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GROWING OLD IS BEING LIKE MOSES
~ Oriana
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The main scene here is what I’ve come to call the “Moses moment” — after years of struggle, you come to see that something you dearly hoped for, an overriding goal, will not be achieved.
Creative people yearn for recognition (they may deny it, but most of them do); there comes a point at which most of them realize that even if they win that big contest, it’s too late — it will not change their life, nor bring them actual fame — meaning not shallow celebrity, but the opportunity to bring the gift of their work to many people.
The Moses moment is inevitably painful. Fortunately, the human brain is very flexible, and between chronic bitterness and diminished expectations, it will (in most cases) wisely choose the latter. Remember, barring the extremes, the human brain can manufacture a good mood regardless of circumstances. The Moses moment shall pass, and we'll turn to reliable sources of contentment.
(There is an earlier blog, one of my personal favorites, where I explore “the Moses moment” in greater detail: https://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-moses-dilemma.html
Julius Schnorr: Moses on Mount Pisgah. Note the "horns."
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BUDDHA AND MOSES
First, a Zen story of Buddha walking along a stream with disciples. The group pauses and, deciding he’s thirsty, Buddha asks the youngest to go and get some fresh water from the stream. But as it happened, an ox cart was crossing through the stream at the time, kicking up dirt and muddying the water. Seeing that the water had become unfit for consumption, the youngster returns to let them know. Buddha smiles, and a half-hour later sends the same disciple back out again.
The eager pupil found that the water was still muddy. Trekking once more to where Buddha has encamped, he offers the disappointing update. More time passes, and once again Buddha asks him to go back and fetch water. However, this time the mud has finally settled and the surface water is clean and clear. The disciple fills a jug with fresh water and brings it to Buddha, who drinks and exclaims, “See what you did to make the water clean? You let it be, and the mud settled down on its own. Now you have clear water.”
Buddha wanted to teach a type of thinking that was not yet natural to them: Respond, don’t react. Be patient and let things be. Neither thirst nor agitation will speed up processes that we don’t control, so we might as well let the feelings go as we wait for the world to resolve itself. Meaningful work emerges from knowing the limits of our powers.
THE MOSES MODE
Contrast this type of thinking with a well-known story from the Jewish tradition. After wandering the wilderness for 40 years, the Israelites are on the verge of entering the Promised Land. Yet the mood is not joyous, but fearful. They have run out of water and are lamenting as to why Moses would lead them out of Egypt to die miserably in the desert.
Moses asks for divine guidance and God tells him to take his walking staff, gather the people, and speak to a sacred stone so that it will offer its water. But instead of speaking, Moses uses his staff and smashes the stone twice. Water comes pouring out.
Moses was modeling a cognitive framework significantly different from the type espoused by Buddha. He believed that there was no natural order or optimal path. We cannot wait for things to unfold on their own. Moses taught that we need to enact the results that we want through our work.
SOMETIMES WE NEED TO BREATHE, SOMETIMES TO PUSH
An astute reader might object to the surface reading of these stories, noting that the muddy water in the story of Buddha is a metaphor for our muddied minds. The real teaching is knowing how to pause our thoughts, even when we feel overwhelmed, even while at work, doing nothing but breathing until mental peace finds us. It is a cognitive strategy designed to mitigate the Buddhist truth of suffering. Meaning comes from this peace.
Rabbi Shalom Dovber Schneersohn explained that the story of Moses is also metaphorical. He explained that the stone in the tale represents wisdom. God wanted Moses to speak to the stone, symbolically letting wisdom come to those seeking it with clarity and ease. But Moses believed that wisdom born of passivity would be of little value to the stiff-necked people under his care; if they were to encounter meaning in their lives, it would require the effort of work.
I think both of these stories speak to the challenges of finding meaning in contemporary work. Sometimes our work environment is like a disciples’ stroll by a stream with a beloved mentor, while at other times we feel more like a fractured people lost and leaderless in the wilderness, uncertain about the viability of our natural resources and justifiably concerned that our terrifying future will be worse than our past.
COMPASSION OR CO-CREATION?
There’s another difference in these two paradigms that speaks loudly to the modern challenge of work. Buddha seems to be offering a style of leadership that may be described as micro-managing. Leaders today seeking to emulate him will want to manage, with compassion, the needs of their stakeholders. They would presume to know what can and cannot be changed, what their workers are feeling, and what actions are best to satisfy these feelings. It is a compassionate model, but still presumptive and hierarchical.
In contrast, Moses wanted to initiate a partnership. He wanted to encourage cooperation with what he described as his “stiff-necked people.” Leaders looking to this paradigm would be less interested in tools of management, and more interested in techniques to encourage co-creation. Moses smashed the stone because implementing the divine plan was not his priority. He recognized that he and his people were in this together. If this was the more difficult path, so be it. From conflict will come meaning.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/managing-meaning/202202/moses-buddha-and-differing-paths-meaningful-work
Oriana:
Obviously, there is no universal way of acting that applies to every possible situation. Sometimes wisdom lies in “do nothing and wait,” and sometimes in urgent action.
But my pleasure here has been in looking at those ancient stories again. They don’t contradict each other. Their lessons apply in different contexts.
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A FASCIST STATE CELEBRATING VICTORY OVER FASCISM
~ While Russian forces are mass-slaughtering innocent civilians in Ukraine and putting the fleeing citizens of Mariupol through “filtration camps,” Moscow’s legendary Bolshoi Theatre is tonight showing “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “The White Rose” (the story of a group of students who lost their lives standing up to Hitler).
Russia these days, fully in the grip of toxic militaristic madness: A fascist state celebrating the 77-year-old victory over fascism. ~ Mikhail Iossel
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PUTIN’S SUPER YACHT SIZED
The Scheherezade — Putin's secret super yacht — has just been arrested in Italy.
Scheherezade, my... neck. He is sitting in a nuclear blast-proof concrete bunker 300 meters below ground, somewhere in the Ural Mountains: what would he need a yacht for? His seagoing days are over. His days as a free man, capable of enjoying the freedom of unrestricted movement in the world of people are over. His life as it was once known to him is over. No Scheherezade with her unending supply of soothing tales could change that gloomy circumstance. ~ M. Iossel
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WINTERS IN BUCHENWALD
My father spent four years in Buchenwald. Winters were the worst he said.
He remembered the frozen bodies.
Some looked like they had been cemented in the ice, heads and hands and knees above the ice line, stomachs and feet below.
The prisoners who died this way must have been trying to raise themselves out of the freezing water, but the water froze too quickly.
Some of the living prisoners peeled coats and pants from the bodies of the frozen dead, but my father didn’t.
He stood there staring at the dead. Their legs were black with frostbite, their pricks shriveled to the size of acorns.
He never forgot the lesson he learned. A frozen naked man was a miserable thing.
~ John Guzlowski
LESS THAN ANIMALS
“We were not even human beings. When we got to Buchenwald, the SS shoved us into a shower room to spend the night. I had heard the rumors about the dummy shower heads that were gas jets. I thought, 'This is it.' But no, it was just a place to sleep. The first eight days there, the Germans kept us without a crumb to eat. We were hanging on to life by pure guts, sleeping on top of each other, every morning waking up to find a new corpse next to you. ... The whole experience was a complete nightmare — the way they treated us, what we had to do to survive. We were less than animals. Sometimes I dream about those days. I wake up in a sweat terrified for fear I'm about to be sent away to a concentration camp, but I don't hold a grudge because that's a great waste of time. Yes, there's something dark in the human soul. For the most part human beings are not very nice. That's why when you find those who are, you cherish them.”
~ Robert Clary, an actor in the TV series “Hogan’s Heroes”
This iconic photo of the inmates in Buchenwald upon liberation was taken by Margaret Bourke-White
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SOLZHENITSYN ON WARTIME TORTURE IN THE RED ARMY
~ I recall with shame an incident I observed during the liquidation-in other words, the plundering-of the Bobruisk encirclement, when I was walking along the highway among wrecked and overturned German automobiles, and a wealth of booty lay scattered everywhere. German cart horses wandered aimlessly in and out of a shallow depression where wagons and automobiles that had gotten stuck were buried in the mud, and bonfires of booty were smoking away. Then I heard a cry for help: “Mr. Captain! Mr. Captain!” A prisoner on foot in German britches was crying out to me in pure Russian. He was naked from the waist up, and his face, chest, shoulders, and back were all bloody, while a sergeant osobist, a Security man, seated on a horse, drove him forward with a whip, pushing him with his horse. He kept lashing that naked back up and down with the whip, without letting him turn around, without letting him ask for help. He drove him along, beating and beating him, raising new crimson welts on his skin.
And this was not one of the Punic Wars, nor a war between the Greeks and the Persians! Any officer, possessing any authority, in any army on earth ought to have stopped that senseless torture. In any army on earth, yes, but in ours? Given our fierce and uncompromising method of dividing mankind? (If you are not with us, if you are not our own, etc., then you deserve nothing but contempt and annihilation.) So I was afraid to defend the Vlasov man against the osobist, I said nothing and I did nothing. I passed him by as if I could not hear him … so that I myself would not be infected by that universally recognized plague. (What if the Vlasov man was indeed some kind of super-villain? Or maybe the osobist would think something was wrong with me? And then?) Or, putting it more simply for anyone who knows anything about the situation in the Soviet Army at that time: would that osobist have paid any attention to an army captain?
So the osobist continued to lash the defenseless man brutally and drive him along like a beast.
This picture will remain etched in my mind forever. This, after all, is almost a symbol of the Archipelago. It ought to be on the jacket of this book. ~
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: an experiment in literary investigation
“Osobist” = military counter-intelligence agent
Oriana:
The man "in German britches" was a "Vlasovite," i.e. someone who defected from the Red Army to the German side, motivated by the hope of getting rid of Stalin. In Ukraine, it was the "Banderites." Vlasov and Bandera had a deluded hope that Germans would liberate them from Stalin.
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RUSSIA IS HEADED FOR A MAJOR CATASTROPHE
~ Russia is heading for a major catastrophe akin to 1991 when the Soviet Union disintegrated. Now as then, the many crises converge to form the perfect storm impossible to weather out.
The underlying reason remains the same: incompetence and mistakes of the ruling elites.
According to official data from Rosstat, in January 2021, the population decline in the Russian Federation was 113,200. A year earlier, in the same month, it amounted to 45,300 people, an increase by two and a half times. Since then, Rossat was ordered to doctor stats, and government fired its head.
Taken into account, that at least a third of the population is not accounted for at the registry offices, we’re talking about two million decline in population within a year.
The last time such a massive demographic decline Russia experienced was during the Second World War.
At the end of 2020, the decline in the population of the Russian Federation amounted to almost 687,000 people, a record over the past 15 years.
The reasons for the accelerating population decline include, but not limited to:
No lockdowns: many deaths could have been avoided
“Reformed” healthcare has left millions of Russians without access to hospitals and physicians while overburdening the remaining facilities with COVID-related patients
There were fewer children born in the 1990s than at any time in modern history of Russia. They came of age at the time of another economic crisis and feel disinclined to have children being unable to support them.
Government’s hope to bring uneducated migrants from Muslim Central Asian republics has failed -- more than 40% of the existing migrants have returned home in the past two years.
Low wages and debased national currency ruble has made their presence in Russia economically impractical, and since they’re victims of constant racist attacks, they don’t feel particularly attached to their temporary homeland.
Clearly, Russia is waging a bloody war against itself, however the ruling elites are spinning as if we’re fighting Cold War 2.0. In fact, they have fallen for their own distortions and lies.
unexploded Russian shells near Kyiv
They expect things to get worse, and they’re sitting on all this cash and gold to defend themselves against the West in the forming years when sanctions have been dialed up. [This article was written before the invasion of Ukraine and the current sanctions, including the freezing of the oligarchs' assets -- if they can be found.]
The economy keeps sliding, only officially, at 3% annually, but it is believed the real situation is two or three times worse. Retail market has readjusted itself to the top 10–15% consumers with prices doubled, and tripled in the past few years, while salaries have stagnated.
In the meantime, freight brokers in the US are seeing unprecedented tsunami of freight from Asia to the US. Says Nerijus Poskus, vice president of global ocean at freight forwarder Flexport:
“For the month of May, everything on the trans-Pacific is basically sold out. We had one client who needed something loaded in May that was extremely urgent and who was ready to pay $15,000 per container. I couldn’t get it loaded. Price doesn’t even matter anymore.”
Like in the 1980s, Russians will hear (read and watch, too if the elites don’t shut down Internet, which they probably will) about consumption in America going through the roof, while staring at the empty shelves or shelves filled with merchandise they can’t afford to buy.
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Russia has given Ukraine independence of its own accord; however, in 2014, in the wake of Maidan, decided that it should become the platform for revanchist asymmetrical proxy war with the US.
National economy quickly found itself a sacrificial lamb on the altar of the Gods of War.
Oligarchs were paid off to prevent palace coup, and the population was deemed to consist of dumb serfs, good enough to watch propaganda, sports events, drink vodka and eat bad quality food.
Clearly, lessons of the Soviet Union disintegration haven’t been learned, or rather fallacious conclusions have been drawn: the blame was laid squarely on the shoulders of Mikhail Gorbachev and excessive spending on designing and building advanced weapons.
The reasoning of the ruling elites goes as follows: we would have won if only we had had a better leader at the helm and had spent less on militarization. This is their takeaway from the Soviet Union, and totally not “It’s economy, stupid.”
Our “American partners” got it. We don’t. Give our elites another century — one day they will. If there’re any citizens left alive at that point.
In the meantime, the ruling elites continue to be willfully blind to the fact that their subjects are human beings fully capable of creating a competitive, top world economy, under the right system and leadership.
In fairness, it should be noted that Bolsheviks had massacred or driven into exile tzarist elites: well-educated, Western-minded men and women — noble class, business class, scientists and artists.
Stalin kept exterminating the new Soviet elites right after they managed to form — the fire of the world’s revolution had to be fed with those incapable of rational or analytical thinking.
Russia has also lost many millions of its educated citizens in the 1990s, and during Putin’s countless terms kept losing hundreds of thousands of educated men and women annually who have been fleeing to the West.
104 years of NKVD/KGB/FSB reign of terror has been hugely detrimental to professional classes, the ones who are responsible to create a civilization and modern robust economy. One can’t intimidate people into building an economic powerhouse.
The current ruling elites are the product of the totalitarian regime, and they sincerely believed that by fixing those two issues: Putin is a better, more patriotic leader, and waging asymmetric warfare on a shoestring instead of armed race, they can build a robust state.
Like back in the Soviet Union, the state TV is full of sports victories and war victories, and heroes. We were handed 11 days off to celebrate Victory Day when it used to be only one. At the expense of the employers. The New Year holidays are almost two weeks long. The ruling elites believe we’re lazy and good for nothing, and our goal in life is not to work.
Of course, when you’re paid pennies, and your work is not appreciated, and you have no advancement opportunities without connections, such labor is rendered meaningless.
The ruling elites are currently sitting on a huge stockpile of billions of dollars in the national fund, and tons of gold. Trillions of dollars are parked in the offshore accounts. They don’t treat all these riches as bloodline to spearhead Russia’s economy.
And then one day, it will be Perestroika 2. Russia is lost in the forest of empire nightmares, walking around in circles. ~ Misha Firer, quora (This article goes back to 2021)
Christopher Stanton:
The epidemic of FAS (fetal alcohol syndrome) is creating a medical and economic burden which Mother Russia has little hope of unlimbering. Corruption and cronyism have thoroughly demoralized the working and middle classes. What few people realize is that Russia still operates on the Soviet Union’s old Zero Sum Game (regardless of what Marxist doctrine says).
All that changed with the Soviet Union’s collapse was that the military apparatchiks took off their uniforms and put on business suits. Other than that, it’s been business as usual.
Tom Chisell:
Russian politics has always baffled and somewhat frustrated me — as individuals, Russians tend to be down-to-earth realists, cynical towards power… and yet for several centuries, Russia as a nation always defaults toward an autocratic ruler surrounded by a constellation of corrupt parasites: from the Tsar and the aristocrats, to the Party Leader and the bigwigs of the Central Soviet, to the President and the oligarchs.
Feudalism, Communism, Capitalist democracy — the end result — in Russia — somehow seems remarkably similar.
Ravi Vaish:
Putin is, at heart, a secret policeman. The tools he most favors — arrests, assassinations, black ops, disinformation, etc. — are ineffective against a systemic economic crisis.
Shelama Leesen:
The Bolsheviks at least had an ideology. Putin and his oligarchs seem mostly just to be greedy and corrupt and don’t really give a damn about Russia beyond what they can milk. This is so sad.
George Graham:
Have seen that up to 300 generals and senior military officers have met with dubious deaths during Putins reign as well as numerous news reporters. Putin seems to have metamorphosed in Ivan the Terrible or Joseph Stalin II, neither of which would have been capable of leading a state into the 21st century.
People should also remember how Putin came to power — blowing up native Muscovites in their apartments and blaming it on the Chechens and thus appearing the strong man in a time of crisis. He poisoned Litvinenko in London with polonium 210 when he revealed that little stunt. Litvinenko was an FSB officer who refused a direct order to murder one of Putins opponents and fled to London and so was in a position to know. Then we’ve had the latest, 2018 Salisbury poisoning of an ex FSB man and his daughter.
Misha Firer:
The quality of education in Russia is far below that of the Western countries. Additionally, it is more theoretical and the graduates are little prepared for real life jobs. Most of the graduates don’t even get a job in their field. I know this is a problem in the west too, but don’t compare liberal arts college graduate and engineers, economists and such left without employment opportunities.
Chris Ashfield:
That’s a long-winded way of saying “non-diversified economy based on asset stripping.”
Rafai Khawaja:
Russia is a hospice and Putin is the director.
It saddens me to see such an innovative and intelligent nation debased to this.
The nation that put people in space, pioneered air and space travel, rocket designs, stealth technology, engineering, and some of the best composers on the planet.
The one nation that refuses to learn from its mistakes.
In the Russian North-East
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UKRAINE AS A COLONIAL WAR
~ When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it.
Empire’s story divides subjects from objects. As the philosopher Frantz Fanon argued, colonizers see themselves as actors with purpose, and the colonized as instruments to realize the imperial vision. Putin took a pronounced colonial turn when returning to the Presidency a decade ago. In 2012, he described Russia as a “state-civilization,” which by its nature absorbed smaller cultures such as Ukraine’s. The next year, he claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were joined in “spiritual unity.” In a long essay on “historical unity,” published last July, he argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single country, bound by a shared origin. His vision is of a broken world that must be restored through violence. Russia becomes itself only by annihilating Ukraine.
As the objects of this rhetoric, and of the war of destruction that it sanctions, Ukrainians grasp all of this. Ukraine does have a history, of course, and Ukrainians do constitute a nation. But empire enforces objectification on the periphery and amnesia at the center. Thus modern Russian imperialism includes memory laws that forbid serious discussion of the Soviet past. It is illegal for Russians to apply the word “war” to the invasion of Ukraine. It is also illegal to say that Stalin began the Second World War as Hitler’s ally, and used much the same justification to attack Poland as Putin is using to attack Ukraine. When the invasion began, in February, Russian publishers were ordered to purge mentions of Ukraine from textbooks.
Faced with the Kremlin’s official mixture of fantasy and taboo, the temptation is to prove the opposite: that it is Ukraine rather than Russia that is eternal, that it is Ukrainians, not Russians, who are always right, and so on. Yet Ukrainian history gives us something more interesting than a mere counter-narrative to empire. We can find Ukrainian national feeling at a very early date. In contemporary Ukraine, though, the nation is not so much anti-colonial, a rejection of a particular imperial power, as post-colonial, the creation of something new.
Southern Ukraine, where Russian troops are now besieging cities and bombing hospitals, was well known to the ancients. In the founding myth of Athens, the goddess Athena gives the city the gift of the olive tree. In fact, the city could grow olives only because it imported grain from ports on the Black Sea coast. The Greeks knew the coast, but not the hinterland, where they imagined mythical creatures guarding fields of gold and ambrosia. Here already was a colonial view of Ukraine: a land of fantasy, where those who take have the right to dream.
The city of Kyiv did not exist in ancient times, but it is very old—about half a millennium older than Moscow. It was probably founded in the sixth or seventh century, north of any territory seen by Greeks or controlled by Romans. Islam was advancing, and Christianity was becoming European. The Western Roman Empire had fallen, leaving a form of Christianity subordinate to a pope. The Eastern (Byzantine) Empire remained, directing what we now call the Orthodox Church. As Rome and Constantinople competed for converts, peoples east of Kyiv converted to Islam. Kyivans spoke a Slavic language that had no writing system, and practiced a paganism without idols or temples.
Putin’s vision of “unity” relates to a baptism that took place in this setting. In the ninth century, a group of Vikings known as the Rus arrived in Kyiv. Seeking a southbound route for their slave trade, they found the Dnipro River, which runs through the city. Their chieftains then fought over a patchwork of territories in what is now Ukraine, Belarus, and the northeast of Russia—with Kyiv always as the prize. In the late tenth century, a Viking named Valdemar took the city, with the help of a Scandinavian army. He initially governed as a pagan. But, around 987, when the Byzantines faced an internal revolt, he sensed an opportunity. He came to the emperor’s aid, and received his sister’s hand in marriage. In the process, Valdemar converted to Christianity.
Putin claims that this messy sequence of events reveals the will of God to bind Russia and Ukraine forever. The will of God is easy to misunderstand; in any case, modern nations did not exist at the time, and the words “Russia” and “Ukraine” had no meaning. Valdemar was typical of the pagan Eastern European rulers of his day, considering multiple monotheistic options before choosing the one that made the most strategic sense. The word “Rus” no longer meant Viking slavers but a Christian polity. Its ruling family now intermarried with others, and the local people were treated as subjects to be taxed rather than as bodies to be sold.
Yet no rule defined who would take power after a Kyivan ruler’s death. Valdemar took a Byzantine princess as his wife, but he had a half a dozen others, not to mention a harem of hundreds of women. When he died in 1015, he had imprisoned one of his sons, Sviatopolk, and was making war upon another, Yaroslav. Sviatopolk was freed after his father’s death, and killed three of his brothers, but he was defeated on the battlefield by Yaroslav. Other sons entered the fray, and Yaroslav didn’t rule alone until 1036. The succession had taken twenty-one years. At least ten other sons of Valdemar had died in the meantime.
These events do not reveal a timeless empire, as Putin claims. But they do suggest the importance of a succession principle, a theme very important in Ukrainian-Russian relations today. The Ukrainian transliteration of “Valdemar” is “Volodymyr,” the name of Ukraine’s President. In Ukraine, power is transferred through democratic elections: when Volodymyr Zelensky won the 2019 Presidential election, the sitting President accepted defeat. The Russian transliteration of the same name is “Vladimir.”
Russia is brittle: it has no succession principle, and it’s unclear what will happen when Vladimir Putin dies or is forced from power. The pressure of mortality confirms the imperial thinking. An aging tyrant, obsessed by his legacy, seizes upon a lofty illusion that seems to confer immortality: the “unity” of Russia and Ukraine.
In the Icelandic sagas, Yaroslav is remembered as the Lame; in Eastern Europe, he is the Wise, the giver of laws. Yet he did not solve the problem of succession. Following his reign, the lands around Kyiv fragmented again and again. In 1240, the city fell to the Mongols; later, most of old Rus was claimed by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then the largest state in Europe. Lithuania borrowed from Kyiv a grammar of politics, as well as a good deal of law. For a couple of centuries, its grand dukes also ruled Poland. But, in 1569, after the Lithuanian dynasty died out, a Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was formalized, and the territories of Ukraine were placed under Polish jurisdiction.
This was a crucial change. After 1569, Kyiv was no longer a source of law but an object of it—the archetypal colonial situation. It was colonization that set off Ukraine from the former territories of Rus, and its manner generated qualities still visible today: suspicion of the central state, organization in crisis, and the notion of freedom as self-expression, despite a powerful neighbor.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all the forces of Europe’s globalization seemed to bear down on Ukraine. Polish colonization resembled and in some measure enabled the European colonization of the wider world. Polish nobles introduced land-management practices—along with land managers, most of whom were Jewish—that allowed the establishment of profitable plantations. Local Ukrainian warlords rushed to imitate the system, and adopted elements of Polish culture, including Western Christianity and the Polish language. In an age of discovery, enserfed peasants labored for a world market.
Ukraine’s colonization coincided with the Renaissance, and with a spectacular flowering of Polish culture. Like other Renaissance thinkers, Polish scholars in Ukraine resuscitated ancient knowledge, and sometimes overturned it. It was a Pole, Copernicus, who undid the legacy of Ptolemy’s “Almagest” and confirmed that the Earth orbits the sun. It was another Pole, Maciej of Miechów, who corrected Ptolemy’s “Geography,” clearing Ukrainian maps of gold and ambrosia.
As in ancient times, however, the tilling of the black earth enabled tremendous wealth, raising the question of why those who labored and those who profited experienced such different fates.
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The Renaissance considered questions of identity through language. Across Europe, there was a debate as to whether Latin, now revived, was sufficient for the culture, or whether vernacular spoken languages should be elevated for the task.
In the early fourteenth century, Dante answered this question in favor of Italian; English, French, Spanish, and Polish writers created other literary languages by codifying local vernaculars. In Ukraine, literary Polish emerged victorious over the Ukrainian vernacular, becoming the language of the commercial and intellectual élite. In a way, this was typical: Polish was a modern language, like English or Italian. But it was not the local language in Ukraine. Ukraine’s answer to the language question was deeply colonial, whereas in the rest of Europe it could be seen as broadly democratic.
The Reformation brought a similar result: local élites converted to Protestantism and then to Roman Catholicism, alienating them further from an Orthodox population. The convergence of colonization, the Renaissance, and the Reformation was specific to Ukraine. By the sixteen-forties, the few large landholders generally spoke Polish and were Catholic, and those who worked for them spoke Ukrainian and were Orthodox. Globalization had generated differences and inequalities that pushed the people to rebellion.
Ukrainians on the battlefield today rely on no fantasy of the past to counter Putin’s. If there is a precursor that matters to them, it is the Cossacks, a group of free people who lived on the far reaches of the Ukrainian steppe, making their fortress on an island in the middle of the Dnipro. Having escaped the Polish system of landowners and peasants, they could choose to be “registered Cossacks,” paid for their service in the Polish Army. Still, they were not citizens, and more of them wished to be registered than the Polish-Lithuanian parliament would allow.
The rebellion began in 1648, when an influential Cossack, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, saw his lands seized and his son attacked by a Polish noble. Finding himself beyond the protection of the law, Khmelnytsky turned his fellow Cossacks toward revolt against the Polish-speaking, Roman Catholic magnates who dominated Ukraine. The accumulated cultural, religious, and economic grievances of the people quickly transformed the revolt into something very much like an anti-colonial uprising, with violence directed not only against the private armies of the magnates but against Poles and Jews generally. The magnates carried out reprisals against peasants and Cossacks, impaling them on stakes. The Polish-Lithuanian cavalry fought what had been their own Cossack infantry. Each side knew the other very well.
In 1651, the Cossacks, realizing that they needed help, turned to an Eastern power, Muscovy, about which they knew little. When Kyivan Rus had collapsed, most of its lands had been absorbed by Lithuania, but some of its northeastern territories remained under the dominion of a Mongol successor state. There, in a new city called Moscow, leaders known as tsars had begun an extraordinary period of territorial expansion, extending their realm into northern Asia. In 1648, the year that the Cossack uprising began, a Muscovite explorer reached the Pacific Ocean.
The war in Ukraine allowed Muscovy to turn its attention to Europe. In 1654, the Cossacks signed an agreement with representatives of the tsar. The Muscovite armies invaded Poland-Lithuania from the east; soon after, Sweden invaded from the north, setting off the crisis that Polish history remembers as “the Deluge.” Peace was eventually made between Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy, in 1667, and Ukraine was divided more or less down the middle, along the Dnipro. After a thousand years of existence, Kyiv was politically connected to Moscow for the first time.
The Cossacks were something like an early national movement. The problem was that their struggle against one colonial power enabled another. In 1721, Muscovy was renamed the Russian Empire, in reference to old Rus. Poland-Lithuania never really recovered from the Deluge, and was partitioned out of existence between 1772 and 1795. Russia thereby claimed the rest of Ukraine—everything but a western district known as Galicia, which went to the Habsburgs. Around the same time, in 1775, the Cossacks lost their status. They did not gain the political rights they had wanted, nor did the peasants who supported them gain control of the black earth. Polish landowners remained in Ukraine, even as state power became Russian.
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Whereas Putin’s story of Ukraine is about destiny, the Ukrainian recollection of the Cossacks is about unfulfilled aspirations. The country’s national anthem, written in 1862, speaks of a young people upon whom fate has yet to smile, but who will one day prove worthy of the “Cossack nation.”
The nineteenth century was the age of national revivals. When the Ukrainian movement began in imperial Russian Kharkov—today Kharkiv, and largely in ruins—the focus was on the Cossack legacy. The next move was to locate history in the people, as an account of continuous culture. At first, such efforts did not seem threatening to imperial rule. But, after the Russian defeat in the Crimean War, in 1856, and the insult of the Polish uprising of 1863 and 1864, Ukrainian culture was declared not to exist. It was often deemed an invention of Polish élites—an idea that Putin endorsed in his essay on “historical unity.” Leading Ukrainian thinkers emigrated to Galicia, where they could speak freely.
The First World War brought the principle of self-determination, which promised a release from imperial rule. In practice, it was often used to rescue old empires, or to build new ones. A Ukrainian National Republic was established in 1917, as the Russian Empire collapsed into revolution. In 1918, in return for a promise of foodstuffs, the country was recognized by Austria and Germany. Woodrow Wilson championed self-determination, but his victorious entente ignored Ukraine, recognizing Polish claims instead. Vladimir Lenin invoked the principle as well, though he meant only that the exploitation of national questions could advance class revolution. Ukraine soon found itself at the center of the Russian civil war, in which the Red Army, led by the Bolsheviks, and the White Army, fighting for the defunct empire, both denied Ukraine’s right to sovereignty. In this dreadful conflict, which followed four years of war, millions of people died, among them tens of thousands of Jews.
Though the Red Army ultimately prevailed, Bolshevik leaders knew that the Ukrainian question had to be addressed. Putin claims that the Bolsheviks created Ukraine, but the truth is close to the opposite. The Bolsheviks destroyed the Ukrainian National Republic. Aware that Ukrainian identity was real and widespread, they designed their new state to account for it. It was largely thanks to Ukraine that the Soviet Union took the form it did, as a federation of units with national names.
The failure of self-determination in Ukraine was hardly unique. Almost all of the new states created after the First World War were destroyed, within about two decades, by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or both. In the political imaginations of both regimes, Ukraine was the territory whose possession would allow them to break the postwar order, and to transform the world in their own image. As in the sixteenth century, it was as if all the forces of world history were concentrated on a single country.
Stalin spoke of an internal colonization, in which peasants would be exploited so that the Soviet economy could imitate—and then overtake—capitalism. His policy of collective agriculture, in which land was seized from farmers, was particularly unwelcome in Ukraine, where the revolution had finally got rid of the (still largely Polish) landholders. Yet the black earth of Ukraine was central to Stalin’s plans, and he moved to subdue it. In 1932 and 1933, Stalin enforced a series of policies that led to around four million people dying of hunger or related disease. Soviet propaganda blamed the Ukrainians, claiming that they were killing themselves to discredit Soviet rule—a tactic echoed, today, by Putin. Europeans who tried to organize famine relief were dismissed as Nazis.
The actual Nazis saw Stalin’s famine as a sign that Ukrainian agriculture could be exploited for another imperial project: their own. Hitler wanted Soviet power overthrown, Soviet cities depopulated, and the whole western part of the country colonized. His vision of Ukrainians was intensely colonial: he imagined that he could deport and starve them by the millions, and exploit the labor of whoever remained. It was Hitler’s desire for Ukrainian land that brought millions of Jews under German control. In this sense, colonial logic about Ukraine was a necessary condition for the Holocaust.
Between 1933 and 1945, Soviet and Nazi colonialism made Ukraine the most dangerous place in the world. More civilians were killed in Ukraine, in acts of atrocity, than anywhere else. That reckoning doesn’t even include soldiers: more Ukrainians died fighting the Germans, in the Second World War, than French, American, and British troops combined.
When the war began, in 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany were de-facto allies, and jointly invaded Poland. At the time, what is now western Ukraine was southeastern Poland. A small group of Ukrainian nationalists there joined the Germans, understanding that they would seek to destroy the U.S.S.R. When it became clear that the Germans would fail, the Ukrainian nationalists left their service, ethnically cleansed Poles in 1943 and 1944, and then resisted the Soviets. In Putin’s texts, they figure as timeless villains, responsible for Ukrainian difference generally. The irony, of course, is that they emerged thanks to Stalin’s much grander collaboration with Hitler. They were crushed by Soviet power, in a brutal counter-insurgency, and today Ukraine’s far right polls at one to two per cent. Meanwhile, the Poles, whose ancestors were the chief victims of Ukrainian nationalism, have admitted nearly three million Ukrainian refugees, reminding us that there are other ways to handle history than stories of eternal victimhood.
After the war, western Ukraine was added to Soviet Ukraine, and the republic was placed under suspicion precisely because it had been under German occupation. New restrictions on Ukrainian culture were justified by a manufactured allocation of guilt. This circular logic—we punish you, therefore you must be guilty—informs Kremlin propaganda today. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has argued that Russia had to invade Ukraine because Ukraine might have started a war. Putin, who has said the same, is clearly drawing on Stalin’s rhetoric. We are to understand that the Soviet victory in the Second World War left Russians forever pure and Ukrainians eternally guilty. At the funerals of Russian soldiers, grieving parents are told that their sons were fighting Nazis.
Ukrainian national rhetoric is less coherent than Putin’s imperialism, and, therefore, more credible, and more human. Independence arrived in 1991, when the U.S.S.R was dissolved. Since then, the country’s politics have been marked by corruption and inequality, but also by a democratic spirit that has grown in tandem with national self-awareness. In 2004, an attempt to rig an election was defeated by a mass movement. In 2014, millions of Ukrainians protested a President who retreated from the E.U. The protesters were massacred, the President fled, and Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time. Again and again, Ukrainians have elected Presidents who seek reconciliation with Russia; again and again, this has failed. Zelensky is an extreme case: he ran on a platform of peace, only to be greeted with an invasion.
Ukraine is a post-colonial country, one that does not define itself against exploitation so much as accept, and sometimes even celebrate, the complications of emerging from it. Its people are bilingual, and its soldiers speak the language of the invader as well as their own. The war is fought in a decentralized way, dependent on the solidarity of local communities. These communities are diverse, but together they defend the notion of Ukraine as a political nation. There is something heartening in this. The model of the nation as a mini-empire, replicating inequalities on a smaller scale, and aiming for a homogeneity that is confused with identity, has worn itself out. If we are going to have democratic states in the twenty-first century, they will have to accept some of the complexity that is taken for granted in Ukraine.
The contrast between an aging empire and a new kind of nation is captured by Zelensky, whose simple presence makes Kremlin ideology seem senseless. Born in 1978, he is a child of the U.S.S.R., and speaks Russian with his family. A Jew, he reminds us that democracy can be multicultural. He does not so much answer Russian imperialism as exist alongside it, as though hailing from some wiser dimension. He does not need to mirror Putin; he just needs to show up. Every day, he affirms his nation by what he says and what he does.
Ukrainians assert their nation’s existence through simple acts of solidarity. They are not resisting Russia because of some absence or some difference, because they are not Russians or opposed to Russians. What is to be resisted is elemental: the threat of national extinction represented by Russian colonialism, a war of destruction expressly designed to resolve “the Ukrainian question.” Ukrainians know that there is not a question to be answered, only a life to be lived and, if need be, to be risked. They resist because they know who they are. In one of his very first videos after the invasion, when Russian propaganda claimed that he had fled Kyiv, Zelensky pointed the camera at himself and said, “The President is here.” That is it. Ukraine is here. ~
https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/the-war-in-ukraine-is-a-colonial-war
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PUTIN’S PSYCHOLOGICAL GRIP
~ Let’s start with Putin’s uses of nostalgia. His mission has always been to “bring Russia off its knees”, the Kremlin version of “make America great again”. This has now reached a climax: in his rambling historical speech validating the invasion of Ukraine he invoked his mission to restore the Russian empire, and framed his war in terms of a second world war redux to battle (utterly mythical) Nazis.
Apart from the pleasures of wallowing in (often fictional) past glories, this nostalgia propaganda is effective psychologically in other ways too. It posits that the great Russian people have been humiliated by malign outside powers, and now Putin is restoring pride. The most important humiliation Russians experience, both historically and currently, is of course internal. But the nostalgia narrative allows the Kremlin to transfer its own brutality on to a shadowy outside “enemy”, and then help people relieve their pent-up anger through aggression. The abusive, sadistic tone of Putin’s speeches, and the ones of his leading TV propagandists such as Vladimir Solovyov, give people an emotional path to articulate and validate their darkest and most violent feelings. It’s OK to be vicious and mean, this propaganda implies, it’s all history’s fault.
But this nostalgia propaganda also exists to cover up Putin’s great Achilles heel: his lack of a vision for the future. The future has long disappeared from Russian political discourse. Thinking about the future means concentrating on political reforms, cleaning up the courts, abolishing corruption – all things Putin cannot achieve, as they will put his own system in danger. With the new economic reality post-invasion, any hope for the future has been eradicated completely. But people will still think about it. What do the sanctions, which are yet to properly kick in, mean for their children’s futures?
Media and communication with the Russian people needs to focus on these questions about the future. Both on the personal level, but also in terms of the future of the country. What, ultimately, should the future role of Russia be in the world? One of the most resonant phrases on Russia media runs: “What’s the point of the world if there’s no place for Russia in it?” The “Russia” this invokes is imperial, its identity tied to crushing others. Is there another way?
To further open up such questions, a group of Russian academics led by historian Alexander Etkind propose to create a university in the Baltics that will bring students from Russia and its neighbors to work on common challenges such as the environment. Projects like these are of course long-term aims, but without the language and ideas with which to talk about the future we can’t even start to chart the way towards it.
This idea of a future Russia has to be developed in partnership with Russia’s neighbors, so that it balances the needs of all of them, and escapes the conspiratorial, zero-sum vision of the world Putin’s propaganda promotes.
Conspiracy thinking is another foundation of Putin’s playbook. It serves many uses.
Conspiratorial thinking helps solidify community, promoting a sense of “us” under attack from “them”. It helps explain a confusing world. It also removes any sense of responsibility. Big new posters around Moscow claim that Russia “wasn’t given any choice” but to start the war, implying it’s all the fault of enemy powers. Ultimately, conspiracy thinking also spreads a sense that people are powerless to change anything in the world, which in turn seeds passivity. This can often be beneficial to the Kremlin: it wants a docile country.
But this sort of thinking can also work against the government. It feeds a culture of suspicion and distrust. Thus, during Covid Russians refused to take the Kremlin’s vaccine, suspecting the government itself was somehow plotting something malign against them.
As the sanctions take effect, and if people become painfully aware that their experience is far more arduous than that of the elites, a crisis in motivation could kick in. Putin’s system has always motivated people by giving them a piece in the overall cake of everyday corruption: from the traffic cop up to the minister. As long as you showed your loyalty occasionally, you were free to pursue your own financial aims. Now that motivation is gone, and you’re meant to make great sacrifices for a conspiratorial pseudo-ideology. People could simply give up on keeping the system going. This is what happened at the end of the USSR, when many people basically stopped fulfilling their professional responsibilities. Not so much a strike as just lack of motivation and despondence.
As the economic situation worsens, and the propaganda weakens, Putin will turn to the power ministries to use oppression rather than ideas. This has always been his final argument: that he can carry out any crimes at home, any invasion abroad, any war crime from Grozny to Aleppo, and get away with it. In Ukraine, Putin is purposefully targeting humanitarian corridors, bombing refugees and hospitals in order to break the will of the people. It’s a message to the world that all statements about humanitarian values, the UN’s “responsibility to protect”, “safe zones” is guff. His argument is that might is right, and in the futureless new world the ones who are most ruthless, from Beijing to Riyadh and Moscow, will flourish.
One small, first, but hopefully important step has been taken by the human rights lawyer and author Philippe Sands, who is trying to create a Nuremberg-style tribunal for those who began this war, not merely for war crimes but for having started a completely unprovoked invasion in the first place. In the meantime, however, there’s a joke going round pro-Putin circles inside Russia:
Two Russian soldiers are drinking champagne in Russian-occupied Paris, the whole of Europe conquered. “Did you hear?” one smiles to the other. “We lost the information war.” Such humor is its own form of propaganda: helping push Russians away from the thought that the “special operation” isn’t going quite as planned. But it highlights a deeper truth: in wartime, propaganda of the deed outweighs propaganda of the word. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/20/solve-problem-like-putin-writers-russia-ukraine-oliver-bullough-peter-pomerantsev?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Ukraine Borodyanka
Oriana:
As has been pointed out many times, Russia has never had a reckoning with the crimes committed by the Soviet Union — which continues to be glorified, with Stalin adored as the greater leader who won WW2. Russia never officially acknowledged that Stalin was a monster like Hitler, an architect of Great Terror (think of the Gulag Archipelago) and the Holodomor — the artificially produced great famine that killed more than three million Ukrainians. And he was also complicit in beginning World War 2 (though trusting the Nazi really backfired).
Nor was Lenin innocent of atrocities — but he too is still glorified, his body preserved and piously displayed in a mausoleum.
De-nazification of Germany is regarded as a great success, but think how long it really took. And the first step was to acknowledge that the Nazi committed crimes against humanity, and to punish the main perpetrators. That why the Nuremberg trials were so important. Nothing similar ever took place in Russia, a holy country that could do no wrong.
Mary: A SYSTEM IN THE THROES OF ITS OWN COLLAPSE
The idea that Putin sees his world as a broken one that must be healed by violence succinctly states both the error and impossibility of his project. Violence cannot heal anything, only destroy. It is not a creative force. What his invasion of Ukraine has done is lay bare the bankruptcy of the Russian state, hollowed out by massive corruption at every level, until there is nothing at all behind the curtain, the illusion of military power dispelled completely by putting it into action. It may come off as ludicrously inept, that paper tiger, but there's plenty of suffering to follow. Lies, ineptitude and manipulation all help to make frustrated, angry, hungry, poorly led, poorly armed, desperate soldiers ready to rape and pillage, sabotage their own poor equipment and plow down their own generals. War crimes...and crimes beyond war...soldiers unaware of the dangers of the Chernobyl area because the truth was never revealed about that disaster, digging trenches in contaminated soil, kicking up radioactive dust, coming down with radiation sickness.
None of these lives matter to Putin, his own soldiers a disposable resource used to eradicate people he wants to reduce to nothing. No more Ukraine, no more Ukranians.
That Russia has not dealt with its own history, the horrors of Stalin, and in fact has a great nostalgia for him is certainly a major factor allowing the horrors of Putin. But, truly, how many states, how many national cultures, have even attempted, much less succeeded at the kind of assessment and coming to terms with their own history evidenced in Germany?? This reckoning with history is a bridge to the future...one that must be built to avoid eternal repetition (and intensification) of the worst evils of the past. This fantasy of restoring the "greatness" of a past viewed with the mystifying, distorting, intoxicating lens of nostalgia leads only backwards. Involvement with this fantasy of past greatness is a kind of intoxication with falsehoods, with a past that never was as it is remembered, with a dream of that past that can only recreate itself as nightmare.
In the US it entails nostalgia for the slave state, Jim Crow, segregation, the exclusion of women from work and the vote, the refusal of basic human rights to LGBT persons, women, people of color, anyone who is not a white English-speaking Christian.
Nostalgia for racism, nationalism, xenophobia, sexism, ignorance and inequality. Here these are all part of an active struggle we have a chance of working our way through, though the result, the future, is far from assured. In Russia all power has been directed to suppress and avoid that struggle, no matter how many have to be poisoned, shot, thrown out of windows, imprisoned, tortured, starved or bombed. A tragedy. A global threat. A human disaster. A system in the throes of its own collapse.
Joe: PUTIN’S POWER FAILURE
To form a vision for a nation is to envision the delegation of power and shared prosperity for business and tradesmen. To share wealth requires a dictator to control his greed for wealth and power. Without self-control, the dictator spends his time protecting himself and his authority. Thus, Putin’s lack of vision is his failure to understand how to use his power.
Egypt and Rome are among the most famous ancient great empires. They organized their power structure to use economic prosperity to ensure loyalty. Unlike the use of force, the ruler’s system does not require hands-on control. It depends on economics to manage a power hierarchy and minimize the desire for revolution.
The emperor’s power came not from fear alone but from their control over wealth. They formed a system allowing the military and the bureaucrats to collect taxes and fees. Over time a system developed that made graft profitable. The emperor ignored a small amount of graft, allowing those in the imperial power grid to live a more comfortable lifestyle.
The system worked fine as long those located downstream from the ruler controlled their greed. When those along the power chain became overly greedy, the authorities executed them. Of course, assassinations and military coups removed rulers, but the power control system remained long as the empire functioned.
To join a revolt, the revolutionary risk losing their family and lifestyle. The system confined the size of businesses to a family enterprise. Although families grew large, they found their prosperity secured by not challenging the king’s power. Today, large corporations remain independent of rulers by controlling wealth.
Lacking a system like that of ancient Rome forces Putin to spend his time defending his position as he protects himself from those who are nearly equally wealthy and powerful. Inserting himself in a self-made iron bubble, he is unable to trust his own judgment on the trustworthiness of his advisors. Thus, any whistle-blowers who uncover a plot against him go unheard.
Micromanagement is a frequent problem for dictators. Hitler studied Mussolini’s writings, and scholars considered him the architect of the modern-day oligarchy. He misinterpreted the Roman economic system and believed the emperors used direct control. As a result, he never fully exploited the full power of control provided by a little graft.
If we study the Roman emperors, most had no vision except to gain wealth through taxes and conquest. By limiting their control, rulers gave people the freedom to invent and envision a prosperous future. Under their stable regime, great empires produced inventions: tools, temples, aqueducts, roads, and more.
When the dictator becomes power and wealth-centered, he must spend all his time protecting his back. When people spend their time on basic survival, they have nothing to lose and develop a willingness to revolt. The history of emperors teaches us that the most successful allowed their people a degree of freedom where greed worked the most effectively.
Oriana:
“A degree of freedom where greed worked most effectively” — that’s brilliant.
Putin has an additional problem: rather than an unavoidable amount of limited graft — what you call “effective greed” — he has overwhelming levels of excess greed and corruption at all levels. Thus, the oligarchs entrusted with the funds to modernize the armed forces used those funds to buy mega yachts and villas, both in Russia but especially abroad, say Italy, and various foreign investments such as real estate or soccer clubs in the UK. None of it went to build more prosperity in Russia. And considering that Putin is the thief-in-chief, everyone feels emboldened to steal. This is the road to wealth for the few and misery for the many.
Putin did have a vision of restoring Russia to its former position as a global superpower, with the former territory of the Soviet Union restored to it. It turns out that military might is very expensive, and Russia doesn’t have the the kind of economy that can support a large military equipped with the latest weapons. As for its nuclear weapons, they were inherited from the Soviet Union, and we may doubt if proper maintenance has been performed over the last thirty years.
Putin’s vision of Russian glory is a castle in the air, without the industrial might that accounted for the success of Nazi Germany — up to a point. Russian account of their victory entirely omits the fact that the West (chiefly the U.S) extensively supplied them with weapons, food, and other necessities. This is not to disparage the Russian extremely important contribution to defeating the Nazis— but that contribution came in the form of being wiling to suffer enormous casualties. Stalin didn’t care how many million would be killed or disabled. Eighty percent of the casualties were on the Western front.
Unfortunately Putin seems mentally unhinged to the point of believing his own propaganda. And no one dares to tell him the truth. There were some ancient emperors like that too, too greedy to allow “effective greed” — but generally they managed to get assassinated before doing too much damage to the empire. Putin takes paranoid precautions to protect his life. But the lives of others mean nothing to him. That may prove the greatest source of his undoing.
*
RUSSIA INHERITED THE SOVIET NAVY, BUT WITHOUT THE BUDGET TO MAINTAIN IT
~ The Russians inherited this colossally large force after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet military was the largest in the world. The Russians had these huge forces to maintain; dozens of warships, hundreds of submarines, tens of thousands of tanks. However, the military budget available to them went from $350 billion per annum (2014 US dollars) in 1988 to around $20 billion in 1998.
That’s a fall of 94%. During the 1990s and 2000s much of the Russian navy just sat in port and rusted. Even at their current levels, that are much higher (about $80 billion) the costs of refitting their large warships are crippling, and they also have to purchase newer platforms that are very expensive. Basically the Russian military is drowning under the weight of its legacy Soviet systems. We also have to remember that the vast majority of the Russian navy is what they have left over from the Soviet Navy. Virtually all of it was built in the 1970s and 1980s. Look at the commission dates; Udaloy 1980, Sovrymenny 1978 (although all of the older boats have been decommissioned), Slava 1982, Kirov 1980 (although the late 80s boats are still in commission), Kuznetsov 1985, Krivak 1982, Neustrashimyy 1993. None of their large warships were built after the collapse of the Soviet Union, only frigates and corvettes.
What does that mean for reliability? Well old stuff, especially machinery, breaks more often. Military platforms, generally speaking, get more expensive to run as they age, especially after they get past 20 years old. As things break more often your consumption of spare parts increases with time. This is only exacerbated if your production line has been shut down for 30 years. Now, I can already tell that people are going to advance the very typical counterargument that “western warships are often quite old as well”. Take the Nimitz class, it has a projected lifespan of 50 years. USS Nimitz was commissioned in 1975 after all. Well, we need to remember that economic and financial catastrophe that happened to the Russians.
Older warships need to go through regular refits in order to maintain reliability. Sometimes this includes putting new engines in the vessel, like literally cut open the side and put brand spanking new engines in the ship.
Because the Russians have been trying to maintain the military of a superpower with the budget of a middle power they just haven’t been able to upgrade (or maintain) their warships in the same way as the West or Chinese have. Take the Moskva that was just sunk. She had only been through one “major” refit since she was commissioned, and this was back in 2000.
The reason the Russians have not upgraded their warships in the same way other navies do is simply because their current force is not economically sustainable, or in other words, they don’t have the money. That also means they almost certainly lack the resources to maintain their vessels properly, especially as they age and become less reliable. The neglect of the 1990s and 2000s will almost certainly have also had a deleterious effect on reliability. Something like the Kuznetsov is almost certainly in desperate need of a massive refit, including the large scale replacement of most of its machinery, not to mention its other systems.
To sum up, the Russian navy (indeed the Russian military as a whole) is not like other navies. Its a rump superpower, the shattered remnant of the mighty Soviet Navy that endured decades of neglect, and now one with the economic resources of Saudi Arabia or India. It is being suffocated under the deadweight of its Soviet inheritance, which is only becoming more and more expensive to maintain as the Soviet Union fades away into the increasingly distant past.
These once great symbols of Soviet power, like the Kuznetsov, are mere follies, remnants of a former greatness now long gone, and one the Russian military is clearly reluctant to relinquish. Arguably, what Russia really needs is a military that is more in line with its current reality; one that is 30% the size and able to be fully modernized. But that is a very unlikely path for Moscow to walk down, especially under a leader like Putin who has built some of his legitimacy on restoring Russia to its position of greatness. Accepting that Russia is no longer a superpower may be just too tough a pill to swallow. ~
Tim Blizzard, Quora
"Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, I refuse to believe that the Russian military is as incompetent as it's pretending to be in Ukraine. Are there any credible theories as to what's really going on?"
~ The Russian military has been pillaged and raped for 30 years. Ten years of total neglect after the fall of the USSR, followed by 20 years of Putin’s “reforms”, which have mostly involved enriching various oligarchs.
This is the inevitable results of endemic corruption at every level. Nobody knows how deep this rot goes. Numbers are inflated at every level. There’s a meme about “When you realize you sold half the fuel, and Yuri sold the other half”.
Admiral Makarov, another ship recently struck by two Ukrainian missiles
There’s clearly elements in Russia that don’t want this war, and are either not doing their jobs, or actively supporting Ukraine.
Putin doesn’t understand the military, at all. He still thinks like a spy.
Putin doesn’t understand warfare outside of Soviet era WWII stories. War has evolved since the 1980’s, and Russian soldiers are neither equipped nor trained to operate in a modern battlefield.
Russia! = USSR. Russia is smaller, poorer, and has less resources, especially human resources.
See, it didn’t used to be like this. Russia’s (well, the USSRs) time in Afghanistan showed them as a competent, modern force. Russia spent ten years in Afghanistan and lost some 14,000 men. It was an experience that really wasn’t unlike the US experience there. (Sure, bloodier, but remember we lost in Vietnam with 58,000 dead)
But this isn’t the USSR from 1989. Or from 1942 or 1922 or 1895. This is Russia circa 2022 that has used its military as a slush fund to buy expensive yachts. Do that in any of those other time periods, and you would be shot by the end of the week. In Putin’s Russia, you get promoted.
That’s what happened to the Russian military. Right there. That and dozens of other yachts and cars and boarding schools in France and the fuel that went into Private Yuri’s Lada. ~
Chris Everett, Quora
Oriana:
What really astonished me was the photo of egg cartons instead of special extra armor on a tank, and the news that instead of body armor, at least some soldiers ended up with a stiff piece of cardboard imitating a bullet-stopping vest. One just can’t make up this kind of stuff. It seems too ridiculous to be real.
Imagine how a soldier feels putting a piece of cardboard over his chest instead of real body armor.
It’s also interesting that Russia reported 14,400 killed through 10 years of war in Afghanistan (the real number is probably greater), while the number of Russians killed in Ukraine is larger — perhaps as many as 20,000. Add to this the wounded who can no longer fight and some of whom will remain disabled and be a burden on Russia for many years to come, and the picture is a sorry one indeed. Afghanistan, “the graveyard of empires,” is regarded as having playing a significant role in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It simply couldn’t sustain this protracted and expensive war.
Religion: pro-war and pro-infection (Russian soldiers suffering from radiation sickness outside of a hospital in Belarus -- they dug trenches around Chernobyl, remember?)
Lilith:
I wonder about the condition of the Russian nukes. I understand nukes need regular maintenance to stay in a state of readiness. The US invests a great deal in that. But do the Russians? I suppose contracts are given to oligarchs to maintain the nuclear arsenal, and we can imagine how that goes.
Oriana:
*
IT’S NOT THE EXPANSION OF NATO THAT PUTIN REALLY FEARS
~ The reality is that there is a level at which the Russian propaganda line of Putin feeling threatened by ‘Eastern expansion’ is true. However, the Eastern expansion Putin truly fears is not of NATO, but of Liberal Democracy. He fears that if a people who the Russians think of as ‘little brothers’ grow far more successful and prosperous than the citizens of ‘great Russia’, then his own people will start to get ideas. Russians may come to conclude that a system of gangster-fascism that brings corruption and poverty and is predicated on mystical musings about the ‘Russian soul’ is not so appealing after all. They may look at a prosperous and liberal neighborly nation, whose people they think (thought) of as brotherly, and ask themselves “why not us?” If there could be a revolution at the Maidan in 2014, then why not one at Red Square in 2024?
Living well is the most dangerous thing democratic people can do when neighboring a tyrant. It’s an existential terror for autocrats everywhere, which they wrap up in paranoid conspiracy theories about the CIA and ‘color revolutions’. But the reality is that tyrants fear above all what their own people will do to them, should they reject the tyrant’s proffered deal of reduced freedoms in return for reduced quality of life. They fear the example that a prosperous democratic neighbor provides.
So they will do anything in their power to prevent such a nation from prospering. ~ Alan Gould, quora
* * *
WHY WOMEN PREFER ABORTION OVER ADOPTION (2019)
~ Adoption is not a reasonable option for all pregnant women. Some girls and women would imperil their health if they carried a baby to term. Many pro-abortion-rights people believe it is immoral to compel a woman to carry a pregnancy she does not want, especially if that pregnancy is a result of rape or incest. And some studies show that abortion is medically safer than childbirth.
But even among American women for whom carrying a child to term would be safe, (adoption
is a remarkably unpopular course of action. Though exact estimates for
all women are hard to come by, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention reports that among never-married women, about 9 percent chose
adoption before 1973, when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. The figure was higher for white women: 19 percent.) By the mid-1980s, the figure had dropped to 2 percent, and it was just 1 percent by 2002, the last year the CDC data captured. In 2014, only 18,000 children under the age of 2 were placed with adoption agencies. By comparison, there are about 1 million abortions each year.
The available research on adoption’s relative unpopularity is still limited. But the sociological studies that exist suggest that some women who are deciding between adoption and abortion find adoption to be more emotionally painful than abortion. And the reason complicates the narrative around abortion on both sides.
For the most part, women are not choosing abortion instead of adoption. In fact, both adoption and abortion rates have fallen over time, while births to unmarried women have risen over the past few decades. This suggests to some researchers that women are choosing between abortion and parenting, and more and more, unmarried women are choosing parenting. “Women just generally aren’t interested in adoption as a reproductive choice,” says Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist at the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health research group of the University of California at San Francisco. “It’s an extremely rare pregnancy decision.”
The move away from adoption is part of the historical trend toward reduced societal stigma for unwed mothers. Today, women who are inclined to go through with a pregnancy are simply keeping their babies. In a 1992 story about the drop in adoption placements, Debra Kalmuss, a professor at the Columbia University School of Public Health, told The New York Times that in past decades, many unmarried women had been sequestered during their pregnancies. The babies were placed with adoption agencies, and the women returned to their normal life. “Relinquishing a baby for adoption really ceased to be a mainstream choice after abortion became legal,” Kalmuss told the paper.
Meanwhile, many pregnant women who don’t wish to become mothers seem to have a dim view of the adoption process, according to a study that Sisson and her colleagues published in 2017 in the journal Women’s Health Issues. The researchers relied on the Turnaway Study, a five-year, longitudinal look at women who sought abortions at 30 U.S. clinics from 2008 to 2010. The authors interviewed 956 women, 161 of whom went on to give birth, and 15 of whom chose adoption. They also had more in-depth conversations with 31 of those women, 16 of whom received abortions, and the rest who did not.
The authors note that the women seem to consider their options sequentially: They first seek abortion, and if they can’t afford or access one, they might then consider adoption. A week after being denied an abortion, 14 percent of the women said they were considering putting the baby up for adoption instead. But ultimately, only 9 percent of the women who were denied an abortion chose adoption. The majority simply went on to parent.
Meanwhile, none of the 16 women who got abortions were at all interested in adoption at any point. Some of their reasons were practical: “Adoption was often ruled out because they felt it was not right for them, because their partner would not be interested, because they had health reasons for not wanting to carry to term, or because they believed there were already enough children in need of homes,” the authors write.
The mothers who did choose adoption ultimately reported that they were happy with their decision. But Sisson told me that, at least initially, “adoption can be deeply traumatic. Uniformly, the birth mothers experience grief after placement. It’s a very hard choice and one that a lot of women are not interested in making.”
In the study, several women expressed an unwillingness to part with a baby they had carried to term and given birth to. “I had too many feelings for her to give [her] to someone I barely knew,” one woman said. Some said they would feel guilty placing their children with adoption agencies, and one even imagined the fully grown child coming back one day and interrogating her about her choice. “By the time they are delivering the child, women feel bonded to their pregnancies and their children,” Sisson said.
Sisson also performed a small study on mothers who placed their children with adoption agencies from 1962 to 2009. These women, she writes, were also largely choosing between abortion and parenting. “Rarely was adoption the preferred course of action; it emerged as a solution when women felt they had no other options,” Sisson wrote. Even among these women, who were not recruited from abortion clinics, a majority of the participants described their adoption experiences as “predominantly negative.” Most of the negative experiences involved “closed” adoptions, in which the birth parents have no contact with the child. Today, “open” adoptions are more common, and many experts and families believe that they create healthier situations for parents and children. But arguably every kind of adoption comes with its own complications.
Sisson’s findings echo a study published in 2008 of 38 women who were getting abortions. It found that a quarter of the women had considered adoption, but they largely regarded it as too emotionally distressing. “Respondents said that the thought of one’s child being out in the world without knowing whether it was being taken care of or who was taking care of it was more guilt inducing than having an abortion,” wrote the authors, who are researchers from the abortion-rights think tank the Guttmacher Institute. In another Guttmacher study of women seeking abortions, in 2005, one-third of women considered adoption but “concluded that it was a morally unconscionable option because giving one’s child away is wrong.”
Like in Sisson’s paper, one respondent in the 2008 study referenced the bond she expected to form with the baby as the factor that prevented her from going with adoption. “If I go that far, I’m attached. I cannot just give my baby away to someone,” said an unmarried 24-year-old mother of two.
What’s more, many people view adoption as “a difficult decision for the mother,” Johnson told me via email. “Although the general public views adoption as a good outcome for the child and the adopting family, the idea that adoption promotes the woman’s best interests is not as fully embraced by those that are on [the] front lines [of] options counseling—or by the mother herself or her family.”
In the end, this line of research is not especially vindicating for either the defenders or opponents of abortion rights. Rightly or wrongly, very few women who desire abortions actually see adoption as a favorable alternative. In fact, some of these papers end with policy recommendations along these lines: “The ongoing promotion of adoption by the American anti-abortion movement is unlikely to impact women’s abortion decisions, because very few women pursuing abortion are interested in adoption,” Sisson and her colleagues write.
But the reason the women don’t choose adoption is not great for the pro-choice side, either. Some of these women report feeling bonded with their fetuses, or at least too attached to give up the resulting baby. That’s an inconvenient point if you feel that a fetus is nothing more than a collection of cells, and that what happens to it before viability is basically immaterial.
Together, the results suggest that if the rate of unintended pregnancies remains constant, but abortion restrictions are tightened, the U.S. won’t necessarily see a spike in domestic adoptions. Instead, there are likely be more mothers who initially didn’t want to give birth to their babies, but decide to raise them nonetheless.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/why-more-women-dont-choose-adoption/589759/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2NzGdtuwXZTQ0WWtBteEeB05UlYhcFxtybl36ObJ2V222o3c49zoT6y58
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A FEW FACTS ABOUT ABORTION:
~ Current abortion rates are lower than what they were in 1973 and are now less than half what they were at their peak in the early 1980s, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization that supports abortion rights.
In 2017, pregnancy rates for females age 24 or below hit their lowest recorded levels, reflecting a long-term decline in pregnancy rates among females 24 or below.
Overall, in 2017, pregnancy rates for females of reproductive age hit their lowest recorded levels, with 87 pregnancies per 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Over 90% of abortions happen in the first trimester (by 13 weeks).
Medical researchers agree a fetus is not capable of experiencing pain until the third trimester, somewhere between 29 or 30 weeks.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/06/1096676197/7-persistent-claims-about-abortion-fact-checked
“As the feminist Ellen Willis once put it, the central question in the abortion debate is not whether a fetus is a person, but whether a woman is.”
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And now some comic relief:
“Science has discovered that the universe is finite, which is good news for people who never remember where they left their keys.” ~ Woody Allen
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PARENTS HAVE A LIMITED EFFECT ON HOW THEIR CHILDREN TURN OUT
~ Parents want what’s best for their children — whether they’re young or old, rich or poor, married or divorced. Shelves of parenting books promise to show people how to address the difficult decisions that parents face every day and how to achieve the best outcomes.
Whether they’re about tiger parenting or free-range parenting, parenting like the Dutch or parenting like the Germans, these books share one consistent message: If your child isn’t succeeding, you’re doing something wrong.
As it turns out, the science supports a totally different and ultimately empowering message: Trying to predict how a child will turn out based on choices made by their parents is like trying to predict a hurricane from the flap of a butterfly’s wings.
Do you know about the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings in China, perturbing the atmosphere just enough to shift wind currents that they end up fueling a hurricane in the Caribbean six weeks later?
If you are a parent, you are the butterfly flapping your wings. Your child is the hurricane, a breathtaking force of nature. You will shape the person your child becomes — just like the butterfly shapes the hurricane — in complex, seemingly unpredictable but powerful ways. The hurricane wouldn’t exist without the butterfly.
You might ask, “What about all the successful parents who have successful children? Or the struggling parents who have struggling children?”
They seem to show the power of parenting, but children are shaped by many forces that they grow up with and that are often intertwined — forces like genes, peers and culture. This makes it hard to know which forces influence who children become.
Millions of children have been studied to disentangle all those shaping forces. Studies have followed identical twins and fraternal twins and plain-old siblings growing up together or adopted and raised apart. Growing up in the same home does not make children noticeably more alike in how successful they are, how happy or self-reliant they are, and so on.
In other words, imagine if you’d been taken at birth and raised next door by the family to the left and your brother or sister had been raised next door by the family to the right. By and large, that would have made you no more similar or different than growing up together under the same roof.
On the one hand, these findings seem unbelievable. Think about all the ways that parents differ from home to home and how often they argue and whether they helicopter and how much they shower their children with love. You’d think it would matter enough to make children growing up in the same home more alike than if they’d been raised apart, but it doesn’t.
In 2015, a meta-analysis — or a study that analyzes many, many studies — found this pattern across thousands of studies following over 14 million twin pairs in 39 countries. They measured over 17,000 outcomes, and the researchers concluded that every single one of the outcomes was heritable. Genes influence who children become, but genes didn’t explain everything.
Environment mattered too but it wasn’t enough to shape children growing up in the same home to be more alike.
Some people have looked at these findings and concluded that it means parenting doesn’t matter, that you would’ve become the same person you are today, regardless of who raised you.
On the other hand — or really I should say on the other hands because there are many caveats — these findings are not all that shocking when you think about how the same parent can shape different children in different ways. For example, one child might find it helpful when her mother provides structure, while her sister finds it stifling. One child could think his parents are caring when they ask questions about his friends, but his brother thinks they’re nosy. One child might view a divorce as a tragedy, while his sister sees it as a relief.
Same event, different experience.
But just because an event doesn’t shape people in the same way doesn’t mean it had no effect. Your parenting could be shaping your children — just not in the ways that lead them to become more alike. Your parenting could be leading your first child to become more serious and your second child to become more relaxed. Or, it could lead your first child to want to be like you and your second child to want to be nothing like you.
You are flapping your butterfly wings to your hurricane children.
I know this isn’t typically how we think about parenting, and it doesn’t make for simple advice. At this point, you may be like the students in my class who sometimes say, “OK, we get it — development is complicated, and maybe it’s not worth studying because it’s too complicated.”
But meaning can be made from chaos. Scientists now understand how babies go from apparent lumps to walking, talking, thinking, social independent beings. They understand this process well enough to intervene to test newborns for a genetic condition that once led to mental retardation. Scientists are also developing an ever more sophisticated understanding of how parents could shape their children’s futures.
So what can we do with all these findings?
First, know that parents do matter.
That might seem obvious, but smart people have argued otherwise.
Second, know that how parents matter is complex and difficult to predict.
For anyone who’s ever been a parent: Stop blaming yourself as if you’re in control of your child’s path. You have influence — but you don’t have control.
For anyone who’s ever been a child: Stop blaming your parents, or at least stop thinking you must be defined by them.
And stop blaming other parents. A recent survey of thousands of parents revealed that 90 percent of mothers and 85 percent of fathers feel judged, and close to half of them feel judged all or nearly all the time by people they know and by complete strangers. Even when parents do their best, you can’t satisfy everybody. There’s only so much time.
This is especially true for “dragon parents”. Author Emily Rapp came up with this term after her baby was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease. She knew then and there that Ronan would never walk or talk and he would likely die before the age of 4.
My firstborn son was born with a condition that prevents the intestine from absorbing nutrients or water for the body. It affects only 1 in 5 million babies, and it’s so rare that one doctor felt confident telling us that we would be screwed if that’s what our baby had. He was also the one who had to break the news to us later.
Dragon parents have a lot to say about parenting, even if they know their children will die young or even if we have no idea whether our babies will live.
Rapp wrote:
“We will not launch our children into a bright and promising future, but see them into early graves … This requires a new ferocity, a new way of thinking, a new animal. We are dragon parents, fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself … Parenting, I’ve come to understand, is about loving my child today. Now. In fact, for any parent anywhere, that’s all there is.”
I had thought that my expertise in child development would help prepare me for becoming a parent. Instead, becoming a parent helped me see the science in a whole new light.
Third, appreciate how powerful your moments with them can be because of what they mean for you and your child right now — not because of what they mean for your child long-term, which you cannot know.
Activist Andrew Solomon noted that “even though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.” Maybe we’d be less sad if we could let go of the notion that our children’s futures are in our control.
If we could embrace the complexity of our children’s development, it could transform how we approach the parenting decisions we face each day and empower us to realize how much more there is to having a child rather than trying to shape a specific outcome. I’ve learned to appreciate every moment with my firstborn son — who is thriving at the age of 14 — and with his younger brother and the unique paths they are each taking.
The science of parents and children — us butterflies and our hurricanes — can free people to focus on what is most important and meaningful in our lives. This can make the experience of being a parent and the experience of having been a child more realistic and more satisfying. ~
https://ideas.ted.com/why-parents-should-stop-blaming-themselves-for-how-their-kids-turn-out/?utm_campaign=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_content=2022-3-25&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR21uXI09NVmOP_hZj1PG_hCfWwqWijKurz2hXR6XnwIw2UyJSm4k5TCbPo
Oriana:
“You do have an influence, but you don’t have control” is I think the most important message of this article. This is important, because it's only human for many parents to have "great expectations": their children will grow up to be successful professionals, will have happy marriages and successful children of their own. There is no guarantee of that. That was one of the favorite talking points of a friend of mine, much missed, who was a mother of five. In fact, she said, in a large family, someone is always likely to be undergoing a crisis of some sort, whether it's a divorce or drug addiction or financial problems.
And she was the sort of mother who read to them at bedtime and sang while she cooked. She put her family ahead of everything else. But she was also wise enough to say, "Each child will turn out different, and you have no control over it."
Mary: A FAMILY IS LIKE A CULTURE TO ITSELF
The idea that parents influence but don't control how their children "turn out" is certainly true, and the reality is much richer, more complicated and more nuanced than any formula can suggest. My sisters and I have spoken about how it sometimes seems we couldn’t have grown up in the same house...how even our memories of the very same things and events are so different. In a household with seven children, two parents and a grandmother, there were many subsets of relationships, and the relationship between each child and adult was different. These also grew and changed over time, as we grew and changed. We were all "raised Catholic" and went to parochial schools k through 12. But no two of us have the same religious beliefs and practice. The range is from fairly devout and churchgoing, to atheist, and the two at the farthest poles are also the closest friends.
There are values we couldn't avoid, it seems, like our father's work ethic, but our politics and tastes are pretty varied. However, only one of us did not pursue college education, even though it was beyond our parents ability to afford. Four of us had careers in the medical professions. Parental influence, I think so, though we were never helicoptered, urged, or even encouraged. When I said I wanted to go to college they said they couldn't see how, apologetically, there was no money for it. As far as our educations went, we were pretty much self directed, and found our own ways. At that time there was an abundance of available strategies: scholarships, grants, work studies, state colleges, and loans. And we managed without accumulating the crushing loan debt so many carry now. Times were different.
A family is like a culture to itself, within the larger culture and environment. The mistake may be to assume there ever even can be a way to control the "products" of that culture, in any sure way, no matter how much you might want to. Too many variables, all in motion, all the time.
Oriana:
My late friend Una, a mother of five, often said about children: "They all turn out different, and there is nothing you can do about it." And no one would deny that she was speaking from experience.
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DOES ANYONE DARE BE OPTIMISTIC ABOUT THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY?
~ Why is the Anglo-Saxon world so individualistic, and why has China leaned towards collectivism? Was it Adam Smith, or the Bill of Rights; communism and Mao? According to at least one economist, there might be an altogether more surprising explanation: the difference between wheat and rice. You see, it’s fairly straightforward for a lone farmer to sow wheat in soil and live off the harvest. Rice is a different affair: it requires extensive irrigation, which means cooperation across parcels of land, even centralized planning. A place where wheat grows favors the entrepreneur; a place where rice grows favors the bureaucrat.
The influence of the “initial conditions” that shape societies’ development is what Oded Galor has been interested in for the past 40 years. He believes they reverberate across millennia and even seep into what we might think of as our personalities. Whether or not you have a “future-oriented mindset” – in other words, how much money you save and how likely you are to invest in your education – can, he argues, be partly traced to what kinds of crops grew well in your ancestral homelands. (Where high-yield species such as barley and rice thrive, it pays to sacrifice the immediate gains of hunting by giving over some of your territory to farming. This fosters a longer-term outlook.) Differences in gender equality around the world have their roots in whether land required a plow to cultivate – needing male strength, and relegating women to domestic tasks – or hoes and rakes, which could be used by both sexes.
Galor has been interested in a lot more besides; his book, The Journey of Humanity, stretches from the emergence of Homo sapiens to the present day, and has a lot to say about the future, too. In just over 240 pages it covers our migration out of Africa, the development of agriculture, the Industrial Revolution and the phenomenal growth of the past two centuries. It takes in population change, the climate crisis and global inequality.
There will be inevitable comparisons with Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, not least because this too is a work of “macrohistory” and Galor is also from Israel, though he has taught at Brown University in the US for the past 30 years. “If you’re born in a place that is incredibly rich in history, you understand that you’re part of a long, long lineage. You see the Temple Mount that was there 3,000 years earlier. You’re really walking in history. So the link to earlier stages of development is very much part of my upbringing in Jerusalem.”
The Journey of Humanity is certainly being pitched, at least in terms of impact, as another Sapiens – translation rights have already been sold in 27 languages. But the similarities may be quite superficial. Sapiens was first published when Harari was a young professor, based on a series of lectures to undergraduates. The Journey of Humanity is the culmination of Galor’s career, the recasting of an earlier work, a maths-and-data-heavy book called Unified Growth Theory, in digestible form.
And while Sapiens ends on an equivocal note, warning that present-day civilization teeters between the singularity and Armageddon, the signal characteristic of The Journey of Humanity is its optimism. If you need an evidence-based antidote to doom-scrolling, here it is.
The extraordinary increases in standards of living, huge falls in child mortality, incredible gains in knowledge and technology – these are the products of inexorable forces that are not going anywhere, Galor argues, and will only augment as time goes on. Even pandemics and wars, horrific as they are for the millions caught up in them, “cannot divert the journey of humanity from its long-term path”. Surprisingly, given the circumstances we find ourselves in, the book is highly persuasive: Galor builds his case meticulously, always testing his assumptions against the evidence, and without the sense of agenda-pushing that accompanies other boosterish thinkers – the Steven Pinkers or Francis Fukuyamas of this world.
What sets him apart, perhaps, is a grounding in numbers. “I was an unusual economist in the sense that I always had sort of a deep interest in the mathematics of discrete dynamical systems,” he tells me. Examples of discrete dynamical systems include populations of bacteria or human beings that evolve constrained by things such as food supply or susceptibility to disease. Zooming from his office in Rhode Island, Galor speaks evenly, sounding as though he is always about to break into a half-smile. Like Pinker, he has a shock of silvery hair that approaches his shoulders. “I was sort of an interdisciplinary student, very interested in macro-history, very interested in political science, very interested in economics, and very interested in mathematics. So part of my ability to construct this unified theory of economic growth was those deep mathematical foundations.”
What is his theory, then, and how does it appear to break new ground? Economists have always found it difficult to reconcile two distinct eras. During the first, any increase in resources led only briefly to greater prosperity. More food, for example, meant people could raise more children. But the gains were lost because a bigger population meant everyone had a smaller share of the pie. This is known as the “Malthusian trap” after the gloomy clergyman and demographer Thomas Malthus, and it lasted a couple of hundred thousand years.
Then, suddenly, beginning in the 18th century, everything changed. In an increasingly technological world, it paid to be literate and better trained. As a result, parents focused their resources on raising a smaller number of children equipped with the skills they needed to make it in the world. They were investing in “human capital”, and soon the state did too: quite quickly the whole population became much better educated. That meant it was more likely to invent new things that made it easier to produce wealth, which was in turn plowed back into human capital: a virtuous cycle. The rocket ship of progress took off.
Viewed in this way, the Industrial Revolution was a benign development: less dark satanic mills than sunlit uplands. But what about the hideous conditions, the slums, children put to work in factories because their little hands could reach into the moving parts to clear away debris? Galor argues that industrialization in fact more or less eradicated child labor, and had the added bonus of instigating universal education.
Because of the demands of subsistence living, child labor had been an “intrinsic element of human societies throughout history,” he writes. At the time of the Industrial Revolution, however, it had reached a peak that only further technological change could remedy. It did that in two ways: first, machines quickly became better at doing the kind of basic work children had been used for. Second, the need for a skilled workforce meant that it was in employers’ – and parents’ – interests for children to learn rather than work. Universal education followed, spurred on by industrialists, and opposed only by the landed gentry who realized that if tenant farmers’ children went to school, they would go and get better jobs elsewhere. In any case, Galor’s data shows that “the scourge of child labor first disappeared in the most industrialized nations and, within them, in the most industrialized areas”.
It’s a little harder to see another side effect of industrialization through rose-tinted glasses. A huge increase in pollution made lives dirty and difficult at the time, but has bequeathed an even deadlier legacy to us and future generations: climate change. Can Galor really be optimistic about that too? “So my view is a bit complex,” he says carefully. “What triggered climate change is, yes, pollution created since the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, that revolution created two additional important trends. First, it started a fertility decline that initially occurred in the western world and gradually diffused around the globe. Even India is now having fertility just at replacement level, which is incredible. And then at the same time, we know that this decline in fertility freed an enormous amount of resources for investment in human capital.”
With that comes greater potential for technological progress. “If the growth of population starts to decline, this itself will reduce the current trend of carbon emissions. And then the power of innovation causes me to be confident that perhaps within two or three decades, we will have revolutionary technologies that will reverse those emissions. Now, we cannot envision what these revolutionary technologies will be. But I do believe, as we saw in the context of Covid, that such technologies will emerge and will allow us to prevail.”
If that seems like a stunning gamble, Galor is clear that he’s not for putting all our eggs in a techno-utopian basket. He clarifies that “actions to mitigate carbon emission are critical ingredients in averting the potential catastrophic consequences of climate change”. It’s just that he believes there are two other vital weapons in our arsenal: fertility decline and innovation, both of them inevitable consequences of growth.
Not that he recommends simply watching and hoping; he has policy prescriptions too. In the case of the climate crisis, they come a bit out of left field. Climate policy should not stop at cutting carbon: it should involve pushing hard for gender equality, access to education and the availability of contraceptives, to help drive forward the decline in fertility. Demographic advocacy like this, he says, might be better received by developing countries than an insistence on regulating industry, since “they provide the benefits of economic growth alongside environmental preservation”.
Growth is good, then, but no one needs reminding that its benefits haven’t been felt equally. Explaining the different trajectories of countries since the 18th century takes up as much room in The Journey of Humanity as the mechanism of growth itself. The basic idea is that those places that were a little bit further behind in the run up to the Industrial Revolution soon found themselves left in the dust. This is where the “initial conditions” really came into their own. So, perhaps your land had been less suitable for growing high-yield crops. Or maybe you lived in a part of the world beset by livestock-bothering Tsetse flies. Politics and institutions played their part too: in 1485, for example, the Ottoman sultan banned movable type printing using the Arabic script in order to protect religious interests, ceding a head start to northern European nations that took up the invention with alacrity.
As progress gathered pace, countries that started out with an advantage pressed it ruthlessly, enslaving and colonizing others, and using the expropriated resources to turbo-charge their own growth. Once industrialization started in earnest, the colonized were essentially held in a state of arrested development, farming to provide food and raw materials for their imperial masters, whose economies were freed up even further to specialize in advanced technologies.
There’s one remaining part of the jigsaw. To explain it, Galor starts with a colorful analogy. He asks us to imagine a land mass that has five different colors of parrot on it: blue, yellow, black, green and red. A hurricane hits, and some of the parrots are blown on to a neighboring island. It’s unlikely that every kind of parrot would have been picked up by the winds; perhaps only the green, blue and red ones, making this breakaway population less diverse. In time, a few of these parrots migrate to another island, and again they represent only a subset of the population: just the blue and red ones. This third population is even less diverse.
Galor argues that this is precisely what happened when Homo sapiens left Africa, and the pattern was repeated with each onward migration. Africa is the most diverse place on the planet, genomically and culturally, and diversity has a knock-on effect on prosperity. It accounts for about a quarter of the otherwise unexplained variation between nations, Galor calculates; in contrast, diseases (the Tsetse fly, malaria etc) account for one seventh, and political institutions (democracies versus autocracies) less than one tenth.
What is it about diversity that makes such a big impact? Social cohesiveness – low diversity, in other words – can have its benefits, particularly in earlier phases of development. But in the modern world, or the boiling kettle phase, cultural fluidity is the greatest driver of innovation. “Like biological breeding, the mating of ideas … benefits from a broader pool of individuals,” he writes. That mating of ideas gives rise to new policies, new inventions and enhanced productivity, stoking the engine of growth.
Culturally fluid societies are also more likely to be able to adapt to changing conditions.
Galor believes, not uncontroversially, that there might be a sweet spot between homogeneity and fragmentation, where diversity and cross-pollination thrive without undermining social cohesiveness. Countries may sit outside of that spot in either direction: they can be stultifyingly monocultural, or fractious and prone to civil strife.
In 2012, he was challenged by a group of academics who warned that the suggestion of an “ideal level of genetic variation” could be misused to “justify indefensible practices such as ethnic cleansing”. Galor responded that the criticism was based on a “gross misinterpretation” of his conclusions. And the policy prescriptions they generate are, on the face of them, benign. “If Bolivia, which has one of the least diverse populations, would foster cultural diversity, its per capita income could increase as much as fivefold,” he writes. “If Ethiopia – one of the world’s most diverse countries – were to adopt policies to enhance social cohesion and tolerance of difference, it could double its current income per capita.”
Rather than saying that genes equal destiny, Galor’s message appears to be that whatever the circumstances you have inherited, change is possible. It’s an analysis of the human condition that leads not to a counsel of despair, but a new set of tools he believes can help build a better future. But is that all wishful thinking? I ask whether his innately sunny disposition means we should distrust his intuitions. “I think that I do have a positive outlook in my personal life. Naturally that must be projected on to the way that I view the world.”
“But when I’m projecting my optimism,” he adds, “I’m projecting it based on my study of history.” Galor contends that his work goes beyond intuition, even beyond theory: “This has all been explored empirically, in a rigorous way.”
It’s tempting, particularly at this moment in history, to bask in a silver-haired sage’s confidence in his facts and figures. Maybe that in itself should cause our skeptical antennae to twitch. For many, though, a dose of faith in human progress will be hard to resist. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/apr/30/an-optimists-guide-to-the-future-the-economist-who-believes-that-human-ingenuity-will-save-the-world?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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THE DARK SIDE OF LOVE
~ We can all agree that, on balance, and taking everything into account, love is a wonderful thing. For many, it is the point of life. I have spent more than a decade researching the science behind human love and, rather than becoming immune to its charms, I am increasingly in awe of its complexity and its importance to us. It infiltrates every fiber of our being and every aspect of our daily lives. It is the most important factor in our mental and physical health, our longevity and our life satisfaction. And regardless of who the object of our love is – lover or friend, dog or god – these effects are largely underpinned, in the first instance, by the set of addictive neurochemicals supporting the bonds we create: oxytocin, dopamine, beta-endorphin and serotonin.
This suite of chemicals makes us feel euphoric and calm, they draw us towards those we love, and reward us for investing in our relationships, even when the going gets tough. Love feels wonderful but ultimately it is a form of biological bribery, a cunning evolutionary trick to make sure we cooperate and those all-important genes continue down the generations. The joy it brings is wonderful but is merely a side-effect. Its goal is to ensure our survival, and for this reason happiness is not always its end point. Alongside its joys, there exists a dark side.
Love is ultimately about control. It’s about using chemical bribery to make sure we stick around, cooperate and invest in each other, and particularly in the survival-critical relationships we have with our lovers, children and close friends. This is an evolutionary control of which we are hardly aware, and it brings many positive benefits.
But the addictive nature of these chemicals, and our visceral need for them, means that love also has a dark side. It can be used as a tool of exploitation, manipulation and abuse. Indeed, in part what may separate human love from the love experienced by other animals is that we can use love to manipulate and control others. Our desire to believe in the fairy tale means we rarely acknowledge the undercurrents but, as a scholar of love, I would be negligent if I did not consider it. Arguably our greatest and most intense life experience can be used against us, sometimes leading us to continue relationships with negative consequences in direct opposition to our survival.
We are all experts in love. The science I write about is always grounded in the lived experience of my subjects whose thoughts I collect as keenly as their empirical data. It might be the voice of the new father as he describes holding his firstborn, or the Catholic nun explaining how she works to maintain her relationship with God, or the a-romantic detailing what it’s like living in a world apparently obsessed with the romantic love that they do not feel. I begin every interview in the same way, by asking what they think love is. Their answers are often surprising, always illuminating and invariably positive, and remind me that not all the answers to what love is can be found on the scanner screen or in the lab. But I will also ask them to consider whether love can ever be negative. The vast majority say no for, if love has a darker side, it is not love, and this is an interesting point to contemplate. But if they do acknowledge the possibility of love having a less sunny side, their go-to example is jealousy.
Jealousy is an emotion and, as with all emotions, it evolved to protect us, to alert us to a potential benefit or threat. It works its magic at three levels: the emotional, the cognitive and the behavioral. Physiology also throws its hat into the ring making you feel nauseous, faint or flushed. When we feel jealousy, it is generally urging us to do one of three things: to cut off the rival, to prevent our partner’s defection by redoubling our efforts, or to cut our losses and leave the relationship. All have evolved to make sure we balance the costs and benefits of the relationship. Investing time, energy and reproductive effort in the wrong partner is seriously damaging to your reproductive legacy and chances of survival. But what do we perceive to be a jealousy-inducing threat? The answer very much depends on your gender.
Men and women experience jealousy with the same intensity. However, there is a stark difference when it comes to what causes each to be jealous. One of the pioneers of human mating research is the American evolutionary psychologist David Buss and, in his book The Evolution of Desire (1994), he details numerous experiments that have highlighted this gender difference. In one study, in which subjects were asked to read different scenarios detailing incidences of sexual and emotional infidelity, 83 per cent of women found the emotional scenario the most jealousy-inducing, whereas only 40 per cent of men found this to be of concern. In contrast, 60 per cent of men found sexual infidelity difficult to deal with, compared with a significantly smaller percentage of women: 17 per cent.
Men also feel a much more extreme physiological response to sexual infidelity than women do. Hooking them up to monitors that measure skin conductance, muscle contraction and heart rate shows that men experience significant increases in heart rate, sweating and frowning when confronted with sexual infidelity, but the monitor readouts hardly flicker if their partner has become emotionally involved with a rival.
The reason for this difference sits with the different resources that men and women bring to the mating game. Broadly, men bring their resources and protection; women bring their womb. If a woman is sexually unfaithful and becomes pregnant with another man’s child, she has withdrawn the opportunity from her partner to father a child with her for at least nine months. Hence, he is the most concerned about sexual infidelity. In contrast, women are more concerned about emotional infidelity because this suggests that, if their partner does make a rival pregnant and becomes emotionally involved with her, his partner risks having to share his protection and resources with another, meaning that her children receive less of the pie.
Jealousy is an evolved response to threats to our reproductive success and survival – of self, children and genes. In many cases, it is of positive benefit to those who experience it as it shines a light on the threat and enables us to decide what is best. But in some cases, jealousy gets out of hand.
Emotional intelligence sits at the core of healthy relationships. To truly deliver the benefits of the relationship to our partner, we must understand and meet their emotional needs as they must understand and meet ours. But, as with love, this skill has a darker side because to understand someone’s emotional needs presents the possibility that you can use that intelligence to control them. While we may all admit to using this skill for the wrong reasons every now and again – perhaps to get that sofa we desire or the holiday destination we prefer – for some, it is their go-to mechanism where relationships are concerned.
The most adept proponents of this skill are those who possess the Dark Triad of personality traits: Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism. The first relies on using emotional intelligence to manipulate others, the second to toy with other’s feelings, and the third to denigrate others with the aim of glorifying oneself. For these people, characterized by exploitative, manipulative and callous personalities, emotional intelligence is the route to a set of mate-retention behaviors that certainly meet their goals but are less than beneficial to those whom they profess to love. Indeed, research has shown that a relationship with such a person leaves you open to a significantly greater risk that your love will be returned with abuse.
n 2018, the psychologist Razieh Chegeni and her team set out to explore whether a link existed between the Dark Triad and relationship abuse. Participants were identified as having the Dark Triad personality by expressing their degree of agreement with statements such as ‘I tend to want others to admire me’ (narcissism), ‘I tend to be unconcerned with the morality of my actions’ (psychopathy) and ‘I tend to exploit others to my own end’ (Machiavellianism). They then had to indicate to what extent they used a range of mate-retention behaviors, including ‘snooped through my partner’s personal belongings’, ‘talked to another man/woman at a party to make my partner jealous’, ‘bought my partner an expensive gift’ and ‘slapped a man who made a pass at my partner’.
The results were clear. Having a Dark Triad personality, whether you were a man or a woman, significantly increased the likelihood that ‘cost-inflicting mate-retention behaviors’ were your go-to mechanism when trying to retain your partner. These are behaviors that level an emotional, physical, practical and/or psychological cost on the partner such as physical or emotional abuse, coercive control or controlling access to food or money. Interestingly, however, these individuals did not employ this tactic all the time. There was nuance in their behavior. Costly behaviors were peppered with rare incidences of gift giving or caretaking, so-called beneficial mate-retention behaviors. Why? Because the unpredictability of their behavior caused psychological destabilization in their partner and enabled them to assert further control through a practice we now identify as gaslighting.
The question remains – if these people are so destructive, why does their personality type persist in our population? Because, while their behavior may harm those who are unfortunate enough to be close to them, they themselves must gain some survival advantage, which means that their traits persist in the population. It is true that no trait can be said to be 100 per cent beneficial, and here is a perfect example of where evolution is truly working at cross purposes.
Not all Dark Triad personalities are abusers but the presence of abuse within our closest relationships is a very real phenomenon, the understanding of which continues to evolve and grow. Whereas we might have once imagined an abuser as someone who controlled their partner with their fists, we are now aware that abuse comes in many guises including emotional, psychological, reproductive and financial.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) questioned both men and women in the United States about the incidences of domestic violence they had experienced in their lifetime. Looking at severe physical abuse alone – which means being punched, slammed, kicked, burned, choked, beaten or attacked with a weapon – one in five women and one in seven men reported at least one incidence in their lifetime. If we consider emotional abuse, then the statistics for men and women are closer – more than 43 million women and 38 million men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
It is hard to imagine that, having experienced such a litany of abuse, anyone could believe that love remained within their relationship. But here the power of the lived experience, of allowing everyone to have their ideas about love becomes clearer. Because, while we have many scientific tools to explore love objectively, at the end of the day, there is always an element of our experience of love that is subjective, that another cannot touch. This is no more powerfully evidenced than by the testimony of those who have experienced intimate partner violence. In 2013, three mental health nurses, led by Marilyn Smith in West Virginia, explored what love meant to 19 women who were experiencing, or had experienced, intimate partner violence. For them, this kind of abuse included, but was not limited to, ‘slapping, intimidation, shaming, forced intercourse, isolation, monitoring behaviors, restricting access to healthcare, opposing or interfering with school or employment, and making decisions concerning contraception, pregnancy, and elective abortion’.
It was clear from the transcripts that all the women knew what love wasn’t: being hurt and fearful, being controlled and having a lack of trust and a lack of support or concern for their welfare. And it was clear that they all knew what love should be: built on a foundation of respect and understanding, of support and encouragement, of commitment, loyalty and trust. But despite this clear understanding of the stark difference between the ideal and their reality, many of these women still believed that love existed within their relationship.
Some hoped the power of their love would change the behavior of their partner, others said their sense of attachment made them stay. Some feared losing love, however flawed; and, if they left, might they not land in a relationship where their treatment was even worse? A lot of the time, cultural messaging had reinforced strongly held beliefs about the supremacy of the nuclear family, making victims reluctant to leave in case they ultimately harmed their children’s life chances. While it can be hard to understand these arguments – surely a non-nuclear setup is preferable to the harm inflicted on a child by the observation of intimate partner abuse – I strongly believe that this population has as much right to their definition and experience of love as any of us.
In fact, the cultural messages we hear about romantic love – from the media, religion, parents and family – not only potentially trap us in ‘ideal’ family units: they may also play a role in our susceptibility to experiencing intimate partner abuse. This view of reproductive love, once confined to Western culture, is now the predominant narrative globally. From a young age, we speak of ‘the one’, we consume stories of young people finding love against all the odds, of sacrifice, of being consumed. It is arguable that these narratives are unhelpful generally as the reality, while wonderful, is considerably more complex, involving light and shade. But research has shown that these stories may have more significant consequences when we consider their role in intimate partner abuse.
South Africa has one of the highest rates of partner abuse against women in the world. In their 2017 paper, Shakila Singh and Thembeka Myende explored the role of resilience in female students at risk of abuse, which is prevalent at a high rate on South African university campuses. Their paper ranges widely over the role of resilience in resisting and surviving partner abuse, but what is of interest to me is the 15 women’s ideas about how our cultural ideas of romantic love have a role to play in trapping women in abusive relationships. These women’s arguments are powerful and made me rethink the fairy-tale.
Singh and Myende point to the romantic idea that love overcomes all obstacles and must be maintained at all costs, even when abuse makes these costs life-threateningly high. Or the idea that love is about losing control, being swept off your feet, having no say in who you fall for, even if they turn out to be an abuser. Or that lovers protect each other, fight for each other to the end, even if the person who is being protected, usually from the authorities, is violent or coercive. Or the belief that love is blind and we are incapable of seeing our partner’s faults, despite them often being glaringly obvious to anyone outside the relationship.
It is these cultural ideas about romantic love, the women argue, that lead to the erosion of a woman’s power to leave or entirely avoid an abusive partner. Add these ideas to the powerful physiological and psychological need we have for love, and you leave an open goal for the abuser.
Love is the focus of so much science, philosophy and literary rumination because we struggle to define it, to predict its next move. Thanks to our biology and the reproductive mandate of evolution, love has long controlled us. But what if we could control love?
What if a magic potion existed that could induce us, or another, to fall in love or even wipe away the memories of a failed relationship? It is a quest as ancient as the first writings 5,000 years ago and the focus of many literary endeavors, including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – who can forget Titania’s love for the ass-headed Bottom – and Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. Even in a world where science has largely usurped magic, type ‘love potions’ into Google and the first two questions are: ‘How do you make a love potion?’ and ‘Do love potions actually work?’
But today we know enough about the chemistry of love for the elixir to be within our grasp. And we don’t have to look very far for our first candidate: synthetic oxytocin, used right now as an induction drug in labor. We know from extensive research in social neuroscience that artificial oxytocin also increases prosociality, trust and cooperation. Squirt it up the nose of new parents and it increases positive parenting behaviors. Oxytocin, as released by the brain when we are attracted to someone, is vital for the first stages of love because it quiets the fear center of your brain and lowers your inhibitions to forming new relationships. Would a squirt up the nose do the same before you head out on a Saturday night?
The other possibility is MDMA or ecstasy, which mimics the neurochemical of long-term love, beta-endorphin. Recreational users of ecstasy report that it makes them feel boundless love for their fellow clubbers and increases their empathy. Researchers in the US have reported encouraging results when MDMA was used in marriage therapy to increase empathy, allowing participants to gain further insight into each other’s needs and find common ground.
Both of these sound like promising candidates but there are still issues to iron out and ethical discussions to have. How effective they are is highly context dependent. Based on their genetics, some people do exactly what is predicted of them. Boundaries are lowered and love sensations abound. But for a significant minority, particularly when it comes to oxytocin, people do exactly the opposite of what we would expect. For some, a dose of oxytocin, while increasing bonds with those they perceive to be in their in-group, increases feelings of ethnocentrism – racism – toward the out-group.
MDMA has other issues. For some people, it simply does not work. But the bigger problem is that the effects endure only while usage continues; anecdotal evidence suggests that, if you stop, the feelings of love and empathy disappear. This raises questions of practicality and ethical issues surrounding power imbalance. If you commenced a relationship while taking MDMA, would you have to continue? What if you were in a relationship with someone who had taken MDMA and you didn’t know? What would happen if they stopped? And could someone be induced to take MDMA against their will?
The ethical conversation around love drugs is complex. On one side are those who argue that taking a love drug is no more controversial than an antidepressant. Both alter your brain chemistry and, given the strong relationship between love and good mental and physical health, surely it is important that we use all the tools at our disposal to help people succeed? But maybe an anecdote from the book Love Is the Drug (2020) by Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu will give you pause. They describe SSRI prescriptions used to suppress the sexual urges of young male yeshiva students, to ensure that they comply with Jewish orthodox religious law – no sex before marriage, and definitely no homosexuality.
Could such drugs gain wider traction in repressive regimes as a weapon against what some perceive to be immoral forms of love? Remember that 71 countries still deem homosexuality to be illegal. It is not a massive leap of imagination to envisage the use of SSRIs to ‘cure’ people of this ‘affliction’. We only have to look at the continued existence of conversion therapy to see that this is a distinct possibility. Love drugs could end up being yet another form of abuse over which the individual has very little control.
Evolution saw fit to give us love to ensure we would continue to form and maintain the cooperative relationships that are our route to personal and, most crucially, genetic survival. It can be the source of euphoric happiness, calm contentment and much-needed security, but this is not its point. Love is merely the sweet treat handed to you by your babysitter to make sure the goal is achieved. Combine the ultimate evolutionary aim of love with our visceral need for it and the quick intelligence of our brains, and you have the recipe for a darker side to emerge. Some of this darker side is adaptive but, for those who experience it, it rarely ends well. At the very least there is pain – physical, psychological, financial – and, at the most, there is death, and the grief of those we leave behind.
Maybe it is time to rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about love because the danger on the horizon is not the dragon that needs to be slain by the knight to save the beautiful princess but the presence of some who mean to use its powers for their gain and our considerable loss. Like all of us, love is a complex beast: only by embracing it in its entirety do we truly understand it, and ourselves. And this means understanding its evolutionary story, the good and the bad. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/love-is-both-wonderful-and-a-dangerous-evolutionary-trick?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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WHY AMERICAN CHRISTIANS WOULDN’T LIKE THE EARLY CHRISTIANS
~ If you could meet one of the first Christians would you like them?
I’m convinced that many American Christians would not. In the course of 2000 years, Christianity- while maintaining the basic tenets, has morphed and shifted from the way it was originally designed and lived out. Since we tend to live in a culture that is rather self-centered, we have a tendency to assume we “have it right” while completely overlooking the fact that our version of Christianity might appear quite foreign — even hopelessly corrupted — if viewed through the eyes of one of the first Christians.
If those entrenched in American Christianity could transport back in time to experience Christianity as it originally was, they’d be uncomfortable at best, and at worst, would probably have declined the invitation to join Christianity at all.
Here’s 5 of the major reasons why I think many American Christians probably would not have liked the first ones:
THE FIRST CHRISTIANS REJECTED PERSONAL OWNERSHIP OF PROPERTY AND ENGAGED IN A REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH.
Americanized Christians often fight to make sure our taxes are lower, fight to repeal healthcare for poor people, and throw a fit over a small portion of our income going to provide foodstamps. While touting “voluntary” and “private” charity as the way to go, we give on average 2-3% of our income to the church or charities– not nearly enough to actually address the needy in any meaningful way. But what about the early Christians?
Well, the first Christians were quite different. In the book of Acts (the book that tells the story of original Christianity) tells us that “all the believers were together and held everything in common, selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need” (Acts 2:44-45). We’re further told that there were no poor among them, because those who had land or property sold it so that this wealth could be “redistributed” to the needy (Acts 4:35). While on one hand communal property and redistribution of wealth was voluntary, scripture tells us that “all” of the believers in the church did this — meaning that it wasn’t exactly voluntary but a condition of being accepted into the group.
If Americanized Christians were to see how the first Christians lived, it would be denounced as some sort of communist cult being led by folks who distorted the Gospel.
THE FIRST CHRISTIANS DIDN’T LIKE BIG, SHOW-Y CHURCH STUFF.
The first Christians weren’t fans of the “go big” and showmanship stuff that we see plaguing the church in America today. Churches back then were house churches with maximum numbers that would be considered below the minimum amount of people you’d want as a core “launch team” to plant a church in the United States. They rejected the need for wealth, fancy meeting places, or any kind of honor that would elevate them above someone else.
One early writer wrote, in critique of early Christians:
“They despise the temples as houses of the dead. They reject the gods. They laugh at sacred things. Wretched, they pity our priests. Half-naked themselves, they despise honors and purple robes. What incredible audacity and foolishness!”
If one of the original Christians were to be transported through time to attend the average American church with fancy projection screens, high salaries, and entertainment based church services, they’d probably walk away shaking their head at the thought that was actually considered church.
THE FIRST CHRISTIANS DIDN’T WARN ANYONE ABOUT HELL
Any time I have posted on why I believe the traditional teaching on hell is unbiblical I get a lot of pushback. Not infrequent is the argument that I have “removed all motivation for following Jesus” which is usually followed with “may God have mercy on your soul” or something like that. The folks at Way of the Master have successfully convinced much of conservative Christian culture that preaching hell is absolutely central to inviting people to follow Jesus. However, if that were true, I’d think we’d expect to see hell be front and center with the first Christians.
Small problem: it’s not. When you read the book of Acts, it’s almost as if they didn’t believe in hell at all because hell was not something they used to motivate or warn people. There’s no “can I ask you if you’re a good person?” and no “if you died tonight, do you know where you’d spend eternity?” Yes — the first Christians were passionate about spreading the Good News, passionate about inviting people to follow Jesus — but when you read the story of the early church in the Bible, talk and warnings of hell are actually absent.
If Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort were to fly back in time to see how the first Christians– those who walked and talked with Jesus — were doing things, they’d say they were totally doing it wrong, and have succumbed to liberalism.
THE FIRST CHRISTIANS WEREN’T PATRIOTIC.
Flag-waving Fourth of July type services?
Not in the early church. The first Christians weren’t patriotic at all. This was in part because they were oppressed by a brutal empire, but also in part because they saw themselves not as citizens of an earthly realm but citizens of heaven whose allegiance and loyalty were for God’s Kingdom instead of an earthly nation. These first Christians were caught up into the invitation to build God’s Kingdom, and would be utterly dumfounded as to why anyone would get caught up into patriotic nationalism — something early Christians would believe to be idolatry.
A 2nd century Christian once said, “This world and the next are two enemies…. We cannot therefore be the friends of both.” This attitude would have made patriotic nationalism impossible, because they had no attachment to earthly nation states — realizing instead that Christians are called to live as people completely different than the rest of the world.
Many of today’s Christians would consider the first Christians “ungrateful” but conversely, the first Christians would consider those of today to be idolaters with mixed up priorities.
THEY WERE UNIVERSALLY PACIFISTS.
Like it or not, the historical fact is that Christianity was built upon the foundational belief of total nonviolence. The first Christians were so dedicated to this principle of nonviolent enemy love that slews of them became martyrs — willing to be killed by their enemies before they were willing to lift a hand to harm them. In fact, for the first 300 or more years of Christianity, the belief in pacifism was a universal belief.
In addition, the early Church was exclusive in some ways– and American Christians wouldn’t be a fan of who they didn’t allow to join the church: soldiers and magistrates. The first Christians believed using violence against an enemy was incompatible with being a Christian — very similar to how conservatives will say being a homosexual is incompatible with being a Christian. After some time, they did ease up on allowing soldiers to join the church (in the late era of the early church), but even then they only allowed soldiers who were willing to commit to nonviolence. Some of these converts were executed by military authorities for refusing orders to kill, but the first Christians realized that to kill an enemy is perhaps one of the most anti-Christ behaviors one can engage in, and so they were willing to die before killing.
This is perhaps where American Christians and the first Christians would really dislike one another: American Christians would think they were hippies who didn’t stand up for themselves, and the first Christians would look at the gun carriers and unapologetically proclaim that they weren’t Christians at all.
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Christianity has a history — and it’s an important one. Those who were closest to Christ himself speak to us from history, if we will listen. While the scriptures haven’t changed in 2000 years, Christianity itself certainly has fallen prey to the powers of culture to distort and twist. Christianity in America is no different — it has become distorted to the point that those who first founded Christianity and walked with Jesus, would hardly recognize it.
I say, we need to move backwards, not forwards… We need to return to the beliefs and wisdom of the first Christians, even if that makes us uncomfortable. ~ Benjamin Corey, author of the new book, Unafraid: Moving Beyond Fear-Based Faith
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/formerlyfundie/5-reasons-why-many-american-christians-wouldnt-like-the-first-ones/?
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THE LAST “HERETIC” TO BE BURNED AT THE STAKE WAS AN OLD, DEMENTED SWISS ABESS WHO WAS BURNED IN 1793.
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WE ARE NOT BROKEN BEINGS NEEDING FIXING, NOT SINNERS NEEDING SALVATION (and the power of books and ideas)
“That . . . changed when I noticed headlines on news websites reading, “Christopher Hitchens dead at 62.” What finally captivated me the most was his message regarding religion. I had never heard anyone criticize religion in such a way, but the shock was soon taken by a slight smirk. I loved it. I instantly found myself agreeing with almost everything he had to say.” ~ Dan Arel
Oriana:
Here is an example of the power of books, so often dismissed by those who don’t bother to read them. For me the most important recent book was the little known “The Belief Instinct” by Jesse Bering. By showing the cognitive biases that underlie religion it put the final nails in religion’s coffin. Funny, before reading Bering I was pretty sure I was 100% an atheist; but it was only after reading it more than once that I gained that 100% confidence — which led to the serene strength that’s the gift of clarity.
Why write about it? Because it takes a long time to think through an entire worldview and reject the harmful specifics of the doctrines that I was force-fed as a child. Because bad ideas need to be held up to the light, their badness fully seen, before being tossed into the garbage. I have to go through one lie after another, and nod my head: this is nonsense, and that is nonsense. And usually it’s pernicious nonsense that was used to keep us scared, convinced it was our “most grievous fault.” It was emotional terrorism: keep them intimidated.
The church actively sought to break our spirit early on in life, making children feel they were bad persons who deserved an eternity in hell. I think many children were able to shrug off this message, but I was serious and sensitive, a people-pleasing little girl who took it to heart: I was a sinner. It takes a lifetime to recover from that. It takes friends who keep pointing out that you are kind, warm-hearted, generous — a fine person — before you start feeling you're OK, or at least no worse than average.
“Nobody's perfect” — do you realize how holy those words are to me, what fantastic wisdom of self-acceptance instead of the self-hatred preached by the church?
Being a bad person — a sinner — was the cornerstone of the whole edifice of intimidation. If you are a good little girl, you need no more salvation than a puppy. But convince a child that she is morally at fault, a sinner, and Jesus had to die a torturous death to save her from hell — now you can manipulate that child through guilt and shame.
That’s why even now it’s so liberating to think: WOW! We are not sinners! We don’t need salvation! No one died “for our sins”! We’re imperfect humans, but the average person has done nothing so bad that it would deserve eternal torture. Maybe some community service . . . It’s sheer joy to contemplate this again.
Stages of cultural evolution: first, human beings are burned for their dissenting ideas. Then just their books — that’s terrific progress. Then the books are just banned, without public bonfires: more progress. And finally there is open discussion.
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AGING CLOCKS — BIOLOGICAL AGE VS CHRONOLOGICAL AGE
~ Most aging clocks estimate a person’s biological age based on patterns of epigenetic markers—specifically, chemical tags called methyl groups that are layered onto DNA and affect how genes are expressed. The pattern of this methylation across thousands of sites on DNA seems to change as we age, although it’s not clear why.
Some clocks promise to predict life span by estimating how a person’s body has aged, while others act more like a speedometer, tracking the pace of aging. Clocks have been developed for specific organs of the body, and for multiple animal species.
Proponents of aging clocks are already trying to use them to show that anti-aging interventions can make individuals biologically younger. But we don’t yet know enough about clocks, or what they tell us, to make such claims.
The first epigenetic aging clock was developed in 2011 when Steve Horvath at the University of California, Los Angeles, volunteered to participate in a study with his identical twin brother, Markus. The study was looking for epigenetic markers in saliva samples that might explain sexual orientation. (Steve is straight and Markus is gay.)
As a biostatistician, Horvath offered to analyze the results and found no link to sexual orientation. But he also looked for links between the volunteers’ age and epigenetic markers. “I fell off my chair, because the signal was huge for aging,” he says.
He found that patterns of methylation could predict a person’s age in years, although the estimates differed on average by around five years from each person’s chronological age.
Horvath has worked on aging clocks ever since. In 2013 he developed the eponymous Horvath clock, still among the best-known aging clocks today, which he calls a “pan-tissue” clock because it can estimate the age of pretty much any organ in the body. Horvath built the clock using methylation data from 8,000 samples representing 51 body tissues and cell types. With this data, he trained an algorithm to predict a person’s chronological age from a cell sample.
Other groups have developed similar clocks, and hundreds exist today. But Horvath estimates that fewer than 10 are widely used in human studies, primarily to assess how diet, lifestyle, or supplements might affect aging.
What can all these clocks tell us? It depends. Most clocks are designed to predict chronological age. But Morgan Levine at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, says: “To me, that’s not the goal. We can ask someone how old they are.”
In 2018, Levine, Horvath, and their colleagues developed a clock based on nine biomarkers, including blood levels of glucose and white blood cells, as well as a person’s age in years.
They used data collected from thousands of people in the US as part of a different study, which followed the participants for years. The resulting clock, called DNAm PhenoAge, is better at estimating biological age than clocks based solely on chronological age, says Levine.
A one-year increase in what Levine calls “phenotypic” age, according to the clock, is associated with a 9% increase in death from any cause, as well as an increased risk of dying from cancer, diabetes, or heart disease. If your biological age is higher than your chronological age, it’s fair to assume you’re aging faster than average, says Levine.
But that might not be the case, says Daniel Belsky at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City. He says there are many reasons why biological age might exceed a person’s years.
Belsky and his colleagues have developed a tool to more accurately measure the rate of biological aging, based on work that tracked the health outcomes of 954 volunteers at four ages between their mid-20s and mid-40s. The researchers looked at biomarkers believed to indicate how well various organs are functioning, as well as others linked to general health. Then they developed an epigenetic “speedometer” to predict how these values would change over time.
Another popular clock, also developed by Horvath and his colleagues, is called GrimAge, in a nod to the Grim Reaper. Horvath claims it’s the best at predicting mortality, and he’s been applying it to his own blood samples.
His results were consistent with his chronological age two years ago, he says, but when he ran another test around six months ago, his GrimAge was four years older than his age in years. That doesn’t mean Horvath has shaved four years off his life span—“You cannot directly relate it to how long you’ll live,” he says—but he thinks it means he’s aging faster than he should be, though he’s still puzzled as to why.
Others have used changes in their results to infer that their rate of aging has slowed, usually after they started taking a supplement. But in many cases, the change can be explained by the fact that many epigenetic aging clocks are “noisy”—prone to random errors that distort their results.
The problem is that at each area of the body where methyl groups attach to DNA, very slight changes take place over time. These subtle changes can be magnified by errors in methylation estimates. It ends up being a huge problem, says Levine, and results can wind up being off by decades.
To answer this, they are “breaking apart” existing clocks and comparing them. They hope to work out what different clocks are measuring, and how to build better ones in the future.
Levine and her colleagues have been working to get rid of this noise. She’s also trying to understand what aging clocks actually tell us. What does it really mean to have a lower biological age? And how can this knowledge be applied?
While aging clocks may be a good indicator of your overall health, they simply aren’t accurate enough to count on in most cases. “I think they haven’t realized their full potential yet,” says Levine.
That potential could lie in clinical health checks, says Horvath, where clocks could be used alongside tests of blood pressure and cholesterol to help people understand how fit and healthy they are, or whether they are at risk of disease.
“Epigenetic clocks will never replace clinical markers, [but] the clocks add value to them,” he says. “I think five years from now we will have human blood-based clocks that are so valuable that they could be used [clinically].”
In the meantime, eating a healthy diet, avoiding smoking, and getting enough exercise remain some of the best ways to stave off the impacts of aging. We don’t need new aging clocks to prove that those strategies can help keep us well. ~
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/15/1050019/aging-clocks/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
I think the most important thing is to keep blood sugar, and thus insulin, on the low-normal side. Insulin and cortisol — those are the worst pro-aging hormones, if found in high levels.
Blood sugar and insulin are relatively easy to control through diet and by taking berberine -- or, if you prefer and can get an MD to prescribe it even if you are not diabetic, the life-extending drug metformin. Berberine has the advantage of also improving the cholesterol profile.
Barberries, the source of berberine, may remind you of goji berries. Goji berries taste good, especially if rehydrated in tea, and they have been found to lower the risk of maculate degeneration.
*
WILL COVID DRAG ON THE WAY HIV IS DRAGGING ON?
HIV and SARS-CoV-2 are completely different viruses. They spread and make people sick in completely different ways. But in 2020, when COVID-19 started to spread, Stephanie Brooks-Wiggins says, it felt familiar.
"Everywhere you went, people just seemed to be getting sick," she says. Through the pandemic, she lost five family members to COVID-19. "I lost my son-in-law. I lost my mother-in-law, my brother-in-law, my sister-in-law. They all died within months of each other.”
Back in 1986, when she was diagnosed with HIV, it felt the same way. "There were people dropping like flies – people were dying," she says.
What's also familiar to Brooks-Wiggins is the optimistic refrain from federal officials, as scientific breakthroughs give society more ways to combat the spread of a virus: "We have the tools.”
There are now effective COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, tests you can do at home in minutes, and high quality masks, they point out, with the implication that the virus is practically beaten.
"We have the tools we need to move forward safely and return to more normal routines," President Biden wrote in early April.
Three years ago, under a different administration talking about a different virus, the message was exactly the same.
"We have the tools available to end the HIV epidemic," then-Health Secretary Azar wrote in 2019 announcing the End the HIV Epidemic initiative. There are at-home HIV tests, a pill you can take daily to prevent HIV, and effective, easy-to-take treatments.
Despite all those tools, decades after it started, the HIV epidemic has not ended in the U.S. An estimated one in four people who might be eligible for the preventive pill actually take it. Around 150,000 people in the U.S. are HIV positive but don't know it because they haven't been tested. And more than 30,000 people in the U.S. test positive for HIV every year, a number that has remained stubbornly high, even as new tools have been developed.
When federal officials say "we have the tools" Brooks-Wiggins says, they're missing the point. "There's a human aspect to it that they're discounting – people have emotional habits that they don't break, and that's how the virus thrives," she says.
As with HIV, the COVID-19 situation is still precarious even though effective treatments are available. Cases skyrocketed in the winter despite widely available vaccines. Some 70 million Americans haven't gotten even one shot of the vaccine, and around half of people eligible for a booster haven't bothered to get one. The virus continues to spread and cause preventable deaths especially among people who are Black or Latinx, people who are poor, or uninsured, and people who live in rural places.
Only two years into the response, with restrictions like indoor masking mostly lifted and federal COVID funding drying up, Americans seem ready to move on and declare the pandemic over. But it's far from over, and as with HIV, the country is poised to shrug its way through years more of unnecessary deaths.
Some public health experts are sounding the alarm. They warn that instead of pulling back, it's time to double down on outreach efforts to connect with people whose lives can still be saved.
That message is especially clear coming from people whose lives and work have been affected by HIV for decades. They say there are lessons for this new pandemic from HIV about how hard it can be to get pandemic-fighting tools to the people who need them most.
SCIENCE ALONE WON’T SAVE LIVES
The road to effective and easy-to-take HIV treatments was rocky. The first treatment for people with HIV, called AZT, came along in 1987. It cost about $8,000 a year – at the time, the highest cost for a prescription drug in history.
It also made her feel so horrible, Brooks-Wiggins says, she stopped taking it. "I figured I would just rather feel better and be happy than be miserable, depressed and sick. And if I was going to die, I was going to die.”
Over time, the treatments got better – a lot better. Now, she says, "we've got down to taking them once a day with or without food." And at age 76, Brooks-Wiggins is happy to still be alive and healthy – living in Baltimore and working part time as a tax preparer, while staying involved in local HIV peer support and advocacy.
"We've come such a long way – there are drugs that not only prolong people's lives and really permit them almost a normal lifespan, but also prevent people from transmitting it," says Dr. Adaora Adimora, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She first started treating people with HIV in the 1980s, and has watched the pharmaceutical industry roll out better and more convenient treatments and prevention tools, like topical gels, new pills, and injections that give long-lasting protection.
Still, she says, "I don't know that I ever greeted any of these new advances saying, 'This is the thing that's going to end HIV.' "And the reason is because, as a clinician, I've seen the barriers that there are to access to care and to implementation.”
Some of those barriers are the high cost of prescription drugs and the maddening patchwork health care system.
They also include the stigma of the disease, and for some communities, a distrust of the medical system that prevents them from seeking care, says Dr. Laura Cheever, who is Brook-Wiggins's doctor and also runs the domestic Ryan White Program in the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, which provides free treatment to low-income people with HIV. "There's still so much underlying stigma around the way HIV is transmitted and I think that is a huge barrier.”
All of this has led to certain communities being much more affected than others. As journalist Linda Villarosa documented in 2017 in the New York Times, America's black gay and bisexual men have a higher HIV rate than any country in the world. ~
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/04/19/1093052484/despite-effective-treatments-hiv-drags-on-experts-warn-covid-may-face-the-same-f
Oriana:
Truvada: an anti-viral drug that prevents HIV.
This reminded me that we now have Paxlovid, which seems quite effective against Covid. It’s actually a combination of two anti-virals in one pill. It’s not for preventive use, but it could be more widely used to prevent severe Covid. Alas, the very fact that Paxlovid is available by prescription only means that access to it is automatically limited. Few people wish to deal with the medical system if they don’t have to.
The closest that I know of is the aminoacid LYSINE. It's available as an inexpensive supplement and is also found in many food. Meat, cheese (especially Parmesan), eggs, certain fish (cod and sardines), and beans are all good sources.
*
COVID’S CHANGES IN THE BRAIN SIMILAR TO ALZHEIMER’S
~ For some, it’s just a sniffle. But for others, COVID-19 can hit hard. Either way, some people who get COVID-19 will suffer from long-term effects. This is known as “long COVID,” and its sufferers are often referred to as “long haulers.” Chances are you already know about long COVID and you may even have been affected by it or have friends or family who are. What is less well known, however, is that neurological issues are common in long COVID.
BROKEN BRAINS
Brain inflammation, stroke, chronic headache, disturbed consciousness, cognitive impairment, and “brain fog” (an all-encompassing phrase to describe a condition that usually manifests as slow thinking, memory lapses, and difficulty concentrating) can all result after infection with the virus known as SARS-CoV-2.
Even the illness’s unusual hallmarks, hyposmia, and hypogeusia—better known to us non-scientists as loss of smell and taste—are thought to be due to changes in nervous system function.
But while both clinicians and patients have noticed a myriad of brain issues post infection, scientists don’t know very much about how SARS-CoV-2 infections can lead to impaired brain function.
This may be changing.
A study published on Feb. 3 in Alzheimer’s & Dementia sheds light on a potential physiological mechanism behind the neurological problems COVID-19 survivors experience.
While the deeper insight into what is going on is good news, unfortunately, there’s bad news, too.
The new study, “Alzheimer’s-Like Signaling in Brains of COVID-19 Patients,” includes some disturbing findings.
ATTACKING ACE2 RECEPTORS
The study, led by Andrew R. Marks, a cardiologist and chair of the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in Manhattan, consisted of analysis of brain tissue collected from 10 people who died from COVID-19.
Marks’s team looked posthumously at the brains of four women who ranged in age from 38 to 80, and six men, ages 57 to 84.
It’s already known that the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 binds to ACE2 receptors all over the body, including in the heart, lungs, kidneys, and epithelial cells that line the blood vessels.
Scientists also believe that the multi-system failure that can result in death from COVID-19 is likely due to this invasion of heart and lung cells via these ACE2 receptors.
Since the receptors have been invaded by the virus, the activity of the enzyme associated with the receptors (angiotensin-converting enzyme) is reduced, as scientists explained in a 2021 article published on The Conversation.
The damage to the lungs and heart is usually uppermost in doctors’ minds when patients are experiencing severe illness. But, it turns out, there are also ACE2 receptors in the brain.
Unless you’re a neuroscientist, this is pretty technical. Stay with me anyway. Decreased ACE2 activity is associated with increased activity in transforming growth factor-beta (“TGF-beta”). And high levels of TGF-beta in the brain are associated with irregularities in the “tau” proteins that stabilize nerve cells, specifically due to something called “hyperphosphorylation.”
Phosphorylation, a normal biological process, is the addition of phosphate to an organic molecule, in this case, the tau protein.
Hyperphosphorylation is the addition of too many phosphate groups at too many sites.
Hyperphosphorylation can result in proteins with excess filaments that get tangled up. And these tau filament “tangles” are associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
LEAKY BRAINS
Marks and his five colleagues at Columbia University investigated whether people who died of COVID-19 exhibited evidence of tau protein irregularities that are associated with Alzheimer’s.
A significant body of recent research suggests that calcium ions “leaking” from certain ion channels in the brain, known as ryanodine receptors, may cause these tau irregularities.
Ion channels enable the flow of ions through cell membranes, including brain cells (neurons). In a nutshell, ions enable the flow of electrical charges throughout the body and this flow is critical to the function of all cells. It’s, in one sense, the communication system of the body and one of the primary mechanisms of brain function.
Healthy brain function relies on ion channels, such as the ryanodine receptors just mentioned, operating as they should. Just as there are dangers when an electrical wire is “leaking” electricity due to a short, there are risks when these ion channels leak ions. Oxidative stress may be responsible for depleting calbindin, a protein that helps keep these channels closed, preventing them from leaking. When the levels of calbindin are low, channels that should remain closed may start to leak calcium.
Too many calcium ions floating around in the brain or anywhere else in the body can cause a number of health problems.
Marks’s team examined the brain tissue of the 10 people who died from COVID to see if there was evidence of leaks.
More specifically, they analyzed the contents of the brain tissue for markers of TGF-beta activity. They found evidence of increased TGF-beta activity in both the cortex and the cerebellum. They also found evidence of increased oxidative stress.
CEREBELLUM CONCERNS
People who suffer from Alzheimer’s show evidence of tau filament “tangles” only in the cortexes of their brains, not in the cerebellum.
However, this Columbia University research indicated that, unlike with Alzheimer’s, COVID may cause disturbances in the cerebellum as well.
The cerebellum is involved in balance, coordination of movement, language, and posture, according to the University of Texas Health Science Center.
Other recent research has shown that 74 percent of hospitalized COVID patients have had coordination problems. If COVID is compromising the cerebellum as well as the cortex, this may help explain the coordination issues clinicians have observed.
Interestingly, though this was a small study, all the people who died had evidence of brain pathology. The TGF-beta marker was found in all the brains, even those of the younger patients who had exhibited no sign of dementia prior to coming down with COVID-19.
Most people have heard that the presence of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain is an indication of Alzheimer’s. Even though lowered ACE2 activity is also associated with an increase in beta-amyloid plaques, the Columbia team didn’t find any changes in the pathways that lead to the formation of amyloid beta in the brains of the patients who died from COVID (with the exception of one 84-year-old male who was previously suffering from dementia). This is one notable distinction between the pathology of COVID-19 and Alzheimer’s or dementia.
TREATING NEUROLOGICAL SYNDROMES
Marks’s interest in the ryanodine ion channels is long-standing, and his recent COVID-related research may lead to financial benefits should other researchers affirm his findings. In 2011, a research team led by Marks demonstrated that a class of drugs, Rycals, may be effective in treating heart failure and muscle disorders by stabilizing the same ryanodine ion channels this new research indicates may be affected by COVID-19 infections.
One drug from this class, ARM210, has been in the clinical-trial stage but has been officially classified as an orphan drug because the illness it was intended to treat was so rare.
Marks told ScienceDaily that his study indicates a potential target for therapeutic interventions for the neurological symptoms of COVID.
“My greatest hope is that other laboratories will look into our findings, and if they are validated, generate interest in a clinical trial for long COVID,” he said.
Both Columbia University and Marks own stock in ARMGO Pharma, Inc., the company that has been developing drugs to target ryanodine channels. They also own patents on Rycals, according to a conflict of interest statement at the bottom of this study. Another of the study’s co-authors, Steven Reiken, has been consulting for ARMGO. While conflicts of interest like these are fairly typical for published scientific research, and they don’t invalidate the research, they are an important part of the overall picture that shouldn’t be ignored.
It also isn’t unusual for a drug created for one purpose to find new life treating other conditions. In some cases, these new uses prove more important than the original intended use of the drug.
In their paper, the Columbia team wrote that “ex vivo treatment of COVID-19 patient brain samples with the Rycal drug ARM210 … fixed the channel leak.”
While that may suggest a promising avenue for further investigation, applying a drug to brain tissue in the lab is a long way from giving it to living patients.While that may suggest a promising avenue for further investigation, applying a drug to brain tissue in the lab is a long way from giving it to living patients. ~
https://www.theepochtimes.com/covid-19-linked-to-alzheimers-like-brain-changes-study-suggests_4379650.html?utm_source=morningbriefnoe&utm
ending on beauty:
A SHORT HISTORY OF JUDAIC THOUGHT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
The rabbis wrote:
although it is forbidden
to touch a dying person,
nevertheless, if the house
catches fire
he must be removed
from the house.
Barbaric!
I say,
and whom may I touch then,
aren’t we all
dying?
You smile
your old negotiator’s smile
and ask:
but aren’t all our houses
burning?
~ Linda Pastan
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