Cemetery in Rakowice, near Krakow; photo: Anna Stępień
*
ALL SOULS
Sometimes I think Warsaw fog
is the dead, coming back
to seek their old homes —
wanting to touch even the walls.
But they cannot find those walls,
so they embrace the trees instead,
lindens and enduring chestnuts;
they embrace the whole city,
lay their arms around the bridges
and the droplet-beaded street lamps;
they pray in the Square of Three Crosses,
kneel among the candles and flowers
under bronze plaques that say
On this spot, 100 people were shot —
they bow, they kiss
even the railroad tracks —
they do not complain, only hold
what they can, in unraveling white.
~ Oriana
Polish cemetery on All Souls'
*
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” ~ Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living
*
”When I was young, I was attracted to sorrow. It seemed interesting. It seemed an energy that would take me somewhere. Now I am older, if not old, and I hate sorrow. I see that it has no energy of its own, but uses mine, furtively. I see that it is leaden, without breath, and repetitious, and unsolvable.
And now I see that I am sorrowful about only a few things, but over and over.”
~ Mary Oliver
*
THE DECLINE AND FALL
~ Gibbon is widely regarded as a typical man of the Enlightenment, dedicated to asserting the claims of reason over superstition, to understanding history as a rational process, and to replacing divine revelation with sociological explanations for the rise of religion. He is probably cited most often for his facetious observations about early Christianity. He is particularly severe on the miracles ascribed to the early monastics.
“The favorites of heaven were accustomed to cure inveterate diseases with a touch, a word, or a distant message; and to expel the most obstinate daemons from the souls, or bodies, which they possessed. They familiarly accosted, or imperiously commanded, the lions or serpents of the desert; infused vegetation into a sapless trunk; suspended iron on the surface of the water; passed the Nile on the back of a crocodile, and refreshed themselves in a fiery furnace. These extravagant tales, which display the fiction, without the genius, of poetry, have seriously affected the reason and the morals of the Christians. Their credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.”
He tells the story of a Benedictine abbot who confessed: “‘My vow of poverty has given me an hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince.’—I forget the consequences of his vow of chastity.” He recounts how the practices of penance and the renunciation of the world produced one sect of Anchoret monks who “derived their name from their humble practice of grazing in the fields of Mesopotamia with the common herd.”
More grimly, he reports the murderous zeal with which Christians pursued those of the faith defined as heretics. He produces a document from an inquisition into the heresy of Eutyches in 448 A.D.: “‘May those who divide Christ be divided with the sword, may they be hewn in pieces, may they be burnt alive!’ were the charitable wishes of a Christian synod.”
In contrast to such passion, Gibbon prefers the philosophical temperament of ancient Athens, and he reserves his severest rebukes for two of the men who broke “the golden chain of Platonic succession.” The Archbishop of Alexandria, Theophilus, “a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold, and with blood,” in 389 A.D. sacked the edifices of the old Roman pagan religion, destroying the library of Alexandria and the two hundred thousand volumes of Greek and Roman literature deposited there by Marc Antony. “The compositions of ancient genius, so many of which have irretrievably perished, might surely have been excepted from the wreck of idolatry, for the amusement and instruction of succeeding ages; and either the zeal or the avarice of the archbishop might have been satiated with the rich spoils, which were the reward of his victory.”
The Emperor Justinian in 529 A.D. suppressed the remaining Greek schools of philosophy in the name of Christ. “The Gothic arms were less fatal to the schools of Athens than the establishment of a new religion, whose ministers superseded the exercise of reason, resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned the infidel or skeptic to eternal flames.” In the summary of the fall of Rome that he gives midway through his opus, Gibbon includes “the abuse of Christianity” as one of the causes.
“The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity [timidity]; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity… . the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody, and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from the camps to the synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country.”
Gibbon’s modern reputation, accordingly, is largely that of an English Voltaire or Montesquieu, a man warning his country, at a time of its own rising imperial fortunes, of the need to throw off the shackles of superstition and the institutions that produced it. There are aspects of Gibbon’s own career that support this impression. After he left Oxford, his real education took place at Lausanne in French Switzerland, and his first attempts at literary essays were written in French. His own great work, though inspired by his celebrated vision of barefoot monks chanting vespers in the Temple of Jupiter in the Capitol, actually began as an English attempt to better Montesquieu’s earlier history of Rome, Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur of Rome and its Decline.
Certainly, it was as an Enlightenment radical that Gibbon appeared to my generation who, as undergraduates in the 1960s, read him in the only version of his work then readily and cheaply available, the nine hundred page abridged edition published by Penguin under its old Pelican label. But now, reading the whole thing in this new Penguin Classics edition, a very different Gibbon emerges, one that suggests an alternative view of the Enlightenment in England as well.
Apart from publishing the full text, the major difference between the Penguin Classics and the old Pelican edition is that the former contains all Gibbon’s footnotes, which are so extensive they consume roughly 20 percent of the total printed space. In a few places, they take up no less than three-quarters of the whole page. Gibbon uses his footnotes not only to source his references but also to make lengthy, sometimes acrimonious, sometimes witty, commentaries on the veracity of both his primary and secondary sources. (A sample: “The Dissertation of M. Biet seems to have been justly preferred to the discourse of his more celebrated competitor, the Abbé le Boeuf, an antiquarian, whose name was happily expressive of his talents.”)
Those with the fortitude to read them will find that a considerable number of Gibbon’s notes are devoted to disputing the French version of events, especially those of Baron Montesquieu and several other Enlightenment philosophes. Gibbon corrects Montesquieu in both his detail and his theory of history. He points out that Montesquieu is ignorant of the extent of the penetration Gothic barbarians had made of both Rome’s territory and its mercenary forces—“the principal and immediate cause of the fall of the Western Empire.” And as the Introduction by Penguin’s editor, David Womersley, argues, and the text itself confirms in many places, Gibbon has a completely different interpretation of the nature of history.
Montesquieu was committed to establishing that the surface milieu of history bore an underlying rationale and that there were general causes for the rise and fall of civilizations that transcended the influence of individuals. The Decline and Fall, however, is a demonstration that history is often driven by politics and sometimes by chance and that human passion usually presides over human reason. In their interpretations of the course of empire, the English and French Enlightenments are worlds apart.
Gibbon is well known for the aphorism that “history is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind,” but this expression is rarely taken seriously because his own work appears to contradict it. The Decline and Fall contains some of the earliest versions of what later became the specializations of social history (in his analysis of the character of the barbarians of Germany and Siberia), economic history (the trade between Rome and China), and religious history (the sociology of paganism and Christianity; the institutional and theological development of the church). However, in the realm of Gibbon’s political history, it remains true that “crimes, follies and misfortunes” dominate the scene for long periods of time.
One of the reasons that Gibbon remains such a good read today is the pace of his story as he narrates the careers of those who ascended to the emperor’s purple robe from what were sometimes very humble origins as common soldiers, peasants, and slaves, or even, as in the case of Justinian’s wife, the Empress Theodora, from the nude cabaret and brothels of Constantinople.
But equality of opportunity was matched by equality of outcome. Rome was plagued for most of its existence by the problem of succession, which was normally accomplished by a civil or military rebellion combined with the assassination of the incumbent. “Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same. A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike led to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder.”
The subjects of these princes sometimes remained immune to the violence of succession but at other times were bound up with it. In just three battles in the civil war of 323 A.D. between Constantine and Licinius, sixty thousand Romans were left dead in the field. When emperors fell, Gibbon notes, they could take whole provinces with them. After the failed revolt in about 265 A.D. of Ingenuus, whose troops in the province of Illyricum [modern Albania and Montenegro] had elevated him to usurp the purple, his rival Gallienus sent a message to one of his ministers.
“It is not enough,” says that soft but inhuman prince, "that you exterminate such as have appeared in arms: the chance of battle might have served me as effectually. The male sex of every age must be extirpated; provided that, in the execution of the children and the old men, you can contrive means to save our reputation. Let every one die who has dropt an expression, who has entertained a thought against me, against me, the son of Valerian, the father and brother of so many princes. Remember that Ingenuus was made emperor: tear, kill, hew in pieces. I write to you with my own hand, and would inspire you with my own feelings."
Gibbon’s analysis is sophisticated enough to recognize that a large-scale political system such as the Roman Empire can itself display relative stability while at the same time suffering continuous turbulence at the level of the palace. In the history of great monarchies, he says, the attention of both the writer and reader of history is naturally drawn to the court, the capital, and the army, while the millions of obedient subjects pursue their lives in obscurity. In less established systems, such as the early republics of Athens or Sparta, the impact of ordinary individuals is much greater and thus attracts more historical attention, even when this is sometimes unwarranted.
In other words, in opposition to the French search for general laws of historical causation, Gibbon argues that explanations need to be appropriate to their subject. In some historical circumstances, such as newly formed or emerging polities, the role of individuals such as founding fathers may be profound; in other circumstances, a system may be so well entrenched that it might survive the worst kind of abuse from apparently powerful political figures.
Similarly, once major internal systemic problems have emerged, neither the fortunes nor adversities of politics may be able to stem the tide. Under Justinian, the general Belisarius recaptured Italy from the Goths and Africa from the Vandals. But the economic decline of Rome, coupled with high taxes and the complete loss of martial spirit among the citizens, meant that new armies could not be raised and so the territorial gains could not be held.
Gibbon deploys a counterfactual (a device that some recent authors imagine has only just been invented) to argue that, under the reign of Justinian’s Byzantine court, Rome had reached the state of economic and political weakness where, even if “all the Barbarian conquerors had been annihilated in the same hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West.”
Gibbon also argues for the impact upon history of the role of chance, of the perfidy of distant decisions, and of the influence of unintended consequences. The outcomes of the wars between the various German tribes who contested the territories on the periphery of the empire, Gibbon demonstrates, depended as much on luck and ignorance of the enemy’s position as it did on strength of arms and valor. The eventual survival of the Franks in Gaul was due to such accidents and fortune, while the complete extermination of the Gepidae nation was the result of an alliance formed between the Lombard and the Avar kings that was directed more at Rome than at the hapless victim.
Volume Three of the Penguin edition traces the empire from 640 to 1500 when its history is dominated by the emergence of Islam, first by the Arab conquest of the Middle East and Africa, second by the Crusades which were organized in response, and third by the final capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans. The growth of Islam, Gibbon contends, was a matter of chance.
Deploying another counterfactual, he argues that had Justinian’s Abyssinian allies not lost an obscure military conflict in Yemen in the sixth century, Arabia would have been preserved for Christianity and the Islamic uprising that began in Mecca would never have happened.
“Mahomet must have been crushed in his cradle, and Abyssinia would have prevented a revolution which has changed the civil and religious state of the world.”
*
All of Gibbon’s mockery of the miracles claimed for hermit monks, of the celibacy of the clergy, of the worship of images and relics, and of the temporal lust for wealth and power displayed by so many princes of the church, can be explained by his Protestantism. Writing for an English audience, he is making the same kinds of criticism of Roman Catholicism that Protestants had urged since Luther.
To a Protestant audience, all his ridicule is directed at safe targets—the indulgence, myths, and deviations of Popery—and does not call into question the basis of the religion itself. At one point, he even comments that an epistle he cites will be “painful to the Catholic divines; while it is dear and familiar to our Protestant polemics.”
Moreover, his identification of Christianity as one of the causes of the fall of Rome is far from unequivocal. He certainly ascribes some responsibility to the otherworldliness adopted by “the useless multitudes of both sexes” who locked themselves away from society, but in the same passage he goes on to record how Christianity was a “principle of union as well as of dissension” and that the sermons from the pulpits of the empire “inculcated the duty of passive obedience to a lawful and orthodox sovereign.”
Caligula
Gibbon’s own justification for recording so many of the flaws of the faith is that he is not writing theology, which is “the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity,” but history, which discovers “the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.”
The Christianity for which he acknowledges most sympathy is the simple faith of the gospels, the creed that prevailed before theologians and bishops emerged to generate heresies, inquisitions, schisms, and innumerable sentences of death over fine lines of doctrine which few of the priesthood, let alone their parishioners, fully understood.
He quotes with approval the sentiments of Procopius, the chronicler of the political, military, and religious accomplishments of the age of Justinian: that religious controversy is the offspring of arrogance and folly; that true piety is most laudably expressed by silence and submission; that man, ignorant of his own nature, should not presume to scrutinize the nature of God; and that it is sufficient for us to know, that power and benevolence are the perfect attributes of the Deity.
Though it initially attracted some critics, Gibbon’s work was generally highly praised when it was published. It turned him into a London literary celebrity, and he was one of the most popular authors of his day. In 1776, he said his first volume was “on every table and on almost every toilet.” This means his writing was both an expression and a reflection of enlightened opinion in late eighteenth-century England.
If this is so, then this opinion cannot be equated with that of France at the same time. Besides those already discussed, there are other areas in The Decline and Fall that, if examined in detail, could make the same point. For instance, while the philosophes saw their king as the barrier to freedom, Gibbon argued that a hereditary monarchy was a precondition for a civilized political system since it solved the problem of arbitrary succession that had caused so much and such predictable bloodshed in Rome.
His attitude to the savages and barbarians of Siberia and Africa was also the opposite of his French contemporaries’. In a long passage, he dissects and demolishes Montesquieu’s concept of the “noble savage,” the idea that the natural man is virtuous and that it is civilization that makes him corrupt. For Gibbon, this Romantic idea is the opposite of the truth, as he demonstrates through several extensive examinations of the bleak and lawless pastoral societies of the Goths, Vandals, Huns, Tartars, Mongols, and other nomads of the plains of Siberia and Ukraine who periodically fought their way across the Danube to wreak havoc on the cultivated lands of the Mediterranean.
In short, the intellectual product and legacy of the English Enlightenment is quite different from that of the French. In Gibbon, the spirit of inquiry and the fruits of research confirm the value of the existing institutions of English society, including its religion. In France, these tools were deployed in opposition to the same institutions. In England, Gibbon emphasized the responsibility of individuals and celebrated the virtue and courage of statesmen and churchmen, where they existed, even though he recorded that the natural passions of humanity were likely to leave such qualities in short supply.
In France, the philosophes sought to find general laws of society that would render the actions of individuals irrelevant. The intellectual heritage of the English Enlightenment, as exemplified in Gibbon, clearly goes some of the way to explaining the different political histories of the two countries in the ensuing two centuries. England has enjoyed a stable and peaceful national history marked by a gradual extension of its democracy; France has been periodically racked by revolution, internal collapse, and foreign invasion.
Toward the end of his Introduction, David Womersley advises: “You are on the threshold of one of the greatest narratives of European literature.” Who could disagree? In its own way, The Decline and Fall is as powerful a work of art as King Lear, Hamlet, or Handel’s Messiah. Unlike these three, unfortunately, you cannot pop out one evening to the theater to take it in. It needs a whole summer holiday or a long winter by the fire, a time scale few of us today are likely to commit more than once or twice in a lifetime. Still, like any great work of art, once you have experienced it, you wonder how you could have lived without it. ~
https://newcriterion.com/issues/1997/6/edward-gibbon-the-enlightenment
*
IS A WORLD WITHOUT WORK DESIRABLE?
Oscar Wilde thought hard work “the refuge” of those with nothing better to do while he envisaged a society of “cultivated leisure” as machines performed the necessary and unpleasant tasks.
Karl Marx’s dream was of state-regulated general production that allowed liberated workers to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner” without the drudgery of being tied to one job.
The 19th-century socialist activist William Morris advocated for more pleasurable work, believing that once the profit motive of the factory had been abolished, less necessary labor would lead to a four-hour day.
So Elon Musk’s suggestion to Rishi Sunak that society could reach a point where “no job is needed” and “you can do a job if you want a job … but the AI will do everything” revives a debate on the issue of how we work that has long been discussed.
Yet a world without work, experts question, may be more dystopian than utopian.
“This is an old, old story that never actually happens,” said Tom Hodgkinson, co-founder of the Idler magazine, which for three decades has been a platform to examine issues surrounding work and leisure.
“There was a poem in ancient Greece saying, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we have invented the watermill so that we no longer have to grind our corn? The women can sit around doing nothing all day from now on.’ It’s that kind of recurrent idea.
“People like Bertrand Russell were talking about this in the 30s. What would we do without work? One view is people wouldn’t know what to do because people are more or less slavish. That they would just sit around watching daytime TV or porn all day.”
In fact, given more free time, such as on furlough during Covid, “they start living better”, Hodgkinson said. “They are starting neighborhood groups, doing more gardening, doing up the house, spending more time with family, doing creative things, playing music, writing poetry, all the things that are part of what I would call a good life.”
Despite that, he said, studies had shown that paid work was beneficial for mental health, for status and identity.
“I think we need to do some sort of work. We should be moving towards a shorter working week, and more leisure-filled society,” Hodgkinson said, adding that a radical overhaul of our economic and education models would be needed to eliminate work on the scale that Musk predicted.
One significant body of research in 2019, led by Brendan Burchell, professor in social sciences and a former president of Magdalene College, Cambridge, established that eight hours of paid employment a week was optimal in terms of benefit in mental health, and that no extra benefit was subsequently accrued.
Setting aside the “awful jobs that really screw you up”, Burchell said, “your average job is good for you” in terms of social interaction, working collectively, giving structure and sense of identity.
A world without work “is a terrible idea of what society would look like for all sorts of reasons, as well as people’s mental health,” he said.
The labor market, as a way of distributing money around the economy, would have to be transformed, as would the education system, “to teach people how to fill their days, by writing poetry or going fishing or whatever, instead of going to the factory or the office”, Burchell continued.
Shifting to shorter working hours was shown to have “massive benefits for people”, said Burchell, but he added: “If we move to a society where lots of people are completely excluded from the labor market, then I get very worried that’s going to be a very dystopian future.”
In his book Making Light Work: An End to Toil in the 21st Century, David Spencer, professor of economics at the University of Leeds, also makes the case for less work, but not its elimination. “It would leave us bereft potentially of things that we value in work,” he said, citing communal enterprise, personal relationships and the development of skillsets.
So in essence, we would be a poorer, sadder, less skilled society. “Yes, there will be some loss through loss of work,” Spencer said. “I realize not all work is good. So we ought to automate drudgery, seek to use AI to reduce the pain of work, and therefore leave work which is good.”
He draws from Morris, who talked about bringing joy to work. “Skillful work is good work and it has a role in the creation of a better society,” said Spencer. “We ought to use technology to create less and better work. In that sense, the future can be really positive.
This was, he added, the future imagined by “Oscar Wilde, William Morris, and a lot of utopian positive thinking, where technology makes work lighter. It’s not eliminating work – it’s bringing light to work.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/03/experts-question-elon-musk-vision-of-ai-world-without-work
Mary:
A work- free world would be missing too much to be truly satisfying. I know when I was suddenly jobless there was a period of adjustment where I had to figure out what to do with my time, how to fill the days in ways that were interesting, challenging, and productive. Luckily I had many interests and "hobbies," that I now had real time to pursue.
For some, especially those who dedicated almost all their time and energies to their work, retirement can arrive and stir a real sense of panic — a kind of restless emptiness, filled with boredom and a growing unhappiness. People solve this in different ways...some find some sort of work, maybe part time, doing something they enjoy or feel passionate about. Some take up new interests, become artists in one way or another, finding new joy in creating. Some pursue their passions, ones they didn't have time for while working.
For those who don't find solutions in these ways there can be a long decline into passivity and boredom, which I am convinced, makes them more vulnerable to the illnesses and catastrophes of age, more likely to die sooner than those more active and engaged in the world.
Oriana:
I’ve witnessed it myself: when a man’s life is dedicated to his job [usually it’s a man who’s so job-centered], retirement can be a catastrophe. Work provides not only income, but also a purpose in life and social ties at the office. The reaction to the loss of a job through retirement can indeed lead to deep grief, with predictable negative impact on health.
The spouse. used to having the house all to herself during the day, may also be bothered by the husband unwanted presence during what used to be his “working hours.” It’s a huge disruption of the previous routine for both of them. While much is said about “retirement savings,” it seems that finding either volunteer work and/or special hobbies is much more essential.
Some college professors continue to teach part-time until their early eighties. This may seem like a great solution, but it deprives younger faculty of classes they are eager to teach. The same goes for editors and others in senior positions, the long-term alpha males who view retirement with dread. “Retirement? don’t ever mention that word to me!” I remember one grandfatherly editor exclaiming — exploding almost.
Some men take to obsessive fence painting and grass mowing, so that bare ground shows through — yes, I’ve witnessed that too. Others constantly go on cruises or join senior travel groups to places like Las Vegas or Disney World. The despair on the faces of some of these travelers is frightening.
One of the privileges of being self-employed is that you can carry on as long as health allows. If you are truly engaged and connected, you’ll also be healthier and live longer.
On the other hand, people who successfully transition to retirement may find that these are the happiest years of their lives.
Obviously, whether retirement is a virtual death sentence or the happiest period of one’s life depends on the individual — on the richness of life he’s managed to build up.
*
THE RISE IN LATER-YEARS DIVORCE
~ The instance of mature couples divorcing is on the rise. Are over 50s less inclined to stay together than their parents, and what makes a ‘good uncoupling’? ~
“I went through this process of feeling like my future had been stolen from me,” says 53-year-old Kate Christie about the end of her 22-year marriage. “He said to me, ‘I don’t love you any more. I want to leave our marriage. I want the chance to meet and fall in love with someone else while I’m still young.’ And that was that.”
“I felt really blindsided. I was angry, upset and resentful.”
Christie is one of a growing number of over 50s navigating life after separation and divorce.
“[There’s] definitely an uptick in mature age divorces compared to even 10 years ago,” says clinical psychologist, Dr Rashika Gomez. It’s an observation supported by the most recent research from the Australian Institute of Family Studies, which shows that the proportion of divorces among couples married for 20 years and longer has increased from about 20% in the 1980s and 1990s, to over 25% in 2021.
Dr Gomez has also noticed an increase in the number of those in mature marriages seeking relationship advice. “They’re seeking that outside opinion on [whether] something is wrong, because you can’t see it when you’re in it.”
It was a counselor that helped Brodie see her roller-coaster marriage for what it was – emotional abuse. “She was my savior,” says the 63-year-old of her counselor. But family and friends were shocked Brodie was calling it quits after 32 years. “We were known as the golden couple.” She shakes her head. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
Brodie says life on the other side has never been better. “Bloody amazing. I can feel the sunshine. I can hear the birds. I’ve rediscovered myself.” And despite her experience, she is not anti-relationships or anti-marriage. “But I can assure you I will never have anyone live with me again.
“I’d rather be on my own than unhappy,” she insists. “I’ve got my friends. I’ve got my sons.”
*
Recently divorced, Raymond is grateful he has the support of a boatload of good friends, but the 71-year-old longs for that special someone. “A lot of people think friends are enough. But I don’t think they are. You’ve got to have someone special that turns into a partner.”
And after 24 years of marriage, he thought he had that person, but the fear and uncertainty circulating during the pandemic tipped the relationship upside down. The final straw came after restrictions eased. His ex-wife was averse to him returning to the job he’s loved for over 43 years. “If you go, don’t come home.” So, ultimately, he moved out.
REACHING THE THRESHOLD
Dr Gomez describes the point Raymond reached as a “threshold,” a common reason those in mature marriages suddenly go “I can’t do this any more”.
Relationship therapist Clinton Power agrees reaching a threshold is when couples may see separation and divorce as inevitable. “Sometimes if there’s been a lot of hurt or betrayal or there’s an enormous distance from growing apart, the idea of working on the relationship feels more overwhelming than separating and starting anew.”
In his experience, the lack of a shared focus or a realization that the couple has fewer common interests are key contributors to mature age separation. It often occurs at the time the couple’s children reach early adulthood or leave home.
Another is midlife, when individuals in a relationship may undergo significant personal change or question the direction of their lives. “So that’s when I see some individuals in a relationship start to think, ‘hang on, I’m not completely happy here, this relationship is not fulfilling my needs’,” says Power.
“If you just look at life expectancy, for example, in the past, people didn’t live as long as we’re living now. Now we’re hitting 90, 100, with relatively fewer issues. So when you’re hitting your 50s, you’re no longer looking at 15 years more with someone you might find annoying, or you don’t get along with, you’re now looking at another 50 years with someone like that,” says Dr Gomez. “And that can feel really confronting, and overwhelming, and you just might not want to do that any more.”
Lawyer Brad Saunders, who has specialized in family law for 25 years, says the over 50s are less inclined to stay together and ‘grin and bear it’ than their parents. “More choose to separate and it is more acceptable to separate,” he says.
But he sees one major difference in the way older couples, in general, approach separation compared to younger couples. “Older couples are better at planning their separation more amicably.”
Power says he’s found many mature aged couples aim for a “good uncoupling” so that they can maintain a healthy relationship. “So maybe ‘we can be in each other’s lives and have a healthy relationship’, whereas sometimes that slash and burn approach happens in the younger couples.”
With his divorce finalized earlier this year, Raymond and his ex are rebuilding their friendship. “I can’t see the point in being filthy angry with anybody. All it does is eat you away as well.” But he’s adamant they’ll never get back together again. “Life’s too short, anyway.”
Christie agrees: “Life is too short to be angry, or sad, or lonely, or resentful, or unfulfilled.” By March 2020, Christie and Dan had found a new way of being. “We were starting to form the basis of our new friendship,” she says. And “we were co-parenting really well”. One month later, Dan was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, then 11 months later, he passed away. “It was so brutally fast,” recalls Christie. He was 54.
Alongside the grief, Dan’s passing ignited in Christie a desire to live life differently. “I had this really clear resolution, which I honestly feel was a gift from him, that I wanted to live very differently from that point on.” She wrote a list of things she wanted to do, experience or change. Today, Kate’s list is a structured set of goals and plans to achieve them. Earlier this year, she published a book on her new approach, called The Life List.
She found the act of writing cathartic. “Phenomenally healing.” It’s helped her order her thoughts into words and to reflect on her separation. She can now admit that she didn’t fight to save her marriage. “I didn’t once say to him, ‘Well, fall back in love with me honey, let’s work on this.’ I didn’t suggest counseling. I didn’t try and talk him out of it. I think I was relieved … I could get on with my own life.” She’s proud she found the courage to show her vulnerability. “We all have a backstory and I’m proud of myself for letting people in.”
Learning to let her guard down is something that 50-year-old Anne McCrea is struggling with after an irreparable breakdown of trust in her marriage. She and her husband had been married for 18 years. All in one moment, things fell apart. “I kind of just, you know, froze. I was at the beach with the kids and the dog and kind of just sat quietly crying to myself for a little while.”
Separating at this life stage can rarely be a clean or complete break. “We had to talk to each other, we had no choice. I couldn’t just ignore him; we had three children [aged 10, 15 and 18] that we needed to manage day to day.” McCrea adds, “so we kind of got functioning and working very quickly.”
Functioning included traveling with her ex-husband on a planned European family holiday shortly after her grandmother’s funeral. It would only be on their return that they would confirm what McCrea admits the kids already knew, that they were separating. But she insists, “it was good for them to see that we could travel together”. From day one, McCrea’s priority has been her children’s well-being and maintaining their bond with their father. “[Maybe] it’s not worth saving the relationship, but it’s worth saving the future for the kids, you know, so they don’t have to have those uncomfortable Christmases.”
After returning from Europe, McCrea was diagnosed with cancer. Treatment would delay her sharing the news of her separation with her parents. “It was at least another year before I actually told my mother and father.”
Dating and divorce parties
McCrea says her trust in people has diminished and she’s developed a “bullshit radar”. She’s kept some friends, made new ones and said goodbye to others she’d shared with her ex-husband for more than 25 years. Does she want to get married again? “Who knows?” She’s dating again but admits it’s hard. She’s pickier now. “Dating in your 50s is brutal.”
Raymond is also dating again. He’s listed on a couple of online dating sites and is hoping to find that someone special to travel and enjoy life with. But he’s found mature aged dating challenging. “There are a ton of nice ladies out there, but once bitten, twice shy.” Raymond sighs: “I’ll just plod along. I think she’ll have to trip over me.”
Christie’s updated goals include finding a new love. She’s proud she hasn’t rushed into anything. “I wanted a period of time to understand me and what makes me tick as a person on my own.” What she found was a woman who is confident, tenacious, resilient and happy. “We’ve had some really hard years, but I think that the sadness and loss has made me the strongest that I am. I feel great.”
McCrea is rebuilding her confidence. “It’s taken a bit of a beating.” In anticipation of receiving her divorce papers, she’s planning a party – a divorce party. “A celebration of the next phase and next chapter.” She’s looking forward to drawing a line under the last six years of separation. “I can’t change anything in the past. I can only change what I can for the future.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/nov/04/i-think-i-was-relieved-life-on-the-other-side-of-mature-age-divorce
*
In breaking marriage you break more than your own personal narrative. You break a whole form of life that is profound and extensive in its genesis; you break the interface between self and society, self and history, self and fate as determined by these larger forces. ~ Rachel Cusk
*
IN CASE YOU DIDN’T KNOW, HAMAS MAKES IT CLEAR
~ In an interview, Ghazi Hamad of the Hamas political bureau expressed the organization’s readiness to repeat the October 7 “Al-Aqsa Flood” Operation as many times as necessary, with the ultimate goal of Israel’s annihilation. Hamad emphasized that Palestinians are prepared to bear the costs and proudly sacrifice martyrs for their cause, […], stating that they view everything they do as justified.
(From United with Israel, Nov 1, 2023)
And here is that XXI-century idealist:
~ Henryk Grynberg, Facebook
*
A BETTER WAY TO ELIMINATE HAMAS (CNN opinion)
~ Israel’s strategy for defeating Hamas — destroying its military and political capabilities to the point where the terrorist group can never again launch major attacks against Israeli civilians — is unlikely to work.
Indeed, Israel is likely already producing more terrorists than it’s killing.
To defeat terrorist groups like Hamas, it is important to separate the terrorists from the local population from which they emerge. Otherwise, the current generation of terrorists can be killed, only to be replaced by a new, larger generation of terrorists in the future. (This is described by experts as “counterinsurgency mathematics.” )
Although the principle — of separating the terror group from the broader population — is simple, it is incredibly difficult to achieve in practice.
This is why Israel and the United States have waged major military operations that killed large numbers of existing terrorists in the near term — but ultimately led to the rise of many more terrorists, often in a matter of months.
Exactly this pattern happened in the past when:
1.) Israel invaded Southern Lebanon with some 78,000 combat troops and almost 3,000 tanks and armored vehicles in June 1982.
The goal was to smash PLO terrorists, and Israel achieved significant near-term success. However, this military operation caused the creation of Hezbollah in July 1982, led to vast local support for Hezbollah and waves of suicide attacks and ultimately led to the withdrawal of Israel’s army from much of southern Lebanon in 1985 and the growth of Hezbollah ever since.
2.) Israel maintained a heavy military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank from the early 1990s to 2005.
These operations succeeded in killing many terrorists from Hamas and other Palestinian groups, but also triggered vast local support for the terrorist groups and massive campaigns of suicide attacks against Israelis that stopped only when the heavy Israeli military forces left. Far from defeated, Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections.
3.) Israel launched a ground offensive into Lebanon in July-August 2006.
Although the goal was to completely destroy Hezbollah’s leaders and fighters so that it could never again kidnap Israeli soldiers and launch missiles at Israeli cities, the Israeli offensive failed, and Hezbollah is vastly stronger today as a result.
4.) The United States invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003 with 150,000 combat troops.
American forces completely defeated Saddam Hussein’s army within 6 weeks. However, these heavy military operations led to the largest suicide terrorist campaign in modern times, a major civil war in Iraq and ultimately, the rise of ISIS.
A US Marine pulls down a picture of Saddam Hussein at a school in Al-Kut, Iraq, 2003.
*
IS HISTORY REPEATING IN GAZA 2023?
In Gaza, this tragic pattern is probably already happening. Right now, we are witnessing not the separation of Hamas and the local population, but the growing integration of the two, with likely growing recruitment for Hamas.
The Israeli order for 1.1 million Palestinians — the population of northern Gaza — to move south is not going to create meaningful separation between the terrorists and the population.
Many thousands cannot move because they are too young, too old, or too sick or injured and dependent on specialized care and hospitals. Hence, evacuating the entire civilian population of northern Gaza is not possible. Even if the civilian population did move, many Hamas fighters would simply go with them.
Moreover, Hamas has ordered civilians not to evacuate. Since Hamas and the civilian population remain tightly integrated, it is no surprise that Israeli operations to kill Hamas terrorists has led to the death of over 8,000 civilians, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, citing sources from Hamas-controlled Gaza. Virtually all have family members who are already likely being recruited by Hamas in large numbers.
We should expect that Hamas is thus growing stronger, not weaker, with every passing day.
So, what does work?
To defeat terrorist groups, it is crucial to engage in long campaigns of selective pressure, over years, not simply a month (or two, or three) of heavy ground operations, and to combine military operations with political solutions from early on.
Indeed, the very effort to finish off the terrorists in just a month or two militarily with little idea of the political outcome — as Israel appears to be doing now — is what ends up producing more terrorists than it kills.
The only way to create lasting damage to terrorists is to combine, typically in a long campaign of years, sustained selective attacks against identified terrorists with political operations that drive wedges between the terrorists and the local populations from which they come.
Israel is drawing comparisons with the defeat of ISIS, but it is important to remember that Muslim ground forces made an enormous difference by applying military pressure against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, over years, in ways that did not galvanize the local population to replace them, by allowing the local populations to effectively govern the area cleansed of terrorists.
The campaign that defeated ISIS joined military and political operations together practically from the beginning.
Going forward, Israel needs a new strategic conception for defeating Hamas. The only viable way to separate Hamas from the local population is politically.
Israel’s strategic vision has been to go in heavily militarily first and then figure out the political process later. But this is likely to integrate Hamas and the local population together more and more and to produce more terrorists than it kills.
Furthermore, Israel doesn’t appear to have a political plan for the period after eliminating Hamas. Since 2006, Hamas has been the only government in Gaza. Israel claims it does not want to govern Gaza, but Gaza will need to be governed, and Israel has yet to explain what a post-Hamas Gaza will look like.
What will prevent Hamas 2.0 from filling the power vacuum? Given the absence of serious political alternatives to Hamas, why should Palestinians abandon Hamas?
There is an alternative: now, not later, start the political process toward a pathway to a Palestinian state, and create a viable political alternative for Palestinians to Hamas.
This could, over time, separate Hamas from the local population more and more, and so lead to significant success. It must be the Palestinians who decide who leads Gaza.
This new strategic conception is the best way to defeat Hamas, secure Israel’s population and advance America’s interests in the region. ~ Robert A. Pape, a professor of political science and director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats. He is the author of several books on air power and terrorism, including “Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/01/opinions/israel-flawed-strategy-defeating-hamas-pape/index.html
Oriana:
For decades, some of the best minds have tried to offer solutions to the conflict — to no avail. Obviously, if the underlying idea of is the total elimination of the state of Israel, which came into being as a safe refuge from genocide, it’s a no-go from the start.
Joe:
Oriana:
You speak for an ideal: that everyone recognize that each ethnic group adds to the richness and flavor. America's greatness derives from its diversity, and no ethnic group should be put down.
Mary:
Arundhati Roy's words seem particularly relevant now...we certainly are witness to "unspeakable violence" that we must struggle to understand, and "never, never forget." After Hamas horrific attack on October 7 it seems futile and blind to talk of peace. Such evil cannot be tolerated--and I mean Evil..outside all laws of reason, justice and humanity. No one can excuse this under any circumstances. Innocents were violated, tortured and killed, bodies desecrated and brutalized, and all done with relish, with a demonic glee, with satisfaction in their own barbarism. Hamas stated goal, stated and repeated again and again, is the extermination of all jews and the jewish state.
Israel must take them at their words, judge them by their acts, and answer as they have done. Terrorists can't be bargained with, trusted, or allowed to flourish and continue in their stated goal of genocide. They have embedded themselves in the population, strategically, so that any action against them involves by necessity harm to the general population, including innocents. Not to act is only to invite them to more barbarism, more horrific evils, committed on their part not with reluctance but with relish.
I think the left sympathizers with Palestine are missing the necessities of this situation, the structure of this war. They make a false equivalency between Israel and a colonizer state. Hamas is not waging a revolution but a genocidal reign of terror. It sees advantage in the deaths of civilians — civilians they commanded not to flee, because those deaths are good propaganda to use against Israel. And that propaganda is working, is having an international effect in turning sentiment against Israel...accompanied by a frightening rise in open antisemitism and antisemitic attacks.
What is very telling is that bordering Arab nations do not want Palestinian refugees at all — because they are sure to come with embedded Hamas terrorists who have incited violence and conflict when allowed in before. Does the war radicalize, create more terrorists than it eliminates? That’s certainly a possibility. But there is no time and little appetite for a slow, years long campaign to separate the terrorists from the general population. That may be the only real solution, but the exigencies of war are making it less and less likely with every passing day.
WHY THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION IS DEAD (Jason Greenblatt)
I spent nearly three years at the Trump White House attempting to reach a peace deal between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors. But I always understood that among the many reasons it was unachievable then, and unlikely to be for the foreseeable future, was not just the seemingly unbridgeable positions on land, Jerusalem and other well-known obstacles. (Indeed, the peace plan we crafted was rejected by the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah before they even read it.)
Even if we had come up with a solution that was acceptable to the parties, though, there were still far too many Palestinians who were intent on massacring Jews and destroying the Jewish State of Israel.
That desire was on full display in October 7th unprecedented, devastating attack. Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel and killed at least 1200 people, wounded thousands and took hostage up to 200 (no official number has been released). The captives will surely be spread out and hidden all over the Gaza Strip, making their rescue extraordinarily challenging.
I was supposed to be in the Middle East this week for work, but postponed my trip in light of what’s going on. Almost every single one of my Arab colleagues and friends understood immediately why and expressed outrage, concern or disgust over what happened. Clearly, many Arabs oppose such horrific violence. But I also heard a minority of voices blaming Israel.
Unless and until Palestinians of good will and their leaders fully and unequivocally condemn and repudiate this hatred and the glorification of the slaughter of Jews, Palestinians will not achieve any of their aspirations because Israel cannot, and should not, compromise on the security of its citizens. No country should.
Israel cannot achieve peace with Palestinians when a segment of the Palestinian population still intends to destroy it. Israel cannot make peace when the leaders of the Palestinians include Hamas. Or when a member of Fatah, Hamas’ political opponent and the party that runs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, expresses not sorrow over the loss of innocent life, but celebrates a “morning of victory, joy, and pride” and urges all Palestinians to participate in the terror against Israel.
Many of the would-be peacemakers I spoke to during my time in the White House ignored the deep-seated hatred in this subset of the Palestinian population intent on ruining any chance for peace.
They told me that as long as the Palestinians were given a fully autonomous state of their own, this would all go away, or they pretended away this hatred in the first place. After the events of the last few days, I think they finally have to accept the truth.
Israel, like communities of Jews throughout history, will always need to protect itself from haters. As a consequence, any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if ever one is to present itself, must always address the need for Israel to defend itself, control security over whatever the Palestinian areas might become and do what it needs to protect its citizens.
I am heartened by the tremendous support for Israel from around the world. Scenes of the Israeli flag being displayed on the façade of 10 Downing Street and on Germany’s Brandenburg Gate are inspiring in these dark days. As was President Joe Biden issuing strong, appropriate remarks. I hope this support will be unwavering and be followed up by serious assistance to Israel for whatever it needs. I hope the Biden administration also recognizes the Iranian regime’s suspected role in this carnage and acts accordingly.
Indeed, the focus of the world must be to support Israel in its quest to punish those who perpetrated these dastardly acts and to work to prevent attacks like this in the future. Any human being who values life must condemn these acts unequivocally, with no moral equivalence.
Accordingly, the world must recognize that Israel is now defending itself in Gaza, as any country would, and that the fault for the unfortunate casualties that will inevitably occur among innocent Palestinians lies with Hamas. War is a terrible thing. But it’s not Israel that asked for this war.
Those who gather in cities around the world to celebrate the death and destruction perpetrated by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, including in my former home state of New York, are in essence saying they believe in the slaughter of innocent individuals, that it’s okay to shoot children in front of their parents, that it’s acceptable to parade women naked and to massacre grandparents.
They are saying that they are the enemy of Jews. But they are also saying that they are the enemies of peace and of the Palestinians as well for so deeply hurting their cause. These people should tell their loved ones, including their own grandparents, that this is what they stand for — death, destruction and misery. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/10/opinions/israel-gaza-hamas-biden-greenblatt/index.html
*
ISRAEL’S HIGH-TECH SECURITY SYSTEM
~ Over the last few years, Israel spent more than $1.1 billion to construct a sprawling security barrier along the entirety of its nearly 40-mile border with Gaza. This was, allegedly, to be the fence to end all fences. In addition to 20-foot-high multi-layered wire, steel, and concrete barriers, the “smart fence” integrated a vast network of cameras, motion and other sensors, radars, and remote-controlled weapon systems, all monitored by dozens of towers that served as data hubs and high-tech observation and listening-posts.
An underground wall and sensor system, designed to stop infiltration by tunnels, was extended far below the earth along the whole border, at great expense. Meanwhile, Israel’s advanced, exceptionally costly “Iron Dome” missile defense system protected the skies. “The barrier is reality-changing. What happened in the past won’t happen again,” the then-IDF chief of staff Aviv Kohavi declared at a ceremony marking its construction in 2019.
Some former members of the IDF have in recent days testified on social media that the fence really was a technological marvel. Not so much as a stray cat could get anywhere near the border without setting off alarms, they recalled. And the Israeli government and military certainly seem to have believed it was impenetrable, which partly explains why, by the start of this month, they had redeployed most of their regular military forces to guard the West Bank and northern border instead.
But of course, on 7 October, this great wall of silicon proved almost totally useless, overcome in a matter of minutes by Hamas, which was then left to rampage across southern Israel almost unopposed. At least 1,400 Israelis lost their lives as a result. What happened? Let’s lay aside Israel’s broader strategic intelligence failure — having been falsely convinced that Hamas had been successfully pacified and was no longer interested in attempting attacks — which this certainly was. The border’s defenses were expected to detect and repel even an unexpected assault — or at least were billed as such. How and why did they fail?
At the simplest level, we could say the IDF was overconfident in its defenses and underestimated its enemy. “The thinning of the forces [stationed near the Gaza border] seemed reasonable because of the construction of the fence and the aura they created around it, as if it were invincible, that nothing would be able to pass it,” recounts Brig. Gen. Israel Ziv, a former head of the IDF’s Operations Division and ground forces commander in the south.
We could also say that the IDF had allowed itself to become strategically rigid and was ill-prepared to adapt flexibly when things went wrong. From the moment the fence was proposed, some military officers warned that pouring resources into it — along with the Iron Dome — was a mistake, because it would ultimately degrade the military’s ability to maneuver offensively and pre-emptively neutralize the enemy’s capacity to conduct attacks.
Col. Yehuda Vach, commander of the IDF’s Officer Training School, warned in 2019 that “because we don’t cross the fence, the other side has become strategically stronger”, as they’d been handed operational initiative. “The enemy will seek in the next campaign to carry out an operation to kidnap soldiers and harm civilians in the towns near the fence, thus enjoying the first achievement of the campaign,” he ominously predicted. “The fence creates an illusion and gives a false sense of security to both the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces and the residents near the fence,” he said.
These are both classic military mistakes, warned against repeatedly by strategists from Carl von Clausewitz to Sun Tzu. In this case, however, the even greater mistake may have been that the IDF came to rely far too heavily on technological solutions, methods, and ways of thinking.
One of the most famous sayings of the U.S. Air Force pilot and strategist Col. John Boyd, who helped to develop modern maneuver warfare, was: “People, ideas, machines — in that order!”
While war-fighting devices were and are important, as are doctrines, tactics, and stratagems, these are all less important than the people doing the fighting, planning, and organizing — as well as being far less adaptable and reliable. As Boyd would often harangue generals in the Pentagon, usually to no avail: “Machines don’t fight wars… Humans fight wars!”
Boyd had seen for himself the perils of over-reliance on Big Brain tech wizardry in Vietnam. The latest generation of US aircraft, designed by geniuses who insisted that the age of aerial gunfights was long over, had been stripped of their guns and maneuverability — and built to be flying missile and bomb platforms. But in combat, the missiles proved horrifically unreliable — and the planes were no use at all in a dogfight. When they ran into lightweight North Vietnamese MIGs, they got destroyed: the US air-to-air kill ratio fell from 10:1 in the Korean War to 1:1 in 1967.
While technologies can certainly offer solutions to discrete problems, they are typically not flexible and adaptable enough to function as intended when things go sideways. Moreover, fragile technological solutions can produce entirely new liabilities that did not even exist before. In the current case, the widespread reliance of the IDF’s defenses on wireless data transmission became a critical weakness that the enemy was able to exploit to great effect.
In fact, it seems likely that Israel was actually worse off with all its high-tech border gadgetry than it would have been without it. These over-engineered solutions to guarding the border were not cost-effective, instead representing an opportunity cost that could have been better spent elsewhere — such as on maintaining a far greater number of disciplined, sharp-eyed soldiers with guns. When the tech failed, it was only such men who were able, eventually, to adapt and respond. By reversing Boyd’s admonition and putting machines first and people last, the IDF actively degraded the capability of those people to respond to disaster when it most mattered.
But even this understates the bigger problem exposed by the folly of the “smart fence”. Israel’s smart border defenses should be understood as the adoption of a needlessly complex system. “Complexity” here must not be mistaken to just mean “complicated”. Rather, a complex system is a technical term defining a system composed of such a great quantity of component parts, in such intricate relationships of dependency and interaction with each other, that its composite behavior in response to entropy cannot be predictively modeled.
When things go wrong in a complex system it can’t be easily solved, because each sub-system relies on many other sub-systems, and pulling any one lever to try to solve one problem will produce entirely unexpected effects. This means complex systems are vulnerable to failure cascades, in which the failure of even a single part can set off an unpredictable domino effect of further failures. Even if the original failure is fixed this cannot reverse the cascade, and the whole system may soon face catastrophic collapse.
This is essentially what happened to Israel’s border defense system. The replacement of low-tech solutions with high-tech ones needlessly added additional layers of complexity to the system, making it more, not less, fragile. Under pressure, the system then collapsed more completely and with more devastating consequences than if a simpler, more robust system had been used.
On close inspection, those technologies that have the most transformative and lasting impact are almost always those that are the most simple, robust, adaptable, and scalable, and which generally work in accord with the human element, rather than attempt to totally replace him with a complex system. The cheap little drones that Hamas used so successfully, and which have already revolutionized warfare in Ukraine and elsewhere, are a perfect example of this.
This is true, too, beyond the world of warfare. In all aspects of life, we have come to worship technology and complexity for its own sake, believing it to be the sorcery that can solve our problems once and for all. Except far too often, it doesn’t — it just creates the illusion of having done so, while our own capacities have diminished and our vulnerabilities to systematic collapse have increased. In this way, technology has become a false idol, squatting in the place of or even preventing genuine human ingenuity, innovation, and adaptability.
Just as complex systems are vulnerable to collapse, so are empires and civilizations. And empires fall the same way most complex systems do: by becoming too complex to bear their own weight. They come to span the globe, and have too many alliances and commitments, too many “vital national interests”, too many IOUs, too many enemies, to ever handle at once. This is what “imperial overstretch” really means: not just that there is too much budgeted for the treasury to pay for, but that overall complexity has reached such a level that the empire has become impossible to manage. Trying to solve one problem only creates another. The empire may still appear strong, but it has become fragile. The potential for even a single point of failure to ignite a catastrophic failure cascade grows more and more acute.
Naturally, a wiser method would be to simplify: to deliberately pare back commitments and overextended positions, concentrating on conserving strength and defending only the most critical nodes of the system, until the balance of capabilities and commitments can reach a stable new equilibrium. But reform of this kind is extremely difficult, as untangling the imperial Gordian Knot one thread at a time often proves to be impossible. Historically, this type of impasse is typically only ever resolved, and simplicity restored, with one decisive stroke: by systemic collapse. ~
https://unherd.com/2023/10/israels-illusion-of-security/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups
Dali: The Face of War, 1941
*
THE JEWISH DREAM AND THE JEWISH NIGHTMARE
~ In the Israeli imagination, this land should have been empty when Jews immigrated here to settle it in the first half of the twentieth century: the vacant land of Israel, waiting for its children to return to it after two millennia in exile, to find refuge from their troubles. This land, we were raised to believe, is the one place Jews can claim as their own, the one place where we belong.
But, as history would have it, the land was not empty and the people who lived here were reluctant to leave and hostile to the Zionist project. The existence of Palestinians in this land and their resistance to Israel was always seen as the main obstacle to realizing the Israeli dream, and Israel has responded to it by using force to push Palestinians away and to keep those who remain at bay.
The full acknowledgment of Palestinians as equal citizens would have required a substantial change in the conception of Israel as a Jewish project, while the founding of an independent Palestinian state would have required Israel to give up parts of the land that are also widely seen as essential to the Israeli project.
Furthermore, many Israelis see violent Palestinian resistance to the growing Jewish community in the first decades of the twentieth century and, later, to the founding of Israel in 1948 as proof that Palestinian political freedom poses an intolerable risk to Israel’s existence. What the majority of Israelis find impossible to accept is that many Palestinians see this land as their home— that those here are deeply committed to staying here and that those who are refugees aspire to return.
The conflict became even more acute when, in 1967, Israel conquered the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, thereby taking control of millions of Palestinians, many of whom had escaped as refugees to Jordan and Egypt in 1948. Israel wanted the land it conquered, not the Palestinians who lived on it. Again, force was used to control and expel Palestinian existence without recognizing the basic rights of Palestinians, who have since lived under military rule in these territories and the overwhelmingly majority of whom were not granted citizenship.
In the 1990s, following the Oslo Accords, partial civil control over certain parts of the West Bank and Gaza was handed to the Palestinian Authority, a Fatah-controlled government body that, in many ways, serves as a contractor of the Israeli government.
In 2005 Israel dismantled its settlements in Gaza and withdrew its permanent ground forces, though it retained control of the borders, sea, air space, customs, currency, water and electricity supply, population registration, and much else. Two years later, after Hamas came to power in Gaza, Israel imposed a blockade, severely restricting movement of people and products into and out of the Strip. Periodically, Hamas has fired rockets into Israel, and Israel has conducted military campaigns in Gaza. Large-scale military campaigns occurred in 2008–9, 2012, 2014, and 2021.
Force has continued to be Israel’s primary mode of engagement with Palestinian existence in this land. But the force exercised against Palestinians, though often brutal, was restrained in various ways so as to accommodate—sometimes only in appearance—some of the demands of international law, Western politics, and Israelis’ own sense of justice. Most importantly, Israelis perceived Israel’s use of force as restrained.
Sometimes Israel’s purported restraint was a source of pride, other times a source of frustration. For example, in 1994, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin explained the importance of the newly formed Palestinian Authority by noting that, unlike Israel, Yasser Arafat could fight Hamas “without Bagatz [Israel’s supreme court] and Betselem [a prominent Israeli human rights organization]” — that is, without being constrained by legal and moral considerations. In other words, somewhat-restrained force was Israel’s modus operandi. The “Palestinian problem” was contained or managed, not resolved, but this was a compromise most Israelis felt they could live with. It is not so anymore.
If the Israeli fantasy has always been a land empty of Palestinians, the Israeli nightmare has always been a Palestinian massacre of Jews. The reason for Israel’s existence is said to be the prevention of such attacks on defenseless Jews. The October 7 massacre was the greatest, most damning failure of the State of Israel in this regard: its force was not enough to defend Israelis against their own nightmares. Immediately following the massacre, comparisons to the pogroms and the Holocaust were made. The massacre is, for us, the end of history: an event that refuted the premise of our existence in this place.
The conclusion most Israelis draw from this situation is not that the use of force is limited in what it can achieve, but that we were mistaken to ever limit our use of force to begin with (another fantasy, another nightmare). Many find it difficult not to interpret the events of October 7 as a decisive confirmation of the longstanding Israeli suspicion that the Palestinians will slaughter us if they get the chance — in other words, as proof that the existence of one people can only come at the expense of the other.
The fact that the Israeli nightmare became a reality leads many to conclude that the Israeli fantasy must also be achieved: we must use force to wipe “them” out, simply in order to survive.
But ethnic cleansing and genocide are not only morally reprehensible; they are impossible. Palestinians will continue to exist in this land, and there is nothing Israel can do about it. I think most Jewish Israelis know this, but given what happened, they find it impossible to accept. The compromise that allowed for some bare form of Palestinian existence under Israel’s rule of force can no longer be sustained, but the idea that force is our only savior is as entrenched as it ever was in the Israeli psyche.
I do not accept the dichotomy of recognition and the genocidal conclusion it leads to. I believe that force on its own is not power, and that power requires recognition of those who exist alongside us—recognition that their existence and dignity should be protected. To protect its own existence and dignity, Israel must fight Hamas while giving Palestinians hope for a decent life, hope for recognition without violence. We must not view the massacre of October 7 as an act committed by all Palestinians or as an expression of innate hatred of Jews, and we must not conflate it with the Palestinian demand for freedom, which is just.
And yet I confess that I too feel the widespread terror and panic that make such distinctions fall on deaf ears. I feel the terror of knowing it could have been me: I could have easily been one of the people who were slaughtered, one of the people kidnapped, one of the people who lost a child or a parent. Like most Israelis, I know people to whom this happened, and I know people whose friends and family were directly affected. I feel the terror, the grief, and the rage; I see these feelings in the eyes and movements of the people I meet; I hear these feelings in their voices.
When terror and brutality are as rampant as they are now, they possess us. Resisting them feels as futile as resisting a force of nature — a giant wave, an avalanche, a blizzard. We are compelled to exercise force by the force that terrifies us. Yet this observation, that we do not possess force but are possessed by it, is significant. It might, in the words of Simone Weil, “interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.” “Where there is no room for reflection,” Weil writes, “there is none either for justice or prudence.”
*
In The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, published in the winter of 1940, Weil argued that force is the true hero of the Iliad. Force determines human affairs, but it belongs to no one; even when it serves our ends, it is never ours: “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.
“When force is on our side, it blinds us to the existence of others and to our own vulnerability. Thus, the Iliad describes “men in arms behaving harshly and madly.” A sword driven into the breast of a disarmed enemy pleading at his knees; Achilles cutting the throats of twelve Trojan boys on the funeral pyre of Patroclus “as naturally as we cut flowers for a grave.” Under the spell of the force they exercise, these men cannot see that they, too, will succumb to force. “Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.”
In war, Weil says, force takes hold of us and traps us inside the terror of death. It effaces even its own goals as well as the notion of it ever coming to an end. This is not easy to understand. There is a rift between those who look upon war from the outside and those who inhabit it. “To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end,” she writes.
In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence. Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they were easy to bear; actually, they continue because they have deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.
It is now 9 p.m., Thursday, October 19. The mind is doing violence to itself. We are inside war, inside terror, but we must envision the end of war and terror. We must ask ourselves how we can bring about a reality in which life is possible, and we must accept the unalterable fact that life will not be possible for us unless it be possible for those who share this place with us. In the words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Munir Akash:
“It’s either him or me!”
That’s the way war starts. But
it ends with the embarrassing confrontation:
“Him and me!”
There is darkness outside and darkness inside, there is inconceivable loss, unfathomable evil. This land is beautiful and its people are good. ~
Oded Na’aman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a longtime member of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli non-governmental organization established in 2004 by veterans of the Israel Defense Forces. It is intended to give serving and discharged Israeli personnel and reservists a means to confidentially recount their experiences in the Occupied Territories (Wikipedia)
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/letter-from-israel/
*
DO ISRAEL’S CRITICS UNDERSTAND EVIL?
~ After the Holocaust, academics and others tried to make sense of the murder of six million Jews. Historians pointed to the rise of nationalism following the First World War; the dismal state of the German economy when Hitler rose to power; the dehumanizing abstraction of Enlightenment rationality. Some rabbis argued that the Holocaust was a punishment from God, but they could not agree on why it was merited. Was it because the Jews of Europe sought to found a state of their own? Or because they didn’t? Others more prudently followed Wittgenstein’s observation: “That of which we cannot speak, we must consign to silence.”
Many historical and societal factors set the stage for the Holocaust. But none of these, individually or collectively, can explain the kind of violence to which the Nazis subjected their Jewish victims.
Jewish children and babies were, for a time, thrown alive into fire pits at Auschwitz. It has been calculated that, in this manner, the SS saved approximately two-fifths of a cent per child on Zyklon-B, the insecticide they used in the gas chambers. Were the children burned alive to save money? It would be obscene to suppose that economy explains such a horrific method of murder. The same holds for sealing people in a boxcar for as much as a week without telling them to bring water and food, neither of which the Nazis provided. Or sewing twins together back-to-back, as Dr Mengele once did at Auschwitz. (Gangrene immediately set in and they died in three days.)
In fact, nothing could explain such abominations. Primo Levi’s distinction between “useful” and “useless” violence makes this clear. Useful violence has an aim outside itself. A thief kills a witness to a crime in order to avoid capture. The victim would otherwise have been unmolested, but was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Such violence is evil, but useful in that it serves a purpose outside of itself. The thief might say: “I never wanted to hurt anybody, but then she came out of the back.” Perhaps he really is just unusually callous and stupid; he didn’t go looking for evil, but he found it. This explanation makes some sense, but does not excuse: the thief is going to prison for homicide, and rightly so.
Useless violence, however, is the deliberate production of pain and suffering as an end in itself. There is nothing apart from the violence to which one could point and say “that’s why they did these things”. The sole aim of useless violence is to torture, to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible. It is not evil, but Evil.
Evil (with a capital E) defies explanation, which is why it is often called “senseless”. Evil is done for its own sake, and in this it mirrors, like a photographic negative, the senseless kindness of Good. In his novel Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman writes of a Soviet woman who, prepared to strangle a wounded German soldier who had participated in deadly reprisals against her village, instead gave him water. “No one could understand [her action]; nor could she explain it herself.” That spontaneous and inexplicable act of kindness — kindness for its own sake — was Good.
Theologians have long understood Evil as an absence or privation: complete separation from God. But while mere absence is inert, Evil is as potent and contagious as certain deadly viruses.
It can fill entire social classes and ethnic or religious groups with bloodlust, and drive them to frenzies of violence. Organized and routinized by the State, Evil can even give rise to an entire industry of death. The power that produced the labor, transit, concentration, and death camps of Nazi Germany was evidently substantial and virulent.
Still, the theologians have discerned something important about the negative capacity of Evil. Evil has a way of disabling moral receptivity and short-circuiting intelligence. Examples abound in Claude Lanzmann’s brave film Shoah, a 9.5-hour documentary that records the testimony of perpetrators, survivors, and witnesses of the Holocaust.
Consider Frans Suchomel, SS Unterscharführer at Treblinka, a death camp where 800,000 Jews were murdered. Suchomel embodies pure superficiality: a human outside with no inside. He is secretly filmed by a van outside his apartment building. The technology Lanzmann employs generates a grainy image in which faulty video transmission or reception obscures Suchomel’s eyes with a black line, as if to emphasise his moral blindness. He sings a song that the doomed “worker Jews” of Treblinka were forced to sing as they dealt with a noxious liquid pool of decomposing corpses. The song’s message is that the human lot, the lot of Germans and Jews alike, is determined by forces that we can neither fully understand nor control. When he finishes, he says to Lanzmann with obvious pride: “Satisfied? No Jew knows that today!”
Consider also Mrs Michelsohn, the wife of a Nazi schoolteacher at Chelmno, where 400,000 Jews were murdered in mobile gas vans. (These vans were outfitted with a pipe that fed exhaust fumes into the sealed interior of the vans, which were driven until the Jews packed within were asphyxiated.) Michelsohn cannot recall how many Jews died in Chelmno; she remembers only that the number began with a four. At one point she confuses Poles and Jews. Asked by Lanzmann what the difference is between the two, she says: “The Poles weren’t exterminated and the Jews were. That’s the difference. An external difference.” But she “can’t assess” the “inner difference,” for “I don’t know enough about psychology and anthropology”.
Today, the world is still full of willfully blind Suchomels and obtuse Michelsohns, callous perpetrators and complicit witnesses who see no Evil and hide behind a veneer of intellectual abstraction. Lanzmann’s words about the making of Shoah ring true: “The worst moral and artistic crime that can be committed in producing a work dedicated to the Holocaust is to consider the Holocaust as past.”
When they invaded Israel on October 7, Hamas terrorists beat, robbed, raped, kidnapped, and executed Jewish men, women and children. They also burned families alive, shot babies in the head, and decapitated them. Such horrific crimes hadn’t been perpetrated against Jews since the Holocaust. Yet politicians and university presidents who were previously quick to comment on issues of social justice have little or nothing to say about mass slaughter in Israel, while more than a few students and professors have applauded Hamas’s atrocities and assaulted Jewish students.
Hamas, whose hateful ideology was directly influenced by Nazism, has claimed that the brutal murder of Jewish children and babies in Israel was perpetrated by enraged civilians from Gaza. In fact, documents recovered from Hamas terrorists killed in southern Israel show “detailed plans to target children and young people”. Hamas’s supporters cite “facts” that are supposed to justify the terrorists’ vile deeds, including the seizure of Palestinian land in the 1948 War of Independence, when the Jews of the new nation of Israel fought the armies of five invading Arab nations. But there can be no justification of Hamas’s atrocities, not even in principle. They are so vile as to fall beyond the realm of explanation, let alone excuse. History teaches us at least this much.
In other words, Hamas’s vicious deeds were Evil. They exemplified useless violence, for they were designed to make their victims — Israelis, and insofar as possible, all Jews — suffer in the most cruel possible way. This must be understood, because the organs of supposedly judicious opinion are already explaining that Israel’s military response to Hamas must not be “disproportionate”. We’ve seen this movie ad nauseam: it plays on an endless loop. Israelis are murdered in terrorist attacks, and then they are denounced for taking concrete steps to protect themselves.
There is something absurd about the demand that Israel exercise proportionality in the face of Evil. As Douglas Murray has observed, that would mean that “Israel should try to locate a music festival in Gaza and rape precisely the number of women that Hamas raped… kill precisely the number of young people that Hamas killed.… [They should] go door to door and kill precisely the correct number of babies that Hamas killed.”
The revulsion this suggestion elicits in decent human beings underscores the literal impossibility of reckoning with Evil. If Good is transcendent, Evil is negatively transcendent, exceeding measurement as it exceeds explanation. To try to measure or explain either Good or Evil is like trying to capture mathematical infinity in a finite sequence of numerals. It simply can’t be done.
We must not forget this when we hear “reasonable” people at the UN, The New York Times or the US State Department urge Israel not to go too far in its attempt to eradicate Hamas, or when they condemn the country — as is inevitable — for having done so. Such judgments pose as clarity, but are in fact moral and intellectual obfuscation. They can only encourage antisemites everywhere, and give Hezbollah and other agents of Iran’s theological tyranny a pretext for opening up more fronts in their effort to effect a Final Solution: to finish, once and for all, the work of the Holocaust.
Indeed, Hamas and its Islamist allies are counting on exactly this. They have set a trap for Israel, baited by their Evil. They want the IDF to grind Gaza to a pulp. They hope that publicizing images of suffering in Gaza (including fake ones, if past performance is any indication) will stimulate world outcry and justify a wider war — one that Israel may not be able to win. This violence might seem to be “useful”, but if so, it is useful only in the cause of Evil.
If we are to speak of Evil at all — and now is no time for decent people to be silent — we cannot rely on ordinary frameworks of evaluation. The only language that can hope to do justice to Evil is theological. Perhaps all that can be said of Hamas and the worldwide gang of Islamists is that their crimes and plans are Satanic: absolutely and completely demonic. ~
https://unherd.com/2023/10/do-israels-critics-understand-evil/?=refinnar
*
sign on a bookstore in Turkey
*
PARALLELS BETWEEN UKRAINE AND PALESTINE
~ The striking paradox is that the logic of Russia’s policy toward Ukraine runs parallel to Netanyahu’s logic toward the Palestinian state.
Xenomorph’s egg at the doorstep
Long ago, Israel agreed to a two-state solution. But deep down inside, they didn’t like the idea.
The recent history leaves no doubt. Anyone with half a brain understands that after decades of Arab-Jewish enmity, a full-blown Palestinian state that sandwiches Israel will almost certainly be a launchpad for the next Arab-Israeli war.
No UN can possibly prevent that.
Crucible for a newborn nation
After all, every time democracy gets the slightest chance anywhere in the Arab world, the hawks beat the doves hands down. No one really doubts that Hamas and their brothers-in-arms would win a truly democratic election in Palestine. And what’s the only thing that will keep them from butchering each other in the Night of Long Knives after the evening of victory celebration?
A holy war on the Zionists.
This is the way nation-building works everywhere.
That’s how Israel views it. Netanyahu’s the smartest and most consistent implementer of this view. They formally do not oppose the two-state solution. But in practice, they do everything not to make it happen.
Magnanimity scorned
Same with Russia and Ukraine.
Back in 1991, we recognized Ukraine as a separate state. We also recognized as theirs all the territories they inherited from the Communists.
We blame drunkard Yeltsin for the foolishness. But no one forced President Putin’s hand to confirm the deal once again on 28 January 2003 when he signed a border agreement with Kiev. The idea was to slowly drag them back into the Russian World. Shower them with love and money until they forget the nonsense of being a separate nation.
But President Putin failed.
Treasonous brothers
Our President hates to fail in full public view. Making or breaking Ukraine became his personal crusade. Moreover, due to the zillion of personal and economic ties between Russians and Ukrainians, a sovereign European Ukraine would be a huge hole for smuggling rotation of power, competitive politics, and other Western depravity into our realms.
We had no crusades for true faith in our history. Our equivalent to the Holy Crusade is anti-Nazism. This is how the war against Ukraine joining NATO and the EU became “de-Nazification.”
The entire logic of Russia’s nation-building led to this war. The belligerence of the nationalists in Kiev fed and amplified it, but didn’t cause it. Irrespective of the outcome of the SMO, these bloodlands are going to be Europe’s 38th parallel for decades to come.
Dark times ahead
Summed up, Israel pays lip service to the two-state solution, but there will be no peace until either the tentative “Palestinian State” or Israel ceases to exist. Likewise, there will be no lasting peace in the east unless Ukraine or Russia in their present shape has crumbled.
The only difference is that the Ukrainians would be content to be left in their 1991 borders, while the Palestinian nationalists won’t stop until Hamas has everything between the Golan Heights and the Rafah border crossing.
Below, the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, taken by Russia from Ukrainian forces. This is something awaiting northern Gaza in the weeks to come.
It might appear a paradox that Russia scorches the territory we consider Russian. But it isn’t if you keep in mind that this was a nest of enemy resistance to the Russian World. Poisonous seeds of Western influence would spread to our lands from here. If incineration is what it takes to clean this place, let it be fire. ~ Dima Vorobiev (? I'm pretty sure, given the frequent use of "we" and "our"; the former "propaganda executive" seems to identify totally with the supposed glory of his former country), Quora
Bahmut after bombing
*
WHY HE FIGHTS FOR UKRAINE
~ Russian Buryat fighting for Ukraine in a new volunteer battalion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine "Sibir" under the call sign "Buryat" told why he is fighting for Ukraine.
“Why do they need this Crimea when we have our own peninsula that needs to be developed? It’s still being destroyed. Buryatia lives on subsidies. Although our republic is very rich: we have gold, Baikal, forests. But this all belongs to Muscovy, and we are waiting for handouts from them. Our winters are cold, and firewood is expensive, we don’t have gas,” said Buryat.’
He also clarified that huge gas pipelines pass near Buryatia, through which blue fuel goes to China. It is much more important for the Kremlin to sell gas abroad than to provide a decent life for its citizens. Buryat also noted that many acute contradictions reign in Russian society, in particular on the ethnic issue. Racism in the country is very strong.
"I told myself that (...) I wouldn’t set foot in today’s Russia! I won’t go back. I’ve been to Moscow three times, three times I’ve been a “chock”, “narrow-eyed”, “Chinese”, but not a citizen of the Russian Federation. In Ukraine this has never happened before, never at all,” said the fighter.
He also added that the outcome of the war started by Russia is already determined. And this will be a victory for Ukraine.
*
FINNISH ATTITUDE TOWARD RUSSIA: “RUSSO-REALISM”
~ Finland is the only country in the world where using the traditional word describing a Russian, “ryssä,” has become so derogatory that it no longer can be used in civilized discourse. The R word has become a N word.
The polite way of referring to a Russian is calling him “venäläinen”, that is to say using a word that is derived out of “vendi”, Wends having been a West-Slavic group that resided on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea, some thousand years ago.
“Ryssittely”, calling Russians Russians, is a national pastime, and “ryssiä” (to russify) is a verb, meaning to spoil or destroy something. The Finns generally have very few, if any, positive things to say about the Russians. ~ Martin Cardiaster, Quora
Oriana:
In Poland too the word “russky” is derogatory (a more neutral term for a Russian person exists). But the special insult is “Moskal.” “Bolshevik” used to be more or less the equivalent of “savage” or “barbarian” for my grandparents’ generation. To call someone a Bolshevik was like calling him a hoodlum.
Even though the official word for “Russia” is meant to be neutral, there is an in-built hiss. Just a linguistic accident, but it’s hard to escape the emotional impact of that hiss, and the image of viper.
Poland and Finland (and the Baltic countries even more so) have plenty of historical reasons to feel negative about Russia. And just as those countries were beginning to feel more secure and voices rose up against “Russophobia” — that’s history, things have changed now, etc — Russia invaded Ukraine, for all to see that things have not changed. The viper has struck again.
Vessa Heikkinen:
Majority of Finns might be “Russo-Realists” by default but we don't express that by storming to the airports, train / bus stations and hotels and demanding suspected Russians to show their passports, ask them to pronounce Finnish word “hyvä” or firebomb their premises. Only people brave enough to harass foreigners even verbally are some extreme right-wingers but they worship Putin so Russians are safe with them.
*
WHY RUSSIA FAILED IN AFGHANISTAN (Dima Vorobiev)
~ The reason for our defeat in Afghanistan was the same as the defeat of the US in Vietnam: we didn’t commit ourselves to winning.
The resources allocated weren’t enough. The objective wasn’t defined adequately. But above all, the will to win was sadly lacking.
Stalin or Trotsky would have nailed it. But not Khrushchev, or anyone after him.
The crucial factor was WW2. The post-war generation of Soviet rulers were — like the rest of our nation — deeply traumatized by it. The horror and pain of the great war sat too deeply in the Soviet psyche. They drained the energy off the worldwide Soviet project bequeathed to us by Lenin and Stalin.
Deep down inside, we were sick and tired of violence and self-sacrifice needed for revolutionary struggle. Neither we nor our rulers wanted to pull all the stops in the Communist crusade for peace and progress. Least of all in that dirt-poor landlocked rocky territory far from everything that had true value for us.
The Afghans had the winning spirit. On our side, the determination and resolve needed for victory never materialized. No wonder we lost. ~ Quora
Terry Gearing:
The problem with both wars that neither the USSR or the USA ever attempted to hold the ground that they had won after a battle.
Martin Jacob Kristoffersen:
John McCain said in his presidential debates that to stabilize a country after an invasion, you need to occupy it for 50 years. Like Japan. He was lambasted for saying that and compared to a frenetic warlord by both Democrats and some other Republicans. Of course, this was painful to hear and at that time, completely unpresidential thing to say in a time when everyone was fed up with Iraq. But you don’t need to study much history before you realize he was absolutely correct. Rest in peace, John.
Matthias Heinze:
There is another aspect. Russia also lost militarily because they could never disable the factories that made the Stinger missiles that brought down Mi24’s. They could never stop the flow of weapons to the other side.
Rick Gauger:
The guerrillas don’t have to “win” the war. They only have to persist until the foreigners give up and go home.
*
DIMA VOROBIEV ON WHY THE SOVIET UNION COLLAPSED
~ Marxism is a secular grandchild of Christianity. It inherited the Christian approach to error management. Whenever something goes terribly wrong on the watch of Marxists, it’s not the idea of radical justice —it’s the servants you need to blame.
Marxism as an ideology is infallible, just like Jesus. It’s totally impossible to ever get disillusioned about the idea a of society where everyone is equal, no one is exploited, and the economy is an endless cornucopia in the service of human self-improvement.
Just like Christianity itself cannot fail — because God is firmly on its side and you can’t defeat God — Communism can be defeated only in three cases:
1. Unintended deviation from the true Communist path. This is an exact parallel to the Christian notion of “falling into sin”. In Soviet propaganda, our list of sins was long and included such things as “self-satisfaction”, “short-sightedness”, “loss of vigilance”, “tolerance of bourgeois views”, “errors”, “arbitrariness in decisions”, “loss of Party control” etc.
2. Willful deviation from the true Communist path. In Christian terms, apostasy. True Communists here on Quora will tell you tons about how the USSR deviated from genuine Marxism, so I won’t torment you with this. The Chinese “Communists” have created a huge corpus of “Marxist” works on where exactly the Soviet “revisionists” knowingly abandoned the Communist cause and persisted in their wrongful ways until the bitter end.
3. Treason. Same as the Devil’s work for Christians. This is what Stalinists in Russia and abroad especially mention as the main cause. In their book, Gorbachev with a small clique of sellouts at the top of Party wreaked havoc on the Soviet Union on CIA’s money. Usually they also attach “drunk Yeltsin” to the list of traitors, since he belonged to the hard core of Perestroika champions in the Kremlin until he fell out with Gorbachev.
Below, a Russian cartoonist in 2008 marks his displeasure with President Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama is holding hands with Gorbachev, as if joining him in the cause of liberal treason. Dmitri Medvedev, who at the time was appointed by Putin to hold his place as President warm until his return in 2012, enviously watches the two. Medvedev is dreaming of his own prize for national treason. The text says “Perestroika 2”.
*
“I WAS BORN TO HATE JEWS”
I was born to hate Jews.
It was part of my life. I never questioned that. I was not born in Iran or Syria. I was born in England. My parents moved there from Pakistan. Theirs was the typical immigrant story: move to the West hoping to create a better life for themselves and their children.
We were a devoted Muslim family, but not extremists or radicals in any way. We only wanted the best for everyone
— everyone except the Jews. The Jews, we thought, were aliens living in stolen Muslim land, occupiers involved in a genocide against the Palestinian people. Our hatred was therefore justified and just.
And it left me and my friends vulnerable to radical extremist arguments. If the Jews were as evil as we've always believed, shouldn't those who support them — Christians, Americans and others in the West — be just as evil?
Starting from the 90s, speakers and teachers in mosques and schools began repeating this theme endlessly: We were not western. We were not British. We were Muslims, first and foremost. Our allegiance was to our religion and to our fellow Muslims. We owe nothing to western nations who welcomed us. As westerners, they were our enemies.
All of this had its desired effect. At least it did on me. It changed the way I looked at the world. I began to look at the suffering of Muslims, including in Britain, as the fault of Western imperialism. The west was at war with us, and the Jews controlled the west. My experience at the university in the UK only reinforced my increasingly radical conviction. Hating Israel was a badge of honor. Set up an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian rally, and you were sure to attract a huge, approving audience.
While in uni, I decided that the protests and propaganda against Israel were not enough. Real jihad requires violence. So I made plans to join the real fight. I want to drop out of college and join terrorist training camp in Pakistan. But, fortunately for me, fate intervened — in a bookstore.
I came across a book called The Case for Israel by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. The case for Israel? Which case could that be? The title itself infuriated me, and I started reading the pages almost like a travesty. How ill-informed, how stupid, can this guy be to defend the defenseless? Well, he was a Jew. That must have been the answer.
All of this just pissed me off. I had to prove Dershowitz wrong to see with my own eyes how racist and oppressive Israel really was. Then I bought a plane ticket. I would go to Israel, the home of my enemy. And that's when everything changed.
What I saw with my own eyes was even more challenging than what Dershowitz had written. Instead of apartheid I saw Muslims, Christians and Jews coexisting. Instead of hate, I saw acceptance, even compassion. I saw a violent, modern, liberal democracy, full of flaws, for sure, but fundamentally decent. I saw a country that wanted nothing but to live in peace with its neighbors. I watched my hate melt before my eyes. I knew just then what I had to do.
Too many people on this planet are consumed by the same hate that consumed me. They have been taught to despise the Jewish state — many Muslims through their religion, many others by their university professors or student groups.
So here's my challenge to anyone who feels this way: do what I did — seek the truth for yourself. If the truth can change me, it can change anyone.
I am Kasim Hafeez from Prager University. ~ Av Kaseem Hafiz, Quora
*
Oriana:
I first encountered this idea in the title of one of Jack Gilbert’s poems: “We Have Already Lived in the Real Paradise.”
*
RELIGIONS DIE WHEN WORSHIPERS ABANDON THEM
The Jews invented a portable god, not dependent on temples — and it used to be a Jerusalem temple-focused cult, so that's a marvelous rabbinical achievement, that apparent survival of a bad-tempered archaic god. I hasten to add that Judaism changed so much over the last 2,000 years that one could argue the old Yahweh is indeed dead except for the ultra-orthodox. A new concept of the divine has emerged, sufficiently vague that each believer can project his or her wishful belief on that undefinable “it” in the sky (or perhaps beyond earth’s atmosphere, in outer space? Diffused all over the universe? “Beyond space and time” — but what does it really mean?)
It's easy enough to say that the old gods were not the true gods. They were obviously invented, but no, never MY god — he EXISTS independent of how many people believe in him, and will exist even with no believers. No he won't. The more recent history of world religions is mostly about the great empire builders — Islam and Christianity, getting its first great start via the Roman Empire (read a bit about the Emperor Justinian if you think he was a nice guy, joining the cross and the sword).
At least some of the worshipers of the old gods derived joy from participating in the rites (especially the mystery religions) and holidays, both the community feeling and the emotional security of having divine protection — but times change, and the old satisfactions can be found in new religions, more so Catholicism and Shia, both closer to the pagan ways. Will we ever know the answer? I think we know it regarding Santa Claus and Easter Bunny, so it just depends how much longer people will be able to kid themselves.
Would you like to point out to a member of ISIS that he practices the wrong religion, and only yours is true? Monotheism has mostly been the tragedy of humanity. Not exclusively a tragedy, but mostly. Yet the moment people abandon a particular religion, where is it? Some relics in museums . . . of less and less interest.
*
THE ORIGIN OF THE COMPLEX STRUCTURES INSIDE THE CELL
~ More than 1.5 billion years ago, a momentous thing happened: Two small, primitive cells became one. Perhaps more than any event — barring the origin of life itself — this merger radically changed the course of evolution on our planet.
One cell ended up inside the other and evolved into a structure that schoolkids learn to refer to as the “powerhouse of the cell”: the mitochondrion. This new structure provided a tremendous energetic advantage to its host — a precondition for the later evolution of complex, multicellular life.
But that’s only part of the story. The mitochondrion is not the only important structure within complex eukaryotic cells. There’s the membrane-bound nucleus, safekeeper of the genome. There’s a whole system of internal membranes: the endoplasmic reticulum, the Golgi apparatus, lysosomes, peroxisomes and vacuoles — essential for making, transporting and recycling proteins and other cargo in and around the cell.
Where did all these structures come from? With events lost in the deep past and few traces to serve as evolutionary clues, it’s a very tough question to tackle. Researchers have proposed various hypotheses, but it is only recently, with some new tools and techniques, that cell biologists have been able to investigate the beginnings of this intricate architecture and shed some light on its possible origins.
A microbial merger
The idea that eukaryotes originated from two cells merging dates back more than 100 years but did not become accepted or well known until the 1960s, when the late evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis articulated her theory of endosymbiosis. The mitochondrion, Margulis said, likely originated from a class of microbes known as alphaproteobacteria, a diverse group that today includes the bacterium responsible for typhus and another one important for the genetic engineering of plants, among many others.
Nothing was known about the nature of the original host cell. Scientists proposed that it already was fairly complicated, with a variety of membrane structures inside it. Such a cell would have been capable of engulfing and ingesting things — a complicated and energetically expensive eukaryotic feature called phagocytosis. That might be how the mitochondrion first got into the host.
But this idea, called the “mitochondria late” hypothesis, doesn’t explain how or why the host cell had become complex to begin with.
In 2016, evolutionary biologist Bill Martin, cell biologist Sven Gould and bioinformatician Sriram Garg, at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, proposed a very different model known as the “mitochondria early” hypothesis. They argued that since no primitive cells today have any internal membrane structures, it seems very unlikely that a cell would have had these over 1.5 billion years ago.
Instead, the scientists reasoned, the endomembrane system — the whole hodgepodge of parts found inside complex cells today — could have evolved soon after the alphaproteobacterium took up residence inside a relatively simple host cell, of a kind from a class called archaea. The membrane structures would have arisen from bubbles, or vesicles, released by the mitochondrial ancestor.
Free-living bacteria shed vesicles all the time, for all sorts of reasons, Gould, Garg and Martin note, so it seems reasonable to think they’d continue to do that when enclosed inside a host.
Eventually, these vesicles would have become specialized for the functions that membrane structures perform today inside eukaryotic cells. They would even fuse with the host cell’s membrane, helping to explain why the eukaryote plasma membrane contains lipids with bacterial features.
Vesicles could have served an important initial function, says biochemist Dave Speijer of the University of Amsterdam. The new endosymbiont would have generated plenty of poisonous chemicals called reactive oxygen species, by oxidizing fatty acids and burning them for energy. “These destroy everything, they are toxic, especially on the inside of a cell,” Speijer says.
Sequestering them inside vesicles would have helped keep the cell safe from harm, he says.
Another problem created by the new guest could also have been helped by making membranes barriers, Gould, Garg and Martin add. After the alphaproteobacterium arrived, bits of its DNA would have mixed with the genome of the archaeal host, interrupting important genes. Fixing this would mean evolving machinery to splice out these foreign pieces — today they’re known as introns — from the messenger RNA copies of genes, so those protein-making instructions wouldn’t be garbled.
But that created yet another problem. The protein-making machinery — the ribosome — works extremely fast, joining several amino acids together per second. In contrast, the intron-removing system of the cell is slow, snipping out about one intron per minute. So unless the cell could keep the mRNA away from ribosomes until the mRNA was properly processed, the cell would produce many nonsensical, useless proteins.
The membrane surrounding the nucleus provided an answer. Serving as a spatial barrier, it allows mRNA splicing to finish up in the nucleus before the intron-free mRNA is translated in the cell’s internal fluid, the cytosol. “This is the selective pressure behind the origin of the nucleus,” Martin says. To form it, vesicles secreted by the endosymbiont would have flattened and wrapped around the genome, creating a barrier to keep ribosomes out but still allowing small molecules to pass freely.
An inside-out explanation
In short, Gould, Garg and Martin’s hypothesis explains why endomembrane compartments evolved: to solve problems created by the new guest. But it doesn’t fully explain how the alphaproteobacterium got inside the host to begin with, says cell biologist Gautam Dey at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany; it assumes the endosymbiont is already inside. “This is a massive problem,” Dey says.
An alternative idea, proposed in 2014 by cell biologist Buzz Baum of University College London (with whom Dey once worked) and his cousin, University of Wisconsin evolutionary biologist David Baum, is the “inside-out” model. In this scenario, the alphaproteobacterium and the archaeal cell destined to be its eventual host would have lived side by side for millions of years in an intimate symbiosis, each depending on the other’s metabolic products.
The archaeal cell would have had long protrusions, as seen on some modern-day archaea that live in close association with other microbes. The alphaproteobacterium would have nestled up against these slender extensions.
Eventually, the protrusions would have wrapped around the alphaproteobacterium and enclosed it completely. But during the long stretch of time before that happened, the archaeal cell would have begun some spatial division of labor: It would keep information-processing jobs in its center, where the genome was, while functions like protein building would take place in the cytosol within the protrusions.
The power of the inside-out model, Buzz Baum says, is that it gives the cell eons of time, before the alphaproteobacterium becomes fully enclosed, to evolve ways to regulate the number and size of the mitochondrion and other membrane compartments that would eventually become fully internal. “Until you can regulate them, you’re dead,” Buzz Baum says.
The model also explains why the nucleus has the shape that it does; in particular, it provides an explanation for its unusually large pores. Viewed from inside the center of an archaeal cell, the long protrusions would be openings that could naturally become big pores like those, Baum says.
Most important, the inside-out model explains how the alphaproteobacterium would have gotten inside the archaeal host in the first place.
Still, the inside-out model has features it needs to explain. For example, the mitochondrion would end up in the wrong place — inside the endoplasmic reticulum, the network of tubes on which sit the cell’s protein-making ribosomes, as the archaeal protrusions wrapped around it. And so an additional step would be required to get the alphaproteobacterium into the cytoplasm.
But Martin’s main objection is that the inside-out model does not provide an evolutionary pressure that would have caused the nucleus or other membrane-bound compartments to arise in the first place. The inside-out model “is upside-down and backwards,” Martin says.
The nucleus: A riddle in the middle
Though the models agree that the mitochondrion evolved from an alphaproteobacterium, they have very different ideas about the origin of the nucleus and other organelles.
In the Gould, Garg and Martin model, the source for all of the structures would have been vesicles released by the evolving mitochondrion. Vesicles to contain reactive chemicals or cellular cargo, and the ability to move this cargo around, would have evolved very early. The nucleus would have come later.
In the inside-out model, the nucleus was, essentially, the remains of the archaeal cell after it wrapped its membranes around the alphaproteobacterium. So it would have appeared immediately. The endoplasmic reticulum also would have formed early, created from those squished-together protrusions. Other organelles would have come later — arising, Buzz Baum says, from buds of archaeal membrane.
Thus the models also make different predictions about the chemical nature of the membranes of cell organelles — at least originally — and how today’s complex cells came to have membrane lipids that are all chemically like the ones in bacteria, not archaea.
In the Gould, Garg and Martin model, in the beginning all the membranes except for the host cell’s outermost one would have been bacterial, like the membranes of the new resident. Then, as bacterial vesicles fused with this archaeal outer membrane, the bacterial lipids would slowly replace the archaeal ones.
In the inside-out model, the membranes of the nucleus and endoplasmic reticulum — and probably others — would have been archaeal, like the host, to start. Only later on, after genes from the bacterial genome moved over to the archaeal genome, would the lipids become bacterial in nature, Baum suggests.
How to test these ideas? Through experiments, cell biologists are starting to glimpse ways in which simple vesicles could have diversified into different organelles with distinct jobs — by taking on different shapes, like the layered membrane stacks of the modern endoplasmic reticulum or the Golgi body, or by ending up with different proteins inside them or on their membranes.
They are also highlighting the dynamism of the modern-day mitochondrion — and its potential to spawn new membrane structures.
Take, for example, the compartment that Speijer thinks evolved early in order to deal with reactive oxygen species: the peroxisome.
Peroxisomes are organelles that sequester diverse oxidative reactions and play important roles in metabolism, reactive oxygen species detoxification, and signaling. Oxidative pathways housed in peroxisomes include fatty acid β-oxidation.
It may never be possible to know for sure what happened such a very long
time ago. But by exploring what can happen in today’s living bacterial,
archaeal and eukaryotic cells, scientists can get more clarity on what
was possible — and even probable. A cell moves into another cell,
bringing benefits but also problems, setting off a complex cascade. And
then, McBride says, “all this stuff blooms and blossoms.”
https://knowablemagazine.org/article/living-world/2023/how-endomembrane-system-of-eukaryotic-cells-evolved?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
*
HOW MICROBIOMES AFFECT FEAR
Researchers are finding evidence that microbiomes can influence the fear responses of their hosts, possibly by releasing compounds that affect the brain’s neuroanatomy and function.
Our brains may seem physically far removed from our guts, but in recent years, research has strongly suggested that the vast communities of microbes concentrated in our digestive tract open lines of communication between the two. The intestinal microbiome has been shown to influence cognition and emotion, affecting moods and the state of psychiatric disorders, and even information processing. But how it could do so has been elusive.
Until recently, studies of the gut-brain relationship have mostly shown only correlations between the state of the microbiome and operations in the brain. But new findings are digging deeper, building on research that demonstrates the microbiome’s involvement in responses to stress. Focusing on fear, and specifically on how fear fades over time, researchers have now tracked how behavior differs in mice with diminished microbiomes.
They identified differences in cell wiring, brain activity and gene expression, and they pinpointed a brief window after birth when restoring the microbiome could still prevent the adult behavioral deficits. They even tracked four particular compounds that may help to account for these changes. While it may be too early to predict what therapies could arise once we understand this relationship between the microbiome and the brain, these concrete differences substantiate the theory that the two systems are deeply entwined.
Coco Chu, the new study’s lead author and a postdoctoral associate at Weill Cornell Medicine, was intrigued by the concept that microbes inhabiting our bodies could affect both our feelings and our actions. Several years ago, she set out to examine these interactions in fine-grained detail with the help of psychiatrists, microbiologists, immunologists and scientists from other fields.
The researchers performed classical behavioral training on mice, some of which had been given antibiotics to dramatically diminish their microbiomes and some of which had been raised in isolation so that they had no microbiome at all. All the mice learned equally well to fear the sound of a tone that was followed by an electric shock. When the scientists discontinued the shocks, the ordinary mice gradually learned not to fear the sound. But in the mice with depleted or nonexistent microbiomes, the fear persisted — they remained more likely to freeze at the sound of the tone than the untreated mice did.
Peering inside the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the outer brain that processes fear responses, the researchers noticed distinct differences in the mice with impoverished microbiomes: some genes were expressed less. One type of glial cell never developed properly. Spiny protrusions on the neurons associated with learning grew less plentifully and were eliminated more often. One type of cell showed lower levels of neural activity. It’s as if the mice without healthy microbiomes couldn’t learn to be unafraid, and the researchers could see it on a cellular level.
The researchers also set out to learn how the condition of the microbiome in the gut caused these changes. One possibility was that microbes send signals to the brain through the long vagus nerve, which carries sensations from the digestive tract to the brain stem. But snipping the vagus didn’t alter the behavior of the mice. It also seemed possible that the microbiomes might stir up responses in the immune system that affect the brain, but the numbers and proportions of immune cells in all the mice were similar.
But the researchers did pinpoint four metabolic compounds with neurological effects that were far less common in the blood serum, cerebrospinal fluid and stool of the mice with impaired microbiomes. Some of the compounds were already linked to neurological disorders in humans. The team speculated that the microbiome might produce certain substances in abundance, with some molecules making their way into the brain, according to the microbiologist David Artis, the director of the Jill Roberts Institute for Research in Inflammatory Bowel Disease at Weill Cornell Medicine and the senior author on the study.
The medial prefrontal cortex, an area near the front of the brain, is important in the extinction, or “unlearning,” of fear responses. In this micrograph of the region, neurons appear green and microglial cells are red. Researchers found abnormalities in these cells in mice that had depleted microbiomes.
In many laboratories, there’s a growing interest in tracking specific bacterial substances that are involved in nervous system signaling, said Melanie Gareau, an associate professor of anatomy, physiology and cell biology at the University of California, Davis. Numerous metabolites and pathways are probably involved in such processes.
Research on other disorders like depression has also pointed to the involvement of particular compounds created by microbes, but there’s still no consensus on which ones contribute to any condition, said Emeran Mayer, a professor of medicine and director of the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience at the University of California, Los Angeles. And although the intestinal microbiome is clearly altered in many people with brain conditions, it’s often unclear if that change is a cause or an effect, he said. Differences in the microbiome might give rise to neurological problems, but the conditions could also change the microbiome.
There’s disagreement within the field not just about the consequences of diseased microbiomes, but also about healthy ones. “For a long time, we’ve been focused on this idea that we could identify specific types of bacteria that provide either risk or resilience to stress-related disorders, and it may be that it doesn’t have to be a particular microbe,” Lowry said. Even in healthy people, microbiomes vary widely. Particular microbes might not matter if a microbiome has enough diversity — just as there are many kinds of thriving forests, and one individual type of tree may not be necessary.
Still, the study of microbial effects on the nervous system is a young field, and there is even uncertainty around what the effects are. Previous experiments reached inconsistent or contradictory conclusions about whether microbiome changes helped animals to unlearn fear responses. What gives extra weight to the findings from Chu and her colleagues is that they can point to evidence for a specific mechanism causing the behavior they observed.
Animal studies like this one are especially helpful in cementing a clear connection between the nervous system and the microbiome, even if they don’t point to treatments for humans, said Kirsten Tillisch, a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “The way that humans process emotion, physical sensation and cognition in the brain is just so different than in animals that it’s just very difficult to translate,” she said.
In theory, the presence of certain microbial substances might help predict who is most vulnerable to disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder. Experiments like these could even identify pathways of communication between the brain and the microbiome that could be targeted by treatments. “That’s always the big hope from these mouse experiments, that we’re getting close to interventions,” Mayer said, and the studies often generate striking results through rigorous methods. But the operations of the human brain aren’t fully reflected in mice. Moreover, the interactions of the brain and the gut microbiome differ in humans and mice, and diet-driven differences between their respective microbiomes add to the disparity.
For humans, interventions targeting the microbiome might be most effective in infancy and childhood, when the microbiome is still developing and early programming takes place in the brain, Mayer said. In this new research, the scientists saw a specific window of time in infancy when mice needed a typical microbiome to extinguish fear normally when they grew up. Mice that were totally isolated from microbes for their first three weeks were then mixed in with mice that had typical microbiomes. The germ-free mice picked up the microbes of the other mice and developed rich microbiomes, but when they grew up and went through the same fear unlearning experiments, they still showed deficits. At only a few weeks old, they were already too old to learn to extinguish their fear normally.
But when microbiomes were restored in newborn mice, who gained rich microbiomes after they were placed with foster parents, the infant mice grew up to behave normally. In the first few weeks after birth, the microbiome appeared to be critical — an insight that fits smoothly into the larger idea that circuits governing fear sensitivity are impressionable during early life, Tillisch said.
The kind of fear unlearning that the researchers tested is a fundamental skill in an evolutionary sense, Artis said. Knowing what merits fear and adapting when it no longer poses a threat can be crucial to survival. An inability to extinguish fear is also present in PTSD and tied to other brain disorders, so deepening scientific knowledge around the mechanisms that influence this circuitry could illuminate core human behaviors and pave the way for potential therapies.
On an evolutionary timescale, human microbiomes have changed as more people have come to live in cities, and brain disorders have become increasingly prominent. The swarms of microbes inhabiting each of us have evolved with our species, and it’s vital that we understand how they impact both physical and mental health, Lowry said. Our environments may affect our nervous systems by way of the microbiome, adding new layers of complexity to the study of health and disease in the brain.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-microbiomes-affect-fear-20191204/
*
IS THERE A NATURAL WAY TO IMITATE THE EFFECTS OF OZEMPIC?
~ While reading study after study about Wevgovy and Ozempic, I learned that the drug mimics a hormone that our bodies naturally make when we're eating food. It's called GLP-1. This made me wonder: Could we increase levels of this hormone by changing our diet?
Turns out, the answer is yes – you can increase your body's production of GLP-1 with your diet, says Frank Duca, who studies metabolic diseases at the University of Arizona. One of the key foods that triggers its release is a food most Americans struggle to eat enough of, even though it comes with a cornucopia of health benefits. Yup, I'm talking about fiber.
"Whenever my family finds out that I'm studying obesity or diabetes, they say, 'Oh, what's the wonder drug? What do I need to take? What do I need to do?'" Duca explains. "And I say, 'Eat more fiber.'"
But here's the hitch. Not all fiber works the same way. Duca and other researchers are beginning to show that particular types of fibers are more potent at triggering GLP-1 release and at regulating hunger than others. "We're seeing now that companies are adding fiber to foods, but a lot of the time, they don't add the kind of fiber that's super beneficial for you," Duca says.
How GLP-1 helps flip hunger into satisfaction
To understand why fiber is so important for producing GLP-1, let's look at what happens when you don't eat much fiber. Let's say you wake up in the morning feeling hungry and you eat two slices of white bread and a fried egg. As the digested food moves into the small intestine, many of the nutrients, such as the carbohydrates, fats and amino acids, trigger an avalanche of activity in your blood and brain.
"The food activates cells in your intestine, which then release a ton of hormones," says Sinju Sundaresan, who's a gut physiologist at Midwestern University. About 20 of these hormones, including GLP-1, are known as satiation hormones.
"They tell your body to start absorption, and to suppress your hunger signals," Sundaresan says. So you slow down eating and eventually stop because you feel satisfied.
At this point, GLP-1 kicks into action. It stimulates the release of insulin and slows down how quickly the bread and egg moves from your stomach into the intestine. So you don't use up the fuel all at once, says Gary Schwartz, who studies the neuroscience of eating and appetite at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
GLP-1 also likely activates neural circuitry inside the brain by turning on nerves inside the lining of your gut. "These neurons collect information from the gut, and then signal all the way to the brain stem, where you find another signaling pathway for GLP-1," Schwartz explains.
But GLP-1's actions are extremely fast. "Once the hormone hits the blood, it begins to be degraded," says integrated physiologist Darleen Sandoval, at the University of Colorado, who has studied GLP-1 for more than a decade. "By the time GLP-1 gets to the heart and the rest of the circulation, there's very little of it left," she says.
And so an hour or two after eating this no-fiber breakfast [eggs and white bread], GLP-1 levels in your blood plummet. And when lunch rolls around, you're hungry again.
This is where GLP-1 differs substantially from semaglutide, the active ingredient in weight-loss drugs. GLP-1 sticks around in the blood for only a few minutes, but semaglutide persists for days. And this stability allows the drug to go into the brain, where it squelches appetite and cravings directly, says Sandoval. That's why people on these drugs lose so much weight. "In mice or rats, we can give naturally occurring GLP-1 directly into the animals' brains, and it stops them from eating," Sandoval says.
But, back to our breakfast scenarios: What if, instead of eating white bread, you had two slices of high-fiber rye bread, with about 8 to 10 grams of fiber in them? Turns out, adding that hefty portion of fiber adds another opportunity for your intestine to release GLP-1, many hours after the meal.
Satiation hormones last longer after eating fiber
Our bodies don't have the capacity to break down fiber. So it moves through our small intestines largely unchanged, and eventually – approximately 4 to 10 hours after a meal – reaches our colons.
Here, inside the large intestine, the fiber meets a whole crew of microbes that can digest the fiber. Bacteria in your large intestine can break down certain dietary fibers into smaller molecules. And these smaller molecules can trigger the release of not only GLP-1, but also another key hormone that decreases your appetite, called PYY (peptide YY). These smaller molecules also can suppress appetite on their own, and have been linked to lower body weight and better glucose regulation.
Since this extra boost of GLP-1 and PYY occurs hours after you eat, it can tamp down cravings between meals and even the overall desire to eat the next meal. "PPY regulates satiety – that is how long you wait between meals," says the University of Arizona's Frank Duca. "The release of PYY, in addition to the GLP-1, can increase the length of time between meals," he says.
These hormones may even influence how much you eat at the next meal. "This is what's called a second meal effect," says Edward Deehan, a nutritional microbiologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "If you eat a lot of fiber at one meal, by the time it's in your colon, it's around the time of your next meal. So you may have improved insulin responses and improved satiety or a feeling of fullness," Deehan says.
But, not all fiber is equal: To get this extra boost of satiation hormones, you need to eat fiber that bacteria can digest. These fibers are called fermentable because bacteria literally ferment them, in a similar way that yeast ferments barley into beer.
Scientists, such as Duca, have just started trying to figure out which fermentable fibers may be best at suppressing appetite and inducing weight-loss. "So the agricultural community in the U.S. could prioritize the growing of grains with these fibers," he explains.
In one preliminary study with mice, Duca and his colleagues found that a fiber in barley, called beta-glucan, induced the most weight loss in obese animals. "At face value and, at least in our settings, it was only beta-glucan that was effective," he says.
Beta-glucan is also found in oats and rye, mushrooms and algae. And indeed, studies with people have found that beta-glucan fiber may improve insulin sensitivity, lower blood pressure and increase satiation between meals.
Other fermentable fibers include dextrin in wheat, potatoes, corn, and rice, oligosaccharides in beans, peas and lentils, and pectin in apples, pears and green bananas.
If your diet currently doesn't include much fiber, Duca says, don't worry too much about which fiber you start adding. "Just being aware of how much fiber you're eating and increasing it, that's a huge step to improving your health," he says. "Then once you get into the habit of eating more fiber, you can be more specific about adding more beta glucan and barley.”
But beware of processed foods that claim to have fiber added to them, Duca says. "Companies are hearing that they need to increase the fiber in their foods, but then a lot of times, they're adding fiber that isn't super beneficial for you," he says. "It's the type of fiber that just passes right through you, without triggering the release of any hormones.” ~
~ Most fermentable fibers are soluble,
but there are also some insoluble fibers that can function in this way.
Fermentable fibers include pectins, beta-glucans, guar gum, inulin and
oligofructose. The best whole-food sources of fermentable fibers are
beans and legumes. ~
Oriana:
What I have found effective in causing satiation is not so much fiber, with its unpleasant side effects such as that bloated feeling, as healthy fats. If I add olive oil or MCT oil to the meal, I can go for many hours without eating.
Still, it's important to eat enough fiber. We have go feed our friendly bacteria. Be good to your bacteria, and they'll be good to you.
*
ending on beauty:
A single rose is all the roses
and this one—the irreplaceable one,
the perfect one — a supple spoken word
framed by the text of things.
How could we ever speak without her
of what our hopes used to be,
and of the tender moments
in the continual departure.
~ Rilke, from The Late French Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke tr. by David Need
No comments:
Post a Comment