Door knob in the shape of a fish Tyniec Benedictine Abbey, near Krakow, Poland*
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago,
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying, “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
“Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
~ T. S. Eliot, the opening section of The Waste Land
Oriana:
It’s been at least twenty years since I last read The Waste Land. On re-reading, I discovered that I remembered many lines — and yes, they were beautiful and startling the way great poetry tends to be. Thank you, T.S.
CRITICS HATED THE WASTELAND WHEN IT WAS FIRST PUBLISHED
~ Poems, T. S. Eliot insisted, were not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. The mind that suffers and the mind that creates are two different species, and the authentic creative fount is impersonal. Eliot regarded poetry as an arduous exercise in depersonalization. Whatever emotional content is detected in poetry is there by way of an “objective correlative,” which is the assemblage of resonances that translate or transpose a personal emotive stimulus into concrete equivalents. Freud (unmentioned by Eliot) called such strategies condensation and displacement in the psychic economy of the unconscious.
For those mindful of the theoretical nuances of Eliot’s prose, The Waste Land could seem like the objective correlative run amok. Everything in it reeked of condensation and displacement, obscuring any big picture expected of a work steeped in the Grail legend and its Wagnerian associations. Nonetheless, despite much perplexity Eliot’s poem succeeded not least because of its carefully coordinated debut, straddling the Atlantic with two periodical and two book publications.
In England, some reviewers addressed both the poem and the inaugural issue of The Criterion, while in America the Dial Award was commonly mentioned (sales of The Dial rose dramatically for the November 1922 issue in which “The Waste Land” appeared, to 4,500, increasing to 6,200 for the December issue—nearly double the monthly average).
Other reviews were based on the book, which was padded out with several pages of notes, adding talking points while exacerbating the general consternation about the poem. The distinction between the book and the periodical versions was reflected in basic orthography: “The Waste Land” or The Waste Land. An unfortunate preview of future bungling of the poem’s title was in Boni and Liveright publicity announcements for “The Wasteland ”—an error all too often perpetrated today. Even before it was published, Eliot felt it necessary to remind people it was not “Waste Land” but The Waste Land: three words, not two.
Reviews were often pitched at nonspecialist general interest readers, coasting along on a soft carpet of unexamined assumptions about the arts, culture at large, civil discourse, and acceptable behavior. To come to Eliot’s poem with a few platitudes about decency, intelligibility, and ease of access to poetic chestnuts was to be brutally confronted with something not only unknown but perilously close to the unknowable. Eliot originally wanted to use, as epigraph to the poem, Kurtz’s gasp “The horror, the horror!” from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but Pound talked him out of it. Had it remained, some reviewers would surely have flung it back at the poem itself.
Two notable omissions color all the reviews of The Waste Land. First, there was no reference to (nor any suppositions concerning) the nervous breakdown suffered by its author. In fact, several of those who wrote the most probing reviews—including Aiken, Wilson, and Seldes—knew of Eliot’s personal plight. The second omission concerns the role of Pound in editing and shaping the original heap of fragments shored against the author’s ruins. The famous dedication to Pound was not added until the poem was reprinted in Poems 1909–1925. Lacking awareness of the role Pound had played in convening a certain intelligibility for a heterogeneous ensemble, reviewers were left to speculate about the poem’s disorderly conduct.
So plentiful were reviews and notices that there were reviews of other reviews, as in Christopher Morley’s “Apollo and Apollinaris,” which appeared in the New York Evening Post of January 9, 1923. He capped off his report by observing, “Eliot is a mighty clever chap, and The Waste Land is unquestionably a highly sophisticated and cathartic bolus of cynical humor. But it has almost crazed some of the more advanced critics, who try with lamentable gravity to find Deep Meanings in some high-spirited spoofing.”
For Morley, the poem was of negligible interest, and he may not have bothered to read it. The real news was the gossip, not the verse.
There was some derision in the reviews, understandable given that many metropolitan papers felt obliged to cover a newsworthy event. But even positive reviews tucked in a few throwaway barbs. In a sampling of characterizations meant to raise eyebrows, The Waste Land was charged with being an affront to literary values, as well as
If some found the poem of negligible interest—one critic, punning on the title, called it “waste paper”—many found Eliot overly cerebral. He was thought flippant, pompous, and presumptuous by some, withdrawn and unresponsive by others. Some tried to have it both ways: Eliot was “a dandy of the choicest phrase”—a figure at once derogatory and laudatory.
Reviewers puzzled over what the poem was about. “It is an erudite despair,” opined Burton Rascoe, and “the sardonic grin which suffuses it is a rictus which masks a hurt romantic with sentiments plagued by crass reality.” For Edmund Wilson, Eliot depicted “the human soul as a mess.” The poet Elinor Wylie came up with the most exceptional characterization. The author was “a cadaver, dissecting himself in our sight.” “If this is a trick, it is an inspired one,” she added.
Critics were either perplexed by or resentful of the multitude of references and quotations, especially if they were nagged by the notes, which some perceived as insolent. J. L. Lucas complained, “A poem that has to be explained in notes is not unlike a picture with ‘This is a dog’ inscribed beneath”; while Gorham Munson imagined a reader for whom the notes appeared to be an invitation to higher learning. Munson foresaw a reader’s resentment when he “discovers that after all his research he has not penetrated into some strange uncharted region of experience but has only fathomed the cipher of a quite ordinary and easily understandable state of mind”—namely, despair.
Because The Waste Land was unorthodox, many were befuddled about the subject. It’s remarkable how few realized that the title named the topic, and that the poem concluded with a reference to its method (“these fragments I have shored against my ruin”). Initial impressions were duly registered as a way of dipping a toe in purportedly turbulent waters. For the antimodernist J. C. Squire, it was little more than “a vagrant string of drab pictures which abruptly change, and these are interspersed with memories of literature, lines from old poets, and disconnected ejaculations.” Others found the poem “a collection of flashes” “boiling in the nozzle of the whirlwind,” amounting to “a cross-section of the human consciousness of a single specific human being.”
Harriet Monroe, who had published “Prufrock” in Poetry, found The Waste Land “kaleidoscopic, profuse, a rattle and rain of colors that fall somehow into place.” Reference to a kaleidoscope is telling, in that Baudelaire used the same figure when evoking the experience of urban crowds. The modern artist, he wrote, “enters the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.”
Herbert O. Gorman also applied the kaleidoscopic analogy to Eliot’s poem, suggesting that there were two approaches: one that doted on detail (which he compared to a viewer examining palette daubs and brushstrokes in Whistler and Monet) and a more holistic apprehension. “One may easily isolate a passage and call it chaff from a spinning mind, just as one may isolate a bit of colored glass in a kaleidoscope and note that it is nothing more than glass. But the ensemble becomes a thing of magic.”
Louis Untermeyer criticized the poem’s “kaleidoscopic movement in which the bright-colored pieces fail to atone for the absence of an integrated design.” The presumption of a dialectic between part and whole was the interpretive reflex many readers brought to the poem. For some it was a casual assumption, and insofar as it remained casual, they could be unperturbed. But the lure of “hidden form” was too tempting for others. “I am compelled to reject the poem as a sustained harmoniously functioning structural unit,” wrote Munson. “On the other hand, it is amazing how simple is the state of mind which these broken forms convey.” The broken forms, he suggests, are the fruit of a method “which is to take ancient beauty by the neck and twist it into modern ugliness.” Given such savagery, another critic sneered, “a grunt would serve equally well.”
Forms and formalism persisted as terms of reference. American poet John Crowe Ransom found the poem “the apotheosis of modernity” because it “seems to bring to a head all the specifically modern errors.” These included “an extremely free verse which we know as the medium of a half-hearted and disillusioned art”; but the worst offense was Eliot’s conflation of form with “formula”—though Ransom refrained from specifying what the formula was. Conrad Aiken offered a more audacious take on the question of form or design: “If it is a plan, then its principle is oddly akin to planlessness.”
The most receptive readers of The Waste Land were those (to use a later idiom) who could go with the flow. The issue of plan or underlying unity was moot, thought Harriet Monroe, when one sees that, for the poet, “it is a condition, not a theory, which confronts him.” The condition was manifestly chaotic—an unfamiliar sensation in poetry—but self-identified moderns among Eliot’s readership recognized that the poem approximated a contemporary bedlam. Mood and emotion precipitate an atmosphere in which the wasteland shimmers like a mirage.
There was a medley of details, evocations of discrepant moments and events, but as a poem it had a sequence. The five numbered parts prompted some to conclude it was not one but several poems. Aiken speculated that it “originally consisted of a number of separate poems which have been telescoped—given a kind of forced unity.” (Although he was Eliot’s friend, he had not been privy to its composition.) Clive Bell identified in Eliot an engine “in perpetual want of grist.” Unable to gush, he could only scavenge for material: “Birdlike he must pile up wisps and straws” to fill out the poem. An insistent concern was how such a hodgepodge could make an impact. There was a “rhythm of alteration,” Gilbert Seldes observed, “between the spoken and the unspoken thought” in the poem. This touched on psychological matters most reviewers shied clear of.
Rhythm was key, suggesting a receptivity below conscious awareness. Helen McAfee, like Seldes, detected it through the lens of psychology and the way consciousness can serve “the bidding of the subconscious.” In Eliot’s poem, she discerned, “the parts move with a certain rhythm—the rhythm of daydreams—and, dream-fashion, resolve one into another and so achieve a whole. It is mood more than idea that gives the poem its unity. And that mood is black.”
Harold Monro likewise appealed to the model of the dream, going so far as to suggest that “this poem actually is a dream presented without any poetic boast, bluff or padding; and it lingers in the mind more like a dream than a poem, which is one of the reasons why it is both obscure and amusing.” He also compared it to a cloud “which, though remaining the same cloud, changes its form repeatedly as one looks.”
Music was also commonly used to explain the poem’s unusual aura. One reviewer found that it lingered in the mind as “a sound of high and desolate music.” Aiken, himself a seasoned recipient of the lingering provocations of Wagnerism, thought it merited description as program music. “We ‘accept’ the poem as we would accept a powerful, melancholy tone-poem.” To accept is not the same as to understand.
Musical references could be used to suggest a more sinister turn. A reviewer for The Double Dealer found the poem an “agonized outcry of a sensitive romanticist drowning in a sea of jazz.” “Sometimes it turns suddenly and shockingly into the jazz of the music-halls,” noted Edmund Wilson. Untermeyer, incensed by the lack of any apparent governing pattern, derisively itemized “Eliot’s jumble of narratives, nursery-rhymes, criticism, jazz rhythms, ‘Dictionary of Favorite Phrases’ and a few lyrical moments.” Jazz was a largely disreputable reference at the time, redeemed only slightly by Clive Bell’s use of the term to characterize what was most distinctive in modern art, literature, and music.
An infamous allegation concerning Eliot’s poem was in the very first issue of Time magazine in a column provocatively titled “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih: Has the Reader Any Rights before the Bar of Literature?” In the final paragraph, “It is rumored that The Waste Land was written as a hoax.” This incendiary statement was compounded by the erroneous assertion that the Dial Award was “for the best poem of 1922.” No other print source refers to a hoax, but this suggestion does attest to the notoriety surrounding the poem’s publication.
A concern raised in several reviews was the suspicion that, if not a hoax, The Waste Land was the result of some unsavory cabal, foisting undercooked fare on a gullible public. In his regular column for the New York Herald Tribune, Burton Rascoe reported a rumor that “a group of us are conspiring to mislead the public.” His was a literary gossip column, which he stoked by recounting a meeting with Edmund Wilson and Elinor Wylie, who shared his excitement about The Waste Land. Wilson wrote two of the first reviews of the poem, Wylie wrote one, and Rascoe penned numerous salutes. But he insisted there was no group effort involved.
The source of the rumor of a cabal, Rascoe surmised, was Untermeyer, whose damning review of Eliot’s poem had appeared a week earlier. The poem’s “mingling of willful obscurity and weak vaudeville,” Untermeyer wrote, “compels us to believe that the pleasure which many admirers derive from ‘The Waste Land’ is the same sort of gratification attained through having solved a puzzle, a form of self-congratulation.” Wilson in his earlier review may have provided grist for the reference, when he suggested that some would suspect that “Eliot has written a puzzle rather than a poem.” ~
https://lithub.com/why-most-critics-hated-the-waste-land-when-it-was-published/?fbclid=IwAR139bMGuv2E74-z75WD9qHP_aTBxVhtR0Ov54TDO15HXVTe6eibSs-68as
~ What makes a person “successful” isn't success, but how they cope with failure. ~ Jesse Bering
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RUSSIA’S BLAME GAME: THE REAL ENEMY IS THE U.S.
~ For Russia, the US is its archenemy, the root of all troubles, the engineer behind the greatest calamity to befall humankind: the downfall of the USSR. I don't know if Putin honestly believes it (he probably does), but it doesn't even matter: this fiction is the basis of the social contract between the Russian people and their rulers. I can't tell you what comes first: the anti-American propaganda or the widespread perception that the Russian Empire is not the most fantastic place on earth YET because of the Evil States.
Meanwhile, neither US citizens nor its government spends much of their time thinking about Russia (which no self-respecting Russian can imagine, by the way). And say what you will about global politics and national interests, but attention-seeking is at the core of Russia's motivation in mounting apocalyptic global crises. The scorned RF must remind everyone, particularly the US: we're not just an oversized mafia-ruled banana republic with little to offer besides our natural resources and doped athlete prodigies.
And now that Russia is in the daily headlines, the Americans still fail to realize — something evident for anyone watching Russian news — that it is the AMERICANS the Russians are fighting.
It doesn't end here: the US is not only oblivious to the fact that they're taking part in this war, but they're also winning, and quite spectacularly — all at the cost of 0 dead, 0 wounded, and 0 captured American soldiers.
And that could have been the punchline, but no. The funniest thing here is that the US is not even sure whether they want Russia to lose.
It partly has to do with the nuclear threats — there is a risk, however small, that a desperate Putin will push the button in the face of defeat. A more significant and plausible threat is the collapse of the Russian Federation — on a more dramatic, violent and unhinged scale than the USSR in the 90s.
Like its army, the RF is big, monolithic, and impervious only on paper. In reality, it's the last grand Empire of old: a ramshackle aggregation of over 30 different political entities spanning nine time zones, dozens of disparate ethnicities and cultures, and thousands of barely functioning corrupt bureaucracies. An almost religious belief in Moscow's power glues this archaic mess together. And it probably would have gone the way of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German and British Empires in the nineties had the Bush administration not done everything possible to preserve it.
The US did not want the collapse of the USSR for a pragmatic reason, as this would create overnight anarchy and chaos on a span of land more extensive than the surface of planet Pluto, littered with thousands of nuclear warheads.
Such a fall of an empire would have been a nightmare in peacetime. But Putin, in his stubborn prosecution of an ill-fated adventure in Ukraine, broke the seals on not one but several Pandora's boxes, ensuring that the collapse of RF would look more like 1917 than 1991. The only reason that he hasn't summoned Chthulu yet, is because — just like with nuclear weapons — the US made it patently clear they would kill him and Shoigu should they ever attempt that ritual. Let's take a brief look:
Even the elite Russian regular forces behaved like a mob of thugs upon entering Ukraine: with widespread murder, rape and looting, complete lack of discipline either condoned or even encouraged by their superiors.
Several mercenary outfits promptly joined — of which Prigozhin's Wagner and Kadyrov's National Guard are just the most famous formations. These private armies have access to RF's arsenal but are not under the command of the Russian generals or the jurisdiction of Russian law.
The Wagner Group can recruit, condone or execute convicted criminals. Thousands went from Russian prisons straight to Ukrainian battlefields with weapons in their hands.
To complete this orgy of murder and death, Putin called in hundreds of thousands of Russian civilians in his mobilization order — the first to be issued in Russia since 1941. Unprepared and unequipped, thrown into the trenches as shock troops and cannon fodder, whoever survives this war will have learned that it is either kill or be killed. Many will apply this knowledge for the rest of their lives.
Russian media quickly went from the hypocrisy of a "humanitarian" special operation (protecting the Russian speakers, fighting Nazis, retrieving the Ark of the Covenant, etc.) to a candid blood frenzy, openly advocating for strikes on civilian infrastructure, the genocide of Ukrainian people, and the use of nuclear weapons against anyone who disagrees.
And while the support for Putin is —ostensibly — waning within Russia, nothing indicates that's because Russians suddenly realize that the invasion of Ukraine is illegal and amoral. There is some anger because of the mobilization, and many voices admonishing the supreme leader for not being strong enough.
On top of it, the Russian economy is facing a triple challenge of sanctions, war focus, and tremendous workforce and domestic income loss due to those hundreds of thousands mobilized.
This violence and impoverishment ensure that the eventual collapse of Putin's government will not usher in a new era of peace and prosperity. At the same time, all these actions increasingly link Putin's own fate to that of the war — with the definitive military failure likely signaling the end of his government and probably his life. But what comes next?
I figure the scariest picture in the mind of a US foreign analyst should be this. A few dozen warlords in the mold of Prigozhin and Kadyrov, riding around Eurasian steppes on top of their private Iskander ballistic launchers, painted in their war colors and adorned with severed heads on spikes.
And, should Ukraine win the war tomorrow, this will likely be a reality just in time for November 2024. Now, explain how you conducted the most successful foreign policy since FDR to the US electorate.
Hence, the US officials carefully choose words to outline their commitment to Ukraine. If I recall correctly, Anthony Blinken once stated that we should ensure "Ukraine wins this war." And he probably got slapped on the wrist for that, too, since the official rhetoric is "not allowing Russia to win" or "not allowing Ukraine to lose.”
In a way, it's a Catch-22 scenario for the US. They could ensure a prompt Ukrainian victory by increasing the weapon supplies and giving them access to ATACMS HIMARS munitions. Even at the current supply rate, Ukraine will win — although it will take them longer. And the US is not interested in preserving Putin's government, nor can it save it even if it wanted to — Putin is set himself firmly on a road of self-destruction.
I guess the US is biding more time: waiting (and hopefully working) for a surge of a more acceptable alternative to Putin than private armies and their warlords. Either an actual anti-war popular movement in Russia, a capable siloviki group within the Kremlin that could withdraw from Ukraine without disintegrating the RF, or a mix of both. At the moment, neither seems likely.
UPDATE:
Shortly after posting, I received a comment from Ron Keffer, which sums up my opinion so perfectly that I'm just going to quote it:
"The end of a major war — and this IS a major war — often doesn't produce the expected and intended outcomes. We find it hard to imagine what a new reality would look like, even if, in the end, it's a better one — so we fear the future. The wheel turns, and all the factors in play guarantee the future will be different from the present, and it will happen regardless of whether we fear it or not.” ~ Vladimir Kokorev, Quora
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WHAT THE WEST WILL GAIN IF UKRAINE WINS
~ The paper tiger has been defanged. The emperor has no clothes. The fact is that Russia is now a depleted, low-rank military and poses no real threat to anyone any longer — except for their shaky nuclear threat. The West™ will have to be careful not to underestimate Russia’s possible insane use of their nukes out of desperation. We can only hope Putin is succeeded by someone sane.
The Russians have inadvertently helped to rearm Ukraine by abandoning giant caches of heavy armor and ammunition. Perhaps this might alleviate the whining by those who begrudge The West’s supply of weapons to Ukraine.
Europe’s Faustian deal with the devil (energy purchased from Russia) has been proven to be a trap and now the world has solid proof that Russia cannot be trusted. This gives full credibility to Western fears that Russia would do what they have now demonstrated to the planet. It’s no longer fear porn but reality.
The West gains new NATO members as well, ruining Dr Evil’s chances at dividing The West.
The West also gains points for demonstrating to other autocrats and dictators that The West’s weapons and technology is not to be underestimated. By proxy, the Axis of Evil countries now see that their second rate garbage weapons from Russia are out of date by decades. So The West gets higher stature for superior weapons and tactics.
The use of drones may cause a huge ‘David vs Goliath’ effect, i.e. is reminiscent of the early days of the US’s own ‘Revolutionary War’ in which our country upset the rigid notions of Napoleonic warfare embraced at the time by Europeans including the Brits and said ‘fuck that we’re going to hide behind trees and ambush you any which way we can’. The drone successes are I think quite disruptive, caught the Russians off guard. Drones are the new ‘Greek fire’. ~ CCB, Quora
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Greek fire was an incendiary weapon used by the Eastern Roman Empire beginning c. 672. Used to set fire to enemy ships, it consisted of a combustible compound emitted by a flame-throwing weapon. Some historians believe it could be ignited on contact with water, and was probably based on naphtha and quicklime. The Byzantines typically used it in naval battles to great effect, as it could continue burning while floating on water. The technological advantage it provided was responsible for many key Byzantine military victories, most notably the salvation of Constantinople from the first and second Arab sieges, thus securing the empire's survival. ~ Wiki
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MARXISM AND THE SOVIET REALITY
~ Marx’s writings were almost entirely about capitalism. He says very little about communism or socialism, like 50 pages in the 50 vol. collected works, and that at a high level of generality, such as the famous slogan, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. He doesn’t say how to realize this. This is not an oversight. Marx expressly disavows “writing recipes for the cookshops of the future” instead of “proceeding from the actual facts.” It is clear from what little he does say, however, that the USSR did not realize anything like what Marx anticipated for a socialist society, for example, a “free association of producers,” where “the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.”
The Soviets gave lip service and little else to these ideals, except for the abolition of private property—but not, as Marx urged, the abolition of the wages system. Partly this was because Marx expected socialist revolutions to come about in advanced capitalist societies like Britain or France, with highly developed economies, and not in poor agrarian Empire that barely even had a proletariat, like Russia. Such revolutions did indeed occur in developed or rapidly developing countries, including France (Paris Commune, 1870), and all across Europe, including, notably, Germany, after World War I, but they were crushed by armed might.
The defeat of the German revolution in particular was very damaging to the new Soviet Russia, and Lenin and the Bolsheviks knew this well. (Also to the rest of the world: had the German revolution succeeded, there would have been no Stalin, no Hitler, no WWII. The Soviets were faced with the task of developing their nation and creating a working class, where Marxists had traditionally anticipated the working class of a developed nation taking over an advanced industrial society.
Unfortunately the Bolsheviks chose not to rely on the creativity and energy of revolutionary workers and returned soldiers, and in fact actively repressed the Soviets of workers and soldiers that gave the country its name. They imposed a top down system where a bureaucracy made the important decisions for the workers, and dissent was dealt with by a secret police, the Cheka, the ancestor of the KGB. This was not “a free association of producers.”
The old Bolsheviks retained much of their revolutionary idealism. But after Lenin’s death the bureaucracy was taken over by Stalin, the consummate bureaucrat, who proclaimed, in place of Marx’s and indeed Lenin’s internationalism, Socialism in One Country. (To be fair, after the defeat of the German Revolution, one country was all they had.) He accelerated the process of bureaucratic control, murdered most of the idealists and caused the deaths of millions of others. Possibly Lenin’s and the old Bolsheviks choice for a one party state and bureaucratic rule was a choice made of desperation in desperate circumstances. But it started the Soviet Union on the wrong path, and Stalin squelched any hope that it might return, or turn, to its Marxist roots. ~ Justin Schwartz, Quora
Parades in which people carried giant portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin were an indispensable part of life in the Soviet Union and the satellite countries.
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SURPRISES IN THE UKRAINIAN WAR FROM THE PROPAGANDA POINT OF VIEW
From the POV of propaganda, I see three puzzling holes in what the Ukrainians do.
1. Crimea not being the symbolical focal point of the Ukrainian war effort.
Recapturing Donbas means taking over a ruined, largely Russophile territory, with industry looted by Russian players and drained of young and educated people. Crimea is surely not much better in terms of economy and demography. It’s a pensioners’ and the military’s haven, with solid addition of government servants and people on the dole.
Symbolically, however, it would be a fabulous prize. Both in terms of rubbing our Russian noses in it, and also thanks to its history and salient place on the map. Kind of beach property, the thing triples the value just because of the view.
If I were Zeliensky, I would step up tomorrow before the TV cameras and declare to the nation and the world: “L'Shana Haba'ah B'Sebastopol! [“Next year in Sevastopol!” — after “Next year in Jerusalem”]
2. Too little Blut und Boden [“blood and soil” — a Nazi slogan]
Ukraine, like any nation under attack, undergoes a deep right-wing shift. Add to that the general Zeitgeist of the 21st century away from traditional Socialism.
It may happen I don’t catch much of the internal Ukrainian discourse because of my unfamiliarity with their language. But let’s say one question keeps torturing me: when will they declare the “Ukrainian Republic of Rus”?
3. Timid libertarians
Through the State-centric Russian lens, Ukrainians in general appear outrageously libertarian. The war has demonstrated their phenomenal ability to self-organize beside, and often in spite of their government. Thanks to the trauma of the Soviet past, their libertarianism has a pronounced right-wing tilt. This makes Ukraine probably the closest thing to an American anti-Statist’s paradise.
Ukrainians could gain a lot if they find a way to communicate this to the American Reps. So far, Tucker Carlson, the alt-right crowd, and non-aligned libertarians like John Cate regularly play on Putin’s side. In this particular segment, Ukrainian propaganda totally sucks.
The libertarian core of Ukrainian nationalism deprives it of the firm, well-funded, multilayered discipline of Statist propaganda that Russia has practiced since the Imperial era. No matter what the Americans say to you, in things like war and ideology the State wins over private initiative any day.
Nathaniel Gousset:
Militarily it make no sense. Take back Donetsk and you cut Russians in two, Crimea will fall without nearly a fight. It's not possible to sustain troops here in number. Take Crimea first and you did nothing to diminish Russian power, you still have to go through more and more defensive line with no benefit.
Chris Barker:
Reclaiming Crimea is, while not impossible, still quite a long shot, so Zelensky is probably being smart not promising something which may be out of reach.
Steve Miller:
Considering the overwhelming American popular support for Ukraine, it seems like their libertarian propaganda is working quite well as is. The US alt-right crowd actually has some sympathy for the Ukrainians but their isolationism and opportunism are much stronger than their sympathies.
Overall, Americans support Ukraine because their rhetoric sounds American (they’re like us!), they look like us (the white part of us, anyway), and, well, they’re being brutally assaulted simply for wanting to choose how they will live. And they’re fighting an incompetent force accusing them of “Judeo-Nazism,” one of the more disgusting, cynical, fraudulent concepts ever invented by man. Which is really saying something. As you’ve pointed out in the past, propaganda has to be built on selected truths. This label’s got nothing to work with.
Not to mention that the big takeaway for Americans from World War II is, stop land-hungry dictators, don’t appease them beyond a few minor adjustments. Russia has never stood a chance given these factors, at least with the American people.
Paul Merzejski:
The Ukrainians aren’t trying to relate to the Kievan Rus, they’re more into Cossacks. Seeking roots in the Kievan Rus is more of a Russian thing. If they’re not trying to make Crimea the focal point of the war, that can only mean they’re not (realistically) expecting to recapture the peninsula any time soon.
Dima:
Their trident is definitely Varangian [Viking]. And the Cossack business of guns-for-hire, slaving, and looting coastal and fluvial settlements is Varangian, too.
Oriana:
Dima's reply shows the trouble with trying to use history to promote current national goals. Kiev was indeed founded by the Vikings, most of them from Sweden. Should Sweden therefore reclaim Ukraine as their own territory? And what about the ancient Greek settlements in Ukraine? Should Greece therefore . . . etc, etc? Europe is a continent blessed and cursed with too much history, on which hyper-nationalist feast like vultures.
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THE REAL DIVIDE IS BETWEEN PEOPLE WHO INHERIT FROM THEIR PARENTS AND THOSE WHO DON’T
~ Isobel had a hard time getting pregnant. After several heartbreaking miscarriages and three gruelling rounds of IVF, she had begun to worry that, at 34, she was running out of time. But, miraculously, the fourth round worked, and when we speak she is weeks from giving birth. Her parents are “amazingly excited” about meeting their first grandchild, not least because they funded Isobel’s fertility treatment – as is the case for an estimated one in eight British couples needing IVF – meaning she and her partner could throw everything into trying to conceive, undergoing several treatment cycles in quick succession.
“I’m so grateful to have been able to rattle through it at the speed we did, when I know friends have taken big gaps between IVF rounds because they had to save up,” says Isobel, who works for a London-based charity. “I didn’t have to think about how much it cost, which really took the pressure off.” The pandemic had also made her acutely aware of her parents’ mortality, worrying they might not live to see any grandchildren. So she and her partner gratefully accepted their offer.
It’s not the first time family money has helped her out. Isobel’s parents inherited legacies from their own parents in their 50s, which helped them pass on “living gifts” to her. They helped her buy a house in London when she was 27, and paid off her student loan when she was 22, so she could start saving for a pension. “When I think of the money that’s gone into that pension, it just starts a whole cycle of privilege over again,” Isobel says. Although she couldn’t be more grateful for her parents’ life-changing generosity, like many recipients of family money, she isn’t comfortable discussing it publicly; Isobel isn’t her real name and she hasn’t been upfront with colleagues about how she came to buy a house so young. It was awkward, she admits, when they started holding Zoom meetings from home during the pandemic and everyone could see where she lived. “It doesn’t feel fair – and it makes you feel guilty.”
Britain is entering a golden age of inheritance, as the trillions accumulated by the postwar baby-boom generation begin trickling down to their children and grandchildren in what’s been dubbed the great wealth transfer. By 2025, £100bn – more than half the annual budget of the NHS – could be changing hands every year, according to a landmark analysis commissioned by estate administrators the Kings Court Trust. By 2047, they estimate that number could more than treble.
Around £5.5tn in total could flow down through families over the next 30 years, both in conventional legacies and increasingly in living gifts like Isobel’s, which don’t attract inheritance tax if the donor survives for seven years after handing them over. In wealthy families, these can be part of a carefully crafted strategy to reduce death duties, often funneled into property or school fees. “As a grandparent, have you considered investing in your grandchild’s education instead of paying 40% inheritance tax?” asks the website of fee-paying Bolton school, suggesting brightly that it’s one way to “leave a worthy bequest whilst avoiding giving away lifetime earnings to the taxman!”
But wealth transfers aren’t confined to the rich. Research into lifetime gifting by HMRC found nearly a quarter of over-70s had helped their children out financially in the last two years alone, with the instinct to help so strong that some were getting into debt to do it. Half of first-time buyers have financial help from family, according to the annual Bank of Mum and Dad report from financial services company Legal & General, while roughly a third of grandparents plan to help grandchildren with university costs. A generation who enjoyed free education, and could become homeowners even on relatively modest incomes, are watching in alarm as their children struggle to reach the same milestones, and stepping in if they can.
The sums involved in the great wealth transfer are so staggeringly high partly because the so-called boomers make up such a big chunk of the population – roughly a fifth – but partly because they got lucky. Historically, it’s perfectly normal for older people to be richer than younger ones, having had a lifetime to accumulate property, pensions and savings. What has happened to those assets over a generation, however, is unusual. House prices trebled in real terms between 1980 and 2020, and even a council house bought through Margaret Thatcher’s right to buy can be worth seven figures in some London postcodes. One in four pensioner households are now worth over £1m on paper, even if they’re not cash rich. Now this windfall is heading down to the next generation – or to some of them.
As the Kings Court Trust analysis warns, there is a “deep and growing divide” between younger people who expect to be left something and those painfully aware they won’t be, in a world where family money is becoming increasingly critical to life chances. Research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank last year showed that for children born in the 60s, a quarter of the difference in living standards between rich and poor was explained solely by inherited capital.
For 80s children, a third of it is. And the harder it feels to make it on merit in tough economic times, the more inherited wealth may grate, making it an extraordinary wellspring of guilt, rivalry and sometimes gnawing resentment. Last summer, New York magazine rather melodramatically asked, “Will the Great Wealth Transfer trigger a millennial civil war?”, arguing that the supposed generational conflict between boomers and millennials might soon morph into conflict between the young haves and have-nots.
It’s something Isobel worries about. “Of my friends who have bought houses, most have got money from their parents,” she says. “When people talk about our generation having a terrible time, I think the divide is between people who do and don’t have inherited wealth.” No wonder inheritance has become the middle class’s dirty secret, harder to talk about than sex.
A child of Nigerian immigrant parents, the writer Otegha Uwagba did not grow up with money. But getting a full scholarship to a private school, then moving on to Oxford, brought her into contact with a very different social circle. In her bestselling memoir We Need To Talk About Money, she describes her new friends’ strange coyness about how they became homeowners in their 20s: “Few people are forthcoming in noting the often massive inheritances underwriting these purchases. Instead, we see Instagram photos of beaming twentysomethings standing proudly on the steps of their new home, or engage in polite dinner party chitchat about paint swatches and mid-century Ercol furniture, even as we silently wonder, ‘How?’” Puzzled, Uwagba once asked a friend how she’d secured a mortgage aged only 24. It turned out the woman’s parents had bought the flat outright, and she was just pretending to need a loan.
“I think people are coy about sharing the reality of any form of privilege, whether it’s racial or gender or financial. They think it diminishes them,” Uwagba says. After all, they haven’t made it on merit.
“Intergenerational gifting is sensitive,” write sociologists Liz Moor and Sam Friedman, in a research paper examining how people whose parents have helped them to buy justify their good fortune. “It can elicit feelings of guilt, embarrassment, even shame, and therefore often goes unspoken in everyday life.” Some of the heirs they interviewed felt judged by friends for not having made it on their own, while those with left-wing views struggled to reconcile personal gratitude with political conscience. Participants tended to say inheritance tax was a good thing, but mainly if it fell on people richer than them.
Moor, who set out to examine why there isn’t more social pressure to tax inherited wealth, says interviewees tended to defend themselves by citing the working-class roots of relatives who made money generations ago. “People could find a way to reconcile a belief in meritocracy with receiving unearned income by making that connection to upward social mobility over time,” she says. “It’s a bit self-serving, but it lends itself to the status quo when you can say, ‘Yes, but it was my working-class grandparents selling their bungalow that helped me buy my flat.’” What they found harder to explain away was the disparity between them and friends in similar jobs who couldn’t afford to buy. One interviewee, Alicia, simply hid the fact that she had bought her flat outright.
As Uwagba points out, this embarrassed silence just leaves those without family money to self-flagellate over why they can’t seem to get their lives together when the truth is their friends haven’t really done so either; they just have parents who did. For most of her 20s she assumed financial success was “a question of working hard, getting further up the career ladder”, but not any more: “If I can’t figure it out, I just assume it’s family money, and that’s a good rule of thumb, especially with people working in the media and publishing.”
Wealth acquired young, she points out, has a powerful multiplier effect. Get your student loan paid off and you can save for a deposit earlier. The sooner you buy property, the sooner money that would have gone on rent is building assets your own children might inherit. Wealth breeds wealth, so much so that one study tracing the descendants of wealthy Victorians found their great-great-grandchildren were still disproportionately likely to be well off five generations later. Some of Uwagba’s contemporaries had their education funded by grandparents: “So now your life trajectory is determined not even by your parents’ money but by your grandparents’ – how do you compete with that?”
Inherited money, or the expectation of it, also has less tangible advantages. It can free people to take professional risks, entering potentially lucrative fields that don’t pay well initially – from insecure gigs such as acting to professions with surprisingly low earnings for juniors, like criminal law. Uwagba herself went into advertising after graduating, worrying that writing for a living seemed too precarious. But friends from wealthier families were more confident about taking unpaid internships in creative industries: “It’s the knowledge that there’s money coming down the line eventually. You can take more risks, think more long term.”
That’s true for Beth, who works in PR, and discovered in her mid-40s she was to inherit a “life-changing” amount after her parents died in quick succession. The windfall was a surprise, as her parents are from ordinary backgrounds and she hadn’t considered them rich. But her father started a successful engineering business in her native Australia; her parents bought property, managed their money carefully, and left enough for Beth to pay off her mortgage. But she has also worked out that, if she wants to, she could now move to a hot country where overheads are cheap, and not work for a decade. She isn’t sure if that life is for her, but knowing that, for the first time in her life, she could quit has transformed her attitude to a stressful job. “If you have a bad day at work, you can think, ‘Screw this, I don’t need it.’ No wonder the confidence of rich folk!”
Yet for some, family money comes with more complex feelings attached. Philippa, a 39-year-old NHS worker, says her parents are not wealthy but stretched themselves to help her buy a small flat on the outskirts of London she couldn’t otherwise have afforded on a public sector salary. She worries whether they have left themselves enough for a comfortable retirement, and whether she invested wisely (she recently discovered some issues with the flat that may make it harder to resell). “They trusted me to make the right decisions, and I worry about letting them down,” she says. Like Isobel, Philippa views her good fortune with both gratitude and guilt that she isn’t more financially independent. “You want to be self-sufficient, but to be in a position to have help – that’s a really difficult thing to turn down.” The hopes and fears bound up with inheritance can make it an emotionally loaded issue not just in broader society, but also within families.
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It was back in the early noughties, just as the baby boomers were entering their 50s, that marketing analysts first identified what became known as the “ski set”; empty nesters who had paid off their mortgages and were unashamedly out to Spend the Kids’ Inheritance on bucket-list holidays, sports cars and pleasures they had denied themselves while raising families.
The ski-ers had worked hard and meant “to make the most of it while they can” instead of leaving legacies, a report by the analysts Datamonitor concluded. Hidden in the small print was the fact that many had already given their children money to buy property first. But still, the idea of hedonistic pensioners caught on. When the Joseph Rowntree Foundation conducted research into attitudes to legacies back in 2005, it found two-thirds of those potentially wealthy enough to leave something weren’t worried about organizing their finances to do so, and more than half of adults didn’t expect to get anything. Older people wanted to enjoy the fruits of their labors, and some might even have worried about inheritance doing more harm than good: this was, after all, the era of celebrities from software billionaire Bill Gates to cookery writer Nigella Lawson declaring they wouldn’t leave fortunes to their children because (in Lawson’s words) “it ruins people not having to earn money”.
But in 2005, Britain was in the middle of a seemingly endless economic boom. Three recessions later, parents are far less confident about their children’s prospects and also potentially their own, with rocketing inflation disrupting retirement plans. The original ski-ers are now in their 70s and 80s, and worrying about this winter’s central heating bills, even as they may be fretting about their adult children growing older in rented flats.
Rachael Griffin is head of tax and trusts at the wealth management company Quilter, and specializes in inheritance advice. Some clients still worry about spoiling their children by passing money on, she says, but she senses attitudes shifting: most want to see their hard-earned wealth passed down the family, not collected by the taxman.
“There’s always this sort of underlying concern that people want their children or grandchildren to achieve on their own, and understand the value of money and work. But that way of thinking is changing, just because trying to get on the housing ladder now is completely different from how it would have been for baby boomers.”
Even for those wealthy enough to need advice from a firm like hers, the cost of living crisis is making itself felt. Some clients worry about keeping back enough to pay for nursing care in their old age, given uncertainty about what the government will fund (a promise to cap care costs has just been delayed for another two years). Others are seeking advice on conserving capital, not giving it away. “We’re in a crisis, so people feel like they need their own money today,” Griffin says. “It’s that fear of running out of money during their lifetimes.”
A society that has become overly reliant on inherited money may have potentially painful consequences not just for those who don’t inherit, but also for people’s quality of life at an age when they should be free to please themselves. According to a recent report on inheritance from low-income think tank the Resolution Foundation, some older people are now making significant sacrifices in order to leave something to their children, with 9% downsizing, 16% saving more and 4% working longer into retirement. “It’s not just about younger people missing opportunities if they don’t happen to have rich parents – it penalizes older people, too,” says Jack Leslie, senior economist at the foundation and co-author of the report. This often unspoken intergenerational clash of expectations makes inheritance a sensitive subject in many families.
Fiona is a 33-year-old single parent, working in local government. Her parents chipped in for her older sister’s house deposit and promised to do the same for her, she says. But when she was ready to buy, her parents told her they had plowed everything into a house abroad, hoping for a retirement in the sun, leaving Fiona torn between accepting that it was their hard-earned cash to do with as they wanted, and feeling privately bitter.
“Even with my parents, it’s very difficult to talk about. There’s a lot of emotion attached, and a lot of shame,” she says. “They are quite prickly about it. But this is what I struggle to reconcile – I do sound entitled; my parents came from very working-class backgrounds, worked hard and ended up well off, and if they want to buy houses overseas, they can.” But she struggles not to feel short-changed, compared with her sister. What makes the passage of money down through families so emotionally loaded is that money is rarely just that. All too often, it can stir painful memories of who was the favorite child, or who felt overlooked growing up. No wonder some families end up squabbling over seemingly trivial trinkets following a bereavement, or blowing their inheritances on fighting each other in court.
“I’ve had people come to me for a legal consultation and describe incidents in their highchairs,” sighs Barbara Rich, a family law barrister specializing in high-value inheritance cases and a mediator trained to resolve family disputes over wills. Her first question to clients, she tells me over Zoom from her elegant study, is now invariably about their place in the birth order and relationships with siblings; she has never forgotten overhearing, as a young barrister, a conversation that sounded like “something out of a Larkin poem” unfolding outside court. “A middle-aged woman turned and said to [the sibling] next to her: ‘Mum never loved you, you know, and those candlesticks aren’t real pewter.’ That really sums it up.”
Perhaps surprisingly, such legal wrangling over legacies is no longer confined to families who would regard themselves as rich. Especially in London and the south-east, the property boom has created a new class of unexpected heirs. “People whose parents or grandparents were working-class Windrush arrivals and council house right-to-buy owners – their descendants are in this net now,” Rich says. “Someone who came over on the Windrush could have a secure blue-collar job and afford a mortgage on what would then have been a run-down house in Brixton or Tottenham.” She has represented clients who grew up in “really unimaginable poverty – broken windows, not enough shoes for all the children to go to school every day”, and yet found themselves in line for seven-figure inheritances.
What commonly brings them into dispute, she says, is that older people who don’t consider themselves rich may not bother making a will. In the absence of one, estates usually pass by default to surviving children or spouses – an arrangement that may suit traditional nuclear families, but not always those broken and remade by migration. “A grandfather who came on the Windrush might well have left siblings and parents in Jamaica; they might even have left children to come and work, then perhaps formed a new relationship. There are perhaps children they barely know who are entitled to inherit in the absence of a will, and someone they’ve lived with, children they’ve had from a long relationship, living in the house, who aren’t.”
Sometimes it’s only in death that the tensions and secrets beneath the surface of family life emerge. Rich has handled several disputes where the existence of a mistress or even a second family with a claim to money emerged posthumously. Another common source of tension, she says, is wealthy men divorcing, then marrying younger women, who outlive them and clash with the children of the first marriage over the inheritance.
But perhaps the most painful disputes are between siblings not treated equally in a will – in some cases because parents are trying to compensate for perceived hardship in one child’s life. “Sometimes parents get an idea about their children, even when the children are quite small – who’s the pretty one, who’s the clever one – and then perhaps subconsciously mold their children’s lives to fit that pattern,” Rich says.
Sheila, a 60-year-old retired City dealer and mother of two grown-up children, inherited nothing from her father when he died. There wasn’t much to leave, she says, as she comes from a “very ordinary” family. But her father told her in advance her younger sister would get the family house, because Sheila had a successful career and didn’t need it. When I ask if being cut out was hurtful, she insists it made her proud of being self-reliant. “I feel almost aggressively righteous about not having received a penny from anybody,” she says. “As a child, my sister was always the one who was asking for stuff, she always feels hard done by, and you think: how many of these things should come easily? She had conversations with my dad saying, ‘I have nothing, she’s got everything,’ and he just thought, ‘Well, OK then.’”
Some of her friends think millennial children have it too easy and should give up luxuries rather than rely on their parents. (More than half of boomers still think overspending on things like Netflix and holidays is a key reason young people can’t buy property, according to research published in June by King’s College London.) But Sheila fervently disagrees. “My husband bought his first house in 1975 for about tuppence ha’penny. He and his first wife had very ordinary jobs – she was a manager in a shop – but they bought a three-bedroom semi in London. That would be impossible now,” she says, pointing out that her children’s generation is also burdened with student debt.
When her husband inherited from his father, the couple passed the money directly to their children – but have given their 30-year-old son more help than his older sister. “She’s very ambitious, works hard. We have given money to both of them, but he has received far more. He’s not married – he’d be living with us still if we hadn’t topped up the inheritance money he already had.” She pauses. Though she plans to even things up in her will, her daughter isn’t happy about it: “We have a strained relationship – she says, ‘Oh, he’s always the golden child.’”
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If inheritance is a deeply conservative idea, arguably its most conservative function is to underpin the status quo. Historically it’s always helped the rich make their children rich in turn, consolidating wealth and power within the same tight circle. But family money has also insulated many Britons from what would otherwise have been a more painful middle-class squeeze over the last decade.
That ability to live off past glories, creating the illusion of good times still rolling even as real wages flatlined, has arguably kept an artificial lid on pressure for change. “There’s a lot of talk about Generation Rent and how millennials aren’t well off. But there are enough people who are inheriting money, so it doesn’t affect as many people as you think,” Otegha Uwagba says. “When you think about the system of power, who are the gatekeepers, who goes into media and politics – I wonder how many MPs have had to do London renting on a very average salary?”
Yet for all that, the idea of the taxman coming between parent and child remains startlingly unpopular, even among those who might stand to benefit. The Resolution Foundation’s Jack Leslie didn’t ask his focus groups about inheritance tax, reasoning that they weren’t rich enough to be liable for it, but found they were strongly resistant to the idea: “It feels deeply unfair to people – basically, people feel it’s right that they should be able to help their children or their grandchildren.” In October, amid rumors that the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, might be eyeing up inheritance tax as one way of bailing out the public finances, a YouGov poll found two-thirds of Britons opposed a higher rate, and almost half wanted the entire tax abolished. The parental instinct to protect your own can be fiercer sometimes than reason.
When I ask Isobel if she has a solution to the uncomfortable social divide she describes, she says instantly: “Tax us more!” But it may be a brave politician who takes her up on that in a country where inheritance is increasingly central to middle-class ambitions, or seen as a shield against the slings and arrows to come. Too many lives are shaped by family money, perhaps, to give it up without a fight. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/dec/03/why-inheritance-is-the-dirty-secret-of-the-middle-classes-harder-to-talk-about-than-sex?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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THE FABELMANS: WUNDERKIND STEVEN SPIELBERG AND A MOTHER EVERYONE WILL HATE
~ The Fabelmans, a notably sharp semi-autobiographical drama mounted with proficiency, evokes Steven Spielberg’s youth years, dwelling in his great-to-watch family dynamics and early passion for cinema. Spielberg's declaration of love for the seventh art is sincere, funny and tender, with some magical moments that will easily conquer the viewers’ heart.
Never in the same vein of his previous works, Spielberg shows how versatile he is, a fact confirmed through his alter ego, Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle acts with class and gravitas), who makes low-budget westerns, WWII battles, and homemade movies with the same acuity. We follow him with amusement from age seven to 18, a specific life period that starts in New Jersey, passes by Phoenix, Arizona, and ends in California. Observant, Sammy captures a secret within the family that confounds, hurts and scares.
After the disappointing and unnecessary remake of West Side Story, it’s good to see master Spielberg back in business with an intimate, personal chronicle that is as much endearing as it is eye-popping. The melancholic grace of the image is superb and benefits from the obvious pleasure of staging, while the story itself — another successful collaboration with playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner (Lincoln, 2012; Munich, 2005) — contains real finds, intense moments of happiness, and painful struggles proper from the adolescence.
The Fabelmans is forged with a developed sense of narrative, harmonious composition, and an unblemished command of the actors, with my favorite episode occurring in the final minutes, when the young filmmaker meets the renowned director John Ford (impeccably impersonated by David Lynch) at CBS Studios. Spielberg hasn’t lost sight of the engaging, practical nature of his style, and benefits from the excellent performances of LaBelle, Paul Dano and Michelle Williams. ~
https://alwaysgoodmovies.com/reviews/the-fabelmans-2022
Steven Spielberg, long past his teens
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~ With a career stretching out over five decades and more than thirty feature films, Steven Spielberg has found unprecedented success, while steadily improving at his craft and becoming a contender for the Greatest of Our Time. Yet his detractors have accused him of being juvenile, of catering to fantasies and skipping over grown-up issues, of favoring boy's stories (and not knowing how to handle women), and of preferring spectacle to humanity.
Whatever Spielberg was hiding from or avoiding, he has now faced fully, and embraced, with his glorious The Fabelmans. Like James Gray's recent Armageddon Time, The Fabelmans is a memory piece, a quasi-autobiography wrapped in fiction. But while Gray wrestled with the problem of memory versus nostalgia, Spielberg is more content to weave a tapestry, or rather a ballet, where memory, cinema, and life dance gracefully around one another.
It tells his own life story, though we know that because Steven Spielberg has become "Sam Fabelman," that this is a story, and not fact. It begins in 1952 as young Sam (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) goes to the movies for the first time with his parents, Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano). Sam is initially frightened of the dark and the "giants" on the screen, but he is soon mesmerized by Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth.
For Hanukkah, he receives a beautiful Lionel train set. His first impulse is to re-create the train crash from the movie. His father, a brilliant technical engineer, punishes him, but his mother — an artist herself, a piano virtuoso — understands. She gets out the 8mm movie camera and suggests filming the crash so that it can be watched again and again without damaging the train.
Sam grows (Gabriel LaBelle) and shoots more homemade movies, showing a keen inventiveness in both the filmmaking process and the editing process, finding ways to make things more realistic, more cinematic, more amazing. And as much as we'd love to witness the birth of Spielberg's poetry, and the origins of his most famous creations, the camera is frequently put away so that Sam can live his life.
In any case, we meet "Uncle" Bennie (Seth Rogen), who works with Burt and is Burt's best friend. As Mitzi explains, he is able to talk more plainly about what Burt actually does so that regular folks can understand. Bennie seems to be around a lot, even going on a family camping trip with the Fabelmans. And when Sam discovers the reason why, his world is ripped out from under him.
More drama comes when the family moves to California so that Burt can accept a job at IBM. Sam and his sisters Reggie (Julia Butters) and Natalie (Keeley Karsten) wind up at a school populated by Aryan giants. There, they get their first taste of anti-Semitism, although Sam does end up with his first girlfriend, Monica (Chloe East), a Christian whose room is decorated with pictures of "sexy" Jesus.
Monica encourages Sam to pick up a camera (a 16mm Arriflex this time) to film senior Ditch Day, and he uses the opportunity to process his feelings about two of his bullies: the twisted, hateful, anti-Semitic Chad (Oakes Fegley) and the handsome, chiseled athlete Logan (Sam Rechner), who is less hateful, but who does nothing to discourage his friend's nasty remarks. The finished film somehow, perhaps purposely or perhaps instinctively, captures the true nature of the bullies, and hands them their just deserts.
Things jump to a year later in Los Angeles as an exhausted Sam struggles with college, suffers panic attacks, and hunts futilely to find his first job, anything at all, even being an "assistant to the assistant" on a new TV show called Hogan's Heroes. But then Spielberg finds his most perfect ending, an astonishing meeting between the future great, and the actual GOAT, with a brilliant piece of casting that only adds more layers.
Truthfully The Fabelmans doesn't move like a traditional story. Rather, it's like snatches of moments. Each moment can lead either lead to the next logical moment, or it can jump ahead to months later. Each scene, each single shot, shows the conflict, the connection, between life and art. The artist occupies his life, but is also constantly searching for anything that is a filmable moment. Is this moment cinematic? Is there a poem here?
In one crushing moment in which his parents announce their divorce to the children, Sam is present, but Spielberg moves his camera across the living room to show a wall mirror, and in the mirror, an alternate, dream version of Sam has his camera out, and is capturing the moment on film. In another scene, Mitzi plays the piano, and the camera travels over her and the instrument, until it finally settles on a low-angle shot that perfectly frames her face reflected in the polished wood. He's forever looking for "the shot.”
In a centerpiece sequence, Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) comes for a visit. Having worked in the circus and in silent cinema, he has the same artistic temperament as Mitzi and Sam, and in a bravura piece of acting, he gives Sam a sinister warning about being so devoted to your art that you shift your family to second place. ("I want you to remember pain.”)
If anyone had any doubts that Spielberg could direct a great female performance, then Michelle Williams's incredible work should remove those doubts permanently. She also suggests that, between Spielberg's parents, he perhaps felt closer and more connected with her. His real struggle was in connecting with his father, which may explain why there are so many father-son stories — and absent fathers, and father-figures — in his filmography. (The scenes between Leonardo DiCaprio and Christopher Walken in Catch Me If You Can are especially close to what we see here.)
Truthfully The Fabelmans doesn't move like a traditional story. Rather, it's like snatches of moments. Each moment can lead either lead to the next logical moment, or it can jump ahead to months later. Each scene, each single shot, shows the conflict, the connection, between life and art. The artist occupies his life, but is also constantly searching for anything that is a filmable moment. Is this moment cinematic? Is there a poem here?
If anyone had any doubts that Spielberg could direct a great female performance, then Michelle Williams's incredible work should remove those doubts permanently. She also suggests that, between Spielberg's parents, he perhaps felt closer and more connected with her. His real struggle was in connecting with his father, which may explain why there are so many father-son stories — and absent fathers, and father-figures — in his filmography. (The scenes between Leonardo DiCaprio and Christopher Walken in Catch Me If You Can are especially close to what we see here.)
As Americans, we tend to celebrate young artists and generally neglect the old masters as they age, criticizing them for either exploring the same themes more deeply or for trying something new. But artists that are open to life are still learning new things, and can add many new chapters to a career. Martin Scorsese proved this with his The Irishman, a masterpiece that looked back on his career of gangster pictures while adding more nuance, and more reflection. With The Fabelmans, Spielberg has arrived at a similar place. He has decided to trust us even more. He has found more courage, and perhaps more peace. ~
https://www.combustiblecelluloid.com/2022/fabelmans.shtml
Let us now take a look at a rare negative review:
~ Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical The Fabelmans is a dull, self-indulgent victory lap for the most victorious filmmaker in history.
Steven Spielberg has always had mad filmmaking skills. Nobody doubts that, I should hope. Jaws? The D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan? Big chunks of Lincoln? Probably many other sequences that I can’t think of now because I tend to hate Spielberg movies so much? All fantastically effective.
But Spielberg’s overall sensibility is so frustratingly dull and solemn and sentimental and corny, dragging down the possibilities of his talent, he’s always been the bane of my film-loving existence. Or at least, one of the main banes.
And The Fabelmans, currently playing in theaters, is Spielberg’s own autobiographical account of how he got that way. So it’s a massive, meta-Spielbergian tribute to himself, and for me, largely torture to watch.
To my surprise, the film is playing in indie art house theaters instead of in the big exhibition venues. But then, he’s courting “artist” status assiduously and has been for many years, since he’d so thoroughly conquered the box office with Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, and the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park franchises, there were no more profit-motivated worlds to conquer. He’s been trying to make the Alfred Hitchcock move from ultra-popular film entertainer to legendary genius auteur since the mid-1980s with serious films like The Color Purple (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), Schindler’s List (1993), Amistad (1997), Saving Private Ryan (1998), A.I. (2001), Munich (2005), War Horse (2011), Lincoln (2012), and so on.
The Fabelmans continues this quest by treating Spielberg’s onscreen alter-ego, young Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), as a budding cinematic genius in a family divided into two camps — the artists versus the scientists. “Sammy’s like me,” says his mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a vivacious and gifted pianist steadily losing it in her entrapping wife-mother role, while Sammy’s mild-mannered workaholic father Burt (Paul Dano) charts an ever-upward career path as a brilliant electrical engineer getting in on the ground floor of computer development at RCA, GE, and IBM.
Of course, Sammy will actually represent both the artists and the scientists with his mastery of a form that combines the aesthetic with the technological. And some of the better moments of the film show how the kid Sammy ingeniously works out practical filmmaking problems on his own, like how to make it appear that guns wielded by kid cowboys in a bare-bones Western are actually firing — by poking tiny pinholes through the film itself, creating bursts of light at the end of the barrels.
Spielberg, working with his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner (Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story [2021]), puts together a script that’s overly schematic and explains everything right into the ground. Take the first sequence that features the child Sammy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) going to his first movie, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). I wish I could say it was somehow meaningful that Spielberg would choose this notoriously mediocre spectacle by a director who made steadily less interesting but more popular films over a very long career. But it’s quite a literal-minded choice — that is, it’s actually the first film little Stevie Spielberg ever saw.
Little Sammy, though, is suddenly frightened about seeing the movie. So his father reassures him in rational engineering terms by explaining how film projection actually works, while his mother reassures him in expressive, emotional, arty terms by urging upon him the beautiful, exteriorized dream that is the cinematic experience. Neither parent realizes there’s going to be a big train-crash dramatized in this circus movie or that their son is going to be so terrified by it he’ll have to reenact the trauma repeatedly for some time afterward by crashing his new toy train set repeatedly. Ultimately, he finds that filming the crash spares the train set and is just as satisfying to watch.
Anxious that the audience won’t understand this common psychological process, Spielberg and Kushner have Mitzi say, long after it’s already clear, “Oh I see, he wants to get control over it.”
Yes. That is correct. By doing so, he converts frozen fear into just enough scariness to be manageable and therefore thrilling. I guess we should be grateful Mitzi didn’t say all that too.
Overall, The Fabelmans is a sententious slog, like most of Spielberg’s attempts at profundity. Poor Michelle Williams has to strain every nerve and muscle to bring some vibrancy and tension to the film, mirroring her role as Mitzi, who’s marooned in the dull conventions of the 1950s middle class and trying to Auntie Mame her way through them. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Williams, a marvelous actor, pushed over into moments of goofy — almost clownish — overacting.
At first, I thought this was meant to be signaling serious mental illness, including developing psychosis. But it turns out that Mitzi is only deeply depressed at her stalled career as a concert pianist and a trained dancer, as well as by the loss of her true love, gregarious Bennie Loewy (Seth Rogen). He’s called “Uncle Bennie” by the kids because of his omnipresence in their lives. He even moves with them from New Jersey to Arizona when Mitzi insists on Burt getting Bennie a new job with GE too.
Note that by preferring Bennie to Burt, Mitzi is simply choosing the livelier electrical engineer. Both men are nice, smart, stable, nerdy, bespectacled Jewish guys who are kind to the kids. The killing off of Mitzi’s serious artistic endeavors, and her desperate extroversion as a way of compensating for her loss, is the most interesting thing about her, but it gradually devolves into a duller tale of being torn between two engineers.
It’s too bad, because the other loss is the far more riveting one, which reaches its bizarre and haunting peak midway through the film, during a fateful family camping trip, when Mitzi suddenly does an impromptu ballet performance in her nightgown, lit by the car headlights. Her daughters (Julia Butters, Keeley Karsten, and Sophia Kopera) are in an agony of embarrassment, especially because their mother’s body is visible through the nightgown as she dances, but the male campers — Burt, Bennie, Sammy — are all transfixed by this sudden, poignant, eccentric, erotic display of artistic expression that has no other outlet.
The emotional affair of Bennie and Mitzi that gets accidentally captured on camera by young Sammy during the camping trip amounts to tiny looks and gestures and touches, no more. Spielberg turns it into a study of what the camera can reveal that’s not seen by the naked eye, which is Film Studies 101 stuff, but always works like magic when dramatized well. As Sammy runs repeatedly over the same shot, backward and forward, in slo-mo, then in freeze-frames, the eye contact, the smiles, the hand on the waist that’s quickly withdrawn, seem to emerge from the celluloid itself and grow in dimension before our eyes.
Spielberg is going to represent this mild transgression and the eventual breakup of his parents’ marriage — after Mitzi tries for years to stay the course as the faithful housewife and mother — into tragedy worthy of grand opera. He’s long been noted for his representations of divorce as practically the worse fate that can befall a suffering humanity:
“But, of course, the saga of Spielberg’s parents’ divorce, which he’s discussed in interviews many times, and which became the template for the broken homes in his own movies going back to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), is not a subject that’s likely to get a lot of viewers revved.”
I don’t see why it wouldn’t get a lot of Americans revved — it always has before. And it’s always worked on my last nerve, Spielberg’s stodgy 1950s middle-class attitude that life should all be smooth sailing and it’s an outrage when it’s not. I mean, how well do you expect everything to go? Spielberg’s father was a hugely successful pioneer in computers — the family income was steadily rising — the one not-nice home the family lives in is a rental house they have to put up with for a few months while their own splendid California-modern house is being built. And Steven Spielberg himself has been about as successful, from youth onward, as a human being can get, doing exactly what he always wanted to do.
Though admittedly, it’s shocking that, in the film’s depiction, antisemitism is worse in California than it is in Arizona, and teenage Sammy gets bullied by a couple of bigoted jocks. But through the power of cinema, he gets his revenge and thoroughly owns both of them by cutting together the graduating class tribute film to make one of them (Oakes Fegley) look like a total loser and the other one (Sam Rechner) look like a member of an Aryan master race winning athletic contests in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.
The master-race jock takes it the hardest because Sammy’s film has mythologized him in a way he can’t live up to. Though tall and handsome, he’s basically a weak, insecure mess of a teenager. He threatens Sammy about never telling anyone he broke down crying over the film, and Sammy says brightly, “I won’t — I mean, unless I decide to make a movie about it!”
And we’re watching that movie! Hah-ha!
Spielberg’s triumphal march through his own youth ends with his meeting one of his filmmaking heroes, John Ford, memorably played by David Lynch. (It seems Lynch turned the role down repeatedly for weeks, but Spielberg wouldn’t let it go.) It’s interesting, because Lynch is pretty much the anti-Spielberg, and for one short scene, Spielberg lets a kind of mild Lynch-like vision of American weirdness reign. When the irascible, eye-patched Ford lights one of his cigars, it seems to take a full minute of puffing at the huge flame, watched by the bug-eyed Sammy, till the act of lighting a cigar becomes divorced from its ordinary meaning and turns into an alarming act of igniting some incendiary inner force of Ford’s. And sure enough, Ford suddenly explodes into his usual choleric demands and questions that he answers himself, giving Sammy an intense, humorous, impious tutorial on how to make formally interesting art.
Which, by the way, is advice Spielberg — the king of normcore cinema — has rarely ever taken.
So although it’s more vivid than most, the last scene is ultimately the most irksome, teeth-grinding interlude of the film, because of the obvious torch-passing implication. Ford, often considered the greatest American filmmaker of his generation, even by other fabulous filmmakers such as Orson Welles, hands the flame of cinematic genius off to Spielberg making him the greatest of the next generation.
And of course, the whole reason we’re watching the film is because we all know that not long after the self-congratulatory end of the film, young Fabelman/Spielberg shot upward like an arrow through Hollywood, soaring from TV work to feature film directing the amazingly accomplished Duel (1971) at age twenty-five, then making it big — huge — with Jaws at twenty-nine.
We get it, Steven Spielberg! You’re very, very, very successful! Congratulations! Now please don’t make an autobiographical sequel entitled Fame, Fortune, and Fabelman or something, okay? ~
https://jacobin.com/2022/11/steven-spielberg-the-fabelmans-autobiography-film-review
Oriana:
Yes, The Fabelmans is a kind of cinematic “portrait of the artist of as a young man.” We’re supposed to cheer as young Spielberg discovers his artistic side by making home movies. We’re supposed to suffer with him as his parents break up over the mother’s infidelity that the teen movie-maker is the first to discover. But for me, it was the mother whose story I was most able to connect with.
The mother, Mitzi, tries to look like Doris Day, the perfect wife and mother of the fifties. But Mitzi can’t conceal her free spirit and suppressed yearning to be an artist. According to her eccentric brother, Boris, Mitzi had enough talent to become a concert pianist, but gave it all up for the sake of marriage to an engineer (himself very creative in his field) and their four children.
Not one to remain constrained, she has an affair with the father’s best friend and co-worker, Benny. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for a child to discover this and then silently confront the mother. A teenager doesn’t understand shades of gray — his mother’s frustration at the loss of her real self doesn’t register on him. To her son, she is the family villain, a betrayer of the sacred trust of the parents’ marriage on which the children’s world depends.
I was wondering what on earth she saw in Benny. Perhaps it was just that Benny was available and truly interested in her as an unusual person, while the father’s great love was computers [back when those were large enough to require a special air-conditioned room]. He is an innovative genius, he works hard, and his absences from home are treated as justified. He is allowed to put his work ahead of family. Mitzi is tacitly required to live only for her family — how dare she be such a bad person as to express her frustrations?
Her only proper fulfillment is to find her ambitions succeed in the creative development of her son. Benny warns the young Spielberg, “If you stop making movies, it will break your mother’s heart.” The mother’s sacrifice of her own talent is never taken seriously. The movie’s uplifting message — which could be distilled to “believe in yourself and follow your true passion” — apparently applies only to men.
To be sure, Mitzi comes across as too frenetic, almost manic at time. We can take it as an indicator that she is compensating for lacking an outlet for her creative spirit — or, if that’s her true personality, she’s simply too frantic and scattered, too much into manicure rather than music, to be a serious artist. And why would this histrionic diva marry an engineer, and then betray him with another engineer? Tough, we can’t expect logic to make sense of emotions.
Logic doesn’t apply to religion either. The part about anti-Semitism in a Northern California high school is well handled — we know how the teenage boy must suffer. When it comes to the Christian girlfriend, we’re into comedy — “Let’s go to another room and we’ll pray some more.” Now, perhaps we didn’t need quite that many pictures of Jesus on the wall, and devout Catholics might be offended. But this excess instantly signals to us the comic intent, and after the family drama and the anti-Semitic incidents we badly need comic relief. This is one of the most precious parts of the movie, and I am so glad that Spielberg didn’t try to be Woke and oh-so-tolerant, instead jumping into comedy with full gusto.
Overall, The Fablemans is an engaging and charming movie. Alas, the title is dull. One possible option would be The Fable Man. From now on, I see Spielberg as a leading “fable man” of our times. 
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THREE PESSIMISTIC PHILOSOPHERS TO BRIGHTEN YOUR DAY
~ In 1961, philosopher Martin Heidegger was asked how to live a more authentic life. His reply was morose, albeit pithy — “we should spend more time in graveyards.”
It’s a sentiment more people should embrace. Graveyards are a modern memento mori that reminds us of the importance of a life well-lived. And I mean really lived. Not lived through a curated social media feed.
And while we are romping through graveyards, we should find our favorite plot of earth above the dead and curl up with the teachings of the following pessimistic philosophers.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)
Any study of pessimism has to begin with the man who earned the monikers — “The Messenger of Misery” and “The Sad Prince of Pessimism.”
Schopenhauer has long been accused of being the poster child for the grouchy philosopher, but that’s not entirely fair. He simply viewed happiness not as profound joy but as the absence of misery.
According to Schopenhauer, we can appreciate our happy moments only when life has dealt us a round of suffering. In other words, if you focus too much on the pursuit of pleasure, misery will find you. For many, pleasure becomes a thinly veiled mask to pain.
Instead, Schopenhauer recommended people embrace their sadness. He believed that we must understand the reasons for our unhappiness if we want to develop an exit plan from our sorrow. And if we don’t understand the root of our suffering, we will engage in meaningless sex or buy unnecessary creature comforts.
According to Schopenhauer, the fulcrum of happiness is to tame loneliness. He believed the problem with most unthinking people is they don’t make a distinction between solitude and loneliness. While loneliness is a desperate need to be around others, solitude is your choice to connect with your inner aspirations. And that capacity to connect with your more authentic self is the mark of an emotionally mature person.
Maya Angelou sums up a more modern interpretation of his philosophies, “You are only free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.” In other words, you can only belong to others when you belong to yourself. Thus the less sociable we are, the more time we have to reflect. But only in those moments of solitude are we truly free.
Schopenhauer was definitely not Mr. Sociable. Perhaps that is why he died alone with his dog, content in the reasons for his misery.
“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard is remembered today as the “father of existentialism” because he was the first celebrity philosopher to explore the problematic nature of authenticity.
Kierkegaard tussled with this tiger because he was a bit of an attention whore himself. Simply put, Kierkegaard’s ego caused him a boatload of suffering. But unlike modern-day celebrities, he was willing to stare that demon down. He tamed his ego with one sharp weapon — pessimism.
Pessimism was a trait baked into Kierkegaard at a young age. By the time he was twenty-five years old, he had lost his parents and five out of his six siblings. He was also physically frail and suffered from anxiety — a subject he wrote openly about.
His dad wasn’t so great at cheering him up. At one point, papa Kierkegaard informed his son that he wouldn’t live past thirty-four because that is when Christ died. Ah, ok. That is weirdly morose. But it’s no wonder that death and religion became a bit of an obsession for Kierkegaard.
When you read Kierkegaard, his distrust of others taints his words with cynicism.“The crowd is untruth,” he warns. At first blush, that advice might sound misanthropic, but it wasn’t humans that Kierkegaard avoided. It was humans coming together that were problematic. Kierkegaard believed that people lose their authenticity and moral responsibilities once they are part of a crowd.
Psychologists will agree with his philosophies. In the “bystander effect,” researchers have found that people are less likely to offer help to someone if they are in a crowd.
And not only are they less likely to help, but they are also more likely to go all Lord of the Flies on vulnerable individuals. In one famous study, Australian psychologist Leon Mann found that when someone was attempting suicide by jumping off a tall building in front of a large crowd, the people on the ground were more likely to scream “jump” if they were part of a large crowd.
Yeah, so people suck, and Kierkegaard got it.
Kierkegaard’s solution is clear — avoid mind-numbing crowds. (And that means you social media darlings.)
Most of Kierkegaard’s teachings center around this one tenet — the loss of the self is what leads to despair. And it's getting caught in crowds that causes this despair because it stymies choices. He called the inability to exercise choices wisely — “angest” — what we know today as angst.
Kierkegaard again had a solution — have a passion. He believed that those who have a passion also have a direction. He wrote, ‘Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forwards.’
“People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.” ~ Søren Kierkegaard
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
If there is one philosopher that I could go back in time and get rip-roaring drunk and silly with…it is Montaigne.
Montaigne approached life with a raw candor that many people would find refreshing today. He abhorred small talk and preferred to discuss the visceral nature of bodies. He tackled everything from the smell of his own sweat to impotence — a subject most Renaissance philosophers wouldn’t dare touch. There’s a lot of philosophizing about farts in Montaigne’s work. He is often carnal, sometimes crass, and definitely clever.
He also thumbed his nose at intellectuals and their pretensions. “Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies,” reminds Montaigne.
Montaigne ran naked through the halls of academia, poking fun at the learned. He found Plato tiresome and believed the problem with most people is they think they are far more intelligent than they are. (Hello, Dunning Krueger effect.)
Montaigne found most pedantry irksome because it lacked the utilitarianism needed to impart meaning. He wrote, ‘If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.’
Montaigne would have scoffed at the self-help industry, mostly because he found nobility in leading an ordinary life. In a society obsessed with being exceptional, it is advice we should heed — it’s ok to be mediocre. After 10,000 hours of Gladwell sweating practice, most of us will end there.
Part of why Montaigne is so refreshing to read is that he embraced the contradictory nature of humans. Introverts, extroverts, empaths, narcissists, thinking, feeling, rich, poor…no one is ever one thing at one time. At the very least, Montaigne preached we should know ourselves before we start to label others.
But his life attitudes were more than just empty solipsism. He also never feared death. And Montaigne had a lot to fear. During his life, the plague killed half of Bourdeaux. His brother was killed by a tennis ball. Only one of his six children survived. Death enveloped him.
When his best friend died, the grief made him feel like he had been “cut in half.” He needed a literary form to express himself, so he turned to the essay. He didn’t exactly invent the essay, but he gave it its name from the french essai meaning “to try or attempt.”
And try he did. He got up every day and tried to know himself by writing about himself. He writes about his ears, penis, kidney stones, sleep, friendship, sex, love, and had an oddly acerbic defense of cannibalism. He wrote about everything.
Montaigne is my inspiration to write about everything. Whenever writers ask me, “should I write in one niche?” I always advise them to read Montaigne. Montaigne will convince you that finding your niche is only running from yourself.
You won’t find a niche. It finds you.
“There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.”― Michel de Montaigne
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Recently, I have noticed attacks on “doomsday” writers. If more people read philosophy, these attacks would not exist.
The job of philosophers is to make you feel both dejected and inspired. If you feel only the inhumanity when reading their works, that is your self-projection. You are choosing to see the world from a slighted angle instead of changing your vantage point.
Philosophy does not carve out answers for you and hand them to you on a silver platter. You have to find those answers.
Graveyard romps are optional.
“To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life” ~ Vincent van Gogh
https://carlynbeccia.medium.com/3-pessimistic-philosophers-who-will-really-cheer-you-up-bad7cddd8ad
Mary:
Of the three pessimistic philosophers it is Montaigne who comes closest, with his attention to the visceral, to the source of both suffering and happiness. It is the body, and our experience as embodied, that gives rise to all else, including philosophy. Loneliness, separation, misery, all physical, all rooted in the body...as is pleasure and happiness. Negative feelings, helplessness, despair, fear, grief — all grounded in the experiences of physical pain, illness, injury, and loss, or the threat of loss. The worst of these, the ultimate misery, is the loss dealt out, inevitable, unavoidable, by death. Death is the bitter pill philosophy chokes on, and the seed from which it grows.
Oriana:
One thing to note about these three was that none of them was what might be called a "family man." They were happy (more or less) introverts. I identify with all three, though in the case of Kierkegaard I repudiate the religious perspective. Still, he was honest enough to gain my respect, and he could write very well. Some have classified Plato an artist, a writer, rather than a true philosopher. The same applies to Kierkegaard, whom I read with great pleasure when I first discovered him. But ultimately I couldn't forgive him for siding with the idea of absolute obedience to the Biblical god, with Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac as an ideal.
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HOW TO BE A HAPPY NIHILIST
~ While I’ll admit that the message that nothing matters – not your job, god, universe, certainly not what type of canned goods you buy – is an overwhelming thought, it doesn’t have to be. Set against this never-ending obsession with locating (or, too often, purchasing) meaning, it can be liberating.
When I contemplate life’s pointlessness, I begin by remembering that, in the scope of all human history, I really matter very little (a rather cosmic approach). My issues and concerns are mute. My successes and failures will all be forgotten. As will the achievements and stumbles of everyone around me (existential nihilism at its finest).
While I may feel dwarfed by the scope of endless and apathetic time, the smallest elements of my life begin to expand. If nothing matters long-term, my focus shifts to this moment. I understand that the present, however mundane, is as fleeting, temporal, fragile and forgettable as the greatest events in human history.
Nihilism makes me wonder about what I do and don’t pay attention to. Is what another person thinks of me imbued with greater meaning (or meaninglessness) as compared with a brush of jasmine tumbling over a neighbor’s fence? Not really. So why am I consumed by one while ignoring the other?
By his own description, Nietzsche ‘philosophise[d] with a hammer’, breaking open large ideas and challenging his readers to see what could be reformed with the pieces. In this way nihilism, like all philosophies, is a tool to explore parts of our lives. As with any tool, it can be picked up and put down, used to create or destroy; outcomes and executions are dependent on the user’s intent. It is up to you to decide if you will fall into the destructive grooves of toxic nihilism, or opt for something a little lighter. You may not have a purpose, but you do have agency. It’s this reading of nihilism that I think about when considering a life without meaning.
But how does one go about picking up such a tool and using it in a positive way? This Guide will help you embrace sunny nihilism and avoid its toxic alternative.
Understand the difference between passive and active forms of nihilism
The challenges posed by nihilism weren’t lost on Nietzsche, who had an elegant way of explaining how the philosophy can serve as a destructive or constructive force. According to him, passive nihilists absorb the messages of meaninglessness and are threatened. They fear the void so scramble to fill it by indulging in any offering of it. As Nolen Gertz wrote in Aeon in 2020, this form of blind self-protection is a ‘dangerous form of self-destruction’.
He added: ‘To believe just for the sake of believing in something can lead to a superficial existence, to the complacent acceptance of believing anything believed by others, because believing in something (even if it turns out to be nothing worth believing in) will be seen by the passive nihilist as preferable to taking the risk of not believing in anything …’
Which is how we end up back in the trap of meaningless meaning. Or standing in the supermarket aisle, trying to convince ourselves that a can of chickpeas really does matter.
As a more constructive alternative, Nietzsche ushered individuals to evolve into active nihilists. That is, to stare into the abyss and see the absence of meaning not as a tragedy but as an opportunity. To consider it a space to fill with your own values, to define how you want to be in the world and what you believe to be true. An active nihilist isn’t intimidated by chaos. They recognize it as a chance to create something new and better.
In my own journey toward sunny nihilism, I landed somewhere in the middle. I wasn’t horrified by a lack of absolute truth, but I also didn’t rush to write my own. Rather, I chose to pause, stare into the void, and consider the freedom of nothingness.
Stay alert to meaningless meaning
Whereas nihilism can prompt reflection and widen your view on existence, the commercial hijacking of meaning plays into the vulnerabilities of the passive nihilist, contributing to our era’s epidemic of self-obsessed selfishness. It not only encourages you to center every action around yourself, but it deceptively presents this as a noble act. When you embrace this kind of personal myth-making, you give yourself permission to spend a lot of time thinking about your own life, actions and experiences.
Speaking to Politico magazine in 2020, Virginia Heffernan, the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art (2016), said: ‘the recent fantasy of “optimizing” a life – for peak performance, productivity, efficiency – has created a cottage industry that tries to make the dreariest possible lives sound heroic.’
To help you avoid this decadent trap, it is worth being vigilant of, and guarding against, the ways the world is trying to convince you that you’re partaking in a sacred act – by positioning every brand, product or service as somehow meaningful.
While writing this article, I was conveniently served an advert for ‘Florence by Mills’, the new teen skincare range from the actress Millie Bobby Brown (I appreciate the algorithm recognizing my youthful spirit). The entire range is clad in the familiar pastel colors and toothless message of ‘empowering young people through something something’ of so many personal care products. But the ‘Feed Your Soul Love U a Latte’ mask stood out in particular. Turns out it’s never too young to preach that enlightenment can be achieved in a 15-minute topical treatment.
I hope that the young people browsing these products are resilient enough to not fall into such narratives; that they’re able to pause to ask what these cheap exchanges are calling on them to invest emotionally or financially. Will this purchase make them happy, or is it an example of what Heffernan cautioned against when she said we were out to make ‘the dreariest possible lives sound heroic’?
Recognize the happy side of nihilism
When promoting nihilism as the antidote to the commercialization of meaning, I tend to meet the same repeated questions: if there’s no point, then why do anything? Why get out of bed? Wash your hair? Treat another person with kindness? Not fall into a quivering heap?
I’m reminded of an episode of the Netflix sitcom The Good Place (2016-20). Chidi – a character who happens to be a moral philosopher – has the kind of existential crisis that inspires these queries. During his breakdown, he walks a classroom of philosophy students down the major paths where humanity has attempted to locate meaning and understand how to live an ‘ethical life’. After cycling through the arguments of virtue ethics, consequentialism and deontology [the study of duty and obligation], he finally declares that all these pathways to meaning lead nowhere (it’s worth watching the show to hear Chidi explain why) before concluding that nihilism is the only logical philosophical view – at which point he has a full meltdown.
While I love Chidi, I find the scene frustrating for how narrowly it presents this cause and effect. Such a response has always puzzled me. After all, did you get out of bed this morning to search for the meaning of life or for a cup of coffee? Again, are such grand questions really bringing such grand comforts?
In contrast to Chidi, another pop-culture figure shows how nihilism can inspire greater happiness. In the film The Beach Bum (2019), Matthew McConaughey plays Moondog, an epicurean, once-iconic, Florida-based writer. His is a woozy and colorful tale of excess and hedonism that involves a lot of drinking, drugs, avoided responsibility, and sex. All of which are indulged in with few consequences.
Watching The Beach Bum, you feel you’ve seen this movie before, you know to wait for the fall, when Moondog will collapse under the weight of his shirked responsibilities and the system will catch up to him. Except the fall never comes. After seeing it at South by Southwest film festival, the critic Hazem Fahmy wrote: ‘Rather than simply not address these issues, the film goes out of its way to remind us that nothing in this strange dimension truly matters.’
Moondog doesn’t care about anything; he lives for pleasure. Towards the end of the film, he outlines his life’s mantra to a reporter: ‘We’re here to have a good time.’ For all this destruction, and clear disregard for rules, values and consequences, Moondog isn’t punished. By the end of the film, he has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize and several million dollars. Although, true to form, he shows they’re meaningless too (I won’t spoil the finale).
Moondog’s embrace of nihilism demonstrates that, when you stop focusing on a greater point, you’re able to ask simpler but more rewarding questions: what does happiness look like right now? What would give me pleasure today? How can I achieve a sense of satisfaction in this moment? Most of the time, the answers aren’t complex. They’re small delights already at hand – time spent with loved ones, a delicious meal, a walk in nature, a cup of coffee. Or, in Moondog’s case, a lot of booze and parties.
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Nihilism doesn’t have to spiral into selfishness
Moondog’s experience sounds great to me, but it leads to a second concern surrounding nihilism. It might not make you miserable, but what about everyone who has to hang out with you? If nothing matters, you’re not part of some larger plan and you’re not held accountable by any rulebook. Motivated only by what feels good in the moment, what’s stopping you acting only for your own interests?
Nietzsche was mindful of these pain points, writing in Beyond Good and Evil (1886): ‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’
Nihilism asks us to toss out meaning and gaze into the void that’s left in its place. But rather than being a simple, terrifying black hole, a void can prompt reflection. It’s a space to be filled with whatever you want. In that way, nihilism can serve as a funhouse mirror, reflecting and distorting your own beliefs. Approach it with pain and fear, and those feelings will be magnified. Go to it looking for a way to excuse gross behavior, and you’ll find it.
Stare into the abyss
Give it a go yourself. Take a moment to truly submit to your own smallness in the Universe. To admit you are meaningless. That you don’t matter. That your name, ego, reputation, family, friends and loves will soon be gone.
This needn’t be a destructive experience. Once the discomfort passes, and your ego abates, stop to consider – how has your understanding of your own time and energy changed? Is your job really so important when coupled with the knowledge that even the greatest achievements in human history will eventually be lost to time? Are the issues, people or situations that cause you stress or pain actually worth the worry when you remember that no one will ever remember or really be impacted by them?
The only real impact these earthly concerns have is on what they take you away from: things that may not ‘matter’, but at least bring you joy.
Focusing on the scale of your own life, and how insignificant it is, also allows you to ask: OK, if I don’t matter, and neither do the issues that take up so much of my time, how does the world show itself differently? If I’m no longer the center of my own universe, what takes that space?
You might start wondering what you want to last after you’ve gone, and what needs to be protected and treasured.
I considered these points recently while witnessing a widely affecting mass collision with nihilism – the delivery of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The shots showed an inconceivable array of distant galaxies that existed billions of years in the past. It was an overwhelming view that crashed into any understanding we have of time, scale and distance – not to mention the potential for life and realities beyond our own. Responding to it, it felt like the whole world had a mass awakening to individual inconsequentialism.
But the reaction wasn’t mass depression or hopelessness. It was awe. People wondered over the beauty and scale of worlds they could never truly comprehend. They saw how their own lives barely register on a cosmic level, that our own galaxy wasn’t even a blip. This sense of our own meaninglessness was humbling. It didn’t break people’s hearts but excited them, reminded them of the inconceivable beauty and majesty of existence. People felt thankful for being a dot in an endless sky, to be part of this cosmic tapestry, even if just for a meaningless moment.
It takes guts, but you too might find that the abyss reframes your attention to things you hope will last for a little longer than yourself. Art, community, the people you love, their right to feel safe, respected and well. If you’re looking for somewhere to redirect all this formerly self-involved energy, start there. In place of existential angst, psychological annihilation or selfish abandon, you can find relief in larger causes.
Try a light meditation on death
When I’m overwhelmed, remembering that one day I won’t exist makes whatever is stressing me appear small. Accepting this finality transforms the bland environs I’m ignoring into an overwhelming buffet of smells, sights and experiences that suddenly feel impossibly rare.
This ‘mindfulness of death’ is central to the work of the artificial intelligence scientist and Buddhist teacher Nikki Mirghafori. To access this feeling, she counsels trying a form of ‘death meditation’ to help confront your fear of death, and experience the strange wonder that can come from that.
To try it, she instructs meditating with the mantra ‘this could be my last breath’. The theory is that by doing so, you work through the terror a little at a time, observing what comes to the surface during the practice and confronting each fear until you eventually reach a place of peace.
Mirghafori posits that, by accepting your own mortality and facing life’s impermanence, you can align the way you live with your truest values. It’s many people’s lack of interest in contemplating death – and as such, how precious and fleeting our lives are – that allows so many to waste their time.
I can report that this is a terrifying exercise. It’s like rehearsing your final moments, inviting your mind to flood with fear, regret, longing, loss, love and gratitude. When you imagine each breath to be your last, each breath becomes a gift on arrival. Even after you’re done, it’s impossible to not enter the rest of your day with a degree of elation at being alive.
Doing it, I’m reminded of what Epicurus once said: ‘Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.’ Epicurus didn’t believe in life after death, as either a punishment or a reward. He taught that life and all it could offer was happening to us right now.
Just as nihilism has become associated with narrow-minded destruction, Epicurus is often synonymous with hedonism and a ceaseless pursuit of selfish pleasures. But in reality, he was certain this kind of living would usher people away from materialism and greed. His ‘pleasure principle’ championed being and doing good, arguing that, with one precious life to enjoy, not a moment should be wasted in guilt or anxiety over pain caused to others. The only way to feel truly good was to treat people well.
Remember pointless pleasures
I’d like to end by lightening things up a little. One way to refocus on the pointless pleasure that actually forms the bedrock of our lives is to start a ‘nice things’ list. Across the day, make an effort to jot down moments, people and events that make you happy.
I’ve been doing this for years. Reviewing my own rambling lists, I’m always surprised by the simplicity of the entries: the smell of fresh basil, an excellent joke, two dogs meeting in the street. Alone they are innocuous (and usually overlooked), but together they flavor my days with endless sweetness. Learning to pay attention to them returns me to what actually provides solace in my day, training me to not overlook the now for the promise of the one day.
So often in the pursuit of greater meaning we erase not only the joy of these forgotten delights, but also their collective power. Yes, a flock of galahs on my nature strip, or crying to a Paul Kelly song, or the spasmodic energy of Junior Bake Off (my most recent entries) are not life-altering – but, taking time to notice and appreciate them, they form the sum of their parts. A handful of treasured beats becomes a good day, a good week, a good year, a good life.
Meaningless, sure. Precious, absolutely.
KEY POINTS
The rise of meaningless meaning. The search for meaning used to be a noble pursuit, but it’s become commercialized and now inspires more angst than awe.
Nihilism as a solution. This is the philosophy that says life is meaningless. Handled with care, it can be liberating.
The cleansing power of sunny nihilism. This is a kind of optimistic nihilism that highlights the delicate beauty of existence, the absurdity of life, and the exciting chaos of the everyday.
Understand the difference between passive and active forms of nihilism. Passive nihilists scramble to fill the void with anything at hand; active nihilists are undaunted, and fill the space with their own values.
Stay alert to meaningless meaning. To avoid passive or toxic nihilism, it pays to be vigilant of, and guard against, the ways the world is trying to convince you that you’re partaking in a sacred act.
Recognize the happy side of nihilism. When you stop focusing on a greater point, you’ll find you can ask simpler but more rewarding questions, such as: what does happiness look like right now?
Nihilism doesn’t have to spiral into selfishness. When you stare into the abyss, it reframes your attention to things you hope will last for a little longer than yourself.
Try a light meditation on death. I can report that this is a terrifying exercise. But when you imagine each breath to be your last, each breath becomes a gift on arrival.
Remember pointless pleasures. From the smell of fresh basil to an excellent joke, start a ‘nice things’ list. Meaningless, sure. Precious, absolutely.
YOUNG PHILOSOPHERS EMBRACING NIHILISM
For uplifting and earnest examples of nihilism’s application, check out the way younger philosophers are exploring it. Two TEDx talks by teenagers stand out in particular. In 2018, Elias Skjoldborg, a student at Harwood Union High School in Vermont, used the platform to introduce his take on ‘optimistic nihilism’. In short, he argues that if life is meaningless – and we are not pinned to some greater existential task or goal – then we may as well focus on finding happiness during this brief, meaningless flash of consciousness we call existence.
When he says ‘if you died right now, it wouldn’t really make a difference in the big picture. Had you never been born, nobody would really care,’ he presents it as good news. He adds: ‘That life has no meaning is not a reason … to be sad.’ Rather, he explains, if our lives are needless, then the only directive we have is to figure out how to find happiness in our momentary blip of consciousness. Skjoldborg suggested that his audience get hobbies, help others, solve problems rather than creating them, and just try their best.
Skjoldborg is not alone in his observations. In his talk a year earlier, Siddharth Gupta, a student at Kodaikanal International School in India, also opened up about how nihilism has helped him. Giving his talk the title ‘Confessions of an Existential Nihilist’, he explained how his belief that life was worthless had given him the ‘opportunity to find meaning in all that I do’.
Meanwhile, over on YouTube, Khadija Mbowe, a Gambian Canadian vlogger on sociology and media, recently looked at nihilism and absurdism in a video asking if life still had value if it was a meaningless random occurrence within an uncaring universe. Clad in a bright orange graphic T-shirt with matching statement makeup, Mbowe looked like any other luminous member of Gen Z, asking: ‘What does our life, our existence, mean when we don’t believe we’re put here for a reason?’ as easily as if they were reacting to a viral mukbang video. Drawing on references from as broad a field as James Baldwin and RuPaul’s Drag Race, Mbowe asks big questions that don’t lead to dense, depressing answers. Instead, this vlogger’s takes are thoughtful, exploratory and ultimately hopeful.
Each generation has a tendency to make the case for why their set of circumstances is especially dire. But for young people coming of age during rolling crises of pandemics, climate catastrophes and quaking world economies, they might have a strong case for being particularly hard done by. Yet basking in the aforementioned reflections of these fresh-faced philosophers, one feels a little lightened, not only by their constructive interpretation of nihilism, but also by the resilience it appears to offer them. ~
https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-find-the-sunny-side-of-nihilism?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=eed751acb8-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_12_05_03_40&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-eed751acb8-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
Oriana:
Sounds pretty much like Epicureanism to me. You become a connoisseur of pleasure. No matter how small, ordinary, and indeed meaningless that pleasure is — that first cup of coffee in the morning or five minutes of simple stretching before bedtime— it is indeed precious and yours to enjoy.
It’s easy to label this a shallow hedonism. But the pleasures need not be only sensory. I love intellectual pleasures. Give me a good book to read, or a fascinating lecture to listen to, and that is more stimulating than any cup of coffee.
And then there are the pleasures of friendship. Talking about that book or lecture adds an extra thrill to it. But simply being in the presence of a friend, a person you trust to wish you the best and always help you, never to attack you, is a special kind of pleasure.
Mary:
Modern philosophy, certainly. Without the religious narrative imposing its own system on how we understand history and the individual, there are no longer any easy guarantees of meaning, any pre-cut purpose to our existence. It all has to be created new, every day, in every life, again and again. This is where passion saves many, creating purpose and direction in the process of following and fulfilling what used to be called a "calling." The religious flavor in that word is not inappropriate...this kind of passion is redemptive, a saving grace, fulfilling, meaningful.
It is demanding to create your own purpose...can't be done passively, like following a catechism or guidebook. The resources are inner and individual, found in solitude rather than the crowd....and the generation of purpose is by no means easy. The core of the problem, the impetus, is again something common to all bodies: death. it is against that end we must declare our meaning, if we are to have meaning at all.
There lies the angst, the challenge, the fearsome abyss, that ultimately nothing lasts, nothing is remembered, nothing matters. There is a terrible temptation to despair here. I would note all the death and illness in the experiences of these philosophers...up close and personal, they were survivors in families full of early deaths. They couldn't avoid addressing it. And, yet, as is stated, that black hole, that abyss, serves to illuminate the beauty and wonder of everything else...like the glory of stars against the dark, the tenderness and sweetness of life in all its forms, no matter how brief or abbreviated.
Oriana:
I had to confront the void several times in my life, whether in response to my mother's death (a strong foreshadowing of my own) or the realization that my poems and my writing in general is bound to bound to perish even before I breathe my last — no illusions of literary immortality past a certain age, not that I ever had them to a significant degree. What saved me from despair is above all the realization that we are "of the moment" — and our task is to fully serve that moment.
The future will be different than anything we could have predicted — perhaps glorious, perhaps terrible. We can't control it. What counts is that we smiled at a stranger in the Walmart parking lot . . . those small kindnesses that make life far from bleak. That, and Voltaire's "We must cultivate our garden" — yes, we need to add beauty to beauty, our own drop of wisdom to the collective wisdom.
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THE OFFICE APOCALYPSE — THE CONTINUING DECLINE OF AMERICA’S DOWNTOWNS
~ Deserted downtowns have been haunting US cities since the beginning of the pandemic.
Before the pandemic, 95% of offices were occupied. Today that number is closer to 47%.
Employees' not returning to downtown offices has had a domino effect: Less foot traffic, less public-transit use, and more shuttered businesses have caused many downtowns to feel more like ghost towns. Even 2 1/2 years later, most city downtowns aren't back to where they were prepandemic.
Not unlike how deindustrialization led to abandoned factories and warehouses, the pandemic has led downtowns into a new period of transition. In the 1920s factories were replaced by gleaming commercial high-rises occupied by white-collar workers, but it's not clear yet what today's empty skyscrapers will become. What is clear is that an office-centric downtown is soon to be a thing of the past. With demand for housing in cities skyrocketing, the most obvious next step would be to turn empty offices into apartments and condos. But the push to convert underutilized office space into housing has been sluggish.
Without more-robust policies to address failing downtowns, cities are going to start hurting. Even small declines in foot traffic and real-estate use compounding over time will lead to reduced tax revenue and sales receipts for small businesses, ultimately affecting city budgets. And while city planners are reimagining downtowns, the impact on cities' bottom lines has been devastating; in New York, for instance, the value of commercial real estate declined by 45% in 2020, and research suggests it will remain 39% below prepandemic levels.
Less economic activity in urban cores and a lower tax base could mean fewer jobs and reduced government services, perpetuating a vicious cycle that further reduces foot traffic in downtowns, leading to more decline, more crime, and a lower quality of life. For residents of many downtowns, ghost downtowns will be a visible infliction, and throngs of people crowding into a bus on a Monday morning will be apparitions of a recent past.
THE DEATH OF THE GREAT AMERICAN DOWNTOWN
The devastation of downtown commercial districts has been an unmistakable shift in America's largest cities. In San Francisco, the landmark Salesforce tower and other buildings have remained mostly unoccupied as the tech industry has embraced remote and hybrid work. In New York, Meta recently terminated its lease agreement for three offices totaling 450,000 square feet in Hudson Yards and on Park Avenue, taking a significant financial hit. This tracks with trends: San Francisco has faced office-vacancy rates of 34% to 40% in some parts of the city, while in New York about 50% of workers are back in the office.
Even in cities where more workers have returned, like Austin or Dallas, occupancy rates are still only 60% of what they were prepandemic. These shifts follow the unassailable stickiness of remote work; researchers for the National Bureau of Economic Research predicted that 30% of workdays would be worked from home by the end of this year, a huge jump from before the pandemic.
The increased cancellations of office leases have cratered the office real-estate market. A study led by Arpit Gupta, a professor of finance at New York University's Stern School of Business, characterized the value wipeout as an "apocalypse." It estimated that $453 billion in real-estate value would be lost across US cities, with a 17-percentage-point decline in lease revenue from January 2020 to May 2022. The shock to real-estate valuations has been sharp: One building in San Francisco's Mission District that sold for $397 million in 2019 is on the market for about $155 million, a 60% decline.
Other key indicators that economists use to measure the economic vitality of downtowns include office vacancy rates, public-transportation ridership, and local business spending. Across the country, public-transportation ridership remains stuck at about 70% of prepandemic levels. If only 56% of employees of financial firms in New York are in the office on a given day, the health of a city's urban core is negatively affected.
The second-order effects of remote work and a real-estate apocalypse are still playing out, but it isn't looking good. Declines in real-estate valuations lead to lower property taxes, which affects the revenue collected to foot the bill of city budgets. Declines in foot traffic have deteriorated business corridors; a recent survey by the National League of Cities suggested cities expect at least a 2.5% decline in sales-tax receipts and a 4% decline in revenue for fiscal 2022. Last year, Atlanta's tax revenue was projected to decline by 5.7%. Finding and retaining government employees has been a problem in New York, where public-sector salaries haven't kept up with inflation. Day-to-day operations and essential government services such as public transportation, trash collection, and street cleaning would undoubtedly take a hit from hamstrung city budgets.
It comes as no surprise, then, that in recent months the combination of a stagnant flow of tax receipts and hollowed-out downtowns has spooked city leaders. At a recent conference, the mayor of Seattle, Bruce Harrell, expressed concern about tax revenue. "The fact of the matter is there will never be the good ol' days where everyone's downtown working," he said. London Breed, San Francisco's mayor, told Bloomberg that "life as we knew it before the pandemic is not going to go back." In the National League of Cities' 2022 survey, almost a third of cities said they'd be in a difficult financial situation in 2023 once federal funds dissipate. In the event of a recession, things could look much worse.
IT’S ABOUT HOUSING, STUPID
While there's been a lack of demand for commercial real estate, the residential market has gone into overdrive. A recent NBER paper suggests the new space requirements of remote workers — space for a desk or office, or to accommodate the extra time spent at home — have helped cause housing costs to skyrocket.
The solution to the office-housing conundrum seems obvious: Turn commercial spaces like offices into housing. Empty offices can become apartments to ease housing pressure while also bringing more people back to downtown areas. But after two years, few buildings have been converted. Jessica Morin, the head of US office research at the commercial real-estate firm CBRE Group Inc., said there hasn't been a "noticeable increase" in conversions. Since 2016, only 112 commercial office spaces in the US have been converted, while 85 projects are underway or have been announced, according to CBRE's data. Despite the promise of new housing — one recent study in Los Angeles estimated that 72,000 new homes could be built in the city by converting offices and hotels — progress has been slow.
So what's going on? Simply: The costs to convert are often hard for developers to justify. Construction costs are assessed on a building-by-building basis and need to take into account structural issues such as floor layouts, plumbing, and window access. Residential buildings also have to accommodate shared spaces like hallways, meaning they generally have less rentable space than an office building. Rising costs of labor and increasing interest rates may dampen efforts to convert offices to homes and inject more risk for developers. "The cost of construction is just so high, and even if you set aside the specific issues related to conversions and just think about the economics of building anything, it's just gotten very difficult," Gupta told me.
Another barrier for office-to-residential conversions is local housing rules. To turn commercial buildings into housing, they would have to be rezoned — which requires input from community members and local officials — to meet specific requirements. Codes for everything from lighting to sustainability vary by city, presenting irregular hurdles in project costs and timelines. Housing developers may not want to put themselves in precarious political situations or go through resource-draining approval processes for a high-risk project with potentially significant financial downside.
Gupta's study suggested, however, that continually falling office values may kick off more interest from developers in adaptive-reuse projects. Despite their cost and complexity, they may be better than letting a building sit empty.
The transformation is likely to mean mixed-use 24-hour neighborhoods and downtowns where nearly all daily necessities are within walking or cycling distance of where people live. In Montréal and New York, some open-street programs developed during the pandemic became permanent, allowing people and events to replace moving vehicles year-round or during the summer months. The repurposing of rail yards in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and of elevated train lines in New York into parks shows that adaptive reuse can be applied to park infrastructure as well.
The corporatization of work led to urbanization, but the trend today is a decorporatization of downtowns. Out of previous financial districts, new vibrant neighborhoods could form and reestablish local consumption. It would require infrastructure upgrades and the adaptation of public spaces and streets, but, as Gupta noted, office buildings are already ideally situated "smack-dab in the center of the transit network." Meanwhile, research has linked mixed-use areas with lower crime rates than commercial districts.
The economic health of cities is intrinsically linked to how space is used or unused, and right now downtowns are undergoing a massive shift. Despite the sluggish movement, it's in cities' best interest to figure out how to quickly convert office-centric downtowns into something more suitable for everyone. ~
https://www.businessinsider.com/remote-work-gutted-city-downtowns-office-real-estate-apocalypse-2022-12?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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AMAZING FACTS ABOUT CROCODILES
THEY ARE THE LARGEST REPTILE
~ Crocs were around before the dinosaurs; and while they might not be as big as a T-Rex, they have lasted a lot longer.
The saltwater crocodile is the largest aquatic reptile on Earth. It can reach lengths of more than 23 feet (7m) and weights over 2,200 pounds (1,000kg).
saltwater crocodile, Australia
THEY DO PRODUCE TEARS
Ever heard about the expression "Crocodile tears"? In our culture, it means showing insincere remorse and comes from the fact that crocodiles produce tears when they eat their prey.
However, it doesn't mean they actually cry.
UF zoologist Kent Vliet carried out a study and found the tears in crocodiles may occur as a result of the reptiles hissing and huffing, a behavior that often accompanies feeding. Air forced through the sinuses may mix with tears in the crocodiles' lacrimal glands emptying into the eye.
The glands produce a fluid that helps to clean the eye and lubricate the passage of the nictitating membrane across the eye's surface.
THE OLDEST CROCODILE LIVED 140 YEARS
The saltwater crocodile has an average lifespan of 70 years. The Nile crocodile can live up to 100 years. But over the years, some crocodiles have broken those records.
Mr. Freshie was a freshwater crocodile residing in the Australia Zoo. He lived to be 140 years old, making him the oldest known crocodile to be put in captivity. He lived long despite being shot twice in the tail and left eye, leaving him blind and badly injured, Oldest reports.
THEY CAN’T CHEW FOOD
Crocodiles' jaws can't move sideways, meaning these reptiles can't grind food down in a traditional chewing motion.
Most of them tear off chunks from their prey and then swallow them whole. It isn't difficult for them, since crocodiles have the strongest bite in the animal world.
THEY CAN HOLD THEIR BREATH FOR AN HOUR
Crocodiles can hold their breath underwater for at least one hour without coming up for a breath of air as they can reduce their heart rate to 2-3 beats per minute. Researchers found that the reptiles can adjust their oxygen consumption, enabling them to dive for longer.
The longest recorded time a crocodile held its breath is eight hours in cold water, as they use less energy and oxygen compared to when they are in warm water.
THEY SWALLOW STONES TO IMPROVE DIGESTION
Crocodiles swallow stones to help with basic digestion, according to the Miami Science Museum. Rocks in a crocodile's stomach help crush and grate food and are particularly useful for those who eat whole prey.
The stones, known as 'gastroliths' when they settle in the reptile's stomach, can remain in the stomach for years.
THEY HAVE SPECIAL HEARTS
A crocodile's heart has four chambers with two atria and two ventricles. Unlike birds and mammals, which have a single aorta — the main artery that supplies blood to the circulatory system — crocodiles have two.
It is considered to be the most sophisticated heart in the animal world.
https://www.newsweek.com/8-cracking-facts-know-about-crocodiles-1648604
From another source:
Crocodiles are semi-aquatic and live in wetland areas, freshwater rivers or lakes, or saltwater – residing in estuaries, lagoons, or mangrove swamps, rather than far out at sea.
There are 14 species of crocodiles, which vary in lifespan between 35 – 75 years, and considerably in size. The smallest, the Dwarf Crocodile, grows to an average 4.9 feet (1.5 meters) in length, and weighs 40 – 71 pounds (18 to 32 kg, or 3 to 5 stone).
The largest crocodile is the Saltwater Crocodile, which can grow up to 23.0 ft (7.0 m) in length, weighing 2,200 – 2,600 lbs (1,000 to 1,200 kg, or 150 to 190 stone).
Some species are active during the day, while other species are only nocturnal. Crocodiles mostly hunt at night, are carnivorous animals and very efficient hunters, with excellent hearing and eyesight.
They are aggressive ambush predators, waiting for their prey to venture close to their hiding position, before rushing to attack. A crocs diet mostly includes other animals, reptiles, birds and fish.
CROCODILES ARE CARNIVORES. HOWEVER, THEY ALSO ENJOY AN OCCASIONAL TASTE OF FRUIT
A 2013 study concluded “there is little doubt that on occasion, fruit is deliberately consumed, often in large quantities“, along with their normal meat-heavy diets of mammals, birds, and fish.
CROCODILES CAN GO THROUGH OVER 4,000 TEETH OVER A LIFETIME
Crocodiles have between 60-110 teeth. When a crocodile loses a tooth, there is a small replacement already on standby. They are able to replace each of their 80 teeth up to 50 times over their lifespan.
A CROCODILE’S JAWS CAN APPLY 5,000 POUNDS OF PRESSURE PER SQUARE INCH – THE STRONGEST BITE OF ANY ANIMAL IN THE WORLD.
A human’s jaw only produces 100 pounds of pressure per square inch in comparison. A crocodiles bite is 10 times more powerful than a great white shark.
BUT CROCODILE’S JAW-OPENING MUSCLES ARE RELATIVELY WEAK. THE JAW CAN BE HELD SHUT WITH A RUBBER BAND OR JUST BARE HANDS.
Although that’s not advisable! However, it has enabled scientists to study them closer!
An easy way to tell the difference between a crocodile and an alligator, is when a crocodile closes it’s mouth, all teeth are visible – as the upper and lower jaw are the same width.
Whereas an alligator possesses small depressions in the upper jaw for the lower teeth, meaning they are not visible when their mouth is shut.
Another key difference to an alligator is snout shape. Alligators have wider, U-shaped snouts, while crocodiles are more pointed and V-shaped.
Crocodiles are generally a little more aggressive, and often larger and stronger, too.
The longest crocodile captured alive measured 6.17 m (20.2 ft) and weighed at 1,075 kg (2,370 lb) by a National Geographic team in Agusan del Sur Province, Philippines.
‘Lolong’ was a saltwater crocodile and the largest ever in captivity.
Crocodiles don’t sweat. To keep cool, they open their mouths which is known as “mouth gaping,” very similar to panting.
They are not displaying aggression when you see them with their mouths wide open! They often sleep with their mouths wide open to release heat.
Crocodiles are extremely fast in the water, swimming up to speeds of 35 kilometers per hour (22 mph).
They use their powerful tails to propel themselves through water, and their feet as rudders to steer.
It’s a common myth that crocodiles can run fast on land. They can ‘belly run’ up to 17 kilometers per hour (11 mph) for short distances.
Crocs tire easily on land and prefer to stay in water, coming ashore only to bask in the sun, or to lay eggs.
Crocodiles have acute senses, an evolutionary advantage that makes them highly successful predators. Crocodiles are mainly nocturnal hunters and have excellent night vision. Their sense of smell and hearing are also extremely well developed.
Crocodiles have been known to occasionally cannibalize smaller crocodiles.
There have been recorded cases of larger crocodiles eating smaller, or younger crocs.
Crocodiles are ambush and opportunistic predators, capable of preying upon large mammals, such as smaller elephants, hippos, sharks or big cats.
Some species like the freshwater crocodile will mostly eat fish, while larger species like the saltwater crocodile or the Nile crocodile, will consume buffalo, zebra, deer and wild boar.
Crocodiles have the most acidic stomach of any vertebrate. This allows them to dissolve and digest bones, hooves and horns or shells from their prey.
Crocodiles perform a ‘death roll’ to overcome prey, clamping on using their jaws, and spinning around powerfully. The spinning motion of the roll disorientates the prey, dragging them under the water and helps separate limbs from the body of larger animals to easily ingest.
Crocodiles vocalize to communicate. The young of some species squeak and grunt, while adult crocs can growl, hiss or roar at each other.
Many species will also respond to other noises, such as engine noise, gun shots or even people mimicking crocodiles.
Crocodiles can sleep with one eye wide open.
Only some other reptiles, birds and dolphins can do the same. They generally sleep with two eyes closed, though.
Larger crocodiles can go for over a year without eating a meal.
A croc’s metabolism is super efficient, using and storing nearly the entirety of the food it consumes. In extreme circumstances, they are able to shut down and live off their own tissue for a long period of time.
Worldwide, crocodiles are estimated to kill about 1,000 humans per year.
Hundreds of those crocodile attacks occur in Africa, often in small communities where they not widely reported.
https://factanimal.com/crocodiles/
~ Around 240 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, the earth looked pretty different. It was a time when dinosaurs roamed freely and crocodiles coexisted alongside them. In fact, crocodiles are one of the only animals that are thought to have survived the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaur population. They survived the mass extinction and thrived for millions of years to come.
Crocodiles are more related to dinosaurs and birds [which are actually avian dinosaurs] than to other reptiles.
PERHAPS THE MOST FASCINATING FACT OF ALL
When a female crocodile lays eggs (of which there can be up to 60 at a time), the temperature of the nest where the eggs are laid actually determines the sex of the baby. The egg of a male crocodile hatches at a temperature of 88.8 ℉. If the temperature is either higher or lower than this threshold, the egg of a female crocodile will hatch.
99% INFANT MORTALITY IN THE FIRST YEAR OF LIFE
These fearsome predators are quite vulnerable when first born. In fact, infant mortality is extremely high in most young crocodiles, reaching up to 99% of them dying before completing their first year of existence. Most of them are consumed in their first year by various predators, including adult crocodiles, lizards, hyenas, and even large fish. Unfortunately [crocodiles are an endangered species], some people also relish eating crocodile eggs.
the most sophisticated heart in the animal kingdom
Crocodiles have the most sophisticated heart in the animal kingdom, and actively change the destination of blood that flows through it depending on requirements.
THEY CARRY THEIR HATCHLINGS IN THEIR MOUTHS
One of the most interesting crocodile facts: they carry their babies to the water in their mouths. Baby crocodiles can make noises from inside their eggs before they hatch. The mother can hear their voices, then digs up the eggs from the sand, and takes the hatchlings to the water.
THEY CAN FIND THEIR HOME FROM A DISTANCE
Crocodiles may possess a homing instinct. In northern Australia, three rogue saltwater crocodiles were relocated 400 km (249 mi) by helicopter, but returned to their original locations within three weeks, based on data obtained from tracking devices attached to them.
CROCODILE FEET ARE WEBBED
Crocodiles have webbed feet which, though not used to propel them through the water (they tuck their feet to the side while swimming and use the power of their tails), allow them to make fast turns and sudden moves in the water or initiate swimming.
https://ourplnt.com/crocodile-facts/
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WHY RELIGION IS IN GLOBAL DECLINE
~ The most dramatic shift away from religion took place among the American public. For years, the United States had been the key case demonstrating that economic modernization need not produce secularization. But recently, the American public has been moving away from religion along with virtually all other high-income countries—in fact, religiosity has been declining more rapidly in the US than in most other countries.
Several forces are driving this trend but the most -- one is the waning grip of a set of beliefs closely linked with the imperative of maintaining high birth rates. For many centuries, most societies assigned women the role of producing as many children as possible and discouraged divorce, abortion, homosexuality, contraception, and any other sexual behavior not linked with reproduction. Virtually all major world religions encouraged high fertility because it was necessary, in the world of high infant mortality and low life expectancy that prevailed until recently, for the average woman to produce five to eight children in order to simply replace the population. Religions that didn’t emphasize these norms gradually disappeared.
A growing number of countries have now attained high life expectancies and drastically reduced infant mortality rates, making these traditional cultural norms no longer necessary. This process didn’t happen overnight. The major world religions had presented pro-fertility norms as absolute moral rules and firmly resisted change. People only slowly give up the familiar beliefs and societal roles they have known since childhood, concerning gender and sexual behavior. But when a society reaches a sufficiently high level of economic and physical security, younger generations grow up taking that security for granted and the norms around fertility recede. Ideas, practices, and laws concerning gender equality, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality are now changing rapidly. Almost all high-income societies have recently reached a tipping point where the balance shifts from pro-fertility norms being dominant, to individual-choice norms being dominant.
Several other factors help explain the waning of religion. In the United States, politics explains part of the decline. Since the 1990s, the Republican Party has sought to win support by adopting conservative Christian positions on same sex marriage, abortion, and other cultural issues. But this appeal to religious voters has had the corollary effect of pushing other voters, especially young liberal ones, away from religion. The uncritical embrace of President Donald Trump by conservative evangelical leaders has accelerated this trend.
And the Roman Catholic Church has lost adherents because of its own crises. A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that an overwhelming majority US adults were aware of recent reports of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, and most of them believed that the abuses were “ongoing problems that are still happening.” Accordingly, many US Catholics said that they have scaled back attendance at mass in response to these reports.
Although some religious conservatives warn that the retreat from faith will lead to a collapse of social cohesion and public morality, the evidence doesn’t support this claim. Surprising as it may seem, countries that are less religious actually tend to be less corrupt and have lower murder rates than religious ones.
Each year, Transparency International publishes a Corruption Perception Index that ranks public-sector corruption in 180 countries and territories. Is corruption less widespread in religious countries than less religious ones? The answer is an unequivocal “no”—in fact, religious countries actually tend to be more corrupt than secular ones.This pattern also applies to other crimes, such as murder. Surprising as it may seem, the murder rate is more than ten times as high in the most religious countries as it is in the least religious countries. Some relatively poor countries have low murder rates, but overall, prosperous countries that provide their residents with material and legal security are much safer than poor countries. It’s not that religiosity causes corruption and murder, but that both crime and religiosity tend to be high in poor countries.
In early agrarian societies, when most people lived just above the survival level, religion may have been the most effective way to maintain order and cohesion. But as traditional religiosity declines, an equally strong set of moral norms seems to be emerging to fill the void. Survey evidence from countries containing over 90% of the world’s population indicates that in highly secure and secular countries, people are giving increasingly high priority to self-expression and free choice, with a growing emphasis on human rights, tolerance of outsiders, environmental protection, gender equality, and freedom of speech.
As societies develop from agrarian to industrial to knowledge-based, growing existential security tends to reduce the importance of religion in people’s lives and people become less obedient to traditional religious leaders and institutions. That trend seems likely to continue, but pandemics such as the current one reduce peoples’ sense of existential security. If the pandemic were to endure for decades, or lead to an enduring Great Depression, the theory underlying this article implies that the cultural changes of recent decades would reverse themselves.
That’s conceivable but it would run counter to the trend toward growing prosperity and rising life expectancy that has been spreading throughout the world for the past 500 years. This trend rarely reverses itself for long because it is driven by technological innovation which, once it emerges, usually persists and spreads. If that happens, the long-term outlook is for public morality to be less determined by traditional religions, and increasingly shaped by the culture of growing acceptance of outgroups, gender equality, and environmentalism that has been emerging in recent decades. ~
https://blog.oup.com/2020/12/why-is-religion-suddenly-declining/
Oriana:
According to one source, 64% of Americans currently identify as Christian, down from 90% fifty years ago. While growing prosperity and the scientific worldview have something to do with the decline, I tend to agree with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who wrote a lot of poems and essays on the subject, that the main secularizing factor is the growth of technology. Our response to health problems, for instance, is to turn to medicine rather than prayer. As for miracles such as driving a car or flying in an airplane, we take it all for granted (and grumble about various inconveniences, especially when it comes to mind-blowing miracle of flying). Rather than worry about surviving winter, we stay warm and dry. Washing hands with soap and hot water has hugely diminished infections. This list could go on and on. Religion thrives on poverty and misery, and these are almost nothing now compared to the past -- at least in the developed countries, which are the least religious.
Joe:
According to some studies, 30% of Christians attend church, but the falling attendance is not only an American trend. In England, less than 50% of Britons identify as Christian. For the first time since the seventh century, Christianity has slipped below 50%. — even though in 600 CE, when the king became Christian, his subjects were baptized. Many reasons influence the falling membership in the Christian community.
One reason is the failure to adapt to an urban community from an agrarian society. All the major religions face a shrinking membership, but Christians are leading the way. We see this in the rise of major religions in politics. Unable to attract new members, they use the government to enforce religious participation and promote religious nationalism.
Today, we see this in the rise of Islam nationalism in Iran and Afghanistan, Hindu nationalism in India, and Christian nationalism in the United States. All these religions agree that they have nothing in common with the global growth of multi-cultural and multi-ethnic cities. In the United States, theologians questioned the wisdom of allowing the Sabbath to become a workday instead of remaining a day of worship.
At that moment, capitalism placed profit over religious tradition, and soon stores were open on Christmas and Easter, and finally, Thanksgiving became a day of business instead of fellowship. Work separated people from their religious community, and soon many Christians were working on Sunday. It wasn’t enough for companies to use a slip work schedule, which allowed their employees to have two Sundays off a month.
Today, people spend more time at their job and less time with their religious community. As a result, the worker became closer to their work community than their church. Furthermore, the work community represents a more ethnically diverse group, representing the urban community. Many churches remained racially and ethnically unmixed rather than becoming a mixing bowl for urban society.
Daily, the employees deal with the homeless, the unemployed, single moms, and the LGBT communities either going to, during, or after work. The bulletin boards at work are full of cards for anniversaries, weddings, births, and graduations. Work encourages behavior that is compassionate and caring. By behaving this way, employees make the workplace provide an ambiance conducive to socialization.
The HR departments spend most of their time training people to treat others with respect. Christian churches preach that God is love, but their politics attempt to force women to bear children and gays to hide their sexuality. They make standard health practices a political issue, i.e., anti-mask and anti-vaccine. Currently, churches seem to attract the anti-social, which might explain why 90% of mass shooters attend a Christian church.
P.S.
Oriana:
Many good points here, especially about the workplace community having become more important than the religious community. This should come as no surprise: humans are very social and easily bond with those whom they see every day.
In addition, companies organize events such as Christmas parties or other celebrations, picnics, family trips to the zoo . . . whatever it may be, to promote this bonding. After retiring, former employees often say that what they miss most is the people at the office. They miss the daily socializing.
True, there are churches that organize various events as well, but they can’t really compete — men would really rather go to a sports bar on Sunday, and women would rather go shopping — not to mention that churches expect their members to believe in all kinds of absurdities, and listen to boring sermons. No wonder many choose to spend their precious leisure time doing other things. And the belief that they will suffer in hellfire for eternity unless they attend church is not what it used to be. Most people don’t want a cruel deity. Those who do belong to the lunatic fringe, and yes, an occasional madman will become a mass shooter.
I also agree that the Church seems obsessed with sex rather than true problems.
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ISLAM MADE ME AN ATHEIST
~ ISLAM made me an atheist. If I had been raised in any religion that wasn't so archaic, rigid, stupid, anti–intellectual, intolerant and brutal with dissent, I might have kept some faith. But Islam killed my ability to believe in any religion from a very young age.
I was 9 when I knew things weren't right. I wasn't like other children. I didn't care about praying and fasting. I didn't care about memorizing chapters from the Qur’an. I didn't feel better around Muslims and different around non–Muslims.
Because I read history books from age 9, that's why. I loved history the way a Muslim is supposed to love Islam. But Islam and the study of history are two completely different paths of mental development.
History teaches the diversity of human civilization, and the romances, mysteries and tragedies that happened to nations all over the world. It also exposes you to foreign religions, philosophies, and worldviews. There is no way to study history without learning about religions other than your own. After all, most of humanity, past and present, has never been Muslim.
If you're emotional about history, you feel the stories you read. Let's say you're reading about Kingdom X. You get amazed at how it rose from nothing, fascinated by its culture, impressed at its achievements, resentful of its enemies, and sad (sometimes very sad) at its end. And most of all you mourn how today it's gone forever, or how it's nothing like it used to be if it still exists. It's unreachable to you no matter how emotionally attached to it you are.
You feel the same way about characters from history. If they're buried somewhere, you can fantasize about visiting them. But most characters from history are simply erased.
As you grow older and take your understanding of history from emotional to analytical, you learn that history is extremely complicated, detail–infinite, often eradicated from physical existence, and, to a large extent, unknowable. So the study of history teaches you to think very cleanly with the little you can know.
All of this is the opposite of Islam. Islam scorns both the ideas and the memory of all non–Muslim civilization. Islam gives no knowledge except for a very finite corpus of writings: the Qur’an and Hadith. Everything else is personal interpretation, but Islam shuns interpretation that takes you away from the literal meaning of the text.
Islam treasures conservative interpretation. And no matter what any Muslim says, Islam certainly does not value inquisitiveness, “outside research,” rationalism, abstract thought, or scholarship. Islam gives you a complete, self–contained set of beliefs. Sticking to them no matter what is the measure of your worthiness before God. Any minor deviation is disliked, and any great deviation can be deadly.
I was taught that Islam is a religion for the whole world; that Islam has logical answers for everything and is the religion of knowledge and science; that the first Qur’anic verse “revealed” to Muhammad was the order to Iqra‘ (“Read!”); and that people follow other religions mechanically and blindly, simply because they were born and raised in them, but anyone who uses his God-given mind will reach Islam.
What I actually discovered is that most Muslims, including my parents and teachers, know nothing about the world. By age 14 I had an educated adult's knowledge of history, geography and global current events, and now at age 34 I have knowledge that can only be corrected by serious academics, niche aficionados, and eyewitnesses of past events. My father, when I explain to him what's going on in some part of the world, is astonished because he is absolutely clueless. In fact my father, who was my first teacher and also one of my worst bullies, turned out to know very little when put to the test by adult me. Islam, the illusion of ultimate truth, makes him feel like he understands things around him much, much better than he actually does. I think it has this effect on most Muslims. Islam makes you supremely confident with ignorance.
What I actually discovered is that very nearly all Muslims are Muslims only because they were born and raised in that religion, and are far more mechanical and blind than other religionists, who usually moderate if not abandon their beliefs as adults.
What I actually discovered is that Islam has no tolerance for logical thinking. You ask a question about a dogma that is giving you a bad feeling; you get your answer; it's supposed to end there. If you question or disagree with the answer, now you're rebelling against God's commands.
For this I was often beaten by my parents, vocally detested by teachers who also relayed everything I said back to my family (and they were schoolteachers of standard subjects, not even instructors of religion), threatened and physically assaulted by classmates and older boys, seen as dangerously creepy by girls I liked, and basically treated like a crazy freak. This lasted ten years.
Once extremely extroverted and the most popular boy in my elementary school, I became a silent, awkward loner in social settings, and withdrew whenever possible to my room or cybercafé and the Internet, which I discovered at 15 and immediately contracted an all–consuming addiction to for the rest of my teens and 20s. Once I discovered the Internet, I would never have a normal life again. Total freedom and adventure in virtual space became for me what food is for someone super morbidly obese. It was impossible to get enough. Only sleep made me pause.
During my last two years of high school and all throughout university, I would leave my family's apartment in the morning and pretend to wait for the bus, but I would actually sneak into cheap cybercafés and spend 12–16 hours there, sometimes not coming home until midnight. In high school I only did this when I could get away with it, but in university I did it almost every single day I was supposed to go to class. When I ran out of cash for the cybercafés I would go to university, just to spend all day in the computer labs. (So naturally, of course, I often flunked my exams and had a C minus average.) The many thousands of hours I accumulated online would've been enough time to learn several languages or get qualified as a surgeon in my country. But I did not have the strength of will to see the long term and carry out prudent and strategic plans.
I pursued stupid online relationships all that time, always putting girls on pedestals as a beautiful opposite to the ugliness of my history, never realizing that my feelings were never a reflection of reality, whether it was the reality of the desired person, the reality of practical and pragmatic constraints, or the reality of how life works in general.
And the only one of these fantasy romances that was with a girl I can even now objectively regard as my most suitable partner, ended also because of Islam. Her typical Egyptian Muslim family, upon discovering that she had had sex at least once in the past, immediately and violently forced on her a respectable husband of their liking. And to this day, this is the first image in my head when I think of religious Muslims — as mindless, cretinous brutes.
What did Islam do? Did it make Egypt a strong country? No. Did it make my father a good father or even a good person? No. Does it make the Muslim world advanced? No. Does it even make it developed? No. Are any of the scientific miracles of the Quran real? Not a one. Does Islam even make Muslims better-behaved, better-spoken and more civilized than non-Muslims? No. Does it make our women happier? No. Are Muslim governments any less corrupt and hypocritical and less prone to human nature than other governments? No. In fact, they are even worse. Are Muslims even in better health than others because they pray 5 times a day, fast, and avoid alcohol and pork? No.
Praying 5 times a day, going to mosque, what does it do? We have most of 1.8 billion Muslims praying daily for the strength and victory of the Ummah. Has it achieved anything? No. Rather the only strong country in the Muslim world, Turkey, got where it is by abolishing Islam from law, education and politics. And now that Erdogan is doing the reverse, Turkey is backsliding.
The reality is that Islam is a huge burden of obligations and antiquated nonsensical dogma, with no benefits to compensate. The reality is that a country and people who have never been touched by Islam can be better in all respects, including behavior, than Muslims are. The reality is that a person who has never been touched by Islam, even an atheist, can be a much better person than a dutifully observant Muslim.
When I say I hate Islam, hate is nowhere near a fierce enough word to convey my emotion toward the religion. I loathe Islam. On Quora I'm known to write with anger against American foreign policy, propaganda and world domination which I see as evil incarnate. But Islam is my own personal Satan which I despise like a Jew despises Nazis. Even in Canada, and although I don't show it, the sight or sound of Islam being practiced gives me a fight-or-flight response. It sets me ablaze inside. ~ Ismail Bashomori (abbreviated), Quora
Richard Saw:
That is why China forbids minors from receiving any religious education until they become adults. Of course, they are free to choose their own beliefs as adults. In fact godless is also a kind of belief. What's interesting is that Buddhism is also essentially a godless religion. That's why there are people in China who consider themselves Buddhist on the one hand and Marxist on the other, and the Dalai Lama was once the most famous of these people.
Ron Chow:
Unlike you Ismail my childhood was far more ‘normal’ than yours as I was blessed with loving parents. I was brought up in a catholic high school and later on in my university years I was exposed to the protestant faith by a devoted professor from Taiwan. However on both occasions I failed to be converted. Common sense took over easily and day-to-day reality made me see through the falsehood of any god-based religion and from then on my status as an atheist was cemented.
Greg Mallet Valentine:
Islam is Judaism on cocaine and steroids.
Riette Hugo:
I loved your story! I am an old white woman living in South Africa. I was brought up as a Christian but I went through the same process as you. I no longer think Christianity or any religion worth my time. A middle aged Muslim builder was working in my house. On my wall I have a Histomap which looks like a modern work of art but shows the various civilizations from 2000 years before Christ to 2000 years after. When talking to him I realized that he had no inkling of history and timelines. He was so blinkered and indoctrinated that it was impossible to understand his mindset: to him Islam and creation are inseparable; in fact he told me that his imam had warned him about people like me who would try to change his mind, try to tell him that there were other ways of thinking about life, even that Jesus was born long before Mohammed. I made a copy of the Histomap and told him to study it and to come and talk to me again when he knew something about History and the way events shaped lives.
I am sorry that you were bullied and shunned but I also salute you for not bowing to blind belief and fear.
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BLACK TEA AND OTHER FLAVONOID-RICH BEVERAGES HELP PREVENT ABDOMINAL AORTA CALCIFICATION
~ A daily cup of tea could help you to enjoy better health late in life — however if you're not a tea drinker, there are other things you can add to your diet.
The key is flavonoids, which are naturally occurring substances found in many common foods and beverages such as black and green tea, apples, nuts, citrus fruit, berries and more.
They have long been known to have many health benefits — however new Edith Cowan University (ECU) research shows they may be even better for us than previously thought.
The Heart Foundation supported a study of 881 elderly women (median age of 80), which found they were far less likely to have extensive build-up of abdominal aortic calcification (AAC) if they consumed a high level of flavonoids in their diet.
AAC is the calcification of the abdominal aorta — the largest artery in the body which supplies oxygenated blood from the heart to the abdominal organs and lower limbs — and is a predictor of cardiovascular risk such as heart attack and stroke.
It has also been found to be a reliable predictor for late-life dementia.
ECU Nutrition and Health Innovation Research Institute researcher and study lead Ben Parmenter said while there were many dietary sources of flavonoids, some had particularly high amounts.
"In most populations, a small group of foods and beverages — uniquely high in flavonoids — contribute the bulk of total dietary flavonoid intake," he said.
“The main contributors are usually black or green tea, blueberries, strawberries, oranges, red wine, apples, raisins/grapes and dark chocolate.”
The flavonoid family
There are many different types of flavonoids, such as flavan-3-ols and flavonols, which the study indicated appear to also have a relationship with AAC.
Study participants who had a higher intake of total flavonoids, flavan-3-ols and flavonols were 36-39 per cent less likely to have extensive AAC.
Black tea was the study cohort's main source of total flavonoids and was also associated with significantly lower odds of extensive AAC.
Compared with respondents who didn't drink tea, participants who had two-to-six cups per day had 16-42 per cent less chance of having extensive AAC.
However, some other dietary sources of flavonoids such as fruit juice, red wine and chocolate, did not show a significant beneficial association with AAC.
Not just tea
Though black tea was the main source of flavonoids in the study — likely due to the age of the participants — Mr Parmenter said people could still benefit from flavonoids without putting the kettle on.
"Out of the women who don't drink black tea, higher total non-tea flavonoid intake also appears to protect against extensive calcification of the arteries," he said.
"This implies flavonoids from sources other than black tea may be protective against AAC when tea is not consumed."
Mr Parmenter said this was important as it allows non-tea drinkers to still benefit from flavonoids in their diet.
"In other populations or groups of people, such as young men or people from other countries, black tea might not be the main source of flavonoids," he said.
"AAC is a major predictor of vascular disease events, and this study shows intake of flavonoids, that could protect against AAC, are easily achievable in most people's diets."
'Higher habitual dietary flavonoid intake associates with less extensive abdominal aortic calcification in a cohort of older women' was published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/11/221122111507.htm
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WHY WE GET MORE COLDS AND FLU IN WINTER
~ A chill is in the air, and you all know what that means — it’s time for cold and flu season, when it seems everyone you know is suddenly sneezing, sniffling or worse. It’s almost as if those pesky cold and flu germs whirl in with the first blast of winter weather.
Yet germs are present year-round — just think back to your last summer cold. So why do people get more colds, flu and now Covid-19 when it’s chilly outside?
In what researchers are calling a scientific breakthrough, scientists behind a new study may have found the biological reason we get more respiratory illnesses in winter. It turns out the cold air itself damages the immune response occurring in the nose.
“This is the first time that we have a biologic, molecular explanation regarding one factor of our innate immune response that appears to be limited by colder temperatures,” said rhinologist Dr. Zara Patel, a professor of otolaryngology and head and neck surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine in California. She was not involved in the new study.
In fact, reducing the temperature inside the nose by as little as 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) kills nearly 50% of the billions of virus and bacteria-fighting cells in the nostrils, according to the study published Tuesday in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
“Cold air is associated with increased viral infection because you’ve essentially lost half of your immunity just by that small drop in temperature,” said rhinologist Dr. Benjamin Bleier, director of otolaryngology translational research at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
“it’s important to remember that these are in vitro studies, meaning that although it is using human tissue in the lab to study this immune response, it is not a study being carried out inside someone’s actual nose,” Patel said in an email. “Often the findings of in vitro studies are confirmed in vivo, but not always.”
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To understand why this occurs, Bleier and his team and coauthor Mansoor Amiji, who chairs the department of pharmaceutical sciences at Northeastern University in Boston, went on a scientific detective hunt.
A respiratory virus or bacteria invades the nose, the main point of entry into the body.
Immediately, the front of the nose detects the germ, well before the back of the nose is aware of the intruder, the team discovered.
At that point, cells lining the nose immediately begin creating billions of simple copies of themselves called extracellular vesicles, or EV’s.
“EV’s can’t divide like cells can, but they are like little mini versions of cells specifically designed to go and kill these viruses,” Bleier said. “EV’s act as decoys, so now when you inhale a virus, the virus sticks to these decoys instead of sticking to the cells.”
Those “Mini Me’s” are then expelled by the cells into nasal mucus (yes, snot), where they stop invading germs before they can get to their destinations and multiply.
“This is one of, if not the only part of the immune system that leaves your body to go fight the bacteria and viruses before they actually get into your body,” Bleier said.
Once created and dispersed out into nasal secretions, the billions of EV’s then start to swarm the marauding germs, Bleier said.
“It’s like if you kick a hornet’s nest, what happens? You might see a few hornets flying around, but when you kick it, all of them all fly out of the nest to attack before that animal can get into the nest itself,” he said. “That’s the way the body mops up these inhaled viruses so they can never get into the cell in the first place.”
When under attack, the nose increases production of extracellular vesicles by 160%, the study found. There were additional differences: EV’s had many more receptors on their surface than original cells, thus boosting the virus-stopping ability of the billions of extracellular vesicles in the nose.
“Just imagine receptors as little arms that are sticking out, trying to grab on to the viral particles as you breathe them in,” Bleier said. “And we found each vesicle has up to 20 times more receptors on the surface, making them super sticky.”
Cells in the body also contain a viral killer called micro RNA, which attack invading germs. Yet EVs in the nose contained 13 times micro RNA sequences than normal cells, the study found.
So the nose comes to battle armed with some extra superpowers. But what happens to those advantages when cold weather hits?
To find out, Bleier and his team exposed four study participants to 15 minutes of 40-degree-Fahrenheit (4.4-degree-Celsius) temperatures, and then measured conditions inside their nasal cavities.
“What we found is that when you’re exposed to cold air, the temperature in your nose can drop by as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit. And that’s enough to essentially knock out all three of those immune advantages that the nose has,” Bleier said.
In fact, that little bit of coldness in the tip of the nose was enough to take nearly 42% of the extracellular vesicles out of the fight, Bleier said.
“Similarly, you have almost half the amount of those killer micro RNA’s inside each vesicle, and you can have up to a 70% drop in the number of receptors on each vesicle, making them much less sticky,” he said.
What does that do to your ability to fight off colds, flu and Covid-19? It cuts your immune system’s ability to fight off respiratory infections by half, Bleier said.
“Not only do masks protect you from the direct inhalation of viruses, but it’s also like wearing a sweater on your nose,” he said.
Patel agreed: “The warmer you can keep the intranasal environment, the better this innate immune defense mechanism will be able to work. Maybe yet another reason to wear masks!”
In the future, Bleier expects to see the development of topical nasal medications that build upon this scientific revelation. These new pharmaceuticals will “essentially fool the nose into thinking it has just seen a virus,” he said.
“By having that exposure, you’ll have all these extra hornets flying around in your mucus protecting you,” he added. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/06/health/why-winter-colds-flu-wellness
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Ending on beauty:
In retrospect, I think
my gravesite stone
shouldn’t have my name
on it, just a sign
perhaps or nothing.
That way, the dogs
who happen by
might mutter, “I wonder
if a creature’s buried there”,
and then go on their way . . .
~ from Vandals, by Kerry Shawn Keys
Oriana:
I especially like the opening:
In retrospect, I think
my gravesite’s stone
shouldn’t have my name
on it, just a sign
perhaps or nothing.
Just a stone — though what makes us think there’ll even be a stone?
For me it would be more about becoming part of nature. Like Wordsworth's Lucy, “Rolled in the earth’s diurnal course / With trees and rocks and stones.”
And when we look at old, old cemeteries, the names on the tombstones become erased — unless there is an endowment for upkeep, or some historical society takes care of periodic clean-up. But there is a special poetry about our names becoming gradually erased . . .
And even if the name is there, it means nothing after generations.
We belong to the moment, and need to make the most of that moment.
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