WALKING ON WATER
After the storm, the clouds
like half-blown milkweed tufts
fade in the widening sky. I still
don’t know how we survive
our youth, how in a matchstick boat
we cross that wind-clawed sea. When I
look back, I see no boat. I must have
walked on water, holding fast
to false beliefs:
that I was strong; that the worst
had already happened;
that to commit suicide would disgrace
the memory of my grandparents,
who had survived Auschwitz,
so what excuse might I give
for not surviving America?
It is not truth that saves us,
not the truth that makes us free,
but a half-forgotten image
of a luminous, familiar
figure walking on the sea.
And like Peter, we step
out of doubt as out of a boat,
and start walking across the storm —
not on water or air,
hardly even on faith —
toward nothing we dare
call love.
~ Oriana
Mediterranean seen from Tel Aviv; Misha Iossel
*
“People escape into other things;
you don’t escape into poetry.
You confront yourself
when you are reading poems.”
~ Mark Strand
*
“Some sort of pressure must exist;
the artist exists because the world is not perfect.
Art would be useless if the world were perfect,
as man wouldn’t look for harmony
but would simply live in it.
Art is born out of an ill-designed world.”
~ Andrey Tarkovsky
*
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE AS A PORTRAYAL OF MISOGYNY
~ The Age of Innocence is the subtlest of Wharton’s masterpieces, a catalog which also includes the harsh yet hilarious consumerism satire The Custom of the Country and the tragic The House of Mirth, which ends in a socialite’s suicide. Scorsese, along with co-writer Jay Cocks, faithfully adapted Wharton’s novel, which follows the milquetoast banker Newland Archer and his doomed affair with his fiancée’s cousin. Wharton recreated in Innocence the vanished world of her 1870s Old New York childhood, a mannered, insular, ultimately superficial society where “what was or was not ‘the thing,’” Wharton wrote, was what governed its members’ destinies.
Scorsese treated this subject matter with the weight, nuance, and emotional intensity of his most noted movies. He rejected the notion that New York’s superficial decorum in Innocence was less dramatically rich than, say, the more poverty-stricken New York that his other protagonists had inhabited. In fact, at the time of its release, he called Innocence his most violent work yet—asserting that Archer, unlike his other cinematic antiheroes, did not have an outlet for his rage.
Indeed, Archer was not a typical Scorsese protagonist by any means. He grew up in a protective bubble of wealth and privilege. At the story’s outset, he’s engaged to a daughter of the New York aristocracy, May Welland, in a perfect match of convenience—not passion. She symbolizes for him the innocence, procreativity, and gentility that society expects him to carry throughout his life. But he bristles against these pressures too, particularly regarding the predicament of May’s cousin, Ellen Olenska. Olenska’s separation from her high-status husband has caused a scandal among the male gentility of which Archer is a member. “I’m sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots,” he says at the dinner table to his mother and sister.
No other protagonist of Scorsese’s was as interested in believing himself to be moral as Wharton’s Newland Archer. Fittingly, the character offered Scorsese the opportunity to explore the theme of male alienation in someone compelled to suppress, rather than express, how he feels— finding the violence in moments of silence rather than in action.
Scorsese interprets Wharton’s novel through his own unique and equally engaging cinematic language. The film’s opening at the New York Opera, where Archer watches a performance of Faust, was shot at the Philadelphia Academy of Music; with its ornate 1850s decor surrounding the action, Scorsese frames stunning tableaux of the opera’s actors in their gorgeous costumes and precise make-up. He then swivels his camera to the audience of gentlemen in suits and women in gowns watching them. The spectators, in Scorsese’s hands, have become the spectacle.
The production design broadly reflects the taste of Archer, who identifies himself as a “dilettante” interested in the abstract concepts of “beauty” and “form.” Details from Wharton’s novels, like “tree-ferns arching their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo,” populate the ballroom where Archer announces his engagement to May.
Scorsese commissioned over 1,000 imitation paintings of European classics to adorn the Gilded Age drawing rooms in which characters aimlessly chatter. These objects and pieces prevent us—maybe even the characters themselves—from discovering who they are beneath the elaborate designs.
“In reality,” Wharton wrote, “they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.” Scorsese reveled in sculpted sentences like these from the book. Wharton’s narration was voiced in the movie by Oscar-winning actress Joanne Woodward and generously featured throughout, from lush descriptions to spikier observations.
The director’s main point of departure reveals itself in the projected distance from Archer’s thoughts, particularly regarding the careful bond he develops with Ellen Olenska. One scene finds Archer reading a letter in which Olenska’s estranged husband threatens to expose her adultery if she divorces him. Archer has been recruited by May’s family to serve as Olenska’s lawyer, to essentially convince her to return to her husband and save the family from embarrassment. But Archer is sympathetic to Olenska’s plight to find true happiness—if also, perhaps, attracted to her. Scorsese’s camera realizes this complexity. When a beaming Archer enters Olenska’s drawing room, expecting them to be alone, he notices another man’s belongings; the lighting goes dim and dark, and all we can focus on are Archer’s jealous, betrayed eyes.
It’s gradually made clear to Archer that his world is not one in which pursuing a life with Olenska is possible, which leads him to lash out. In one crucial scene opposite May, he opens a window for some fresh air. May insists he close it, or he might “catch” his death. Woodward’s narrator brings us inside Archer’s volatile state of mind: “What if it were SHE who was dead! If she were going to die—to die soon—and leave him free! Yes, May might die—people did: young people, healthy people like herself: she might die, and set him suddenly free.” The beautiful drawing room, adorned with paintings and a library of books, is suddenly a gilded cage. Archer then stands up, like Othello about to strangle Desdemona, but caresses May’s hair instead. It’s an unnerving visual, layered in emotion and meaning, that’s at once signature Scorsese in its ferocity and uncharted territory for the filmmaker.
May’s feelings toward Archer are of enduring mystery in both the book and the film. Is it a tactic of control when she allows Archer to break off their engagement to be with another woman, or a statement of her powerlessness? Her sharp social tact further complicates matters. When Archer insists that he wants to travel without her, May—intuiting that he might escape at last—hands him a letter Olenska wrote, saying she left for Europe for good. Scorsese forms a shadow around Archer’s eyes as he scans the letter. Then, before Archer can admit what he wants, May says he can’t travel unless he takes her with him, before adding, “That is, if the doctors will let me go…”—implying that she’s pregnant.
Scorsese once argued that this was a moment Archer would remember all his life. His camera captures a dizzying range of angles in the room as May rises to “trap” Archer with her pregnancy before kneeling at his feet in tears. She seems to have weaponized her innocence to guilt Archer into staying with their family, placing into question how innocent she really was after all. It’s an idea carried over cleanly from Wharton’s novel to Scorsese’s movie, but the latter uses cinematic devices to communicate it in a fashion thrillingly specific to its medium.
*
The female characters of The Age of Innocence are afforded complexity and agency, even within the stifling confines of its 19th-century setting. Perhaps appropriately, Wharton mastered this approach in Innocence. It’s not the typical, melodramatic period romance in the vein of that Faust opera that Archer enjoys in the movie’s opening. Scorsese met his match in Wharton because of her interest in those fine lines, and her resistance to a tidy sort of ending, wherein Archer might have ascended the stairs of Olenska’s Paris apartment to win back his true love. As the story ends, Archer realizes that rekindling his romance with Olenska would not satisfy his longings. He’s clinging to a youthful fantasy, one shaped by his surroundings and not the actual person.
Scorsese’s film holds up 30 years later because that tension between personal fulfillment and social obligation, so artfully and painfully dramatized, still resonates. Wharton holds up 113 years later for the same reason. The Hollywood age in which Scorsese could pay homage to such a subtle masterpiece for an audience of millions has passed away, replaced by the era of superhero blockbusters and streaming bloat. On a rewatch, this Age of Innocence is now a movie brilliantly out of time—an irony, no doubt, that Wharton could have appreciated. ~
https://lithub.com/30-years-later-the-age-of-innocence-remains-scorseses-most-subtle-deconstruction-of-misogyny/
Bellesguy:
I love the ending where Archer's son, whose mother told him his father gave up the thing he most wanted for his family, asks him how he is to explain to the Countess Olenska that Archer hasn't come up with him. “Just say I'm old fashioned. She'll understand.”
Mannyfurious:
When Archer refuses to go up to the apartment because it's "more real" down there, he's talking about the life he lived without Ellen. Not the life he imagines with her.
Remember, earlier in the book he tells Ellen that she showed him his first glimpse of a "real" life and was then asking him to return to his false life. Then, prior to the final scene, we're given a summary of his life after Ellen left and he never spoke to her again. That life was a "successful," pleasant, even important life, in many ways. But it wasn't "real." And the whole point of the book is nothing is real in that world. Archer almost had something real, but his circumstances placed it beyond his having — that's the tragedy.
He doesn't want to see Ellen because it would be a reminder of the false life he lived without her. It's a devastating ending.
Oriana:
For me it was the drama of fidelity versus the possibly richer life and greater erotic fulfillment that breaking the engagement — and the social norms of the time — might bring. A lesser writer than Wharton might yield to the temptation of presenting a full-blown romance crowned with a happy ending. After all, “love conquers all.” But does it? In her wisdom and realism, Wharton doesn’t let Archer off the leash.
Also, let’s not forget May’s suffering when she discovers that her husband is in love with another woman. She’d been aware all along — and comes to admire Archer for his self-sacrifice. To her, it proves that this is a man who can be trusted.
Masterpieces are usually full of suffering. They manage to make that suffering strangely enchanting. Should Archer have “gone for it”? Whatever he does, there will be suffering. Great literature doesn’t shrink from portraying it.
Mary:
*
WHY BARBIE AND LITTLE MERMAID MADE 2023 SUMMER THE DEAD GIRL SUMMER
Ariel and Barbie have quite a bit in common: They’re both frozen in time, and they both yearn to live as humans do.
The fantastic seascapes and perfect dollhouses of “The Little Mermaid” and “Barbie” might appear whimsical. But I see these settings – and the characters who inhabit them – as figurations of death.
In my forthcoming book, I consider the relationship between mermaids and Barbie dolls. In the case of the 2023 films, I couldn’t help but think about how Ariel and Barbie make the same ironic choice: to leave the stasis of their deathlike existence for a human life – which ends in death.
These dead girls offer insights about living. Embracing death’s inevitability brings some freedom, as well as access to truths about time and the natural world.
‘I am dead yet I live’
Ariel and Barbie are not your typical dead girls – at least in the literary sense.
The dead girl trope goes back to Shakespeare’s Ophelia, who drowns herself after being driven to madness by Hamlet’s erratic, abusive speech. But dead girls have long populated folktales about sleeping beauties and myths of goddesses traversing the underworld.
Today, the trope is often found in noirish mysteries. These narratives frequently prioritize the development of a male protagonist – a detective who grapples with his own mortality while solving a crime that regularly involves sexual violence.
David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks,” which first aired on ABC in 1990, wields this version of the trope. FBI agent Dale Cooper investigates the murder of Laura Palmer, a homecoming queen whose corpse is discovered wrapped in plastic. Though Laura Palmer has been victimized, she isn’t voiceless. She appears in flashbacks and has recorded her feelings and desires in diary entries.
In Showtime’s 2017 reboot, “Twin Peaks: The Return,” the afterlife version of Laura tells Cooper, “I am dead yet I live.”
Ariel and Barbie are their films’ protagonists, and they don’t die via murder. But they nevertheless actualize Laura’s words: Choosing flesh over immortality is to live and die, too.
Dreaming death in fish tails and pink
“Do you guys ever think about dying?” asks the character known as “Stereotypical Barbie,” played by Margot Robbie, a few scenes into the film. The irony is that Barbie is already dead, cheerfully doomed to repeat the same pink day, devoid of food, conflict and sex.
Barbie’s dreamworld is home to many iterations of its title character, including Mermaid Barbie. There are also a number of Kens. They are coupled, but they aren’t having sex. As Stereotypical Barbie declares, Barbies don’t have vaginas, and Kens don’t have penises.
Fish tails don’t typically feature vaginas either. The virginal Ariel is stuck in her fin, fathoms below.
Ariel and Barbie don’t get periods and can’t get pregnant. They’ll also never go through menopause.
In their films, the protagonists reject dollified existences and choose human life with its opportunities for sex and unavoidable death. Ariel leaves the ocean’s eternity for the prince’s land-world after she saves him. Barbie sacrifices physical perfection – her own and Ken’s – for the possibility of authentic intimacy and the spontaneity of an aging female body. The latter leads her to visit the gynecologist’s office at the film’s conclusion.
Hollywood films promise happily ever afters, but those weren’t the main draw for audiences of “The Little Mermaid” and “Barbie.”
I think that part of what drove theater attendance this summer was a subconscious attraction to the deathlike repetition of timeless dreamworlds, whether underwater or plastered in pink.
As dead girls, Ariel and Barbie are appealing vessels because, in them, time stops: You can’t be out of time when there is no time to begin with.
A water-bound mermaid and an ageless doll present a “timeout,” especially for girls and women pressured to achieve specific education and other life goals within certain time frames. Fish-tailed mermaids and Barbie dolls are free from ticking biological and career clocks – although they imagine or play at the things determined by those clocks, too. As a doll, Barbie gets to have any and all jobs, trading one for another whenever her player gets bored. She can be a doctor, an astronaut or even president of the United States.
Audiences might go to the movies to escape reality. Yet, Barbie and Ariel choose to enter reality, leaving their respective dreamworlds. Such outcomes make the films relevant to the summer of 2023: The dead girl can’t age, but her perpetual youth signals the future’s promises, even when there is no promise of a future.
‘This sad, vanishing world’
In her fish-tailed state, Ariel sings about wanting to know about fire and its causes, questions applicable to this summer’s reckoning with global warming. Humans have scorched the planet to fulfill a desire for, among other things, plastic – the very material that made Barbie possible.
The unprecedented heat in the summer of 2023 demands that everybody listen to another ticking clock, the one counting down to environmental ruin.
Ariel and Barbie choose to live in the world their audiences inhabit, even though the characters are fully aware that humans are destructive and cause suffering.
“The Little Mermaid” is explicit about how humans hurt the ecosystem, a critique made by Black mermaids in older folk tales and recent literature inspired by them. Ariel and Eric inevitably sail away, leaving her home under the sea and his coastal kingdom. The bittersweet ending suggests they, each equipped with knowledge of the other’s world, will carry insights about environmental harmony to other places.
“The Little Mermaid” and “Barbie,” I believe, reveal a truth found in many sacred stories. If you accept that you are dead already and that time is always passing away, you might gain the freedom to truly embrace the brief life you do have in what the Hindu deity Krishna described as “this sad, vanishing world.”
Or as W.B. Yeats wrote, “Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?”
~ Katie Kapurch, Vox Populi, September 14, 2023
*
BARBIE: A “COMING OF AGE” MOVIE
~ At first glance, her film “Barbie” is a glittering and guileless fantasy fashioned to provoke audiences to lovingly wax nostalgic about their own childhoods. And, yet, for others much more critical of the values the dolls were said to represent, the film opens the door for a hard look at certain gender roles — particularly related to a certain eye-opening speech by a character played by America Ferrera.
Starring Margot Robbie as “Stereotypical Barbie” (all the dolls from the Mattel toy line are named “Barbie,” except for Skipper and Midge, of course), Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach have fleshed-out a plastic plaything dating back to the 1950s into the inhabitants of a kind of alternate world where everything is all-Barbie, all the time.
The Barbies all live in open air “Dream Houses” and drive cars that are too small but somehow they fit. They run everything: They have a Barbie President, a Barbie Supreme Court and they have Physicist Barbie, Lawyer Barbie, Doctor Barbie, Judge Barbie and more. And, every day consists of Stereotypical Barbie waking up and greeting every Barbie she meets, showering with no water, eating breakfast with no real food, and then going out to do whatever fun thing happens her way. Mostly, it involves a beach party with Ken (Ryan Gosling), her semi-boyfriend, who has no real function except to look cool with all the other Kens while running on the beach, where no one leave footprints in the sand and the water is a stiff prop.
All is peaceful and idyllic, that is until Stereotypical Barbie inexplicably blurts out a passing thought about death.
What the Barbies have apparently never considered is that their existence depends on the person playing with them, a person who lives in the flesh-and-blood real world beyond their plastic borders. And, it is to this world that “Weird Barbie” (Kate McKinnon) — a broken, punked-out and abused doll — encourages Stereotypical Barbie to explore in order to find answers to an existential crisis that is suddenly affecting Barbie Land. So, Stereotypical Barbie, and stowaway Ken, take a journey by car, boat, spaceship, snowmobile, bicycle, camper van and neon rollerblades to Los Angeles, California.
They find answers all right, but what they discover will change Barbie Land forever and put a pretty big dent in the real world too.
Much of this has to do with changes affected by Stereotypical Barbie encountering executives at the Mattel toy company led by the CEO (Will Ferrell) and the woman who played with Barbie when she was younger named Gloria (Ferrera), plus her friendship with an alternative doll back in Barbie Land named Allan (Michael Cera). But, the biggest change occurs when Ken discovers the concept of patriarchy in the real world and decides to share it his fellow Kens back home.
Once audiences head back to their own homes, they may find themselves wondering about what they just saw. For many, it has already meant gathering all their friends and sharing this movie with them in a movie theater, millions of them, making this one of the highest grossing films of all time. ~
https://www.taosnews.com/tempo/reviews/now-showing-barbie/article_e83548ea-4812-11ee-a40b-97522f17223c.html
Mary:
Oriana:
Or, as TS Eliot put it, "Birth, copulation, death." Tough, there is just no getting away from it.
*
. . . “Since the beginning of time, since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls,” Helen Mirren intones in a voiceover as a primitive society of girls in pinafores mother old-fashioned porcelain dolls onscreen. “But the dolls were always and forever baby dolls, until . . . ” Thus Spake Zarathustra plays as Barbie—Margot Robbie herself, a monumental living statue straight out of Valhalla—suddenly appears in their midst like Kubrick’s monolith. The girls smash their babies to the ground.
It’s true that, together with television sets and record players and many other leisure goods, Barbie helped inaugurate what the historian Lizabeth Cohen called the consumer’s republic of postwar America, even playing a tutelary role in it; as Cohen observed, “her closets full of fashionable outfits and accessories taught the importance of how you dressed and what you owned.” (A television set and a record player appear in Barbie’s first Dreamhouse, which arrived in 1962.)
And if Barbie has a particularly charismatic status among these items, this too stands to reason — I am not the only one with happy memories of dolls. Indeed, the movie’s conceit is that the real world in which Barbie is a commodity produced by Mattel, and the imaginary world in which she lives out the fantasies projected onto her, are closely but obscurely connected, their border crossable by those in the know.
This is at a glance a clever idea, and one gets the sense that Barbie’s director Greta Gerwig believes it is a slyly subversive one. Barbieland, an enchanting pink vision of California midcentury modernity, is a liberal feminist utopia in which women run society, do choreographed dances, ignore men, and lounge. This happy state developed as the Barbie universe diversified, Mirren explains, evolving to include career girls and racial difference and a slightly expanded range of body types. The film sees bitter irony in the fact that the Real World has fallen so far behind the Barbies’ world, and comic potential in the fact that the Barbies don’t know it until one of them arrives there.
“You’re a fascist,” Sasha informs Robbie bluntly. The encounter offers an intriguing twist on a classic motif of children’s literature and film, wherein a fantasy realm is thrown into chaos by a child who has put away childish things. “Children know such a lot now. Soon they don’t believe in fairies, and every time a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies,’ there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead,” Peter tells Wendy in J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.
What happens when a child says, “I don’t believe in Barbie” because she knows such a lot about the traffic in women? What psychic material is buried in the process of this achievement? Does anyone fall down dead? Alas, Gerwig retreats from these questions as soon as she raises them, because the entire thing turns out to be a mixup: it is actually Sasha’s mother, Gloria, a stressed-out everywoman played by America Ferrera, who has been nostalgically playing with Barbies; it is Gloria whose dyspepsia has infected Barbieland. Gloria works for Mattel.
In her essay “Fascinating Fascism,” which centers on the work of Leni Riefenstahl but locates a related sensibility in movies like Fantasia and, indeed, 2001, Susan Sontag writes,
Fascist art displays a utopian aesthetics—that of physical perfection. Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
Minus the nudity, these are apt descriptions of Barbieland—though to point this out risks willfully refusing to recognize another Sontagian aesthetic, camp. It’s not just that bodily imperfections are forbidden here, it’s that Robbie developing cellulite is a national emergency; it’s not just that the pornography is asexual, it’s that Barbie and Ken don’t have genitals. Such gags obviously send up Barbieland’s veneer of perfection, and yet an aura of authoritarianism clings to the film like a Ken to his Barbie. Another moment from “Fascinating Fascism” gets us closer to solving this riddle.
Describing Triumph of the Will, a film she found “superb” and deplorable, Sontag writes, “in a temperate zone clean-cut people in uniforms group and regroup, as if they were seeking the perfect choreography to express their fealty.” Beach, check; uniforms, check; choreo, check; but to whom are the Barbies expressing their fealty?
The answer, of course, is Mattel. Though the company is the target of mild satire, its all-male executive team clownish and easily pranked, there is no question that Barbie’s makers ultimately control the meaning of the doll, and that Barbieland is nothing but a vassal state. With the exception of Weird Barbie, stigmatized in Barbieland after being mangled by a kid who “played too hard,” no one in the seaside colony shows signs of having experienced the destabilizing effects of child’s play at all.
Barbie, in short, has disrupted a stalwart genre of children’s stories about the power of fantasy to remake the world, often by animating the jumbled things around her. It has done so by cutting out the middleman of the child entirely, and banishing all toys that are not Barbies.
The idea that dolls offer girls a prefabricated range of options for what they can be, rather than a set of objects on which to play out wishes and fears, aggression and desire, grants an enormous amount of psychic power and civic responsibility to corporations. Barbie not only seems to believe this but suggests that it is good and even natural, part of the evolutionary process that began when Barbie first rose in the mist and inspired girls to destroy their crude unbranded playthings, dangerously empty vessels for the imagination. ~ 
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/who-was-barbie/
Oriana:
Like many viewers, I was surprised by how engaging this movie is, and how well it present the matriarchy/patriarchy split. My favorite scene has Ken, in the Real World, get into a hospital and ask if he can perform an appendectomy. “Absolutely not,” replies a female doctor. “May I speak to a doctor?” Ken replies. “You are speaking to a doctor” is the reply. But Ken is already rushing toward a man he perceives as a “real doctor.”
This reminds me of a woman professor in my graduate school who said that she always answers the phone, “Doctor So-and-So” — “because if I don’t say ‘doctor,’ they will assume I’m a secretary.” This sad reality is not entirely behind us. And Gerwig’s unexpected masterpiece works precisely because gender stereotypes are still with us. Yes, we have come a long way since the 1950s, but gender-related issues are still alive, and perhaps always will with us. I am reminded of a provocative 19th century Polish novel, The Emancipated Women, going back to the late 19th century. In it, the most emancipated character, the schoolmistress, remarks to a budding feminist: “Women can never be equal because only women bear children.”
And, by and large, the culture still penalizes women for having children. This is one of the causes of the incipient demographic crisis. Barbie is a surprisingly thought-provoking movie — while almost miraculously being a pleasure to watch.
As movies go, this has been a summer to remember. “Oppenheimer” reminds us that that humanity could destroy itself in a nuclear holocaust— or, in the “not with a bang but a whimper” tradition, more and more women could choose to remain child-free. Instead of a disruptive birth cry, the decorous silence of a cemetery.
*
*
THE ORIGIN OF COMMUNISM (Dima Vorobiev)
~ Communism is all about a world where there’s no private property.
Jesus Christ and His disciples were the first to make it a political program.
And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. ~ Acts 2:44-5.
Now, the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common… There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. ~ Acts 4:32–5.
Also, Jesus was the first radical progressive when it came to the implementation of this program.
All Karl Marx did was to re-interpret this idea in terms of class struggle instead of Salvation. His economic theory also presented Communism as a force of nature, not a moral imperative. This force of nature would manifest itself in human action and make us all eternally happy in this world, rather than in the Great Beyond.
Below, a painting by Vassíly Kurákin, “The Report by a Young Pioneers’ leader to the Pedagogic Council.”
The room is filled
with light, its walls luminescent with the reflection of a perfect
world. Portraits of Communist prophets (Vladimir Lenin with his wife
Nadezhda, proletarian novelist Maxim Gorki and proletarian poet Vladimir
Mayakovsky) adorn the scene.
The table in the center, covered
with scarlet tablecloth, is the altar of the true teaching. On it, we
see a landscaping model made by young pioneers during a school project
to transform the earth according to Marxist visions.
The
congregation sits in their Sunday clothes. The chairman has a landline
on his table, the symbol of direct connection to the higher authority.
We can see how everyone is deeply moved by the Young Pioneers’ leader’s
tale. No one seems to be bored or lost in daydreaming. Two men to the
left study photographic documentation. The group to the right are
passing around some artifact testifying for the kids’ good work. The
secretary in the center is a Communist scribe, catching the moment for
posterity in the absence of phone cameras and Instagram.
The
entire mood and the style of the painting are clearly derived from
Christian art. Imagine this is the older sister of the Portugal kids
telling about Our Lady of Fatima to the village elders. Or the girl
singing a gospel to the glory of Our Lord. That’s how applied Marxism
took the hard core of Christian spirituality and weaponized it with the
superior toolset of the vanguard Party and democratic centralism.
HowManyAngelicasIWonder:
What
a hoot the painting is! Another thing: it's a girl Pioneer, and women
figure prominently. And the telephone, symbol of the modern era. The
phone is also a means of mass communication over great distances,
bringing people together.
Dima:
Something tells me was a women’s cult to start with—before some men saw a power potential in it.
Rik Osborn:
I
would, however, mention the biggest difference between Jesus’
“socialism”, and Marxist socialism. Jesus left it as a voluntary,
individual choice; Marx wanted to force it on everybody. Jesus said
(paraphrasing), YOU sell what you own and give to the poor. He didn’t
say, “Petition/overthrow the government and force everybody to
redistribute the wealth.”
Marx may have *hoped* that people would
come to it voluntarily, but even he recognized that it was going to
take violent revolution to actually implement his vision. And, in my
opinion, I think he rather naively failed to predict that, once the
revolution happened, the people in charge would inevitably behave just
like every other power-hungry bastard in history. Marxist socialism
fails to account for human nature. Jesus understood human nature, and
knew that most people weren’t going to go along with his ideas.
David Pringle:
I
used to teach a course in “The Bible as Literature,” and some
conservative Christian students were shocked at the realization that the
community of disciples in Jerusalem, after Jesus’s ascension into
Heaven, were in fact practicing “primitive socialism.” I’d point out
that many revolts against the Church (from the Cathars and Hussites to
the Protestant Reformation) cited the book of Acts as precedent for
seizing the property of the bishops and monks and sharing it out among
the people. Then, to make the students feel better, I’d go on to note
that many of Paul of Tarsus’s writings and travels were aimed at getting
donations to be sent back to the community in Jerusalem; in brief, the
commune needed outside funding and wasn’t viable on its own.
Mirek Fidler:
As
practiced in the sphere of Soviet influence, Marxism was nothing else
than religion. It had it all — church, processions, dogmas, saints,
beliefs, heretics, inquisition…
Ross Driedger:
I would
suggest you reread the Gospels, with particular attention to The Sermon
on the Mount. What Jesus advocated for sounds a lot more like a
communist ideal than a capitalist one.
Dima:
The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, would be a good start:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman
and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now
open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the
contending classes.”
David Pringle:
The idea of the
dialectic—thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—as an objective description
of how EVERYTHING works and progresses (society through its phases, a
plant through its growth cycle, an individual person through the stages
of their life, etc.) can be found in Hegel, and Marx was a Hegelian
(although he “stood Hegel on his head”). “Dialectical materialism”
was thus meant to be seen as a purely objective, scientific explanation
of the inevitability of communism.
Andy Kashen:
I always knew Jesus was a stinkin’ commie!
Yevgeniy Leto:
Exactly and Catholic orders are the closest things to true communism.
Dima:
Monastic communities in general, yes. And the nuclear family of course.
La Grande Chartreuse
*
RUSSIA’S DECLINING POPULATION
In the first 7 months of 2023 (January-July), 726,641 babies were born in the Russian Federation and 1,023,947 people died.
That’s 297,306 negative growth.
In just 7 months, Russia lost nearly 300,000 people. It will be about half a million in the whole year, if not more.
In June 2023, fewer children were born in Russia than in any other June since 1991 — the year when the USSR collapsed and shop shelves were empty.
According to the forecast of independent demographer Alexei Raksha, in 2024 the number of births in Russia will be at the level of 1943.
Women in Russia don’t want to bear children because of lack of money.
(And, I suppose, lack of security because of war — but women don’t want to mention the war to pollsters.)
The only way how Russia used to manage this demographic crisis was by bringing migrants from ex-USSR republics: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, etc.
But now Russia is sending migrants who got Russian passports to the war in Ukraine. Ruble is plummeting and unqualified jobs where migrants work are now paying about the same as in their home countries. Before, migrants could earn double the amount compared to wages in their home countries.
This means that both Russia’s ability to fill job vacancies and maintain the size of population will suffer.
Putin’s war is destroying Russia, in all societal dimensions. But most of all, it’s destroying it morally, requiring from people to approve destruction and mass murders. It changes the group psychology of the Russian society. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
AKA Skurat:
Also, the middle class and upper middle class have already fled or working there way up to do so. People of reproductive age don't want to stay in Russia.
Audi Chason:
As you know Russia has a high divorce rate, 74%. My Russian wife tells me one reason for the low birth rate is child support is only capriciously enforced and alimony is rarely awarded. So, a Russian woman has one child, divorces without support, and is reluctant to bear a second child.
Oriana:
“The roots of Russia's crisis go back 30 years. The country reached peak population in 1994, with 149m people. The total has since zig-zagged downwards. It was 145m in 2021 (that figure, from the UN, excludes the 2.4m people of Crimea, which Russia seized in 2014 and incorporated into its national accounts).
A DEMOGRAPHIC TRAGEDY is unfolding in Russia. Over the past three years the country has lost around two million more people than it would ordinarily have done, as a result of war, disease and exodus. The life expectancy of Russian males aged 15 fell by almost five years, to the same level as in Haiti. The number of Russians born in April 2022 was no higher than it had been in the months of Hitler’s occupation. And because so many men of fighting age are dead or in exile, women now outnumber men by at least 10 million.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/03/04/russias-population-nightmare-is-going-to-get-even-worse
Oriana:
The demographic crisis is global; it's just more acute in Russia, where a typical ethnic Russian household consists of the mother, one child, and the grandmother who helps out with child care and cooking.
*
FOOD SUPPLY IN THE SOVIET UNION
~ The carbs supply was present at all times, all Soviet shops had bread, local pasta, flour, sweets and some strange items like sea cabbage, birch tree juice, fish cutlets tefteli or dry kisel’ in blocks.
The supplies were better in Moscow, the electric trains to Moscow from small towns were called “sausage trains”.
The Baltic states had to supply Leningrad.
There was a joke. “How are pigs killed in our factories? By a grenade! How come? All the parts fly off to Leningrad and Moscow!”
It was absolutely natural that there was no meat, poultry, almost no fresh vegetables and fruits in the shops. Therefore we understood we must get it ourselves. For example we went to our relatives at countryside to work [and get paid in sacks of potatoes and cabbages and carrots we collected ourselves] to ensure we have not rotten potatoes and other vegetables.
And people were given “collective gardens” from state to grow vegetables since 70s and very intensively in early 80s. Our neighbors were keeping nutrias / coypu, and the above mentioned relatives were growing rabbits.
Also before New Year you could receive “package” from trade union at special shop that would include a hen blue in color [due to old age], some mayonnaise (Pravonsal’ brand) and some pepper.
Sometimes it included also canned products from “friendly countries”.
When Gorbachev came, the rationed food coupons began to appear.
Of course there were also strange exceptions, like Bulgarian cigarettes or Cuban rum and cigars that were at a regular supply at not too high prices in kiosks. ~ Jonas Oškinis, Quora
David Pan:
When the first Soviet inspectors came to my base in Belgium for the first INF Treaty inspection, they were taken to our small [military] dining facility where all the personnel ate. Nothing special, just a cafeteria line with salad bar. The Soviet personnel were absolutely delighted by the food. They cleaned out the salad bar and took most of the fruit.
Vasily Smith:
Very popular joke from Soviet Union. Two sausage factories directors are chatting.
“And how do you make your kielbasa? “
“Hmm. We take cardboard. Add some meat and mix it…”
“ Ohh boy. You do use meat? Wow.”
Anything of the value, including good food, was stolen right away by people in charge and bartered for goods and services from people like them.
Jalar Laes:
Can't confirm by direct contact, but hear rumors that Russians living nearby came/come regularly to buy groceries from Estonia due differences in food quality (despite the price and pay grade gap) — they seem to complain about things like that in Russia they have palm oil shoveled in everything.
Vasily Smith:
Either it was on sale or you had to go without.
And you knew where and how to get it. Many times it involved hand to hand fighting with bunch of elderly ladies. Nothing in particular I’m proud of..
And if you think that results were predictable, think again.. These girls had a lifetime experience on their side.
Patriciu Radulescu:
In Romania we made moonshine from the “friendly” Cuban candies. They were 99% pure cane sugar.
*
WHY THE SOVIET CONSUMER GOODS WERE SO BAD
~ The reason why the Soviet Union was bad at consumer goods is the reason why we have anti-monopoly laws.
If you were a head of a factory of consumer goods in the Soviet Union, you had a guaranteed market share. Your entire production will be sold and there will be a line for more, because there was no competition anyway, the state prioritized military production and flashy public projects, consumer goods were a distant second or third. There was no reason to improve and no reward for producing something better than the absolute minimum required. Furthermore you could probably siphon off some funds as well, so you may be inclined to make further cuts in quality.
This wasn’t a Soviet thing. Monopolies were found to produce results like this in the West in 19th century already, so anti-monopoly laws were introduced to mitigate the problem. Soviet approach was diametrically opposite: they embraced state monopolies, because without private ownership everything will be completely different, right?
There were also other issues, like that time when someone not terribly bright decided the Soviet people should all have guitars, so all the furniture factories across the USSR were ordered to make guitars for like a year. They produced lots of guitars and were happy, the reports looked very nice indeed. The fact these guitars were nearly useless as instruments due to shoddy workmanship never made into reports.
This was the key downside of Soviet consumer economy and the reason for shabby everything that wasn’t meant for official or military use. ~ Tomaž Vargazon
Maxence Gomez:
My Trotskyist acquaintances used to say that the Soviet Union failed to build a Socialist economy but instead ended up with “State owned capitalist monopolies “
Now, in hindsight , one could have added “State-owned mafia-operated capitalist monopolies."
William Lebotschy:
The Soviet economy was never geared to be a consumer economy. Consumer products, from a centralized decision making point of view, was only based on essentials (soap, clothes, food) etc. Luxury goods (cars, domestic appliances), etc were only produced to satisfy the upper levels of the administration’s needs. The top echelon bought consumer goods at the foreign currency stores. Only enough to keep them alive and not rebellious. Add to that monopolies, as you write, and one has a drab, poor quality consumer sector. The strange thing is that expenditure on the military eventually led to the collapse of the economy. Even the Soviets could not escape economic fundamentals.
R. Kumar:
Soviet consumer goods were excellent, in fact better than western goods.
But only when they were made on military production lines.
It's all a matter of Priorities.
The Soviets never cared about living standards. They were a military economy and hence only prioritized military. All military stuff from the USSR are of very good quality.
*
IF IT WASN’T ON RUSSIAN FEDERAL TV, THEN IT’S FAKE NEWS. It never happened and if you insist you’re discrediting Russian Armed Forces.
My daughter’s mother, Maria, refused to believe that there were drone attacks in Moscow where she resides.
I sent her photo proofs from the location of the attack that I took with my phone but all she said to stop pulling her leg, “it wasn’t in the news.”
Several days later after a barrage of kamikaze drones were crashing into residential buildings and office towers left and right, federal television showed the footage on evening news. And only then Maria believed drone attacks in Moscow.
KGB methods haven’t changed in the past fifty-sixty years , however they don’t work so well in the Internet age when you can instantly see photos and videos on your telegram channel.
KGB exercises a tight control on the official narrative, calls fake news whatever doesn’t fit it, and tweaks message depending on the altered circumstances.
For example, when the sunk Moskva flagship became viral and a topic for the countless memes in the West, Russian propaganda broke the silence and several days later finally admitted that the warship is indeed on the bottom of the sea like the submarine Kursk.
It hasn’t been hit with adversaries’ missiles. Rather, there were two smokers taking a break in the ammunition storage on the ship that led to a fire and an explosion.
As a result, Russian propaganda reaction to a joke gave rise to another joke, about omnipresent “two smokers” smoking in all the wrong places like oil depots and military factories causing blazes of fires.
Damage control was rather bizarre. The flagship of the Black Sea fleet with its hundreds of missing sailors was dismissed as “old” hence irrelevant to the needs of SMO. Apparently, the flagship was much older than oligarchs’ super-yachts and not as cool and fun.
As for sailors, Russian women pledged to give birth to more sailors, and the families wouldn’t receive any compensations until the government sees the male babies first. [Oriana: in case someone is new to Misha Firer: now and then he engages in satire]
Ukrainian defense forces attacked two Project 22160 Vasily Bykov class patrol ships in the southwestern part of the Black Sea. There is some damage and there’s a footage of the attack.
The ships went on a maiden voyage in 2019 hence they can’t be dismissed as derelict like Moskva, but it doesn’t matter : if it is not on federal news then no attack took place.
A people without agency has secret service agents exercise it on their behalf.
Rebuilding Soviet Union wouldn’t be complete without parallel reality that KGB constructs for its eternally slumbering citizens to enhance their sweet dreams.
The high goal is to protect them from realization that they’re a third-rate image projection of the West, which is 100% dependent on the Western civilization for technologies, innovations and everything else from social trends and values system to music, literature, architecture, healthcare, etc.
This knowledge causes KGB officers and generals an uncomfortable feeling of deep and irreparable inferiority.
Although Russian ruling elites at war with the West, they continue to drive Western cars, wear Western clothes , eat Western food, live in Western houses, work in Western offices behind Western computers, have their family reside in the West while shaking hand angrily pledging to wipe the West off the surface of the earth if they do not acknowledge their tsar’s ultimatum.
How truly pathetic. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Michelle Hout:
“Rebuilding Soviet Union wouldn’t be complete without parallel reality that KGB constructs.” Well there's a fact.
Alan Kruza:
Something really needs to be done about those careless Russian smokers!
Oriana:
Another pathetic lie: “Russia never invaded anyone.”
*
THE RUSSIANS OFTEN DO NOT COLLECT THEIR DEAD AND WOUNDED
~ The report by the American analysts states that the Russians refuse to evacuate their own fighters from the frontline areas. Due to this, in particular, the number of deserters increased.
Also, the terrorist army of the so-called Russian Federation complains that there is a lack of weapons and equipment, which is why they cannot carry out a successful offensive in various areas of the front in Ukraine. ~ Neil Hawker, Quora
Alan Blackwood:
Russia pays compensation to the families of dead soldiers. If the dead aren’t collected from the battlefield, or if they are disposed of in the mobile crematoriums the Russians use, there is no body to return and therefore those soldiers are listed as missing; no compensation to pay.
Sara Torres:
RuSSian soldiers must also be aware of this policy, so if they are aware of the crematoriums, then they must know they are cheated? Morale in the dump, if it is not already there in the first place?
(Oriana: Strange, this is the first time I actually noticed that there is “SS” in Russia [RoSSiya].)
William Mclaurin:
No way I would fight for a country that disrespects the dead this way.
*
RUSSIAN POPULATION IN CRIMEA; CRIMEA’S WATER PROBLEM
~ They will simply have to leave and return to Russia so the Ukrainians the Russians evicted and exiled can have their own property back and a place to live.
But here is a fun fact about Russian stupidity. When the Russians blew up that dam, they doomed the Crimea to be forever a welfare state with no future except Russian handouts. The problem is that without that dam, the North Crimea Canal gets no water. That canal provided well over 80% of all the Crimea’s fresh water. Now about half the water must be trucked in from Russia even with the cessation of all agriculture requiring irrigation and all industry that needs water.
But that is not the bad part. The bad part is that the Crimea has very, very little fresh water. What it has is a lot of salt marshes and salt swamps. The water from the canal not only irrigated farms and provided water to industry, it kept the saltwater from encroaching into the farmland. With the water cut off, the salt water is encroaching rapidly into the water table, a little further each day.
This water destroys the land for agriculture and cannot be used by industry without expensive desalinization that Russia cannot afford. Global warming and sea rise has increased the need or fresh water and has made saltwater encroachment a much worse problem than when the dam, and canal were built.
Even if the water supply is resumed eventually it will take decades for it to force the salt back out of the water table so agriculture can return.
Just another example of a level of stupidity the world seldom sees. ~ RW Carmichael, Quora
Chris Jones:
It’s not stupidity. It’s a matter of priorities.
Putin wants to keep living. Through that lens blowing up the dam makes sense. The moment Ukraine wins and Russia loses, which is a When by now not an If…Putin will die. So he’s trying to push back that When.
So even though blowing up the dam ruined Crimea’s future what it did do was delay the Ukrainian offensive and thus push back the end of the war. Putin doesn’t act like someone who gives a shit about Russians, Russia, Crimea or the future of any of those things. He cares about not being shot in the head and tossed out a window for starting this disastrous war.
Notgiven:
The funny thing is it only temporarily delayed the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The more the land dries out, the easier it will be to retake the land by routes not previously open. Not to mention the flood that occurred after they blew the dam washed away some of the Russians first line defenses. So in the long run, blowing the dam might ACCELERATE the Ukrainian offensive. It also killed some of the Russian troops that were in the way of the flooding.
Adam Gatson:
Given what you've said, it's possible that the Russians were making sure that Crimea was ruined for when the Ukrainians come back. But that involves some forward thinking…
*
HOW BRITISH CAN YOU GET
~ I was told the following story really happened.
During the 1970s, a demonstration against the government took place in London. A Union leader spoke to the very angry crowd:
“Let’s burn down Buckingham Palace and throw a bomb in the Houses of Parliament.”
There was one policeman, all alone and unarmed. He kindly asked the speaker if he could use the microphone for a moment. The Union leader agreed and the policeman said to the crowd:
“Please, in order not to disturb the traffic, those who are going to burn down Buckingham Palace to the left, those who are going to throw a bomb in the Houses of Parliament to the right.” ~
Marek:
This somehow reminds me of this joke:
A drunk man gets onto a bus, looks around and shouts: “Now I got into a nice company! Everyone on the left side of the bus are idiots, and everyone on the right side of the bus are thieves!”
One man on the right side stands up and says: “Excuse me? I’ll have you know, sir, that I have never stolen anything!”
“Fair,” says the drunk, “alright, you can switch to the left side, then.”
*
COLD WAR — LIBERALISM IN MOURNING
“Lionel Trilling crystallizes the cynical Cold War liberalism that sacrificed idealism for self-restraint.”
Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe—for liberalism. This distinct body of liberal thought says that freedom comes first, that the enemies of liberty are the first priority to confront and contain in a dangerous world, and that demanding anything more from liberalism is likely to lead to tyranny.
This set of ideas became intellectually trendsetting in the 1940s and 1950s at the outset of the Cold War, when liberals conceived of them as essential truths the free world had to preserve in a struggle against totalitarian empire. By the 1960s it had its enemies, who invented the phrase “Cold War liberalism” itself to indict its domestic compromises and foreign policy mistakes.
That did not stop it from being rehabilitated in the 1990s, when it was repurposed for a post-political age. A generation of public intellectuals—among them Anne Applebaum, Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, and many others—styled themselves as successors to Cold War liberals, trumpeting the superiority of Cold War liberalism over illiberal right and left while obscuring just how distinctive it was within the broader liberal tradition. 1989 ushered in the global triumph of freedom, but on Cold War liberalism’s distorted terms.
Then came the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which unleashed a great war over liberalism—a polemical one, at least—and prompted yet another resurgence of Cold War liberalism’s core ideas. Patrick Deneen’s much-discussed assault, Why Liberalism Failed (2018), was met by a crop of liberal self-defenses, almost all of them explicitly or implicitly attempted in Cold War terms.
Francis Fukuyama, Adam Gopnik, and Mark Lilla all wrote book-length versions of why Cold War liberalism still had legs, but literally thousands of essays and websites, and even whole magazines such as The Atlantic, offered the same message in frantic response to Trump’s breakthrough. Organized as much against the left as the right, these defenses not only rang hollow; they have failed to forestall the political crisis they promised to transcend.
The result has been the reversal of Cold War liberal triumph into today’s mood of desperation and despair that has left liberalism on the ropes, hated by a left and a right that now both propose to move beyond it. In the last several years, of course, a few right intellectuals of Deneen’s ilk have continued to call for a vague “post-liberalism,” the main actual function of which sometimes seems to be to bait Cold War liberals into reasserting their creed.
Thanks to this eternal return, Cold War liberalism still sets the fundamental terms of the liberal outlook—in spite of all the alternatives within the liberal tradition. Lost in this shuffle was how much of a betrayal of liberalism itself Cold War liberalism had been. Perhaps no one better illustrates this chosen fate than literary critic Lionel Trilling. One of the most admired of the Cold War liberals, Trilling was also the most remorselessly self-critical. The essays he wrote in the later 1930s and 1940s established the position of The Liberal Imagination, his 1950 triumph that sold almost two hundred thousand copies. Alongside Trilling’s 1947 novel, The Middle of the Journey, his essays crystallize the abandonment of the liberal cause in the name of rescuing it from illusions and immaturity.
This kind of Cold War liberalism continues to haunt liberalism even today, but Trilling was also its most pitiless critic. We now tend to think of Cold War liberalism as a political stance with familiar implications in domestic and foreign policy, defending freedom of thought against miscreants right, left, postmodern, and “woke” at home, and choosing between containment and rollback of bigger geopolitical challengers while engaging in counterinsurgency and proxy wars around the world. Yet like so many political doctrines, Cold War liberalism was as much about the self as the state or society.
In 1958 political philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously captured this liberalism’s commitment to “negative liberty,” freedom against interference; by contrast, Trilling’s call to contain disorderly passion for the sake of austere freedom resonated with an ideology of self-control in deep tension with the notion of liberty as noninterference. While his fellow Cold War liberal Judith Shklar, a political theorist at Harvard, defined the creed as a “liberalism of fear” that committed itself above all to avoiding cruelty, Trilling thought it also entailed self-subjugation and self-policing, and he squirmed under the self-torture he recommended. His call for a self-regulated Cold War liberal persona was never complete and unambivalent: even as a damaged life led him to impose limits, he never entirely relinquished his youthful protest against unnecessary ones.
Born in New York City in 1905 to Polish Jewish immigrants (his father sold fur-lined coats), Trilling had been a fellow traveler of communism very briefly, from 1931 to 1933, and he was never a party member. But in some ways he never left the 1930s, and his Cold War liberalism could be read as a kind of therapy in response. As Trilling saw it, Stalinism, far from being some foreign enemy alone or even mainly, was rooted in the form of liberalism that Trilling’s generation had inherited from the nineteenth century. The deepest contest for this Cold War liberal was inside.
Trilling spent the decade after 1933 in ideological transition. He and his life companion, Diana Rubin, emerged from fellow traveling, registering their first public dissent in 1934. It was thus perhaps no accident that his first form of therapy, in choosing his dissertation topic in the midst of his communist flirtation and completing it as he weaned himself from it, was the Victorian mandarinism and moralism of Matthew Arnold—who hoped to see the ascendant middle class educated in great books to ensure that civilization would not become coarse.
Trilling came by his Anglophilia more honestly than most Cold War liberals who shared it. While his lineage on both sides traced back to Bialystok, it was formative that both his grandmother and his mother had been born and raised in England—and adored it. Trilling was unsure how to rescue liberalism, but Arnold’s brief for high culture in Culture and Anarchy (1869) and other writings offered a starting point.
In the book on Arnold he published in 1939, Trilling was already aware that he was indulging in nostalgia, celebrating the best that has been thought and said. He would go on to teach in Columbia’s great books program for decades, but recognized that it hardly offered a credible politics on its own. On the one hand, he was amazingly open about the need for cultural elites to anticipate and guide democratization, perhaps permanently. “Democracy assumes the ability of all men to live by the intellect,” he wrote. But “we surely must question with Arnold the number of those who can support the intellectual life, even in a secondary way as pupils of the great.”
On the other hand, Trilling understood that cultural mandarinism couldn’t solve the more basic problem: liberals were perpetually shocked by their limits and opponents, not anticipating them and sometimes reinforcing their strength. Reformers acting in the name of liberalism frequently helped its enemies (read: communists) out of enthusiasm for progress.
“Surely if liberalism has a single desperate weakness,” Trilling explained four years later in a book on E.M. Forster, “it is an inadequacy of imagination: liberalism is always being surprised. There is always the liberal work to do over again because hard upon surprise disillusionment follows and for the moment of liberal fatigue reaction is always ready—reaction never hopes, despairs or suffers amazement.” ~
Lionel Mordecai Trilling
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/liberalism-in-mourning/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=2a33cc82b9-newsletter_9_06_23_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-2a33cc82b9-40729829&mc_cid=2a33cc82b9
Oriana:
I suspect we need a new term and a new definition of what it stands for. The same goes for conservatism. What is it trying to “conserve”?
*
THE GEOGRAPHY OF U.S. LIFE EXPECTANCY
life expectancy in the US
~ Where you live in America can have a major effect on how young you die.
On paper, Lexington County, S.C., and Placer County, Calif., have a lot in common. They’re both big, wealthy, suburban counties with white supermajorities that border on their respective state’s capital cities. They both were at the vanguard of their states’ 20th century Republican advances — Lexington in the 1960s when it pivoted from the racist Dixiecrats; Placer with the Reagan Revolution in 1980 — and twice voted for Donald Trump by wide margins. But when it comes to how long their residents can count on living, the parallels fall apart. Placer has a Scandinavia-like life expectancy of 82.3 years. In Lexington, the figure is 77.7, a little worse than China’s.
The geography of U.S. life expectancy — and the policy environments that determine it — is the result of differences that are regional, cultural and political, with roots going back centuries to the people who arrived on the continent with totally different ideas about equality, the proper role of government, and the correct balance point between individual liberty and the common good. Once you understand how the country was colonized — and by whom — a number of insights into Americans’ overall health and longevity are revealed, along with some paths to improve the situation.
When it comes to defining U.S. regions you need to forget the Census Bureau’s divisions, which arbitrarily divide the country into a Northeast, Midwest, South and West, using often meaningless state boundaries and a depressing ignorance of history. The reason the U.S. has strong regional differences is precisely because our swath of the North American continent was settled in the 17th and 18th centuries by rival colonial projects that had very little in common, often despised one another and spread without regard for today’s state (or even international) boundaries.
Those colonial projects — Puritan-controlled New England; the Dutch-settled area around what is now New York City; the Quaker-founded Delaware Valley; the Scots-Irish-dominated upland back country of the Appalachians; the West Indies-style slave society in the Deep South; the Spanish project in the southwest and so on — had different religious, economic and ideological characteristics. They settled much of the eastern half and southwestern third of what is now the U.S. in mutually exclusive settlement bands before significant third party in-migration picked up steam in the 1840s.
In the process — as I unpacked in my 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America — they laid down the institutions, cultural norms and ideas about freedom, social responsibility and the provision of public goods that later arrivals would encounter and, by and large, assimilate into. Some states lie entirely or almost entirely within one of these regional cultures (Mississippi, Vermont, Minnesota and Montana, for instance). Other states are split between the regions, propelling constant and profound internal disagreements on politics and policy alike in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, California and Oregon.
At Nationhood Lab, a project I founded at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, we use this regional framework to analyze all manner of phenomena in American society and how one might go about responding to them. We’ve looked at everything from gun violence and attitudes toward threats to democracy to Covid-19 vaccination rates, rural vs. urban political behavior and the geography of the 2022 midterm elections.
This summer we’ve been drilling down on health, including a detailed examination of the geography of life expectancy. Working with our data partners Motivf, we parsed the rich trove of county-level life expectancy estimates calculated from the Centers for Disease Control data for the years 2017-2020 by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute’s County Health Ranking and Roadmaps project. We wanted to answer the bottom-line question: Is your region helping extend your life or shorten it?
The results show enormous gaps between the regions that don’t go away when you parse by race, income, education, urbanization or access to quality medical care. They amount to a rebuke to generations of elected officials in the Deep South, Greater Appalachia and New France — most of whom have been Republican in recent decades — who have resisted investing tax dollars in public goods and health programs.
“We don’t have these differences in health outcomes because of individual behaviors, it’s related to the policy environments people are living in,” says Jeanne Ayers, who was Wisconsin’s top public health official during the Covid pandemic and is now executive director of Healthy Democracy Healthy People, a collaboration of 11 national public health agencies probing the links between political participation and health. “Your health is only 10 percent influenced by the medical environment and maybe 20 or 30 percent in behavioral choices. The social and political determinants of health are overwhelmingly what you’re seeing in these maps.”
I shared these maps with cardiologist Donald Lloyd-Jones, a past president of the American Heart Association who chairs the preventive medicine department at Northwestern University in Chicago, who said they didn’t surprise him at all. “There’s a reason why the Southeastern portion of this country is called the Stroke Belt: It’s because the rates of stroke per capita are substantially higher there and mirrored by rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and other risk factors.”
“The places on your map where you see orange and red have structural and systemic issues that limit people’s ability to have socioeconomic opportunity, access health care, or achieve maximum levels of education,” Lloyd-Jones added. “All of these policies affect your health and these disparities in longevity absolutely reflect social and structural and historical policies in those regions.”
At Nationhood Lab we wondered if all of this is might just be a reflection of wealth. Some American regions have always had higher standards of living than others because their cultures prioritize the common good over individual liberty, social equality over economic freedom and quality services more than low taxes. The Deep South was founded by English slave lords from Barbados who didn’t care about shared prosperity; the Puritan founders of Yankeedom — who thought God had chosen them to create a more perfect society — very much did, and it made the average person materially a lot better off, both then and now.
Maybe the differences between the regions would go away if you compared just rich counties to one another or just the poor ones? Nope.
We used the prevalence of child poverty as our metric and compared the life expectancy of the least impoverished quartile of U.S. counties — the “richest” ones, in other words — across the regions. The gaps persisted: 4.6 years between the rich counties in the Left Coast and Deep South, for instance.
And they got wider from there when we compared the counties with the highest percentage of children living in poverty: a staggering 6.7 years between those same two regions. Further, the life expectancy gaps between rich and poor counties within each of these regions varied: It was more than twice as wide in Greater Appalachia (3.4 years) and the Deep South (4.3 years) as in Yankeedom (1.7 years.) We saw similar patterns when we repeated the exercise using education levels. When it comes to life and death, some regions are less equal than others.
The same went for relative access to quality clinical care. CHRR assigns every U.S. county a ranking for this based on a combination of 10 factors, including the number of doctors, dentists, mental health professionals, mammography screens, flu vaccinations and uninsured people per capita, as well as how often Medicare enrollees wind up admitted to hospitals with conditions that should be able to be treated on an outpatient basis, an indication the latter services weren’t available. We compared those counties in the top quartiles of this ranking system to one another across the regions and found the gap between them not only persisted, it actually widened, with the Deep South falling about two and half years behind Yankeedom, El Norte and the Far West, 4.4 years behind New Netherland and 5.1 behind Left Coast.
We repeated the experiment using counties that fell in the worst quartile for clinical care and saw the gap grow even wider, with Greater Appalachian (74.6) and Deep Southern (74.7) life expectancy in those communities lagging Yankeedom by about 3 years and New Netherland by about five and a half. That there are fewer counties where most people can afford and access top-notch clinical care in these southern regions than the northern and Pacific coast ones isn’t really a surprise: laissez-faire political leaders tend to create systems that have looser health insurance regulations, leaner Medicaid programs and fewer public and non-profit hospitals. That those that do manage to have decent services nonetheless underperform suggests reversing these gaps won’t be easy.
Turns out even the “haves” are not doing better in the “laissez-faire” regions. One of the most arresting facts that emerged from our analysis was that the most impoverished quartile of U.S. counties in Yankeedom (ones where around 30 to 60 percent of children live in poverty) have a higher life expectancy than the least impoverished quartile of U.S. counties (where child poverty ranges from 3 to 15 percent) in the Deep South by 0.3 years. Those are both big regions (circa 50 million people each) with a wide mix of counties: rural, urban, rich, poor, blue-collar and white-collar, agricultural and industrial. If you compare the poorest category of counties in (completely urbanized) New Netherland to the richest ones in Deep South, the former has a 0.4-year advantage in life expectancy. And people in the Left Coast’s poorest quartile of counties live 2.4 years longer than those in the richest quartile counties in the Deep South.
I asked CHRR’s co-director, Marjory Givens, for her reaction to the gaps. “This is logical considering the overall values and variation in health and opportunity of Yankeedom are more favorable than the Deep South or Greater Appalachia,” she said. “There are regions of the country with structural barriers to health, where types of long-standing discrimination and disinvestment have occurred through policies and practices applied and reinforced by people with more power. … Counties in these regions have fewer social and economic opportunities today.”
One example: States that have expanded Medicaid eligibility have seen significant reductions in premature deaths while those that have not have seen increases. At this writing, 11 states still haven’t expanded the state-implemented program even though almost the entire burden of doing so comes from the federal government. All but two of those states are controlled by the Deep South and Greater Appalachia. Just one — Wisconsin — is in Yankeedom, and its Democratic governor has been trying to expand it through a (vigorously gerrymandered) Republican legislature.
Expansion was a no-brainer for Republican administrations in Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Vermont, but a bridge too far for their colleagues further south.
Or take New Netherland, the Dutch-settled area around what’s now New York City. Despite its density, diversity and income inequalities — and contrary to the “urban hell-hole” rhetoric of the extreme right — it’s one of the healthiest places to live in the U.S., with an overall life expectancy of 80.9 years. “You can have policies that can meaningfully change life expectancy: reduce drug overdoses, expand Medicaid, adopt gun control, protect abortion and maternal health,” says data scientist Jeremy Ney, author of the American Inequality data project. “That New Netherland region ticks the box on all five of those.”
Before you ask, yes, we also compared just rural and just urban counties across the American Nations model’s regions and the gaps persisted. As expected, life expectancy is better in urban places in all the regions, but the gap between urban and rural counties almost disappeared in Yankeedom — where even the smallest municipalities often have powers comparable to those of counties in other regions — and the Far West. The latter was a bit surprising given the vast open spaces typical of that region, which fosters the social isolation that has contributed to the region’s frighteningly high suicide rates.
And, given that Black Americans have a nearly four-year disadvantage in life expectancy compared to whites, we looked at racial disparities across the regions. Echoing what we saw between rich and poor counties, there are big gaps in whites-only life expectancy across the regions, with whites in Greater Appalachia dying 3.6 years sooner than whites in Left Coast and 4.4 years sooner than those in New Netherland. In the Deep South, the region with the distinction of having had the continent’s most repressive formal slave and racial caste systems, the gap with the three aforementioned regions was almost identical — just a tenth of a year better than Greater Appalachia. Three centuries of formal white supremacy hasn’t served whites very well.
Five years ago, University of Cincinnati sociologist Jennifer Malat and two colleagues probed a related question: Given the legacy of white privilege in American society, why do white people have lower life expectancy than their counterparts in Canada and Western Europe, as well as per capita suicide and psychiatric disorder rates far higher than their Black, Asian or Latino peers? Their conclusion: “Whiteness encourages whites to reject policies designed to help the poor and reduce inequality because of animosity toward people of color as well as being unaware that the poor include a great many white people.” Other wealthy countries, they noted, produce poverty rates similar or greater than ours, but they have stronger welfare systems that buffer much of the population from the health problems that often flow from poverty. Whatever the reason, our data definitely show a relationship between social spending and health outcomes for white people across regions.
That said, African Americans actually fare a bit better, relatively speaking, in Greater Appalachia (where their life expectancy is 74.2) than in many other regions, including the Deep South (where it’s 73.6) and even the Far West (74.1) and Yankeedom (73.6). But starkest is that the Midlands — home to cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia and St. Louis with some of the worst racial disparities in the country — becomes the least healthy region for Black people, with life expectancy falling to just 73 years, which is lower than the overall 2020 figure for Peru. By contrast, the super-densely populated New York City region (New Netherland) remains one of the best for Black longevity, at 76.9 years, 3.9 years higher. The bottom line is that Black/white health disparities are real and enormous, but they don’t really explain the big gaps between U.S. regions.
Analyzing Hispanic life expectancy provides some fresh twists. Hispanics actually have much higher life expectancy than whites in the U.S. Researchers call this the “Hispanic Paradox” because it confounds the usual associations between socioeconomic status and life expectancy, and they’ve spent considerable time trying to understand why without reaching a solid consensus. It has been established — by demographers Alberto Palloni and Elizabeth Arias — that Cuban and Puerto Rican Americans don’t have better life expectancy than whites, but Mexican-Americans do.
I share this background because, curiously, we found that Hispanic life expectancy is relatively poor in El Norte (80.7 years) and the Far West (81.1), the two regions where people of Mexican descent presumably form a supermajority of the “Hispanic” population. New Netherland — home to the largest concentration of Puerto Ricans on Earth, including San Juan — isn’t that great either, at 82.7. Surprisingly, southern regions do really well, with Tidewater and New France hitting the upper 80s to top the list, though you might want to take the latter finding with a grain of salt as the number of Hispanics there is pretty small.
Keith Gennuso of the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute says the reason Hispanic life expectancy is worse in El Norte is likely linked to centuries of discrimination. “Unjust housing policies and forced land dispossessions, immigration enforcement, racial profiling, taxation laws and historical trauma, among numerous other issues, all act as barriers to equal health opportunities for these populations at the border, with known impacts across generations,” he noted. Other researchers have found the mortality advantage is greatest among Mexicans in communities where they are more insulated from less healthy U.S. dietary and lifestyle choices than those of Mexican descent who have been in the U.S. for decades or centuries.
Regional differences persist in other measures of health outcomes that contribute to mortality. With public health researchers at the University of Illinois-Chicago and the University of Minnesota, we looked at several of them and published our conclusions in academic journals. Obesity, diabetes and physical inactivity all followed the same general regional pattern, with the bad outcomes concentrated in the Deep South, Greater Appalachia, New France and First Nation at the bottom of the list for all three (and El Norte for diabetes.)
“It’s no big surprise when you look at county-level data that the southern regions have higher prevalence of these things, but never has the relationship been so clean as with the American Nations settlement maps,” says lead author Ross Arena, a physiologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago who studies the health effects of exercise.
“The gaps you see in life expectancy are just the tip of the iceberg because our health system is really good at keeping unhealthy people alive through medications and surgeries. The regional gap in people’s health span — how many years of your life are you living with a high quality of life with independence and functionality — is probably even greater because it lines up with smoking, access to healthy foods and these other factors.”
So how to improve the situation? Lloyd-Jones, the preventive medicine expert at Northwestern University, says it’s all about the policy environment people live in.
“If you just want to move the needle on longevity in the short term, aggressive tobacco control and taxation policies are about the quickest way you can do that,” he says. “But for the long term we really have to launch our children into healthier trajectories by giving them great educational and socioeconomic opportunities and access to clean air and water and healthy foods.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/01/america-life-expectancy-regions-00113369?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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THE LASTING EFFECTS OF HAVING BEEN THE FAVORITE CHILD
*** Most parents won’t admit it, but a surprising number have a ‘hidden favorite’ and the way they treat that child compared to their siblings can have long-lasting impacts. ***
~ My siblings and I always knew when our middle brother was coming to visit my parents: my mother would put out little bowls of prawn cocktail as a special starter.
"Prodigal son," we would protest, slightly miffed that the rest of us never had this kind of privileged treatment. The official explanation was that he didn't come over for Sunday lunch as often as the rest of us, but that still didn't really seem fair.
In truth, despite the prawn cocktail, I did not think my parents had any favorites. I grew up as one of six siblings in a working-class family in north London. Of course, my brothers, sister and I all had different roles and jobs in the family, but the reasons just seemed practical. As the youngest, for example, I was always the one to go fetch things for my parents, maybe because they thought I had lots of energy anyway. My sister was usually the one to go shopping, because she could drive. It was a busy house and to add to the mix, we also owned a dalmatian dog, Sheba.
Overall, it all felt quite even-handed to me. But last year, at a family gathering, one of my brothers blurted out that he thought I was my father's favorite.
My sister seemed a bit surprised by that. And I realized that there might be more to the story I had told myself – of our parents not really having favorites. I wondered how people in my and other families really experience these dynamics, and how they might shape us in the long run even if we're not fully aware of them.
Research suggests that parental favoritism is surprisingly common – and rather than being just a quirk of family life, can actually be very harmful. It occurs in around 65% of families, and has been identified and studied across many different cultures.
As widespread as it is, it can damage children's well-being across the lifespan, from their childhood into middle age and beyond. It is considered such an important factor in a range of emotional problems that psychologists have a name and acronym for it: "parental differential treatment", or PDT.
However, as in my exchange with my brother, siblings in the same family may disagree over whether their family is even affected by it. That's because feeling less-favored can be very subjective, says Laurie Kramer, a professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University in the US. "It is the experience that people have, that a parent prefers another child to them," she says. "This could be by devoting more time, attention, praise, or affection. Possibly asserting less control, so that they may enjoy fewer restrictions, be subject to less discipline or even punishment.”
Importantly, not everyone in the family may see it that way. "This may not be the same observation that the other sibling encounters and may be different again for what the parent believes they have engaged in," says Kramer.
For the person who feels like they are treated as second-best, the consequences can be profound. Research suggests that from an early age, children are aware of differential treatment, such as parents showing more warmth to one sibling than another. Such perceived parental favoritism has been associated with low self-esteem in children, as well as childhood anxiety, depression, and behavioral problems, including risky behavior.
There may also be a knock-on effect on emotional well-being that causes other, more indirect problems. Researchers in China have, for example, shown that parental favoritism is a predictor for mobile phone addiction in adolescents. In a small Canadian study of eight homeless teenagers, seven said they felt that their parents had favored a sibling over them, while they had always been the "problem child", and that this had contributed to the breakdown of family ties.
While this final study is too small to draw wider conclusions, it highlights just how far a child's experience of favoritism can potentially go.
In many cases parents do not deliberately bestow favor on one child over another and are largely unaware that they are doing so
The mental health impact may persist into adulthood, with maternal favoritism for example being associated with higher depression scores in adult children. The bias itself may also continue in later life, with parents still playing favorites with their adult children. And while the parents rather than the siblings bear the responsibility for this, favoritism can harm the sibling bond over the life course and increase tensions and conflict between siblings. This is especially worrying as having good relationships with our siblings is important for our lifelong health and happiness.
Given how damaging it is, can parents not simply avoid picking a favorite?
In Kramer's view, they may not doing so intentionally, and are likely not even aware they are. "Preferential treatment may begin for parents due to one child being easier to parent, they may relate to that child more, see similarities between them and the child," she says.
Her research on adolescents and their parents has shown that families don't tend to talk about this, which makes it even harder to clear up any hurt or misunderstandings.
"If these situations were addressed in a sensitive manner, where no one feels they are being blamed or that it is their fault, you can have more open conversations on all sides to understand," Kramer says. Parents could, for example, ask why the child feels they prefer a sibling. "If a parent listens [and] then provides a reason for the differential behaviors to a child, that can work wonders." The child may realize that there is a practical reason, and that it's not about the sibling being loved more.
In my family, we had never broached the subject of favoritism, either. But after my brother's throw-away comment on me being the favorite, I decided to find out more.
First, I asked my brother why he had made this comment. He replied that our father had once told him off for scaring me with the Mole from the Thunderbirds TV series – a kind of giant drilling machine – and making me cry. I have no recollection of this moment, maybe as I was not on the receiving end of the telling-off.
As my siblings and I talked more, we remembered my mother sometimes giving our eldest brother preferential treatment, probably because he was her firstborn. Meanwhile, our father often praised our middle brother for being shrewd, a quality he admired, and which they both shared. And then there's that prawn cocktail that comes out when our middle brother visits, of course.
These are small differences, but it's easy to see that they might have amplified into something more and could even have led to resentment. It's possible that the impact was watered down by the fact that there are six of us – and the five who didn't always get the "prawn cocktail treatment" could joke to each other about it. And we all still got to enjoy the prawn cocktail when my middle brother visited. Imagine a family with only two grown children, and one is served a prawn cocktail lunch, while the other always gets the plain option: it would probably feel very cruel to that child, like being punished or cut out.
Megan Gilligan, an associate professor of human development and family science at the University of Missouri, worked with Jill Suitor, a professor of sociology at Purdue University and Karl Pillemer, a psychology professor at Cornell University, on the Within-Family Differences Study in the US, a longitudinal project funded by National institute of Aging. The project has tracked different families for two decades in order to better understand relationships between the generations. As part of the study, the researchers asked mothers and fathers a direct question about favoritism – for many, it was the first time they were asked about it at all.
The question was: "To which of your children do you feel most emotional closeness?" After a slight deliberation, a high proportion of mothers (75%) then named one of their children. The rest chose none, or said they felt equally close to all of them.
They were also asked who they felt more disappointment and conflict with. The answer had consequences across the lifespan, with the child picked early on as "disappointing" then also treated that way later on.
Birth order played a role in some aspects of favoritism, but perhaps not as much as is often assumed. "In adulthood, [research does not] find this to be an overwhelming predictor of favoritism," says Gilligan.
Specifically, my guess that the first-born would naturally be picked as the "golden child" is not backed up by the scientific research. For emotional closeness, last-born children are actually more likely to be chosen than the middle or first child, Gilligan says. But the strongest predictor for emotional closeness were the parent's feelings of the child being similar to them.
Gilligan also highlighted the real damage that can result from differential treatment, which showed up in the longitudinal story, such as poor sibling relationships, the less-favored sibling feeling more inadequate about themselves, and having a less positive relationship with the parent.
Being the "golden child" can also come with pain. "You might expect being a favorite child to come with many benefits, however, it can also cause emotional distress for adult children," she says. "We have found favoritism to be associated with higher depressive symptoms for favored children. We believe that this is because being a mother's favorite child creates conflict in their favored children's relationships with their siblings. We have found that that this tension with siblings in adulthood is consequential for psychological well-being.”
It may also lead to an unequal burden later in life. When a parent eventually requires care by family, they often turn to the child they feel was the favored one, she says.
And while favoritism can haunt us even as adults, our experience of it can change subtly as we age. Gillian authored a review of studies on the impact of favoritism across the lifespan, from very young children to grown children now in their 60s or older. She found that there are differences in how it shows up at different stages. For younger children, favoritism may be more about how much time parents spend with them compared to a sibling. For adult children, it may be more about unequal financial support.
The answer is not to treat all of one's children exactly the same, says Kramer. "It is impossible to treat kids the same in every situation, and neither do children want this," she says. "They want to be understood for who they are, their age, interest, gender, personality." Still, being more self-aware can help parents avoid consistently causing unfair situations, she says. This is especially important as children may learn the pattern of favoritism, and as adults, apply it to their own parenting style and relationships: "Unless we are aware and take action to break that transmission, we are likely to engage in the same behavior.”
The idea of learning certain biases from our parents, certainly rings true. My mother would always plate up slightly larger portions for my brothers, as they were seen as "growing lads". My partner has noticed that when I dish up our evening meal, I do the same, serving him more than myself.
I don't feel traumatized by the slight differences in the way my siblings and I were treated as children, and perhaps, even today. We are close to our parents, and to each other. Looking back, our pet dog, Sheba, was possibly my dad's real favorite.
But becoming more aware of some of these differences in treatment, and how they've shaped my own behavior, has made me see a few things in a different light. For a start, I might try serving myself larger portions in the future – and I don't wait for my brother to visit to treat myself to a prawn cocktail. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230809-the-lifelong-effects-of-the-favorite-child
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ON EARTH, SHAPED BY LIFE
~ Darwin was the first to see that all life forms, from worms to corals, transform the planet. What does that mean for us?
I want to start with a proposition: if Earth had never come alive, it would be a profoundly different world. Conversely: the planet of today has, to a remarkable extent, been made what it is by the activities of life forms. Over the course of the planet’s long history, a history that extends back more than 4.5 billion years, life forms have shaped the rocks, the water, the air, even the color of the sky. A Never-Life Earth would not even have as many different kinds of minerals.
This is the portrait painted by the modern science of life and Earth, a fusion of biology and geology that seeks to understand all the planets that Earth has been, and that unites such apparently unrelated fields as the study of bacterial metabolism with the physics of atmospheres. The central observation of this undertaking is that, over time, life forms have profoundly altered the fabric of this planet, and this, in turn, has altered the circumstances in which life forms evolve.
Yet the idea that life forms might alter Earth is not new.
In his encyclopedic Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749), the French natural philosopher Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon remarked on the prodigious heaps of fossil shells that make up many rock formations, and stated that substances such as limestone, chalk and marble, despite their inanimate nature, are the result of the activities of life forms.
In Hydrogéologie (1802), Buffon’s protégé Jean-Baptiste, Chevalier de Lamarck took the point further, suggesting that the activities of life forms had shaped the mineral composition of Earth. But as far as I have been able to discover, the person who first attempted to measure the changes that life forms have wrought, and who had the clearest sense of why they have an impact, was none other than Charles Darwin. In thinking about the Anthropocene – the age of human impacts upon Earth – the lessons of his work have never been more important.
Darwin, of course, is famous for his work on evolution. His book On the Origin of Species (1859) laid out a wealth of evidence that evolution occurs, and proposed a mechanism – natural selection – for how it does so. Although much has been learned since, and many of his ideas have been extended, corrected or refined, the Origin remains the founding text of modern biology, and is the pinnacle of Darwin’s work. But Darwin’s first scientific monograph and his last – the two bookends of his thoughts, so to speak – were both about how animals have, over vast spans of time, transformed the landscape.
These two works of biogeology – one on coral reefs, the other on earthworms – were, as far as I know, the first detailed studies of the subject ever published. On casual inspection, they appear to be unrelated undertakings, just part of Darwin’s long and eclectic list of interests, along with barnacles, orchids, carnivorous plants, peacocks’ tails, the emotions of humans and other animals, the volcanoes of South America, and so on.
This impression is enhanced by the fact that the two works differ greatly in style and were published almost 40 years apart – The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs appeared in 1842, while his book on earthworms, The Formation of Vegetable Mold Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits, came out in 1881, about six months before he died. (Vegetable mold is what you and I would call topsoil.) But, actually, these two books reflect life-long interests and, taken together with his work on evolution, show a vision of Earth astounding in its completeness and magnificent in its scope. Darwin had an extraordinarily complete conception of the workings of the world, anticipating current ideas of the co-evolution of life and Earth by more than a century.
ll his life, Darwin was interested in the power of huge numbers of small things – acting slowly, over years, decades, and centuries piled upon centuries – to have enormous impacts. In this, he was inspired by the work of Sir Charles Lyell, who had argued that geological change takes place through slow, gradual processes accumulated over vast spans of time. Darwin took that idea and applied it to biology, making it the unifying insight of his work on corals, evolution and worms.
It’s a simple insight, yet one that is strangely hard to develop a feeling for. The human brain has evolved to think in terms of hours, days, months, perhaps a few years. Conceiving of changes summed over decades, centuries, millennia and on into the dizzying spans of Earth history – that’s far more difficult and elusive. A single earthworm has no particular significance. But given enough worms and time, Darwin argued, entire landscapes would be transformed. Coral animals are likewise minute; nonetheless, with an abundance of them, plus a few million years, corals can build gigantic structures. As Darwin remarked:
We feel surprise when travelers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals!
He wrote these words in The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), an account of his adventures during a five-year circumnavigation of the globe. The ship sailed from England on 27 December 1831, when Darwin was just 22. In the course of this voyage, he visited South America, New Zealand and Australia, as well as a number of small islands, including Cape Verde, the Galápagos, Tahiti, Cocos (Keeling) and Mauritius.
During the voyage, Darwin developed a theory of the formation of coral atolls – those rings of low, flat islands around a central lagoon – that dot the Pacific and Indian oceans. Remarkably, he developed his ideas before he had ever visited an atoll, or seen a reef, working instead by a process of deduction from observations he made while studying the geology of the west coast of South America. An opportunity to inspect an atoll in person didn’t come until many months later, when the HMS Beagle called at the islands of Cocos (Keeling), in the Indian Ocean, in April 1836, just six months before the ship would arrive back in England.
The ship spent 12 days at the islands, giving Darwin plenty of time to explore. One day, when the sea was calm and the tide was low, he propelled himself to the outer edges of the reef ‘by the aid of a leaping-pole’, curious to examine the corals that ‘break the violence of the open sea’. I like to think of him there, youthful and vigorous, splashing in the surf against a backdrop of coconut palms and an azure sky, colorful fish darting in the calm waters of the lagoon nearby.
Atolls have a number of puzzling features. First, they are all low and flat. As Darwin remarked, ‘there are enormous areas in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, in which every single island is of coral formation, and is raised only to that height to which the waves can throw up fragments, and the winds pile up sand.’ Second, they appear suddenly in the deep parts of the ocean. Third, they tend to cluster. And finally, since they are built by life forms that like to live in warm, sunny, shallow waters, and yet occur where the ocean is deep, each must be constructed on top of some kind of submarine structure.
At the time, those structures were imagined to be the rims of craters of submerged volcanoes, an idea Darwin found ‘monstrous’, and ‘almost too preposterous to be mentioned’. He scorned it, in part, because individual atolls can measure more than 130 kilometers (80 miles) across – which would assume the presence of hundreds of volcanic craters of unheard-of dimensions all close to, but miraculously never jutting above, the surface of the sea.
As long as the volcano doesn’t sink too fast, the corals can keep pace with its descent. On the west coast of South America, Darwin had observed earthquakes heaving chunks of land upwards; here, he inverted the idea, and considered what would happen if the land should sink.
The fact that each island is built by life forms has an important corollary. Stone is hard; but given enough time and enough feet, stone steps can be worn to nothing. Yet in the case of atolls, the stone is continually rebuilt. Or, as Darwin put it:
The ocean throwing its waters over the broad reef appears an invincible, all-powerful enemy; yet we see it resisted, and even conquered, by means which at first seem most weak and inefficient … It is impossible to behold these waves without feeling a conviction that an island, though built of the hardest rock, let it be porphyry, granite, or quartz, would ultimately yield and be demolished by such an irresistible power. Yet these low, insignificant coral-islets stand and are victorious: for here another power, as an antagonist, takes part in the contest. The organic forces separate the atoms of carbonate of lime, one by one, from the foaming breakers, and unite them into a symmetrical structure. Let the hurricane tear up its thousand huge fragments; yet what will that tell against the accumulated labor of myriads of architects at work night and day, month after month?
His argument makes a clear prediction: somewhere beneath each atoll, beneath these immense piles of life-built rock, these mountains of limestone, you will find the remnants of a volcano.
Darwin did not have the means to drill down through an atoll and test his idea directly. Instead, on arriving back in England, he embarked on a massive study, a kind of comparative reefology. It was an exhaustive analysis of the sort that he would deploy in his work again and again.
He spent many months reading accounts of earlier voyages and poring over nautical charts, classifying coral reefs by whether they were atolls, barrier reefs or fringing reefs growing close to shore. He viewed the three types of reef as parts of a continuum, arguing that, in areas of sea-floor subsidence, reefs would begin as fringing reefs, develop into barrier reefs, and finish as atolls. In the course of his work, he compiled the first global map of coral reefs ever to have been produced.
Darwin’s reef map was first published in The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs
In this computer age, where you can sit at your desk and fly over any atoll you please, even take a virtual stroll along the beach of some distant islet, Darwin’s map holds a kind of poignancy. The place names are antiquated – Australia is marked as ‘New Holland’; Hawaii, as the ‘Sandwich Isles’; the Indian subcontinent, as ‘Hindoostan’ – which serves as a reminder of how long ago he was working.
To put this further into perspective, no one knew then that corals live in shallow water because they harbor symbiotic single-celled life forms that require sunlight to grow; the establishment of the great age of Earth was still more than a century in the future. The appendix of his book details where he got his information, and how he decided on the nature of each reef. The tone is dry and dusty, and would cure most cases of insomnia – ‘Starbuck Isld (5˚S., 156˚W.); is described as formed of a flat coral-rock, with no trees…’ – but the work is monumental and impressive.
However, despite the clarity of his reasoning and the mass of his evidence, not everyone was convinced. Towards the end of his life, feeling frustrated by the doubters, Darwin wished ‘that some doubly rich millionaire would take it into his head to have borings made in some of the Pacific and Indian [Ocean] Atolls’. He thought that borings to a depth of 500 or 600 feet (152-183 meters) would be sufficient. And if it turned out that he had been wrong in his ideas, then ‘the sooner I am knocked on the head and annihilated so much the better.’
A few months after wishing for annihilation should he be proved wrong, Darwin published his study of earthworms. At the time, the book was wildly popular, selling 3,500 copies within the first month. Today, though, it is little read, and often dismissed as the eccentric afterthought of a great man whose life was drawing to a close.
But it wasn’t an afterthought. True to form, Darwin had studied earthworms for decades. In November 1837, just over a year after returning from his voyage around the world, he gave a brief speech about the animals at the Geological Society of London and, a couple of years later, he published a short paper about them. In this paper, Darwin described several fields that he had visited with his uncle. Each of the fields had, some years previously (though no one could remember exactly when), been covered with a superficial layer of materials such as cinders. But, in each case, the layer had mysteriously disappeared. When Darwin dug holes in the fields, he discovered that the overlaid materials were now at some depth below the surface. His uncle speculated that this was due to the activities of earthworms. As they burrowed through the soil, the worms were, his uncle suggested, acting as slow-motion plows. Altogether, the observations were so interesting that William Buckland, an eminent geologist of the day, suggested that Darwin had identified ‘a new Geological Power’.
As their family began to expand, Darwin and his wife decided they wanted to move out of London. Accordingly, in August 1842, a few months after his book on reefs was published, the Darwins bought a house in the country; it came with some land. Soon after moving in, he set aside some of that land to test his uncle’s hypothesis. From the outset, this was a long-term project: Darwin intended that the field should lie undisturbed for many years. In his science, as in his thoughts about the workings of the world, he embraced a long, slow view.
Earthworms burrow through soil by eating it; they also nibble on organic matter such as dead leaves. To defecate, they generally come to the surface, where they eject, as Darwin put it, ‘little intestine-shaped heaps’ known as castings. On the basis of his conversations with his uncle, Darwin suspected the worms of tilling the soil, bringing fine particles from deep in the ground up to the surface.
As a result of these repeated actions, he thought, the soil would be slowly turned over and mixed. New soil would be raised up, while objects at the surface would become dusted with earth and, as the years went by, would gradually become buried. To measure how long such a burial might take, in 1842, just before Christmas, Darwin had lumps of broken chalk spread on top of the field that he had set aside. Twenty-nine years later, he had a trench dug across the field. The chalk now formed a line through the soil, roughly 18 centimeters (7 inches) below the surface.
From this, Darwin calculated that in each of the intervening years the worms had covered the ground with a layer of topsoil that was, on average, 0.56 centimeters (0.22 inches) thick. Something similar happened to a row of flagstones that, in 1843, he’d had placed to make a path across his garden lawn. ‘During several years the path was weeded and swept; but ultimately the weeds and worms prevailed, and the gardener ceased to sweep. The stones had gradually disappeared beneath the grass.
Never one to settle for a single piece of evidence, Darwin did not stop there. Once again, he mustered an enormous mass of material, from as many sources as possible, to support his claims and overwhelm potential objections. He embarked on experiments to see how worms perceive the world. Were they creatures of tastes, with active preferences? Yes, they like to nibble on cabbage leaves, but disdain thyme and sage.
Moreover, leaves did not only serve as food. Darwin observed that earthworms often line their burrows with leaves, perhaps ‘to prevent their bodies from coming into close contact with the cold damp earth’. He also compiled huge numbers of observations from others, enlisting the help of four of his sons, as well as correspondents in places as diverse as India, Australia, Brazil and Venezuela.
Much of this work was unglamorous, consisting as it did of collecting and weighing those little intestine-shaped heaps of excreted soil. One of the most valiant efforts was made by his niece, Lucy Caroline Wedgwood. For a year, on a near-daily basis, she collected and weighed earthworm castings from two designated plots, each just under a square meter in size. On the less productive plot, the worms brought up just short of 2 kilograms of soil per square meter per year, which doesn’t sound like much. But scale up these numbers across space and time, and the results become impressive. Darwin estimated that worms move between 18.98 and 45.49 tons per hectare per year (7.56 to 18.12 tons per acre per year), depending on where they live. He reckoned that, considering the worm-friendly areas of England and Scotland together, earthworms would move more than 325 million million tons – in today’s parlance, that’s 325 trillion tons – of earth over the course of a million years.
If worms bury bits of chalk, Darwin reckoned that they would also bury other objects dropped on the ground – coins, gold jewelry, ancient tools. Nor was that the end of their powers. By analogy with the sinking flagstones in his garden, he suspected that worms could cause the burial of ancient ruins. By burrowing away below, worms would cause buildings to subside and sink into the soil; and by bringing soil to the surface, he thought that they would gradually cause the ruins to become covered up. And so off he went to find out.
Picture a hot day in August 1877. Darwin, by now, is an old man, the leaping pole long since discarded. He has a long white beard that makes him look vaguely like an Old Testament prophet or, as one of his eulogists would write, ‘an ancient philosopher’. He has traveled some distance from home to attend the excavation of the ruins of a Roman villa discovered beneath a field in Surrey.
On each of several mornings after the villa’s atrium had been excavated and swept of soil, Darwin knelt down to inspect the tiled floor – and found several little heaps of soil left by worms. The worms, it turned out, had come up through small gaps between the tiles. By snatching away the fresh castings, Darwin even managed to surprise several worms in the act of retreating into their burrows. From what he observed at the site, Darwin concluded that worms had been the chief agents of burial. ‘Archaeologists are probably not aware how much they owe to worms for the preservation of many ancient objects,’ he declared.
Taking his results together, Darwin showed that earthworms have several important effects. The animals do not just mix the soil by bringing deeper material up to the surface. By munching on fallen leaves, and by pulling those leaves down into their burrows, they also create new soil and enrich it with a nutritious compost. In addition, as earthworms eat their way through the soil, they grind it into smaller particles, breaking up small stones and milling the soil to a finer consistency. Earthworm burrows – which, in some places, can be well over a meter deep – also serve as channels that irrigate and aerate the soil, and make it easier for plants to send down their roots.
Over time, these activities transform the landscape. Worm castings don’t always stay put: rain, wind and gravity conspire to shift some of the soil that the worms upheave, tending to send it downhill. By measuring worm castings before and after wind and rain on slopes of different steepness, Darwin showed that, each year, some fraction of the soil excreted by worms flows downhill. While, from one year to the next, this would be an imperceptible creep, over many centuries, it adds up. Or, as Darwin put it:
'When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse, we should remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly leveled by worms. It is a marvelous reflection that the whole of the superficial mold over any such expanse has passed, and will again pass, every few years through the bodies of worms. The plow is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man’s inventions; but long before it existed the land was in fact regularly plowed, and still continues to be thus plowed by earthworms.'
Worms might appear insignificant, but because there are so many of them, little by little, they sculpt the contours of the world.
More than a decade after Darwin’s death in 1882, ‘a doubly rich millionaire’ duly appeared, eager to discover whether, somewhere beneath each atoll, you do indeed find the sunken remnants of a volcano. To test the idea, in 1896 the millionaire – in the guise of the Royal Society of London – dispatched an expedition to the atoll of Funafuti, in the South Pacific Ocean.
After two years of struggles and false starts, the team managed to drill to a depth of 340 meters (1,114 feet) – a remarkable accomplishment given that they were working with a drill powered by a coal-fired steam engine. (All the coal, which amounted to well over 140 tons, had to be shipped in.) But despite having drilled so deep – rather deeper, indeed, than the 180 meters (600 feet) that Darwin had suggested – they found nothing but the remnants of corals and other reef-building life forms.
In the 1930s, the Japanese sent an expedition to Kitadaitōjima, an island once known to Europeans as North Borodino, in the Philippine Sea. This team drilled down to 431 meters (1,416 feet); but, again, they found only life-built limestones and shells. In both cases, the reef-builders had clearly grown in shallow waters, a finding consistent with the idea of subsidence; but clinching proof of Darwin’s hypothesis remained elusive.
Enter a new, richer millionaire, in the sinister form of Uncle Sam. In the 1940s and ’50s, the United States government tested dozens of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, a cluster of atolls that lie in a remote part of the Pacific a little to the north of the equator. This brought a host of scientists – geologists, biologists, oceanographers – to study the area. In 1952, a team of geologists drilled deep into Enewetak Atoll. At 1,283 meters (4,208 feet), they struck basalt. Volcanic rock. Darwin was right.
Fossils found in the limestones just above the basalt show that the reefs of Enewetak Atoll began growing more than 50 million years ago. Back then, the planet was another world. The Atlantic Ocean was far narrower than it is today, much of Antarctica was clad in forest, and the Himalayan Mountains had yet to be upheaved. It is strange to think that when the corals of Enewetak first started growing, Mount Everest, the highest peak of the world today, was still millions of years in the future.
The growth of the Enewetak corals has not been continuous: at times either the sea level fell, or the atoll rose, exposing the corals to the air and the rain, killing the lifeforms and allowing the rock above the surface of the sea to be eroded away. Even so, today, the volume of limestone, of life-built rock, that makes up the atoll is estimated to be more than 1,000 cubic kilometers – or more than 250 cubic miles. On one atoll. That’s equivalent to building the Great Pyramid of Giza more than 400,000 times.
If I could travel back in time to meet Darwin, that’s something I would want to tell him. That, and the fact that the Great Pyramid itself was constructed chiefly from limestones built by lifeforms. Not a reef, in this case, but a rock built from gigantic accumulations of the shells of nummulites – single-celled lifeforms that lived and died in vast numbers soon after corals first began to grow on Enewetak. I like to imagine that he would have been delighted.
But if Darwin was right about corals, he was, in one fundamental respect, wrong about worms. At the end of his book, he remarks: ‘It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.’ In this, however, he profoundly underestimated the scale of the changes wrought by other life forms.
First off, the tilling processes that Darwin described are not limited to earthworms, with different burrowing animals having effects at different scales. Ants, for example, tend to bring up the finest grains of sand or soil. In Berlin, where I live, you often see small piles of fine sand heaped along the edges of cobblestones, and if you look closely, you will often see ants hard at work. Although the grains are typically brought up a few at a time, in places the ants are so abundant that they will shift many tons of soil per hectare per year.
In one study that was directly inspired by Darwin’s work on earthworms – Geologic Work of Ants in Tropical America (1910) – the author, John Casper Branner, estimated that ants in Brazil were responsible for moving considerably more soil per hectare each year than earthworms in England. Meanwhile, larger burrowing animals such as badgers excavate huge mounds of earth, creating hillocks that can last for centuries, to say nothing of the earth-shifting activities of bandicoots, beavers, chipmunks, gophers, meerkats, mice and moles, or of burrowing birds and burying beetles.
And it’s not just on land. As you walk to the sea across that part of a beach or mudflat that’s covered by waves when the tide is high, but exposed when the tide is low, you may see tiny crabs, no bigger than your fingernail, excavating burrows one armful of sand at a time. Don a mask and look beneath the waves, and you’ll find an incredible variety of animals digging burrows.
Moreover, burrowing animals are not the only life forms to have a substantial planetary impact. Far from it. Before the evolution of the first trees, around 400 million years ago, rivers were far less likely to boast meanders and oxbows and other features that allow them to dawdle their way to the sea. Plants have also contributed a great increase in mud.
Ancient reefs and banks of shells have not only left a legacy of enormous piles of limestones, they also have altered the shapes of mountains: as rocks go, limestones are relatively malleable, so when ancient reefs and banks of shells are crushed and cooked as mountain chains are upheaved, the presence of limestones will affect the way the mountains fold. The more limestones, the more folds. Limestones so treated will also, often, become crushed and cooked into marble. Many of the world’s greatest sculptures and monuments have been created from rock built by life and then transformed by Earth as it builds mountains. Next time you look at Michelangelo’s David, remember that it was built from marble formed from crushed life-rocks, as were many of the grandest buildings and structures of ancient Rome.
Long before animals or plants evolved, moreover, the planet was being sculpted by much smaller life forms – bacteria and archaea. (Of these, bacteria are far better known. That’s because archaea were not identified until the 1970s. Seen through a microscope, archaea superficially resemble bacteria – both are small and tend to take shapes such as rods or spheres. So it was not until the development of molecular tools that it became clear that the two groups are distinct.) I will not enumerate all the effects these life forms have had, as it would take too long. Instead, I will give just two examples of their impacts. First, certain species of archaea are responsible for the biological generation of methane, a greenhouse gas, which warms the climate.
Second, no conversation about the impacts of life forms upon the planet would be complete without mention of the cyanobacteria. These life forms, formerly known as blue-green algae, are, in my view, the most important life forms in the history of the planet. At the time they evolved, more than 2.3 billion years ago, Earth had no oxygen molecules in the air to speak of. Instead, all the oxygen atoms were tied up in the water and the rocks. Cyanobacteria evolved to use the radiant energy of the Sun to split water molecules apart, a process that roughly halfway through the history of Earth would result in an atmosphere that contained oxygen molecules.
Back then, the atmospheric oxygen would not have been adequate to support you or me. Yet its very appearance had several transformative effects. As oxygen is reactive stuff, its arrival led to a proliferation of new minerals. Indeed, Earth began to rust. At the same time, the advent of oxygen led to the creation of an ozone layer, which protects the planet’s surface from the most harmful rays of the Sun. The presence of this layer fundamentally changed the circumstances in which life forms on land subsequently evolved. And since the color of the sky is a consequence of the composition of the atmosphere, lifeforms have also reached out and painted the heavens above.
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What if this planet had never come alive? What if no living beings had ever breathed or swum, burrowed or flown here? How would Earth be different now, a little more than 4.5 billion years into its history?
At first, the answer seems simple: just remove the life forms. Strip away the trees, the grass, the bushes. Scrape the moss and lichens off the rocks. Vanish the animals, annihilate the mushrooms, disappear the microbes. Silence the birds, frogs, cicadas. Empty the oceans of fish, jellyfish, octopus, whales, crabs; skim the ponds of slicks and scums. And then, with all the life forms gone, you’re done. Right?
Not so fast. Removing the life forms is just the start. To create an Earth that had never had life, you also have to take away the detritus of life – all the things humans have made, of course, but also the fallen leaves, the pearls, the spiders’ webs. You have to sieve the pollen from the wind, and empty the soil of spores and seeds. You have to dig out the guano from caves where bats roost, and from islands where seabirds nest. You have to fill in the wallows where sparrows bathe in the dust, and repair the pits on the seafloor where whales rootle for food. You have to flatten the mole hills, ant nests and termite mounds, and bust the beavers’ dams.
Once you’d dealt with the life of today, you’d have to turn your attention to the past. You’d have to remove the fossils – the prodigious piles of bones and shells that litter the planet, the vast petrified forests, the ancient reefs. You’d have to erase the footprints of dinosaurs, fill in the burrows of long-dead worms, and rub out the imprints of fallen flowers. You’d have to get rid of the amber, siphon off the oil, and shovel away great mountains of coal.
And still you would not be done. You’d have to undo transformations wrought by life that, at first, appear to have nothing to do with it. You’d have to get rid of all the chalk, much of the marble, some of the diamonds. Many types of minerals – more than half – would have to go too. You’d have to suck oxygen from the air, and take away the ozone layer. You’d have to extinguish the fires, clean away the charcoal, and scrub the soot from the rocks. You’d have to sweep the topsoil from the ground, sharpen the edges of the mountains, and straighten the meanders in the rivers.
More speculatively, the sky might not be blue. The Moon might be at a different distance from Earth, and the length of the day might not be the same. The climate would be hotter and more arid.
In short, the Never-Life Earth would not be the Earth of today, just without the green. It would be profoundly different: an alien planet. A human, or some other animal, magicked there would be killed in an instant, overcome by suffocating air and lethal levels of radiation.
It would be a planet not merely lifeless, but deadly.
As more and more people crowd into cities around the world, more and more of them say they feel disconnected from nature. At one event I went to, ‘connection’ to nature was being promoted through virtual reality; individuals sat indoors, alone in their masks, removed from actual reality, watching immersive films. And this was to celebrate the birthday of a world-renowned ecologist. So it is an irony that, considered together, humans are more connected to nature now than any species has ever been before. Humans are not the first species to change Earth. But through our activities, humans are affecting more dimensions of the life-Earth system than any life form has previously – and the impacts are accumulating more rapidly. Far more rapidly. The effects that we are having upon the planet are unprecedented in their scope, and unprecedented in their speed.
Again, one plastic bag does not make a rubbish dump. But do a Darwin, and sum up the cumulative impacts, add together all the plastic bags that humans have ever made, and you will find that the effect is dramatic. Similar summings-up apply to the impacts of airplane flights and car journeys, to paper cups and plastic straws, to the use of fertilizer, or to any other aspect of human activity that you care to name. But if we are distinguished by the scale and speed of our impacts, we are also distinguished by our awareness. As far as anyone can tell, humans are the only lifeforms that have ever been able to study the world and know what we do – and that brings opportunity. Perhaps, together, we can reduce our impacts and develop a new ethos of planetary care.
I would like to end on a personal note. Contemplating the entwined histories of life and Earth has changed the way I see the world. It has heightened my interest in all life forms, no matter how humble, and it has enhanced my sense of connection to the air, the water, the rocks. I find it majestic to think that the air I breathe and the rocks I tread have been shaped by countless life forms that lived and died ages ago. To me, this view of life and Earth is poignant, beautiful, and grand. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/the-insight-of-darwins-work-on-corals-worms-and-co-evolution?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6d1820c68e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_09_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-b43a9ed933-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
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GROWING UP FEMALE IN AFGHANISTAN
I
was born and raised in Afghanistan, under Taliban rule. I have since
managed to immigrate to England, with the help of my aunt. My family
still live in Afghanistan and firmly believe in these sexist values. I
have been told that if I return, I will likely be imprisoned by my
father or the Taliban. There is a probability that I would be killed.
As
a child I was told that our community was the best. That we pleased
Allah the most, and that Allah was the most important thing in our
lives. He was our divine dictator, nothing could overrule him.
Women
always wore a full veil, with a small piece of mesh to see through, in
the typical light blue color. The wearing of this started at the
beginning of puberty, around age 11. There were severe punishments for
those not wearing the burqa including whippings, so many played in the
safe side and started wearing it early to avoid punishment.
Once I
started wearing it, I was no longer allowed to speak in public. Before I
had always been discouraged from talking, even to my family, outside
the house. I remember when I was 7 and after being told that I would
have to sweep the ground if our house, I loudly said, “I hate sweeping,
make (brothers name) do it!” My parents and I received looks from nearly
everyone in the market place, with many men loudly saying how I should
be whipped until I learn my place. I was hit on my back and when we got
home I was whipped until I bled. I rarely talked outside the house
again.
Despite living there until age 19, I never left the house
alone. Only with a male guardian. Even then my parents rarely let me out
as I was considered to be ‘rebellious’ due to me refusing to follow my
brothers instructions. This led to a period in time (ages 12–16 approx)
where if I went out I was attached to my guardian by a leash to prevent
me from doing anything they considered Haram.
I was forbidden by
the laws in place to attend school. I taught myself to read through my
brothers books and the Qur’an. I was caught and punished multiple times,
but it didn’t deter my passion for knowledge. However, my sisters
didn’t possess the same instinct and have sadly submitted to the
Taliban ways. I don’t blame them. I have scars down my back from
beatings and I can feel the pain when I run my hand over them. When they
sting I begin to regret my choices, I tell myself that I could have
given in and become the submissive woman I was born to be and save me
all the pain.
But I’m glad I didn’t. I live in England with my
Aunt. I’m studying for my degree in biochemistry and I plan on working
in medicine, creating cures for illness and suffering. Things most
people take for granted I cherish. Even small things like talking are
light years away from my old life.
When I moved I tried hard to
retain my faith. However something in me wouldn’t let me. I had doubted
God nearly all my life, and it just didn’t seem logical to me. How God
an all loving God force my family, ancestors and descendants to live
lives of horror and unfairness. Some may say they are not true Muslims,
but everything my Father forced upon me was backed up with quotes from
the Qur’an. To me it seems like Islam created my Hell. ~ Anonymous,
Quora
VERY LOW-CALORIE DIET SHOWN TO REVERSE DIABETES
*** In a new study, a Yale-led research team uncovers how a very low calorie diet can rapidly reverse type 2 diabetes in animal models. If confirmed in people, the insight provides potential new drug targets for treating this common chronic disease, said the researchers. ***
~ One in three Americans will develop type 2 diabetes by 2050, according to recent projections by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Reports indicate that the disease goes into remission in many patients who undergo bariatric weight-loss surgery, which significantly restricts caloric intake prior to clinically significant weight loss. The Yale-led team’s study focused on understanding the mechanisms by which caloric restriction rapidly reverses type 2 diabetes.
The research team investigated the effects of a very low calorie diet (VLCD), consisting of one-quarter the normal intake, on a rodent model of type 2 diabetes. Using a novel stable (naturally occurring) isotope approach, which they developed, the researchers tracked and calculated a number of metabolic processes that contribute to the increased glucose production by the liver. The method, known as PINTA, allowed the investigators to perform a comprehensive set of analyses of key metabolic fluxes within the liver that might contribute to insulin resistance and increased rates of glucose production by the liver — two key processes that cause increased blood-sugar concentrations in diabetes.
Using this approach the researchers pinpointed three major mechanisms responsible for the VLCD’s dramatic effect of rapidly lowering blood glucose concentrations in the diabetic animals. In the liver, the VLCD lowers glucose production by: 1) decreasing the conversion of lactate and amino acids into glucose; 2) decreasing the rate of liver glycogen conversion to glucose; and 3) decreasing fat content, which in turn improves the liver’s response to insulin.
These positive effects of the VLCD were observed in just three days.
“Using this approach to comprehensively interrogate liver carbohydrate and fat metabolism, we showed that it is a combination of three mechanisms that is responsible for the rapid reversal of hyperglycemia following a very low calorie diet,” said senior author Gerald I. Shulman, M.D., the George R. Cowgill Professor of Medicine and Cellular and Molecular Physiology and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The next step for the researchers will be to confirm whether the findings can be replicated in type 2 diabetic patients undergoing either bariatric surgery or consuming very low calorie diets. His team has already begun applying the PINTA methodology in humans.
“These results, if confirmed in humans, will provide us with novel drug targets to more effectively treat patients with type 2 diabetes,” Shulman said. ~
https://news.yale.edu/2017/11/09/study-reveals-how-very-low-calorie-diet-can-reverse-type-2-diabetes
GUT MICROBIOME IS DIFFERENT IN PARKINSON’S PATIENTS
Through the recent study they conducted, Dr. Ayse Demirkan and her colleagues saw that individuals with Parkinson’s disease had distinct gut microbiomes characterized by dysbiosis — the phenomenon of imbalance between so-called good versus bad bacteria.
Their study suggested that around 30% of the proportion of gut bacteria in people with Parkinson’s disease is different from those without Parkinson’s.
“We found one-third of these microbes [in the gut of people with Parkinson’s] to be different,” Dr. Demirkan said.
“So this is a very strong indication of dysbiosis. And also how they [the bacteria] function, what kind of genes they carry, [these aspects were] also different. We found a reduced [amount of] short-chain fatty acid producers, for example, bacteria that [are] known to be gut-friendly […] We found increased pathogenic bacteria […], including Escherichia coli, and we found a lot of bacterial pathways disturbed as well, potentially affecting the well-being of the neuronal tissues.”
Dr. Demirkan and her colleagues found that bacteria such as Bifidobacterium dentium — which can cause infections such as brain abscesses — were at significantly elevated levels in the gut of people with Parkinson’s disease.
Other infection-causing bacteria more abundant in people with Parkinson’s were E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, which can cause pneumonia, and Klebsiella quasipneumoniae, which can cause similar infections.
The study conducted by Dr. Demirkan was not the only recent research to zoom in on the differences in gut bacteria.
Research from the University of Helsinki — published in May 2023 in Frontiers — in animal models of Parkinson’s disease, suggests that Desulfovibrio bacteria may be implicated in this condition. These bacteria produce hydrogen sulfide, which may lead to forms of inflammation.
Desulfovibrio also came up in a study from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, which appeared in May 2023 in Nature CommunicationsTrusted Source. This study, whose aim was to find a method of diagnosing Parkinson’s earlier, identified an “overabundance” of these bacteria in people with REM sleep behavior disorder and early markers of Parkinson’s.
REM sleep behavior disorder is a deep sleep disturbance tied to a higher risk of Parkinson’s disease. In people with this disorder, the usual brain mechanisms that prevent them from “acting out” the content of their dreams no longer work, which means that they perform uncontrolled movements in their sleep.
Shaughnessy said that he, too, experiences deep sleep disturbances. “Over the last few years, I have very really vivid dreams, and […] I’ve fallen out of bed a few times because I’m turning over doing something, you know, sort of dealing with whatever it is in the dream,” he described.
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If gut bacteria do play a role in Parkinson’s disease, the question that arises is: What mechanisms might mediate their impact on neurological health?
One hypothesis hinted at in the studies on the link between the gut and the brain in Parkinson’s is that systemic inflammation may be one of the mechanisms involved, since some of the bacteria that are overabundant in this condition are pro-inflammatory, meaning that they can trigger inflammation.
There is research indicating that immunosuppressant medication is associated with a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease, which suggests that a similar type of medication may also help manage the condition.
Indeed, chronic brain inflammation is an important part of Parkinson’s disease, and some studies seem to indicate that systemic inflammation may worsen brain inflammation and thus contribute to disease progression.
Some inflammatory conditions have actually been linked with a higher risk of Parkinson’s. For example, one Danish study from 2018 suggested that people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) have a 22% higher risk of Parkinson’s disease than peers without this inflammatory condition.
Dr. Demirkan agreed that inflammation linked to Parkinson’s disease may start in the gut, caused by “bad” bacteria. However, she emphasized that this potential mechanism is not yet confirmed, and further research on this topic is necessary to draw firm conclusions.
COULD DIET FIGHT DYSBIOSIS IN PARKINSON’S PATIENTS?
If gut bacteria may play a role in Parkinson’s disease, it may seem reasonable to infer that diet could help fight gut dysbiosis and perhaps provide an easy option for symptom management.
While there are some dietary recommendations and nutritional supplements that may help provide some symptom relief for some people, it remains unclear just how much diet can actually do to alter the course of this disease.
One study from 2022 suggests that diets high in flavonoids — natural pigments found in many fruits — are linked to a lower risk of mortality in Parkinson’s disease.
And an older study, from 2018, argued that a protein found in many types of fish, called “parvalbumin,” may help prevent Parkinson’s disease by stopping alpha-synuclein from collecting into clumps in the brain — which is what happens in the brains of people with Parkinson’s, disrupting signals between brain cells.
However, when asked about the potential of diet and supplements to regulate gut bacteria in people with Parkinson’s, Dr. Demirkan expressed some reservations.
She emphasized that since people have different risk factors for Parkinson’s, as well as different iterations of the disease, it is difficult to make general recommendations that would actually prove helpful:
“It’s very difficult for me to advise anyone anything because we are all very individual, our gut microbiome is individual. So prevention [of the condition] is [one thing] I think, and the long-term maintenance is something else, together with the other complications of the disease. So I cannot really advise anything, but studies show there is a problem with increased sugar consumption. There are some intervention studies on diet indeed, but it’s very difficult [to conclude anything], as the studies are not really finalized. [It is difficult to know] how to advise an individual with a certain genetic and lifelong history of exposure to different things, because we don’t know what is in [them].”
EXERCISE AND CORE HEAT
Research from 2017 advised that at least 2 and a half hours of exercise per week could help people with Parkinson’s improve their mobility while slowing down disease progression.
Dr. Demirkan agreed that exercise can be a helpful strategy for managing Parkinson’s disease. “Exercise itself is an amazing way of shaping our brain and body,” she said.
“In terms of reversing [Parkinson’s] pathology, there are some large physiological effects that we can think about. If you’re running a marathon, for example, it’s a big thing that your body has to go through. For instance, one thing is that your heat increase for a long time in a feverish way, right? There is a long-term increase in the core heat, that’s one thing, and that should definitely have an important effect on the gut,” she explained.
Indeed, some research suggests that the heat stress taking place during exercise could reduce intestinal blood flow, which eventually may impact the gut microbiome by potentially suppressing some bacteria and making room for others to expand.
As to which form of exercise is best for people with Parkinson’s disease, a Cochrane review published in January 2023 concluded that pretty much all forms of exercise can help improve life quality for those living with this condition.
According to the review authors, existing evidence suggests that aqua-based training “probably has a large beneficial effect” on quality of life. Endurance training is also helpful, both in improving life quality, in general, and in managing motor symptoms in particular.
When it comes to managing motor symptoms, the authors write that dance, aqua-based exercise, gait/ balance/ functional exercise, and multi-domain training could all be equally helpful.
And some past research — in women with overweight but without Parkinson’s — has suggested that endurance training results in an increase in beneficial bacteria called Akkermansia, which contribute to improved metabolic function.
Shaughnessy, who regularly takes part in demanding and arduous marathons and other sports challenges to raise funds for Parkinson’s research told us that exercise has helped him more than anything in maintaining his well-being.
“Exercise has become a big part — was already a part of my life before [the diagnosis], but it’s become a big way of helping me to manage and control the condition,” he told us in the podcast.
“I gradually went from, you know, a bit of running to marathons. And then the latest thing I’ve done was a 14-day cycle from Liverpool to Ukraine — 1,400 miles, which was probably a little bit beyond my capability, to be honest,” he mused.
But challenging himself in this way, he said, truly helped him on a mental level. “While I’m exercising, I don’t feel like I have Parkinson’s, quite often,” Shaughnessy told us.
For him, it is all about focusing on what you are actually able to achieve at any given point in time, and aiming for that.
“And, you know, actually, ironically, I have got better and I ran my personal best in the marathon in May this year — so, eight years after diagnosis.” Shaughnessy said. ~
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/in-conversation-why-parkinsons-research-is-zooming-in-on-the-gut
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THE IMPACT OF FATS AND CARBS ON LONGEVITY
~ Japanese researchers found that, in the study cohort, men who got fewer than 40% of their daily calories from carbohydrates were at a significantly higher risk of all-cause mortality.
For women, by contrast, those who got more than 65% of their calories from carbohydrates were at a higher all-cause mortality risk.
The researchers found no appreciable difference between the effect of consuming minimally processed carbohydrates versus refined carbohydrates.
Regarding dietary fat, men who got more than 35% of their calories from any kind of fat were at a higher risk of cancer and cardiovascular mortality.
In men, when the quality of fat intake was examined, no clear association was observed for saturated fat intake. However, consuming less unsaturated fat was associated with a higher risk of all-cause and cancer-related mortality.
For women, consuming more fats — particularly saturated fats — decreased their risk of all-cause and cancer mortality.
The study involved 34,893 men and 46,440 women, ranging in age from 35 to 69 years. The average body mass index (BMI) for men was 23.7, and for women 22.2, within the healthy range.
According to cardiology dietician Michelle Routhenstein, who was not involved in the research, “This study suggests that low carbohydrates in diet and low-fat weight loss diets for women can decrease longevity.”
She also expressed concern that some deaths described in the study may represent “poverty and inadequate nutrient intake overall, and are unlike the U.S. population.”
The study suggests a shortfall in bioactive dietary components may be at play. Specifically, the authors mention fiber, heme iron, vitamins, minerals, branched-chain amino acids, fatty acids, and phytochemicals as being in short supply.
Routhenstein noted the need in women for “a certain amount of fat in order to produce adequate hormones like estrogen, which are cardioprotective.”
The authors themselves do not speculate on this, but note that the intake of saturated fat was inversely linked to mortality risk only among women.
Oriana: NO OBESE CENTENARIANS; FUCOIDAN
What’s astonishing here is not so much the idea that Japanese men might need more carbs while women should consume more fat, especially saturated fat — what’s amazing is the low body mass index of both men and women in this study. Compared to the average American, the Japanese are stunningly slender! And that’s perhaps the primary reason for the high life expectancy of the Japanese — the highest life expectancy in the world.
There are no obese centenarians.
On the other hand, there is no need to be concerned about those “extra ten pounds” as long as there is sufficient muscle mass. Serious health problems and shortened life expectancy develop not with plumpness, but with obesity (BMI of 30 or above). Obesity kills.
~ The average age of death is around 75-80 for an obese woman and around 70-75 for an obese man. For an obese woman who smokes, the average age of death is around 70-75, and for an obese man who smokes, it's 65-70. ~ https://www.yourtango.com/2018311896/study-overweight-people-longer-life-expectancy
Is it the Japanese diet that keeps the population slender and long-lived? My guess is the consumption of seaweed. Seeweed is a source of fucoidan, a polysaccharide (a chain of fucose particle) found in cell walls of brown algae. Fucoidan is known to be a suirtuin activator, of known importance for longevity. Fucoidan is also known to ameliorate rheumatoid arthritis, high blood pressure, and diabetes. In cancer patients, it interferes with the process of metastasis.
The therapeutic use of fucoidan awaits further research. But we already know that it's a very valuable component of the diet — one that is sadly neglected anywhere except in Japan. I am lucky to live within an easy commute to an East Asian market, with its rich assortment of seaweed and other superfoods, e.g. mushrooms, also known to be a good source of fucoidan.
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ending on beauty:
The temple bell stops—
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.
~ Basho, trans. by Robert Bly
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