towards their own and other classes of people. ‘Charity’ is the term that, for Berkeley, captures the fulfillment of these responsibilities. He preached on charity at the English merchant colony in Livorno in Italy in 1714, saying – perhaps with an eye to the background of his audience – that the mutual satisfaction of wants through commerce was a form of charitable action within the reach of all. Duty to God and charity to his neighbor will make the true Christian attempt the conversion of heathens and infidels, Berkeley said in the sermon he preached to the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts on his return from his failed expedition to found a university in Bermuda. That project was itself geared towards the conversion of Native Americans, as well as the religious reform of white colonists.
Berkeley’s God is the source of all authority, subordination and order. Finite spirits aren’t obliged to obey only God, but also to obey their superiors in the social order. Servants are obliged to obey their masters. In a way that distinguishes him from immediate predecessors such as John Locke or Samuel Pufendorf, Berkeley blurred the line between servitude and slavery, between contractual and forced, temporary and permanent servitude. In The Querist, Berkeley asked: whether ‘other nations have not found great benefit from the use of slaves’ for public infrastructure projects? ‘Whether temporary servitude would not be the best cure for idleness and beggary …?’ ‘Whether all sturdy beggars should not be seized and made slaves to the public for a certain term of years?’
Berkeley’s language here minimizes the difference between slavery and servitude. Likewise, in notes for a sermon preached in Rhode Island, he said that in the New Testament ‘servants’ signified ‘slaves’. I’m not suggesting that Berkeley believed slavery was a positive good. Rather, he believed that what he understood to be dissolute, dirty, cynical, slothful, asocial forms of life were a great ill, and that being forced to participate in projects promoting the public good was better than being left at liberty to dehumanize. Such a view, of course, legitimizes slavery.
Berkeley presents slavery within an orderly Christian society as preferable to forms of liberty that, he believes, limit the development of important human capacities. When Berkeley was in Rhode Island waiting for his college funding, there’s evidence of him buying two and baptizing three enslaved people. The historian Travis Glasson has convincingly argued that the Yorke-Talbot legal opinion, issued in 1729, that baptism and slavery were compatible was the result of the activism of Berkeley or his circle, trying to facilitate the baptism of enslaved people in America.
Berkeley had argued in his Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches (1725) for the college that would take Native American and Black students, as well as the sons of white planters, that ‘Slaves would only become better Slaves by being Christian’. Berkeley supported obedience to forms of temporal subordination that are now recognized as morally repugnant, and argued that some forms of forced labor, perhaps temporary, perhaps not, were a social good – a greater good than the ills of servitude or slavery.
There’s much about this picture of Berkeley’s God, and the human and divine relationships it implies, that Berkeley shares with other Christian writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. It’s not surprising to see Christianity connected to subordination and obedience, both in political and social life, and encompassing slavery, for instance. It’s more unusual, perhaps, in the precise obligations it entails for someone like Berkeley, a philosophical educator.
The central realization Berkeley wanted his readers to undergo is that of absolute and continual dependence upon the will of a superior for everything in their world – their sensory experiences, the laws of nature, the capacity of their wills to bring about consequences, the complex coordination and subordination of wills involved in producing a social world. This realization issues in the striking doctrine of immaterialism. But it also issues in the particular form of conservative political and social life that Berkeley lived and promoted in his varied activities as a churchman, economist, husband, brother, slave-owner and so on.
Understanding Berkeley’s immaterialism, and the role of God in his immaterialism, requires an acknowledgement of his religious view of political and social life. Some of that view is closely shared with other Christian writers of his time, some of it more idiosyncratic and characteristic of the visionary immaterialist that he was. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/from-immaterialism-to-obedience-in-the-philosophy-of-berkeley?utm
Oriana:
Who knew? The philosopher popularly known for the maxim, “To be is to be perceived” and the question of whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if there’s no one to hear it — that lovable eccentric— is not lovable any more when he reveals himself to be a religious philosopher. Absolute subordination to god — who makes the world exist by perceiving it — also justifies obedience to worldly authority, including a slave’s duty to obey his owner.
We know that both the defenders of slavery and Abolitionists quoted passage from the Bible to support their views. Thus, the American Civil War became also a religious war, which inflamed it and made it the bloodiest civil war in human history.
Monotheistic religions arose in the era when kings and emperors had absolute power. Their autocratic rule was a model for the “King of Kings” — and god’s absolute power was in turn used to justify the absolute earthly rulers.
Joe:
According to Bishop Berkeley, God gave us the world to show us how to behave. Berkeley believes people should submit to the authority (the rich and powerful) leading government and church. If Christians followed this rule of obedience to Christ’s one commandment to love others as yourself, would slavery, the Inquisition, or the holocaust have been possible?
The American Christians, who argue that slavery was good, want to impose their religious authority over the United States. Yet their ancestors were not slaves. In 1980, the conservative Christians made public their alliance with the Republican Party. Since then, my concerns have grown over demagogues using racism in their religious/political speech.
I live in Poway, California, and on Sunday, a Christian group appears at the corners of a major intersection. Their signs read, Wake up America, God created The U.S. The Greatest Nation. One day, I walked by them as they protested. Standing in the shade, I noticed they shouted Go back to China or Mexico at selected cars and trucks.
As I left, one man yelled, We should mount machine guns on Trump’s Wall. I recalled Jesus’s comments on religious hypocrites. He said they were pretty on the outside but dead and decaying on the inside. Leon Blevins believes the commandment You should not take God’s name in vain, means more than not using God in vulgar language.
It also means not using God’s name to support political, racist, and religious business operations. Berkeley is guilty of this when he writes that slavery was a positive good, and so are modern-day evangelicals, who use racial innuendos or slurs in their street corner conversations.
Oriana:
It's always a sad spectacle when a religion of love and peace gets turned into a cult of hate and violence. Christianity is by no means unique in that respect. As Charles Simic observed, a book on world history is a morally obscene text.
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THE SCARCITY OF THE COLOR VIOLET BEFORE IMPRESSIONISM
~ I went to the National Gallery in central London and, after checking the entire collection, found just one violet painting made before the Impressionist era began in 1863. Strangely, it looked like the greatest artists of the past epoch had ignored this color – until the French Impressionists embraced it. Why so? I decided to find out.
Over the past 20 years, I visited 193 museums in 42 different countries. Equipped with 1,500 Munsell color chips – the world-standard samples for color science – I examined 139,892 works of art, searching for violet. I concluded that there were indeed only a very few artworks before the 1860s that contained this color from my childhood. But from the second half of the 19th century, violet became very popular. This striking conclusion made me wonder why the status of violet had changed so drastically, at such a well-defined point in time? Clearly, more research was needed, and I was determined to do it.
Along with two color scientists, Eric Kirchner and Elena Fedorovskaya, I selected 14 of the world’s largest art museums that had made large parts of their collections available in high resolution online. We collected hi-res digital photographs from a total of 4,117 paintings. We included objects from ancient civilizations, and from the Middle East and Asia, dating from the 4th century up to the mid-19th.
We also needed a definition of violet. Developments in color science led to reliable image analysis tools to recognize the color categories red, orange, yellow, green and blue. However, no such algorithm existed yet for violet. To make matters worse, international surveys showed that people tend to be unsure about exactly what constitutes the color violet. The same person who describes an object’s color as violet today might describe it as purple, blue, magenta, fuchsia or burgundy tomorrow. Language plays a role, too – there’s a difference even between British English and American English. The color beyond blue on the spectrum is called purple in the US, but violet in the UK. Reddish-purple is sometimes called violet in the US, but hardly so in Britain. The complete range of colors between red and blue is often called purple in British texts, but sometimes the word violet is used, too.
Our research led us to a first working definition for the color violet: all mixtures of red and blue for which blue dominates. We observed more than 1,500 color chips from the Munsell color system in a light-booth, ensuring well-defined light, and selected 51 color chips that we thought of as violet.
As we examined paintings using this definition, we confirmed my prior findings. Until the mid-19th century, the color violet had appeared in fewer than 4 per cent of paintings. But in the second half of the 19th century, this rate quickly rose to 37 per cent, and spiked to 48 per cent in the 20th century. We still didn’t know what sparked that sudden change, so we looked for some explanations.
First, we considered that colors might have faded over the centuries. But the colors in paintings from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and the medieval Islamic cultures survived especially well in their extremely dry climates. And they had no violet in them at all.
Second, we thought that violet coloring was expensive before the early 1860s. Yet some purple and ultramarine blue pigments had been very expensive back then, and this never stopped artists from using those colors.
A third potential explanation was that, from 1855 to 1870, chemists forged a range of violet dyes and pigments for the garment industry. However, we found that the Impressionist painters didn’t make much use of them – because they had already been using their own violet hues, which they made by mixing blue and red.
It turned out that it wasn’t the garment industry that stimulated Impressionists to embrace the violet color, but rather the science of color itself. First, it was the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul who discovered the law of simultaneous contrast: colors appear to be more intense when placed next to their complementary color. Then, in 1864 the influential French art critic Charles Blanc wrote an article in which he applied Chevreul’s law to Eugène Delacroix’s paintings. Blanc described how violet, produced by mixing red and blue, is intensified by placing it next to yellow. In 1867, Blanc further elaborated on this example in his book The Grammar of Painting and Engraving, a prominent treatise for artists in late-19th-century France. It would directly inspire painters such as Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Camille Pissarro and indirectly also Claude Monet, Paul Signac and many others.
It was only fitting that the Impressionists embraced violet. In the natural world, violet colours are fairly rare, so it’s not surprising that ancient or medieval painters seldom used violet on their canvas. But the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists no longer tried to imitate the colours of the world. Aiming at producing color impressions instead, they were much more flexible than earlier painters in creating and using colors. When searching for contrast to yellow sunlight, for example, Blanc’s description led them to create mixtures of red and blue, often resulting in violet.
Impressionist painters used the colour violet so prolifically that critics accused them of violettomania. And as they educated others through their paintings and art classes, the public began to appreciate violet too, so the color spread into fashion, interior and industrial design. We recently published these findings in the paper ‘Computational Evidence of First Extensive Usage of Violet in the 1860s’.
As a scientist, however, I kept wondering if there were also other forces that enabled us to see and appreciate the color violet. We distinguish colors because receptors in the eye’s retina react to the different wavelengths of light. Notably, the retina is actually an extension of the brain, formed embryonically from neural tissue and connected to the brain by the optic nerve. These complex structures, which enable us to see the rainbow of colors – and also to distinguish and comprehend those colors – formed over millions of years of evolution, often in response to changes in our planetary environment and planetary light.
Over the millennia, the light reaching our planet might have changed, causing our retinas to adapt accordingly. The idea drives the zoologist Andrew Parker’s ‘light switch’ theory, which suggests that, when atmospheric oxygen increased during the Cambrian explosion, this in turn boosted the amount of light reaching our planet, increasing the evolutionary benefits of vision too. As a result, the eyes of the creatures that populated Earth back then rapidly developed. That ancient process seems to be confirmed by the biologist Shozo Yokoyama at Emory University in Atlanta, who has studied the evolution of vision from the monochromatic perception of our early ancestors to the rainbow of colors we humans see today.
But what could have caused us humans to embrace the color violet so recently in our history?
One theory comes from the American astrobiologist Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas, who has suggested that cosmic rays produced by supernovae can alter ionization of the atmosphere, resulting in showers of subatomic particles called muons; the muons in turn might induce genetic mutations in Earth’s inhabitants, including us. Low levels of ionizing radiation can cause biological molecules to mutate slightly, which can promote genetic variation. This fosters small and gradual changes in living things, allowing them to develop better survival traits and adapt to their changing environments.
Our planet is still plowing through the debris of ancient supernovae, and I can’t help but wonder whether a muon shower might have enhanced our ability to see violet midway through the 19th century on Earth.
As the Ukrainian American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973: ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ From a literal perspective, a key might be the evolution of planetary light. I’m just trying to shed a little light on the situation. ~
https://psyche.co/ideas/why-it-took-us-thousands-of-years-to-see-the-colour-violet
This reminds me that I was 8 years old at the time of my first remembered experienced perception of beauty. It also seemed to be the first time I really saw a panorama (in this case, the Carpathian mountains), and felt awe that made me stop walking and just look.
What I'm trying to say is that the brain has to be sufficiently developed to perceive certain things — which may extend to “certain colors.”
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THE END-PERMIAN EXTINCTION LINKED TO NICKEL
~ The most severe mass extinction event in the past 540 million years eliminated more than 90 percent of Earth's marine species and 75 percent of terrestrial species. Although scientists had previously hypothesized that the end-Permian mass extinction, which took place 251 million years ago, was triggered by voluminous volcanic eruptions in a region of what is now Siberia, they were not able to explain the mechanism by which the eruptions resulted in the extinction of so many different species, both in the oceans and on land.
Associate professor Laura Wasylenki of Northern Arizona University's School of Earth and Sustainability and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is co-author on a new paper in Nature Communications entitled, "Nickel isotopes link Siberian Traps aerosol particles to the end-Permian mass extinction," in collaboration with Chinese, Canadian and Swiss scientists.
The paper presents the results of nickel isotope analyses performed in Wasylenki's lab on Late Permian sedimentary rocks collected in Arctic Canada. The samples have the lightest nickel isotope ratios ever measured in sedimentary rocks, and the only plausible explanation is that the nickel was sourced from the volcanic terrain, very likely carried by aerosol particles and deposited in the ocean, where it dramatically changed the chemistry of seawater and severely disrupted the marine ecosystem.
"The study results provide strong evidence that nickel-rich particles were aerosolized and dispersed widely, both through the atmosphere and into the ocean," Wasylenki said. "Nickel is an essential trace metal for many organisms, but an increase in nickel abundance would have driven an unusual surge in productivity of methanogens, microorganisms that produce methane gas. Increased methane would have been tremendously harmful to all oxygen-dependent life.”
"Our data provide a direct link between global dispersion of Ni-rich aerosols, ocean chemistry changes and the mass extinction event," Wasylenki said. "The data also demonstrate that environmental degradation likely began well before the extinction event—perhaps starting as early as 300,000 years before then.” ~
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-geochemical-end-permian-mass-extinction-event.html?fbclid=IwAR2OLZKqyGaIFr7d6A1LMymSKrY34S1rfFmJxuh_5u5WKjhWsANC1ISk8a4
and this:
DEATH METAL: NICKEL LINKED TO THE GREATEST MASS EXTINCTION
Around 250 million years ago, life on Earth nearly came to an end, in a mass extinction between the Permian and Triassic periods known as the Great Dying. Some 90% of the species in the oceans and 70% of vertebrate families on land were killed, and the great marine life experiment of the Palaeozoic era was brought to a halt.
This catastrophic episode was triggered by several different events, which in turn killed the world's species in different ways: declining oxygen levels in the ocean, massively rising temperatures, and a possible meteor impact.
One of these trigger events involved a major jolt to the carbon cycle, which had dramatic climate effects. Some scientists think the temperature of the upper level of the world's oceans and rivers increased from 21℃ to 38℃ in the late Smithian era (250.7 million years ago).
This shift in the carbon cycle has been attributed to a major burst of activity of deep marine colonies of Archaea methanosarcina, relatives of bacteria. These colonies had acquired a new way of getting energy from their environment. In much the same way as human bodies get energy from food, producing carbon dioxide in the process, these organisms got energy from transforming organic carbon into methane.
The archaea colonies were normally limited by the amount of nickel in the oceans, but for some reason, 250 million years ago, nickel seems to have been in abundant supply compared with today.
At the same time as the Great Dying, in an area on Earth that we now call Siberia, an astronomical amount of lava generated in the guts of the Earth erupted over an area the size of Europe. This province is the host to the Noril'sk ore deposits, the Earth's most valuable source of mined nickel.
Scientists previously thought that nickel released into the atmosphere could explain the glut of marine nickel 250 million years ago. But how could nickel get into the air? This is where our work comes in.
During our recent studies of the Noril'sk nickel ores, we found the smoking gun: we used 2-D and 3-D X-ray imaging to show nickel-rich sulfide droplets physically attached to former gas bubbles, frozen in the ore.
We combined this observation with simple thermodynamic models to show that this transport mechanism greatly increases the amount of nickel content in volcanic aerosols.
The Noril'sk nickel deposits are unique. They are the only known place where nickel had a direct path to the atmosphere. Explosive eruptions helped to release colossal amounts of gas into the air.
During these massive gas episodes, our sulfide-carrying champagne bubbles transported large amount of nickel and tipped it into the atmosphere to feed the blooming archaea, playing an important role in the Great Dying.
The Noril'sk ores formed in a freak event, but if the broader hypothesis is correct they hold a lesson for life on Earth: release large amounts of methane into the atmosphere at enormous peril.
Under normal circumstances, volcanic eruptions are a relatively minor source of methane in the atmosphere, but lethal time bombs exist in methane frozen into permafrost, much of it, coincidentally, to be found in the tundra wastelands covering the Siberian lava fields. Here, melting of the permafrost releases bubbles of methane into the atmosphere, creating a climate changing feedback loop – to potentially devastating effect. ~
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-death-metalhow-nickel-role-world.html
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THE LAST JUDGMENT AS THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD
In “Lapidarium IV,” Ryszard Kapuscinski relates trying to write an article on the Last Judgment, interviewing friends, historians, theologians. Each person had a different vision of it.
One (a historian, I imagine) was a literalist. “The Last Judgment? That’s impossible!” Kapuscinski asked why. “Because it would require that all the [resurrected] dead and all the living to appear — billions and billions of people over the last 200,000 years. There isn’t room enough.” Not in the designated Kidron Valley, running through the Old City of Jerusalem.
And he imagined how they’d have to stand in line, some of the living dying on their feet while waiting. And since those to be judged are now living, resurrected bodies, surely they need food. How to feed those billions?
Who goes first? The earliest-born? The Jews and certain other nations? Men and women separate, like lines for restrooms?
So perhaps a mobile Last Judgment, special vehicles coming to people from different epochs and locations?
And above all, how are the living and the dead to be judged? All by the same standard? What if something was not a sin according to their culture?”
As a child, I never tried to work out the details for myself. The paintings were enough. The proceedings seemed orderly, like selection in concentration camps — the angels directing people to the left and to the right, the Elect in halos being handed white robes, the damned falling down naked into the pit.
There actually was no Judgment, with some verdict or explanation — just this instant separation.
And the best part was always the skeletons stepping out of the graves, putting on flesh. Such blatant, wonderful wishful thinking.
And the most terrifying part was the entrance of the damned (now clad in youthful human bodies) into hell forever.
The belief was absolutely literal. I blink, startled, when I think that I didn’t differ from other children my age in taking all this literally, “as shown in the picture.” The paintings substituted for the impossible reality. If the church had not falsified the Second Commandment, I don’t see how the children, so prone to asking questions, would be indoctrinated as deeply as they were.
And no wonder the mainstream Protestant churches, devoid of such art, produce both tepid believers and non-passionate atheists.
All those paintings with god in the garment of clouds . . . how naive they seem now. And, when I was a child, the constant frustration of looking up at the clouds, trying to get a glimpse of him — at least of his huge beard, gray, curdled, mingling with the clouds — no such luck. There would be no sign, no announcement (perhaps in Latin?), no revelation. It was a perfect Theater of the Absurd: we were to believe in the invisible presence of the Great Absence.
Now I can hardly believe that once I did believe. I can’t get back into my own childhood mentality. I believed in the Last Judgment and was in terror of it. That’s where emotional child abuse comes in, but even that sounds absurd now: the church made her dread the Last Judgment. A nine-year-old girl cowering in fear that she will be plunged naked — in flesh, the better to suffer with! — into the fires of hell. As I say in my opening poem:
Why would God bother
with the Last Judgment:
bone joining bone, putting on flesh,
just to be judged? Redeemer,
where?
Kidron Valley, where the Last Judgment is supposed to take place
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FRIED FOODS, SUGARY DRINKS LINKED TO SUDDEN CARDIAC DEATH
~ In a new study, researchers have found a positive association between the Southern diet — which involves more fried food and sugary drinks — and sudden cardiac death. They also linked the Mediterranean diet to a reduced risk of sudden cardiac death.
Death certificates show that sudden cardiac death is a factor in 1 in 7.5 deaths in the United States. A key underlying cause is coronary heart disease.
In the present study, the researchers drew on data from the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke Study cohort in the U.S. This cohort consists of 30,239 African American and white adults aged 45 years or older, who all joined the study between 2003 and 2007.
The researchers excluded participants who were missing appropriate recorded information or were unavailable at follow-up. This left them with a sample size of 21,069 for the current analysis. Of these participants, 33% were Black, and 56% were women.
A total of 56% of the participants lived in the Southeastern United States. This area is known as the Stroke Belt because it has had a higher-than-normal rate of death due to stroke since the 1940s.
The researchers took background health and demographic information from the participants at baseline and asked them to complete a food frequency questionnaire each year to show how many of 110 different food items they had eaten during the previous 12 months.
The researchers were also able to identify five dietary patterns:
The convenience pattern: This dietary pattern primarily consisted of pasta, pizza, and Mexican and Chinese food.
The plant-based pattern: People following this pattern ate lots of vegetables, fruits, cereals, legumes, yogurt, chicken, and fish.
The sweets pattern: This pattern included high amounts of dessert, candy, chocolate, and sugary cereal.
The Southern pattern: The Southern diet is high in fried foods, sweetened drinks, processed and organ meats, and eggs.
The alcohol and salad pattern: People following this pattern consumed lots of leafy greens, dressings, tomatoes, and alcoholic drinks. (Emphasis mine: I've never heard of this kind of diet!)
According to lead author Prof. James M. Shikany, who is a professor of medicine and associate director for research in the Division of Preventive Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, “All participants had some level of adherence to each pattern but usually adhered more to some patterns and less to others.”
The researchers attempted to contact the participants approximately every 6 months over a 10-year period, which enabled them to record any cardiovascular events, including sudden cardiac death. During this period, there were 401 recorded instances of sudden cardiac death.
SOUTHERN DIET INCREASES RISK
The researchers found that the participants who had the closest adherence to the Southern dietary pattern had a 46% higher risk of sudden cardiac death than those who adhered to it the least closely.
Conversely, the participants who most closely adhered to the Mediterranean diet were 26% less at risk of sudden cardiac death than those who had the lowest adherence.
According to Prof. Shikany: “While this study was observational in nature, the results suggest that diet may be a modifiable risk factor for sudden cardiac death, and, therefore, diet is a risk factor that we have some control over.” ~
I'm surprised by no mention here of french fries, the most common fried food in America.
In any case, this is another strike against deep frying fat high temperatures. The process creates trans-fats and other toxic compounds such as acrylamide. Hello obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
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ending on beauty:
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
~ Charles Bukowski, The Laughing Heart
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