Henryk Plociennik: Blue Garden, 1973. Somehow we keep returning to Adam and Eve, the primordial couple, “a man and a woman — the oldest story in the world.” *
DANTE IN NORTH PARK
In rain and fog I drove past a sign:
DANTE’S CAFÉ.
SAME-DAY SERVICE.
I blinked: no, it said
Dante’s Laundry.
I imagine the bard of the Inferno —
the ambitious jutting chin,
laurel wreath upon his brow —
stooped over the long counter,
folding socks and underwear.
Oh vengeful Alighieri,
in which circle of hell
do you find yourself?
Do you believe your torment
was ordained by the “infinite love
that moves the Sun
and the other stars”?
Or have you become so numb
from folding and picking up,
that you no longer think at all?
Oh, you were subtle as the serpent,
but never harmless as the dove.
Beyond the stench of brimstone,
the garish glow of the flames,
you created perfect, geometric pain.
Now in this laundry you know:
hell is the death of the soul.
The dryers churn concentric
circles of towels, panties, shirts,
bras flayed with static,
smelling of mortality and detergent —
while you stand and fold
other people’s bottomless laundry.
And will do so until
you remember mercy.
~ Oriana © 2015
I wrote this rather judgmental poem on Dante’s judgmentalism and sadistic vengefulness without asking myself what shapes people this way — long before I understood the consequences of a wound that never heals.
An article by Robert Harrison, “Dante on Trial,” in the New York Review of Books, made me all the more acutely aware that the growing lack of compassion for the sinners that Dante the Pilgrim shows in his journey through hell — his hardening of the heart being supposedly the mark of his spiritual growth — stemmed both from the cruel temper of his times and from Dante’s great personal wound. Though he saw that it was circumstances that doomed him to the infamy of exile, he never appears to understand the role of circumstances in the life the sinners. If they acted out of their unhealed wounds, that’s too bad — off with them into this or that circle of hell.
But again we must remember that Dante lived in cruel times and most likely had a harsh childhood — that was simply normal. A childhood filled with punishment provides a rich material for imagining many kinds of infernal punishments.
Even more important, we must understand that until fairly recently there was little understanding of psychology. You were a sinner, not a product of genes interacting with circumstances. Notions like social conditioning didn’t exist. One feature of the Middle Ages (and several centuries beyond, alas) was the belief in free will in its worst form — you are responsible for all evil that befalls you — it’s god's punishment for your sins.
But theology is indeed subtle as the serpent. If no sin could be proved, then the misfortune was actually divine grace: “God sends suffering to those he loves.” Such suffering is then a kind of purgatory here on earth, making you more fit for heaven. This attitude survives even today, among the many who claim that suffering ennobles a person.
According to that doctrine, what a gift suffering is! Indeed, given that he regarded himself as innocent, it’s somewhat strange that Dante did not express gratitude for his exile. Catholic theologians could accuse him of spiritual immaturity.
But the problem may be deeper. My eyes were opened when I read the article, “Christianity is not about being a good person.” After all one can be a good person without being a Christian, the minister explained (this is extremely progressive thinking, as ministers go). Instead, the minister continued, Christianity is about sin and salvation. Christianity is not about being a good person; it's about seeing yourself as a bad person deserving eternal damnation, but saved from that by the "bloody ransom" paid by Jesus.
The clarity of this stunned me. All those years I've been unable to define Christianity in any concise way, to answer the question, What is the most important thing about Christianity? (my try was “forgiveness" — but wait, “without blood, there is no forgiveness”). So, again, what's the most important thing about being a Christian? It’s seeing yourself as a sinner. There it was, using the simplest words, none of theological abstract mumbo-jumbo like kenosis. Forget kenosis! Christianity is about sin and hell and salvation. The “god of punishment” (don’t be taken in by false praises of his mercy) has to be appeased by the “bloody ransom.” A god of mercy would not need to be appeased by anyone’s suffering, much less his own son’s death under torture.
But isn’t Christian ethics about being a good person? That’s a misconception, the minister argued with impeccable logic. A Christian’s first duty is to god, not to fellow men (Kierkegaard agreed; note his obsession with Abraham's obedience in the story of Abraham and Isaac). End of argument.
I remember the unencumbered time before my first religion lesson. Not idyllic happiness, not paradise; I think the best word is indeed “unencumbered.” I knew I wasn’t a perfect little girl, but I didn’t think of myself as a bad little girl either. Then came the story of Adam and Eve, and the phrase “the original sin” — of which we too were guilty, by virtue of being human. We were all guilty of being human! We were born in sin, in the clutches of Satan. The concept was elaborated in subsequent lessons until I did come to see myself as a bad little girl. I would probably end up in hell. The anguish began.
A deep, real anguish caused by something entirely imaginary. Years after leaving the church, it's difficult to comprehend that I could have ever believed such pernicious mythology. But I was a sensitive, people-pleasing child, and such children are easily intimidated. I have to forgive myself, and forgive those who saw children and others as punishment objects.
But I digress. My only excuse is to be able to quote Nietzsche again: “Religions are, at bottom, systems of cruelty.” No childhood trauma or other extenuating circumstances are admitted: humans are simply evil and deserve to be punished with utmost severity.
In earlier times, the sadism of Christianity was more open. Thus, Tertullian (c.160 - c.225) wrote that Christians should not attend gladiatorial fights in the Circus, but not to worry: they will have much better entertainment in heaven, watching the torments of those in hell.
But again I digress. Don’t waste your time on Tertullian. Read Dante, who really was a great poet, even if his moral understanding does not always meet our standards.
(The problem stems from the very belief in the existence of hell. Dante has the problem of theodicy on his hands — how to reconcile this cruelty with god’s supposed infinite love for humanity? Dante placed all his personal enemies in hell — eternal torment without possibility of parole, i.e. some kind of moral awakening and growth — often having to do with the insight that “we are the victims of victims.” We are not so much evil as damaged, wounded. But that’s a modern view, far removed from the MiddleAges.)
Mary:
In the discussion of Dante and what the true essence of Christianity is about, I think I see the reason it doesn't work for me. If the basic requirement is to see yourself as bad, as a horrible sinner, so that what saves you is the blood sacrifice of Christ...I simply never fit that requirement, could never believe myself a bad, horrible sinner, requiring confession and atonement, much less a blood sacrifice. In trying to think and examine my conscience, for instance, in preparation for confession, I truly didn't find sin. Mistakes, yes, failures, yes, sins...not really. Nothing I couldn't forgive myself for, so nothing that merited hellfire, no need for any god's blood sacrifice, no need for being "washed in the blood of the lamb."
Surely any god worth his salt would have to be kinder, more loving and generous than his creation...so if I forgave myself he certainly would have been there before me, of necessity understanding it all more thoroughly than I could. Begging forgiveness and mercy, enduring punishment, fearing hellfire, just not necessary. The kind of crazy demands and punishments threatened by that Judgement Day God could only come from a petty tyrant, deserving no respect, and certainly no worship. It was easier to walk away from the whole shebang than swallow the god of tradition, vengeful, punishing, cruel, subject to temper tantrums and supreme narcissism. Not believing in hell came for me before not believing in god.
Oriana:
You were lucky. I found American Catholicism to be less punitive and sin-and-hell oriented than Polish Catholicism, which never had to compete with Protestant denominations.
Still, no matter how the church tries to reform, there is no getting away from the fact that the existence of hell is the very foundation of Christianity. And in the past, the level of threat and intimidation was indeed very high. I was terrified of hell. I thought that’s where I was headed because there was no way I could love god. I didn’t see as good; he seemed to out-Hitler Hitler. One friend aptly called him the god-of-punishment (GOP).
And the idea of heaven as constantly praising god wasn’t appealing either.
You can't teach an old dogma new tricks. ~ Dorothy Parker
*
DANTE’S PROGRESS: FRANCESCA DA RIMINI, BEATRICE, PICCARDA DONATI
Dante Alighieri was early in recognizing that our age has a problem. He was the first writer to use the word moderno, in Italian, and the difficulty he spotted with the modern mind is its limited capacity to relate to the whole of reality, particularly the spiritual aspects. This might sound surprising, given that his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, is often described as one of the most brilliant creations of the medieval imagination. It is taken to be a genius expression of a discarded worldview, not the modern one, from an era in which everything was taken to be connected to the supreme reality called God. But Dante was born in a time of troubling transition. He realized that this cosmic vision was being challenged, and he didn’t seek to reject it or restore it, but to remake it. He does that because his epic verse is a self-conscious response to a shifting consciousness with which, in many ways – particularly when it comes to meaning – we are still wrestling.
It took him on a pilgrimage through the three domains of the afterlife, as they have been imagined by many within Christianity and other traditions such as Islam. For Dante, hell is a place and state of mind in which people are trapped. They believe they have been condemned – though, as Dante comes to see, their problem is subtler than simply finding themselves cursed by a capricious divine judge. At heart, they’ve lost their capacity to change because their mistaken and foul habits have become so ingrained.
Crucial issues quickly become clear in the first phase, the Inferno. It could be summarized as being exposed to false and limited ways of knowing. Take one of the most celebrated encounters Dante has, when he meets the lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta. Francesca tells him how she fell for Paolo:
Love, that excuses no one loved from loving,
seized me so strongly with delight in him
that, as you see, he never leaves my side.
She is being tossed about by the winds of hell as she speaks, mirroring the storms of passion she felt in life, but her account evokes our sympathy: who has not been there, or wanted to be so joined? Why is this desire deemed bad?
The reason is that their hope never to be parted collapsed their lives into a cosmos of two. They drew together, and became each other’s obsession. Dante will himself be told later that he became obsessed with Beatrice. ‘Too fixed!’ he will hear called out to him when he was at risk of turning her into an idol. The wider suggestion is that, while falling in love brings intimations of paradise, trying desperately to sustain the excitement is ultimately imprisoning. In an age such as ours, which idealizes romance, perhaps because of the fear that such intensity is the best that life might offer, it is hard to trust that there is more. It is even harder to trust that more will come with letting go.
Another facet of this clinging to life emerges as Dante and his companion, Virgil, descend into lower circles of hell. They meet souls perpetually seeking revenge for perceived wrongs and others who cannot imagine any way of living other than deceit, theft, pimping and pilfering. Dante is, in effect, in agreement with Friedrich Nietzsche, who in Ecce Homo (1888) pithily remarked that human beings become what they are. If you use others, you will, eventually, consume yourself.
However, as he and Virgil continue down, Dante starts to understand something else. A key insight comes when he reflects on the way these tragic souls experience time. They are shaped by old practices and bad habits because they have forgotten that there can be a present in which things might be different. Dante sees that these figures are destined to live lives on repeat because the past dominates their minds and stops any novelty or freshness appearing. The point is underlined when the companions reach the floor of hell. It is not fiery and hot, but frozen and cold. Everything is still, locked in ice.
In Purgatory, poets, in particular, address Dante, as you might expect, given that he is a poet. In purgatory, there are no encounters that aren’t opportunities for expansion. They tell him that, during their mortal lives, they often didn’t really know what they were writing about, though they felt the allure of what they were writing about, and that they are learning to close that gap now.
It is a process of embodiment that comes to a head for Dante when he meets Beatrice on purgatory’s summit – a moment that could be expected to be full of love and celebration. What unadulterated delight might he find in seeing her smile once more, now in a realm beyond death?
Only, she doesn’t greet him fondly. Far from it. She lambasts him over two excruciating cantos.
Beatrice reproaches him because he had treated her like a god, longing only for her face, and not seeing that her beauty might be, for him, an awakening. Again, there is this theme of how every instant can become an invitation to step into more, if the right energy can be detected, collaborated with, and ridden. When coupled to such discernment, love is known as a spiritual path, not a romantic ideal. It is not primarily about a mutual exchange of empathy and pleasure but an increase of sight. It is not about being understood but understanding.
She longs for him to know more. If their meeting in the afterlife had been merely a reunion, he would have been lost in a dream of a past that had never existed. Instead, her steely resolve to not let that happen, though it causes distress, enables him to embrace another aspect of his transformation.
It is enabled by exercising his free will – a crucial issue that Dante discusses at some length. Spiritual intelligence understands that free will is not a naive notion of unimpeded action or unrestrained expression, but is about utilizing what psychologists call intention: the ability deliberately to turn the mind’s eye towards this or that object or idea, as opposed to unthinkingly reacting to whatever insists we notice it. Realizing that we can make such interior choices typically takes practice, which is why self-reflection is a focus in many spiritual exercises, such as confession and meditation. With it, Dante is ready for the transhumanizing experience of paradise.
A way of grappling with what that means is to consider how Dante’s awareness of time shifts once more. That happens with another round of profound challenges to his assumptions: like purgatory but more so, paradise works by intensifying problems, not offering quick resolutions, because the aim is to comprehend, not be spoon-fed. A good case in point brings up the particularly difficult issue of suffering, and arises with the first soul he meets in the lowest heaven, Piccarda Donati.
She was the sister of one of his childhood friends, Forese Donati, and Dante is not surprised to meet her in paradise, as she was a beautiful soul on earth. However, he is surprised to meet her so soon and not in a higher heaven, nearer to God. His surprise turns to shock when Piccarda explains that she was abused during her mortal life. Another brother, Corso, who was a warmonger, forcibly removed her from the convent of the Poor Clares that she had joined, and married her off in an attempt to secure an advantageous alliance. The abduction meant that she broke her vows, which is why she appears to Dante in a lower heaven.
Dante is outraged at this news. His moral intelligence jumps to the conclusion that the injustice she suffered on earth has been repeated in heaven. She had no choice in the matter of her exit from the convent, he protests. Is she not being unfairly punished?
However, much as Beatrice had done at the top of Mount Purgatory, Piccarda is ratcheting up the tension so that Dante might see further. Descents come before ascents. More can emerge at the point that other forms of intelligence are surpassed – now, with Piccarda, Dante’s moral sensibilities in particular are engaged.
She explains that her removal from the cloister revealed a truth that she might not have otherwise seen: she could let go of the future she had planned for herself and discover what she had in no way anticipated. Looking back, she no longer feels violated by the injustice and suffering of being forced, because she realizes that her fate revealed the possibility of knowing a deeper, utterly resilient joy. She can welcome what occurred because, by saying ‘yes’ to events, she is made capable of including and transcending anything that might happen. She is not only free of the past and living in the present, but can appreciate life sub specie aeternitatis — from the highest, eternal perspective down.
The psychotherapist Donald Winnicott was on to the same dynamic when he remarked in 1947 that it is only after knowing the full ferocity of hate that the imperturbable nature of love can be trusted. Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, such as were held in South Africa, trust it too, because they know that when darkness is exposed to the light, new options spontaneously present themselves. It can sound highly offensive to ears attuned to the damage abuse can do, and is readily misunderstood. But Piccarda is not implying that the virtuous soul must embrace suffering; she is not teaching religious masochism. Neither is she condoning abuse: her manipulative brother will be confronted by the significance of his actions, Dante learns.
Rather, Piccarda is carving out an alternative way of facing tragedy. It is not as the ancient Greeks portrayed it, awaiting a deus ex machina that puts things right. Nor is it as Nietzsche said, when he remarked that the things that don’t destroy us make us stronger. Rather, Piccarda is saying that there is a way of looking at the world that can always detect goodness, regardless of the evils that are present, and moreover can find the means consciously to align with it.
Human beings can access this mode of perception when they trust the value of virtues. These personal habits and traits, which can be embodied in institutions and societies as well, guide us towards what is good by enabling us increasingly to participate in what is good, as it is found, often surprisingly, within and around us.
To put it another way, Dante sees that virtues disclose more of reality. The virtue of humility is central in this increase, although it needs to be understood properly because it is not about self-abnegation or about putting yourself last. Rather, it is about an unbounded receptivity so as to be filled with more. One image Dante uses likens humility to the sea because the sea’s lowest place means that everything flows into it. The sea can, therefore, be said to be humble because of how it befriends, without reserve. Similarly, the properly humble person grows. They are open to all things and so know of all things, whether good or ill: because they are not attached to one thing more than another, they are connected to all things, and thereby gain infinitely more. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/the-fractal-consciousness-of-dantes-divine-comedy
Piccarda Donati kidnapped from the convent of Santa Chiara
*
ARTHUR KOESTLER ON WHY MEN ARE CAPABLE OF MASS MURDER
“For the last three or four thousand years, Hebrew prophets, Greek philosophers, Indian mystics, Chinese sages, Christian preachers, French humanists, English utilitarians, German moralists, American pragmatists, have discussed the perils of violence and appealed to man's better nature, without much noticeable effect. There must be a reason for this failure.
The reason, I believe, lies in a series of fundamental misconceptions concerning the main causes which compelled man to make such a mess of his history, which prevented him from learning the lessons of the past, and which now put his survival in question. The first of these misconceptions is putting the blame for man's predicament on his selfishness, greed, etc.; in a word, on the aggressive, self-assertive tendencies of the individual.
The point I shall try to make is that selfishness is not the primary culprit, and that appeals to man's better nature were bound to be ineffectual because the main danger lies precisely in what we are wont to call his 'better nature'. In other words, I would like to suggest that the integrative tendencies of the individual are incomparably more dangerous than his self-assertive tendencies. The sermons of the reformers were bound to fall on deaf ears because they put the blame where it did not belong.
The crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or a political conviction.
Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?
...No matter what period we have in view, modern, ancient, or prehistoric, the evidence always points in the same direction: the tragedy of man is not his truculence, but his proneness to delusions. ‘The worst of madmen is a saint run mad’ — Pope’s epigram applies to all major periods of the ideological crusades of the totalitarian age down to the rites which govern the life of primitives.
The Ritual of Sacrifice
Anthropologists have paid far too little attention to the earliest, ubiquitous manifestation of the delusionary streak in the human psyche: the institution of human sacrifice, the ritual killing of children, virgins, kings and heroes to placate and flatter the gods. It is found at the dawn of civilization in every part of the world; it persisted through the height of antique civilizations and pre-Columbian cultures, and is sporadically still being practiced in remote corners of the world.
The usual attitude is to dismiss this subject as a sinister curiosity belonging to the dark superstitions of the past; but this attitude begs the question of the universality of the phenomenon, ignores the clue that it provides to the delusional streak in man's mental structure, and its relevance to the problems of the present.” ~ Arthur Koestler, Ghost in the Machine
Jeremy Sherman:
Are ideological assholes selfish? Arthur Koestler thought the majority aren't but have become automatons hypnotized by proud faith, soldiers who have outsourced their consciences to an abstract romantic vision of a clear path to the transcendence of human nature.
He also says fascism is just what you'd get if you abandoned religion and got cocky about rationality's power to transcend human nature.
It basically comes down to this: Integrating oneself into an ideology is subordinating oneself to it, outsourcing one's conscience to it. This becomes a means to subordinate others.
A bit like when a car dealer has to “talk to his manager” in order to stiff you on the car price.
Miriam:
I think Koestler missed that fascists exploit whatever cover story comes to hand, whether it's rationality or religion or so-called progressivism (the kind that spawned the eugenics movement). I'm certain that, in his quest for truth, he was solidly antifascist, but he got distracted by surface appearances.
I've been learning a lot about East Asian history lately, and feudalism, in general. Fascism is just a modern rebranding of an ancient practice, i.e. elites treating out-groups of people as exploitable resources. Religion was an all-too-common pretext for justifying treating people as less than human.
Neo-Confucianism created a faux-rational hierarchical framework for doing the same thing, while trashing religion as "barbaric." Japan dismantled the Korean Joseon empire by purporting to bring civilization to the Korean Peninsula. They both visited mass murder on Koreans at the bottom rung of society. The common thread is fascism, regardless of whatever other identity it may assume.
Oriana:
I think we also need to take into account the human need to blame something or someone for everything that goes wrong. This motivates a search for a scapegoat, often an ethnic group.
*
THE ELECTRICAL LIFE OF LOUIS WAIN
~ Louis Wain, cat painter, illustrator, amateur inventor, hobbyist, and would-be musician, was an unusual man. He was as unkempt as his hair, talked a mile a minute, and moved kinetically through life. (He swims spasmodically, and plays a piano with his feet, proving this point). Wain was obsessed with harnessing electricity for practical use, and later believed cats could conduct it. His life story gets an unconventional retelling in the peculiar biopic, "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain," co-written and directed by Will Sharpe.
The drama, cheekily narrated by Olivia Colman, concentrates on Wain's (Benedict Cumberbatch) life from the 1880s through the early 1920s. She explains that Wain was in charge of his five sisters and his mother after the death of his father. However, he's not very responsible — that duty falls to his formidable sister, Caroline (Andrea Riseborough), who runs the chaotic Wain household with an iron fist. Alas, Louis is not interested in work, given that he prefers to make drawings, pen operas, and dabble in boxing, all to Caroline's chagrin.
When Louis is offered a job illustrating for a newspaper edited by Sir William Ingram (Toby Jones), he initially turns it down. But when he realizes his work will help pay for his sister's governess, Emily (Claire Foy), he changes his mind. At their first family dinner together, Louis and Emily make eyes at each other, signaling that they are, pardon the pun, smitten kittens. Of course, proper society looks down on gentlemen consorting with the lower classes, but neither Louis nor Emily seem to care. (Caroline, of course, is concerned not only about the family's finances, but also its reputation).
"The Electrical Life of Louis Wain" spends much of its first half on the courtship between Louis and Emily. Their romance is more awkward than whirlwind as he fears she will dislike him because of his severe harelip and recurring nightmares. (Both are brought vividly to life). Emily, however, is more than pleased to spend time with Louis, and a trip to the theater to see "The Tempest," which triggers his fears, cements their attraction even as it causes tongues to wag.
However, the couple's happiness is short lived as they receive bad news [Emily has breast cancer]. Things improve slightly when Louis and Emily take in a cat that they name Peter. Peter brightens their spirits and inspires Louis' talents. And before tragedy strikes, there is a moving scene of Emily and Louis talking about their mutual appreciation for each other.
"The Electrical Life of Louis Wain," is deliberately more fable than biopic. The film makes its points about Louis' poor decisions — like his failure to secure a copyright for his work — but is more focused on showing his resilience. His idea to go to America is in his mind a good one, but the reality of him lecturing suggests otherwise. Sharpe has Louis, who anthropomorphized cats in his illustrations, envision cat heads on people in the audience. Louis also has an unsettling, nightmarish moment on the ship on his journey home. In addition, scenes of Louis chasing electricity seem to emphasize his madness.
If Sharpe's treatment of his subject is at times fanciful — a National Cat Club meeting is whimsical — it is always respectful. A late scene in the film, where Louis reconnects with Dan Rider (Adeel Akhtar), a man he met decades earlier, is quite poignant. Louis' character is celebrated throughout the film for being different. As H.G. Wells (Nick Cave) indicates in a radio broadcast, Louis Wain was "devoted his life to making all our lives happier, and cattier…. He changed our world for the better." ~
https://www.salon.com/2021/11/04/electrical-life-of-louis-wain-review-benedict-cumberbatch/
While the Salon’s review summarizes the movie quite well, the one on Roger Ebert’s website goes straight to the the heart of the problem:
"The Electrical Life of Louis Wain" has the same problem as its real-life subject, in that it goes off in too many directions at once.”
Another problem with the movie is its insufficient explanation of Louis’s obsession with electricity. This review does it amazingly well, distilling clarity from the scattered, chaotic, frenetic collision of movie details.
“While scientists and inventors were trying to use electricity to illuminate darkness and operate machinery, Louis Wain believed that electrical forces are what pull us forward in time and help us hold onto our memories. He called electricity "the key to all of life's most alarming secrets." This idea helped inspire his pictures of cats, which became more stylized and kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic, over the decades.”
The Ebert reviewer, Nell Minow, also captures the mental illness aspect:
~ Today, we would call Wain neuroatypical. For example, he drew his intricate artwork with both hands simultaneously, each hand beginning at a side of the page, meeting up with perfect alignment in the middle. His interactions with other people had a blunt awkwardness that might be diagnosed today as on the autism spectrum.
He also spent his last decades in mental hospitals. Colman's narration tells us his mind was a "dark, screaming hurricane of crippling anxieties and recurring nightmares." Wain says that his constant, frantic activity was an effort to manage his mental chaos. Some contemporary experts believe he had schizophrenia and the increasing abstraction and fantasy of his images is evidence of a disconnect from reality. The movie depicts him having a terrifying hallucination that could be caused by psychosis.
He had a lot of external pressures as well. He was the sole provider for his "whimsical and bohemian" widowed mother and five "hungry and precocious" sisters, one of whom would become severely mentally ill, and none of whom contributed to the family's upkeep. Even after his work was very successful, his poor judgment and lack of understanding of money kept the family struggling and in debt.
The only moments of peace and true happiness for Wain were in a very sweet romance with his sisters' governess, Emily (a warm-hearted and witty performance by Claire Foy). Peter was a stray cat they adopted together. He was a great source of comfort as Emily developed breast cancer and became very ill. She was the one who told Wain that cats were "ridiculous, silly, cuddly, frightened and brave, just like us," and that inspired the beginning of his whimsical drawings of cats enjoying human activities, often gently making fun of the era's fads and fashions.”
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-electrical-life-of-louis-wain-2021
The last sentence of Minow’s review complains that the movie “makes the fanciful cats more real to us than Wain himself.”
Yes. Just because Louis himself is chaotic and frenzied doesn’t mean that a movie about him needs to be just as chaotic and confusing.
Louis Wain ginger cat. Note the sharp-edged outlines, typical of the art of schizophrenics, and the “psychedelic” background. But before Louis became psychotic, he mostly drew humorous anthropomorphized cats, and that was the kind of art that brought him huge popularity.
Also, the viewer could use more explanation that might explain mysteries such as Emily’s hiding in a closet of the first scene we meet her, or why Louis has recurrent nightmares of drowning. It won’t do to call these two “eccentric,” even if its their favorite summary label of themselves. True, the Victorians had little understanding of mental illness, but that doesn’t mean the viewer needs to be doomed to the equivalent state of buzzing confusion.
Still, the movie is a unique portrait of a very strange artist and his very strange life. I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from seeing it. In spite of its flaws, it’s unforgettable. After I said it, a friend of mine replied, “It’s an unforgettable mediocre movie.” True, but the emphasis is on “unforgettable.” 
*
A NEW VISION OF THE DAWN OF HUMANITY
~ History matters. As we debate statues and slavery and dispute the role of empire, we have become accustomed to constant sparring over the past. But there is one branch of history that has, so far, remained above the fray: the story of our very early past, the “dawn” of humanity. For the anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, this consensus is a problem. As they argue in this iconoclastic and irreverent book, much of what we think we know of this distant era is actually a myth – indeed it is our origin myth, a modern equivalent of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. At its core is a story of the rise of civilization and, with it, the rise of the state. Like all origin myths, this narrative has enormous power, and its reach and resilience are preventing us from thinking clearly about our present crises.
This myth, they argue, can be found on the shelves of every high-street and airport bookshop, in super-sellers such as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday and Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order. All of these books share a common assumption: as societies become larger, more complex, wealthy and “civilized”, they inevitably become less equal. Early humans, it is said, lived like the foragers of the Kalahari, in small, mobile bands that were casually egalitarian and democratic. But this primitive idyll or Hobbesian hell (views differ) disappeared with settlement and farming, which required the management of labor and land. The emergence of early cities, and ultimately states, demanded even steeper hierarchies, and with them the whole civilizational package – leaders, administrators, the division of labor and social classes. The lesson, then, is clear: human equality and freedom have to be traded for progress.
Graeber and Wengrow see the origins of this “stagist” narrative in Enlightenment thought, and show that it has been so persistently appealing because it can be used by radicals as well as liberals. For early liberals such as Adam Smith, it was a positive story that could be deployed to justify the rise in inequality brought by commerce and the structure of the modern state. But a variation on the story, put forward by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proved just as useful to the left: in the “state of nature” man was originally free, but with the coming of agriculture, property and so on, he ended up in chains. And Friedrich Engels fused Rousseau’s “noble savage” fable with Darwinist evolutionary ideas, to produce a more optimistic Marxist narrative of historical progress: primitive communism is superseded by private property and states, and then by a modern, proletarian communism.
It is this tale – in both its liberal and more radical forms – which Graeber and Wengrow seek to dismantle using recent anthropological and archaeological research. Excavations in Louisiana, for example, show that in about 1600BC Native Americans built giant earthworks for mass gatherings, drawing people from hundreds of miles around – evidence that shatters the notion that all foragers lived simple, isolated lives.
Meanwhile, the so-called “agricultural revolution” – the Neolithic Faustian bargain when humanity swapped egalitarian simplicity for wealth, status and hierarchy – simply didn’t happen. The shift from foraging to agriculture was slow and patchy; much of what has been thought of as farming was actually small-scale horticulture, and perfectly compatible with flat social structures. Similarly, the rise of cities did not necessitate kings, priests and bureaucrats. Indus valley settlements such as Harappa (c2600BC) show no signs of palaces or temples and instead suggest dispersed, not concentrated power. While Graeber and Wengrow are open about the very limited evidence and the disputes over its interpretation, they build a compelling case.
Yet they reserve particular scorn for another myth: the assumption that the “savage” was stupid as well as noble. In an age that worships the tech-gods of Silicon Valley, it is tempting to believe that we are more sapiens than our distant ancestors. But 17th-century Jesuit missionaries were exasperated to discover the intellectual agility of the Native American Wendat people in resisting conversion; indeed, they showed themselves more eloquent than the “shrewdest citizens and merchants in France”. This sophistication was attributed to the Wendats’ democratic councils, which were “held almost every day in the Villages, and on almost all matters” and “improve[d] their capacity for talking”. These skills and habits, Graeber and Wengrow suggest, actually made so-called primitive peoples more truly “political animals” than we are now – engaged in the day-to-day business of organizing their communities rather than impotently tweeting about it.
Graeber was, until his death last year at the age of 59, among the world’s most famous anarchists and an intellectual leader of the Occupy Wall Street movement (now celebrating its 10th anniversary). The Dawn of Everything certainly follows a long tradition of anti-statist anthropology. An early example was Mutual Aid (1902) by the anarchist geographer Prince Kropotkin, which provided an alternative to the fashionable evolutionary histories of his era, and defended “savage” peoples against the harsh judgments of imperialists and Marxists alike. And in his 1972 essay The Original Affluent Society, the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wondered whether the Kalahari foragers, with their two- to four-hour working day, were really so much worse off than the nine-to-five office or factory worker.
Importantly, Graeber and Wengrow do not idealize a particular “golden age”; we are not being urged to embrace a Palaeolithic lifestyle. They stress the sheer variety and hybridity of early human societies – hierarchical and non-hierarchical, equal in some respects and not in others. Indeed, peoples like the Cherokee or the Inuit even alternated between authoritarianism and democracy depending on the season. Nevertheless, the authors make their sympathies clear: they admire experimentation, imagination and playfulness, as well as mastery of the art of not being governed, to use historian James C Scott’s term.
The Dawn of Everything is an exhilarating read, but it’s unclear how effectively it makes the case for anarchism. Sceptical readers will be driven to ask: if states in their current form are really so unnecessary, why have they become so dominant across the world? To address this, Graeber and Wengrow would have needed to offer a much fuller account of why modern states emerged, how they could have been avoided and how we might live without them. This is what Kropotkin tried to do, and such questions seem particularly pressing when the sheer complexity and interconnectedness of current global challenges lead many to conclude that we need more state capacity, not less.
Even so, myth-busting is a crucial task in itself. As we seek new, sustainable ways to organize our world, we need to understand the full range of ways our ancestors thought and lived. And we must certainly question conventional versions of our history which we have accepted, unexamined, for far too long. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/23/the-dawn-of-everything-by-david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-review-inequality-is-not-the-price-of-civilisation
from another source
HUMAN HISTORY GETS A REWRITE
~ The Dawn of Everything is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker; and accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men.
Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization—literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires. Flash forward a few thousand years, and with science, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, we witness the creation of the modern bureaucratic state. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).
It is also, according to Graeber and Wengrow, completely wrong. Drawing on a wealth of recent archaeological discoveries that span the globe, as well as deep reading in often neglected historical sources (their bibliography runs to 63 pages), the two dismantle not only every element of the received account but also the assumptions that it rests on. Yes, we’ve had bands, tribes, cities, and states; agriculture, inequality, and bureaucracy, but what each of these were, how they developed, and how we got from one to the next—all this and more, the authors comprehensively rewrite. More important, they demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces, moving helplessly along a technological conveyor belt that takes us from the Serengeti to the DMV. We’ve had choices, they show, and we’ve made them. Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we’re used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring.
The bulk of the book (which weighs in at more than 500 pages) takes us from the Ice Age to the early states (Egypt, China, Mexico, Peru). In fact, it starts by glancing back before the Ice Age to the dawn of the species. Homo sapiens developed in Africa, but it did so across the continent, from Morocco to the Cape, not just in the eastern savannas, and in a great variety of regional forms that only later coalesced into modern humans. There was no anthropological Garden of Eden, in other words—no Tanzanian plain inhabited by “mitochondrial Eve” and her offspring. As for the apparent delay between our biological emergence, and therefore the emergence of our cognitive capacity for culture, and the actual development of culture—a gap of many tens of thousands of years—that, the authors tell us, is an illusion. The more we look, especially in Africa (rather than mainly in Europe, where humans showed up relatively late), the older the evidence we find of complex symbolic behavior.
That evidence and more—from the Ice Age, from later Eurasian and Native North American groups—demonstrate, according to Graeber and Wengrow, that hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined. The authors introduce us to sumptuous Ice Age burials (the beadwork at one site alone is thought to have required 10,000 hours of work), as well as to monumental architectural sites like Göbekli Tepe, in modern Turkey, which dates from about 9000 B.C. (at least 6,000 years before Stonehenge) and features intricate carvings of wild beasts.
They tell us of Poverty Point, a set of massive, symmetrical earthworks erected in Louisiana around 1600 B.C., a “hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state.” They describe an indigenous Amazonian society that shifted seasonally between two entirely different forms of social organization (small, authoritarian nomadic bands during the dry months; large, consensual horticultural settlements during the rainy season). They speak of the kingdom of Calusa, a monarchy of hunter-gatherers the Spanish found when they arrived in Florida. All of these scenarios are unthinkable within the conventional narrative.
The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. Others looked at their neighbors and determined to live as differently as possible—a process that Graeber and Wengrow describe in detail with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Northern California, “puritans” who idealized thrift, simplicity, money, and work, in contrast to the ostentatious slaveholding chieftains of the Pacific Northwest. None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.
The authors carry this perspective forward to the ages that saw the emergence of farming, of cities, and of kings. In the locations where it first developed, about 10,000 years ago, agriculture did not take over all at once, uniformly and inexorably. (It also didn’t start in only a handful of centers—Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, Peru, the same places where empires would first appear—but more like 15 or 20.) Early farming was typically flood-retreat farming, conducted seasonally in river valleys and wetlands, a process that is much less labor-intensive than the more familiar kind and does not conduce to the development of private property. It was also what the authors call “play farming”: farming as merely one element within a mix of food-producing activities that might include hunting, herding, foraging, and horticulture.
Settlements, in other words, preceded agriculture—not, as we’ve thought, the reverse. What’s more, it took some 3,000 years for the Fertile Crescent to go from the first cultivation of wild grains to the completion of the domestication process—about 10 times as long as necessary, recent analyses have shown, had biological considerations been the only ones. Early farming embodied what Graeber and Wengrow call “the ecology of freedom”: the freedom to move in and out of farming, to avoid getting trapped by its demands or endangered by the ecological fragility that it entails.
The authors write their chapters on cities against the idea that large populations need layers of bureaucracy to govern them—that scale leads inevitably to political inequality. Many early cities, places with thousands of people, show no sign of centralized administration: no palaces, no communal storage facilities, no evident distinctions of rank or wealth. This is the case with what may be the earliest cities of all, Ukrainian sites like Taljanky, which were discovered only in the 1970s and which date from as early as roughly 4100 B.C., hundreds of years before Uruk, the oldest known city in Mesopotamia. Even in that “land of kings,” urbanism antedated monarchy by centuries. And even after kings arose, “popular councils and citizen assemblies,” Graeber and Wengrow write, “were stable features of government,” with real power and autonomy. Despite what we like to believe, democratic institutions did not begin just once, millennia later, in Athens.
If anything, aristocracy emerged in smaller settlements, the warrior societies that flourished in the highlands of the Levant and elsewhere, and that are known to us from epic poetry—a form of existence that remained in tension with agricultural states throughout the history of Eurasia, from Homer to the Mongols and beyond. But the authors’ most compelling instance of urban egalitarianism is undoubtedly Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that rivaled imperial Rome, its contemporary, for size and magnificence. After sliding toward authoritarianism, its people abruptly changed course, abandoning monument-building and human sacrifice for the construction of high-quality public housing. “Many citizens,” the authors write, “enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own.”
And so we arrive at the state, with its structures of central authority, exemplified variously by large-scale kingdoms, by empires, by modern republics—supposedly the climax form, to borrow a term from ecology, of human social organization. What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package that’s persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics).
Some states have displayed just two, some only one—which means the union of all three, as in the modern state, is not inevitable (and may indeed, with the rise of planetary bureaucracies like the World Trade Organization, be already decomposing). More to the point, the state itself may not be inevitable. For most of the past 5,000 years, the authors write, kingdoms and empires were “exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants … systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority.”
IS CIVILIZATION worth it, the authors want to know, if civilization—ancient Egypt, the Aztecs, imperial Rome, the modern regime of bureaucratic capitalism enforced by state violence—means the loss of what they see as our three basic freedoms: the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements? Or does civilization rather mean “mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality [and] simply caring for others”?
These are questions that Graeber, a committed anarchist—an exponent not of anarchy but of anarchism, the idea that people can get along perfectly well without governments—asked throughout his career. The Dawn of Everything is framed by an account of what the authors call the “indigenous critique.” In a remarkable chapter, they describe the encounter between early French arrivals in North America, primarily Jesuit missionaries, and a series of Native intellectuals—individuals who had inherited a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as “generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.”
The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom. The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition). They go further, making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We’re richer, went the logic, so we’re better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.
The Dawn of Everything is not a brief for anarchism, though anarchist values—antiauthoritarianism, participatory democracy, small-c communism—are everywhere implicit in it. Above all, it is a brief for possibility, which was, for Graeber, perhaps the highest value of all. The book is something of a glorious mess, full of fascinating digressions, open questions, and missing pieces. It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity.
“How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”? It’s a pretty good question. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” It isn’t clear to me how many possibilities are left us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history-humanity/620177/
Oriana:
The Standard Version of human beginnings is very firmly entrenched: After the relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer era came agriculture, and with it private property and a more stratified social order, eventually with a king or emperor at the top. If The Dawn of Everything is correct, then the story of human cultural evolution is not so linear, but much more varied: some groups tried agriculture and then abandoned it; different social arrangements were likewise tried by various groups.
The one common note is that humans had to achieve large-scale cooperation to arrive at what we consider modern civilization. But the paths to achieving that cooperation apparently varied. This makes sense, though when it comes to very early human history, certainty will always elude us.
As a summary statement, this one seems best: "The book is something of a glorious mess, full of fascinating digressions, open questions, and missing pieces. It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity."
Mary:
What I find exciting about Graeber and Wengrow's work is that it's a new kind of narrative, replacing a single narrative thread with one type of forward motion with another, more subtle and nuanced, that doesn't see a single simple direction of development — hunter gatherer to farmer, tribe to state — but one that can move in other directions, entertain different kinds of organization, alternate kinds of progress.
The old simple narrative of our species development has already been drastically changed and reformed. Those old pictures of the stages from cave man to modern man are nothing like the story the archeological record has revealed. There were many different hominids, and they were constantly on the move. They met and parted, crossed and recrossed paths, and the meetings produced hybrids. It was out of Africa, and back, and out again...to even the most remote parts of earth, and the timeline of these movements goes earlier and deeper than we ever expected.
Just as our biology was not a simple story, neither was our social and technological development. Agriculture was not one and done, but something practiced in one way or another, abandoned, returned to, and in different shapes. All the different forms of agriculture did not necessitate the formation of cities and states, the division of labor and social classes. Cities existed without rulers, culture and art long before, and invention pretty much from the start. These are exciting ideas because they overturn long held assumptions about history and humanity, and open intriguing possibilities for both understanding the past and building the future.
David Graeber
*
SECRET SEARCH FOR THE ARK OF THE COVENANT
~ In the annals of archaeology, it ranks as the most bizarre excavation team. Led by a handsome British aristocrat, its members included a Swiss psychic, a Finnish poet, an English cricket champion and a mustachioed Swede who once piloted a steamboat on the Congo River. None had any training in the field.
Nor was the object of their search ordinary. This motley assemblage arrived in Jerusalem in 1909, when the Holy City was still under the authority of the Ottoman Empire, ruled from Istanbul. They sought nothing less than the famed Ark of the Covenant, along with treasures gathered by King Solomon 3,000 years ago that, according to legend, were later hidden.
Long before Raiders of the Lost Ark was a box-office smash, this band of unlikely explorers launched a secret dig that blew up into an international scandal that shook the Middle East, with consequences still felt today.
It all began when an obscure Scandinavian scholar suggested that he had unraveled a secret biblical code that pinpointed the site of the buried sacred treasure. The surviving notes of Valter Juvelius are a mass of scribbled numbers, obscure phrases and references to scripture, so exactly which cipher he claimed to have decoded is unclear. But he was convinced the sacred objects rested in a Jerusalem tunnel. Juvelius traveled across Europe, fruitlessly seeking a patron until he secured an introduction to Captain Montagu Brownlow Parker, the 30-year-old brother of an English earl.
A Boer War veteran and feckless London socialite, Parker was intrigued. He agreed to serve as the expedition leader and set up a syndicate to sell 60,000 one-pound shares in the venture. His status, charm and dashing looks proved irresistible to an array of investors, from Chicago meatpacker J. Ogden Armour to the duchess of Marlborough. They ponied up the equivalent of $2.4 million today to cover expenses.
Parker’s winning argument was that this paltry sum would recover not only the world’s most famous sacred artifact, but also an enormous fortune. He estimated that the Ark, along with the many gold and silver platters and bowls and other precious objects mentioned in the biblical text, would net $200 million on the art market—some $5.7 billion today. Searching for the Ark was not simply a spiritual quest; it would be an immensely profitable one as well.
There is a hint that Parker’s interest in the treasure was neither pious nor greedy, but ultimately romantic. One American newspaper later claimed that he agreed to lead the venture in order to obtain the hand of a wealthy divorcée. “Well, bring back the Ark of the Covenant and I will talk to you again,” she is alleged to have said.
*
The Ark is described in the Book of Exodus as a rectangular wooden chest made of acacia wood, covered in gold leaf and topped with statues of two cherubim on its gold lid. Scripture maintains it was built to hold the two tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments soon after the Israelites departed Egypt. “There, above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the Ark of the Covenant law, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites,” God tells Moses, while providing detailed instructions on the design of the portable box that could be carried with two wooden staves.
Such shrines were common in the ancient Near East. A similarly sized wooden chest was discovered in King Tut’s tomb, while others in Egypt have been found topped with statues of deities and used as sarcophagi. Some were ceremonial boats carried by priests on poles. The cherubim from the Bible were likely derived from Babylonian tradition.
What set the Ark apart from its Near Eastern cousins was the biblical claim that it served as a powerful spiritual weapon, capable of parting the Jordan River, bringing down the walls of Jericho and generally routing any enemy of the Israelites. King David was said to have brought it to Jerusalem; he danced ecstatically before the sacred object as it entered the city.
Eventually, it came to rest on the city’s Temple Mount in Solomon’s temple, within the chamber known as the Holy of Holies—the central sanctuary accessible only to the high priest, and then only once a year. Its presence would have given the mountain town a new and powerful religious might, yet it is never again mentioned in the Bible.
n 586 B.C.E., the Babylonian army attacked Jerusalem and “carried to Babylon all the articles from the temple of God, both large and small, and the treasures of the Lord’s temple and the treasures of the king and his officials,” as reported in the biblical Book of Chronicles. It’s unclear whether the Ark itself was among these objects; the invaders were, in any case, the third army mentioned in the Bible that had looted the sanctuary. Whether taken, hidden or destroyed, the Ark’s fate has spawned innumerable legends, hundreds of books and one Steven Spielberg blockbuster.
Candidate locations for the lost Ark include an Ethiopian church, an Irish bog, a Vatican basement, an Egyptian temple, a Jordanian mountaintop and a Dead Sea cave. Some Jewish traditions insist that priests hid the Ark and other treasures under or near the Temple Mount, where they allegedly remained even after the Roman destruction of the last Jewish sanctuary in 70 C.E.
Nineteen centuries later, the golden Dome of the Rock and the sprawling al-Aqsa Mosque rose above the parks and fountains of Islam’s third holiest site. Excavating on what Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary was strictly forbidden by the Istanbul-based sultan, who was caretaker of Islam’s most sacred places. Juvelius, though, believed that “his rendering of the Hebrew text denoted that the Ark of the Covenant could be found by working up the hill through underground passages,” as one expedition member later wrote.
These passages lay under a rocky ridge extending south of the acropolis, which archaeologists had recently determined was the site of the ancient city conquered by King David sometime after 1000 B.C.E. Outside the Old City’s walls, this spur of land was largely pasture and at a safe distance from the Noble Sanctuary. It was just a matter of penetrating the ridge to find the tunnel that led uphill to Solomon’s treasure.
Parker traveled from London to Istanbul and secured an excavation permit in exchange for 500 British pounds—about $80,000 today—along with a secret deal to share half the loot with Ottoman officials. In the summer of 1909, the bulk of the team arrived at the Palestinian port city of Jaffa, though their disembarking was delayed by an outbreak of bubonic plague. Once in Jerusalem, the group rented a luxurious villa outfitted with Persian rugs and long-hosed hookahs, with one room dedicated to the valuable finds they were certain they would soon collect.
“They were certainly the oddest archaeologists to visit Jerusalem,” remarked Bertha Spafford Vester, an American missionary who grew up in the city. “We heard of gay dinners given by the Englishmen, once with the Turkish Pasha as guest, and of their using oranges for target practice.”
Vester’s amusement turned to anger when she learned that the team intended to dig on the historic slope south of the Noble Sanctuary. She was appalled by “their complete lack of archaeological knowledge.” This was no exaggeration; one of the expedition members insisted that the Ark must be found on Mount Ararat, apparently having confused Noah’s Ark with that of King David. Under pressure from local expats, Parker agreed to grant access to a French monk who was also an archaeologist to record their finds—though the object of their search was kept strictly confidential.
The dig itself was difficult to keep secret, since it was the largest in Jerusalem’s history to date. Nearly 200 workers burrowed four-and-half-feet-high passages beneath the ridge, with air supplied by mechanical pumps. “We lived underground nearly the whole time it was daylight,” the French monk later reported. “The work went on at nightfall without stopping, by the light of torches and to the sound of songs chanted by the workmen.” They encountered numerous ancient passages-—“dark mysterious tunnels which seemed to stretch endlessly into the very entrails of the rock.” But the monk said that the only artifacts they found were “some old Jewish flat lamps made of baked clay, some red pottery jars [and] a few metal sling balls.”
Pottery recovered by Parker and his excavation team There was no sign of gold or silver, much less the Ark. Soon, the weather turned bitterly cold and damp; at one point, the workers went on strike. That fall, Parker and his team packed up and left until the following summer. When they returned, it was with the chief engineer of London’s revolutionary subway system, known as the “tube.” By then, Juvelius had fallen ill with malaria and grown disillusioned with the search. He sailed home as Ottoman officials monitoring the dig grew impatient with the delays. The diminished team worked through the next winter with no better luck.
By the spring of 1911, with only a few months left before the permit expired, Parker concocted a foolhardy and dangerous plan. He bribed the Muslim sheikh in charge of the Noble Sanctuary and had him send the guards to an Islamic festival taking place outside of town. For the first time since the Crusades, the revered site was vulnerable to foreign trespassers. For nine subsequent nights, Parker and his men shoveled away at various places on the platform, but to no avail.
Finally, with time running out before the festival ended, Parker made an even rasher decision. On the tenth night, he and a small team entered the shallow cave beneath the Dome of the Rock—known to Westerners as the Mosque of Omar—close to the very place where Mohammad was said to have ascended into heaven. The aristocrat was convinced that this was the obvious resting place of the Ark, since it was rumored to mark the spot of Solomon’s long-lost Holy of Holies. It was also a spot surpassed only by Mecca and Medina in sanctity among Muslims.
The particulars of what took place on the night of April 12, 1911, are fuzzy. Either a sleepless resident stumbled onto the workers as they hacked away at the rock or a caretaker not in on the secret heard the noise and raised the alarm. What is beyond dispute is that the Muslim residents of Jerusalem quickly filled the streets, infuriated at the news that their holy site was under Christian attack. Fearing for their lives, Parker and his friends fled, quickly jumping on the train to Jaffa. They coolly had tea in the harbor town before offering to fête Ottoman immigration officials on their yacht. Parker and his colleagues rowed to the boat to prepare for their guests—and then promptly sailed away.
Rumors swirled around the globe that the foreigners had made off with the staff of Moses, the tablets of the Ten Commandments or any number of possible other relics. “Gone with the Treasure that was Solomon’s” read the May 4 banner headline in the New York Times, over the subheading: “English Party Vanishes on Yacht after Digging under the Mosque of Omar.” Three days later, the same newspaper published a long feature titled “Have Englishmen found the Ark of the Covenant?” The Times reported: “It is believed that the explorers found Solomon’s crown, his sword and his ring, and an ancient manuscript of the Bible.”
Meanwhile, some 2,000 demonstrators took to the city’s streets demanding justice. “There was an awful row, which required both battalions of Turkish Infantry, quartered in Jerusalem, to quell,” one expedition member wrote. The Noble Sanctuary’s sheikh and the city’s governor were arrested, but that did little to tamp down the public fury. “Moslems in a Rage” in a “Recent Sensation from Jerusalem,” read the headline of Washington, D.C.’s Evening Star.
News reports in the European press even suggested that Parker’s debacle might lead to the overthrow of the government in Istanbul. On May 8, the Ottoman parliament met in a contentious special session. Arab lawmakers presented evidence that the Jerusalem pasha and local military commander had been bribed by Parker. “The government covers everything up,” concluded a scandalized representative from the Black Sea region. One government minister drew hoots when he insisted that their share of Parker’s treasure would have been enough to have pay off nearly the entire national debt. In the end, all senior officials were cleared of wrongdoing, though the governor of Jerusalem lost his job.
One American newspaper warned that the treasure hunt by the Christian adventurers “might have provoked a holy war throughout the world.” This was no exaggeration: The events in the Holy City drew condemnation from Islamic leaders around the globe, including in British India. A commission of Indian Muslims investigated the incident and eventually concluded that nothing had been looted. Officials in London breathed a sigh of relief.
Parker returned to Britain without having grasped the consequences of his actions. Nor did the British Foreign Office appear to rein in the rogue aristocrat. Astonishingly, he went back in September of that same year for a second try at the alleged treasure. Advised by Ottoman friends not to land where he had previously anchored at Jaffa, Parker boldly sailed instead to Istanbul. But war had broken out between the empire and Italy, and no bribe could win him a new permit; the war took precedence over digging for gold. Parker never returned to Jerusalem, and the incident of 1911, if remembered at all, was dismissed in the West as a minor comic opera.
Yet this improbable expedition did more than inspire others to seek the Ark. It quietly seeded an intense distrust for archaeology among Palestinian Muslims while laying the foundation for Palestinian nationalism. According to Brooklyn College historian Louis Fishman, the incident demonstrated to local Arabs that the Ottomans could not be trusted to protect the Noble Sanctuary; it was up to the Palestinians to ensure its sanctity. The Dome of the Rock and the sacred platform soon emerged as a central symbol of rising Palestinian nationalism. This put Jerusalem’s Muslims on a direct collision course with the rising tide of Jewish immigrants, who crowded along the nearby Wailing Wall to pray.
The British went on to occupy Jerusalem and administer Palestine in the wake of World War I, while Parker served in the British army in France and then stepped out of the spotlight. On the death of his brother in 1951, he became the Fifth Earl of Morley and resided at an elegant Georgian mansion outside of Plymouth. So far as is known, he never spoke or wrote about his Jerusalem misadventure again. Needless to say, he never won the hand of the socialite, instead dying a bachelor in 1962.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-secret-excavation-of-jerusalem-180978888/
Oriana:
The story of this futile quest reminded me not of The Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I didn’t see, since I dislike action movies, but of the Maltese Falcon, which turns out to be a worthless fake, and of the scene in Waiting for Godot where it turns out that the heavy suitcases carried by Lucky contain nothing but sand.
There is something peculiarly modern about the quest for the Ark. In heroic tales of previous eras, the object of a quest would be found. Not so in modern times: the narrator never gets to enter the castle; the obsessed hero either never find the treasure, or if he does, the treasure turns out to be worthless.
I even had a dream on the same theme: I inherit an envelope stuffed with banknotes, but those turn out to be Tzarist rubles.
There are no doubt endless stories of failed quests, making the successful ones seem a miracle: the polio vaccine, or an actual ancient bronze statue found at the bottom of the sea. Or the more modest goal that I had after I decided to master English — to be able to read Shakespeare in the original — which I accomplished, and Shakespeare did not disappoint. Our lives, both private and collective, are so filled with Godot-like travesties that actually achieving something after a long struggle and not being disappointed by whatever kind of Grail it was meant to be, is something we need to remember again and again as our stay against despair.
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“TOTAL DEPRAVITY” = THE TOTAL DEPRAVITY OF EVERYONE ELSE
~ “According to white evangelicalism, humanity is totally depraved, which may have a technical theological meaning but on a popular level means utterly nihilistically wicked to the point of deserving eternal torture in hell. If other people appear to be reasonable and basically good, that is because our perception of them is distorted by our own sin. If we saw them with the eyes of God, we would see why God wants to torture them forever. This means that presumably the closer we get to God, the more repugnant the wickedness of humanity will look to us, which is why Christian preachers are said to be more “biblical” the more emphatically they denounce humanity’s sin.
But here’s where the ideological sleight of hand happens. If you’re living under the guidance of a wise, self-certain patriarch in a “biblical” church, then your human nature is no longer totally depraved because you’re “walking in the light.” I mean, sure, you’ll say that you’re the greatest of sinners to be theologically correct, but functionally, your membership in a “biblical” church means that you’re right and other people are wrong. The doctrine of total depravity becomes the total depravity of everyone else, especially the “humanists” who claim that people are basically good.
What has made this ideology so potent over the past thirty years is the way that it dovetails perfectly with the resentment of working class whites against “liberal urban elites.” Rich people are fine as long as they’re not “elitist” (i.e. as long as they wear cowboy hats, own a ranch, and talk “blue-collar”).
James 4:4 says, “Friendship with the world is enmity with God.” For early church fathers like St. Basil, “friendship with the world” meant attachment to wealth, power, and other worldly idols that get in the way of our connection with God. But for many white evangelicals today, being addicted to wealth and power is not a problem as long as you don’t associate with liberals.
Because progressive secularism is the “world” you’re not supposed to be friends with. This is just one example of the many Bible verses whose meaning is utterly distorted by a culture war lens. When zero-compromise nihilism is the measure of your Christian faith, then you really don’t have to go to church anymore as long as you don’t vote Democrat.
I’m not saying that conservatism is innately toxic. I’m saying that the nihilism of a hyperbolic understanding of human wickedness makes Christians into toxic trolls and saboteurs whose scornful sanctimony has almost destroyed our democracy.” ~ Morgan Guyton, Mercy Not Sacrifice
This title comes from the verse in Matthew: "I desire mercy, not sacrifices."
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GOODBYE TO PASCAL’S WAGER
It feels embarrassing to acknowledge that all my adult life I experienced moments of terror because of Pascal’s wager: if you don’t believe in the Christian god, and you happen to be wrong, you will spend eternity burning in hell.
Since the middle of the seventeenth century onward, many who knew of Pascal’s wager valiantly tried to persuade themselves to believe in virgin birth, vicarious atonement through blood sacrifice on the cross, rising from the dead, the second coming and collective resurrection in the flesh, walking on water and other miracles. All those absurdities had to be accepted without questioning because the risk of hell, even if it’s only one in one in a million, was still too great to warrant thinking on one’s own.
What’s Pascal’s advice to those who don’t believe but out of prudence would like to believe? “Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.” Here Pascal shows surprising psychological knowledge long before the birth of the theory of cognitive dissonance. It’s “fake it till you make it.” Your brain will struggle for coherence between your behavior and your beliefs, and you will end up believing.
This sounds at least plausible: if you choose to act as though you believed, belief may indeed happen; the mask becomes the face. On the other hand, we also know that even after years of going to mass and saying prayers, a person may nevertheless lose belief. This happens quite often in adolescence as the brain develops more ability to reason. But it can also happen in the middle of adulthood, and even priests and nuns are not immune to the loss of belief. The other side of the coin is conversion during adulthood, often based on what the new believer finds a compelling experience, unexplainable unless we accept mysticism.
I should not that I include the unconscious cognitive processes in “reason”; once your unconscious decides there is no god, it’s not really possible to go against that decision. Conversely, in cases of adult conversion, the unconscious decides that god (of a particular religion) exists, and it’s probably equally impossible to go against that decision.
In my childhood, I experienced faith as a consequence of indoctrination. In adolescence, I experienced the loss of that faith imposed by intimidation. The loss was gradual at first, but after a decisive insight, sudden and final. For a while, I tried to cling to belief, saying my prayers (much as I always hated the rosary, which led me to a stupefied daze with its overdose of mechanical repetitions) and going to mass and to confession (much as I always hated confession). If Pascal was right, going through the motions should have confirmed me in faith.
But the deliberate clinging did me not good. Once my unconscious decided that god didn’t exist, going to mass, which used to give me some pleasure, became a hollow and boring experience. The medieval air of the church rituals, the holy water, the choking incense (only later I learned that in the original rite of temple sacrifice, it was meant to mask the smell of the blood of the sacrificed animals), the crucifix, the skull and bones, now seemed both backward and a deliberate mass manipulation: unnerving and unwholesome, the cult of death and suffering. There was still some esthetic pleasure — the candles, the chanting, the beams of light from the high windows — but once I found a compelling intellectual argument, the esthetic part was not enough.
There was, nevertheless, that thorn in the flesh: Pascal’s wager. I don’t mean to suggest that after leaving the church I spent any significant time brooding over it. Not just my conscious deliberations and reading books on the origins of religion and mythology, but my experience and my intuition, convinced me there was no god and no afterlife. But once in a while there was a flash of hellfire in my mind — like a frightened child screaming and running, her clothes on fire. I tended to dismiss it by reminding myself of what I first thought at 14, when belief became impossible: that a deity who torments people forever based on non-belief or wrong belief is a cruel tyrant not worth worshiping. If such a narcissistic deity existed (I never believed that god was good, had feelings, or cared one bit about human suffering), then I was ready for the consequences, in the spirit of “better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”
Pascal was a deep thinker rather than a shallow pragmatist. He saw how difficult it was for a thinking person to believe: “If I saw no signs of a divinity, I would fix myself in denial. If I saw everywhere the marks of a Creator, I would repose peacefully in faith. But seeing too much to deny Him, and too little to assure me, I am in a pitiful state, and I would wish a hundred times that if a god sustains nature it would reveal Him without ambiguity.” I can imagine the torments this man must have gone through trying to convince himself to believe.
He was also a strict logician: “We understand nothing of the works of God unless we take it as a principle that He wishes to blind some and to enlighten others.” Pascal was a Jansenist; Jansenism is similar to Calvinism. Only a small minority are predestined to enter heaven. Pascal never questioned the unfairness of it, and, if the majority are doomed to hellfire for eternity, the immense cruelty of this assumption.
It turns out that Pascal wasn’t the only one to formulate the wager. “Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, was narrated as having said: "The astrologers and the physicians both said the dead will never be resurrected. I said, 'Keep your council. If your idea is correct, I will come to no harm by my belief in the Day of Judgement, but if my belief is correct then you will be a sure loser by not believing in that day.'" (Narrated in Ihya of Al-Ghazali)”
The mention of Islam of course brings up the “many religions” objection to Pascal’s wager. I’ve discovered only now that Pascal was aware of this counterargument. He dismissed pagan religions as manifestly wrong as can be seen by their extinction and/or by the inferiority of the cultures that practice them, Judaism has been superseded by Christianity. And as for Islam — Pascal is at his weakest here — well, if we examine it carefully, Islam just can’t be true.
Of course if we examine it carefully, Christianity can’t be true either — hence the pitiful state of uncertainty that Pascal mentions. Pascal was a brilliant thinker, but in this realm he was too intimidated by the threat of hell to keep pressing. As for the very recent argument that says, “The extent of god’s mercy toward the dead is not known to us,” it was too early for such advanced thinking and the appreciation of kindness. The child of the brutal severity of his times, Pascal settled for the wager.
I know that just yesterday I was delighted by the “many religions” refutation of Pascal’s wager. Today I’ve done more reading and regained my balance, so to speak. All religions are human inventions; they are archaic philosophy and “theory of everything.” Not one has sufficient evidence to support supernatural claims.
There remain two strong arguments against Pascal’s wager. First, a deity worthy of worship would probably judge on the basis of ethics rather than correct doctrine, which is chiefly an accident of birth: those born in Saudi Arabia are Muslim, those born in Ireland are Catholic, those born in Greece are Greek Orthodox, and so on. Second, there is no hell. The barbarous idea has been dismissed even by Pope JP2, who has redefined heaven and hell as not places, but states of mind that can be experienced right here on earth. Heaven is a loving state of mind, while hell is a state of mind filled with hatred and negativity.
While the Pope added that “Heaven is also the person of God,” that doesn’t seem as convincing as the statement that heaven is not a place, but a loving state of mind. It might even be argued that a loving state of mind IS god — “the kingdom of heaven is within you.” A state of mind filled with loving kindness can be attained without any dogmatic beliefs about virgin birth or resurrection in the body. Thus, we don’t need Pascal’s wager: we can enjoy heaven right here on earth. Here our guide is not Pascal, but the poet Mary Oliver who asks, in “The Summer Day”
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
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PS. For Pascal’s Wager to work, one needs to have a terror of hell. And one can be an atheist on the rational level, but on the emotional level still have nightmares about hell. It comes from vicious childhood indoctrination that makes god into a sadistic monster.
I'm also struck that Pascal, one of the greatest intellectuals ever, advises us to “deaden our acuity” — meaning our critical thinking. He could see that reason would reject the archaic absurdities of faith, but faith seemed so previous to him that to defend it he was ready to reject reason. But ultimately, as Freud put it, “the voice of the intellect is soft but persistent, and it will be heard.” Alas, this pertains only to those people who may be said to possess intellect.
COVID SETBACK IN RUSSIA
~ After a devastating few months, the latest COVID surge is easing across much of the world. But while most countries are getting better, Russia is actually getting worse.
And for one main reason. “A significant percentage of Russians fear the vaccine more than the virus,” Anna Gotlib, a Russian-born philosopher and bioethicist at Brooklyn College, told The Daily Beast.
And the Russian government, rather than battling vaccine skepticism, has actually encouraged it. All in the hope of scoring a quick buck and owning the West.
Globally, authorities counted around 3 million new coronavirus infections last week—down from 4.6 million at the peak of the surge in early September. Deaths are declining, too. There were 49,000 COVID deaths last week, down from 69,000 six weeks ago.
In Russia, however, the trends are heading in the opposite direction, based on even the most conservative official figures. On Wednesday, the country of 146 million people set all-time official records for daily cases (around 36,000) and deaths (nearly 1,100).
And it’s possible the actual numbers are worse than the official ones. Critics have credibly accused Moscow of cooking the books in order to downplay the seriousness of the crisis and insulate the government from criticism.
“There’s a gap between reported and real COVID-19 cases and mortality everywhere, but based on comparisons of numbers of deaths in 2020 to 2021 with previous years, that gap is wider in Russia—and some other post-socialist countries—than anywhere else in the world,” Judy Twigg, a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, told The Daily Beast.
The pandemic is so bad in Russia right now that the Kremlin, which for months resisted mandating commonsense public health measures, ordered a 10-day partial lockdown in Moscow starting Thursday. But the lockdown is a band-aid on a gaping—and largely self-inflicted—wound.
Despite being the first country to release a COVID vaccine and make it freely available to residents, Russia is one of the least-vaccinated developed countries. Just 33 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, compared to 58 percent in the United States, 68 percent in the United Kingdom and 74 percent in Canada.
Misinformation, much of it officially sanctioned, has turned millions of Russians against vaccines while also eroding trust in their leaders. “Misinformation has always been a huge factor in Russia, and in the era of the internet and social media, misinformation has taken such a hold that I am not sure whether it is even possible for those without access to non-Russian media to distinguish between what is true and what is, in fact, propaganda,” Gotlib said.
The confusion can manifest as a deep reluctance to follow health guidelines. “Among some people,” Twigg said, “there's a general sense that if the government is telling us to do this thing—get vaccinated—then it can't possibly be a good idea.”
It doesn’t help that the Kremlin rushed development of the first of three locally made vaccines and pushed it on the population without also showing good trials data, all in the interest of being first in the vaccine race. When it comes to the Sputnik V vaccine, you don’t have to be misinformed to be skeptical.
It’s a perfect storm. An untrustworthy government pushing an unproven vaccine on a hesitant populace, and then refusing to take any other action until COVID spiraled out of control. If you think Washington’s response to the pandemic has been fractious, uneven, and inadequate, consider that Moscow has consistently done pretty much everything wrong. And now everyday Russians are suffering.
Like most countries, Russia has endured several waves of COVID. There was that initial surge in the spring of 2020, of course. And then another much worse surge that winter. Cases and deaths dropped this spring then started rising again in the fall as new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus became dominant.
Things are different in Russia. New cases and deaths are still rising, months after the fall surge began. Plus, the ratio of deaths to cases is much higher than in other well-off countries.
It’s not hard to understand why. A lower vaccination rate means infected Russians as a population aren’t protected against the worst outcomes—severe illness, hospitalization, even death—the same way people in better-vaxxed countries are.
“The initial problem was Russia’s desire to ‘win’ the vaccine race,” Gotlib explained. Russian regulators approved the two-dose Sputnik jab—which uses the human adenovirus as a vector— for widespread use in August 2020 after it had been tested on just 38 people. A larger, phase 3 trial was still underway.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration was, at the time, still four months from greenlighting the first fully tested vaccine, the two-dose messenger-RNA jab from Moderna. For Moscow, being first appeared to be the whole point. The Russian government compared the Sputnik vaccine to the Sputnik satellite, which in 1957 became the first manmade object to orbit Earth.
The Sputnik vaccine would change the world’s perception of Russia, just like the satellite did 63 years earlier, claimed Kirill Dmitriev, whose Russian Direct Investment Fund bankrolled Moscow’s vaccination campaign. “For countries, it’s difficult to acknowledge that: ‘How is it possible that Russia, which has been always shown as this backward, authoritarian country, can do this?’” Dmitriev said.
Dozens of countries inked expensive deals with Russia to acquire the Sputnik vaccine, sight unseen. But production fell far short of projection. More than one country canceled its contract after deliveries failed to arrive.
The vaccine’s developers at the Gamaleya Research Institute in Moscow eventually posted what it said were results from large-scale trials involving more than 20,000 volunteers. The vaccine is 92 percent effective, the institute claimed.
But in defiance of the usual rules of medical research, Gamaleya never released the raw data from the trials. This seeded doubt in the minds of many scientists that has lingered even as independent studies have indicated that Sputnik is safe and reasonably effective.
Gamaleya declined an interview request on the basis that The Daily Beast is “overly biased in its coverage of Russia.”
Twigg described Sputnik as “a solid product.” But that’s now beside the point. “Premature and exaggerated claims are a huge part of the lingering skepticism about Sputnik V, both in Russia and internationally,” he said. The most recent major poll, from the Moscow-based Levada Center in September, found that just 14 percent of Russians were willing to take a Russian vaccine.
But America’s vaccine uptake, middling though it may be owing to right-wing resistance, has been sufficient to build a wall of immunity. Not against all infections, necessarily, but against serious infections resulting in hospitalization or death.
Cases during the worst days of the summer surge nearly matched the worst days of the winter surge, but deaths were proportionally lower. Nearly 5,500 Americans died of COVID on the worst day this winter, Feb. 12. Just 3,400 died on Sept. 16, the worst day of the current surge.
Russia failed to build that wall of immunity. So when infections spiked, deaths also spiked—and just as badly. And it’s entirely possible that the government is hiding the true severity of the problem. The official figures are bad—record cases and deaths this month—but the unofficial figures are even worse.
The Kremlin has reported around 230,000 total COVID deaths. But Alexey Raksha, an independent demographer, scrutinized the data on “excess mortality”—that is, deaths above what you’d expect based on historic trends—and identified an additional half-million deaths that could be COVID-related, according to The Washington Post.
The harm that Russia’s leaders and institutions are inflicting could linger long after COVID has been eradicated or suppressed. “The long-term destruction of basic citizenship structures that occurs when trust is destroyed is very damaging for any society,” Ruth Groenhout, a professor of health-care ethics at the University of North Carolina, told The Daily Beast.
“Citizens need to be able to trust that their political leaders tell the truth, provide them with accurate information and give them sufficient evidence so that the citizens can judge their own needs safely,” Groenhout added. “And the destruction of that trust, unfortunately, causes long-term damage that can take generations to restore.” ~
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-russia-botched-its-covid-19-response-in-every-possible-way?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
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FIVE MILLION GLOBAL COVID DEATHS
~ The global coronavirus death toll passed 5 million on Monday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The United States alone accounts for around 15 percent of worldwide fatalities. The country’s death toll, past 770, 000, is the highest in the world, followed by India and Brazil.
The virus officially claimed 4 million known deaths on July 8 earlier this year; Sunday’s grim milestone comes three months and three weeks later. This is the first time that the interval between millions has increased, reflecting a recent downtick in the number of daily reported deaths around the world. Official numbers are believed to be undercounted—the true pandemic death toll could be much higher. “It’s quite possible that the number of deaths is double what we see,” a professor epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health told National Geographic on Friday. “But five million is such a staggering number on its own. No country has been able to escape it.” ~
https://www.thedailybeast.com/global-covid-19-pandemic-death-toll-passes-5-million-milestone?via=newsletter&source=CSAMedition
PFIZER’S NEW ANTIVIRAL DRUG HELPS TO ELIMINATE 89% OF HOSPITALIZATIONS
~ Pfizer says that its COVID-19 pill reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by 89%, in a clinical trial that tested the drug in adults with the disease who were also in high-risk health groups.
The oral medicine is called Paxlovid. Similar to Merck's new pill that was approved in the U.K. on Thursday, Pfizer said its drug showed good results when administered within five days of the first COVID-19 symptoms.
Pfizer says its pill is also helped by co-administering a low dose of ritonavir, a drug used in HIV/AIDS treatment regimens. Ritonavir helps protease inhibitors like the Pfizer drug persist longer in the human body, making them more effective in fighting a virus.
Officials in both the U.S. and U.K. say that effective COVID-19 pills could be a game-changer in the fight to end the pandemic, because the pills can easily be administered at home. Regeneron's antibody cocktail has become a key tool in medical workers' rush to prevent the worst outcomes for people who've contracted COVID-19, but the monoclonal antibody treatment requires either an intravenous infusion or a series of shots.
“[Paxlovid] has demonstrated potent antiviral in vitro activity against circulating variants of concern, as well as other known coronaviruses, suggesting its potential as a therapeutic for multiple types of coronavirus infections," the company said as it announced the drug trial results.” ~
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/11/05/1052679112/pfizer-covid-pill-treatment
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COMPOUNDS IN GREEN TEA, DARK CHOCOLATE, INHIBITS A KEY COVID ENZYME
~ Chemical compounds in foods or beverages like green tea, muscadine grapes, and dark chocolate can bind to and block the function of a particular enzyme, or protease, in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, according to a new study.
Proteases are important to the health and viability of cells and viruses, says study corresponding author De-Yu Xie, professor of plant and microbial biology at North Carolina State University. If proteases are inhibited, cells cannot perform many important functions—like replication, for example.
“One of our lab’s focuses is to find nutraceuticals in food or medicinal plants that inhibit either how a virus attaches to human cells or the propagation of a virus in human cells,” Xie says.
For the study, researchers performed both computer simulations and lab studies showing how the so-called “main protease” (Mpro) in the SARS-CoV-2 virus reacted when confronted with a number of different plant chemical compounds already known for their potent anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties.
“Mpro in SARS-CoV-2 is required for the virus to replicate and assemble itself,” Xie says. “If we can inhibit or deactivate this protease, the virus will die.”
Computer simulations showed that the studied chemical compounds from green tea, two varieties of muscadine grapes, cacao powder, and dark chocolate could bind to different portions of Mpro.
“Mpro has a portion that is like a ‘pocket’ that was ‘filled’ by the chemical compounds,” Xie says. “When this pocket was filled, the protease lost its important function.”
In vitro lab experiments showed similar results. The chemical compounds in green tea and muscadine grapes were very successful at inhibiting Mpro‘s function. Chemical compounds in cacao powder and dark chocolate reduced Mpro activity by about half.
“Green tea has five tested chemical compounds that bind to different sites in the pocket on Mpro, essentially overwhelming it to inhibit its function,” Xie says. “Muscadine grapes contain these inhibitory chemicals in their skins and seeds. Plants use these compounds to protect themselves, so it is not surprising that plant leaves and skins contain these beneficial compounds.”
The paper appears in Frontiers in Plant Science.
https://www.futurity.org/green-tea-compound-sars-cov-2-enzyme-2480582/
ending on beauty:
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass."
~ Ezra Pound
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