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Only sound, Tomas, slips,
ghost-like, from the body.
Speech is an orphan sound.
Push the lampshade aside,
and by staring straight ahead
you’ll see air face to face:
swarms of those who have stained it
with their lips before us.
~ Josip Brodsky, “Lithuanian Nocturne”
Only sound slips like a ghost from the body, as the soul is supposed to do at the moment of death. “Speech is an orphan sound” — the parent body already left behind. Brodsky doesn’t believe in any other ghosts — only sound — mainly words, but not exclusively. He does believe in a larger community beyond the individual, and our connection with it — call it the “collective psyche.”
As for the tradition meaning of “soul,” I’ve said it several times by now: the ancient Hebrews did not believe in the soul apart from the body — and the word for soul was ruah, “breath.” The breath of life. Life started with the first breath, and ended with the last breath. You were either dead or alive, meaning breathing. That’s why the dead awakened by the angel’s trumpet had to put on bodies in order to be judged at the Last Judgment.
But something does leave the body and “travel” — the sounds we make. Brodsky didn’t want to say “words.” That would be too narrow. He wanted to include laughter and sobbing — hence “sound”:
Only sound, Tomas, slips,
ghost-like, from the body.
Speech is an orphan sound.
Later the word “stained” reminds me of Beckett’s “Every word is a stain on silence.” But that’s not Brodsky’s attitude. He’s more like Rilke, who saw the multitudes of those who loved before us — the geological layers of all the immense loving that preceded us— ancient fathers like ruined mountains, the dried riverbeds of foremothers. There is “tenderness toward existence” in both Rilke and Brodsky.
I am also reminded of the poem by Akhmatova where she imagines a huge column of grieving people walking in the snow behind her and Marina Tzvetayeva. There is a feeling of community with others — with oppressed, grieving multitudes, who follow the poets like a funeral procession.
Aside from that solidarity with others, Brodsky also shows the reality of the mental realm. Millions have lost the notion of a detachable, brain-free soul that keeps on roaming, consciousness intact, "unencumbered" by the body. But what happens after death is gradually becoming less important than our notions of life while it lasts. And the life of the mind, understood as a process, certainly has a strong reality. In fact it's in recent decades that we understood how much of our memory is fictional, and that, conversely, fictional characters may have influenced us more than actual people. Brodsky could be called a "literary atheist" — something I call myself at times.
Known for always cracking jokes, Brodsky had a very stressful life, especially before being expelled from the Soviet Union (that expulsion must have caused a severe heartbreak, considering how much Brodsky loved Russia). He knew a lot about suffering — and about not giving in to despair. I recommend his essays — marvelous writing, and his best work, most readers agree. Too bad he died so young (at 55), of heart disease. He’s buried in Venice, the city he loved, in part because it reminded him of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg again). “Watermark” is a magical collection of his essays about Venice, but the ghost of a different city flits through it here and there — the ghost captured in words, consisting of words. ~ Oriana
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ON BRODSKY AND HIS CONTRADICTIONS
~ It is hard to guess what brought Brodsky to Morton Street — chance or somebody’s advice. While looking for a New York apartment he probably considered many things, from price to location — it is in the center of Manhattan, with many coffee shops and restaurants, the Hudson River nearby, and scenery with something vaguely European about it. Or perhaps it is what Europeans want to believe, trying to justify choosing America?
The Russian Samovar restaurant on 52nd street — once owned by Joseph Brodsky, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and a Russian-born former language teacher turned restaurateur, Roman Kaplan — occasionally holds poetry readings in a room on the second floor. The dining area is on the first floor. There is a coat room to the left and a toadish-green bar to the right. What strikes the visitor first is a display of huge bottles with various brands of vodka. Further down stands a white Royal piano played by Sasha Izbitser. On the right side there is a brick wall with photographs of celebrities who have visited the restaurant: from Bella Akhmadulina to Miloš Forman.
On the second floor, a full-body bronze statue of Joseph Brodsky stands on a table under samovars in the left corner of the rectangular room where Russian-speaking New Yorkers gather for readings. The statue is based on a well-known photo of Brodsky. The photographer caught him in the middle of the street, with a briefcase under his arm and a scarf around his neck. The scarf and the poet’s long coat are flapping in the wind. The dynamics of the figure captures the poet’s hastiness, and perhaps also his inner unrest.
In the evenings I like to sit next to the statue, making myself comfortable in a soft leather chair creaking like old wood.
Forbidden Brodsky
For my generation, Brodsky’s name probably resounded first at the beginning of perestroika, when a Moscow-based journalist Henrikh Borovik presented a TV documentary about Jewish emigration to Israel and America. The film was obviously propaganda: one weeping family from Israel begged the Soviet government to give them back their Soviet citizenship, and pledged to walk to their country on foot if necessary.
In America, according to the report, senior citizens watch Soviet movies on VHS, and bohemian youths make fun of Pravda headlines chanting “Prav-da-da-da!”
Borovik commented: Look what scum have left our glorious country. But one of those scumbags said: “Well, who needs Russian literature here in America? Except perhaps Solzhenitsyn or Brodsky. ” That was how, at least for me, Brodsky’s name came up for the first time. Of course I could not know then about his trial, or about his exile to the village of Norenskaya, about the circumstances of his departure for America, about his friendship with Auden, or about his poems and essays.
The complete ban on Brodsky was something to be expected from a system that blacklisted everyone who did not acquiesce to it in every possible way. Such was the case of Joseph Brodsky, an exile forced to leave the Soviet Union and seemingly erased from Russian culture forever.
Later, after his Nobel Prize, Brodsky became an object of veneration in the Soviet Union. His figure was inseparably linked with the Nobel aura. Later still, when the transcripts of his 1964 trial were published, together with his memoirs from his Leningrad days, as well as the details of his complicated relationship with Marina Basmanova, his conversations with Akhmatova, his poetic attitude to Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, his meetings with Auden, and also some facts about his American life — all this deepened my conviction that beyond the text there existed another inter-textual Brodsky who, like it or not, supplemented Brodsky the poet. I also started to think that the idea that each poet’s biography is fully contained in his poems is only half- or even a quarter-true.
To be fair, Brodsky’s lack of publication in the Soviet Union was partly compensated in the west, where unofficial literature in the East was carefully followed, and where his poems and books started to appear in translation. After all, judging by the standards of Soviet citizenship, what were the prospects for a poet who had served a sentence in exile, had spent some time in a mental institution, had no steady employment, was consorting with foreigners, and moved in suspicious circles of Leningrad bohemia constantly surveilled by the KGB, even though he wasn’t really a dissident?
If we look for a similar case, the first person who comes to mind is Vasyl Stus.[Vasyl Semenovych Stus (1938 – 1985) – a Ukrainian poet, translator, literary critic, journalist.] Why Stus? Because of some telling similarities, as well as differences, between him and his Russian counterpart. Although Stus’s poetry is quite unlike Brodsky’s, they both belonged to the same generation and, because of their moral and poetic principles, they both refused to play any games with authorities.
They both rejected the very idea of compromise, and they both explored the deeper layers of poetic language. That is why, in many poems by Stus and Brodsky alike, the dominant motifs are reflection on culture, abstractions, and existential questions. Their poems show a strong inclination toward philosophical contemplation of reality and moral choices, of choosing the right path, and of the relationship between a poet and authority. Their similarities can also be found in the dialogue both Brodsky and Stus conducted with Rilke — an emblematic figure for European modernism and for them personally. Stus translated Rilke, and Brodsky wrote the essay “Ninety Years Later,” a comprehensive analysis of Rilke’s poem “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes.”
And what separated them? Well, to begin with, their childhoods in Leningrad and Donbas, Brodsky’s intelligentsia background and Stus’s peasant origins, as well as Brodsky’s Jewish and Stus’s Ukrainian roots that place them differently within the historical and imperial context. Brodsky sees history through the prism of disrupted Jewish history (“The Jewish Cemetery,” “The Jewish Crow-Bird”), through Old Testament motifs (“Flight into Egypt”), and personified Hellenic and Roman history — a culture of vanished empires and recent historical events (“On the Death of Zhukov,” Afghanistan in “Lines on the Winter Campaign, 1980”).
For Stus, the sense of history is rooted in the memory of defeat (“A Hundred Years Since the Sich Died,” “From the Chronicle of Samovid,” “N.G. Chernyshevsky’s Laments”), which explains his attitude towards the Empire. That is why their poems containing “imperial” motifs (directly or indirectly expressed) place both poets on opposite sides of the barricade.
Jewish Brodsky and Ukrainian Stus see the empire, their own relationship to it, and also the Empire’s future in a radically different way. For Brodsky, the transformation of the Soviet Union into post-Soviet Russia was perfectly natural. In Stus’s case, the issue is more complicated. I am not sure what he thought about the complete emancipation of Ukraine from Russia, but he was convinced that “amicable” relations between Russia and Ukraine should cease at some point until Ukraine liberates itself from this forced love. That is why the Empire, though it rejected Brodsky’s poetic gift, considered him, through the mediation of Russian language and culture, its own delinquent, someone who went astray. On the other hand, the Empire always considered Stus a delinquent outsider who dared to question its hallowed existence. Under those circumstances, just forcing Stus beyond the Empire’s borders was simply out of the question. He had to be destroyed.
I have no doubt that Brodsky was “fortunate.” He was fortunate with his internal exile, because that is how the West has learned about him; he was fortunate with his milieu, which influenced him in good measure (Leningrad, Akhmatova); he was fortunate with America (Auden, Miłosz, Paz, Sontag, Strand, Hecht, and Walcott). Certainly all these “fortunate” elements would amount to nothing were it not for his poetry.
Brodsky the Poet
After reading several of Brodsky’s poems for the first time, I felt as if an electrical current had run through my body. His poetics was unlike anything offered by prominent Russian Shestydesatniky (“The Sixties Generation”) — it did not resemble Akhmadulina’s melos or Voznesensky’s futurism/avant-gardism, or the op-ed style of Yevtushenko. The nature of Brodsky’s poetry, it seemed, was clearly at variance with the well-established and celebrated poetics of his contemporaries.
Entire treatises are written today about the influence of Yevgeny Baratynsky and John Donne on Brodsky. It was established that his versification carries on certain rhythmic and melodic traditions of Russian poetry. For me, the important thing was Brodsky’s sense of an idea in poetry — of his poetry’s metaphysical roots in the tenets of Christianity and Judaism. In fact, Brodsky’s idiolect, his unique literary personality, manifests itself also in his conceptual approach to the composition of his own books. We get the impression that rather than choosing his poems randomly, shuffling them like cards in a deck, he wrote those poems working from a specific concept and from a common general idea.
That is why Brodsky is a poet of unique resonance, timbre, and melos — a poet of the city, of human existence and nature, a poet who personalizes history, and reflects on culture. This, in turn, links him to his contemporaries — to Russians and other Slavic poets such as Miłosz, Herbert, Szymborska, Stus [Vasyl Semenovych Stus (1938 – 1985) – a Ukrainian poet, translator, literary critic, journalist], and even English-language poets, from marginalized domains where history — imperial or colonial — still occupies a prominent place in the collective and individual memory. It links him to them, yet at the same time sets him apart.
Brodsky wrote about the Leningrad landscapes of his life in his famous 1985 essay “In a Room and a Half.” It was composed in English, and the choice of the language was absolutely deliberate. According to Brodsky, only English could protect the text from the erosion of time.
A room-and-a-half was the space assigned by Russian authorities to the war veteran Alexander Brodsky. It was the space in which his son, the future poet, grew up and developed. Brodsky’s essay, however, is dedicated to memory more than space. In it, he grows the muscle of guilt about his parents, who were never allowed to visit their son in America, and the muscle of memory about the objects that surrounded him in those rooms, about the smell of communal apartments, about their residents, about streets and sacral architecture — and tests this muscle’s strength by stretching it like a bow-string over his contemporary condition as a denizen of America.
The city in which Brodsky grew up was an imperial city. It was apparent, first of all, in its architecture whose visual impact, grandeur, and might influenced the residents’ subconscious, many Soviet proletarian neighborhoods notwithstanding. This could not be without an impact on Brodsky’s future inclinations.
For Brodsky, self-expression in poetry was less important than something else. The form of his poetry is rather traditional, although he would loosen and innovate it by using inventive stanza patterns, enjambments, the possibilities of different sound registers present in Russian speech, by mixing up landscapes, sensations, intellectual stimuli. Brodsky wrote at a time when the greatest Slavic poets, most significantly Poles (Miłosz, Herbert, Różewicz, Szymborska) had freed themselves from the encumbrances of rhythm and rhyme and considered history – memory – time the real cornerstones of their poetry. Their personalized history differed from the Russian one, although their nation had endured no lesser cataclysms.
The Empire According to Brodsky
Among the reasons for writing this essay was not only my desire to re-read Brodsky following Irena Grudzińska-Gross and Lev Loseff, who almost simultaneously published books about Brodsky in Polish and Russian, or my wish to contribute something to the body of Brodsky criticism. One of the reasons was a certain problem Grudzińska-Gross and Loseff did not ignore, but did not fully resolve either — the poem “On the Independence of Ukraine.”
I was prompted to write these notes by something very simple: an article titled “Shocked by Brodsky” I found on the Sem40 website. The author, Sonia T., describes what must have been Brodsky’s last public reading in New York in 1996. She shares her impressions about the evening and how, when the poet read “On the Independence of Ukraine,” she walked out in protest during the last lines.
Grudzińska-Gross touches upon this problem in her book, stating that, “[Brodsky’s] Russian patriotism is affirmed by […] the poem “Nation,” as well as another poem that attacks Ukraine from imperial and great-Russian positions.”
“He has read this poem to Tomas Venclova,” she continues, “who informed me in a conversation that he had advised against publishing it.”
In my opinion, Brodsky’s worldview is too complicated and self-contradictory to hastily appoint accents that would be acceptable to all. We are not talking here primarily about his poetic and aesthetic sympathies or antipathies, or about his purely human faults and virtues, but about a position from which he is observing the world and commenting on political as well as daily occurrences. The crux of the problem is how does one separate — in Brodsky or anybody else — one’s aesthetic from social orientation, one’s purely human sympathies from established, generally accepted, politically correct opinions?
It would appear that since Brodsky suffered at the hands of the Empire, which condemned him to exile, prevented him from realizing himself as a poet, and even refused to allow his parents to see their only son — any defeat of that Empire, its destruction and death, should evoke a sense of happiness or at lease of personal victory, not a desire to defend it.
Indeed, Ukraine’s independence did spell the death of the Empire, no matter how hard the Empire tried to prevent it.
From what vantage point does Brodsky try to view Ukraine? From the position of Russian patriotic intelligentsia? From the position of a Western Slavophile? From the position of a cosmopolitan?
And there is another problem, equally difficult to resolve but relatively easy to define. Living in America, where everything is so politically correct, and communicating with his friends who brought with them their complexes of victimhood by communism (Miłosz) or colonialism (Walcott), Brodsky challenges in his poem every possible rule of required public etiquette. He has produced a text which, in the event of its publication, would clearly define his position not only toward Ukraine, but also toward Lithuania and Poland — countries that he truly loved and whose cultural representatives he befriended.
On the one hand, Brodsky — a spokesman for Russian language and literature — was under no obligation to love Ukraine, even though, as his name indicates, his paternal ancestors must have harkened from Brody in Ukraine. Because of this fact, at least, he might have shown some sympathy for Ukraine. But he didn’t. As Brodsky affirms, for obvious reasons his family hardly ever mentioned their life before the Revolution. It is likely that Brodsky never heard family tales about distant ancestors from Volhynia, once within the borders of the Polish Crown, although he was quite familiar with centuries of common Ukrainian-Jewish history.
Zbigniew Herbert had more reasons to write about Ukrainians and Lviv, where he grew up and spent much of World War II. It is even possible to consider Herbert a poet of the borderlands, who could have nursed a painful memory of the Kresy, the once-Polish eastern lands, and the complex of defeat. Czesław Miłosz, another poet of the borderlands, might have had equal grounds to blame Lithuania for its desire to separate itself from the Soviet Union but not to re-join Poland. But in both cases such propositions would sound quite ridiculous.
As a matter of fact, during the 1988 Lisbon Conference, to which Brodsky, Miłosz, Rushdie, Sontag, and Walcott were invited, Brodsky vehemently defended Russia, not just as an empire of culture, but as a political empire. He took some liberties with the definition of Central Europe and its historical and spiritual foundations, which provoked strong objections from his colleagues. Derek Walcott tried to moderate the conflict, but he was not particularly well-versed in European affairs. Therefore the poets from former empires and from borderlands diverged in their assessments of the current situation.
The imperial idea appears quite frequently in Brodsky’s poems, usually in the Greco-Roman context. These classic imperial models evoke in the poet if not awe at least admiration, presumably not on account of constant wars and territorial conquests, but culture — the pride of every empire.
The Soviet empire was dying, a large part of it — Ukraine — was breaking away, and Brodsky’s reaction seemed quite natural. Already in 1985 he entered into a polemic with Milan Kundera. No matter what has been said about this exchange, especially by Russian commentators, one thing was obvious and undeniable: It was a skirmish between two opposite worldviews of Europe and Asia represented by Kundera and Brodsky — between rational European thought and Asiatic emotional turmoil and mystical probing of the fathomless depths of the human soul. For Kundera, the very thought of Russia aroused a sense of threat. Russia signified aggression and belligerence. What is more, Brodsky decided to base his arguments against Kundera on Dostoyevsky, which was probably the most unfortunate way to settle historical and cultural scores. And what if Kundera resolved to respond with Kafka?
One may agree with Irena Grudzińska-Gross that Brodsky was born and raised in one empire (the USSR), lived in a second (America), and found his eternal peace in the third (Rome). This, however, does not negate the fact that, in the simple human sense, Brodsky was able to accept some imperial borderlands, such as Poland and Lithuania, and to dismiss others, such as Ukraine.
Brodsky’s poets
Brodsky frequently expressed his views on poetic subjects and constructed his own canon of poets who were important to him. He contributed in this way to the world-renown of Tsvetayeva and Mandelstam. He carefully watched over the quality of the English translations of Akhmatova, and harshly denounced what he perceived to be faulty interpretations of her poetry.
Of course, at the core of his poetic predilections was the poetry of Pushkin, Baratynsky, Pasternak, Zabolotsky, together with John Donne, Auden, and Frost. He never said a single word about the poets of the New York School, Allen Ginsberg, or Laurence Ferlinghetti — they were obviously not his cup of tea.
For me, the verse in which he contrasts “the lines of Alexander” with “Taras’s gibberish,” are especially intriguing and revealing. Alexander Pushkin and Taras Shevchenko were two prominent poets who also suffered at the hands of the empire: Pushkin was exiled to “the South” while Shevchenko suffered a more severe punishment — military service in the steppes of Orenburg. Brodsky, who was also exiled to the Arkhangelsk district after he served a prison term, must have compared — if he thought about it at all — his feelings about imprisonment and exile with Shevchenko’s. As a poet, even without reading Shevchenko’s cycle “In the Dungeons,” he could intuitively sense that he was repeating the Ukrainian poet’s fate a hundred years later.
Brodsky’s rejection of Shevchenko, however, did not result simply from the clichés about Shevchenko’s revolutionary views, or about him being a commonplace, home-grown talent. There was probably something deeper here. Incidentally, Pushkin was also against the independence of Poland, although he befriended Mickiewicz.
What does “Taras’s gibberish” mean?
Marina Temkina and I made an appointment to meet in the Russian Samovar at one of their poetry readings. It didn’t work out because someone brought a group of students, the room was incredibly packed, and we just nodded to each other from a distance and moved our meeting to another time and place.
From our email exchanges it became clear that Marina knew Brodsky quite well, translated his essays into English, and was familiar with the details of the poet’s life in New York. She invited me to her place, which was in the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan. Using this opportunity, I turned onto Twenty Third Street to have a look at the Chelsea Hotel, the façade of which was covered, like a veteran’s chest full of medals, with plaques commemorating writers who had lived and worked there.
Marina set the table and quickly prepared a meal. Cheese, a bottle of French wine, and candlesticks with candles occupied an honorary place on the table even before my arrival. A quiet New York street seemed to be well-protected from the noise of Seventh Avenue.
I learned from Marina about the visit of Brodsky’s son in New York and about the poet’s death at his home in Brooklyn Heights, which he had bought and where he had moved in with his family. Coincidentally or not, the neighborhood was once the home of Walt Whitman, Tom Wolfe, W. H. Auden, Arthur Miller, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer.
When I asked Marina what she thought about the poem “On the Independence of Ukraine,” she responded with her characteristic radiant sadness that his anti-Ukrainian feelings could be explained by Jewish post-Holocaust trauma. The poet seemed to have forgiven Poland and Lithuania, but not Ukraine.
I then remembered an episode from the conversation between Russian journalist Solomon Volkov and Brodsky about Italy. Brodsky mentioned Ezra Pound in reference to his visit to Pound’s longtime lover Olga Rudge. Brodsky attended some festival with Susan Sontag, who by pure chance had met Pound’s aged companion in the street and asked Brodsky to accompany her on a visit to her place. As Brodsky recollects, throughout the evening Rudge tried to correct what she considered misunderstandings about Pound’s fascism and anti-Semitism. At some point, Sontag made a reasonable comment that she absolutely could not accept those explanations because they make Pound look like another Tokyo Rose, an opportunistic collaborator who conducted propaganda broadcasts from Tokyo meant to demoralize American soldiers fighting with the Japanese.
Why is Brodsky Wrong About Shevchenko?
Shevchenko was not one of Brodsky’s favorite poets.
If Brodsky had known Shevchenko’s biography at all, he would probably have known it only in general terms. But, paradoxically, the two poets were linked by at least several circumstances: their confrontational position of “a poet against authority,” their arrests, exiles, oppression by authorities, prohibitions imposed on them (for Shevchenko to write, for Brodsky to publish), the location of important parts of their lives (Shevchenko’s Saint Petersburg and Brodsky’s Leningrad), and, to a certain degree, also by the language, because Shevchenko also wrote poetry and prose in Russian.
In the last line of his poem “On the Independence of Ukraine,” after a long tirade full of historical ruminations, Brodsky turns to poetry as the highest authority to judge history, and calls up two names — Pushkin and Shevchenko. For Brodsky, it is both characteristic and perfectly understandable: considering poetry the highest form of artistic expression and the highest form of language, he absolutely could not limit himself to historical arguments or to his personal emotional reactions. Pushkin and Shevchenko are the two judges Brodsky appeals to in order to justify or reject Ukrainian independence and to assess its achievability. Isn’t this why his neutral-positive statements about Pushkin and extremely negative statements about Shevchenko become synonymous with his view on the whole national traditions that stand behind those names?
Brodsky condemns “Taras’s gibberish” not only from the point of view of his poetic or aesthetic standards. We don’t even know which of Shevchenko’s works he had read, or if he had read any. Perhaps he just imagined Shevchenko’s writing, or he had read something in the Soviet press in 1961, during the centennial of Shevchenko’s death. Or maybe he came across some selection of his work in literary textbooks. Was that enough to say that everything in Taras is “gibberish,” that his Ukrainian history, or his Ukrainian perspective on history, is a myth, that a direct response to Shevchenko’s treatments of history and mythology (“The Dream,” “The Caucasus”) is Pushkin’s poem “Poltava”? [Poltava was the site where Peter the First defeated Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, establishing Russian supremacy in Eastern Europe.]
“The material a poet uses is his personal history; this material, if you want, is itself history,” Brodsky once said.
Pushkin, incidentally, belonged to Brodsky’s canon. In Akhmatova’s circle, Pushkin generally occupied a prominent place. In addition, the physical environment — Tsarskoye Selo, Saint Petersburg, the Moyka River — enhanced Pushkin’s presence in the group’s conversations about poetry and poets. In a picture taken in New York by Marianna Volkova we see Brodsky, dictionaries, and a bust of Pushkin. While talking about Akhmatova’s circle, known as the Four Akhmatova Orphans, he draws the following parallels: Yevgeny Reyn is Pushkin, Dmitry Bobyshev is Delvig, Anatoly Nayman — Viazemski, and he, Brodsky, is Baratynsky. Irena Grudzińska-Gross finds a number of Pushkin motifs in Brodsky — first of all the motif of Ovid and the empire from Pushkin’s “Kishinev” cycle and Brodsky’s references to Pushkin in the poem “Sophia.” She remembers that in Brodsky’s opinion the Poles had an innate aspiration for independence. Why didn’t he see such an aspiration in Ukrainians? He did not want to? He couldn’t?
Brodsky’s article in The New York Times was prompted by Milan Kundera’s essay on the nature of totalitarianism, on the Prague events of 1968, on Dostoyevsky, and on Kundera’s own anti-Russian feelings. Brodsky’s response had a polemical title, “Why Milan Kundera Is Wrong about Dostoyevsky.” Its polemical character clearly suggested that the author will try to build his own argument by countering the arguments of his opponent. Kundera did not attack Russian culture. He merely expressed the feelings of a Central European who had suffered the consequences of a violent death of this culture, even though it can boast the names of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Brodsky, as a representative of a culture which was imperial to the core, and which was rolling its tanks into Prague, reacted mainly in defense of his own comfortable feelings about this culture and its place. It was a defense of his private well-being.
Poetry, of course, is not an essay, and by its very nature a poetic text is a confluence of many different intellectual and emotional stimuli. “On the Independence of Ukraine” is just one of many episodes in Brodsky’s wrestling with his historical and political beliefs, which he tends to elevate to the aesthetic domain. Shevchenko and Ukraine, Kundera and the Czech Republic, provoke his hostility because the content of these notions does not agree with the content of his own views on history. The polemic in Lisbon between Miłosz and Brodsky about Central Europe was yet another piece of evidence that Brodsky wasn’t particularly concerned about the rules of polite behavior; his emotions sometimes got the better of his common sense.
Finally, it must be said that Brodsky’s poem is in fact a provocation and not a polemic (there is no use debating him in this particular case, not least because he firmly shuts down the possibility of such debate). If this is true, then the poet has expressed the collective subconscious of a certain part of Russian intelligentsia, which takes a similar position toward Ukraine. Such attitudes have been revived in contemporary Russia and reached the level of official discourse because of the weakening and waning of Ukrainian pro-European forces.
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Joseph Brodsky’s frequent visits to Italy opened before him a vista of imperial artifacts mutilated by history — the broken teeth of the Colosseum — as well as the panorama of eternity. In a sense, the same panorama can be found in New York, but is forever linked to Venice, with its constant floods, its watery element, its ships, docks, harbor cranes, the smell of seaweed, and the crying of seagulls. The poet, born in Leningrad, caught by death in New York, and put to rest in Venice, strung these cities together on the thread of his biography — a biography tied to architecture and water that rises and falls not only with yachts in their moorings, but with the rhythms of history, the wavelike sinusoids of time, the fates of poets, and the fishing corks of local anglers.
Joseph Brodsky was full of contradictions in his poetry as well as in his life with its poetic myths, farewells and returns, streets and cities, the Russian word and the Jewish fate. “I was blamed for everything but the weather.” I don’t want to blame the poet Brodsky, but want to understand him.
When his son visited him in New York, Brodsky wanted to take him and the whole company to dinner in Chinatown, which was not far from Morton Street. For quite some time he couldn’t decide whether to walk there or go there by car. Finally they went by car, but Brodsky wanted to give his son a farewell present and stopped by a store with military apparel where he bought a quite expensive leather U.S. Air Force jacket. His son and the other guests were baffled by this gesture because for the same money one could buy many pairs of jeans, sneakers, and t-shirts — exactly what his son wanted and asked for. But handing him the store bag with the jacket, Brodsky said: “I have never had such a jacket, and I always dreamt about it.”
Poets tend to make mistakes, take quick offense, and ignore obvious facts when their own histories are contradicted by the history of others.
After Brodsky’s death, his beloved Venetian lions with faces soaked in salty seawater stand as silent witnesses and guardians of his poetry, channels glimmer in the moonlight like rings on Venice’s aged hand, floods submerge the island of Saint Michaele, and the lions’ bronze wings cast their shadows on the encroaching waters.
Sometimes I think that poetry flows higher than the water that advances, like barbarians, upon a Rome long-gone.
Brodsky on his balcony in Moscow, 1963
https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/venetian-lion?fbclid=IwAR16qgPcEmBVKnBVypgxmjlwwVkQDv_Lwp1cfx4wAmzBFkR2al9AtL9gcPs
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PUTIN WANTS A LARGER WAR, NOT AN OFF-RAMP
~ “These amendments are written for a big war and general mobilization. And the scent of this big war can already be smelled,” Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the Duma’s defense committee, said this week as the Russian parliament rushed to adopt a new law. The legislation enabling the Kremlin to send hundreds of thousands more men into combat reveals a sad truth: that far from seeking an off-ramp from his disastrous war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is preparing for an even bigger war.
It is understandable that many in Ukraine and the west want to believe that Russia’s president is cornered. The Ukrainian army is gradually reconquering lands occupied by the Russians and has shown itself capable of striking deep into enemy territory — even into the Kremlin itself. The sanctions pressure on Russia is mounting. For now, the west remains united in support of Kyiv, and streams of modern weaponry and money sustain the Ukrainian war effort. Finally, the mutiny staged by the Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and visible conflicts among senior Russian military commanders add to hopes that the Kremlin’s war machine will break down.
Things likely look very different to the Kremlin, which believes that it can afford a long war. The Russian economy is forecast to record modest growth this year, mostly thanks to military factories working around the clock. Critical components such as microchips needed for the defense industry are arriving from China and other sources. Despite sanctions, the Kremlin’s war chest is still overflowing with cash, thanks to windfall energy profits last year and also to the adaptability of Russian commodities exporters, who have found new customers and who settle payments mostly in yuan. If budgetary pressures were to become more acute, Russia’s central bank could further devalue the ruble, making it easier to pay soldiers, defense industry workers and the internal security forces who keep the Russian elite and public repressed and largely in line with Putin’s disastrous course. When it comes to the war itself, the Kremlin still seems unperturbed by the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Even if Kyiv makes more advances, the Kremlin may brush them off as temporary. Putin is banking on the fact that the Russian manpower that can potentially be mobilized is three to four times bigger than Ukraine’s, and the only pressing task is to be able to tap into that resource at will: to mobilize many more men, arm them, train them and send them to fight. This is precisely the purpose of the new law, which should help the Kremlin to avoid another official mobilization.
From now on, the government can quietly send draft notices to as many men as it deems necessary. The upper age limit for performing mandatory service will be increased from 27 to 30, and could be raised again in future. Once an electronic draft notice is issued, Russia’s borders will be immediately closed to its recipient in order to prevent a massive exodus of military-age men like the one Russia witnessed last autumn. The punishments for refusing to serve have also been ramped up. These moves, combined with massive state investment in expanding arms production, should help Putin to build a bigger and better equipped army.
A parallel tactic is the strangulation of Ukraine’s economy. Knowing that the Ukrainian budget is on life support provided by its western allies, the Kremlin wants to deny Kyiv all sources of revenue. Moscow has therefore not only pulled out of the grain deal that had enabled Ukrainian agricultural exports via the Black Sea, it has also launched massive air strikes against Ukrainian ports to destroy any possibility of reviving the agreement. The same logic underpins Russia’s air strikes against civilian infrastructure: they are aimed at making Ukrainian cities uninhabitable and preventing reconstruction efforts.
The Kremlin hopes that the rapid rebuilding of the Russian army and gradual decimation of the Ukrainian economy and armed forces will result in growing western frustration and a decline in material support for Kyiv. To speed up this process and break the west’s will, Moscow is using threats of escalation, including expansion of the conflict towards Nato territory via Belarus with the help of Wagner mercenaries based there.
Putin has made plenty of fatal mistakes. But as long as he is in charge, Moscow will dedicate its still vast resources to achieving his obsession with destroying and subordinating Ukraine. As western leaders think about policies to support Ukraine into the third year of this ugly war, any long-term strategy must take this reality into account.
Mansion of Baron Kelch in St. Petersburg
This mansion, built for Alexander Kelch, in his day one of Russia's richest men, was designed by three different architects each of whom contributed their own ideas and solutions. The splendid facade takes its inspiration from French Renaissance models, the courtyard is predominantly Gothic, the servants' quarters are art nouveau, while the interiors opt for the ornate luxury of baroque and rococo. All of this was put together in 1903, making the Kelch Mansion an archetypal example of the turn-of-the-century trend for eclecticism in Russian architecture, especially in St. Petersburg. (Photographer: Elisio Pina)
THE COMIC ASPECTS OF PUTIN’S RUSSIA
~ Russian state TV is comedy gold. And Russian propaganda is hilariously bad, cringeworthy and funny. It is just lie after lie after lie. If people truly believe that crap, and clearly they do, then there is a serious education problem in that country. And that’s just for starters.
The constant crying and whining about nobody liking them and the whole ‘Russophobia’ thing I find hilarious. They claim everybody, or a select few it depends on whether they decide a country is in the “friend zone” or an “unfriendly country”, hates them — whilst being the most combative, spiteful and hateful country on the planet earth. Hello? Irony?
Russia: “We hate everyone, cause they’re satanic and evil, and we are the saviors of the universe.”
Erm, yeah right, okay. Whatever floats your boat. Or in the case of mother ruzzia, sinks it. Through no fault but their own by the way. Russia is psychologically disturbed with superiority tendencies and inferiority complexes. Hilarious. ~ Frances Neil, Quora
Mykola Banderachuk:
Ruzzia has some top grade comedy writers and comedians — a comedy club with nukes.
Sean Brisbane:
Russian propaganda isn't meant to be believed outside of Russia. The intent is to make people doubt whether there is an objective truth that can be known. In that it has been quite successful at least in US and UK, France.. I'm sure many more.
Frances Neil:
Their imperialist thoughts and delusions of grandeur and superiority betray them every time. Karma is coming.
Carol Bewick:
Russia IS the most evil, spiteful and hateful country on the earth, and I am saying this with a poker straight face. Russia is the cancer of the world.
Horst von Brand:
They know it’s all smoke, mirrors and blatant lies. But keeping the mouth well shut is prudent under a dictatorship in dire straits.
Chris Brisbane:
Putin is turning Russia into a third world country.
The only thing left will be lots of lonely wives and mothers.
And some nice architecture in St Petersburg. Perhaps as a museum for people to visit, to see what Russia may have been without corruption.
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THE WORST THING ABOUT COMBAT
Most civilians have watched enough war movies or read books to know about the technical aspects of warfare and how it looks like.
However, what you can’t imagine unless you have experienced it by yourself is the enormous fear during combat. This is a completely different level of fear than anything that you can experience in civilian life:
Imagine the feeling in your guts when you are driving a car and you have just avoided a collision or a serious accident with another vehicle. Take this moment of fear and multiply it by a hundred.
Unlike in an accident situation, however, battlefield fear doesn't subside after a few moments. It stays with you and gets stronger. It completely wears you out, eats up your soul, and slowly drives you crazy. ~ Roland Bartetzko, former soldier, Quora
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“SECRET GERMANY”: THE VALKYRIE PLOT TO ASSASSINATE HITLER
~ In the film Valkyrie, Tom Cruise plays Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the man who, on 20 July 1944, placed a bomb next to Hitler in his east Prussian headquarters, the Wolf's Lair. The bomb failed to kill Hitler, merely blowing his trousers to ribbons. That night, when the coup was seen to have failed, Stauffenberg was shot in the courtyard of the army headquarters in Berlin on the orders of General Fromm, his superior, who was in on the plot and hoped — in vain — to save himself. Sandbags were piled in the courtyard and the lights of staff cars illuminated the victims. Von Haeften, his aide, threw himself in front of Stauffenberg. He and two others were also shot that night and their bodies quickly buried. Stauffenberg died with the words "Long live our sacred Germany" on his lips, or perhaps — some heard — "Long live our secret Germany”.
The producers of Valkyrie have muffled his last words; the story behind secret Germany does not figure in their script, but they were clearly aware of its significance. Within a few weeks, 80 plotters had been executed in Plötzensee prison by slow strangulation, hung from meathooks; in all, at least 3,000 were killed and many children, including Stauffenberg's, were taken from their families and placed in orphanages. Many of those executed were from Germany's most distinguished families, people who, like Stauffenberg, were appalled by the direction Germany had taken, both in relation to the Jews and to the disastrous war in the east.
The film is true to most of the facts of the plot, but fails to convey any sense of the catastrophic moral and political vortex into which Germans were being drawn. Nor does it give much sense of the immense charisma of Stauffenberg, to whom generals and politicians deferred and who had for some time been tipped as a future chief of staff. A revealing private memoir I was given, which describes a visit shortly before the bomb plot by Stauffenberg to one of the other resister's houses, suggests that the female staff were sent into paroxysms of adoration by the wounded hero. And the film gives no indication at all of Stauffenberg's background and philosophy: he fitted perfectly into the German tradition of Dichter und Helden, poets and heroes. For a start, he looked the part, tall with classical features; he was often compared to a medieval statue of a knight in the cathedral at Bamberg, his home town, and his wedding in this cathedral in 1933 to Nina von Lerchenfeld was a huge social event. Even Hitler believed that Stauffenberg was the embodiment of a German hero.
So when the generals failed in their plots against Hitler — there were as many as 15 of them — someone was needed to head the disparate but substantial resistance, which extended from the army into the Foreign Office, the secret services and to important clerics and trade unionists. Stauffenberg was persuaded by his uncle, Nikolaus Graf von Üxküll, long disenchanted with the Nazis, that he should lead the movement. It seemed that he was the man who unmistakably wore the mantle of a near-mystic German past, a warrior Germany, a noble Germany, a poetic Germany, a Germany of myth and longing.
There is nothing in the script or in Cruise's performance that explores these particularly German preoccupations. At times Cruise looks and sounds like the troublesome cop who has been given a tricky assignment, with 24 hours to get the bad guy before he has to hand in his badge: the assassination attempt is treated as a thriller. It lacks the intelligent understanding that Florian von Donnersmarck brought to The Lives of Others (2006), as people from different backgrounds, and with wildly different ideas of what Germany should become, tried to work together.
Stauffenberg's stroke of genius was to subvert the emergency plan for defending Berlin against insurrection, Valkyrie, into a plan for a putsch after Hitler had been killed. As Hitler became more paranoid, it seemed that Stauffenberg was the only one who had both the access and the resolve to kill him. He was fully aware that the chances of success were slim, but he felt that he needed to demonstrate to the world that there was a better Germany — what he thought of as secret Germany — and perhaps that he was the agent of history.
When I was writing my book The Song Before it is Sung, about a conspirator in the bomb plot, I was puzzled for some time that the British refused to trust the various overtures from the resistance in Germany. Stauffenberg was a close friend and confidant of Adam von Trott, the Rhodes scholar who was also deeply involved in the resistance and executed a few weeks after the July plot. I also pondered the question of why Trott's friend at Oxford, Isaiah Berlin, a magnanimous and generous man, came to distrust him, and I wondered why, 30 years later, he wrote in a letter to Shiela Grant Duff, who knew them both well, saying that Trott was no hero and "not on our side". What he saw, I think, is that in ideas of a mythic German past, and in the belief in a historical destiny, lay the genesis of Nazism.
The idea of a noble Germany, uncorrupted by racial inferiors and alien philosophies, a Germany that would be led by a world figure, was not invented by Hitler. Long before he came along, the simple word Führer — leader — had been turned into something messianic, and I think Berlin knew where the blame lay. During their walks and discussions in Oxford, Berlin often said to Trott that when he was at a loss, he turned to Hegel. Hegel believed, essentially, that history had a forward motion to a point where all contradictions would be resolved.
It is ironic that Stauffenberg's son should have been contemptuous of the notion of Tom Cruise playing his father, on the grounds that he is a cultist, because Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg and his two brothers, Berthold and Alexander, were themselves members of a cult that formed around a mythical secret Germany; their master was the poet Stefan George. George is a sinister figure, but in an American newspaper article of the 1920s he was rated one of the most important men in the world. Hardly remembered and little read today, he was a poet who rivaled Hölderlin and Schiller in his fame.
The Stauffenberg family had held the title of "Schenk", which meant "cup-bearer", since the 13th century, an honor bestowed on them by the Hohenstaufens, the legendary monarchical family of Swabia who also ruled Sicily in the Middle Ages. At the time of Stauffenberg's birth in 1907, his family was to be found at the Altes Schloss in Stuttgart, in the service of the Württemberg monarchy. The Stauffenbergs were a family steeped in tradition, highly cultured, highly regarded.
It was hardly surprising that Stefan George welcomed these good-looking and aristocratic brothers into his circle. This may in part have been because of the homoerotic element in his movement, but it was also because the Stauffenbergs represented everything George felt had been lost in Germany — the medieval greatness of the Hohenstaufen Friedrich II and the warrior qualities of the Teutonic Knights. Poetry was to lead the way back to greatness, and George was Germany's poet; he and his disciples propagated the notion of a unique German-ness, Deutschtum, which was traced back to Friedrich II.
Members of the George circle were subject to some bizarre rules. Only Claus von Stauffenberg kept his own name, presumably because of its flattering historical resonances. His brother Berthold was told not to marry the woman he loved, and he obeyed, at least until George was dead. But even after the war, the surviving brother, Alexander, eulogized George as the spokesman of something uniquely German. Göring revered him too, and after the Nazi takeover of 1933 wanted to instate him as the head of an academy of poetry. George replied that he had for a long time been the leader of German poetry, and didn't need an academy. His circle had many Jewish members, but his views became broadly antisemitic as the Nazis became more important. None the less, he fled to Switzerland and died before it was completely clear where he stood on national socialism.
The Stauffenberg brothers were made George's heirs, and after his death tended his grave in Switzerland and continued to organize candlelit readings of his poetry.
As the war progressed, Stauffenberg enjoyed a rapid rise in the army. He was at first enthusiastic about military successes on the eastern front, but had for some time been deeply alarmed by Hitler: Kristallnacht had disgusted him, particularly as his brother was married to someone of Jewish descent. He quickly became aware that the SS, the SD and the Gestapo were creating a lasting legacy of hatred that would one day be avenged. He began to seek out like-minded officers and spoke at times quite openly about his fears for Germany and the army. Sometimes he recited George's poem "The Antichrist" to support his argument.
As the advance east was halted, it became more urgent to end the war with at least something of Germany intact. Stauffenberg had particular cause for alarm: he was in charge of logistics for the 10th Panzers and knew that for every thousand casualties, only 300 replacements could be found — disaster was inevitable. At the same time he found himself increasingly appalled by the indiscriminate killing of Jews, Slavs and Russian prisoners, and by the SS battalions' unbridled lust for murder, which was having a corrupting effect on the army too. He often ignored or changed orders: he managed to thwart an order that all Russian prisoners should be tattooed on their buttocks.
After Stalingrad, his outspokenness caused some of his superiors to decide that he should be sent to north Africa, which was relatively free of the SS. There he was severely wounded, losing part of his right arm, one eye and two fingers on his left hand. Through determination he made a dramatic recovery and found himself second in command of the home army in Berlin, under General Fromm, and was also appointed to the general staff, which gave him access to Hitler.
After his first visit to the Berghof, he described the atmosphere there as "stale, paralyzing, rotten and degenerate". A few months later, he primed the bomb with the three fingers of his left hand and placed it beside Hitler.
The question the film does not raise is what kind of Germany Stauffenberg envisaged had the coup succeeded, which in all probability it would have, had Hitler been killed. Stefan George's poem "Secret Germany" was the inspiration for Stauffenberg's oath of mutual intent for the conspirators, which was typed by his brother Berthold's secretary:
We want a new order which makes all Germans responsible for the state and guarantees them law and justice; but we despise the lie that all are equal and we submit to rank ordained by nature. We want a people with roots in their native land, close to the powers of nature, finding happiness and contentment in the given environment, and overcoming, in freedom and pride, the base instincts of envy and jealousy. We want leaders who ... are in harmony with the divine powers and set an example to others by their noble spirit, discipline and sacrifice.
When Stauffenberg's body was burned, a ring was lost with it. Engraved on it were the words FINIS INITIUM, which is drawn from another of George's poems with the final line "I am the end and the beginning”.
This wasn't the Germany that the allies had in mind.
Stefan George
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jan/10/valkrie-tom-cruise-hitler-plot
Joe:
The book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich discusses Valkyrie’s plot to assassinate Hitler. Since the publication of this book, some historians and journalists have romanticized the Valkyrie conspirators as men who challenged Hitler’s vision of a new Germany. Their description of the plot is not accurate. These men believed in Hitler’s vision of a German Empire stretching from the Sea of Japan (East Sea) to the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. They did not disagree with the Holocaust or the enslavement of the Slavic nations, but they disagreed with the ineffectiveness of Hitler’s military strategy.
Their plan was to keep as much of the territory that Germany had conquered before their early losses to the Allied forces. They thought that Hitler was negating the army’s chances by refusing to change his positions on death instead of withdrawing to regroup for a counterattack and reestablish their supply chain. They hoped to hold out until the American Republican Party came to power and changed their support from the Allied armies to Germany. Their belief centered on two lines of thinking. One was that the Charles Linberg wing of the Republican Party was Nazi sympathizers.
Oriana:
I happened to visit the “Wolf’s Lair” in Pomerania where the attempted assassination took place (Koszalin; it’s now a tourist attraction). Seems that Stauffenberg wasn’t able to place the suitcase with the bomb close enough to Hitler, and that a thick table leg blocked enough of the bomb’s explosion so that Hitler ended up being tossed out of the window by the force of the explosion, and ended up with just bruises. Hitler decided that “Providence” was protecting him in a Gott mit uns manner.
Yes, just as you point out, Staufffenberg also believed in Hitler's racist theories. He was very brave., but alas, we can't revere him as a hero because he was a dedicated Nazi.
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OPPENHEIMER ON EINSTEIN
“Though I knew Einstein for two or three decades, it was only in the last decade of his life that we were close colleagues and something of friends. But I thought that it might be useful, because I am sure that it is not too soon—and for our generation perhaps almost too late—to start to dispel the clouds of myth and to see the great mountain peak that these clouds hide. As always, the myth has its charms; but the truth is far more beautiful.
Late in his life, in connection with his despair over weapons and wars, Einstein said that if he had to live it over again he would be a plumber. This was a balance of seriousness and jest that no one should now attempt to disturb. Believe me, he had no idea of what it was to be a plumber; least of all in the United States, where we have a joke that the typical behavior of this specialist is that he never brings his tools to the scene of the crisis. Einstein brought his tools to his crises; Einstein was a physicist, a natural philosopher, the greatest of our time.
Einstein is often blamed or praised or credited with these miserable bombs. It is not in my opinion true. The special theory of relativity might not have been beautiful without Einstein; but it would have been a tool for physicists, and by 1932 the experimental evidence for the inter-convertibility of matter and energy which he had predicted was overwhelming. The feasibility of doing anything with this in such a massive way was not clear until seven years later, and then almost by accident. This was not what Einstein really was after. His part was that of creating an intellectual revolution, and discovering more than any scientist of our time how profound were the errors made by men before then. He did write a letter to Roosevelt about atomic energy. I think this was in part his agony at the evil of the Nazis, in part not wanting to harm any one in any way; but I ought to report that that letter had very little effect, and that Einstein himself is really not answerable for all that came later. I believe he so understood it himself.”
~ Robert Oppenheimer, 1965
Einstein and Oppenheimer, 1930s
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BARBIE AND MAKING DECISIONS
~ The Barbie movie is a huge hit. Not just with critics, but also with the audiences, especially young audiences. In some ways, this is not that surprising, given the enormous global promotion the movie got and the ongoing nostalgia for anything Barbie-related. On the other hand, neither the ad campaign nor the nostalgia explains why the Barbie movie has become not just a box office success, but also a cultural reference point that people keep on rewatching. Another explanation has to do with the ways in which the film paints a picture of the psychology of Barbie's decisions that is relatable to all generations.
The Barbie nostalgia is, in any case, limited to the first couple of minutes of the film, where we get introduced to the almost painfully pink world of Barbieland, where every day is perfect. But no matter where you were hiding recently, you probably knew these images from the trailers and posters anyway. The problem with Barbieland from a narrative point of view, is that it is difficult to put together a feature-length story arc in a perfect world. After all, what kind of conflicts and dilemmas could there be in a world where every day is perfect?
And here the film employs a surprising twist of making Barbie face decisions that make her relatable to all of us: decisions where she has to choose between something extremely familiar and something unknown. What is even more surprising is that Barbie faces such dilemmas not once, not twice, but three times. First, when she needs to choose between staying in Barbieland and going to the Real World to fix things. Second, when she is facing the dilemma of going back to the box or not. At the end of the movie, the choice between living in Barbieland and living in the Real World.
The structure of these three decisions is extremely familiar to all of us. We face decisions of that kind, between something we know and something entirely unfamiliar. When you contemplate getting married, having kids, getting divorced, taking a new job, moving to a different country or city, or even an apartment, all these decisions have the same structure. You know one option very well. You know the disadvantages, but also the advantages. And you only have some very faint ideas about the other option.
How do we actually make decisions of this kind? Here, we have a fair amount of findings in the psychology of decision-making and they all point in the same direction: given that we have no firm information about one of these options, it is imagination that plays a significant role in these decisions. You imagine yourself in your new job in an unknown country and see how that feels. Of course, imagination is not a particularly reliable guide to how things actually are, which makes these decisions not exactly rational.
But rationality is not the point of these decisions either. It is not even clear what would count as a rational decision in these contexts. When we make these decisions, we imagine our future selves in these situations, but the future self is, to a large extent, the product of exactly the decision we are making now. In some of the most important decisions we make, there is no right or wrong decision. These decisions mold your future self.
And this is exactly the way Barbie makes her grand decisions between Barbieland and the Real World. Her first decision, with allusions to the Matrix-esque blue pill versus red pill dilemma, turns out not to be a real decision as she has to go to the Real World to fix things. But in her other decisions, she faces the choice between something that feels familiar and cozy (the box or Barbieland) on the one hand, and something scarily unfamiliar and not at all cozy (the Real World) on the other. She consistently chooses the unfamiliar option, and, in the dramatic climax of the movie, does so very explicitly with the help of her imagination.
On a very simple level, the main narrative challenge of a film about Barbie is to make Barbie relatable to the audiences of today. The problem is that Barbie's life is perfect, but our lives are far from perfect. How and why would we then relate to Barbie's ideal life? And the surprising solution to this narrative puzzle is to make Barbie face decisions we all face and struggle with them the way we struggle with them. This psychological complexity may not be what many spectators went to see this movie for, but this is a big part of what makes this film an unlikely audience favorite. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychology-tomorrow/202308/why-is-the-barbie-movie-so-popular
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TO BE HAPPY, THINK LIKE AN OLD PERSON
It’s counterintuitive that old people can be happier. As we move closer to death, we become invisible and are considered a drain on the economy.
When I turned 60, all I saw ahead of me was decline. Then I met a man who said, “I’m 82 and this is the best time in my life.” I wondered, What does he know that I needed to learn?
Laura Carstenson studies aging and happiness. She found older people are happier than middle-aged and younger people. Many researchers have replicated her findings.
Changing Demographics
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, since 2010 the 65-and-older population has increased by 34 percent. It reported that over the last decade, the growth of the “non-working-age, dependent” population has outpaced the growth of the working-age population.
I object to the characterization of this population as “non-working” and “dependent.” Adults aged 65 and older are twice as likely to be working today compared with 1985. Many of them are making good money. More than 20 percent of adults over age 65 are either working or looking for work. The Census Bureau paints a picture of a smaller group of young people caring for helpless old people. Politicians have taken note as they threaten to raise the age for Social Security.
Old people are a reservoir of wisdom and experience. They may work at a slower pace but they are a valuable contribution to the workforce. Old people are a resource that can solve some of the problems of workforce shortage.
An encore job gives life meaning. I’m now 80 years old and I work. Work gives my life meaning. I wrote two books after I turned 65. I am not dependent! Of course, how much education we have and what type of work we do shapes our being able to work past the traditional retirement age.
The Paradox of Aging
In the 1980s, society considered old age pathological: depression, anxiety, and the loss of cognitive function and memory were inevitable consequences of aging.
Americans worship youth and spend billions of dollars annually in the pursuit of youth. We’re told: To avoid a descent into despair, buy this product.
The paradox of aging is that even though people's physical health and functions decline in later adulthood, happiness does not. Many studies show that depression, anxiety stress, worry, and anger all decrease with advancing age.
Recognizing we won’t live forever changes our perspective in positive ways.
Mental Health Improves with Aging
Aging is not a disease; dementia is. Unfortunately, dementia and aging are often used interchangeably. Dementia is not an inevitable consequence of aging. It is ominous to consider 10 percent of the aging population has dementia. But it looks much different when we acknowledge that 90 percent of the elderly are not demented.
Old people process information more slowly. This can frustrate the older person and cause them and their loved ones to worry about dementia. But a longer response time decreases impulsivity; we have more time to think through the problem and give a considered response.
Chronological age is just a number. We have a physical age, a psychological age, and a sexual age. They vary from individual to individual and from time to time.
In many areas, things improve as we age:
Acceptance of self and others
The desire for a deeper connection
Wisdom and empathy
Capacity for forgiveness
Gratitude
Resilience
Less emotional volatility and impulsivity
Don’t measure time; experience it
As we age, our time horizons grow shorter and our goals change. Older people direct their cognitive resources to positive information more than to negative.
I learned from that 82-year-old man that we can either measure or experience time. I was always busy, and in America, being busy is a badge of honor. I rushed from appointment to appointment, meeting to meeting.
Then, I recognized the oppressive power of ambition. I began to think, "Do I want to spend the rest of my life the way I’ve lived the first part?" My priorities changed as I moved closer to death.
Time still carries a sense of urgency, but the urgency of time has been transformed. I no longer see time as an endless series of appointments moving from one goal to the next. Now the urgency is to experience every moment and not waste the time that remains.
Perceiving the future
Younger people focus more on goals linked to learning, career planning, and new social relationships that may pay off in the future. As a young person, I felt no constraints on my time.
Every day, things happen to remind me of my mortality, and they seem to come at me with increasing frequency. As I grew older, I began to focus my attention on the positive aspects of my world. My goals shifted to ones that have emotional meaning. I live in the moment and let the future take care of itself.
I focus more on current and emotionally important relationships. I work, but only where and when I choose to. I decided never to sit through a boring lecture and never to go to cocktail parties to network. I would never wear a necktie because I refused to do what others expected of me.
I didn’t worry about dying but only how I would die. I wanted to avoid a lingering death, and I discussed that with my family and my doctor.
My social network shrank, but I pursued the most important relationships. I began to savor life, ignore trivial matters, appreciate others more, and found it easier to forgive. The more I did this, the happier I felt.
I experienced losses, but I became more comfortable with the sadness. Life became more than a series of painful events. I experience more joy, happiness, and satisfaction.
I no longer believe there’s always tomorrow. I have no promise of a tomorrow, so I’m going to make the best I can of today. I will let the future surprise me; it will unfold as it will.
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Do you value being busy more than an adventure or spending time with your family? If you’re still years away from retirement, don’t wait until you’re 65 to experience the urgency of time. Why spend 30 to 40 years in retirement? Borrow time from our retirement years while you’re young.
Get off the treadmill now. Be happy like old people.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finally-out/202307/to-be-happy-think-like-an-old-person
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A WORLD WITHOUT MARRIAGE?
~ Nearly three decades ago, Princess Diana famously said, “There were three of us in the marriage,” and the world has never forgotten. But in the U.S. (and other places, too), there are three entities in every marriage—the two spouses and the government.
What’s the government doing there? In her just-published book, Moving Past Marriage: Why We Should Ditch Marital Privilege, Eschew Relationship-Status Discrimination, and Embrace Non-marital History, literature professor Jaclyn Geller of Central Connecticut State University makes a compelling case for getting the government out of the marriage business. Of course, in the U.S., that is a highly unlikely possibility, at least in the short run. But individuals can make the choice not to marry.
But why should two people who love each other, and want to commit to each other, choose not to marry? The subtitle says it all, and those three arguments are presented compellingly, and with considerable wit, throughout the book.
First, ditching marital privilege: Government-sanctioned marriage unfairly privileges married people. I have often mentioned the hundreds of benefits and protections that people get just for being legally married. The legalities are just the start: married people are privileged in many other ways as well.
Second, ending relationship status discrimination: The disadvantaging of people who are not married, and the people who matter to them, is the flip side of advantaging married people.
Third, embracing non-marital history: Geller scours centuries of history to unearth the unheralded place of people who have never married:
“Such individuals kept showing up as achievers, community builders, and thought leaders. I discovered never-married forbearers whose numbers were substantial; they were neither a tiny minority nor a lunatic fringe. Their impact on culture was incalculable.”
It’s Personal: How Singlist Laws and Policies Matter in Our Lives
About those ways in which married people are elevated above all others and people who are not married are devalued—to Geller, all that is personal. She has deep, long-lasting, and sustaining friendships; she is very close to her sister; and she has been in a romantic relationship for years. But legally (and informally, too), none of those people count, not the way a spouse would.
Rather than just reciting the laws and policies that separate the married from the not-married, Geller shows us, in dozens of ways, how they matter in her own life. For example, she has paid into Social Security with every paycheck. She wants to name her sister as her beneficiary. Surprise! She has never been married, so she can’t name a beneficiary. When she dies, her contributions go back into the system, a system that uses that money to pay benefits to married people’s surviving spouses and maybe even an array of ex-spouses, if they meet certain requirements.
If Geller’s sister, or her romantic partner, or one of her cherished friends falls ill, she cannot take time off under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act to care for them—and they cannot do the same if she needed their care. The issue isn’t just that the important people in the lives of the never married are not protected in this significant way and so many others; it is also that, much more broadly, they just aren’t regarded as important. Friends are seen as “just friends.” No matter how close a lifelong single person may be to a friend or relative, no matter that their relationship may have lasted far longer than many marriages, no matter how interconnected their lives may be, none of those people will count as a “significant other.”
Marital status discrimination goes beyond just federal laws. There are state and local laws, too, that unfairly privilege married people and disadvantage never married people. There is singlism in many policies and practices—in workplaces, marketplaces, religious institutions, and just about every significant domain of life. For example, do you think spousal hires are a good idea? Geller has a thing or two to say about that.
Her one-sentence answer to the question of why we should move past marriage is this: “Pushing for a marriage-free society, we nonmarital Americans can celebrate our lives, savoring the joys of living alone; creating fluid, loving families; and giving our partnerships respect that the current marriage system withholds.”
Moving Past Marriage is chock full of points worth pondering. Here I’ll mention just a few.
Progress Happens, But Sometimes It Is Rendered Invisible:
Laws and policies and practices do sometimes change in the direction of greater fairness for people who are not married. For example, Geller notes that in 2010, the Obama administration updated hospital visitation rules, such that hospitals participating in Medicaid or Medicare would need to honor patients’ wishes about visitors. “Spouses would no longer get automatic top billing.” The president’s memorandum about these new rules, though, never mentioned this provision. The relevance of the rules for race, sex, sexual orientation, and religion was noted, but marital status did not make it into the memorandum.
Change Toward Greater Fairness:
Slow and Steady? I’ve always imagined that change toward greater fairness for singles would be incremental. Geller believes that something different may happen—that there will be a “galvanizing moment after which nothing is the same,” comparable to what happened after Stonewall or the Seneca Falls Convention.
How Marriage Gets Elevated and Stays That Way:
“Transhistorically,” Geller argues, marriage has often gotten propped up by “legal force, social pressure, religious dicta, economic rewards, status accorded those who conform, and punishments imposed on people who dissent or renege.”
Freedom from Some Financial Risks:
Divorce can be expensive. But if we were to move past marriage, Geller notes, “No one will have to worry that a truncated romance might drain them financially.”
People Who Resist Marriage Get Treated Condescendingly:
Geller’s critique of marriage is longstanding, dating back at least as far as when she published Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique. She has thought deeply, researched extensively, and written forcefully. And yet, she has been subject to some of the same dismissive reactions that some of us who are Single at Heart know all too well—for example, she’s been told that her resistance to marriage is just a phase.
What About the Children?
Anyone who dares to challenge the special place of marriage is likely to hear that the dismantling of marriage would hurt children. Rather than just saying that children would not be harmed, Geller makes a bolder statement—she says that there will be benefits for children: “The state will remain obligated to protect minors from physical and emotional abuse. Its duty will warrant an interest in capable adult caretakers, not spouses. . . No one will be made to feel second-rate for being born out of wedlock. Without matrimony as the dividing line between family and nonfamily, nonmarital households will not be considered second rate.”
Moving Past Marriage Doesn’t Reduce Our Choices, It Multiplies Them
In 2010, Rachel Buddeberg and I shared here at Living Single the perspectives of dozens of people and organizations already arguing, in their own ways, for moving past marriage. Michael Kinsley was one of them. In “Abolish marriage: Let’s really get the government out of our bedrooms,” he explained how freeing this could be:
“End the institution of government-sanctioned marriage […] Privatize marriage […] Let churches and other religious institutions continue to offer marriage ceremonies. Let department stores and casinos get into the act if they want. Let each organization decide for itself what kinds of couples it wants to offer marriage to. Let couples celebrate their union in any way they choose and consider themselves married whenever they want. Let others be free to consider them not married, under rules these others may prefer. And, yes, if three people want to get married, or one person wants to marry herself, and someone else wants to conduct a ceremony and declare them married, let ‘em. If you and your government aren't implicated, what do you care?”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-single/202306/a-world-without-marriage
Oriana:
This doesn't seem to consider the central fact: marriage is a legal contract. It delineates the obligations, privileges (in many cases, this pertains to taxes and health insurance) and protections for spouses and children.
Marriage also announces to others: we (the two spouses) are committed to each other: for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health. I call it the "covenant of non-abandonment." Getting married is the opposite of "having a fling."
When same-sex couples began demanding the right to be married, they reminded the rest of society that yes, marriage does matter, and is respected, apparently for valid reasons. It has some important functions. And the fact that it represents a serious commitment is the primary reason that it's respected.
Sometimes we date a person simply for lack of choice, but if we know that we'd never marry them, this judgment colors the whole relationship. There is a difference between just being infatuated with a new person, and falling in love with the right person.
As for the "financial risks," they are actually another reason strengthening marriage: we have come to trust another person so much that we are willing to make financial decisions that take them into account. We want them to thrive even after we are gone.
To be sure there are comic aspects to any marriage, but nevertheless there are ways in which marriage is sacred.
Like democracy, monogamous marriage is a messy, imperfect institution — until you consider the alternatives.
Mary:
Marriage has always been a social contract — that is nothing new. It is a contract sanctioned by the state, with certain rights and protections for the persons involved: rights and protections valuable to those persons. That's why the right to marry was fought for so hard by the gay community. The marriage contract includes you within society, legitimately, respectfully, and grants you the privileges that protect the interests and support the rights of included persons.
I don't think much of going beyond marriage. It's an institution with a long and universal history; the injustices found historically in the institution were determined by the injustices in the particulars of time and place. Until quite recently woman's inequality was legally and traditionally embedded in marriage — the wife was property, had little recourse against oppression and abuse, and little possibility of having an economic life of her own.
Freedom and equality in marriage, including the possibility of divorce, have been the results of long fought, hard won battles. Things are better than they were, even if far from perfect...and we are still in the process of changing the shape of marriage. Changes in our economic life are pushing these changes, especially in the division of work at home and child care. Working wives and mothers are both less willing and less able to shoulder all those tasks, traditionally "women's work"...while their partners do little or nothing. We are nowhere near solving this, as it is still often characterized as the man "helping" her, rather than an equitable sharing of common tasks. The quality, availability and affordability of child care is still an unsolved problem.
If marriage is privileged by the state, and of course, it is, that's because it is a contract that contributes to the operation of the state — its stability and its continued existence. It may be quite unfair to the unprivileged singles, but dismantling marriage will not correct that unfairness.
It may take the invention of other types of social contracts, between different sets of partners, and elevating these to the status of socially useful and sanctioned groups. It may take a long series of incremental changes to include other kinds of social contracts with the same level of privilege.
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HOW MISREADING ADAM SMITH HAS CONTRIBUTED TO DEATHS OF DESPAIR
~ One of the many pleasures of being a Scottish economist is being able to acknowledge Adam Smith as a predecessor. Smith was one of Scotland’s greatest thinkers in both economics and philosophy. I grew up in Edinburgh and was brought up to recognize Scots’ many achievements but was never told about Smith. Many years later, when I was inducted into the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Smith was mentioned, but only as a conveniently placed friend of the Duke of Buccleuch who helped the Society obtain its Royal Charter—that is, as a sort of well-connected lobbyist. Smith and David Hume were internationally renowned in their lifetime; the mathematician Michael Atiyah notes that their fame induced Benjamin Franklin in 1771 “to undertake the lengthy and tiresome journey by stagecoach to a small, cold, city on the northern fringes of civilization,” but Smith’s fame seems to have waned with time, at least at home.
Smith was not only a great thinker but also a great writer. He was an empirical economist whose sketchy data were more often right than wrong; he was skeptical, especially about wealth; and he was a balanced and humane thinker who cared about justice, noting how much more important it was than beneficence. But the story I want to tell is about economic failure and about economics failure, and about how Smith’s insights and humanity need to be brought back into the mainstream of economics. Much of the evidence that I use draws on my work with Anne Case as well as her work with Lucy Kraftman on Scotland in relation to the rest of the UK.
In her recent book Adam Smith’s America (2022), political scientist Glory Liu reports that in 1976, at an event celebrating the bicentenary of the publication of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, George Stigler, the eminent Chicago economist, said “I bring you greetings from Adam Smith, who is alive and well and living in Chicago!” Stigler might also have noted that the U.S. economy was flourishing too, as it had been for three decades, and might have been happy to connect the flourishing of Smith and the flourishing of the economy.
At an address to the American Philosophical Society earlier this year, the economist Benjamin Friedman updated Stigler’s quip, claiming that Smith is alive, but not so well, and is being held prisoner in Chicago. To be fair, the economics department in Chicago has changed greatly since 1976, so that the “is being held prisoner” should be more accurately put as “was being held prisoner.” And it was in this earlier period where much of the damage was done. In further contrast to 1976, the U.S. economy has not done so well over the last three decades, at least not for the less-educated majority, the currently sixty percent of the adult population without a four-year college degree. I will argue that the distorted transformation of Smith into Chicago economics, especially libertarian Chicago economics, as well as its partial but widespread acceptance by the profession, bear some responsibility for recent failures.
This failure and distress can be traced in a wide range of material and health outcomes that matter in people’s lives. Here I focus on one: mortality. The United States has seen an epidemic of what Case and I have called “deaths of despair”—deaths from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease. These deaths, all of which are to a great extent self-inflicted, are seen in few other rich countries, but in none, except in Scotland, do we see anything like the scale of the tragedy that is being experienced in America. Elevated adult mortality rates are often a measure of societal failure, especially so when those deaths come not from an infectious disease, like COVID-19, or from a failing health system, but from personal affliction. As Emile Durkheim argued long ago, suicide, which is the archetypal self-inflicted destruction, is more likely to happen during times of intolerable social change when people have lost the relationships with others and the social framework that they need to support their flourishing.
Drug deaths account for more than half of all deaths of despair in the United States and more in Scotland. Figure 1 shows trends in life expectancy for men and women in the United States, in the UK, and in Scotland from 1980 to 2019. Upward trends are good and dominate the picture. The increases are more rapid for men than for women: women are less likely to die of heart attacks than are men, and so have benefited less from the decline in heart disease that had long been a leading cause of falling mortality. Scotland does worse than the UK, and is more like the United States, though Scots women do worse than American women; a history of heavy smoking does much to explain these Scottish outcomes. If we focus on the years just before the pandemic, we see a slowdown in progress in all three countries; this is happening in several other rich countries, though not all. We see signs of falling life expectancy even before the pandemic. (I do not discuss the pandemic here because it raises issues beyond my main argument.) Falling life expectancy is something that rich countries have long been used to not happening.
The remarkable thing here is that, in the United States, those without a B.A. have experienced falling (adult) life expectancy since 2010, while those with the degree have continued to see improvements. Adult mortality rates are going in opposite directions for the more and less educated. The gap, which was about 2.5 years in 1992, doubled to 5 years in 2019 and reached 7 years in 2021.
drug overdose deaths Red: US whites; blue: Scotland
The reversal of mortality decline in the United States has many proximate causes; one of the most important has been the slowing—and for the less-educated an actual reversal—of the previously long-established decline in mortality from heart disease. But opioids and opioid manufacturers were an important part of the story.
In 1995 the painkiller OxyContin, manufactured by Purdue Pharmaceutical, a private company owned by the Sackler family, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). OxyContin is an opioid; think of it as a half-strength dose of heroin in pill form with an FDA label of approval—effective for pain relief, and highly addictive. Traditionally, doctors in the United States did not prescribe opiates, even for terminally ill cancer patients—unlike in Britain—but they were persuaded by relentless marketing campaigns and a good deal of misdirection that OxyContin was safe for chronic pain.
Chronic pain had been on the rise in the United States for some time, and Purdue and their distributors targeted communities where pain was prevalent: a typical example is a company coal town in West Virginia where the company and the coal had recently vanished. Overdose deaths began to rise soon afterwards. By 2012 enough opioid prescriptions were being written for every American adult to have a month’s supply. In time, physicians began to realize what they had done and cut back on prescriptions. Or at least most did; a few turned themselves into drug dealers and operated pill mills, selling pills for money or, in some cases, for sex. Many of those doctors are now in jail. (Barbara Kingsolver’s recent Demon Copperhead, set in southwest Virginia, is a fictionalized account of the social devastation, especially among children and young people.)
In 2010 Purdue reformulated Oxycontin to make it harder to abuse, and around the same time the docs pulled back, but by then a large population of people had become addicted to the drugs, and when prescribers denied them pills, black market suppliers flooded the illicit market with cheap heroin and fentanyl, which is more than thirty times stronger than heroin. Sometimes dealers even met disappointed patients outside pain clinics. The epidemic of addiction and death that had been sparked by pharma companies in search of profit was enabled by some members of Congress, who, as Case and I describe in detail in our book, changed the law to make life easier for distributors and shut down investigations by the Drug Enforcement Agency. None of these congressional representatives was punished by voters.
Purdue wasn’t alone. Johnson & Johnson, maker of Band-Aids and baby powder, farmed opium poppies in Tasmania to feed demand at the same time, ironically, that the U.S. military was bombing opium fields in Afghanistan—perhaps an early attempt at friend-shoring. Distribution companies poured millions of pills into small towns. But once the spark ignited the fire, the fuel to maintain it switched from legal prescription drugs to illegal street drugs. Of the 107,000 overdoses in the United States in 2021, more than 70,000 involved synthetic opioids other than methadone—primarily fentanyl.
The Scots can perhaps congratulate themselves that Scottish doctors are not like American doctors. Scotland may have an epidemic of drug deaths, but at least it was not sparked by the greed of doctors and pharma, and not enabled by members of the Scottish parliament. Still, the Scots have their own dark episodes. Let’s go back to one of Smith’s most disliked institutions, the East India Company, and two Scotsmen, James Matheson and William Jardine, both graduates of Edinburgh University, one of whom (Jardine) was a physician. In 1817 Jardine left the East India Company and partnered with Matheson and Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, a Parsi merchant in Bombay in Western India to pursue the export of opium to China—which, by that date, had become the main source of Company profits. China, whose empire was in a state of some decay, tried to stop the importation of opium and, on the orders of the Daoguang Emperor, Viceroy Lin Zexu—who today is represented by a statue in Chinatown in New York with the inscription “Pioneer in the War against Drugs”—destroyed several years’ supply of the drug in Humen, near Canton, today’s Guangzhou. In China today, Lin is a national hero.
In 1839 Jardine appealed to the British Government to punish Lin’s act and to seek reparations for the loss, even though opium was illegal in China. This would be akin to Mexico demanding reparations from the United States for confiscating a drug shipment by a cartel. After Parliament narrowly approved—many MPs saw the drug trade for the crime that it was—Foreign Secretary Palmerston sent in the gunboats to defend the profits of the drug cartel, with effects that can be felt to this day. In contemporary Chinese accounts, this was the beginning of the century of humiliation that only came to an end with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The Opium War still stands in China as a symbol of the evils of capitalism and the perfidy of the West.
Jardine became a member of parliament, and was succeeded after his early death by Matheson, who went on to be a Fellow of the Royal Society and eventually, owner of the Isle of Lewis, where he found a new line in exports: helping Scots living on his estates to emigrate to Canada during the Highland Potato famine. By all accounts, Lord Matheson, as he had by then become, was a good deal more compassionate to his tenants than to his Chinese customers.
Jardine Matheson is to this day a large and successful company. Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy used his wealth from the opium trade to become a philanthropist, endowing hospitals in India, many of which still stand. For this work he was first knighted and then, in 1857, given a Baronetcy by Queen Victoria. In a perhaps unsurprising echo, Queen Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth, awarded knighthoods in the 1990s to Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, owners of Purdue Pharma, not for the human destruction they had wrought in the United States but for their philanthropy in Britain, much of which involved what was later called “art-washing.” Many institutions are still trying to extricate themselves from Sackler money, including, most recently, Oxford University in the UK and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine who produced an “authoritative” report that, by several accounts, exaggerated the extent of pain in the United States, and thus the need for OxyContin.
The Sacklers, Jardine, Matheson, and Jeejeebhoy were all businessmen pursuing their own self-interest, just like Smith’s famous butcher, brewer, and baker, so why did the dealers do so much harm while, in Smith’s account, his tradesmen were serving the general well-being? Perhaps they were simply criminals who used their ill-gotten gains to corrupt the state—just what Smith had in mind when he described the laws that merchants clamored for as “like the laws of Draco,” in that they were “written in blood.” And misbehavior of the East India Company would have been no surprise to Smith. That is certainly part of the story, but I want to follow a different line of argument.
Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand,” the idea that self-interest and competition will often work to the general good, is what economists today call the first welfare theorem. Exactly what this general good is and exactly how it gets promoted have been central topics in economics ever since. The work of Gerard Debreu and Kenneth Arrow in the 1950s eventually provided a comprehensive analysis of Smith’s insight, including precise definitions of what sort of general good gets promoted, what, if any, are the limitations to that goodness, and what conditions must hold for the process to work.
I want to discuss two issues. First, there is the question of whose good we are talking about. The butcher, at least qua butcher, cares not at all about social justice; to her, money is money, and it doesn’t matter whose it is. The good that markets promote is the goodness of efficiency—the elimination of waste, in the sense that it is impossible to make anyone better off without hurting at least one other person. Certainly that is a good thing, but it is not the same thing as the goodness of justice. The theorem says nothing about poverty nor about the distribution of income. It is possible that the poor gain through markets—possibly by more than the rich, as was argued by Mises, Hayek, and others—but that is a different matter, requiring separate theoretical or empirical demonstration.
A second condition is good information: that people know about the meat, beer, and bread that they are buying, and that they understand what will happen when they consume it. Arrow understood that information is always imperfect, but that the imperfection is more of a problem in some markets than others: not so much in meat, beer, and bread, for example, but a crippling problem in the provision of health care. Patients must rely on physicians to tell them what they need in a way that is not true of the butcher, who does not expect to be obeyed when she tells you that, just to be sure you have enough, you should take home the carcass hanging in her shop. In the light of this fact, Arrow concluded that private markets should not be used to provide health care. “It is the general social consensus, clearly, that the laissez-faire solution for medicine is intolerable,” he wrote. This is (at least one of the) reason(s) why almost all wealthy countries do not rely on pure laissez-faire to provide health care.
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So why is America different? And what does America’s failure to heed Arrow have to do with the Sacklers, or with deaths of despair, or with OxyContin and the pain and despair that it exploited and created? There are many reasons why America’s health care system is not like the Canadian or European systems, including, perhaps most importantly, the legacy of racial injustice. But today I want to focus on economics.
Neither America nor American economics was always committed to laissez-faire. In 1886, in his draft of the founding principles of the American Economic Association, Richard Ely wrote that “the doctrine of laissez-faire is unsafe in politics and unsound in morals.” The Association’s subscribers knew something about morals; in his 2021 book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Ben Friedman notes that 23 of its original 181 members were Protestant clergymen. The shift began with Chicago economics, and the strange transformation of Smith’s economics into Chicago economics (which, as the story of Stigler’s quip attests, was branded as Smithian economics). Liu’s book is a splendid history of how this happened.
As Angus Burgin has finely documented in The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (2015), Chicago economists did not argue that Arrow’s theorems were wrong, nor that markets could not fail—just that any attempt to address market failures would only make things worse. Worse still was the potential loss of freedom that, from a libertarian perspective, would follow from attempts to interfere with free markets.
Chicago economics is important. Many of us were brought up on a naïve economics in which market failures could be fixed by government action; indeed, that was one of government’s main functions. Chicago economists correctly argued that governments could fail, too. Stigler himself argued that regulation was often undone because regulators were captured by those they were supposed to be regulating. Monopolies, according to Milton Friedman, were usually temporary and were more likely to be competed away than reformed; markets were more likely to correct themselves than to be corrected by government regulators.
James Buchanan argued that politicians, like consumers and producers, had interests of their own, so that the government cannot be assumed to act in the public interest and often does not. Friedman argued in favor of tax shelters because they put brakes on government expenditures. Inequality was not a problem in need of a solution. In fact, he argued, most inequality was just: the thrifty got rich and spendthrifts got poor, so redistribution through taxation penalized virtue and subsidized the spendthrift.
Friedman believed that attempts to limit inequality of outcomes would stifle freedom, that “equality comes sharply into conflict with freedom; one must choose,” but, in the end, choosing equality would result in less of it. Free markets, on the other hand, would produce both freedom and equality. These ideas were often grounded more in hope than in reality, and history abounds with examples of the opposite: indeed, the early conflict between Jefferson and Hamilton concerned the former’s horror over speculation by unregulated bankers.
Gary Becker extended the range of Chicago economics beyond its traditional subject matter. He applied the standard apparatus of consumer choice to topics in health, sociology, law, and political science. On addiction, he argued that people dabbling in drugs recognize the dangers and will take them into account. If someone uses fentanyl, they know that subsequent use will generate less pleasure than earlier use, that in the end, it might be impossible to stop, and that their life might end in a hell of addiction. They know all this, but are rational, and so will only use if the net benefit is positive. There is no need to regulate, Becker believed: trying to stop drug use will only cause unnecessary harm and hurt those who are rationally consuming them.
Chicago analysis serves as an important corrective to the naïve view that the business of government is to correct market failures. But it all went too far, and morphed into a belief that government was entirely incapable of helping its citizens. In a recent podcast, economist Jim Heckman tells that when he was a young economist at Chicago, he wrote about the effects of civil rights laws in the 1960s on the wages of Black people in South Carolina. The resulting paper, published in 1989 in the American Economic Review, is the one of which Heckman is most proud. But his colleagues were appalled. Stigler and D. Gale Johnson, then chair of the economics department, simply would not have it. “Do you really believe that the government did good?” they asked him. This was not a topic that could possibly be subject to empirical inquiry; it had been established that the government could do nothing to help.
If the government could do nothing for African Americans, then it certainly could do nothing to improve the delivery of health care. Price controls were anathema because they would only undermine the provision of new lifesaving drugs and devices and would artificially limit provision, and this was true no matter what prices pharma demanded. If the share of national income devoted to health care were to expand inexorably, then that must be what consumers want, because markets work and health care is a commodity like any other. By the time of the pandemic, U.S. health care was absorbing almost a fifth of GDP, more than four times as much as military expenditure, and about three times as much as education. And just in case one might think that health care has anything to do with life expectancy, the OECD currently lists U.S. life expectancy as thirty-fourth out of the forty-nine countries that it tabulates. (That is lower than the figures for China and Costa Rica.)
I do not want to make the error of drawing a straight line from a body of thought to actual policy. In his General Theory (1936), Keynes famously wrote that “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” Keynes added “I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.” Keynes was wrong about the power of vested interests, at least in the United States, but he was surely right about the academic scribblers — though the effect works slowly, and usually indirectly. Hayek understood this very well, writing in his Constitution of Liberty (1960) that the direct influence of a philosopher on current affairs may be negligible, but “when his ideas have become common property, through the work of historians and publicists, teachers and writers, and intellectuals generally, they effectively guide developments.”
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Chicago analysis serves as an important corrective to the naïve view that the business of government is to correct market failures. But it all went too far.
Friedman was an astonishingly effective rhetorician, perhaps only ever equaled among economists by Keynes. Politicians today, especially on the right, constantly extol the power of markets. “Americans have choices,” declared Former Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz in 2017. “Perhaps, instead of getting that new iPhone that they just love, maybe they should invest in their own health care. They’ve got to make those decisions themselves.” Texas Republican Jeb Hensarling, who chaired the House Financial Services Committee from 2013 to 2019, became a politician to “further the cause of the free market” because “free-market economics provided the maximum good to the maximum number.” Hensarling studied economics with once professor and later U.S. Senator Phil Gramm, another passionate and effective advocate for markets. My guess is that most Americans, and even many economists, falsely believe that using prices to correct an imbalance between supply and demand is not just good policy but is guaranteed to make everyone better off. The belief in markets, and the lack of concern about distribution, runs very deep.
And there are worse defunct scribblers than Friedman. Republican ex-speaker Paul Ryan and ex-Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan are devotees of Ayn Rand, who despised altruism and celebrated greed, who believed that, as was carefully not claimed by Hayek and other more serious philosophers—the rich deserved their wealth and the poor deserved their misery. Andrew Koppelman, in his 2022 study of libertarianism, Burning Down the House, has argued that Rand’s influence has been much larger than commonly recognized. Her message that markets are not only efficient and productive but also ethically justified is a terrible poison—which does not prevent this message from being widely believed.
The Chicago School’s libertarian message of non-regulation was catnip to rich businessmen who enthusiastically funded its propagation. They could oppose taxation in the name of freedom: the perfect cover for crony capitalists, rent seekers, polluters, and climate deniers. Government-subsidized health care as well as public transport and infrastructure were all attacks on liberty. Successful entrepreneurs founded pro-market think tanks whose conferences and writings amplified the ideas. Schools for judges were (and are) held in luxury resorts to help educate the bench in economic thinking; the schools had no overt political bias, and several distinguished economists taught in them. The (likely correct) belief of the sponsors is that understanding markets will make judges more sympathetic to business interests and will purge any “unprofessionalism” about fairness. Judge Richard Posner, another important figure in Chicago economics, believed that efficiency was just, automatically so—an idea that has spread among the American judiciary. In 1959 Stigler wrote that “the professional study of economics makes one politically conservative.” He seems to have been right, at least in America.
There is no area of the economy that has been more seriously damaged by libertarian beliefs than health care. While the government provides health care to the elderly and the poor, and while Obamacare provides subsidies to help pay for insurance, those policies were enacted by buying off the industry and by giving up any chance of price control. In Britain, when Nye Bevan negotiated the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948, he dealt with providers by “[stuffing] their mouths with gold”—but just once. Americans, on the other hand, pay the ransom year upon year. Arrow had lost the battle against market provision, and the intolerable became the reality. For many Americans, reality became intolerable.
Prices of medical goods and services are often twice or more the prices in other countries, and the system makes heavy use of procedures that are better at improving profits than improving health. It is supported by an army of lobbyists—about five for every member of Congress, three of them representing pharma alone. Its main regulator is the FDA, and while I do not believe that the FDA has been captured, the industry and the FDA have a cozy relationship which does nothing to rein in profits. Pharma companies not only charge more in the United States, but, like other tech companies, they transfer their patents and profits to low-tax jurisdictions. I doubt that Smith would argue that the high cost of drugs in the United States, like the cost of apothecaries in his own time, could be attributed to the delicate nature of their work, the trust in which they are held, or that they are the sole physicians to the poor.
When a fifth of GDP is spent on health care, much else is foregone. Even before the pandemic ballooned expenditures, the threat was clear. In his 2013 book on the 2008 financial crisis, After the Music Stopped, Alan Blinder wrote, “If we can somehow solve the health care cost problem, we will also solve the long-run deficit problem. But if we can’t control health care costs, the long run budget problem is insoluble.” All of this has dire effects on politics, not just on the economy.
Case and I have argued that while out-of-control health care costs are hurting us all, they are wrecking the low-skill labor market and exacerbating the disruptions that are coming from globalization, automation, and deindustrialization. Most working-age Americans get health insurance through their employers. The premiums are much the same for low-paid as for high-paid workers, and so are a much larger share of the wage costs for less-educated workers. Firms have large incentives to get rid of unskilled employees, replacing them with outsourced labor, domestic or global, or with robots. Few large corporations now offer good jobs for less-skilled workers. We see this labor market disaster as one of the most powerful of the forces amplifying deaths of despair among working class Americans—certainly not the only one, but one of the most important.
According to these accounts, the government is powerless to help its citizens—and in fact, it regularly and inevitably hurts them.
Scotland shows that you do not need an out-of-control health care sector to produce drug overdoses—that deindustrialization and community destruction are important here just as they are in the United States. But Scotland seems to have skipped the middle stages, going straight from deindustrialization and distress to an illegal drug epidemic. As with less-educated Americans, some Scots point to a failure of democracy: of people being ruled by politicians who are not like them, and whom they neither like nor voted for.
The inheritors of the Chicago tradition are alive and well and have brought familiar arguments to the thinking about deaths of despair. As has often been true of libertarian arguments, social problems are largely blamed on the actions of the state. Casey Mulligan, an economist on Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors, argued that by preventing people from drinking in bars and requiring them to drink cheaper store-bought alcohol at home, COVID-19 public health lockdowns were responsible for the explosion of mortality from alcoholic liver disease during the pandemic. Others have argued that drug overdoses were exacerbated by Medicaid drug subsidies, inducing a new kind of “dependence” on the government. In 2018 U.S. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin issued a report, Drugs for Dollars: How Medicaid Helps Fuel the Opioid Epidemic. According to these accounts, the government is powerless to help its citizens—and not only is it capable of hurting them, but it regularly and inevitably does so.
I do not want to claim that health care is the only industry that we should worry about. Maha Rafi Atal is writing about Amazon and how, like the East India Company, it has abrogated to itself many of the powers of government, especially local government, and that, as Smith predicted, government by merchants—government in the aid of greed—is bad government. Health care is not a single entity, unlike Amazon, but like Amazon, its power in Washington is deeply troubling. There are serious anxieties over the behavior of other tech companies too. Banks did immense harm in the financial crisis. Today legalized addiction to gambling, to phones, to video games, and to social media has become a tool of corporate profit making, just as OxyContin was a tool of profit making for the Sacklers. After many years of stability, the share of profits in national income is rising. People who should be full citizens in a participatory democracy can often feel more like sheep waiting to be sheared.
Of course, there have always been mainstream economists who were not libertarians, perhaps even a majority: those who worked for Democratic administrations, for instance, and who did not subscribe to all Chicago doctrines. But there is no doubt that the belief in markets has become more widely accepted on the left as well as on the right. Indeed, it would be a mistake to lay blame on Chicago economics alone and to absolve the rest of an economics profession that was all too eager to adopt its ideas. Economists have become famous (or infamous) for their sometimes-comic focus on efficiency, and on the role of markets in promoting it. And they have come to think of well-being as individualistic, independent of the relationships with others that sustain us all. In 2006, after Friedman’s death, it was Larry Summers who wrote that “any honest Democrat will admit that we are all now Friedmanites.”
He went on to praise Friedman’s achievements in persuading the nation to adopt an all-volunteer military and to recognize the benefits of “modern financial markets”—all this less than two years before the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. The all-volunteer military is another bad policy whose consequences could end up being even worse. It lowers the costs of war to the decision-making elites whose children rarely serve, and it runs the risk of spreading pro-Trump populism by recruiting enlisted men and women from the areas and educational groups among which such support is already strong.
The beliefs in market efficiency and the idea that well-being can be measured in money have become second nature to much of the economics profession. Yet it does not have to be this way. Economists working in Britain—Amartya Sen, James Mirrlees, and Anthony Atkinson—pursued a broader program, worrying about poverty and inequality and considering health as a key component of well-being. Sen argues that a key misstep was made not by Friedman but by Hayek’s colleague Lionel Robbins, whose definition of economics as the study of allocating scarce resources among competing ends narrowed the subject compared with what philosopher Hilary Putnam calls the “reasoned and humane evaluation of social wellbeing that Adam Smith saw as essential to the task of the economist.” And it was not just Smith, but his successors, too, who were philosophers as well as economists.
Economics should be about understanding the reasons for, and doing away with, the world’s sordidness and joylessness.
Sen contrasts Robbins’s definition with that of Arthur Cecil Pigou, who wrote, “It is not wonder, but rather the social enthusiasm which revolts from the sordidness of mean streets and the joylessness of withered lives, that is the beginning of economic science.” Economics should be about understanding the reasons for, and doing away with, the world’s sordidness and joylessness. It should be about understanding the political, economic, and social failures behind deaths of despair. But that is not how it worked out in the United States. ~
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-misreading-adam-smith-helped-spawn-deaths-of-despair/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=41059393f5-newsletter_8_2_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-41059393f5-40729829&mc_cid=41059393f5&mc_eid=97e2edfae1
Mary:
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more on the Chicago School of Economics:
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ADAM SMITH: HOW A SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHER BECAME AN ICON OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM
~ One puzzle in the intellectual history of the twentieth century is why the University of Chicago became the leading bastion of free market economics.
Scholars have proposed compelling explanations, from the strong rooting of “price theory” at Chicago by the end of the 1930s to the participation of many of its faculty members in postwar, pro-market advocacy groups that began to embrace neoliberalism by the 1960s. But having spent most of my adult life at the university and in its surrounding neighborhood of Hyde Park, I can’t help but wonder about a more quotidian contributing factor: the area’s limited range of commerce in the days when Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and George Stigler walked these streets.
Hyde Park is on Chicago’s South Side, not the posh North. The area once buzzed with urban commercial traffic—right after World War II, when many Black people moved to the city from the South in order to work in factories. Famous jazz and blues clubs abounded on the neighborhood’s central commercial corridor of 55th street, where legends like Coleman Hawkins, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins played. But then the factories began to shutdown. Poverty and street crime rose. The U.S. “urban crisis” fell on Chicago.
At the university, fears arose about white flight and a potential diminished ability to recruit students and faculty. Thus began a decades-long “urban renewal” project in Hyde Park, carried out by the city and the university. Launched in 1952, the effort became one of the largest of its kind in the United States.
Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), called the initiative “opprobrious.” The project demolished 55th Street, selling lots back to private developers who built low-slung condominiums and two hulking modernist I. M. Pei apartment towers. Automobile traffic was routed away from the neighborhood, and access to public transportation, including the city’s “L” train, was cut off to keep poor (often Black) people out. Wielding eminent domain and controlling so much local property, the university undermined much commercial activity, anxious to keep outsiders from traveling into the neighborhood. Hyde Park saw its population and urban density dramatically decline, becoming a relative commercial desert within the larger metropolis.
By the end of the twentieth century, the university began to change course, recruiting more businesses to open establishments. I recall, as a doctoral student in the mid-2000s, standing in line when the first Starbucks opened, on 55th street. I waited alongside one of my more intellectually intimidating professors, as we readied our orders. Before our turn came, the barista informed us that we could not be served; they had no more coffee beans. Locals shrugged knowingly at each other, as if to say, “only here does Starbucks run out of coffee.” It would take time for multinational corporate enterprise to conquer Hyde Park, but eventually it did.
In his instant classic Globalists (2018), historian Quinn Slobodian traced the origins of what he calls the “Geneva School” of neoliberalism to the experiences of a group of men in Vienna—Hayek, along with Ludwig von Mises, Alexander Rüstow, Wilhelm Röpke, and Michael Heilperin—who lived through the disruptions of world war followed by the breakup of the Habsburg empire. To replace Austro-Hungary, they dreamed up a new imperial project: a global market capitalism free from the fetters of the twentieth-century social democratic state.
I can imagine how a complementary history titled Localists might go—placing the Chicago school in the context of Chicago itself, tracing the experiences of these men as they moved through the streets of Hyde Park. Given its now ample coverage, Friedman’s and Stigler’s membership in the transnational network of neoliberals organized by Hayek at Mont Pelerin, Switzerland, in 1947 could be passed over. Space could be devoted instead to the dearth of business establishments and to all the university-claimed property on Friedman’s daily walk, between his family’s Hyde Park home and his office in the university’s Social Science Research Building.
Could it be that this parochial context fanned the flames of market fundamentalism?
Another suggestive fact is that Hayek’s pro-market libertarian leanings only intensified after he accepted a position at the university’s Committee on Social Thought in 1950 and came to live for over a decade in Hyde Park, where he wrote The Constitution of Liberty (1960)—after having lived in Vienna and London. Stigler, for his part, took his PhD at Chicago in 1938 and spent more than a decade at Columbia, where he worked on the Manhattan Project, before returning in 1958—the same year the city of Chicago approved a “master plan” for the urban renewal project, and a year before the university acquired powers of eminent domain thanks to federal legislation. By 1961 Stigler would start one of his most influential articles by commenting that the theory of information “occupies a slum dwelling in the town of economics.” Local context, it seems, crept in.
No doubt, Stigler at least would reject this perspective on intellectual history. In 1976, when Hyde Park was approaching its urban commercial nadir, the University of Chicago Press published a bicentennial edition of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations with a preface by Stigler, whose research focus was economic regulation. I carried this edition under my arm in graduate school (as Chicago undergraduates still do today), after I convinced one of my professors to grant me a course credit for reading a syllabus on “classical political economy,” for which I selected two texts, Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Marx’s Capital.
How striking was the difference between Stigler’s preface to The Wealth of Nations and Ernst Mandel’s introduction to Capital, also published, coincidentally, in 1976. Where Mandel offered a laborious, seventy-six-page exegesis of Marx’s “dialectical method of investigation,” Stigler gave a breezy gloss that barely crept onto a fourth page. He informed the reader that “the fundamental explanation of man’s behavior, in Smith’s view, is found in the rational, persistent pursuit of self-interest” and that Smith “never married” (presumably in his own self-interest), but not much more. What was this guy’s deal, I wondered?
It turned out that Stigler had already asserted that “the correct way to read Adam Smith is the correct way to read the forthcoming issues of a professional journal”— the positivist reading method he evidently applied to preface writing, too. Stigler also pronounced in his Essays in the History of Economics (1965) that “the dominant influence upon the working range of economic theorists is the set of internal values and pressures of the discipline” and that to investigate any historical context “related to the development of economic theory” is “an exercise in erudition, not in explanation.” He surely would have dismissed any effort to explain his ideas by reference to such vulgar context as his own local surroundings.
But even if my hunch is wrong—even if the Chicago school’s free market advocacy was in no way stoked by contempt for eminent domain, the power of city planners, and the resulting lack of enterprise in Hyde Park—a larger point holds: Stigler got more mileage from quoting The Wealth of Nations than he would have if he had just complained about personal inconveniences he suffered due to Chicago’s municipal zoning regulations. To shore up their intellectual authority, intellectuals cite the authority of bygone intellectuals.
Much less often, mercifully, do they recount their own daily life’s irritations or pleasantries—even when these and not passages from their favorite books shape their highest intellectual commitments. (Just how much has my own writing about the economy—so informed by Keynes, the Chicago’s school archenemy—been shaped by my own daily walks, past the gorgeous building that today houses the economics department to my office in the now shabby Social Science Research Building, where the roof sometimes leaks?)
Rather than pondering the local contexts of their own thought, thinkers more typically project themselves into the thoughts of those who lived before them, often long before them. From these encounters, much misreading and misunderstanding follows—but so, through creative appropriation, does much insight. The history of ideas chugs along.
That there is much to learn from these encounters, something different from what debating what Adam Smith really meant, is the premise of “reception history.” Glory Liu’s careful study of the role played by Smith in American intellectual life over the centuries, Adam Smith’s America, is an exemplary version of this genre of intellectual history, joining such notable studies as Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche (2011), Emily Jones’s Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1930–1914 (2017), and Claire Rydell Arcenas’s America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life (2022). (A much-anticipated study of Marx’s reception in the United States, by Andrew Hartman, is forthcoming.)
Liu presents Smith’s reception history as a unique window into what she calls the nation’s “politics of political economy.” She is right, but in some cases there is more to say about the contexts in which reception takes place than she lets on. As it happens, one of the greatest lessons of Smith’s work itself is that we too often ignore local context at our peril.
Smith published The Wealth of Nations the same year Americans signed the Declaration of Independence. Despite the uncanny coincidence of the date, there was not enough time for Smith’s book to have influenced the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton read Smith, who loomed over post-Revolutionary political economic debates, but not all that large. In the next chapter of Smith’s budding influence, early U.S. colleges used The Wealth of Nations as a textbook in their first courses in political economy. Then, over the nineteenth century, Smith commonly cropped up in public debates about the merits of U.S. industrial trade protection. Free traders cited Smith as their ally.
Smith was not yet a major figure. Still, Liu uncovers a noteworthy pattern. Those who leveraged Smith’s argument on behalf of free trade held it out as a universal truth—hard-won by a science of “political economy,” whose firm foundations Smith had set. Their antagonists did not dismiss The Wealth of Nations. Instead, they asserted that Smith, great though he was, was a thinker of his own times who must be read in historical context. In this instance, his criticisms of eighteenth-century British “mercantilist” trade policy did not directly translate into a convincing criticism of the nineteenth-century U.S. industrial trade tariff.
In the second half of Liu’s book, the pendulum swings about. Progressive economists, like Richard Ely, preferred the historicist reading of Smith. Next, in the hands of the post–World War II Chicago school, the universalist reading of Smith won the day. Only now, during the 1970s, did Smith truly become a public “icon of American capitalism,” to quote Liu’s subtitle.
At the turn of the twentieth century, progressive economists, the men who first split the professional study of “economics” in the U.S. off from its parent “political economy,” appealed to Smith’s entire oeuvre. They hoped that the new economics might still maintain contact with political economy’s parent of moral philosophy. Many of them, like Ely, had first studied economics in German universities, dominated by its heavily empiricist “historical school.” The German reception of Smith focused on the seeming tension between The Wealth of Nations and Smith’s first great work, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). The former began on the topic of self-interest, the latter with a lengthy discussion of sympathy. “Das Adam Smith Problem” was, do the two accounts fit?
Ely and his peers answered yes. Aiding their effort was the 1896 publication of student notes from Smith’s 1762–1763 Lectures on Jurisprudence. There, Smith declared that the maintenance of justice, not, say, market efficiency or economic growth, was “the first and chief design of every system of government.” Ely’s Smith, Liu writes, “stood firmly on the side of labor and tiptoed toward the edge of socialism.” For this generation, “If there was anything like a scholarly consensus around Smith . . . it was held together by shared interest in using Smith to illuminate the ethical and economic possibilities that existed between complete laissez-faire on the one hand and socialism on the other.”
That is where the (largely academic) reception of Smith stood, before the Great Depression struck and after it came FDR’s New Deal. Then Chicago’s Adam Smith enters the picture, and the story takes a sharp right turn.
For Liu the Chicago school’s appropriation of Smith is the pivotal episode in his American reception, meriting two chapters. Liu begins by noting a 1926 sesquicentennial commemoration held in Hyde Park. Chicago’s Smith was not distinctive yet. Philosopher Glenn Morrow called the Scotsman no apologist for “naked individualism,” while economist Jacob Viner held that The Wealth of Nations countenanced a “wide and elastic range of government activity.” In the classroom, Viner and his colleague Frank Knight were teaching their soon-to-be legendary Chicago course on price theory. Student lecture notes reveal that they deployed The Wealth of Nations mostly as a foil to demonstrate errors in economic analysis.
In 1946 Viner left Chicago for Princeton, Knight was easing into retirement, and Friedman, their former student, returned to Chicago as an associate professor. By 1958 Stigler was back, too, and the proverbial “second” Chicago school was born.
In the postwar decades, only Stigler fixated on Smith in his scholarship. One of the oddities of this history is that Smith was not the fountainhead of Chicago economics. Viner and Knight’s price theory was faithful to the “partial equilibrium” economics of the late nineteenth-century Cambridge giant Alfred Marshall (Keynes’s mentor, and the target of his intellectual parricide). Behind Friedman’s monetarism stood the Yale economist Irving Fisher’s quantity theory of money—and behind him, not Smith, but Smith’s great mentor, friend, and fellow Scotsman David Hume.
In Stigler’s positivist reading, there were things Smith got right and things he got wrong. The wrong could simply be dispensed with, the right—the universal truths—embraced. And what Smith got right, Stigler thought, was the primacy of “self-interest.” In Stigler’s reading, The Wealth of Nations was a “stupendous palace erected upon the granite of self-interest.” Stigler cited Smith in his theory of economic regulation. To Stigler, there was no such thing as the “public interest”—a cherished value for Ely’s generation of progressives. Thus, state regulations only expressed the self-interests of the economic actors they benefited, and probably the self-interests of state officials themselves, too.
Additional perspectives could have helped these later chapters of Liu’s book. I have already speculated how the eradication of Black commercial life in Hyde Park might fit into the picture. One aspect of Stigler and Friedman’s relationship to Smith, in the register of affect not ideas, also deserves comment.
Ely thought Smith an ally of progressivism, but he did not wear an “Adam Smith’s best friend” T-shirt or a necktie featuring a cascading series of Smith silhouettes. Stigler and Friedman did. The white, male, conservative lionization of Smith should probably be placed within the broader “roots revival” of the 1970s, which saw the rediscovery of white ethnicity. Intellectual history is no more helpful to explaining Smith’s reception here than it would be to making sense of the rise of, say, 1970s Southern rock.
Added to this cultural setting must be a related political context. For if Stigler forthrightly offered a self-serving reading of Smith, cherry-picking the sentences he liked, Friedman did not try even that hard. He brazenly weaponized Smith in the Chicago school’s no-holds-barred assault on the New Deal state. Unlike Dwight Eisenhower and Rockefeller Republicans, the Chicago school rejected the legitimacy of the New Deal tout court. The fact that Smith became a public icon of American capitalism during the 1970s and 1980s is a testament to the Chicago school’s success in the shifting the terms of U.S. political economic debate from the merits of concrete policies to abstract generalities about the market and the state.
What a strange move it was to look to an eighteenth-century Scotsman for a trenchant critique of postwar American liberalism. Should one have wanted to critique it, the Chicago school had local advantages: there were few better places to see that postwar liberalism had failed than Hyde Park. The Democratic Party’s preferred regimen of urban “slum clearance”—followed by tax credits to indirectly induce private investment in lieu of adequate public investments—was not enough (and still is not enough). Economic development simply did not follow urban renewal—infamously branded “Negro removal” by James Baldwin. Instead, capital flight and white flight joined to gut local commerce in cities like Chicago.
In 1966 Martin Luther King, Jr. arrived in the city to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement, a prelude to the later Poor People’s Campaign. King led a march through an all-white neighborhood in Marquette Park on the city’s southwest side; a rock thrown from the white crowd hit his head. He had first given a speech at the University of Chicago in 1956 and returned two more times in 1959 and 1966. I do not know whether Friedman and Stigler attended his addresses. We do know that the Chicago school was no friend to civil rights legislation or to state efforts to redress urban poverty and advance economic opportunity.
They held principled reasons not to be. The most important ideological move the Chicago school made, in terms of politics, was the rhetorical lumping of all states all together and for all times. Tellingly, this move was evident in several statements Stigler and Friedman made about Smith. In 1976, at a bicentenary celebration of The Wealth of Nations in Glasgow, Stigler bizarrely declared, “I bring you greetings from Adam Smith, who is alive and well and living in Chicago.” Stigler did not say Smith’s legacy was alive and well in Chicago: he said Smith was. Similarly, around this time, Liu uncovers, Friedman gave a speech to the University of Chicago’s corporate board of trustees in which he proclaimed that, “but for the accident of having been born in the wrong century,” Smith would “undoubtedly have been a Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.”
The market is the market, and state is the state; thus divine right monarchies, military despotisms, and democratic republics are in essence all the same. This vision of politics, in which New Deal–era public utility regulations, eighteenth-century British imperial trade restrictions, the U.S. 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the thirteenth-century Mongol sacking of Baghdad are said to be more alike than dissimilar, just might be missing something important about what does or does not make sovereign states legitimate.
Too bad, because postwar American liberalism deserved critique. Stigler was not wrong to suggest that state regulatory authorities can be captured by private economic interests, and Friedman’s speeches against the military draft of the Vietnam War hold up quite well today. But it is remarkable that Friedman, who lived in this midst of the commercial destruction of Hyde Park, never once commented on it in his abundant public writings.
The problem was that these men were too quick to jump to the highest level of abstraction, to insist that the only possible solution was to let the market and not the state decide. That is a vacuous mantra, but it has real consequences—for example, leading a free market economist to jump into bed with Pinochet simply because the general says nice things about the market. Would it not have been better to have consulted for the local Hyde Park Chamber of Commerce?
For historians of ideas, it is commonplace, when recounting the Chicago school’s reading of Smith, to lament just how bad of a reading it was. Liu cannot resist this temptation, but by placing it in the longer history of Smith’s American reception, she shows that there is more to learn from the episode than just confirming that Stigler was not a very sophisticated historian of ideas.
Indeed, Liu demonstrates just how malleable ideologically the interpretation of Smith has been over time. This is not true for all thinkers. Readings of Marx have varied over time, but they have not jumped over the ideological firewalls that typically separate right from left in just the same way. What does this say not about Smith’s reception, but Smith’s thought itself?
Chicago’s version of Smith led to a wave of late twentieth and early twenty-first century scholarship on his thought. Liu discusses this work in her last chapter, when the setting abruptly shifts from the Reagan White House and the pages of the Wall Street Journal back to university seminar rooms and academic journals.
The Chicago school sought out a single, overarching insight of universal application in Smith’s writings, and they claimed they found it in his celebration of self-interest and the market. In my reading, what the last generation of Smith scholarship has demonstrated so well is that Smith arrived a different single, overarching insight, which has nothing to do with political economy per se: we should be wary of single, overarching insights, which purport to transcend time and place. The move to generalize and abstract is often necessary in order to say something useful about a subject, but the desire to do so can be dangerous and should often be tempered.
Smith held that we are all deeply situated in our surroundings and circumstances. His greatest teaching was that, if we only stop to look, we are all localists. A splitter not a lumper, Smith preferred particularist to universalist accounts, across a wide variety of topics. In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith underscored the phenomenological experience of sympathy, rather than hunting for categorical imperatives. His discussion of justice in his Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762–3) offered no comprehensive theory; Smith did not finish the manuscript and willed it burned after his death.
In similar fashion, The Wealth of Nations is full of piercing insights, most famously about the relationship between the “division of labor” and the “extent of markets.” But it offers neither a comprehensive theory of the market nor a categorical imperative that self-interest should or must always rule in economic life or in analysis of it. When he wrote about the merits of economic self-interest, Smith was not advocating laissez faire. Rather, his version of the Enlightenment faith in reason told him that merchants and peasants alike understand local economic conditions better than government officials. Smith also held that governing should not be left to businesspeople, given their partial interests, and should rather be left to the hands of government officials whose job it was to look out for the public interest.
Smith’s particularism means his writings are not always consistent with one another, but there is only Das Adam Smith Problem if one demands that a single thinker’s thoughts must comprise a single systematic whole free of contradictions. Some thinkers metaphysically yearn to create a perfect complete intellectual system; their successes may be judged according to the standards they set for themselves. Smith was not among them. He had no such ambition.
There is worth in comprehensive systems. At times, politics demands ideological stridency.
Smith offers something valuable of a different kind. Being a localist, Smith was not much of an ideologue at all—a fact which makes Liu’s reception history, in which ideologues like Friedman, Thatcher, and Reagan celebrated him, so fascinating and ironic. The greatest mistake that Stigler and Friedman made was not so much to position Smith on the rightward end of the ideological spectrum but to read him as a discoverer of scientific, universal truths that easily translate into ideological slogans.
Yet another mistake made by Stigler and Friedman was that they did not learn well from their teachers. Viner, their professor at the University of Chicago, wrote a classic essay, “Adam Smith and Laissez Faire” (1927), arguably the best treatment of the topic then or since. Rightly, Liu quotes the relevant passages from it at length. Let Viner have the last word:
“Adam Smith was not a doctrinaire advocate of laissez faire. He saw a wide and elastic range of activity for government, and he was prepared to extend it even farther if government, by improving its standards of competence, honesty, and public spirit, showed itself enticed to wider responsibilities. . . . He devoted more effort to the presentation of his case for individual freedom than to exploring the possibilities of service through government. . . . [but] Smith saw that self-interest and competition were sometimes treacherous to the public interest they were supposed to serve, and he was prepared. . . . to rely upon government for the performance of many tasks which individuals as such would not do, or could not do, or could do only badly.
He did not believe that laissez faire was always good, or always bad. It depended on circumstances; and as best he could, Adam Smith took into account all of the circumstances he could find.” ~
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-localist/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=e6ef5a4288-roundup_July_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-e6ef5a4288-40729829&mc_cid=e6ef5a4288&mc_eid=97e2edfae1
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Why do people stick to only one God instead of collecting the whole set as they do in other things like coins, mugs, owls, etc.? ~ Matt Flumerfelt
Oriana:
Matt likes to be funny, but he does say something important here: Being familiar with only one religious tradition doesn't work well in the modern world. I'm all for teaching Comparative Religion as a required course. I realize the pushback from fundamentalist religionists, but it's high time for people to realize that the era of One True Religion is over. We can learn from many religious traditions, and enjoy the strange and wonderful stories from all over the world.
Rather than automatically following the religon most prevalent in the country where we grew up, or the religion of our parents, the modern times require a conscious choice, so that we can say, "This is the religion/philosophy that works for me." And that includes no religion in the traditional sense, as well as "cherry picking" the best part of several religions, finding out what works for us as individuals.
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JESUS AS AN APOCALYPTIC PROPHET; THE CONCEPT OF MYTHOLOGY AS THE START OF THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TOWARD AGNOSTICISM
Oriana: When
it comes to atheism, I’m still thinking of my favorite epiphanies. The
priest who lost his faith while re-reading the proofs of god’s existence
is still #1, but in second place I’d put Bart Ehrman’s moment, which
happened in the parking lot after Bart and friends had watched Monty
Python’s The Life of Brian.
No, it wasn’t the chorus of the
crucified singing and whistling “Always look on the bright side.” It was
the line-up of apocalyptic preachers spouting their nonsense that was
Ehrman’s, then a fundamentalist seminarian, neural lightning.
Afterwards, in the parking lot, he was saying to his friend that of
course Jesus wasn’t anything like those apocalyptic preachers — but as
he was saying this, deep within, he saw that on the contrary, Jesus was
one of those apocalyptic preachers. After you’ve been hit by lightning,
you can’t go back to the pre-lightning condition.
That ruined
what remained of Jesus for me — Bart Ehrman’s fully convincing argument
that Jesus was, first and foremost, an apocalyptic preacher. Passages
that previously didn’t make sense now lit up with meaning. Of course I’d
been an atheist since the age of 14, but some remnant affection for
Jesus still glimmered. Now the words “A NUT CASE” lit up in neon. (Only
in the modern context, and not in the context of the Ancient Near East —
being an apocalyptic preacher was a respectable profession, I assume.)
Of
course fundamentalists stubbornly cling to literal reading, and there
is no point telling them, “Jesus is never coming back. Never never never
never.” If only one could somehow show them The Life of Brian. Or
explain the second coming metaphorically, e.g. “it can only take place
in your heart.”
Now, considering my own “mythology” epiphany, I
can’t help remembering that Dante and Milton did not reject classical
mythology as “not real.” On the contrary, they carefully integrated
various figures of pagan myth into their work (note, for instance, canto
26 of the Inferno, the Ulysses Canto). I wonder: did these great poets
and great minds sense that as soon as we say, “Classical mythology is
not real; it’s just made-up stories,” we cast doubt on
Judeo-Christianity as well?
That when we say, “Zeus did not
really exist,” we are in danger of seeing that Yahweh did not really
exist? Perhaps we might as well get rid of the whole thing, starting
with the creation in six days, the seventh being included because “on
the seventh day God rested.” Why did God rest? Was he tired?
And
when did that ultimately take place, this dismissal of classical
mythology as fiction and “outworn creeds”? Soon after Milton, I suspect.
And the more classical mythology was adored and used in literature, the
more firmly it was accepted that all those stories were simply
invented. — or, if they were based on some true events, the overlay of
legend and supernaturalism was too deep to to remove.
But once
you even have the concept of mythology, it’s a slippery slope. And once
“comparative mythology” is born (18th century), and scholars begin to
unravel layers upon layers of myth, the whole structure of religion as infallible truth
begins to crumble. ~
Amon-Zeus: religions tend to change once they go beyond one particular country. The old gods are rarely totally discarded.
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JEANNE CALMENT, THE OLDEST PERSON EVER
Meet Madame Jeanne Louise Calment, who had the longest confirmed human lifespan: 122 years, 164 days.
Apparently, fate strongly approved of the way she lived her life. She was born in Arles, France, on February 21, 1875. The Eiffel Tower was built when she was 14 years old. It was at this time she met Vincent van Gogh. "He was dirty, badly dressed, and disagreeable," she recalled in an interview given in 1988.
When she was 85, she took up fencing, and still rode her bike when she reached 100. At the age of 114, she starred in a film about her life, at age 115 she had an operation on her hip, and at age 117 she gave up smoking, having started at the age of 21 in 1896. She didn't give it up for health reasons; her reason was that she didn't like having to ask someone to help her light a cigarette once she was nearly blind.
In 1965, Jeanne was 90 years old and had no heirs. She signed a deal to sell her apartment to a 47-year-old lawyer called André-François Raffray. He agreed to pay her a monthly sum of 2,500 francs on the condition he would inherit her apartment after she died. However, Raffray not only ended up paying Jeanne for 30 years, but then died before she did at the age of 77. His widow was legally obliged to continue paying Madam Calment until the end of her days.
Jeanne retained sharp mental faculties. She was asked on her 120th birthday what kind of future she expected to have. Her reply, "A very short one.”
Here are the Rules of Life from Jeanne Louise Calment:
"I'm in love with wine."
"All babies are beautiful."
"I think I will die of laughter."
"I've been forgotten by our Good Lord."
"I've got only one wrinkle, and I'm sitting on it."
"I never wear mascara; I laugh until I cry often."
"If you can't change something, don't worry about it."
"Always keep your smile. That's how I explain my long life."
"I see badly, I hear badly, and I feel bad, but everything's fine."
"I have a huge desire to live and a big appetite, especially for sweets."
"I have legs of iron, but to tell you the truth, they're starting to rust and buckle a bit."
"I took pleasure when I could. I acted clearly and morally and without regret. I'm very lucky.”
~Priyan Fezzaro, Quora
Jeanne Calment at age 120; yes, there are centenarians who were smokers most of their adult lives. Indulgence in alcohol (though not to the point of alcoholism) is also not unusual. What's the secret? Centenarians tend to have genes that endow them with superb ability to detox harmful chemicals.
Who is the oldest person alive today? As of May 2023 it's María Branyas Morera. She is 116 years old.
The previous record belonged to French born Lucile Randon, who lived to 118.
She took the title after Japan's Kane Tanaka died at the age of 119.
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CENTENARIANS POSSESS UNIQUE IMMUNITY THAT HELPS THEM ACHIEVE EXCEPTIONAL LONGEVITY
~ There are approximately 30 trillion cells in a human body and our health is predicated on them properly interacting with and supporting each other, with the immune system playing a particularly pivotal role. One of the defining characteristics of aging is a decline in the proper functioning of our immune system. Centenarians, a rare population of individuals who reach 100 years or more, experience delays in aging-related diseases and mortality which suggests their immune systems remain functional into extreme old age.
Led by researchers from Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Tufts Medical Center, a new study finds centenarians harbor distinct immune cell type composition and activity and possess highly functional immune systems that have successfully adapted to a history of sickness allowing for exceptional longevity. These immune cells may help identify important mechanisms to recover from disease and promote longevity.
"Our data support the hypothesis that centenarians have protective factors that enable to recover from disease and reach extreme old ages," said lead author Tanya Karagiannis, PhD, senior bioinformatician, Center for Quantitative Methods and Data Science, Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center.
"We assembled and analyzed what is, to our knowledge, the largest single-cell dataset of centenarian subjects that allowed us to define unique features of this population that support the identification of molecular and lifestyle factors contributing to their longevity," explained senior author Stefano Monti, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the School of Medicine.
To identify immune-specific patterns of aging and extreme human longevity, the researchers performed single cell sequencing on peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) — a broad category of immune cells circulating in the blood — taken from seven centenarians enrolled in the New England Centenarian Study, one of the largest studies of long-lived individuals in North America led by Thomas Perls, MD, at the School of Medicine.
They then integrated this dataset with two publicly available single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) datasets of PBMCs to investigate compositional and transcriptional changes in circulating immune profiles across the human lifespan and extreme old age. Lastly, they applied advanced computational techniques to analyze the combined data, to evaluate how the cell type composition (the proportion of different cell types) and activity change as a function of age, and whether centenarians manifest profiles capturing or escaping the expected age progression.
Their analysis confirms observations made in previous studies of aging and identifies novel cell type-specific compositional and transcriptional changes that are unique to centenarians and reflect normal immune response.
According to the researchers, when people are exposed to infections and recover from them, their immune system learns to adapt, but this ability to respond declines as we age. "The immune profiles that we observed in the centenarians confirms a long history of exposure to infections and capacity to recover from them and provide support to the hypothesis that centenarians are enriched for protective factors that increase their ability to recover from infections," said senior author Paola Sebastiani, PhD, director, Center for Quantitative Methods and Data Science, Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center.
The researchers believe these findings provide a foundation to investigate mechanisms of immune resilience likely contributing to extreme longevity as a target for healthy aging therapeutics. "Centenarians, and their exceptional longevity, provide a 'blueprint' for how we might live more productive, healthful lives. We hope to continue to learn everything we can about resilience against disease and the extension of one's health span," said senior author George J. Murphy, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the School of Medicine. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230331120650.htm
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PROBABLE LINK BETWEEN FRUCTOSE AND ALZHEIMER'S
~ An important aspect of survival is to assure enough food, water, and oxygen. Here, we describe a recently discovered response that favors survival in times of scarcity, and it is initiated by either ingestion or production of fructose. Unlike glucose, which is a source for immediate energy needs, fructose metabolism results in an orchestrated response to encourage food and water intake, reduce resting metabolism, stimulate fat and glycogen accumulation, and induce insulin resistance as a means to reduce metabolism and preserve glucose supply for the brain.
How this survival mechanism affects brain metabolism, which in a resting human amounts to 20% of the overall energy demand, is only beginning to be understood. Here, we review and extend a previous hypothesis that this survival mechanism has a major role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease and may account for many of the early features, including cerebral glucose hypometabolism, mitochondrial dysfunction, and neuroinflammation. We propose that the pathway can be engaged in multiple ways, including diets high in sugar, high glycemic carbohydrates, and salt.
In summary, we propose that Alzheimer’s disease may be the consequence of a maladaptation to an evolutionary-based survival pathway and what had served to enhance survival acutely becomes injurious when engaged for extensive periods. Although more studies are needed on the role of fructose metabolism and its metabolite, uric acid, in Alzheimer’s disease, we suggest that both dietary and pharmacologic trials to reduce fructose exposure or block fructose metabolism should be performed to determine whether there is potential benefit in the prevention, management, or treatment of this disease.
BUT IS IT THE FRUCTOSE PRODUCED IN THE BRAIN?
There is evidence that Alzheimer’s disease may be linked with obesity and diabetes, and with the western diet. However, while obesity and diabetes are risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease may occur in the absence of these conditions. Therefore, a unifying mechanism for the initiation of Alzheimer’s disease has remained enigmatic.
While glucose acts as an energy-producing fuel, like most nutrients, fructose appears to be used as an energy-storing fuel. This feature of fructose is due to its unique metabolism that decreases energy (adenosine triphosphate [ATP]) within the cell.
The ability of fructose to reduce intrahepatic ATP levels and increase intracellular and serum uric acid levels occurs with the ingestion of soft drinks. In contrast, other major food groups (glucose, protein, and fats) act to increase energy levels in the cell.
Certain foods that do not contain fructose also stimulate endogenous fructose production, including high glycemic carbohydrates, salty foods, and alcohol. High-fat diets alone usually do not cause memory deficits unless combined with fructose.
The presence of antioxidants and flavonols in fruits are known to counter fructose effects.
These associations may begin early in life. Maternal intake of soft drinks during pregnancy as well as soft drink intake in early childhood is associated with cognitive dysfunction in children. Children with a higher intake of refined carbohydrates also show lower nonverbal intelligence scores.
Many biologic effects associated with energy depletion are mediated, in part, by the generation of intracellular uric acid. Uric acid, while an anti-oxidant in the extracellular environment, is pro-inflammatory in the intracellular environment. Studies in humans have also shown that the ingestion of glucose causes a rise in serum glucose that is then converted to fructose in the brain.
These studies suggest high glycemic carbohydrates may also be a potential risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. The amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles are part of the inflammatory response and participate in injury, but are not the central factors driving the disease.
Cerebral insulin resistance and mitochondrial dysfunction have emerged as important contributors to pathogenesis supporting our hypothesis that cerebral fructose metabolism is a key initiating pathway for Alzheimer’s disease.
Fructose is unique among nutrients because it activates a survival pathway to protect animals from starvation by lowering energy in cells in association with adenosine monophosphate degradation to uric acid. The fall in energy from fructose metabolism stimulates foraging and food intake while reducing energy and oxygen needs by decreasing mitochondrial function, stimulating glycolysis, and inducing insulin resistance.
When fructose metabolism is overactivated systemically, such as from excessive fructose intake, this can lead to obesity and diabetes. We present evidence that Alzheimer’s disease may be driven by overactivation of cerebral fructose metabolism, in which the source of fructose is largely from endogenous production in the brain. Thus, the reduction in mitochondrial energy production is hampered by neuronal glycolysis that is inadequate, resulting in progressive loss of cerebral energy levels required for neurons to remain functional and viable. In essence, we propose that Alzheimer’s disease is a modern disease driven by changes in dietary lifestyle in which fructose can disrupt cerebral metabolism and neuronal function. Inhibition of intracerebral fructose metabolism could provide a novel way to prevent and treat this disease. ~
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7516162/
Oriana:
Overall, keto diet may have only mild ameliorative effects once Alzheimer's is fully underway, but it may prove important in the prevention of Alzheimer’s for high-risk individuals. Sugar, which is half-fructose, is not allowed on the keto diet.
I remember that someone said that as we age, we should eat as if we were diabetic, i.e. none of this “let them eat cake” permissiveness about carbs. And it’s never too early to start emphasizing heathy fats (e.g. avocado) over carbohydrates.
There’s also a Mayo Clinic showing that seniors whose diets are high in carbohydrates may have almost four times the normal risk of mild cognitive impairment, a condition that may precede Alzheimer's disease in 50% of the cases.
“The predominant theory about the cause of AD suggests that the build-up of the protein beta-amyloid in the brain disrupts communication between neurons and ultimately kills brain cells. Dr. Swerdlow’s research suggests that amyloid plaques are a result, rather than a cause, of AD and that defects in brain energy metabolism may be the underlying cause. The results of the KDRAFT study appear to support this hypothesis, although larger studies are needed. The research team, however, seems to have established proof of principle that fuel other than glucose can help restore energy metabolism in the brain.” https://ncats.nih.gov/pubs/features/ketogenic-diet-alzheimers
The protective effect of coffee also needs to be investigated further. Imagine: some people might be able to avoid the tragedy of Alzheimer's (and Parkinson’s, and probably other neurological diseases) simply by having an extra cup of coffee or two. This information should be widely available to the public rather than stay buried in medical journals.
Is there a fruit that doesn't contain fructose? Well, avocado is actually a fruit, but that's not most people's idea of a fruit. The fructose-free fruit is acai berries. At the opposite end, all dried fruit is high in fructose.
While mass media have been promoting fruit for as long as I can remember, the real benefits come from tea, coffee, and cruciferous vegetables (the cabbage family).
If you crave sweetness but don't want to suffer the consequences of consuming sugar, I suggest trying ALLULOSE, which actually has health benefits, including the lowering of blood glucose and thus a lower risk of dementia.
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A NEW DRUG MAY HELP AGING-RELATED MEMORY LOSS
~ An experimental drug that bolsters ailing brain cells has raised hopes of a treatment for memory loss, poor decision making and other mental impairments that often strike in old age.
The drug could be taken as a daily pill by over-55s if clinical trials, which are expected to start within two years, show that the medicine is safe and effective at preventing memory lapses.
Tests in the lab showed that old animals had far better memory skills half an hour after receiving the drug. After two months on the treatment, brain cells which had shrunk in the animals had grown back, scientists found.
Etienne Sibille, at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, said the treatment was aimed not only at the “normal” cognitive decline that leads to senior moments, but at memory loss and mental impairments that commonly afflict people with depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.
If the drug did well in human trials, Sibille said it was possible that “anybody over the age of 55-60 who may be at risk of cognitive problems later on could benefit from this treatment”.
“Our findings have direct implications for poor cognition in normal aging,” he said, with the drug potentially improving learning, memory, decision making and essential life planning. “But we see this deficiency across disorders from depression to schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s.”
There are no medicines on the market that improve the sort of memory loss seen in old age and psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. But the Toronto researchers believe their drug can reverse failing memories by targeting specific cells involved in learning and memory, and rejuvenating them. The changes the drug brings about in the brain suggest it could prevent memory loss at the beginning of Alzheimer’s and potentially delay its onset.
Research on memory loss has shown that it is partly linked to levels of a neurotransmitter known as GABA. Its normal job is to slow down the rate at which neurons fire, effectively dampening down electrical “noise” in the brain. Lower this background noise and important signals in the brain can be processed more easily, or so the theory goes.
The new drug is a derivative of benzodiazepine, a family of medicines that includes the anti-anxiety pills Valium and Xanax. While Valium and Xanax have broad effects in the brain, the new drug is designed to target specific GABA receptors found on neurons in key parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, which are heavily involved in cognition.
Scientists tested the drug on mice in a maze and found that half an hour after receiving a single dose, old animals performed nearly as well as young mice. The drug also restored the performance of young mice whose memories had been temporarily impaired by the stress of being kept in a confined space.
“An old mouse will naturally perform at about 50-60% on this test. Its working memory is basically not working. But within 30 minutes of administration of the drug, their performance is back up to 80-90%, so almost at the level of a young mouse. We have a rapid reversal of age-related working memory deficit and that is exciting,” Sibille told the Guardian.
In the latest work, the Toronto team showed that brain cells which had shrunk in older mice grew back after two months of having the drug put in their drinking water. “We can actually grow the brain cells,” Sibille said.
“They tend to shrink with age and they shrink in neurodegenerative diseases. What we see is that the cells grow to a level that’s pretty close to that in young animals.”
The lab tests showed no benefit when the drug was given to healthy young animals, suggesting that it would not work like a cognitive enhancer and give healthy people superhuman memory skills. “It’s not a drug a student would take if they wanted to be smarter when they study for their exams,” Sibille said. The researchers submitted a patent on the drug on Wednesday before a talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington DC.
Scientists now hope to test the drug in humans, with the first trials expected to be in people with depression. When people are in remission from depression, those with poor memory and other mental impairments are often most likely to relapse, Sibille said.
“If we could somehow treat those deficits we could potentially have a major impact on the lifelong trajectory of the illness in those people. It would be a gamechanger in how we treat depression.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/14/new-drug-hopes-reversing-memory-loss-old-age-depression-schizophrenia-alzheimers
Oriana:
This drug would be a boon to the many seniors who suffer from "mild cognitive impairment" -- a condition that turns into dementia 50% of the time.
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WHEN ANXIOUS, DON’T TAKE DEEP BREATHS; BREATHE SLOWLY
Key points
Therapists and well-meaning friends often say to "take a deep breath," but breathing deeply worsens cognitive and physiological anxiety.
Breathing slowly (not deeply), using slow breathing at the right time, and practicing slow breathing regularly will provide more relief.
When having an anxiety attack, it's best to do grounding work to get one's thoughts under control first, before breath work.
~ It’s 8:58 a.m. and I’ve signed into the testing center to take the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP), a daunting standardized test that decides whether you can be licensed as a psychologist or not. To say I’m nervous would be the understatement of the century.
Given the decade of yoga training I’d accumulated at that point, I had a great plan: I would slip into the bathroom right before the test began and take some good old-fashioned deep breaths. In, 2, 3, 4, pause, 2, 3, 4, out, 2, 3… you get the idea.
It didn’t work, though. Instead, I felt shakier. My heart raced. I couldn’t even find my breath, because it was so erratic. Was I doing it wrong? Am I screwed? I walked back into the testing room, my body still a-jitter.
Well-meaning yogis, therapists, counselors, and mindfulness teachers—even parents, now that today’s culture is so mindfulness-informed—have told us for years that deep breathing is the cure to all our anxiety-related ills.
Teens (and a lot of grown-ups) hate it. They are ready to tell me in Therapy Session 1, “Don’t tell me to take a deep breath, because it doesn’t work.” Many times, my own kids have screamed, “I don’t want to take a breath!” mid-tantrum. As I pushed out my second child, in the middle of my awesome breath practice, an L&D nurse told me “Stop that! You’re wasting all your energy!” At some point, I stopped fighting them on it and got curious about why.
As far as I can tell, there are at least two reasons why this advice is sometimes misguided.
1. YOUR THOUGHTS
The breath is often used as a beginning anchor for mindfulness students, but not because it has special powers: It’s just always with you. Training yourself to return to the breath over and over can help distance us from distracting thoughts. But for some of us, particularly when we are already in a state of physiological panic, overfocusing on the breath can lead to spiraling thoughts upon thoughts.
Focus on the breath can be an anxiety trigger for some and lead to panic attacks, due to the judgments and thoughts that pile on as you think about how you should be able to do it, how you’re doing it wrong, how you can’t even do breathing right, and so on. When you’re calm and still and say, mid-meditation, that’s perfectly fine, because you can observe those thoughts without getting attached to them. But in the middle of a freak-out, it’s more likely you’ll get hooked by the thoughts and carried away into panic-town.
2. YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM
One of the most terrifying signs of a panic attack is feeling like you can’t catch your breath. Hyperventilation (i.e., breathing heavily when stressed or panicking) means you’re exhaling too much carbon dioxide. There’s too much, not too little, oxygen in your system, in relation to the amount of CO2. A relative drop in CO2 makes you feel dizzy, lightheaded, and faint.
“Taking a deep breath,” especially a quick one, is essentially extending and exacerbating the hyperventilation cycle. If you’re having a panic attack, or feel close to it, taking a big gulp of even more O2 is the very last thing you should do, because it will tip the scales again in favor of less CO2. With that big gulp of air, you’re pumping even more oxygen.
Ever seen someone hand a panicked person a brown paper bag? Breathing into and out of that paper bag helps balance the ratio. That’s why it works.
As a further illustration, in the Bikram yoga tradition, Kapalbhati, AKA breath of fire, requires using quick, successive, and deep exhales to stimulate the sympathetic nervous system. That’s the exact wrong half of the autonomic nervous system you want to activate if you’re having an anxiety attack! The sympathetic nervous system revs us up and further prepares us for danger. Fire breath is considered an activating or energizing breath exercise, not a relaxing one.
That’s not to say all breathwork is doomed, though. The breath is a tool and can be used in many ways. Some types of breathing exercises definitely improve stress and anxiety. Just cross out “deep” and insert some other modifiers.
How to Get Breathwork to Work for You
1. In the middle of an anxiety attack, practice grounding first, then onto the breath.
Grounding skills will help get your thoughts under control and bring you back to the room. (Remember it’s the spiraling thoughts that cause trouble in the first place!)
As you do this, monitor how distressed (freaked out) you feel. You can use any scale, but 1-10 (10 being the most freaked out ever) works well. As you do your grounding skills, wait till you’re a 3 or 4 out of 10 on the distress scale, not a 9 or 10.
When you’ve allowed your O2/CO2 ratios and your autonomic nervous system to calm down a bit, you can more safely start with more relaxed breathing.
Slow breathing works well as a regular preventive practice, or as a method of stilling an already-still mind even further, but it’s not good at the height of a crisis. Once you are grounded and have some distance from those pesky thoughts about thinking and breathing, you can move to #2.
2. Breathe slowly, not deeply. Fast, deep, irregular breathing is what leads to hyperventilation.
Try to get it slower each time, breathing in for 3 seconds and out for 4 seconds, then in for 3 and out for 5, and so on, rather than starting with 3 counts of in-breath and 8 counts of out-breath. Lengthen the exhale to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, but gradually. Taking shortcuts will backfire.
3. Practice regular, slow breathing when you are not in a crisis. Think of it like flossing… for your nervous system.
Get your mind and body used to discriminating between “I’m breathing slowly and regularly” (i.e., relaxed) and “I’m breathing quickly and deeply” (i.e., panicked). Get familiar with the feeling of transitioning from one to the other and improve the fluency with which you can switch back and forth (i.e., physiological flexibility, which is related to Heart Rate Variability or HRV).
This is where most of the evidence for the effectiveness of breathing protocols on anxiety comes from, by the way (example). Participants are typically asked to practice breathing techniques daily, not just in the throes of panic. And from what we’ve talked about so far, you can see why.
With these modifications, you have yourself a relaxation toolbox that will be much more effective, and less frustrating, than trying to deep breathe your way out of a DEFCON 1 emotional crisis.
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SLOW BREATHING MAY HELP PREVENT ALZHEIMER’S
Stop scrolling. Now inhale slowly, concentrating on expanding your lungs, to a count of five. Exhale, just as slowly and deliberately, as you count to five.
You might find that, in just that 10 seconds, you suddenly feel just a little bit more relaxed or centered. Follow the same practice for 20 minutes a few times a week and – according to the research – you might not just reap the benefits of feeling calmer. You may also be helping to protect against various diseases, including, a recent study has suggested, even Alzheimer's disease.
The benefits of breathing exercises – sometimes called "breathwork" – have been recognized for millennia. In more recent decades, scientific studies seem to support what people in many cultures, particularly in Asia, have long practiced: that deliberate breathing may help to improve a variety of health conditions, including hypertension, stress, anxiety, and even chronic pain.
In the latest study, researchers measured biomarkers in blood plasma that are associated with a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's, particularly amyloid beta 40 and 42. Half of the 108 participants were told to try to bring themselves to a place of calm by imagining a serene scene, listening to relaxing sounds, and closing their eyes – essentially, mindfulness meditation. The goal was to decrease their heart rate oscillations, encouraging their heart rate to have a steadier, more consistent beat.
The other group followed a breathing exercise on a computer screen – when a square rose over the course of five seconds, they inhaled, and when it dropped for five seconds, they exhaled. This kind of deep, slow breathing has been found to increase heart rate oscillations – making the time interval between heart beats more variable (hence a higher "heart rate variability"). Both groups practiced the technique twice a day, for 20 to 40 minutes each time, for five weeks.
When they looked at participants' blood samples four weeks into their practice, the results came as a "surprise", says Mara Mather, professor of gerontology, psychology and biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California and one of authors of the study. The breathing exercises aimed at increasing heart rate variability decreased levels of amyloid beta. The mindfulness exercises, which decreased heart rate variability, made those levels higher.
Although no definitive single cause has been identified for causing Alzheimer's, clumps of amyloid beta protein known as plaques have been found to be one of key features of the disease. Certain types of this protein can be particularly toxic when they clump together inside brain cells, causing them damage that affects their normal function and causes them to die.
Mather and her team hadn't expected the levels of amyloid beta to be "affected so robustly". And it wasn't just for older adults who already might have been more susceptible to having higher levels of amyloid beta. "The effects were significant in both younger and older adults," Mather says.
"This is an intriguing finding because, in healthy adults, lower plasma levels of amyloid beta are associated with lower risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease later," she says. "Slow-paced breathing might have benefits not only for emotional well-being – but also for improving biomarkers associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”
The researchers aren't sure why, exactly, this might be. But one hypothesis is that slow, deliberate breathing may mimic some of the benefits of deep sleep, which research has found might clear neurotoxic waste products from the brain and nervous system at a faster rate. The build-up of these waste products seems to play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s.
The key factor seems to be how each exercise affected heart rate variability (HRV), which reflects how much fluctuation there is between heartbeats. Research has indicated that heart rate variability is a good metric for the functioning of the nervous system, and, therefore, an indicator of overall health and various health conditions, from depression and chronic stress to viral infection and sepsis. Intriguingly, more variability (ie a less consistent pattern) seems to be far healthier, perhaps because it shows the body's ability to adapt to stressors.
Regardless of the exact mechanism, Mather says, a regular practice of deliberate, slow-paced breathing seems to be something that could benefit most people. "We don't yet know what dose is optimal. But it probably doesn't have to be every day – my guess at this point is that doing 20 minutes 4-5 times per week would have benefits," she says.
The study didn't compare different types of breathing techniques, so they don't know yet which type of breathing pattern might be most effective. "What we do know is that breathing at whichever pace between nine and 14 seconds per breath that increased that individual's heart rate oscillations the most was effective at reducing plasma amyloid beta levels," Mather says.
The research has also yet to be replicated in larger numbers of patients to confirm whether a meaningful long-term effect can be seen. Some scientists have also expressed doubts about how effective or reliable breathing techniques could be compared to drug treatments.
But it is far from the only study in recent years to have found health benefits of breathing exercises. Studies have found, for example, that breathwork may reduce blood pressure in people with hypertension, help relieve symptoms of anxiety and depression, and reduce insomnia. A recent meta-analysis, meanwhile, found that it could lower stress and improve mental health.
Breathwork is starting to make its way beyond yoga and meditation classes to corporate retreats and even schools. In New York City, mayor Eric Adams recently announced that all public schools will have to teach daily mindful breathing sessions to students. As he put it: "There's a science to breathing." There are plenty of researchers, it turns out, starting to agree with him.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230724-can-slow-breathing-guard-against-alzheimers
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CLIMB SOME STAIRS TO CUT CANCER RISK
~For adults who can't or don't like to exercise, short periods of vigorous activity as simple as climbing a flight of stairs may be enough to lower their risk of cancer, according to a large cohort study.
Compared with no vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity, the median daily duration of periods of vigorous activity up to 1 minute (totaling 4.5 minutes per day) was associated with a 20% reduction in total cancer risk (HR 0.80, 95% CI 0.69-0.92), reported Emmanuel Stamatakis, PhD, of the University of Sydney in Australia, and colleagues.
Moreover, there was also a 31% reduction in the risk of a physical activity (PA)-related cancer — a composite of cancer sites known to be possibly associated with low physical activity (HR 0.69, 95% CI 0.55-0.86), they noted in JAMA Oncology.
"Daily VILPA [vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity] may be a promising intervention for cancer prevention in populations not able or motivated to exercise in leisure time," Stamatakis and colleagues wrote. "Long-term trials with cancer-related biomarker outcomes and well-designed cohort studies with wearable devices should further explore the potential of VILPA as a cancer prevention intervention for non-exercising individuals and for those who find structured exercise unappealing.”
The researchers also found that a "minimal dose" of 3.4 minutes of vigorous activity per day was associated with a 17% reduced risk of total cancer incidence (HR 0.83, 95% CI 0.73-0.93), while 3.7 minutes daily was associated with a 28% reduced risk of physical activity-related cancer incidence (HR 0.72, 95% CI 0.59-0.88).
In an editorial accompanying the study, Linda S. Lindström, MSc, PhD, of Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, and colleagues, noted that studies have suggested that physical activity can also improve physical fitness, muscle strength, cancer-related fatigue, and quality of life among cancer survivors, adding that whether the results of this study can be extrapolated to cancer patients needs to be evaluated.
In any event, they said that it is clear that most individuals benefit from physical activity, "and the key is to make exercise a habit.”
However, based on the findings of this study, they pointed out that even sporadic episodes of brief, vigorous physical activity can positively affect health and reduce the risk of disease, adding that "any physical activity is better than none.”
This analysis included 22,398 adults from the U.K. Biobank accelerometry subsample (mean age 62 years, 54.8% women, 96.0% white). Only individuals who reported no leisure time exercise and one or fewer recreational walks a week were included.
Vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity is defined as short periods of vigorous physical activity such as bursts of fast walking or stair climbing. Stamatakis and colleagues said that it should only be measured with wearable trackers, such as the wrist-worn accelerometers used by participants in the U.K. Biobank accelerometry study.
Participants with cancer, cancer in remission, a cancer event during the first year after accelerometry baseline, or inadequate wear time were excluded.
Analyses were adjusted for age, sex, body mass index, education level, smoking status, alcohol consumption, sleep duration, fruit and vegetable consumption, medications, parental cancer history, prevalent cardiovascular disease, daily durations of light- and moderate-intensity physical activity, and daily duration of longer vigorous exercise bouts.
During a mean follow-up of 6.7 years (149,650 person-years), 2,356 new cancer events were reported (1,084 in physical activity-related cancer sites).
Most (92.3%) vigorous activity occurred in bouts of up to 1 minute; the results related to 1-minute bouts were similar to those for up to 2 minutes, the authors noted.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/hematologyoncology/othercancers/105661?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2023-07-27&eun=g2215341d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%20Evening%202023-07-27&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_dual-gmail-definition
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HEALTH BENEFITS OF MOZARELLA CHEESE
1. Great Source of Biotin
Mozzarella is a great source of Biotin, which is also referred to as Vitamin B7. This is a water-soluble nutrient, meaning that you can satisfy your immediate nutritional needs rather than storing them in the body. Some pregnant women eat this cheese to cope with a possible biotin deficiency.
This vitamin is used by those looking to strengthen their hair, skin, and nail health. It can be a good vitamin for those with brittle nails and hair. It can also help to lower blood glucose levels for those with diabetes.
2. Good for Bone Health
Like many kinds of cheese and different dairy products, mozzarella cheese is a great source of calcium which helps to support bone strength. This cheese has a high level of this mineral that is great for both bone and teeth health. This is a great way to maintain bone structure and protect your tooth enamel.
Additionally, it can help to reduce the risk of colon cancer and also works to safeguard the heart muscles. It could also help with weight loss. Mozzarella cheese is also packed with protein, which can improve your muscle strength and give you the energy you need to work towards your fitness goals.
3. Powerful Potassium
This cheese is also a great source of potassium. This helps to battle adverse effects that can be caused by sodium consumption by humans. Potassium also helps to lower blood pressure which can rectify abysmal heart rhythms.
4. Source of Zinc
Zinc is a mineral that is found in mozzarella cheese that can help to increase the white blood cell count in the body while also helping to solve skin problems. It can help the prostate gland function well which can help to aid weight loss.
5. Rich in Riboflavin
https://www.denicolasitaliandining.com/blog/5-amazing-health-benefits-of-mozzarella-cheese
ending on beauty:
THE THREE ODDEST WORDS
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.
~ Wislawa Szymborska, tr by Stanisław Barańczak & Clare Cavanagh
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