April Night; Otake Hiiroko*
LATE FRAGMENT
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
~ Ray Carver
It may be humbling to admit that in the end that is what we want most: to be loved. Immersion in fulfilling work may stave off the hunger, but it can't eliminate it completely: we want to be greatly valued by at least one other human being. To be BELOVED.
The word "beloved" may be antiquated, but our need to be beloved never ends.
*
WHAT HEMINGWAY MEANS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
~ In the playwright Simon Gray’s literary diary The Last Cigarette, there’s a moment where he struggles to recall the name of a particular figure. Gray keeps returning to the image of a strutting, bare-chested, big-bellied man on a boat, holding up a huge dead fish. He has “a grey beard, a square bullish face, something stupid about it, and aggressive.” Who is it, Gray asks himself, who is this obnoxious, swaggering figure? “Hemingway!,” he finally remembers.
For many writers, talking about Ernest Hemingway is like talking about an embarrassing ancestor. Hemingway comes burdened with baggage, lots of it; pugilistic metaphors and hard-drinking aphorisms, an obsession with a pure and “clean” prose, a brittle misogyny and a vainglorious narcissism. And then there are all the dead animals. There they are, heaping up behind the great man’s hulking physique: Key West marlin, and bulls, and elephants, and antelope, and lions.
When I visited the Hemingway collections at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston some years ago, I was shown to a room at the top of the building where I could work on my first day of research. It was a replica of Hemingway’s room in the Finca Vigia in Cuba, complete with lion-skin rug, the lion’s head staring upward in an aspect of roaring animosity. On the side was a drinks cabinet with a row of bottles.
Out of the window, I could look out on the waterfront and the Massachusetts Bay beyond, the sun glancing on the sea, nuggets of gold in the expanse of blue. But on the second day, I had to move downstairs, to a more nondescript space, lit with bright, clinical overhead lights. Here I could begin my research properly, no longer distracted by the gorgeous view and the lion skin.
It struck me at the time as an apt metaphor for the writer’s life and legacy; the collection of images marked in our minds as “Hemingway” were, for want of a better phrase, a kind of showroom. Up there, lion-skins and antelope heads jostled with guns and martinis. The real work was in sifting through the complex and confusing remnants the great writer had left downstairs, in the archives.
*
This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of Hemingway’s first published work, Three Stories and Ten Poems, printed privately in Paris in 1923. Already, the stories in the collection showed a writer with a recognizable style; two of the three stories, “Out of Season” and “My Old Man” would reappear in In Our Time (1925), the collection that made Hemingway’s literary name.
In the stories, the elements of the Hemingway style were finding their place: an unflinching eye for detail, the ability to stage quiet tragedy in spare, crystalline prose. In “Up in Michigan,” for example, Hemingway’s description of a sexual assault is framed by the simple, direct, descriptive language of place and atmosphere. The story ends with an effective depiction of the “cold mist coming up through the woods from the bay”: Hemingway’s Midwestern spaces take on the violence, despair and hopelessness of the human relationships that exist around and inside them.
As with some of the other poems, “Along with Youth” recalls the early work of T.S. Eliot, where disparate and seemingly unrelated images are juxtaposed: compare the porcupine skins, stuffed owls, and canoes of “Along with Youth” to the street lamps, crabs, and geraniums of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” say. But in “Champs d’Honneur,” one of three explicit war poems (Hemingway served on the Italian front in 1918), the young writer sounds like Wilfred Owen at his most viscerally effective, describing the soldiers who “pitch and cough and twitch” in a gas attack.
All this is to say that if the mature Hemingway style seems almost fully formed in the stories, the oddness and variety of the writing in the poems is surprising. Hemingway was never one thing—not at the beginning, nor later when he was famous and rich, and his full, white-bearded face gazed up from the cover of Time magazine.
I, too have struggled with Hemingway. And even to put it in those terms—the language of struggle or battle—risks succumbing to the mythology he created. For Hemingway, to engage with a writer was to submit yourself to a boxing bout. He was famously quoted as saying that he had already “beat” Turgenev and Maupassant in the ring, and “fought two draws” with Stendhal (he conceded he would be no match for Tolstoy). This pugilistic language seems at odds with the delicacy of his literary style.
In the early days of reading him, I marveled at the beauty of those sculpted sentences; it seemed at the time as if I was handling fine bone china. Sometimes the prose was so spare it seemed to disappear, and I was left trudging through endless midwestern woods, or dry Spanish plains.
But there were things that were troubling, even in these early days of getting to know Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises seemed to play on anti-Semitic tropes in its portrayal of the character of Robert Cohn (the character is described as having a “hard, Jewish, stubborn streak”).
There was often excessive consumption, particularly of booze. It feels as if there is always a chilled bottle of wine open, one Martini rolls into the next one, and the next. Then there are those dead animals. In a 1934 letter to his son Patrick from Kenya, Hemingway wrote that the hunting party had killed four lions and:
35 hyenas. 3 Buffalo bulls. About 8 Thompson gazelles, about Six Grant Gazelles, 3 Topi, 4 Eland, 6 Impalla, 2 Leopards, 5 Cheetah, a lot of Zebra for their hides. 3 Water buck, one cerval cat, 1 bush buck, 1 Roan Antelope, 3 wart hogs, 2 Klipspringers …
That’s not even touching on the problematic gender politics of Hemingway’s writing. As a male reader, I often felt Hemingway was judging me to be inadequate. Why wasn’t I boxing or shooting or watching bullfights or wrestling swordfish?
*
Yet this reading of Hemingway is, of course, partial and incomplete. The obsessive masculinism of Hemingway’s fiction is undercut, not just by Hemingway’s readers, but by the writer himself. His heroes are broken, wounded. Jake Barnes, for example, the protagonist of The Sun Also Rises, has sustained an unspecified genital injury in the First World War.
On the one hand, Jake is a typical Hemingway man, obsessed with bullfighting and hard drinking. On the other, his gender and sexuality are consistently portrayed as ambiguous; as the critic Ira Elliott has argued, his groin injury leads him to identify with the marginal homosexual characters in the novel. Like them, he cannot perform the heteronormative roles society foists on him.
If Hemingway’s earlier work is, at the least, ambiguous on the issues of gender and sex, his posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden (1986) raised more questions. As Hemingway expert Debra Moddelmog puts it, the book was a “startling and sudden intensification” of these themes: gender fluidity, homosexuality, taboo sex. David and Catherine, the protagonists of that novel, cut their hair so that they look alike, and play at performing the opposite gender, Catherine as boy, David as girl.
The publication of The Garden of Eden, as Moddelmog points out, happened to coincide with the growth of queer theory within the academy: Judith Butler’s highly influential book Gender Trouble would come out four years later. Since then, there have been a proliferation of critical assessments of Hemingway’s attitude to gender and sexuality from Mark Spilka, Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes, Carl Eby, and others.
There is also a growing number of critics looking at Hemingway through an environmentalist lens. At first, it’s difficult to discern anything ecologically sensitive about Hemingway: isn’t the guy all about killing animals? Yet Hemingway’s interest in hunting and fishing went along with a sensitivity to the environment. Writing to his father in 1925 from Spain, he wrote that the “wonderful stream” he had previously visited was now devastated by logging: it made him “feel sick.”
And there is the ruined, “burned out” midwestern landscape of “Big Two-Hearted River” in In Our Time, with its grasshoppers “all black” from the impact of some ecological trauma. Even those dead, hunted animals are not as straightforward as they might seem; the critic Nina Baym’s influential essay “Actually, I felt sorry for the lion” argues for the importance of the lion’s point of view in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” When Brett Ashley sees the bull in The Sun Also Rises she exclaims: “My God, isn’t he beautiful?”; Hemingway’s bulls and lions are less antagonists than tragic protagonists in a ritual dance from which they cannot escape.
If Hemingway’s influence has been difficult for the literary world to live with, our changing readings of him have drawn attention to the protean, fluid quality of his work. Hemingway is a writer of paradox; a macho, masculine writer who questioned masculinity, a hunter who could run with the hunted, a naturalist who mourned the destruction of the very habitats he plundered for big game. He is a teacher who will teach you how to write until you can’t stand him anymore, and then, all the things you thought you knew about him will fall apart.
In his interview with the Paris Review in 1958, he said he left his writing desk each day with a sense of emptiness, but “at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love.” “Nothing can hurt you,” he continued, “nothing can happen, nothing means anything” until the next time you set pen to paper.
A writer who feels like that about writing could take you anywhere with their prose, you sense.
But at the same time, Hemingway’s words feel fragile, damaged; as if he knew he was drawing out pieces of his wounded self to the eager public. I still don’t know what to make of Hemingway, but these days, I’m happy to say I don’t really mind. In the 100 years since he started writing, Hemingway has come to mean so many different things: a future without someone talking about him seems impossible to imagine. ~ David Barnes
https://lithub.com/what-hemingway-means-in-the-21st-century/?fbclid=IwAR2NoTHsRFeku2ymgmFhhNGR6eC_BjUdyHJPvw1VW0B1OkJtt1ZheP9_0bs
Oriana:
By now it’s become a cliché to say that Hemingway actually felt insecure about his masculinity, so he tried to compensate for it by developing a “macho” persona and characters who kill dangerous animals or try to haul to shore the largest fish anyone has seen — even though in the end those actions turn out to be senseless. Tough, a macho man who really isn’t has to keep on proving himself.
Few critics seem to understand that something else left an even great mark on Hemingway and his work — his alcoholism.
True, Hemingway was a special kind of “controlled alcoholic.” He got up early and wrote sober. Then, around 11 a.m., he’d start drinking. We can admire this self-control, at least during the morning hours. We can applaud his concept of a “good drunk,” one who observed certain rules, almost an English gentleman of alcoholism. And I suppose a heroin junkie can try to be a “good junkie,” observing certain rules, including even some intermittent abstinence.
But no amount of “honor” can hide the fact that an alcoholic’s world is one of emptiness and despair, often accompanied by self-loathing — which the person may try to cover up with narcissistic grandiosity.
That emptiness and despair are writ large in Hemingway’s fiction. Maybe this is what David Barnes is hinting at when he writes, “But at the same time, Hemingway’s words feel fragile, damaged; as if he knew he was drawing out pieces of his wounded self to the eager public.”
And this:
“. . . our changing readings of him have drawn attention to the protean, fluid quality of his work. Hemingway is a writer of paradox; a macho, masculine writer who questioned masculinity, a hunter who could run with the hunted, a naturalist who mourned the destruction of the very habitats he plundered for big game.”
Fragile and damaged — yes, that’s how Hemingway registers on me. But perhaps all conspicuous machismo is just that.
Joe:
The article, What Hemmingway Means in the 21st Century by David Barnes, reminded me of the war stories I heard from my uncles about WWII. I thought about their hunting stories and began to believe that Hemingway embodies the tenets of the American Gun Culture. Furthermore, he lived his life according to almost all of them, and as a result, he lost two of his most valuable essentials, his muse and his love for life.
After listening to Christian gun owners in my family, I believe the Gun Culture’s chivalrous view of patriotism encompasses a dark weltanschauung. The main patriotic tenants of the Gun Culture are war, killing of men, hunting, the killing of animals, antisemitism, and racism, which can lead to murder, and misogyny, which can lead to abuse. These are the ideas contained within their concept of chivalry.
Within the gun culture, there is a spiritual connection to the gun. I come from a family of Christian gun owners, and they discuss firearms as a keystone of Christian spirituality. At family dinners, we said grace and commented on the Bible. Then, the conversation shifted to hunting and war — in other words, to talk about killing animals and men.
Hemingway said he never felt as alive as when he hunted big game or followed troops into battle.
At one family gathering, my uncle said he felt a deep, spiritual connection when he hunted before church, specifically when he shot a deer or a Canadian goose. Then, he butchered his kill, cleaned up, and went to church. Communion never felt so special, he said. Hemingway wrote that he never felt as alive as he did during the battle in which he picked up a weapon and joined the fight.
Later, Hemingway wrote a news story about it and remarked how spiritual his baptism in battle made him feel. Hemingway is best known for his novels For Whom the Bell Tolls and Farewell to Arms. These novels indicate that physical or spiritual death is the reward for following patriotism as defined by the Gun Culture. In these stories, loyalty forces the hero to choose between patriotism and love.
The hero in Farewell to Arms chose patriotism over the woman he loves. She and her child die in childbirth. As a result, his soul dies, leaving him to wander the streets of Paris. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, the hero must choose between giving his life to the cause and the love of a woman. He chose death. According to these novels, patriotism described by the Gun Culture leads to the demise of his soul or his death.
After living according to the Gun Culture’s patriotic tenets: participating in war or hunting and believing in antisemitism, racism, and sexism. Hemingway lost his true love, the ability to write — then he committed suicide. It was as if his two most famous novels predicted the demise of his soul that resulted in his death.
Oriana:
As I remember, Frederick is forced to join the war, but he manages to disentangle himself and rejoin the pregnant Catherine. For a few months the two live what seems like an idyllic life in Switzerland. The title meant precisely the rejection of arms, i.e. of war.
For me Hemingway’s short stories are more clearly the celebration of the gun culture (an apt phrase). Guns and maleness have always been heavily connected. I detest hunting, which Hemingway unfortunately celebrated. Note also his celebration of bull fights. The concept of cruelty to animals wasn’t much in the air back in those times. Some men equated subjugation of animals through hunting with subjugation of women.
Thanks for sharing the story about your uncle. Your family stories are a treasure.
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KIM PHILBY IN MOSCOW
“And so, early in 1972, I found myself heading to the apartment of Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, a living legend in the espionage world. I had read reports and heard rumors about Philby’s life in Moscow – his drinking, womanizing, bouts of depression and squalid existence.
Driving to his flat, located on Yuzhinsky Pereyulok, just off Gorky Street in the very center of Moscow, I had butterflies in my stomach, not knowing what to expect. I entered the faded, pre-Revolutionary building and was assaulted by the smell of urine. A dark, rickety elevator haltingly carried me up seven floors. I got out, walked up one flight of stairs to the top floor, and rang the buzzer next to Philby’s reinforced steel door. Nothing had prepared me for what I was about to see.
Someone fumbled with the lock. The door opened, and I stepped inside. There, in the twilight entrance hall, was a wreck of a man. The bent figure caromed off the walls as he walked. Reeking of vodka, he mumbled something unintelligible to me in atrocious, slurred Russian.
Hunched over me was one of the great spies of the twentieth century. Philby, along with four Cambridge University classmates, had decided in the 1930s to devote his life to the Communist cause, and he concluded that he could best serve it by becoming a Soviet spy. Philby and his cohorts infiltrated the British Army, the Foreign Ministry, and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), where, for more than a decade, they passed along invaluable information to the Soviet Union and exposed scores of agents within the USSR.
[135] … Many KGB officials remained – idiotically and utterly without proof – suspicious of Philby. I had read Philby’s file before visiting him, and discovered an analysis by one intelligence officer who argued that Philby was actually a British double agent seeking to misinform the Soviet Union. … Though he undeniably was one of the great spies for the USSR, he was never promoted in the KGB and remained, until the end, a rank-and-file officer, known by his code name “Agent Tom.”
By the time I ascended the stairs to Philby’s rundown apartment, the famed spy, who had risked his life to serve what he believed was a noble Communist cause, had been driven half-mad by the paranoia and idiocy of the KGB. No doubt he also was driven to despair as he saw the cause to which he had devoted his life transformed into the shabby reality of modern-day Soviet life. … It was a miracle he was still alive.
As the gray-haired, puffy-faced, but still handsome, legend stood swaying in the hallway, a wave of pity swept over me. And then, realizing I was from the KGB, Philby began wildly cursing the secret police, the Soviet government, and the world at large.”
- THE FIRST DIRECTORATE My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West, by Oleg Kalugin (St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pages 133, 135
Oriana:
Philby sank ever-deeper into alcoholism and died in 1988, apparently totally disillusioned with the disparity between the communist ideals and the Soviet reality. One thing that particularly disturbed him was the poverty of the Soviet elderly. “Why do you let your old people be so poor? They are the ones who won the war,” he kept asking and weeping. I think he was weeping mainly for himself, for his shattered ideals. Try to imagine what it’s like to realize you’ve dedicated your life to the wrong “holy cause.”
*
HOW NARRATIVES OF RUSSIA’S PAST LEAD TO ITS AUTOCRATIC PRESENT
Nicholas II in 1913, with his wife Alexandra, and the hemophiliac heir to the throne. If you magnify the image, you can clearly see that Alexandra is weeping. Every nation has its founding myths and narratives, usually starring historical figures we know almost nothing about; absurd stories even to the schoolchildren to whom they are usually peddled. Think Alfred and the cakes or Robert the Bruce and his study of spiders. For Russia, it has long been Grand Prince Vladimir, who had 800 concubines and wives before choosing Christ over Muhammad at the end of the first millennium for the very Russian reason that Islam did not permit alcohol. In truth, Vladimir (or Volodymyr to the Ukrainians) is a classic founding figure, now a saint, about whom almost nothing is known. Yet according to President Putin, unveiling a monstrous statue to him in 2016, he “gathered and defended Russia’s lands… by founding a strong, united and centralized state”.
Prince Vladimir statue outside the Kremlin
As Orlando Figes’s new history methodically lays bare, this is both myth-making of the first order and of profound importance to understanding Russia today. From Ivan to Peter, Catherine to Nicholas, Russia’s rulers have reforged these myths to suit their own purposes, sometimes as a defensive standard for the people to rally round, sometimes as a badge of celestial honor to cement Moscow’s place as the savior of the west. Often both at once.
In July 2021, Vladimir Putin published his own story of Russia, a 5,000-word essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, which can now be read as his justification for the invasion he launched seven months later to bring his brother “little Russians” back into the arms of big brother Rus. Reaching back into the mists of myth, he sees the idea of Ukraine as a Trojan horse, an “anti-Russian project” since the 17th century and that the present state is on “historically Russian lands”.
As Figes makes clear, anyone with the most elementary grasp of the shape of Europe, from Berlin to the Urals, would know that borders are determined by raw power, not some mystical racial bond. Flip through any historical atlas of the past 1,000 years and states appear, disappear and move around with astonishing but telling regularity. Empress Catherine, a German, may have founded Odessa (Figes interestingly uses Russian spellings for Ukrainian cities) to capture the world’s grain trade in 1794. But just years before that, the Black Sea coast had been part of the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth.
This historical primer has only traces of the original thinking that Figes’s other important works on Russia have displayed, but it does effectively lay out with important clarity the “structural continuities” of power, how the state and the ruler, be that a tsar or Stalin, “are united in the body of a single being... the sacralization of the tsar’s authority”. He takes us on a chronological journey, in the process highlighting the way Putin and his propagandists have filled the vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union with what Figes calls “the debris of Russian history”. Pride, fear and resentment, aggression and defensiveness have coalesced into the toxic present, which offers a retreat into a conservative celebration of communal sacrifice, with little vision of any constructive future.
In his brief post-invasion update, Figes points out the significance of the speech given by Patriarch Kirill on the “day of forgiveness”, in which he labelled the war in the Ukraine a crusade for “human salvation”, reminding the people that Moscow and the Orthodox church are the saviors of Christianity, the last bastions of true morality. Russia’s soldiers, it emerged, are giving their lives to hold back the onslaught of “gay pride parades”, a Kremlin obsession of the past 20 years. The church yet again has nailed its colors to the authoritarian mast, turning away from European concepts of government and thought and undermining any serious development of a civil society able to challenge central government.
Figes notes the irony that it was the choice of Christianity that opened the gateway to Europe for Muscovy in the first place, which makes Putin’s pivot from all things western so ultimately destructive. For while geopolitics make an alliance with Beijing an immediate strategic imperative, page after page of the Russian story has been defined by continuous, often highly creative friction between western ideas and Russian Slav exceptionalism.
The term Eurasian is bandied around as if the balance of cultural influences were equal, but in truth, after the Mongols had helped establish Muscovy as the primary statelet in the 15th and 16th centuries, what is striking is how marginal the influence of Asia and its culture has been on Russia. However abhorrent the word empire is to “Soviets” and Russians, Moscow became and remains an imperial power, driving at different times into Europe, into Siberia and later into central Asia.
The present Ukrainian horror is the post-imperial catastrophe of a Russia that is struggling to accept what happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union and that empire in 1991. As always with Russia, the costs on all sides will be huge. 1812. 1917. 1945. These dates point to the astonishing impact Russia always has, twice claiming the role of savior of civilization after being invaded itself, as well as being the lodestar of world revolution for over a generation. Add 2022 to that list, as I suspect we will have to, and the long-term reverberations of Putin’s present destruction of Ukrainian cities and confrontation with the west become clear. Is it any wonder that Russians, both leaders and the people, have struggled to accept a humbler status in the world?
Figes quotes the “extraordinary” findings of the respected Levada Center, whose polling suggested that Homo Sovieticus has not died, with his “low material expectations, social conformism, intolerance of ethnic and sexual minorities, acceptance of authority”. Indeed, reading the catalogue of oppression Russians have put up with, head lowered before their rulers, Homo Rus is not that different from Homo Sovieticus, both before and after the Soviet era.
Despite knowing that between 10 and 30 million of their own people were repressed [Oriana: I suppose that getting executed qualifies as the ultimate “repression”] unjustly under Stalin, more than three-quarters polled believe that his policies were “a terrible necessity”. Figes records how in 2021 Putin directly attacked history by closing Memorial, an organization deliberately set up to collect information about the past. Who knows now what the people truly feel about their new tsar’s attempt to re-establish the empire at such cost not just to Ukrainians but to themselves? Reading The Story of Russia you would be betting against history to suggest that Putin and his present boyars are not reflecting something deep in the Russian story. Yet in Kyiv, Putin is now creating another myth that will not easily be forgotten, for a country he does not believe exists: Ukraine.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/21/the-story-of-russia-by-orlando-figes-review-vladimir-putin-and-the-power-of-myth-making
*
THE WORLD WITHOUT PUTIN
There is a point of view that if it were not for Putin, then another Russian leader would still attack Ukraine.
Because, they say, “everything was leading to this.”
I say, it’s nothing but a delusion.
In the world of science, the typical point of view is that global cataclysms in human civilization were nothing more than a series of random factors that could have been avoided.
For instance:
In 1999, answering the question, “Who was the most important person of the 20th century?”, a prominent scholar chose Gavrilo Princip.
Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Serbian nationalist who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary during his visit to Bosnia.
A series of mistakes and accidents brought the Archduke within range.
This is how the scientist explained his choice: Gavrilo Princip was the man who single-handedly set off a chain reaction that led to the death of 80 million people.
With a couple of bullets, this culprit started the World War I, which destroyed 4 monarchies and created a power vacuum filled in Russia by the Communists, in Germany by the Nazis, who then clashed in the World War II.
I agree with the Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker, who says that Hitlerism wasn’t inevitable – and neither was Putinism.
Some try to argue that a big war for power would have inevitably happened in 20th century Europe, sooner or later, given the international tensions of the time.
Truth is, it was no more inevitable than a war between NATO and countries of the Warsaw Pact, in the second part of the 20th century.
In the absence of this spark, the war of the great powers could have been avoided, and there would have been no Lenin, no Hitler, no Eisenhower.
Historians studying historical alternatives, such as Richard Ned Lebow, have made similar arguments.
Regarding World War II, British historian Francis Harry Hinsley wrote, “Historians are almost unanimously convinced that the causes of the World War II were the personality and goals of Adolf Hitler.”
Keegan agrees, “Only one European really wanted war — Adolf Hitler.”
Political scientist John Mueller concludes:
“These statements suggest that no driving forces were pushing Europe into another world war, that historical circumstances did not make this clash inevitable, and that the great European countries were not moving at all on a course that should have led to war.
“In other words, if Adolf Hitler had devoted himself to art instead of politics, if British troops had gassed his trench in 1918, if he had been hit by a bullet during the 1923 Beer Putsch instead of his neighbor, if he would not have survived the car accident of 1930, if Hindenburg had not appointed him Reich Chancellor, if he had somehow been removed from power at any time before September 1939 (and even perhaps before May 1940), Europe's greatest war might never have broken out.”
Just like the Nazi genocide. Most genocide scholars agree with the title of the essay written in 1984 by sociologist Milton Himmelfarb: “No Hitler, no Holocaust.”
The personality of Hitler shaped Germany for 12 years from 1933, ending in 1945 capitulation of Germany.
Personality of Vladimir Putin shaped Russia for 23 years into what it is today.
It’s a mess, but no more a mess than was 1945 Germany. And this means, there is hope for Russia.
But most of all, there is hope for Ukraine, there is hope for Europe, there is hope for democracy, and there is hope for the world. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
RCG:
If Gavrilo Princip wasn’t born, there would have been no WWI, no WWII, no Russian revolution, no Soviet Union, and today, no Russian invasions of Ukraine and Crimea.
George Graham:
What must happen is that Putin must not succeed. You do not feed a monster.
David Gettig:
Obviously HItler didn’t do the war by himself. What we have, as a species characteristic, is a fatal flaw that allows a single person to ever have this much influence. We are sheeple.
Jim Massa:
Now, the question is I think, will the next leader after Putin still continue the war?
Elena Gold:
No. The next leader of Russia will immediately stop the war in Ukraine and blame all problems on Putin. That’s how it’s always been done in Russia.
Mary: HISTORICAL RIPENESS IS ALL
Without that Serbian assassin no WWI? Without Hitler no WWII, no Holocaust? This ignores the fact that these individuals and their actions came out of conditions already present in their societies during those particular historical moments...circumstances they were embedded in, that shaped them and their attitudes and opportunities in the same way they would go on to be movers and shakers themselves. Without these particular individuals events may have gone differently, but maybe not so much...after all, the same conditions and forces would still be there, sure to find expression...either in a way that we might judge to be better or worse than what did actually happen. No individual alone directs history...it is history that has formed that individual...made their actions possible.
It is, pardon my term, a dialectic. Trump did not create our present struggle with fascist threats, the conditions were ripe for him, in fact the transformation of the Republican party has been going on for decades. The troubles we face cannot be simply avoided by eliminating Trump...you may see that as a Necessary condition, but it is not Sufficient.
I can't help but think about what Tolstoy's Pierre learns following the battles in the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, that history is not directed by the acts of Great Men, but develops from the thousands of acts of individuals, the conditions and forces of society, and the weight and inheritance of history. Without the conditions ready for him, Hitler, Napoleon, Trump are not possible. With the ready conditions, some one similar, someone made by these very conditions, can arise.
Hitler neither created antisemitism nor genocide...no more than Trump created racism and misogyny...those were the already existent conditions they appropriated, energized, weaponized and took to their conclusions.
Oriana: TROTSKY, TROTSY ON THE WALL, WHO IS THE MOST DELUDED OF THEM ALL?
I don’t think any educated person would deny that conditions have to be just right. But on top of that, there has to emerge a leader, often a psychopath. When the psychopaths dies — Stalin, Mao — reforms are on the way. At least the most extreme ideological idiocies are swept away. Would China abandon the Communist project during Mao’s lifetime? With Mao still in power, could China possibly achieve prosperity and become a great economic power?
No, it would instead have some disastrous repeat of the already super-disastrous Cultural Revolution. More concentration camps — I mean more than the ones already in operation.
Cold War remained cold because no charismatic psychopath emerged on either side to open the gates of hell.
Along with the historians, I believe that “No Hitler, no Holocaust.” Of course anti-Semitism existed. But it needed to become sufficiently delusional, and one demagogue who knew how to give fiery speeches emerged in the ripeness of time. Yes, of course the circumstances had to be just right, but Hitler, that exact person, was not inevitable. One man has to consolidate the delusions into simple slogans, the right propaganda.
No Putin, no war in Ukraine. I’m with Elena Gold: if Putin were to suddenly die, “the next leader of Russia will immediately stop the war in Ukraine and blame all problems on Putin. That’s how it’s always been done in Russia.”
I think that leaders are very important. Germany knew what it was doing when it sent Lenin and his closest associates from Switzerland to Russia “in a sealed train carriage, like a plague bacillus.”
The case of Gavrilo Princip is more complicated, since his success was accidental, and Princip was only a spark, not a leader — although he had to be fanatic willing to go the extremes. But without the right spark, who knows . . .
It’s easier with Hitler. He alone wanted war. But he and Goebbels knew that you could convince people that the country was in danger. Fear is a fantastic motivator. But it takes someone who is not afraid to go to the extremes.
Quora seems endlessly fascinated by the question of how different history might be if Trotsky seized power instead of Stalin. People agree that Trotsky was ruthless too, and might start regional wars, but the Great Purge? Probably not. And, first of all, no Lenin and no Trotsky, no Bolshevik revolution. The Whites lost the Civil War perhaps mainly because they didn’t have the right leader.
Again, the circumstances had to be just right, and the leader’s delusions also just right — sufficient, but no so excessive that somebody will slip poison into his drink (see my blog on the poisoning of Stalin). Eventually. Sometimes it’s a long wait. Yes, again the circumstances, but also the right assassin.
It’s an interplay of a thousands of factors, and an argument could be made that the whole universe had to be just right for such-and-such to happen. But Milosz points out that it’s human nature to think that because X happened, X had to happen. Not so, Milosz argues. He was of course familiar with the Marxist thinking (actually going back to Hegel) about historical inevitability. To Milosz, that’s delusional thinking — the kind that the right psychopath can latch onto.
Sometimes I let myself get optimistic and think that an extreme ideology no longer has a chance in our world. And then I remember: radical Islam. And there the policy of “decapitation” — i.e. trying to remove leaders — has proved pretty effective.
"History is made by bad people" ~ I.B. Singer
I do think the “right psychopath” is crucial; with great historical luck, the right beneficial leader, though no one is perfect. They all have a tragic flaw! Still, thinks of Zelensky's courage in not fleeing Kiev . . . That's just the most recent example of how an individual can exert a profound influence.
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RUSSIA’S CALL FOR “REAL MEN” (Misha Firer)
~ 70% of the real estate, mostly high rise residential blocks, built last year in Russia still stand vacant.
Rampant inflation and falling standards of living have priced out vast majority of first-time buyers of coveted apartment purchases.
To prop up prices and move units, real estate companies where the ruling class thugs have significant stakes due to huge profit margins have started marketing mortgages with 0% interest rates.
It penalizes faltering banks, most of whom are state-owned, as people take out mortgages they’re incapable to service effectively letting the state subsidize construction companies for the time being until buyers eventually in droves default on their mortgages.
These marketing shenanigans triggered alarm bells in Elvira Nabiullina, Russian Central Bank governor, a former darling of IMF who used to hang out with Henry Kissinger and other luminaries of globalization.
At the start of war in Ukraine, Nabiullina asked for resignation putting down in writing to Vladimir Putin her frustrations over wrecking the work of her life with his stupid full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She was vehemently denied to quit.
Nabiullina is now effectively a feudal serf forced to toil under duress for the regional overlord fighting a turf war against his sovereign tasked with saving his rapidly deteriorating economy heading for the abyss.
She directly complained to Vladimir Putin, literally her master she’s tied to by “voluntary” fealty, about construction companies’ marketing ruses that’s going to affect negatively millions of people.
What Nabiullina actually meant was that her banking system is not thrilled to pick up the tab for the greedy construction companies in cahoots with the overlord’s cronies when the a-la 2007 mortgage crises inevitably happens hinting that the overlord gonna have millions of angry peasants with pitchforks at his gates.
Oil and gas overlord himself added fuel to the fire when his legislative serfs on steroids (or rather on cocaine as it’s their preferred recreational drug) rubber stamped new conscription law.
It bars a person from any financial transactions with his private property if he ignores the electronic summons he received calling him up for war duties.
Putin is a typical Russian boss. He undoes the results of all your best efforts and when you complain to him, he gives you a painful smile and tells a stupid joke, and maybe gives you a raise to shut you up. And if you press on, he fires you.
The only difference in Putin’s case instead of getting sacked, you fall out of a window and plop on the sidewalk like a sack of potatoes.
WELL, YOU’RE A MUZHIK ("REAL MAN")
Muzhik is an interesting choice of word that has two meanings as well as the usage of the intensifying particle “zhe.”
Zhe” amplifies the meaning and emphasizes its rhetorical aspect.
As a slang word, muzhik stands for “a real man.” By adding zhe particle, the message goes something like “it’s a rhetorical question whether you’re a man or not, of course you are a real man so live up to those expectations.”
And then there’s the second implication of “muzhik.” In the Tsarist times, it meant “peasant,” a member of the lowest social class, and noblemen would have duels over being derogatorily called “muzhik” as it was the gravest insult.
You’re just a peasant to the noble class, the underlying message insinuates, and they’re treating you as cannon fodder. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Elena Gold:
Interesting, why don’t they send 2 million Russian enforcers to Ukraine? Police, national guard – aren’t they “real men”? Why do they need to pull guys who never wanted to hold weapons in their hands?
Alex Hanin:
I guess, for the same reason that back in WW2 there were more NKVD agents behind the front lines to keep soldiers from defecting than actual said soldiers.
Michal Jarosz:
Kathy Leonhardt:
It’s quite interesting to note all the emphasis on being this macho type man, considering how high rates of alcoholism and domestic violence are. Obviously there’s a disconnect somewhere and I feel sorry for the men and boys who DON’T fit into this ‘tough guy’ persona. Are Russian women generally in agreement during parenting with this emphasis Mischa?
Misha Firer:
Mostly uneducated women.
SColeman:
Maybe we should be calling him Putichka? That will certainly make him feel manly, right? Personally I like Putler best.
Misha Firer:
Elvira said the average Russian family has to pay for the apartment what they earn in 8 years. Meaning the average family can’t afford to buy a new apartment and continue to enjoy three meals a day.
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“FEW OF US ARE COMMUNISTS”
We definitely have cold winters, and we’ve tried to build communism, so that’s just the reality of Russia and our history. I can’t fell bad about people associating Russia with correct facts. I do have an issue with people associating Russia with stuff that is incorrect. For example, we are no longer building communism, and few of us are communists, even among the members of the Communist Party. ~ Boris Ivanov
A Soviet poster comparing the lack of freedom in America vs the Soviet bliss. It's still interesting to see the Statue of Liberty versus the Hammer and Sickle.
* * *
HOW TO IMPROVE RECALL
~ Methods for strengthening memory can be traced back hundreds, if not thousands of years. The key insight was learning to think in pictures, rather than words. And when you think of it, this makes sense. We are primarily visual creatures who best remember images, rather than words.
The real challenge for our memory (and intelligence) is to correlate things that aren’t ordinarily thought of together. For example: my dog, Leah, is a Schipperke, which is a hard word to remember. Solution? Imagine a tiny boat (representing a tiny dog) with a huge portly captain – the skipper – standing in it while holding a key, skipper key. As in this example, images are most effective as memory prompts when they are whimsical, inappropriate and even outrageous compared to the objects that inspired them. Here are a few key tips to practice for retention and recall of memory.
USE ALL YOUR SENSES (MULTI-CODING)
Picture yourself drinking coffee. Not only can you imagine yourself doing that, but you can also imagine smelling its delightful aroma. In your imagination you can taste it and savor it as it flows over your taste buds. The coffee experience is both verbal (naming and describing it), as well as sensory (tasting, smelling, etc). Nouns like “chair” and “notebook” can be described and imagined in different ways (the comfort of the chair, the softness or hardness of the notebook and so on). The more senses that can be recruited, the more likely you will be able to form a long-lasting memory, as more areas of the brain are involved.
CREATE MEANINGFUL STORIES
Our brains are designed to work with meaning. If meaning isn’t obvious, we create it. The easiest way to organize unrelated information is to place things you are trying to remember into a framework, like a story or a rhyme. As an example, I parked my car yesterday in space 351 in a seven-story garage. So how to guarantee that I will be able to find it? By using the sounds-like system based on rhymes. The number “three” rhymes with “tree,” “five” rhymes with “hive,” and “one” rhymes with “sun”. I pictured a tree under a blazing sun in full bloom with beehives so numerous and ponderous that they weigh down all the branches. When I returned to the garage I had no trouble converting the images back to numbers to remember where I’d parked the car.
MAKE YOUR OWN MEMORY THEATER
It was the 16th-century architect and philosopher Giulio Camillo who suggested the memory theater as a way of using images and loci (the position of these images) to remember. The loci method remains one of the most popular used by mnemonists and a few of the ones I use are 1) my home, 2) a nearby library and 3) a coffee shop. So if I want to remember, say, three items – milk, bread, watermelon – here is how I would do it. House – imagine the house as a pint of milk turned on its side with milk pouring out of the chimney. Library – when I look through the floor-length window facing me, I see loaves of bread instead of books on shelves. Coffee shop – a giant coffee cup on a table outside contains a watermelon. Come up with a longer list of your own loci and place a list of random items in them – the more bizarre or irreverent the images you come up with, the easier they will be to remember.
USE ASSOCIATION
Simply thinking about how two or more things can be associated requires you to concentrate and attend – two brain activities which on their own lead to enhanced memory. As the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson put it: “The art of memory is the art of attention”.
THINK LIKE A NAVY SEAL
Situational awareness exercises are used by US Navy Seals, and other branches of the military. On request a Seal who must be able to describe the location of the doors and windows of the room in which they are sitting, along with other details that would be helpful to remember in order to be able to make a quick escape in the event of an enemy attack. To get a feel for this, the next time you are in a restaurant, close your eyes for a few seconds and mentally picture the arrangement of the people sitting around you at the nearby tables. If you are like most people, you probably won’t do very well with this memory exercise the first time you try it. The goal is to employ your attentional focus in the manner of a searchlight scanning the night sky. The more you practice, the greater the breadth and depth of your memory. You will remember more because at a given moment, your memory is encompassing larger swathes of your immediate surroundings.
LOOK INWARD
One step beyond are situational exercises directed inward. Situational exercises involving self-exploration are used in creative-writing seminars. After encountering unfamiliar people in a social setting, the aspiring novelist is asked to incorporate them into the plot of a novel or short story. As an exercise for remembering an unfamiliar group of people, you can invent a visually vivid story around them. A similar method of looking inwards is used in the training of psychoanalysts. It is referred to as self-analysis. The first patient was none other than Sigmund Freud.
TRY CHUNKING TO REMEMBER NUMBERS
Look at this long string of digits for one minute:
3493705272227500454680208713456553700678192165234456807561450359492340096067659087
Now turn away and write down as many as you can remember, starting from the left. How many were you able to come up with? According to the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (Moca), the gold standard among neuropsychological screening tests, your performance was acceptable if you remembered five or more. But what is the upper limit of numbers that can be remembered by a group of people randomly chosen? In the 1940s, Harvard psychologist George Miller measured the capacity of people’s short-term memory for digits and found that most people could repeat strings of five to nine letters. Now I’ll show you how to repeat more than 20 digits on the first try! Take another look at the digits you attempted to memorize and arrange them like this:
349-370-5272
227-500-4546
802-087-1345
655-370-0678
192-165-2344
568-075-6145
035-949-2340
096-067-6590-87
It should only take a few minutes for you to get the first three phone numbers. But even if you can only remember two of the first three numbers, you have achieved a memorization of 20 numbers, far higher than the five numbers on the standard neuropsychological test. The organizing principle at work here is called chunking – converting random numbers into a memorable string, like a telephone number, so your brain can come up with a way of imposing impose meaning on a meaningless sequence.
USE LARGER COMPUTER DISPLAYS
To form mental images of the greatest clarity, we are better off separating those images so they don’t overlap. If you are using an iPad for instance, you will see the same images as a desk computer with a big screen. But there’s a vast difference when it comes to committing these to memory – so the next time you are reading an important article, work document or committing a map or photo to memory, choose the biggest screen available to you. Bigger displays are better remembered in the imagination. Smaller displays lead to a narrower visual focus and, as a result, less memory formation.
BOOST YOUR WORKING MEMORY TO INCREASE INTELLIGENCE
Working memory, often described as the “queen of memory”, is essentially the ability to keep in your attentional foreground a piece of information while you turn your attention to something else. See how many prime ministers you can think of, starting with Rishi Sunak and going back as far as you can. [Now list their names in alphabetical order. To do this, you have to mentally move the names around and rearrange them. What you are doing is encoding one item while retaining access to items recalled moments earlier. This is working memory in action. Experts consider it the basis for general intelligence and reasoning. In general, the people who can hold the greatest numbers of items in mind are best at considering multiple aspects of a problem simultaneously.
KEEP TESTING YOURSELF AND DON’T GIVE UP
Finally, one highly effective technique for improving your memory is to keep re-testing yourself on the material you want to remember. Even after you have learned something, your long-term memory for it will be strengthened if you repeatedly challenge yourself to recall it.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/apr/08/is-your-memory-struggling-here-are-10-ways-to-boost-recall
Oriana:
Funny how easy it is to remember pleasant things compared to what's not all that pleasant, e.g. a dental appointment. For remembering pleasant things, we don't need any of those special methods.
Still, now and then it becomes necessary to remember something we're pretty sure we'll forget unless we really trying. What I find critical for those occasions is careful, repeated encoding of the information. For extra insurance against forgetting, you can try one of the techniques above. My favorite one is association. As the article indicates, the very act of association insures more attention to the item we want to remember. As Samuel Johnson put it: “The art of memory is the art of attention”.
ARE SINGLE WOMEN AND MARRIED MEN HAPPIEST?
~ In 1972, sociologist Jessie Bernard made a big splash by declaring that there are “his and hers” marriages—and that his is typically better. Now, about 45 years later, it is still a part of our conventional wisdom that women fare better single while men are better off married.
But there is also a competing narrative, which seems to be even more widely embraced: The one that claims that getting married is better for everyone because it makes people happier, healthier, and more connected, and even keeps them alive longer. I have spent much of the past two decades showing the ways in which those claims are grossly exaggerated or just plain wrong. But there are powerful pro-marriage organizations (pro-conventional marriage, that is) invested in perpetuating the myth of the transformative effects of wedlock for both women and men, and they have been highly successful.
Since Bernard published her book, there have been thousands, if not tens of thousands, of studies on marriage. To know definitively what the research really says about sex differences, we would need to see a meta-analysis—a review that statistically combines the results of every relevant study that has ever been conducted. There is no such up-to-date review, and even if there was, it would have problems, because many of the studies are deeply flawed.
What I offer here is just a sample of what some of the research shows. Remember that the results of studies are always averages and do not capture the experiences of everyone. My conclusions should be considered suggestive rather than definitive.
Women and Marriage: They Are Just Not That Into It
Some important studies and reviews of studies find no reliable sex differences, and when there are, it is women who seem more disillusioned by marriage.
An example of research that found no sex differences is the longest-running study of longevity, which has been going on since 1912. Results show that the people who lived the longest were those who stayed single and those who stayed married. Those who divorced, including those who divorced and remarried, had shorter lives. What mattered was consistency, not marital status, and there were no sex differences.
Another kind of research in which men and women fare about the same are studies that follow the same people over time as they go from being single to getting married. A review of 18 such studies found that people generally become no happier after they get married. At best, they become a bit more satisfied with their lives around the time of the wedding; then they go back to feeling about as satisfied (or dissatisfied) as they were when they were single. That pattern is also the same for men and women.
That review of 18 studies also found that both married men and married women become more and more dissatisfied with their relationship over time. A study of covenant marriages found that women become dissatisfied with their marriages sooner than men do.
WHO FILES FOR DIVORCE?
One of the most reliable sex differences in reactions to marriage is in who files for divorce. This difference has been documented at least as far back as 1867, and it is still true now, in Europe, Australia, and the U.S. Who is more likely to walk away from a marriage? Women. They initiated about 62 percent of divorces in the U.S. in 1867, and that number is now closer to 70 percent.
Some marriages end with the death of a spouse, and that can be deeply distressing for both men and women. There are indications, though, that women adapt faster to bereavement than men do.
Once a marriage ends, for whatever reason, women are much less likely than men to try it again.
Rates of remarriage are almost twice as high for men as for women.* Some of that can be explained by more advantageous sex ratios for men who want to remarry than women, but that is unlikely to be the entire explanation for such a big difference.
Living Single and Living Alone: Women Do It Better
With single life, as with marriage, there are important studies showing no reliable sex differences at all. When there are differences, it is the women who seem to do better when single or when living alone.
One of the myths about getting married that has been most definitively dismantled is the one claiming that married people are more connected to other people and that they are the ones who hold communities together. In fact, a whole series of studies has shown that single people do this more than married people. Single people do more to maintain ties with siblings, parents, neighbors, and friends than married people. When people get married, they typically become more insular.
The bottom line about sex differences, though, is that there aren’t any. As Naomi Gerstel notes, “Marriage is equally likely to constrict women’s and men’s social relationships.”
The sharp increase in the number of people living alone is one of the most important demographic changes of our time. Scholars who have written books on this phenomenon have found that, contrary to scare stories in the media, most people who live alone are doing just fine. The exceptions tend to be older men, especially if they are unemployed or in poor health.
Among lifelong single people, women often do particularly well in later life. A noteworthy study examined the social networks of seniors (65 and older) of different marital and parental statuses in six nations—Australia, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. Generally, people who had no children had the most restricted social networks. But there was a big exception: In five of the six nations, women who had no children and had been single all their lives had more expansive social networks in which friends were an important part of their everyday support system. These lifelong single women were not growing old alone.
A recent study of seniors in the U.S. found that in several important ways, women do better than men when living alone, whereas men do relatively better when they live with other people—typically, a wife. One example is the time that they have for their own hobbies and interests: Women have more time to pursue their own interests when they live alone, whereas men have more time to do what they like when they live with someone else. Another example is the question of how satisfied seniors are with the number of friends that they have. Women are always more satisfied with the number of friends they have, whether they live alone or with someone else. But the difference is bigger when they are living alone—71 percent of the women, but only 48 percent of the men, are satisfied with the number of friends they have.
There are also some indications that women savor their solitude more than men do. When asked whether they enjoy their time alone, women are more likely than men to say that they do.
Just a Guess: Over Time, Men Are Going to Get Better and Better at Living Single
We don’t know for sure why women sometimes do better when they live alone. One possibility is that by living alone instead of with a husband and children, women are liberated from traditional roles and expectations. They are no longer the short-order cook, the cleaner, and the laundress for a family. They are freed of the emotional work of shoring up egos and soothing bruised feelings. They don’t have to account to someone else for the money they spend. They also learn how to do the kinds of things that husbands traditionally did—or they find someone else to hire or help.
What is less often noticed is what men get out of living alone, especially now that they are staying single for longer than they ever have before. In their book, Living Alone: Globalization, Identity and Belonging, Lynn Jamieson and Roona Simpson point out that as more and more men (and women) live alone in their early adult years, they are learning all sorts of skills that used to be the bailiwick of the other gender. In married life, for example, women were traditionally the “kin-keepers” and the social schedulers. They kept in touch with family, kept up with friends (if the friends had not been ditched), arranged social gatherings, and covered all the other social and emotional tasks of the couple.
In their interviews with people living alone and in their review of the relevant writings, the authors found that most young men living alone are doing just fine. They have networks of friends and relatives and keep in touch with the people who are important to them. They don’t need a wife to have a social life or meaningful human connections.
That is important in and of itself. But it is also significant for what it suggests about the future. Maybe today’s young men, when they get older, will do a lot better if they live alone; they will already know how to have a good life while going solo. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-single/201701/is-it-true-single-women-and-married-men-do-best
* However, I also found this: About 2% of widows and 20% of widowers get remarried (Smith, Zick, & Duncan, 1991).
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WOMEN HAPPIEST WITHOUT SPOUSE OR CHILDREN (repeat posting)
~ We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population. And they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers, according to a leading expert in happiness.
Speaking at the Hay festival on Saturday, Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioral science at the London School of Economics, said the latest evidence showed that the traditional markers used to measure success did not correlate with happiness – particularly marriage and raising children.
“We do have some good longitudinal data following the same people over time, but I am going to do a massive disservice to that science and just say: if you’re a man, you should probably get married; if you’re a woman, don’t bother.”
Men benefited from marriage because they “calmed down”, he said. “You take less risks, you earn more money at work, and you live a little longer. She, on the other hand, has to put up with that, and dies sooner than if she never married. The healthiest and happiest population subgroup are women who never married or had children,” he said.
Dolan’s latest book, Happy Ever After, cites evidence from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which compared levels of pleasure and misery in unmarried, married, divorced, separated and widowed individuals.
Other studies have measured some financial and health benefits in being married for both men and women on average, which Dolan said could be attributed to higher incomes and emotional support, allowing married people to take risks and seek medical help.
However, Dolan said men showed more health benefits from tying the knot, as they took fewer risks. Women’s health was mostly unaffected by marriage, with middle-aged married women even being at higher risk of physical and mental conditions than their single counterparts.
Despite the benefits of a single, childless lifestyle for women, Dolan said that the existing narrative that marriage and children were signs of success meant that the stigma could lead some single women to feel unhappy.
“You see a single woman of 40, who has never had children – ‘Bless, that’s a shame, isn’t it? Maybe one day you’ll meet the right guy and that’ll change.’ No, maybe she’ll meet the wrong guy and that’ll change. Maybe she’ll meet a guy who makes her less happy and healthy, and die sooner.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert
Oriana:
A lot depends on the quality of the marriage. High marital satisfaction translates into better health, even in women.
But what proportion of marriages are happy? Here sources vary widely.
Perhaps we should drop the adjective "happy," and settle for something like "good enough; not too bad; tolerable." As long as you feel you are getting more benefits in proportion to the sacrifices you have to make, it could be a good deal.
The U.S. divorce rate is around 45%.
Here are some other interesting facts about divorce:
- Overall, the rate of divorces in America is falling.
- Divorces amongst people aged 50+ years are rising.
- Fewer couples choose to marry than pre-1990.
- The US divorce rate is the third-highest in the world.
- There were around 630,000 divorces in the US in 2020.
- Most Americans who file for divorce do so between January and March.
So, it seems that most couples wait until after Christmas and New Year's. In fact, January has become known as the "divorce month."
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SINGLE AND HAPPY IN SOUTH KOREA
~ Min Kyeong-seok is not shy about eating in restaurants alone, or staying in luxury hotels by himself, and shares his experiences online in his blog “One happy person”.
“I want to show people that I am living a happy life despite being single,” says Min, 37.
“South Koreans often view single people as pitiful, lonely, or lacking something be it economically, psychologically or even physically.
“But I don’t need to be with others to enjoy a delicious meal. If anything, the service is better.”
Opting to engage in activities alone is a growing trend in South Korea. It even has its own word, “honjok”, a combination of the Korean words for “by myself” and “tribe”. People who follow a honjok lifestyle do so willingly and confidently, not caring about the judgement of others. Min is among an increasing number of young people in the country embracing single life. Some have chosen to stay unattached, while others are delaying marriage and children.
Some women are taking single living further and ruling out matrimony altogether, a choice known as “bihon”.
Single-living boom
In 2020, the proportion of single-person households in Korea rose to an all-time high of 31.7%. People in their 20s and 30s constituted the largest age groups of single-person households.
Marriage and birth rates in the country are at record lows, as young people blame the high cost of living and home ownership for their reluctance to tie the knot. In South Korea, owning a house is traditionally seen as a prerequisite for marriage and in the past four years, the average price of an apartment in the capital Seoul has doubled.
Raising children is also becoming more expensive and the burden of private education -- seen by many South Koreans as essential — has put many off plans to start a family.
Joongseek Lee, a professor at Seoul National University who researches single-person households, says while South Korea remains a collective and patriarchal society there is a rising tendency “to stay alone or to become independent when one has the chance.”
While attitudes are changing, traditional expectations remain. For women, this includes marriage by 30, quitting their jobs to become mothers and full-time housewives. For men, it is providing a house and being the breadwinner.
Min says the country’s traditional structures prevent him from being himself, and instead he wants to have a “flexible” life.
“In Korean society, you feel as if you are constantly being assigned missions, from going to a good school and university, to getting a job, getting married, and having kids. When you don’t fulfill your set of predetermined missions, you will be judged and asked why not.”
The rise of honjok and bihon
For Seoul-based university student Lee Ye-eun, rampant gender inequality has influenced her way of life. South Korea has the worst gender pay gap among OECD countries. The country ranked last on The Economist’s Glass Ceiling Index for a ninth consecutive year, measuring where women have the best and worst chances of equal treatment at work.
Lee has declared her bihon status, vowing never to marry.
“I’m not going to date, I’m not going to marry, and I’m certainly not going to have a baby — even if you give me money,” says the 25-year-old.
“I didn’t pledge not to get married because there are no good men, but because society dictates that women be in a more disadvantageous position when they enter a relationship.”
New businesses and offerings have emerged to cater for the swelling single and solo-living markets in South Korea.
The Seoul city government has created a task-force developing services for single-person households, such as low-cost security cameras, workshops on mental health and opportunities for singles to make kimchi – a staple in any household.
Hotels are also trying to attract solo customers with “me-time” single occupancy staycation packages. Eating alone, also known as “honbap” and part of the honjok lifestyle, is predicted to grow as a trend in 2022, including at expensive restaurants. Convenience stores are providing more customized products and services for people living alone. And the pet economy is expected to surge in the coming years, according to Korea Rural Economic Research Institute, as more people opt for pets over parenthood.
Expanding the idea of family
Lee Ye-eun says embracing single life over the binds of marriage and child-rearing creates room for other pastimes.
Time with her close friends has become more precious, and she hopes to create a community of like-minded individuals. Through an app for bihon women, she joined a sports group that she meets with several times a week for activities such as climbing and football.
Kang Ye-seul, 27, is a university employee who has also opted never to get married. She says staying single gives her more freedom and allows her to pursue hobbies and hang out with her non-married friends.
“I feel like I’m in a completely different world,” Kang says positively of her life decision.
“In the past, I longed for happiness, wondered what it was, by what criteria to evaluate it, and curious about other people’s standards,” she says.
She remains cautiously optimistic about the place of single people in society.
“A sense of freedom and happiness followed after I learned that I could live a bihon life. Now, no matter what I do, it’s a choice only for me, so I don’t feel burdened or afraid of any responsibility that comes with it. I don’t think I’ll ever be as unhappy as before.”
Government attitudes and social awareness toward single-person households are still lagging compared to the direction in which society is moving, Kang says. She would like to see a society that is more accommodating to nontraditional household structures such as living together without being married or related to each other.
Last year, the government announced it would look into expanding the scope of the term “family” which could eventually include cohabitation and single parenthood, the latter of which continues to be stigmatized.
“There are still limitations to the system for single-person households,” Kang told the Guardian.
“But I also see things positively given that such households are only going to increase in number.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/05/happy-alone-the-young-south-koreans-embracing-single-life
Oriana:
The long-term problem is that in South Korea, the birth rate is half of what is needed for replacement.
Short term, of course, any woman can understand the allure of freedom from family obligations.
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WHY HAIR TURNS GRAY
~ Scientists believe they have discovered the mechanism for hair turning grey, which could help develop treatment to alter cells in order to reverse or halt the process.
A new study suggests stem cells may get stuck as hair ages and lose their ability to mature and maintain hair color.
Certain stem cells – which are able to develop into many different cell types – have a unique ability to transition between growth compartments in follicles. These cells lose the ability to move with age, resulting in grayness.
The research focused on cells in the skin of mice and also found in humans called melanocyte stem cells, or McSCs.
The scientists, led by researchers from New York University Grossman school of medicine, suggested that if their findings hold true for humans they could open up a potential way to reverse or prevent grey hair.
The study’s lead investigator, Qi Sun, a postdoctoral fellow at NYU Langone Health, said: “The newfound mechanisms raise the possibility that the same fixed-positioning of melanocyte stem cells may exist in humans.
“If so, it presents a potential pathway for reversing or preventing the greying of human hair by helping jammed cells to move again between developing hair follicle compartments.”
Hair color is controlled by whether continually multiplying pools of McSCs within hair follicles get the signal to become mature cells that make the protein pigments responsible for color.
Researchers found that during normal hair growth the cells continually pivot between compartments of the developing hair follicle. It is inside these compartments where McSCs are exposed to signals that influence maturity.
Researchers found that McSCs transform between their most primitive stem cell state and the next stage of their maturation depending on their location.
According to the findings, as hair ages, sheds, and then repeatedly grows back, increasing numbers of McSCs get stuck in the stem cell compartment called the hair follicle bulge, where they remain.
A senior investigator on the study, Mayumi Ito, said: “It is the loss of chameleon-like function in melanocyte stem cells that may be responsible for greying and loss of hair color.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/apr/19/scientists-may-have-discovered-why-hair-turns-grey
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COULD DINOSAURS HAVE GROWN ANY BIGGER?
~ In 2001, paleontologists Kristina Curry Rogers and Catherine Forster found a single rib bone in Madagascar that was nearly 3m (9.84 ft) long, roughly the length of a ping pong table. They had discovered a new species of titanosaur – a kind of colossal, plant-eating dinosaur – that was later named Rapetosaurus krausei.
"One of the great things about working with titanosaurs is their 'titanic ' proportions," says Rogers, a DeWitt Wallace professor of biology and geology at Macalester College in Minnesota, USA. "[But] this makes titanosaurs tough to excavate – a single skeleton can take an entire field season or more to extract from the rocks.”
Titanosaurs, literally meaning "gigantic lizards", were the last surviving sauropod dinosaurs, whose members were a diverse bunch of herbivores with very long necks, long tails and relatively small heads. When they were discovered, scientists had already made the famous finds of species like Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus and Apatosaurus, which lived in the Jurassic era, 201 to 145 million years ago. But they thought that sauropods had not survived until the end of the Cretaceous period, which spanned from 145 to 66 million years ago, says Matthew T Carrano, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.
Paleontologists working with titanosaurs often marvel at their sheer scale and size. "A single leg bone is longer than I am, from head to toe," says Rogers, adding that sometimes a single toe bone is as big as an arm bone in a human. "Holding a titanosaur's leg in your hands is pretty remarkable," she says.
But how did they get so large in the first place? And given more time, could they have evolved to be even larger?
All titanosaurs started life relatively small. "They hatched from eggs that were between the size of a softball and a soccer ball," says Rogers. "As brand-new hatchlings they would've been just about the size of a chihuahua. It appears that there wasn't much parental care among these big sauropods, and that babies were out foraging on their own, right out of the nest." Over time, she says, they achieved their colossal size by doing what most sauropods do – eating and eating.
Scientists believe that titanosaurs grew quickly and didn't slow down until they reached their massive adult sizes. "When we compare their growth rates throughout life to [those of] living animals, it comes closest to the growth rates we observe in whales. That's incredibly fast," says Rogers.
Titanosaurs, unlike whales, didn't have the benefit of consuming high-protein, nutritious milk provided by their mothers, adds Rogers. Instead, these dinosaurs were out finding their own food. "Keeping their growth rates high is one way in which most sauropods differ from their meat-eating dinosaur relatives, which seem to have paused their growth more often as they got older.”
And while titanosaurs were the largest sauropods, Carrano points out that their ancestors among sauropods were already pretty big. "Evolving to be 70-80 tonnes from a 20-30 ton ancestor probably didn’t require that much evolutionary innovation," he says. He explains that all the structures and systems were already set up for success at huge sizes.
"Sauropods developed long necks early on from their primitive cousins, the sauropodomorphs," says Skye Walker, a field assistant at the Elevation Science Institute for Natural History Exploration, which conducts field work in Montana and Wyoming. "This allowed them to have varied diets, giving them access to a range of nutritious food," she says. Scientists believe that titanosaurs grew quickly and didn't slow down until they reached their massive adult sizes.
"When we compare their growth rates throughout life to [those of] living animals, it comes closest to the growth rates we observe in whales. That's incredibly fast," says Rogers.
Because of their increasing size, sauropods developed "pneumatic" air sacs in their bones, to make their skeletons lighter. "These air sacs were made up of soft tissue connected to the lungs," says Walker. "This made their weight easier to bear and allowed for more efficient oxygen supply throughout the body. Unlike mammals, sauropods had this to thank for there being almost no limits to how large they could grow.”
Predatory dinosaurs had pneumatic air sacs, as do modern-day birds, says Carrano, and these probably evolved from a common ancestor. However, they are also thought to have evolved independently in other groups, including pterosaurs and sauropods. "This would have increased breathing capacity and lightened these huge bones without sacrificing their strength." Carrano explains that sauropods also had short feet and pillar-like limbs to support their enormous weight. "These are all features taken to extremes in the largest titanosaurs," he says.
Titanosaurs also had adaptations hidden in their joints. Armita Manafzadeh, a postdoctoral fellow studying biology at Yale University, points out that smaller non-avian dinosaurs like T. rex had tight-fitting joints in which their bones interlocked precisely, much like our own. In contrast, titanosaurs had joints with enormous volumes of squishy cartilage at the ends of their bones. This difference in joint structure, she says, especially at key limb joints such as the hip, is thought to be an adaptation for better sustaining the animal’s massive body weight.
However, according to Carrano, what's less clear is how the titanosaurs managed to outgrow their sauropod ancestors. Perhaps they simply had more time to evolve larger bodies, after their Jurassic predecessors were gone. On the other hand, they may have acquired new innovations – tweaking their existing anatomy so that they could get even bigger. "But there’s not a huge difference that makes the answer obvious. It’s also possible that they may have benefited from the availability of new foods, specifically flowering plants, that weren’t around in the Jurassic," says Carrano.
The jury is still out on whether titanosaurs could have become even bigger, had dinosaurs not gone extinct.
"I think that there could have been somewhat larger sauropods, perhaps, but not dramatically so," says Carrano. He says that it helps to think in terms of "orders of magnitude", which technically refers to change by factors of ten, to think about major shifts in size. For example, going from one tonne to 10 tonnes is a big deal, he says – significantly more so than going from 10 to 20 tonnes. "There’s a shift in scale in the former but not the latter.”
However, there may have been an upper size limit sauropods simply couldn’t have gone beyond, says Carrano. "So we already have 70-80 tonne titanosaurs. Could they have reached 100 tonnes? Perhaps. But 200 tonnes, that I would doubt. Even whales don’t get that big, and they live in a buoyant medium all their lives. I think sauropods were in the maximum size range for terrestrial animals," he says. By the time they went extinct, sauropods had already been around for almost 150 million years. Carrano explains that it's possible the added time wouldn’t have made that much difference.
However, some paleontologists say further evolution could have been possible, especially since there’s a lot we still don’t know about these creatures.
Titanosaur specimens, though widespread, are largely incomplete, says Walker. "New titanosaurs are still being discovered, so it's really exciting and optimistic to be able to say that we don't know everything yet and we probably never will. We are discovering new things about these animals every single day and bringing more of their mysteries to light.”
Over the last 20 years, new titanosaurs have been named at an astonishing rate, says Rogers. "I think that now there are over 100 named species," she says. "It drives home the point that globally distributed dinosaurs like these found a niche and were an incredible evolutionary success story. If not for that rock from outer space, they probably would've continued evolving and diversifying.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230405-did-the-dinosaurs-reach-their-maximum-possible-size
Oriana:
According to another article, oxygen levels were higher during the dinosaur era. Today the atmosphere has 20% of oxygen; oxygen levels were as high as 35% at their peak. But ultimately scientists have rejected more oxygen as the reason for dinosaurs’ giant size. Besides, there is a new consensus that oxygen levels were not higher during the Jurassic era.
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HOW DINOSAURS REACHED THEIR SIZE
Sauropods are a unique group of dinosaurs. They had hollow bones, didn't chew their food, they had incredibly long necks, and likely possessed huge stomachs. These traits are theorized to be key in how they attained their enormous size.
Undoubtedly, their long necks allowed them to reach food other animals couldn’t, which made a bigger size more advantageous for them. Their long necks relied on two key traits: hollow, or pneumatized, bones of the spine, as well a small head, which allowed the neck to be light.
The only way they could get away with having such a small head was because they didn't need to chew their food. A chewing head needs to be big in order to accommodate big jaw muscles and strong, heavy bones to crush food. As sauropods' stomachs grew in size, researchers think they evolved the ability to store food for a long period of time. So, they could consume a huge amount of food very fast by swallowing it whole (they didn’t chew each bite 20 times, like your mother tells you to). Then their stomachs would do the slow work of grinding it down over the course of weeks, which would slowly release the nutrients to fuel the massive bodies. There has been some evidence that, like chickens, dinosaurs may have swallowed stones to help break down food.
We also know that sauropods had small offspring and many of them. Each one would have grown incredibly fast before reaching adulthood. This tells us they likely had a fast metabolism and were warm-blooded. However, warm-blooded digestive action creates a lot of heat, so it would appear that such large animals would metabolize so fast that they could cook themselves from the inside out. And the larger the object, the longer it takes for heat to leave, so how did Sauropods cool themselves down?
Lucky for them their pneumatized bones would have helped to lighten the skeleton. They may also have had a super-efficient breathing system, like that of modern birds, which would have evolved at the base of the lizard-hipped dinosaurs' family tree. This respiratory system is thought to be more efficient at dispersing excess heat, which could help the sauropods grow to greater sizes.
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Even though we know that it would have been useful for the dinosaurs to be big to avoid predation and that the ecology might have supported a larger appetite, and even with huge stomachs and specialized breathing, it still doesn’t explain everything.
Gigantism in dinosaurs has mainly left us with more questions like: how did they grow so fast? How did an animal with such a fast metabolism stay cool? and why don’t giant land animals exist today?
https://www.scienceworld.ca/stories/how-did-dinosaurs-get-so-big/
And here is yet another article, confirming the importance of pneumatized bones.
~ During the Late Triassic epoch, dinosaurs grew no bigger than today's largest mammals. However, during the Jurassic period, which began 200m years ago, they developed into giants.
One reason is that, like modern birds, many dinosaur bones were hollowed out by air sacs extending from their lungs, meaning that a dinosaur would have weighed significantly less than a solid-boned mammal of similar size. It follows that dinosaurs could support a much larger body with their four legs — up to 80 tons in the case of the largest plant-eating sauropods (in comparison, today's largest African elephants reach about six tons).
Feeding, too, would have been a serious challenge — how did these dinosaurs eat enough to support their size? According to recent research, one secret may have been that they did not need to chew their food as much as mammals today, but rather cropped branches, leaves and twigs, which they then swallowed whole, meaning they could take in a huge amount of food very quickly. And without the need for lots of bulky teeth for chewing, their heads were lighter so their necks could be longer — meaning they could reach a wider range of plants from one feeding spot.
Among the most famous long-necked dinosaurs is Diplodocus, one of the earliest giants to emerge in the Late Jurassic epoch and, at up to 30 meters from head to tail, one of the longest ever discovered. A cast of a Diplodocus skeleton has stood in the Natural History Museum's central hall for more than a century, forming one of the museum's most famous displays. This dinosaur possessed a hollow backbone, and its neck alone may have extended more than six meters — although, unlike in earlier depictions, it is now thought unlikely to have been able to bend its head upwards very far, so modern depictions show the head held horizontally out in front of the body.
The very largest sauropods evolved in the Cretaceous period, from 145m to 65m years ago. Their size offered two more benefits: a defense mechanism against large predators of the time, and also a means of retaining body heat (owing to their skin's small surface area relative to their enormous body volume — useful among colder blooded creatures; problematic for warm-blooded mammals because of the danger of overheating in warmer temperatures).
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/feb/07/the-size-of-dinosaurs
Oriana:
Special bones (hollow but very strong), special stomachs, special (very efficient) lungs — and an abundance of food. These are all plausible reasons that could account for dinosaurs’ gigantic size.
My guess is that lots and lots of food made giant dinosaurs possible. And then yes, the asteroid, and possibly an increase in volcanic eruptions, and consequent climate change, a cooling, freezing world.
But let’s face it — this is all speculation. Scientists are not certain just why everything was so large during the Jurassic era, including plants — today we have only sequoias left.
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One commenter wrote: Also I believe God would correct your spelling of the word “altar.”
That certainly influenced me when I was growing up: seeing that it was the least educated people who believed — or at least appeared to believe — in earnest. The barely literate old women.
My parents never tried to influence my religious views. Still, I clearly perceived my father’s loathing of the Catholic church, especially its obsession with sex. My mother was perhaps more forgiving. At one point — I think I was twelve or so — she said, “There is no hell. God wouldn’t be so cruel.”
But I believed that yes, he would be that cruel. I saw god as evil, and could never love him. I realized this doomed me to hell, just that simple fact of that I could see how evil he was. This may have had something to do with my grandmother, who was basically my second mother. She was a survivor of Auschwitz.
Mary:
God's cruelty was the basis for my unbelief. If there were people who were capable of love and empathy rather than cruelty and retribution that made a cruel god impossible, because he would be less perfect than his creation. Certainly not worthy of worship, or even consideration.
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SCHIZOPHRENIA AND THE IMMUNE SYSTEM
~ It has been shown that schizophrenia is associated with abnormalities in all immune system components: from innate to adaptive immunity and from humoral to cellular immunity.
Abnormalities in the immune organs have also been observed in schizophrenia. Evidence of increased C-reactive protein, dysregulation of cytokines and chemokines, elevated levels of neutrophils and autoantibodies, and microbiota dysregulation in schizophrenia have the lowest risk of bias.
Peripheral immune abnormalities contribute to neuroinflammation, which is associated with cognitive and neuroanatomical alterations and contributes to the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. However, signs of severe inflammation are observed in only about 1/3 of patients with schizophrenia. Immunological parameters may help identify subgroups of individuals with signs of inflammation who well respond to anti-inflammatory therapy. Our integrative approach also identified gaps in knowledge about immune abnormalities in schizophrenia, and new horizons for the research are proposed. Ideas that inflammation and immunity are involved in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia have been around for decades, but they do not lose their relevance to this day.
Back in 1930, Dameshek W. found quantitative changes in white blood cells in patients with schizophrenia. In 1937, Lehmann-Facius proposed the idea of a humoral autoimmune factor in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. In 1976, E. Fuller Torrey and Michael R. Peterson proposed a viral hypothesis for schizophrenia, describing, among other things, the possible influence of concomitant immune perturbations. Over time, hypotheses about a direct immunocompetent culprit for the onset of schizophrenia have multiplied: general inflammation hypothesis, macrophage-T-cell hypothesis, autoantibody hypothesis, and microglia hypothesis.
GLUTEN SENSITIVITY AND SCHIZOPHRENIA
Some evidence suggests an association between gluten sensitivity and schizophrenia. A meta-analysis showed that biomarkers of gluten sensitivity (anti-gluten, IgG and IgA to gliadin, anti-transglutaminase 2 IgA, and anti-wheat antibodies) were elevated in various forms of psychosis compared with healthy donors. This is consistent with the results of other work that examined the reactivity of antibodies toward gluten proteins in schizophrenia. It was shown that the reactivity of antibodies to gluten in patients with schizophrenia differed from that in people with celiac disease. In particular, gluten-sensitive schizophrenic patients did not show elevated levels of anti-transglutaminase 2 IgA. Thus, the immune response to gluten in schizophrenia and celiac disease is different.
IN SUMMARY:
Schizophrenia is associated with abnormalities in all immune system components: from innate to adaptive immunity and from humoral to cellular immunity. Changes in the immune system indicate the activation of inflammatory responses in about 1/3 of patients with schizophrenia. Peripheral immune abnormalities contribute to neuroinflammation, which is associated with cognitive and neuroanatomical alterations and contributes to the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. Immunological parameters may help identify subgroups of individuals who well respond to anti-inflammatory therapy.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9082498/
Oriana:
Although this may apply to only a percentage of schizophrenics, grain-free diet (this means eliminating oatmeal too, not just bread) might be helpful.
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BIPOLAR DISORDER AND THE IMMUNE SYSTEM
~ Bipolar disorder (BD) is strongly associated with immune dysfunction. Replicated epidemiological studies have demonstrated that BD has high rates of inflammatory medical comorbidities, including autoimmune disorders, chronic infections, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders. Cytokine studies have demonstrated that BD is associated with chronic low-grade inflammation with further increases in pro-inflammatory cytokine levels during mood episodes. Several mechanisms have been identified to explain the bidirectional relationship between BD and immune dysfunction. Key mechanisms include cytokine-induced monoamine changes, increased oxidative stress, pathological microglial over-activation, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis over-activation, alterations of the microbiome-gut-brain axis and sleep-related immune changes.
The inflammatory-mood pathway presents several potential novel targets in the treatment of BD. Several proof-of-concept clinical trials have shown a positive effect of anti-inflammatory agents in the treatment of BD; however, further research is needed to determine the clinical utility of these treatments. Immune dysfunction is likely to only play a role in a subset of BD patients and as such, future clinical trials should also strive to identify which specific group(s) of BD patients may benefit from anti-inflammatory treatments.
Autoimmune disorders represent the most “classic” of inflammatory conditions in that they are defined by the presence of immune dysfunction. In brief, autoimmune disorders occur when the immune system misrecognizes host tissue as pathogenic and attempts to remove the misidentified host tissue [11]. In doing so, both a local and systemic inflammatory response is initiated. Locally, the immune system attempts to break down and clear the triggering tissue (e.g., local break down of skin in psoriasis).
While triggering this local inflammatory response, pro-inflammatory cytokines are released and circulated systemically with some degree of penetration to the central nervous system (CNS) as well. As a group, autoimmune disorders have been identified to occur at increased rates in BD [6]. Epidemiological studies have consistently shown increased rates of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), autoimmune thyroiditis, psoriasis, Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), autoimmune hepatitis, MS and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in BD.
BIPOLAR DISORDER AND OBESITY
Immune dysfunction plays a key role in the progression of metabolic disorders. Diabetes and central obesity have both been associated with chronic low grade inflammation, with the degree of inflammation being directly correlated with disease progression. With immune dysfunction as a likely key mediating factor, BD has been strongly associated with increased rates of diabetes, obesity, dyslipidemia and metabolic syndrome. A key factor facilitating chronic inflammation related to metabolic disorders is the presence of visceral adipose tissue (i.e., central obesity). Visceral adipose tissue is a direct source of chronic low-grade inflammation, increasing the production of pro-inflammatory adipokines and cytokines including IL-6, TNF-α, and C-reactive protein (CRP).
Subcutaneous adipose tissue serves as a “metabolic sink” to prevent accumulation of visceral adipose tissue; however, under certain genetic (e.g., polygenic risk factors for central obesity) and environmental (e.g., sedentary lifestyle and poor diet) conditions, high volumes of dysfunctional visceral adipose tissue may accumulate. In the context of chronic positive energy balance (e.g., greater caloric intake then expenditure), adipocytes undergo hypertrophy and have increased triglyceride stores.
The lypolytic rate is therefore increased leading to increased production of leptin (pro-inflammatory) and decreased production of adiponectin (anti-inflammatory), thereby signaling the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Further, adipocyte hypertrophy promotes macrophage infiltration of adipose tissue. The resultant cross talk between macrophages and adipocytes promotes further release of pro-inflammatory cytokines and adipokines.
BIPOLAR DISORDER AND URIC ACID
Bipolar disorder has also been associated with a slightly increased risk of developing gout. With this epidemiological observation in mind, several investigators have recently hypothesized that purinergic system abnormalities and related variations of uric acid may be involved in the pathophysiology of BD. Uric acid has been strongly associated with other metabolic disorders, increased oxidative stress and inflammation. Further, several proof-of-concept clinical trials have identified a potential anti-manic effect of drugs lowering uric acid (e.g., allopurinol).
INFLAMMATION OR NEUROTRANSMITTER LEVELS?
Taken together, pro-inflammatory signaling may decrease the levels of dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin, which has long been associated with worsening mood and cognitive symptoms. Current pharmacotherapies target the end result of this pathway, namely, monoamine levels. Targeting inflammation may have more disease modifying potential as immune dysfunction is “upstream” of the monoamine changes observed in mood disorders; correcting the underlying cause (i.e., immune dysfunction) may provide greater benefits than only treating symptomatically by correcting the downstream effect (i.e., monoamine changes).
Of recent interest has also been the potential interaction between inflammation and another key neurotransmitter, namely, glutamate. The importance of the glutamate system in mood disorder pathophysiology has been highlighted by the robust evidence demonstrating the rapid and potent antidepressant effects of ketamine, an N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) glutamate receptor antagonist. Significant cross-talk between glutamate and the immune system has now been demonstrated in pre-clinical and clinical models. Inflammatory cytokines have been shown to influence glutamate metabolism through direct effects on microglia and astrocytes.
As such, inflammatory cytokines may increase glutamate levels thus causing abnormal over-activation of glutamate receptors leading to uncontrolled increases of calcium influx through NMDA receptor channels, with the final result of excitotoxicity and impaired neuroplasticity. The administration of exogenous pro-inflammatory cytokines has been shown to increase glutamate levels in the basal ganglia and anterior cingulate cortex (key brain regions sub-serving mood disorder pathology) as measured by magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS).
Further, MRS studies in patients with unipolar depression have revealed that increased markers of inflammation (e.g., CRP) correlate with increased glutamate levels in the basal ganglia, which was specifically associated with anhedonia and psychomotor retardation. In addition, an antidepressant response to ketamine may be predicted by elevated baseline inflammatory markers, further suggestive of significant cross-talk between immune dysfunction, the glutamate system and mood disorder pathophysiology.
PATHOLOGICAL MICROGLIAL ACTIVATION
Microglia are the macrophages of the CNS that serve an important role in facilitating neuroplasticity. Microglia aid in the pruning of unused neural circuits to allow for more space and energy to be made available for more frequently used neural circuits. Under physiological conditions, microglia may effectively prioritize the most important neural circuits leading to optimal brain structure and function. However, with chronic inflammation, pro-inflammatory cytokines promote prolonged over-activation of microglia. With this over-activation, microglia may aberrantly prune important neural circuits sub-serving mood and cognitive function (e.g., prefrontal cortex (PFC), amygdala, hippocampus, insula and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC))
This process results in a positive feed-forward loop whereby activated microglia release cytokines, which further increases inflammation and further microglia recruitment and activation. The release of cytokines from activated microglia may also further perpetuate the previously discussed monoamine changes. Lastly, the over-activation of microglia increases the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) leading to local oxidative stress, further damaging neural circuitry in key brain regions sub-serving mood and cognition. This unfortunate cascade may contribute to the neuroprogression of BD as increasing numbers of important neural circuits are destroyed.
The Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis
In recent years, the role of the microbiota-gut-brain axis in neuropsychiatric disorders has become of great interest The gut and brain may communicate in a bidirectional fashion through numerous pathways including via the parasympathetic nervous system (primarily the vagus nerve), the gut neuroendocrine system, the circulatory system (delivering neuroactive metabolites and neuro-transmitters directly produced in the gut), and most notably, via the immune system.
The composition of the gut microbiota may have a large impact on the signaling molecules, including cytokines, that are being produced by the gastrointestinal (GI) system. The GI system may induce the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines on an acute or chronic basis. These cytokines may have direct effects on brain function as previously described.
Numerous investigators are questioning the potential impact of altering the gut microbiota on immune function and mental illness. While this field is still in its infancy, the potential for novel treatments targeting the gut microbiota to treat BD may represent a completely new class of hypothesis-driven therapeutic interventions. For example, in a recent case report, Hamdani et al., (2015) suspected that a manic episode may have been triggered by alteration of the gut microbiota. Given their hypothesis that the manic episode was triggered by perturbation of the gut-brain axis, the patient was treated with daily activated charcoal (a potent absorbent of gut inflammatory cytokines) instead of conventional anti-manic agents. The manic episode was successfully treated, which corresponded to decreased serum levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines.
While targeting the microbiota to treat BD has yet to be assessed in any clinical trials, this case reports shows promise for a potential role of this novel target. Inflammation and Sleep Dysfunction Sleep dysfunction is a key feature of BD. During all phases of illness, changes in sleep patterns are commonly reported. Indeed, during manic or hypomanic episodes, there is a characteristic decreased need for sleep. During depressive episodes, there may be difficulties achieving adequate quality or quantity of sleep or alternatively, hypersomnia in which patients are sleeping many more hours than would be typical for the general population.
Even during euthymic periods, sleep complaints are still common in BD. Sleep dysfunction is also strongly associated with immune dysfunction. Replicated evidence has demonstrated sleep dysfunction to be associated with increased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines with a bidirectional causal association identified. As such, interest has grown in immune dysfunction as a potential nexus sub-serving the bidirectional interaction between sleep dysfunction and BD.
N-Acetyl-Cysteine (NAC) as treatment for Bipolar Disorder
Among all anti-inflammatory agents, NAC has the strongest evidence as an adjunctive treatment for bipolar depression. In an RCT of NAC for BD (n = 75), adjunctive NAC was shown to lower depression severity scores throughout the trial with a statistically and clinically significant difference compared to conventional therapy alone at the primary endpoint of 24 weeks. Additionally, post-hoc analysis of 17 participants from this sample who met criteria for a current major depressive episode (MDE) at baseline revealed that 8 of 10 participants in the NAC group had a clinical response (i.e., greater than 50% reduction in depression severity) compared to only 1 of 7 participant in the placebo group. An eight-week open-label trial of NAC also showed antidepressant effects in BD.
The effect of adjunctive NAC in mania/hypomania was also explored in a small post-hoc analysis of 15 BD participants experiencing an acute manic/hypomanic episode comparing participants receiving adjunctive NAC (n = 8) versus adjunctive placebo (n = 7). This analysis revealed a greater improvement in symptoms of mania in the NAC group compared to placebo. Overall, NAC shows promise as an adjunctive treatment for BD during all phases of illness; however, evidence is strongest for use in the acute treatment of bipolar depression.
Anti-Inflammatory Effects of Conventional Mood Stabilizers
Also of interest has been understanding the relative impact of conventional mood stabilizers on the immune system. Indeed, as previously discussed, the initial hypothesis of conceptualizing BD as an immune disorder was developed through observing the immune-modulating effects of lithium, one of the oldest and most effective treatments of BD. The interaction between lithium and the immune system is complex as lithium has been shown to have both anti-inflammatory (e.g., suppression of cyclooxygenase-2 expression, inhibition of IL-1β and TNF-α production, and enhancement of IL-2 and IL-10 synthesis) and pro-inflammatory effects (e.g., induction of IL-4, IL-6 and other pro-inflammatory cytokines synthesis).
As such, the ‘net effect’ of lithium on immune function may vary greatly; however, long term lithium use has been associated with normalization of cytokine levels. Compared to lithium, much less in know about the impact of valproic acid on the immune system. Pre-clinical studies have suggested possible anti-inflammatory effects of valproic acid, however, clinical studies have failed to demonstrate a significant anti-inflammatory effect, as determined by changes in cytokine levels pre- and post-treatment. The impact of carbamazepine; lamotrigine and antipsychotics on the immune system also remains unclear due to a lack of clinical studies.
CONCLUSIONS
Bipolar disorder is strongly associated with immune dysfunction. Moreover, in a subset of BD, immune dysfunction is likely playing a key role in the pathophysiology of disease progression. The bidirectional interaction of BD with immune dysfunction is likely responsible for the high rates of inflammatory comorbidities, such as autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disturbances. This interaction is of particular importance as medical comorbidity is primarily responsible for early mortality in BD.
Currently available evidence suggests that anti-inflammatory agents may be specifically helpful in the treatment of bipolar depression. Conversely, the impact of anti-inflammatory agents in mania and hypomania remains unclear. Clinical studies have also suggested that anti-inflammatory agents may be only beneficial for a subset of BD patients, namely, patients with immune dysfunction, as indicated by elevation of inflammatory markers. As such, future clinical trials should stratify patients based on inflammatory profile to determine which specific anti-inflammatory agent(s) are efficacious in which specific subset of BD patients. ~ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5704151/
A large number of studies point point to a link between what we call “mental disorders” (though “brain disorders” might be a more accurate label) and high levels of inflammation. I am also excited about the therapeutic potential of of NAC, a precursor of glutathione. Glutathione is involved in many body processes, including immune function. Low glutathione is associated with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and autism ~ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5611744/ .
NAC (N-Acetyl-cysteine) is a very inexpensive supplement. I recommend it for everyone, but especially for those who drink alcohol. Don’t drink unless you take some NAC before, during, or after drinking — or all of the above. On a daily basis, NAC is best taken with some glycine. NAC, glycine, and glutamine (the most abundant amino acid in food) are precursors for the synthesis of glutathione. Since glycine is also pretty abundant in protein-rich diets, it’s NAC that is critical.
Our glycine levels go down with aging, however, and you may want to start glycine as well. Glycine too is inexpensive.
The point is to lower inflammation, which should result in a good mood (not to be confused with being manic). I first noticed this effect when experimenting with celecoxib, at one point a trendy anti-inflammatory. I felt almost exhilarated. I no longer take celecoxib, but I try to eat an anti-inflammatory diet, which has certainly paid off. Less inflammation = better mental function.
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ending on beauty:
. . .
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
T.S. Eliot, East Coker
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