Casa Batlló, Barcelona*
IN THE HEAVEN OF INDRA
hangs a curtain of pearls
threaded with infinite skill:
each pearl reflects every other pearl,
suspended in the moon gleam.
We too are interlaced
more than we dare believe.
We dream of heaven
because we have known hell.
My mother, already unconscious,
lifted her arm and reached out
as if to lace her hand with the hand
of someone waiting on the other side.
Then she went into that love.
~ Oriana
I knew that gesture so well. My parents used to hike a lot. My father would be the first one to cross a stream, then wait for my mother to catch up. Then he’d stretch out his arm to her, and she’d take his hand before crossing.
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THE SOVIET RAGE OF HATRED AGAINST SOLZHENITSYN
~ When I was in high school, the entire Soviet nation raged against Alexander Solzhenitsyn. There were days when all one could hear on the radio or on television, from dawn to dusk, or read in every newspaper, were the shrill, vitriolic denunciations of that traitor, that contemptible lowlife, yellow earthworm, rabid dog of international imperialism — Solzhenitsyn. Hundreds, thousands of ordinary Soviet people's letters were printed in newspapers and read on the radio on the daily, weekly, monthly basis: throw him in jail, kick him out of the country, kill him, we don't want to breathe the same air with him, we would kill him ourselves with our own bare hands and our own teeth if we were allowed to do so or knew where to find him, he is repugnant, a reptile, the lowest of the low, even his last name is rooted in the word "lie" <the latter statement technically was true — MI>, do something about that Judas, our dear Soviet leaders and competent authorities, or we can't promise we won't take matters into our own hands! Etc.
There were days when one felt one was fairly losing one's mind amid those boundless murky torrents of infinite zoological hatred. One felt scared, frightened. The occasion for the well-orchestrated insanity of the anti-Solzhenitsyn campaign, back at the time (for there would be another and even more vicious one, too, a few years later, when the "Gulag" came out), was the publication in the West (well, obviously, not in the Soviet Union) of his novel "August 14," about the defeat of the tsarist Russian Army at one particular battle in Prussia at the outset of WWI.
It seemed, by the sound of it, like a rather innocuous subject: after all, wasn't the tsarist regime the epitome of everything evil in the world? Wasn't its defeat by anyone and anywhere an a priori good thing? Well, apparently, not. Apparently, it was the very fact that someone had dared to write an unsanctioned novel about the presumed weakness of the eternal Russian military and Russia's matchless fighting spirit and, infinitely worse still, to manage somehow surreptitiously to have the manuscript smuggled abroad and published by some ipso facto anti-Soviet print outlet, first in Russian and then, in an exponentially greater number of copies, in English translation — this was what drove the Soviet leadership crazy.
How dared he? Who did he think he was?.. And so, there was this vast, unending boiling rage, from morning to night, seven days a week, month after month, set off by a novel no ordinary Soviet citizen had read or even knew what it was about and why it was so terribly bad and treasonous. They raged because they knew they were expected to be enraged. They hated for hatred's sake. They felt good raging and hating away, too. If they had been allowed to kill Solzhenitsyn with their own bare hands and their own bared teeth and knew where to find him, they would indeed have done so — that was no joke, no hyperbolic figure of speech. They couldn't rage about anything else in their lives, or at least not openly so, so they raged against Solzhenitsyn, a man no one had seen, whom hardly anyone in the country had read beyond his 1962 novella "One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (which by then had long been banned and removed from any library open to ordinary Soviet people).
It was quite something, this nation-wide orgy of rage. Inevitably, it was taking its toll on people, even in my own little, tiny world. One girl in our class went ashen pale and fainted when geography teacher mentioned Solzhenitsyn's name in class, seemingly out of nowhere. I, for one, once saw Solzhenitsyn's face growing darkly and terribly in the darkened mirror lighted only by the trembling little flame of the candle in my hand, one evening in one of my classmate's parents' dark bedroom.
Briefly: the girl's parents had gone off to Moscow for the weekend, and so there was a party in her apartment, with six of us, high-school classmates, in attendance — three boys and three girls. Nothing out of the ordinary: weak white wine (Rkatsiteli, I believe), Salvatore Adamo's suffering voice ("Tombe la neige"), Engelbert Humperdink, Mireiile Mathieu, Tom Jones, Raphael, Karel Gott, Edita Piekha, Janos Koos, Lili Ivanova, Valery Obodzinsky, and so on. We slow-danced awkwardly, and then someone came up with the idea to play the game whose supposed purpose was to discover and confront one's greatest fear in a darkened mirror while standing in solitude in front of it with a lit candle in one's hand. It was a stupid idea, of course. We were all more high-strung and screwed up in our hearts and minds than we knew. The hostess stupid idea, of course. We were all more high-strung and screwed up in our hearts and minds than we knew. The hostess went in first, and just a couple minutes later she fairly fell out of the bedroom, deathly pale and unable to utter a word or stand on her own feet. She stuttered and sputtered, and dared not say the name of someone or something she'd seen in the mirror. (Later it was revealed that had been Mao Tse-tung.)
While others were fretting over her, ministering to her, bringing her water and cooing over her, I took the candle from the table and went in, closing the bedroom door behind me. There I stood, in the crimson light of the candle's trembling flame reflected ominously in the mirror, and at first I saw nothing but the pale outlines of my own frightened face in it and was about already to return to the living room with a dismissive announcement the whole thing was a stupid hoax -- but then, all of a sudden, a black-and-red cloud started rising from behind my face in the mirror, slowly and inexorably, swelling, growing, undulating, mushrooming out of the dead lake of the amalgam's surface, and gradually acquiring a semblance of facial features, and.. Oh, it was an abominable, devilish face, full of unspeakable vileness and cruelty, its eyes burning with venom — and right away, just then and there, I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt this was Solzhenitsyn, yes, Solzhenitsyn and no one but him, even though I'd never seen his face before. With a cry of pure horror, I fled from the room then, and from the apartment, too, barely finding the presence of mind to place the candle back in its cast-iron holder on the table in the living room first and then to put on my winter clothes and shoes. Others stared at me wordlessly. I said nothing to them.
Solzhenitsyn! I'd seen Solzhenitsyn's face in the mirror! Now I knew what he looked like -- and now HE knew what I looked like, too, it suddenly dawned on me. That thought filled me with infinite fear and despair. As I ran through the empty spaces of our *micro-district* on Leningrad's southwestern edge in snow-bound darkness -- through the narrow passageways, where every square centimeter of surface was familiar to me, in-between the identical-looking five-story cinderblock buildings where all of my friends and classmates lived, yes, through my entire little world, I knew my life was over, lost beyond the point of no return or salvation. Solzhenitsyn was going to find me, now that he knew what I looked like -- and he was going to kill me. That's what he was going to do. I knew I was going out of my mind, but there was nothing I could do about it in those moments. My mind was occluded, eclipsed. My heart was galloping in my chest.
Already nearing my apartment building, I stopped for an instant to catch my breath in front of the one next to it, the only tall, nine-story building in the *micro-district,* and the only one made of brick. It was cold, but I felt hot as hell. The starless, moonless night was brightened darkly by the glowing whiteness of snow and the muted yellow and bluish light falling from the countless windows in that giant building, where ordinary Soviet people, ones just like me, lived. Luckily for them, they'd never they'd never seen Solzhenitsyn's face. The *fortochka* (a small ventilation window in... oh, just google that word) in one of the first-floor windows was open, probably because of the smoke rising from something being cooked with rancid margarine on gas stove in the kitchen, and I heard a comfortingly upbeat, quietly confident radio announcer's voice issuing from it -- a shred of one of program-concluding sports news: "...and the bronze medals in ice-dancing competition at the world championship in Lyon, France, went to the American athletes Judy Schwomeyer and James Sladky…”
Judy. James. Judy Shoo-meyer and James whose last name meant "sweet" in Russian. Americans. Ice-dancing. Sweet! Our dancers had taken the first place, of course: Lyudmila Pakhomova and Alexander Gorshkov, who else? She, in particular, was the pure genius of ice-dancing... Oh! All at once, a blissful sense of peace and serenity came over me. Ice-skating! Evening news! Bad margarine! Life, life!
Life as I knew it, my Soviet life, one in which there was no place for Solzhenitsyn with his monstrous wickedness. All was well with my world, and Solzhenitsyn had no dominion over it. He could do nothing to me while I was within the safety of its cocoon. My world was tiny, and it was beautiful. I felt safe, protected. He could do noting to me. Nothing. Tender and kind was the night. All was well with the world.
~ Mikhail Iossel
Oriana:
What’s especially interesting to me is that the book that aroused such fury was August 1914, “about the defeat of the tsarist Russian Army at one particular battle in Prussia at the outset of WWI. It seemed, by the sound of it, like a rather innocuous subject: after all, wasn't the tsarist regime the epitome of everything evil in the world? Wasn't its defeat by anyone and anywhere an a priori good thing? Well, apparently, not. Apparently, it was the very fact that someone had dared to write an unsanctioned novel about the presumed weakness of the eternal Russian military and Russia's matchless fighting spirit.”
So the exiled writer’s crime was not anything “anti-Soviet.” It was an offense against the Russian nationalism.
This is what can happen when nationalism goes insane. No military defeat can be admitted. No flaws of national greatness are allowed to be revealed, even those safely in the past. Russia’s greatness mustn’t be questioned, especially when it comes to history. “Vyelikaya Rus”— Great Russia — that concept must be defended with one’s life, if need be. Truth-tellers are branded as traitors.
No nation has a saintly history — think, for a moment, of Germany. But the wonderful thing about Germany is that it has officially come to terms with the Nazi atrocities. It doesn’t deny them. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag with the swastika or to deny the Holocaust. Schools teach about WW2 without glorifying Hitler or his armies. Not that everything is ideal — there exist the Neo-Nazis who have adopted the Confederate flag as an emblem of racial superiority; no doubt some degree of denial persists here and there. And yet it is an example how a country can come to terms with a horrible past. It’s emotionally difficult, but it CAN be done, and it SHOULD be done. It’s not a threat to any country’s greatness — the crimes of the past are acknowledged alongside the achievements, the result being the knowledge that no country is all-good — but that’s simply history and the human condition.
As for Mikhail’s strange vision of his mirror image shifting into Solzhenitsyn’s, there seems to have been a bit of prophecy in it. He became somewhat Solzhenitsyn-like in his rejection of Putin’s delusions of national greatness. He also rejects most of the Russian emigré community as too nationalistic and pro-Putin.
As for the girl whose image shifted into that of Mao Tse-Tung, that’s so funny. And yet there may be a connection to propaganda here as well — there was an ideological break between the Soviet Union and China, and anti-Maoist propaganda may have affected the poor frightened girl. So she too saw an alleged enemy of “Great Russia.”
Interesting how strong nationalism breeds the fear and hatred of enemies, who are always easy to find.
Mary:
The rabid hatred of Solzhenitsyn is an example of " when nationalism goes mad," but I think the madness is inherent in nationalism itself. To be ultra patriotic seems to always push toward a rewriting of history that whitewashes all failures, all defeats and evils, as though to admit to any negative would threaten the whole...would amount, really, to treason. We are seeing this process here and now. It's well underway, with removals of books from classrooms and the panic over CRT.
It's important to note what is being found objectionable: the history of the holocaust and the history of racism in this country. Refusing to see these things will allow their perpetuation. That is truly the key. To deny that the holocaust happened, to deny that slavery was an evil fundamental to this nation from its very start, is to deny that racism and antisemitism exist as strong and present dangers now. It delegitimizes the struggle against these old and systemic evils, and substitutes a false narrative in their place. You cannot demand a remedy for ills that don't exist.
What this process does is replace the truth of history with a tissue of convenient self-serving lies. Lies are the blood and bones of madness, whether personal or national. And this is a sickness that is not easy to cure and recover from. So much may look simply ridiculous — like the objection to nudity in MAUS...the nudes are mice for pete's sake! But the stupidity of the objection shouldn't let us lose sight of how dangerous these efforts at censorship are. Hitler was a buffoon after all, and that buffoon created a hell on earth that killed millions and took a world to defeat.
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Speaking of that defeat in battle in August 2014:
~ Solzhenitsyn’s dissection of the Russian defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg, which occupies much of the action of August 1914, should be studied at every military war college. Without that failure, there might well have been no Romanov abdication, no Lenin, thus no twentieth century as we know it. ~ source: an article that follows.
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SOLZHENITSYN AND THE ENGINE OF HISTORY (repost)
~ It is a conceit of the modern world that history is governed by reason. Reason is like an axe to the living, growing tree of history, with its convoluted branches, each cell and molecule emerging as a matter of sheer contingency, one building upon the next—so that great events arise from innumerable plots and threads. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a series of exhausting books, totaling thousands of pages, about unreason in history and the subsequent creation of the modern world, in which the axe of reason, as he puts it, is rare, and when it does fall sometimes creates absolute terror.
The Red Wheel, with its “discrete” “nodes” or “knots,” is composed of August 1914, November 1916, March 1917, and April 1917, with March 1917 alone accounting for several long volumes. This is the principal work of the Nobel laureate’s life, to which Solzhenitsyn dedicated several decades and into which poured all his thoughts about the senseless chaos of the modern and postmodern worlds, all told through the prism of that most contingent of events, the Russian Revolution. That signal event begins with a complex and bungled war and ends with a shaky Bolshevik coup that set in motion a death machine virtually unrivaled in history. And none of this might have happened had Russia’s resolutely effective and moderate prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, who pursued a “middle line of social development,” not been assassinated in September 1911 at the Kiev opera house.
“When things are too clear, they are no longer interesting,” says one of the author’s characters. Solzhenitsyn, far more than other writers, uses his characters to announce counterintuitive and unpopular truths. He knows that a bundle of passions can decide a seemingly clear-cut and rational action, to say nothing of the most consequential decisions that can be decided by a momentary mood.
Hindsight is lazy in this regard, Solzhenitsyn intimates, since it reduces complexity to a counterfeit clarity. He replaces hindsight with a multitude of characters thinking and acting in the moment, so that at the beginning of World War I, “The clock of fate was suspended over the whole of East Prussia, and its six-mile-long pendulum was ticking audibly as it swung from the German to the Russian side and back again.” Indeed, the life and death of whole battalions of men, as the author vividly demonstrates, can be effected by a misplaced pencil movement on a general’s dimly lit field map.
Solzhenitsyn’s dissection of the Russian defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg, which occupies much of the action of August 1914, should be studied at every military war college. Without that failure, there might well have been no Romanov abdication, no Lenin, thus no twentieth century as we know it.
Solzhenitsyn’s presentation of the battle over hundreds of pages is panoramic, immersive, and masterly, the equivalent in typewriter ink of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Fight Between Carnival and Lent. As with any writer of great epics, Solzhenitsyn knows many disparate things: the technicalities of artillery formations and field maneuvers; the mental process by which semi-starving, over-extended, and ill-led soldiers become looters; how small changes in terrain affect forced marches; as well as the placement of the stars in the night sky and the names of many Orthodox saints.
War between Russia and Germany begins in a whirlpool of emotion. Elation was general, especially in Moscow and Petrograd. After all, this was one war you “could not reject.” “Historic obligations” to Slavic brothers in Serbia were sacred. “A European war cannot be a prolonged conflict.”
Of course, the popular naïveté preceding World War I is an old story that is the stuff of many books. But Solzhenitsyn goes on to illuminate in his saga how the same innocence will carry through the entire revolutionary process in Russia, in which phrases like “war” and “revolution” meant very different things to a people whose frame of reference extended only to the end of the nineteenth century.
Thus they had no conception of how history could wildly swerve in a new technological age, so that the new military conflict would be nothing like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and the revolution to come would yield nothing like the French one of 1789, which even with its Reign of Terror was altogether benign compared to what was in store for Russia. People sleepwalked backwards into the horrors of the twentieth century, blindly slashed by its revolving blades. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t tell us this; he illustrates it through dozens of fully realized characters.
World War I on the Eastern Front begins with the uneasy specter of culture conjuring itself up. Solzhenitsyn concentrates on deterministic aspects of reality that our policy and intellectual elite want to avoid. To wit, a Russian soldier is amazed at the tidiness of the German landscape the moment he crosses the frontier: the neat regimentation of the brick houses, the pigsties, and the wellheads. The electric lighting deep in the rural interior and the well-kept roads through the clean, practically shaven forests bespeak an “inhuman cleanliness” and “parade-ground order” shocking to a Russian peasant accustomed to the filthy dreariness of his home and village.
From this flows dozens of pages of description of Russian military disorganization and slovenliness, with a chain of command and general officer corps corrupted by a thoroughly rotten czarist system. Russian generals make alcoholic toasts over heavy lunches in the middle of a campaign. A withdrawal is ordered after gaining ground in a horrific battle to protect a general’s reputation in the expectation of further loses. At the highest levels there is almost always the avoidance of risk and the rewarding of mediocrity.
Solzhenitsyn’s sympathy is rather with the middle-level officers, who “all bore the indelible impress of a similar background: army tradition, long spells of garrison service in a world isolated from the rest of society; a sense of alienation, of being despised by that society and ridiculed by liberal writers.” Throughout these pages Solzhenitsyn reveals himself as the ultimate patriot and reasoned conservative, who, with a deep belief in an Orthodox Christian God, recognizes the primacy of culture and empathizes with the military, even as he must expose every aspect of a decadent and autocratic imperial system that has failed its own people.
Solzhenitsyn’s uniqueness—that is, his greatness—rests on his deep political conservatism, married to a narrative genius akin to Tolstoy’s, encompassing, like the earlier master, just so many universes: from the horrors of the Romanian front, to the exaltations of falling in love in middle age, to the fantastic dinners in private rooms, with masses of smoked salmon and sturgeon, bouillon, sour cream, and rowanberry vodka.
Solzhenitsyn sees an unnecessary war that chain-reacts within a society—spread across half the longitudes of the earth—that for some years already has been crumbling into chaos: with inflation; food shortages; complete bureaucratic dysfunction; a dynasty bordering on sheer “helplessness” and “irresolution”; and a rowdy Duma given to endless, flowery, and directionless speeches in the worst of parliamentary traditions. Here is the very texture of anarchy, with crowds assaulting police with stones and chunks of ice, while the police are in turn afraid of the cossacks.
Meanwhile, congeries of parties and factions within parties are left to debate among themselves. Loose, drunken talk postulates that if only the government would change, everything would become better and more humane. There is almost a romance about the future, about any fate save for the present. The author isn’t so much writing a series of novels as unloading everything he knows and thinks about pre-revolutionary Russia, and constructing a tight philosophical argument about it, which glints through multiple layers of description.
Russian prisoners and guns captured at Tannenberg The Battle of Tannenberg was fought between Russia and Germany between 26 and 30 August 1914, the first month of World War I. The battle resulted in the almost complete destruction of the Russian Second Army and the suicide of its commanding general, Alexander Samsonov. A series of follow-up battles (First Masurian Lakes) destroyed most of the First Army as well and kept the Russians off balance until the spring of 1915. ~ Wiki
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(article continues)
Tyranny is inseparable from the mob. Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-Jewish Nobel laureate in literature, made this the theme of his 1960 masterwork, Crowds and Power, traumatized as he was by the mobs he had seen in Vienna in the decade prior to Hitler’s takeover. The crowd, Canetti suggests, emerges ultimately from vulnerability and the consequent need of the individual for conformity with others. Thus the lonely individual exerts dominance through participation in a crowd that speaks with one voice.
Once that crowd has achieved a sufficient size, others are coerced to join it, or at least not to interfere with it. From lockdown, to isolation, to loneliness, to explosion in the streets, that is: one contingent event leading to another, as in the expanding branches of a tree. Obviously our own society has institutional breaks and barriers that pre-revolutionary Russia utterly lacked. Think of our contemporary drama as a much subtler yet relevant deviation of Solzhenitsyn’s story.
“The crowd!” Solzhenitsyn writes. “A strange special being, both human and inhuman . . . where each individual was released from his usual responsibility and was multiplied in strength.” The psychology of the crowd, or mob, is thus: “show us who [next] to tear to pieces.”
And the mobs that are the most lethal for civilization are composed of the young. Listen to one of Solzhenitsyn’s characters:
“Idolized children despise their parents, and when they get a bit older they bully their countrymen. Tribes with an ancestor cult have endured for centuries. No tribe would survive long with a youth cult.”
The problem with youth, as the aging travel writer Paul Theroux, among others, has explained, is that there is a place where it cannot go, but which its parents and grandparents have experienced in all its vividness: the past. The young have never seen the past and therefore have no intimate realization of it. Having lived enough years in the past makes one humble, unsteady, aware of the imperfections of life and of fate, and therefore more immune to ideal solutions for society.
To trust youth blindly, to see in youth the answer to our own sins and imperfections, may hold some appeal, but it is also dimwitted. Youth can break down an institutional order, but building a new one is another story, especially as the mobs seeking to ransack the dotty Romanov royal house had no idea about how technology in the twentieth century would assist repression in the new regime aborning. ~
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/2/solzhenitsyn-the-engine-of-history
Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with those things. ~Václav Havel, playwright and president of the Czech Republic (2 February 1993 – 2 February 2003)
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MOST PEOPLE AREN’T REALLY INTERESTED IN BEING HAPPY
~ We think we want to be happy. Yet many of us are actually working toward some other end, according to cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics.
Kahneman contends that happiness and satisfaction are distinct. Happiness is a momentary experience that arises spontaneously and is fleeting. Meanwhile, satisfaction is a long-term feeling, built over time and based on achieving goals and building the kind of life you admire. Kahneman explains that working toward one goal may undermine our ability to experience the other.
For example, in Kahneman’s research measuring everyday happiness—the experiences that leave people feeling good—he found that spending time with friends was highly effective. Yet those focused on long-term goals that yield satisfaction don’t necessarily prioritize socializing, as they’re busy with the bigger picture.
Such choices led Kahneman to conclude that we’re not as interested in happiness as we may claim. “Altogether, I don’t think that people maximize happiness in that sense…this doesn’t seem to be what people want to do. They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness,” he says.
Kahneman argues that satisfaction is based mostly on comparisons. “Life satisfaction is connected to a large degree to social yardsticks–achieving goals, meeting expectations.” He notes that money has a significant influence on life satisfaction, whereas happiness is affected by money only when funds are lacking. Poverty creates suffering, but above a certain level of income that satisfies our basic needs, wealth doesn’t increase happiness. “The graph is surprisingly flat,” the psychologist says.
In other words, if you aren’t hungry, and if clothing, shelter, and your other basics are covered, you’re capable of being at least as happy as the world’s wealthiest people. The fleeting feelings of happiness, though, don’t add up to life satisfaction. Looking back, a person who has had many happy moments may not feel pleased on the whole.
The key here is memory. Satisfaction is retrospective. Happiness occurs in real time. In Kahneman’s work, he found that people tell themselves a story about their lives, which may or may not add up to a pleasing tale. Yet, our day-to-day experiences yield positive feelings that may not advance that longer story, necessarily. Memory is enduring. Feelings pass. Many of our happiest moments aren’t preserved—they’re not all caught on camera but just happen. And then they’re gone.
Take going on vacation, for example. According to the psychologist, a person who knows they can go on a trip and have a good time but that their memories will be erased, and that they can’t take any photos, might choose not to go after all. The reason for this is that we do things in anticipation of creating satisfying memories to reflect on later. We’re somewhat less interested in actually having a good time.
This theory helps to explain our current social media-driven culture. To some extent, we care less about enjoying ourselves than presenting the appearance of an enviable existence. We’re preoccupied with quantifying friends and followers rather than spending time with people we like. And ultimately, this makes us miserable.
We feel happiness primarily in the company of others, Kahneman argues. However, the positive psychology movement that has arisen in part as a result of his work doesn’t emphasize spontaneity and relationships. Instead, it takes a longer view, considering what makes life meaningful, which is a concept that Kahneman claims eludes him.
Kahneman counts himself lucky and “fairly happy.” He says he’s led “an interesting life” because he’s spent much of his time working with people whose company he enjoyed. But he notes that there have been periods when he worked alone on writing that were “terrible,” when he felt “miserable.” He also says he doesn’t consider his existence meaningful, despite his notable academic accomplishments.
Indeed, although his contributions legitimized the emotion as an economic and social force and led to the creation of happiness indices worldwide, the psychologist abandoned the field of happiness research about five years ago. He’s now researching and writing about the concept of “noise,” or random data that interferes with wise decision-making.
Still, it’s worth asking if we want to be happy, to experience positive feelings, or simply wish to construct narratives that seems worth telling ourselves and others, but doesn’t necessarily yield pleasure. Meet a friend and talk it over with them—you might have a good time. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-nobel-prize-winning-psychologist-says-most-people-don-t-really-want-to-be-happy?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
This article helped me understand why, in spite of loving classical music very much, I don't actually spend much time listening to it. I see it as a voluptuous pleasure, I know it's excellent for brain health, and yet . . . Most of the time I'm not sufficiently motivated because my life story is too wrapped up with writing.
So yes, happiness is nice but it doesn't get you anywhere. Many of us would rather pursue our goals. And to make things even more complicated, pursuing goals makes at least some of us happier than practically anything else.
NEANDERTHALS WEREN’T BRUTALLY WIPED OUT BY HOMO SAPIENS
~ Neanderthals were a separate species of human that populated Europe for hundreds of thousands of years until they went extinct 40,000 years ago.
New fossils are challenging ideas that modern humans wiped out Neanderthals soon after arriving from Africa.
A discovery of a child's tooth and stone tools in a cave in southern France suggests Homo sapiens was in western Europe about 54,000 years ago.
That is several thousands of years earlier than previously thought, indicating that the two species could have coexisted for long periods.
The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.
The finds were discovered in a cave, known as Grotte Mandrin in the Rhone Valley, by a team led by Prof Ludovic Slimak of the University of Toulouse. He was astonished when he learned that they were evidence of an early modern human settlement.
"We are now able to demonstrate that Homo sapiens arrived 12,000 years before we expected, and this population was then replaced after that by other Neanderthal populations. And this literally rewrites all our books of history.”
The Neanderthals emerged in Europe as far back as 400,000 years ago. The current theory suggests that they went extinct about 40,000 years ago, not long after Homo sapiens arrived on the continent from Africa.
But the new discovery suggests that our species arrived much earlier and that the two species could have coexisted in Europe for more than 10,000 years before the Neanderthals went extinct.
According to Prof Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, this challenges the current view, which is that our species quickly overwhelmed the Neanderthals.
"It wasn't an overnight takeover by modern humans," he told BBC News. "Sometimes Neanderthals had the advantage, sometimes modern humans had the advantage, so it was more finely balanced.”
Archaeologists found fossil evidence from several layers at the site. The lower they dug, the further back in time they were able to see. The lowest layers showed the remains of Neanderthals who occupied the area for about 20,000 years.
But to their complete surprise, the team found a modern human child's tooth in a layer dating back to about 54,000 years ago, along with some stone tools made in a way that was not associated with Neanderthals.
The evidence suggests that this early group of humans lived at the site for a relatively brief period, of perhaps about 2,000 years after which the site was unoccupied. The Neanderthals then return, occupying the site for several more thousand years, until modern humans come back about 44,000 years ago.
So, if it wasn't a case of our species wiping them out immediately, what was it that eventually gave us the advantage?
Many ideas have been put forward by scientists: our capacity to produce art, language and possibly a better brain. But Prof Stringer believes it was because we were more organized.
"We were networking better, our social groups were larger, we were storing knowledge better and we built on that knowledge," he said.
The idea of a prolonged interaction with Neanderthals fits in with the discovery made in 2010 that modern humans have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, indicating that the two species interbred, according to Prof Stringer.
"We don't know if it was peacefully exchanges of partners. It might have been grabbing, you know, a female from another group. It might have been even adopting abandoned or lost Neanderthal babies who had been orphaned," he said.
"All of those things could have happened. So we don't know the full story yet. But with more data and with more DNA, more discoveries, we will get closer to the truth about what really happened at the end of the Neanderthal era.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60305218
THE GENETIC TRAITS OF NEANDERTHALS THAT SURVIVED IN MODERN HUMANS
~ Neanderthals and early humans interbred, which is why people of non-African descent harbor about 2 percent Neanderthal DNA. Although a large proportion of this Neanderthal DNA has deleterious or nonadaptive effects, some of these traits contribute to modern human adaptation to new environments, according to the results of a study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. These Neanderthal-derived traits reflect skin tone, hair color, mood, and more.
In the study, Michael Dannemann and Janet Kelso mined baseline phenotypes for 112,000 individuals from the UK Biobank. The Biobank stores genetic data along with data on physical appearance, diet, sun exposure, behavior, and disease.
With respect to skin and hair colors, the researchers discovered that Neanderthal alleles related to both dark and light tones present in modern-day humans. The authors indicated that the ease with which one tans may be related to Neanderthal alleles.
Although Neanderthal alleles contribute heavily to skin and hair tones, modern humans likely contributed equally, In fact, only 4 identified traits—all behavioral—were more heavily derived from Neanderthals. These traits include chronotype [sleep/activity pattern], loneliness/isolation, frequency of unenthusiasm or disinterest in the last 2 weeks, and smoking status. Of note, chronotype is a behavioral characteristic related to circadian rhythms.
What do all these Neanderthal genetic contributions have in common? According to the authors, the association may have to do with sunlight exposure. Neanderthals inhabited Eurasia for more than 200,000 years and were better adapted to lower UVB levels and variation in sunlight exposure than were modern humans who migrated from Africa around 100,000 years ago. Skin and hair colors, circadian rhythms, and mood are all affected by sunlight exposure, according to the authors.
Ultimately, sun exposure could have played a role in Neanderthal phenotypes, with these genes flowing into the modern genome, thus yielding the respective variation in traits we see today. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-red-light-district/202101/we-have-neanderthals-thank-these-genetic-traits
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I FEEL, THEREFORE I AM (by Antonio Damasio)
“Consciousness is a continuous conversation between the feeling body and the knowing mind.”
~ In the beginning was not the word; that much is clear. Life sailed forth without words or thoughts, without feelings or reasons, devoid of minds or consciousness. Not that the universe of the living was ever simple, quite the contrary. It was complex from its inception, four billion years ago.
But living organisms then took several paths. In the branch of life history that led to us, I like to imagine three distinct and consecutive evolutionary stages. A first stage is hallmarked by being; a second is dominated by feeling; and a third is defined by knowing in the general sense of the term.
And, as I see it, for creatures to be able to feel, they first need to add several features to their organisms. They must be multicellular, and they must possess differentiated organ systems, more or less elaborate, among which shines a nervous system, a natural coordinator of internal life processes and of dealings with the environment. What happens then? Plenty, as we shall see.
Nervous systems enable both complex movements and, eventually, the beginning of a real novelty: minds. Feelings are among the first examples of mind phenomena, and it is difficult to exaggerate their significance. Feelings allow creatures to represent in their respective minds the state of their own bodies preoccupied with regulating the internal organ functions required by the necessities of life: feeding and drinking and excreting; defensive posturing such as occurs during fear or anger, disgust or contempt; social coordination behaviors such as cooperation, conflict; the display of flourishing, joy, and exaltation; and even of those behaviors related to procreation.
Feelings provide organisms with experiences of their own life. Specifically, they provide the owner organism with a scaled assessment of its relative success at living, a natural examination grade that comes in the form of a quality—pleasant or unpleasant, light or intense. This is precious and novel information, the kind of information that organisms confined to a “being” stage cannot obtain.
Not surprisingly, feelings are important contributors to the creation of a “self.” Think of the self as a mental process animated by the state of the organism, anchored in its body frame (the frame constituted by muscular and skeletal structures), and eventually oriented by the global perspective provided by sensory channels such as vision and hearing.
Curiously, each sensory system is, in and of itself, devoid of conscious experience. The visual system, for example, our retinas, visual pathways, and visual cortices, produces maps of the outside world and contributes the respective, explicit visual images. But only the coordinated operation of the three kinds of processing—the kinds that have to do with being, feeling, and knowing—allows the images to be connected to our organism, literally referred to it and placed within it. Only then can experience emerge.
What follows from this momentous but unheralded physiological step is nothing short of extraordinary. Once experiences begin to be committed to memory, feeling and conscious organisms are capable of maintaining a more or less exhaustive history of their lives, a history of their interactions with others and of their interaction with the environment, in brief, a history of each individual life as lived inside each individual organism, nothing less than the armature of personhood.
The Beginnings of Feeling
Feeling probably began its evolutionary history as a timid conversation between the chemistry of life and the early version of a nervous system within one particular organism. In creatures far simpler than we are, the exchange would have generated feelings such as plain well-being and basic discomfort rather than subtly graded feelings, let alone something as elaborate as localized pain. Still, what a remarkable advance. Those timid beginnings provided each creature with an orientation, a subtle adviser as to what to do next or not to do or where to go. Something novel and extremely valuable had emerged in the history of life: a mental counterpart to a physical organism.
The simplest variety of affect begins in the interior of a living organism. It springs up vague and diffuse, generating feelings that are not easily described or placed. The term “primordial feelings” captures the idea. By contrast, “mature feelings” provide vivid and assertive images of the objects that furnish our “interior”—viscera such as the heart and lungs and gut—and of the actions they execute such as pulsing and breathing and contracting.
Eventually, as in the case of localized pain, the images become sharp and focused. But make no mistake: vague, approximate, or precise, feelings are informative; they carry important knowledge and plant that knowledge firmly within the mind flow. Are muscles tense or relaxed? Is the stomach full or empty? Is the heart beating regularly and boringly, or is it skipping beats? Is the breathing easy or labored? Is there pain in my shoulder? We, who have the privilege of feeling, get to know about such states, and that information is valuable for the subsequent governance of our lives. But how do we come by such knowledge? What happens when we “feel,” as opposed to when we simply “perceive” objects in the world at large? What is required for us to feel, as opposed to merely perceive?
First, everything we feel corresponds to states of our interior. We do not “feel” the furniture around us or the landscape. We can perceive the landscape and the furniture, and our perceptions can easily elicit emotive responses and result in the respective feelings. We can experience these “emotive feelings” and even name them—the beautiful landscape and the pleasant chair.
But what we “really” feel, in the proper sense of the term, is how either parts or the whole of our own organism are faring, moment by moment. Are their operations smooth and unimpeded, or are they labored? I call these feelings homeostatic because, as direct informers, they tell us if the organism is or is not operating according to homeostatic needs, that is, in a manner conducive or not to life and survival.
Feelings owe their existence to the fact that the nervous system has direct contact with our insides and vice versa. The nervous system literally “touches” the organism’s interior, everywhere in that interior, and it is “touched” in return. The nakedness of the interior relative to the nervous system and the direct access the nervous system enjoys relative to that interior are part of the uniqueness of interoception, the technical term reserved for the perception of our visceral interior. Interoception is distinct from the perception of our musculoskeletal system, known as proprioception, and from the perception of the outside world, or exteroception. Interoception is not about mere perception. It is a hybrid process. We can obviously use words to describe the experiences of feeling, but we do not need the mediation of words in order to feel.
The Chemical Orchestra
Perhaps we are now ready to take the Orphic plunge and descend into the feeling underworld. The deeper levels of the feeling process concern the chemical machinery responsible for the entire scope of homeostatic regulation along varied pathways. Underneath the qualities and intensities that constitute the valuations expressed in feelings—their valences—there are molecules, receptors, and actions.
How this chemical orchestra does its job is a bit of a marvel. Specific molecules act on specific receptors and cause specific actions. These actions are part of the uphill struggle for the maintenance of life. The actions themselves are important enough, but so is the overall dynamic of which they are a part and which is charged with managing the life of a specific organism. This much is easy to understand. But what is not so transparent is how the actions that result from molecules and receptors doing their job can help us account, in our subjective experiences, for the “stirrings” that feelings cause in us, let alone for the “quality” of a feeling.
In practice, there is little distance between feelings and the things felt. Feelings are commingled with the things and events we feel thanks to the exceptional and intimate cross talk between body structures and nervous system. This intimacy, in turn, is itself a product of the peculiarities of the system charged with signaling from the body into the nervous system, that is, the interoceptive system.
The first peculiarity of interoception is a pervasive lack of myelin insulation in a majority of interoceptive neurons. Typical neurons have a cell body and an axon, the latter being the “cable” that leads to the synapse. In turn the synapse makes contact with the next neuron and either permits or withholds its activity. The result is the firing of the neuron or its silence.
Myelin serves as an insulator of the axon cable, preventing extraneous chemical and bioelectrical contacts. In the absence of myelin, however, molecules in the surround of an axon interact with it and alter its firing potential. Moreover, other neurons can make synaptic contacts along the axon rather than at the neuron’s synapse, giving rise to what is known as non-synaptic signaling. These operations are neurally impure; they are not really separate from the body that hosts them. By contrast, a predominance of myelinated axons insulates neurons and their networks from the influences of their surrounding environment.
A second peculiarity of interoception concerns a lack of the barrier that normally separates neural affairs from the bloodstream. This is known as the blood-brain barrier (in relation to the central nervous system) or the blood-nerve barrier (in the case of the peripheral nervous system). The absence of a barrier is especially notable in brain regions related to the interoceptive process, such as the spinal and brain stem ganglia where circulating molecules can make direct contact with the cell bodies of neurons.
The consequences of these peculiarities are remarkable. Lack of myelin insulation and lack of blood-brain barrier allow signals from the body to interact with neural signals directly. In no way can interoception be regarded as a plain perceptual representation of the body inside the nervous system. There is, rather, an extensive commingling of signals.
The Birth of Consciousness
When we describe ourselves as conscious of a particular scene, we require a considerable integration of the components of the scene. There is no reason to expect, however, that integration alone, no matter how abundant, would be responsible for consciousness. Increased integration of mental contents, over larger amounts of flowing imagetic material, delivers a larger scope of conscious material, but I doubt that consciousness is explainable by the “tying together” of the contributing contents. Consciousness does not spring forth just because mental contents are appropriately assembled. I would suggest that the result of integration is an enlargement of the mental scope.
What does begin to engender consciousness is the enrichment of the mental flow with the sort of knowledge that points to the organism as the proprietor of the mind. What begins to make my mental contents conscious is identifying ME as owner of the current mental holdings. Ownership knowledge can be obtained from overt and specific facts but, quite directly, from homeostatic feelings. Easily, naturally, and instantaneously, as often as needed, homeostatic feelings identify my mind with my body, unequivocally, no extra reasoning or calculation needed.
A major issue in consciousness studies concerns what is now commonly known as the “hard problem,” the designation that the philosopher David Chalmers introduced in the literature. An important aspect of the problem refers, in his own words, to “Why and how do physical processes in the brain give rise to conscious experience?”
The biological formulation of the hard problem, however, is unsound. Asking why should physical processes “in the brain” give rise to conscious experience is an unfortunate question. While the brain is indispensable for the generation of consciousness, nothing suggests that the brain generates consciousness alone.
On the contrary, the non-neural tissues of the organism’s body proper contribute importantly to the creation of any conscious moment and must be a part of the problem’s solution. This happens most notably via the hybrid process of feeling, which we regard as a critical contributor to the making of conscious minds. One might say, in an effort to give the birth of consciousness its due, that there is a chronology, that feeling emerged in evolution just one half step ahead of consciousness, that feeling is, literally speaking, a stepping-stone for consciousness. The reality, however, is that the functional value of feelings is tied to the fact that they are unequivocally referred to their owner organism and inhabit their owner-organism’s mind.
Feelings gave birth to consciousness and gifted it generously to the rest of the mind. ~
Excerpted from Feeling & Knowing by Antonio Damasio.
https://nautil.us/i-feel-therefore-i-am-13869/
Oriana:
This has been Damasio’s basic argument for a long time now: Consciousness is an embodied phenomenon, rather than strictly a brain phenomenon. True, the brain is essential; disable it with anesthesia, and consciousness disappears. But under normal circumstances, it takes both brain function and input from the body to be conscious.
As Damasio argued elsewhere, our sense of self when we wake up results from the brain stem, which receives signals from the body: first of all, we sense our body. I have a body, therefore I am.
Mary:
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We didn't fall from grace; we rose from slime. ~ Jeremy Sherman
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HOW ANCIENT RITUALS GAVE RISE TO RELIGION
~ The invention of religion is a big bang in human history. But what if everything we thought we knew about religion was wrong? What if belief in the supernatural is window dressing on what really matters—elaborate rituals that foster group cohesion, creating personal bonds that people are willing to die for.
Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse thinks too much talk about religion is based on loose conjecture and simplistic explanations. Whitehouse directs the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. For years he’s been collaborating with scholars around the world to build a massive body of data that grounds the study of religion in science. Whitehouse draws on an array of disciplines—archeology, ethnography, history, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science—to construct a profile of religious practices.
Whitehouse’s fascination with religion goes back to his own groundbreaking field study of traditional beliefs in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s. He developed a theory of religion based on the power of rituals to create social bonds and group identity. He saw that difficult rituals, like traumatic initiation rites, were often unforgettable and had the effect of fusing an individual’s identity with the group. Over the years Whitehouse’s theory of religiosity has sparked considerable debate and spawned several international conferences.
Whitehouse remains a busy man in charge of various research projects. I caught up with him during a brief layover in London between trips to South America and Hong Kong. He’d just returned from Brazil, where he met with two research groups studying how soccer fans bond with each other in that football-mad nation. In our interview, we ranged over a wide range of topics: the social utility of difficult, often painful rituals; the psychological power of “God” in large societies; and why it’s so hard to come up with a good definition of religion.
How far back can we trace religion in human history?
Well, one thing we need to sort out is what we mean by “religion.” People use this as a blanket term for many different things—belief in God or gods, belief in souls and the afterlife, magical spells, rituals, altered states of consciousness. Some of these things are incredibly hard to see in the ancient past, particularly in prehistory.
So what do you look for?
Archaeologists spend a lot of time looking for evidence of ritual activity. Some of the best evidence of belief in the afterlife comes from grave goods like pendants and beaded necklaces found in human burials. Some African sites date back more than a quarter of a million years.
How do you know these burial sites had something to do with the afterlife?
When people leave grave goods, there’s a strong suggestion that they imagine that’s not the end of the person they’re laying to rest. I think some of the paleolithic cave paintings are also suggestive. Lots of materials in those caves suggest that altered states of consciousness were being experienced. These environments have really remarkable acoustics, and you can imagine how lighting could be manipulated to enhance the effects on people.
What are you learning about the origins of religion based on this ancient archeological evidence?
When we can see how frequently certain kinds of rituals were performed, we think it’s possible to estimate—based on animal remains, for example—how often feasting events occurred. Some rituals involved killing large and dangerous animals. It’s been estimated that meat from a wild bull could feed 1,000 people. We can learn from burials, particularly in houses where burials are associated with founding events or closures. We can then estimate the frequency of particular rituals. The frequency of a ritual will be inversely proportional to the level of arousal it induces. Those inducers include sensory pageantry, singing, dancing, music, altered states of consciousness, and painful or traumatic procedures. We find that religions with high-frequency rituals will be more hierarchical than traditions that lack those rituals.
One common explanation for the origin of religion is that gods and supernatural beings could explain things that didn’t make any sense, whether it was the explosion of thunder or the death of a child. Was that the root of religious belief?
I suppose people do try to fill in the gaps in their knowledge by invoking supernatural explanations. But many other situations prompt supernatural explanations. Perhaps the most common one is thinking there’s a ritual that can help us when we’re doing something with a high risk of failure. Lots of people go to football matches wearing their lucky pants or lucky shirt. And you get players doing all sorts of rituals when there’s a high-risk situation like taking a penalty kick.
So ritualistic activities in a football match are not that different from explicitly religious rituals?
No. In fact, I find it odd that people would even want to think that they’re different. Psychologically, they’re so incredibly similar.
But presumably what sets religion apart is something to do with the transcendent, with another dimension of reality.
It’s true that there’s a certain sacredness to religion that people don’t associate with supporting a football team. But frankly a lot of football fans hold their team and all its emblems pretty sacred. We tend to take a few bits and pieces of the most familiar religions and see them as emblematic of what’s ancient and pan-human. But those things that are ancient and pan-human are actually ubiquitous and not really part of world religions.
Again, it really depends on what we mean by “religion.” I think the best way to answer that question is to try and figure out which cognitive capacities came first. We know that tool-use goes back deep in history. Homo habilis, otherwise known as handyman, is an early species that used tools, so it’s quite possible that he had some notion of creator beings. Language clearly plays an important role in some aspects of religion, like the development of a doctrinal system. But I’m not sure it’s necessary for many of the fundamental beliefs that undergird what we think of as religion.
All religions seem to have creation stories. Don’t you need language to formulate this kind of mythic imagination?
When you look at the myths of many cultural traditions, they seem to have a kind of dreamlike quality. Often they’re actually inspired by dreams. Dreaming seems to be a widespread feature of the mammalian brain, so while it’s true that sharing dreams depends on language, having dreams doesn’t require language. I’m guessing the mythic imagination wouldn’t depend on having a language.
Psychologically, why is God such a powerful idea?
It may be a product of cultural evolution and the shift to much larger and more complex societies. When you use the singular “God,” you’re talking about some kind of high god, which probably means a god that’s omniscient and cares about the morality of our behavior and punishes us when we behave badly. That’s a relatively recent cultural innovation that may have been an adaptation to living in very large societies.
At some point in human history many societies switched from animistic forms of religion to institutionalized systems that are closer to today’s religions. How do you explain this transition?
The really critical transition is one that occurs in the gradual switch from a foraging, hunting-and-gathering lifestyle to settled agriculture, where you’re domesticating animals and cultivating crops. What happens is a major change in group size and structure. I think religion is really a core feature in that change. What we see in the archeological record is increasing frequency of collective rituals. This changes things psychologically and leads to more doctrinal kinds of religious systems, which are more recognizable when we look at world religions today.
Why did that transformation occur in agricultural societies?
The cooperation required in large settled communities is different from what you need in a small group based on face-to-face ties between people. When you’re facing high-risk encounters with other groups or dangerous animals, what you want in a small group is people so strongly bonded that they really stick together. The rituals that seem best-designed to do that are emotionally intense but not performed all that frequently. But when the group is too large for you to know everyone personally, you need to bind people together through group categories, like an ethnic group or a religious organization. The high frequency rituals in larger religions make you lose sight of your personal self.
I suppose an example of social bonding would be the Muslim practice of praying five times a day.
Or in Christianity, it’s going to church regularly to attend services. All really large-scale religions have rituals that people perform daily or at least once a week. We think this is one of the key differences between simply identifying with a group and being fused with a group. When you’re fused with a group, a person’s social identity really taps into personal identity as well. And identity fusion has a number of behavioral outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, fused individuals demonstrate a significant willingness to sacrifice themselves for their groups.
What about the other kind of ritual where you have very intense experiences?
A lot of small groups are bound together through painful or frightening initiation rituals, particularly in groups that face high levels of threat from people outside their group. You need to stand together firmly to resist. Where I worked in New Guinea, a lot of the small tribal groups had initiation rites for boys and young men. They emerged as tightly bonded military units capable of carrying out raids against neighboring villages. We see the same sort of thing in modern armies. The elite forces have dysphoric training programs and informal initiation rites that bind the group together.
A secular example of these initiations would be the hazing rituals in a college fraternity.
That’s right. We’re developing a survey to see whether the intensity of hazing rituals in fraternities and sororities correlates with group fusion. We’ve also been researching military groups and football fans. What we’re finding is that football fans that suffer more are also more bonded. Going through bad experiences together is actually a more powerful bonding agent than simply having a good time.
Doesn’t a well-trained army have to break down a soldier’s individuality so that he’s committed to helping his comrades?
I think that’s right. Painful or bad experiences are remembered better and become part of our sense of who we are, what makes me, me and you, you. Sharing those powerful experiences breaks down the boundary between self and other and creates the psychological state that we call fusion. One of the interesting correlates of being fused with a group is willingness to fight and die for it. So people willing to make huge sacrifices to groups are typically fused with them.
What brought you to Papua New Guinea?
I didn’t intend to study religion. I’d gone out there to study economic anthropology, but these people had other ideas. They were all members of a religious movement calling itself the Kivung, which had a huge number of beliefs and practices geared toward bringing the ancestors back from the dead. This was what people really wanted me to understand.
Can you describe some of these rituals to bring back the dead?
There were two aspects to the movement and this is really what has driven so much of my later research. There was a large tradition uniting hundreds of villages and thousands of followers across quite a wide region. It involved very high frequency rituals, most of which were focused on laying out offerings to the ancestors in specially constructed temples. Operating on a very large scale, it was quite hierarchical and very well organized. But there were also small groups that sporadically broke away and performed much more emotionally intense rituals that seemed to have a very powerful bonding effect, even though they never succeeded in bringing the ancestors back from the dead.
What were these intense rituals in smaller groups?
In the village where I lived, they performed special rituals where they discarded their clothes and went around naked, which had quite an emotional impact, particularly on women who were exposing their bodies to the predatory gaze of men. They destroyed all their animals and had huge feasts, performing a mass marriage and lots of rituals that were intended to herald the return of the ancestors. They performed vigils under quite difficult conditions where people were forbidden to leave and were forced to endure unpleasant conditions.
Did they ever explain why they thought these rituals would bring back their ancestors?
They had a complex doctrinal system that explained the history of the world and the relationships between their groups and white folks. As in any religion, I’m not sure that everyone bought into every detail of the doctrine. The most compelling aspect of this belief system is that they would be released from a history of exploitation through a brotherhood with invading colonial powers.
They talked about a period when ethnically European businessmen and technologists would appear in the jungle and create, magically overnight, huge high-rise buildings and cities, and they would have a Western lifestyle as a result. But those European people would actually be ancestors of the group who’d just come back from the dead but with the appearance of white skin and European-type hair.
So they thought bringing back their ancestors would give them an opulent lifestyle?
I don’t think it was just about being wealthy in a crass materialistic sense. It was about release from all the sufferings of the hard life that they lived in the forest, where horrible sores, tropical ulcers, malaria, and all kinds of diseases and injuries—including premature death of loved ones—are a common part of everyday life. They were really dreaming of a time when all of that suffering would be eliminated.
You’re suggesting you don’t have to reduce religious experience to belief systems. It’s the experience itself that sweeps you along and binds you to other people.
It’s about both belief and experience. I do think we can kind of separate the two. Imagine having a brain that’s naturally predisposed to believe some things more readily than others, and then over generations, cultural systems develop in ways that essentially play into those predispositions. The point is that our experiences are made meaningful by our implicit beliefs and the two basically work together.
I’m curious, are you religious yourself?
Well, I’ve got the full repertoire of religious intuitions like everyone else. I don’t personally subscribe to beliefs in the supernatural, and since I’m not a member of an organized religion, I suppose you could say that I’m not religious. But like I said earlier, it really depends on what you count as religious. I actually think on one level we’re all religious, even atheists. People can train themselves to dismiss religious intuitions, but I don’t think they can eradicate them.
What kinds of intuitions are you talking about?
The intuition that when people die they’re still around in some sense. I think we have that intuition whether we declare ourselves to be religious or not. And the sense of being watched when you’re doing something you should feel guilty about. When you see the amazing features of the natural environment—like rivers, marine life, trees in the forest—it’s hard not to believe that some creator put them there. Our brains are set up to put a designer in charge of that extraordinary complexity of design. I think we have the intuition that there are supernatural agents around, that they created the world, that we live on after we die. The question is whether we buy into a cultural tradition that builds on those ideas and turns them into something more formalized and doctrinally coherent. I don’t myself, but I think a lot of people around the world don’t have much choice. If I’d grown up in different parts of the world—for example, in Papua New Guinea, where I did my fieldwork—I’m quite sure I would be religious. It’s been interesting to see the decline of organized religion in certain countries, which are usually affluent, safe, and secure. As life gets easier, you could say people get more selfish and less attached to group values.
But if the core impulse of religion is to help us find meaning and purpose in our lives, shouldn’t that also apply to affluent societies?
That’s true, but the question is how we go about looking for meaning in the world. I personally don’t agree with the idea that the main explanation for religion is that we’re on a quest for meaning. I think we need to look at what participation in a particular cultural tradition—religious or otherwise—does for the individual and the community. There are lots of different components to religion. But if we’re just thinking about the ones that are universal, that seem to be part of our evolved psychology, I don’t think innate curiosity and desire to puzzle together the meaning of life explains religion.
And so what does, in summary, explain religion?
Well, it’s not a monolithic entity for which we could offer an overall explanation. If we define what we’re really interested in—supernatural agents, rituals, afterlife beliefs, creation stories—then we’d find they result from quite different mechanisms and have different evolutionary histories. There just can’t be a magic bullet explanation of “religion” as if it’s one single thing. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-ancient-rites-that-gave-birth-to-religion?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Prehistoric Rites: Harvey Whitehouse points out bull horns at Çatalhöyük, an archaeological excavation in Turkey. Through an analysis of artifacts at the settlement, which thrived around 7000 B.C., Whitehouse has discerned “high-arousal” rituals associated with a religious life. Photo: Justin Barrett.
Oriana:
It makes sense: the more painful and/or frequent the rituals, the higher the fusion with the group -- and the less individualism. Praying five times a day is a much higher investment in religion than attending church or temple only once in a while. Those who believe in absurdities are most capable of committing atrocities, as Voltaire pointed out.
It seems that Catholicism used to have more rituals: not just fish on Friday, but also visiting the "graves" on Great Saturday (the graves being the displays of the dead Jesus in the tomb), processions with icons, communal novenas, and more. I think we are witnessing the atrophy of rituals, which doesn't bode well for the future of any religion. For many churchgoers, it's not about faith and dogma, but precisely about the pleasure they derive from liturgy and ritual.
Mary:
That the origins of religion were in rituals that cemented people, or "fused" them with a group makes much more sense than that the origin of gods was primarily to answer questions, and of rituals to propitiate these gods, or convince them to grant favors. Yes, the belief in Luck, and in courting luck's blessing is pretty universal, and not only for gamblers. Aren't we all gamblers with fate, anyway?? Hoping our luck will hold and protect us from common calamities, from loss, sickness, and a bad death, we observe rituals of prayer for protection in the same way we carry our lucky talismans and make novenas to our particular saints.
In our very secular society there's not much left of the painful, endurance kind of bonding rituals, but shadows of them can be found in the language of baptism and penance. These are now both private and symbolic rather than public and physically challenging. What’s left are the pleasurable rituals of feasting and celebration, still structured according to a liturgical, traditional calendar. Observing the traditions becomes a very warm fulfilling pleasure, giving a sense of belonging and of history. So we have Easter and Christmas, Passover Seders and Yom Kippur, and each cultural group celebrates with its own set of traditional observances, foods, music, and stories. These things still exist, but not with the power, fervor and significance they used to have.
The obvious exception to this civilizing of religion is fundamentalism of any kind. The fundamentalist is still quite capable of blood sacrifice, terrorism, jihad and all kinds of bloody murder. The fundamentalist returns to the most primitive kind of group identity, and is dangerous in any form, with any dogma, any god. The fundamentalist group is always only a breath away from the mob, with all its destructive capability and lack of reason. Mobs do not build and create, they tear apart and destroy, and do it with great satisfaction and self righteousness.
Scary as hell.
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CONFESSIONS OF AN EX-MUSLIM WOMAN
~ “Islam ensnares every moment of a Muslim's life. How you eat, how you go to the bathroom, how you put on shoes, how you have sex. Every single aspect of your life is mapped out so that there is minimal opportunity to think. You are trained to just follow. Do as you're told. Don't ask why. Get in line with the rest of the ummah (community of Muslims). Like a school of fish; it is instinctual.
That's the way it is. That's the way the brainwashing goes. Like a soldier trained to take orders and react. Thinking is deadly. Questioning is punished.
This is much more true for women than it is for men. Under Islam, a woman's sense of agency is nonexistent. Her individuality is completely erased, or rather, never given an opportunity to flourish in the first place. Sometimes, like it was for me, this statement is both literal as well as figurative.
My entire being was dampened by a black shroud. Covered from head to toe, without even my eyes connecting with the outside world, I'd float around other humans almost like a ghost. I could see them, but they couldn't see me. I was invisible. My humanity was completely eradicated. I wasn't Yasmine. I was a faceless figure shrouded in black. My wants, needs, interests, desires, preferences, were never even considered — least of all by me. I didn't know that there was such thing as choice. I'd never made a decision. I just did as I was told.
I was miserable. But my misery also made me feel guilty. Why couldn't I move along with the other fish? Why did I yearn to escape their hold? Wasn't this the path to heaven? Any other direction was hell. Why wasn't I strong enough to fight the devil luring me to imagine a life where I could swim in different waters?
Islam is ingenious in its hold. Aspects of its tactics can be found in Mormonism, with Scientologists and Jehovah's Witnesses, but Islam is the only religion that combines all the different ensnaring elements into one, and then turns up the intensity tenfold.
Islam's hold on your body, mind, and spirit is such that almost 15 years after denouncing the religion, I'm still discovering and suffering from remnant conditioning of my mind.
I don't think I'll ever be truly free. I was only able to free my body. But I have not failed. My daughters are free. My daughters will never be able to relate to or understand any of this world. They will listen wide-eyed, unable to fathom that existence. And so, even if I have to take this indoctrination with me to the grave. I don't mind. I'm happy to take it with me 6 feet under, far away from my daughters. Where it can't hurt anyone else from my bloodline. They'll all be free to swim in any direction they choose.” ~
(source: Faisal Saeed Al Mutar)
Oriana:
The power of this image (produced by Anthony Freda Studio) truly touched me.
As for Yasmine’s story: it confirms that with any repressive religion, recovery is a lifetime journey.
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IS THERE A BUILT-IN LIMIT TO HUMAN LIFE SPAN?
~ In the late eighteenth century, while in hiding from his fellow French revolutionaries, the philosopher and mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet posed a question that continues to occupy scientists to this day. “No doubt man will not become immortal,” he wrote in Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, “but cannot the span constantly increase between the moment he begins to live and the time when naturally, without illness or accident, he finds life a burden?”
The answer to that question remains the subject of debate. Some researchers posit that modern human lifespans are nearing a natural ceiling, whereas others see no evidence for such a limit.
One of the first efforts to map the boundaries of human lifespan came from the British mathematician and actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825. His analysis of demographic records demonstrated that after a person’s late twenties, their risk of dying increased at an exponential rate year after year — suggesting that there is a horizon where that risk finally reaches 100%.
“Gompertz speculated that this was a law equivalent to Newton’s law of gravity,” says Jay Olshansky, an epidemiologist and gerontologist at the University of Illinois Chicago. Almost 200 years later, Gompertz’s work remains influential. His model still seems to accurately map the pattern of age-related mortality for a sizable portion of the human lifespan, even though medical advances have shifted the timing somewhat.
In 1996, for example, a mathematical analysis by Caleb Finch and Malcolm Pike at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles used the Gompertz model to estimate a maximum human lifespan of around 120 years — a reasonable ceiling, given that only one person had reached that age.
However, the authors also speculated that medical advances in controlling senescence and treating chronic disease could theoretically bend the curve and make that limit a routine life expectancy in the future.
Questions have emerged about the flexibility of Gompertz’s model as more and more people reach ages that were considered exceptional a few generations ago. The United Nations estimates that there were 573,000 centenarians alive worldwide in 2020 — more than 20 times the number 50 years earlier. And hundreds of people reached the rarefied ranks of the supercentenarians — aged 110 or older — although demographers have validated the records of only a fraction of them. The current longevity record is held by Jeanne Calment, a French woman who passed away in 1997 at the age of 122 years and five months.
Calment’s record survival of 122 years and five months is not only unbroken, but also unrivalled — the nearest contender was Sarah Knauss, who passed away at the age of 119 in 1999. In a 2019 paper, Vaupel and his colleague Anthony Medford estimated that there was a 20% chance that Calment’s achievement might remain unsurpassed by 2050.
Progress in extending average life expectancy could potentially increase the odds of individuals reaching an extreme old age by creating ever-larger numbers of centenarians. Major advances in preventing infant and child mortality, and in the treatment of chronic and infectious diseases, have already produced considerable improvement in this metric.
Milholland points out that gerontologists have identified nine cellular and molecular features that are strongly associated with ageing and mortality. These range from shortening of the telomeric structures that cap the chromosomes and prevent genetic damage, to the accumulation of defective proteins and toxic metabolites and the loss of regenerative stem cells. Milholland sees these breakdowns in the cellular machinery as natural and inevitable outcomes of running a complicated biological machine for many years on end.
Some studies have suggested that interventions that tweak metabolic activity or alterations to the diet can confer significant longevity gains in species such as flies, worms and even mice. But Olshansky cautions that the effects of interventions to delay ageing are likely to be skewed in these animal models. “The problem is that the longer a species lives in general, the less longevity benefit there is to be expected from any sort of intervention,” he says. So a treatment that allows a worm to live a few months, rather than a few weeks, cannot be expected to likewise propel humans into multiple centuries of survival. “We’re living life on different timescales,” he adds.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00070-1?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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IS CLEAN-UP OF SENESCENT CELLS THE ANSWER?
~ Salwa Sebti was growing impatient. In 2014, she and her colleagues at the University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW) Medical Center in Dallas had begun tracking mice that had a genetically enhanced ability to detoxify their cells. The goal was to test the anti-aging effects of boosting autophagy, the biological housekeeping process by which cells rid themselves of damaged components. But it was almost two years — a timespan roughly equivalent to 70 years in humans — before the mice showed any clear signs of health improvements.
It was worth the wait. The animals’ hearts and kidneys had less tissue scarring than usual; spontaneous cancers were kept at bay; and the mice lived approximately 10% longer. As the data finally poured in, Sebti recalls thinking to herself: “Oh wow, we have a strong phenotype.”
Now, a growing number of biotechnology start-ups are trying to replicate those anti-aging effects by using drug compounds.
In mouse models, these compounds have helped to ameliorate signs of Alzheimer’s disease and have restored the functionality of blood-forming stem cells in the bone marrow.
Scientists at MindRank AI in Hangzhou, China, used predictive algorithms informed by machine learning to identify molecules capable of promoting the degradation of damaged mitochondria, a process known as mitophagy. Their virtual screen yielded a list of 18 compounds. Working with gerontologist Evandro Fang at the University of Oslo and pharmacologist Jia-Hong Lu at the University of Macau, the company then used human cells, worms and mice to winnow this list down to two drug candidates, both of which target a protein called PINK1 — an important mediator of mitochondrial quality control. Late last year, the researchers showed how the drugs helped to improve memory in worm and mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease.
METFORMIN, RAPAMYCIN, AND FELODIPINE (possibly also AMLODIPINE)
When it comes to drugs with broad autophagy-inducing potential, several medicines already being widely used seem to fit the bill. For example, metformin, a common diabetes treatment, and the immunosuppressant rapamycin, which is used to prevent transplant rejection, both fire up autophagy signaling through their effects on mTOR, a master regulator of several steps on the autophagy pathway.
In worms and mice, these drugs increase lifespan and overall well-being. But because they have many molecular effects, “you can never be sure what is due to autophagy,” says Beat Nyfeler, a chemical biologist at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Basel, Switzerland.
Unfortunately, the molecular promiscuity of mTOR signalling, which also controls protein synthesis, and the nonspecific nature of the drugs can also result in unwanted side effects. “I think to really address the power of activating autophagy one would need to find something mTOR-independent,” Nyfeler says.
By repurposing an existing drug, David Rubinsztein, a cellular neurobiologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, has identified a blood-pressure medication that induces autophagy through other means. Called felodipine, it works by blocking calcium channels, both to relax blood vessels — hence its use to treat hypertension — and to increase autophagic activity.
[Note: magnesium is a natural calcium-channel blocker]
In mouse models of Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, Rubinsztein and his colleagues have shown that the drug promotes the clearance of aggregate-prone proteins from the brain, resulting in behavioral and functional improvements. A clinical trial is now planned to evaluate whether felodipine treatment can reduce levels of mutant huntingtin protein in the spinal fluid of people with early-stage Huntington’s disease.
[Turning up autophagy] would be like putting more garbage trucks on the road and increasing the size of trash incinerators to ensure clean and safe streets. Along the road to aging, cells might benefit from similar investment in waste management. ~
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00075-w
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NATURAL WAYS TO INCREASE AUTOPHAGY
1. Choose the right foods and supplements
Coffee, green tea [black tea also works], curcumin, ginger, quercetin, Ceylon cinnamon, ginseng, garlic, certain mushrooms (chaga and reishi), pomegranate and elderberries are all known to increase autophagy. Others that might seem less familiar — such as bergamot, berberine, resveratrol and MCT oil — are often taken in the form of a supplement.
2. Fasting, intermittent fasting and almost fasting
Fasting is one of the best ways to kick autophagy into high gear. Why? A dip in available nutrients signals cells to get more efficient (dump low-performing parts to recycle and rebuild new cells). If you think about how prehistoric humans evolved and survived when the next meal was never guaranteed, fasting was just part of life. During the time their bodies were not digesting food (whether for several hours or even days on end), cells were able to repair themselves and get more resilient to ready the body to pounce when that next meal — often a wild animal — came around. So our bodies were literally built for this. Not eating, or drastically restricting caloric intake, for a period of time has been shown to induce autophagy.
But how long do you have to fast to get the benefits in your body? Some experts suggest a daily 16/8 intermittent fasting plan (fast for 16 hours and then eat all of your meals within an eight-hour window). Good news is, if you’re a person who usually skips breakfast, you might already be doing this. Say you finish dinner at 8 p.m. (no midnight snacking!), all you have to do is wait until noon or later to eat lunch the next day. You fasted! The 5:2 method is eating normally for five days of the week and fasting (or limiting calories to 500 per day) on the other two days of the week. Alternate day fasting follows the same rules, only the fasting (or calorie restriction) is every other day.
According to biologist and fasting expert Professor Valter Longo, director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, the best way to really clear out harmful toxins and reset your immune system is to do a three- or five-day fast, even if you only do it once or twice a year. Recognizing that might be terrifying to the average person, Longo developed what he calls a fast-mimicking diet (FMD), which basically tricks your body into a fasted state (giving you the health benefits) while still allowing you to consume about 1000 calories each day. (Here’s hoping you like bone broth!) You can do it yourself, or use Longo’s ProLon fasting kit which is formulated to balance macro- and micro-nutrients throughout the process of your FMD. (Longo's diet is mostly a vegan diet + fish and other seafood.)
3. Going keto
One thing I learned through experience is that incorporating fasting into your life is MUCH easier if you’ve already started to eat a ketogenic diet — since being metabolically flexible makes it easier to go for longer periods of time between meals.
Growing in popularity over the past few years, the keto diet (a low-carb/high-fat diet used to treat epilepsy since the 1920s) is designed to restrict glucose so that your body can switch from relying on sugar for energy and start using fat as its primary source of fuel. The drastic reduction in carbohydrate consumption puts your body into a metabolic state called ketosis, which increases autophagy. (In addition to making your body a fat-burning powerhouse, a HUGE bonus of being in ketosis is feeling energetic and being able to focus your mind; there’s even a term for it: keto clarity.)
Keto-friendly foods include eggs, green vegetables, fatty fish, avocados, healthy oils (avocado, coconut and extra virgin olive oil), almonds, walnuts, unprocessed cheese, steak, chicken, turkey, bacon, chicken, turkey, grass-fed butter and cream. Foods to avoid: sugary and starchy foods, wheat-based products, most fruit (except berries), beans, unhealthy processed vegetable oils, sugar-sweetened beverages and alcohol (very dry wine may be an exception).
4. Protein Cycling
Also known as protein fasting, protein cycling basically means designating one or two days of the week to limit protein consumption to just 15 or 20 grams. According to biohacker Dave Asprey, protein cycling can give you some of the benefits of fasting, but without the deprivation. Since meat and dairy products contain a lot of protein, your low-protein days might look like vegan days. Bonus: if you make a habit of doing this even once a week, it can have a positive environmental impact, by reducing energy and excess waste associated with raising livestock, as well as processing, packaging and transporting meat and dairy products.
5. Exercise, but don't go crazy
Like fasting, exercise creates ‘healthy stress’ in the body. Even if you’re not a workout devotee, you probably at least KNOW about the benefits of exercising regularly: it can lower your blood pressure and cholesterol as well as your risk of heart attack, type 2 diabetes and some cancers.
Research shows that exercise induces autophagy in multiple organs involved in metabolic regulation, such as muscle, the brain, liver, pancreas and adipose tissue. And moderate exercise (including a mix of cardio, resistance training and high-intensity interval training) about 30 minutes per day seems to be ideal for autophagy activation — while excessive or prolonged exercise could negate some of its benefits. (Good news if you were looking for another excuse to never run a marathon.)
6. Turn up the heat
In other 'healthy stress’ news, research published in Science Daily confirms that some of the health benefits of sauna use are autophagy-related. We know that exposing your body to high temperatures (usually 120°-180° F) creates heat shock proteins and stimulates the lymph system, which has a carry-over effect to autophagy because it increases microcirculation. Using an infrared sauna can help keep detox pathways activated and open, enabling you to tap into autophagy faster as well.
7. Get quality sleep
Though it's often easier said than done, getting a good night’s rest turns out to be a boon for optimizing autophagy. Melatonin, a hormone that helps maintain your body's natural circadian rhythm, plays an essential role in regulating autophagy because of its antioxidant properties. It protects autophagy genes from free radicals.
https://www.theselect7.com/the-select-files/wb-all-about-autophagy
Oriana:
If this is complicated and/or you find out that it interferes with your enjoyment of life, relax. I’m sure that enjoying life also helps slow down aging. It’s enough if you take sufficient dose of berberine (a metformin mimic) -- that alone is likely to make you live longer by keeping your blood sugar and insulin low. [image: the source of berberine]
You don’t need to worry about more supplements such as bergamot essential oil (even if you have money to burn, remember your poor liver -- too many supplements burden the liver). If you can’t stand MCT oil, use coconut oil instead — you’ll love the taste and the fragrance.
If you enjoy coffee, drink as much as you like. In the morning, add one of the autophagy-enhancing fats to it, even if you skip breakfast as part of intermittent fasting. A little fat won’t break your fast. Yes, grass-fed butter is OK, but coconut oil might be more efficient. Extra-virgin olive oil? Yes.
And having tea instead of coffee — black tea is fine, a source of valuable theaflavins — is also fine. (I much prefer tea because coffee can make me feel bloated; I also find tea, including green tea, an excellent appetite suppressant.)
Remember that glucose and protein stop autophagy. Now, you have to consume sufficient protein, but most people overdo the amount. Because of Atkins and one-time fad for high-protein diets, it is easy to forget that excess protein is converted to glucose, induces an insulin response, and elevated insulin makes you fat. Atkins didn’t seem to be aware that protein, while not as bad as carbs, also raises insulin.
Not an exercise fan? Just learn to do the plank for one minute. It’s immediately energizing, and the benefits for the bone make the plank a must for older women. (Is one minute too difficult? You’ll get there over time. Practice makes perfect.)
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ending on beauty:
It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.
~ Thomas Transtromer, After a Death
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