JUDGMENT DAY
I saved a dragonfly,
with a canopy pole I hoisted him up
from the pool. Without pausing to dry
the stained glass of his bronze-veined wings,
he took to the air, a weightless shimmer
zigzagging across the dazzled yard.
Perhaps this brilliant buoyancy
will save me on Judgment Day —
on one scale, my heart
heavy with darkness;
on the other, like the Egyptian
Feather of Truth,
a translucent dragonfly wing.
~ Oriana
*
BORGES LEARNED THE OLD ANGLO-SAXON TO COMBAT THE ANXIETY ABOUT GOING BLIND
The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges lost his vision—what he called his “reader’s and writer’s sight”—around the same time that he became the director of the National Library of Argentina. This put him in charge of nearly a million books, he observed, at the very moment he could no longer read them.
Borges, who went blind after a long decline in vision when he was fifty-five, never learned braille. Instead, like Milton, he memorized long passages of literature (his own, and those of the writers he loved), and had companions who read to him and to whom he dictated his writing.
Much of this work—he published nearly forty books after he went blind—was done by his elderly mother, Leonor, with whom he lived until her death at ninety-nine, and who had done the same work for Borges’s father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, a writer who also went blind in middle age. (Borges’s blindness was hereditary, and his father and grandmother “both died blind,” Borges said—”blind, laughing, and brave, as I also hope to die.”)
Borges kept his job as director of the National Library, and he became a professor of English at the University of Buenos Aires. But literature had become, for him, entirely oral.
Borges decided to use the occasion of his blindness to learn a new language, and his description of the pleasure of learning Old English reminds me of my first forays into learning to read tactilely:
~ What always happens, when one studies a language, happened. Each one of the words stood out as though it had been carved, as though it were a talisman. For that reason poems in a foreign language have a prestige they do not enjoy in their own language, for one hears, one sees, each one of the words individually. We think of the beauty, of the power, or simply of the strangeness of them. ~
In the newness of Old English, Borges found an almost tactile relief in the unfamiliar words, as though they were “carved,” like the raised print in those first books for the blind printed in Paris nearly two hundred years before. But because Borges never learned braille, his experience of literature remained fundamentally sonic: “I had replaced the visible world,” he said, “with the aural world of the Anglo-Saxon language.”
In the same lecture, Borges listed the “advantages” that blindness had brought him, but they all strike me as banal, things he could have easily had as a sighted writer: “the gift of Anglo-Saxon, my limited knowledge of Icelandic, the joy of so many lines of poetry.” He is pleased to have a contract from an editor to write another book of poems, provided he can produce thirty new ones in a year, which he notes is challenging considering he’ll have to dictate them. This makes it sound like adapting to blindness for Borges meant, very simply, carrying on his work as a writer.
But in his poems and stories, Borges strikes a less sanguine tone about becoming blind. In “Poem of the Gifts,” Borges observes the coincidence that one of his predecessors in directing the National Library, Paul Groussac, was also blind. The poem, which begins with the irony of God’s granting him “books and blindness at one touch,” is written in a slippery voice that may be Borges’s, or Groussac’s.
“What can it matter, then, the name that names me,” he says, “given our curse is common and the same?” Borges cannot distinguish between himself and “that other dead one”:
Which of the two is setting down this poem—
a single sightless self, a plural I?
The transience of the writer’s identity was a long-standing theme for Borges, one he developed in the work published after his blindness. “So my life is a point-counterpoint,” he wrote in “Borges and I”: “a kind of fugue, and a falling away—and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.
I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.”
Written in the years following his blindness, Borges must have dictated both this story and “Poem of the Gifts,” and both texts express a kind of authorial identity crisis. I wonder how much of this anxiety grew out of the loss of control he felt once he was forced to dictate his work.
I’ve experienced a form of this anxiety myself, as I confront the loss of my visual relationship with language. Once I can’t rely on sight to write anymore, will I, like Borges, no longer be quite sure who is writing this page? When I first tried writing with a screen reader, turning off my monitor to see what it was like, I had a flash of this dissolution: I typed too fast for the screen reader to keep up, so I wrote into a void, the words audible in my mind, but without any confirmation that they were actually being recorded on the screen.
It was like writing in water, or calling out into the darkness. Even when I stopped, and the computer at last read the text back, my words sounded strange, echoed in an unfamiliar, mechanical voice.
But in between writing the first and second drafts of this book, my eyes have gotten weaker, and I now leave the screen reader on all the time. The anxiety of losing my own voice to the computer’s has given way to a relief that I don’t have to strain and stretch so much to see. I’m like a guy who could walk haltingly on his own if he had to, but it’s so much easier to just use the crutches.
I find myself looking away from the screen more and more, resting my eyes as I listen back to a paragraph I’ve just written. If I suddenly lost all of my residual vision tomorrow, I know I’d be overwhelmed, and the grieving process I’ve begun would be painfully accelerated. But I also know I’d be able to finish my work.
I’m still getting used to certain quirks—my braille display doesn’t always show me paragraph breaks, and when I’m speed-listening to a book, the reader burns through the ends of chapters and on to the next without stopping. I have to rewind, slow down, and artificially re‑create the resonant pause that the blank space on the page naturally offers a sighted reader.
But while I’m losing print, I’m not losing literature itself, which exceeds the eyes. The other day, with my phone’s screen reader on, I was reading the newspaper at a pretty furious clip. I’d run across the obituary of Ben McFall, the legendary New York City bookseller who worked at the Strand for forty-three years.
The piece ended by describing McFall’s deep commitment to his work, even after the pandemic and his failing health had forced him into the Strand’s corporate office, away from the line of friends and fans who would wait next to his desk amid the stacks to get a personal recommendation, or just to talk books. The obituary ended,
Mr. McFall, who was so attached to his Strand name tag that he sometimes wore it around his apartment, chose to keep it on even though he no longer spoke to customers.
It read: “Benjamin. Ask me.”
I had the speech turned up so fast that these last two paragraphs—which didn’t even register as paragraphs, since the babbling screen reader ignored the line break—took only a few seconds to read. And yet I still felt tears burst out of my eyes at that final image of McFall’s commitment: not just to the pleasure of solitary reading, but to the community of readers who sustained him to the very end. My response felt like a sign that however awkward it might feel to read this way, I still felt the power of that community; I’m still a reader.
https://lithub.com/borges-dealt-with-his-anxiety-about-going-blind-by-learning-a-new-language/
The tomb of Borges in Geneva depicts a Viking ship and Viking warriors.
*
THE HAMAS FAN CLUB
~ On October 17, just ten days after Hamas massacred over 1,400 Israelis, an email on our faculty listserv announced that, on the following day, there would be a national student walkout and protest in support of the Palestinian people.
This was at Berkeley, where I teach College Writing. Since I had classes on the 18th, I quickly put an assignment together to replace our in-person sessions in case any of my students wanted to attend the protest. The theme of my classes is Conformity Sucks and, given that protest is a key component of nonconformity, I wanted to give them the opportunity to attend.
The protest was to take place on Sproul Plaza, Berkeley’s main drag. Sproul is where student groups, clubs, fraternities, and others, including outside special interests and the occasional obnoxious street preachers, are free to market their services, petition for a redress of grievances or, as is often the case concerning the preachers, rant.
The email, as it turned out, was wrong. The protest was for the following week. I had canceled my in-person class for nothing. I then told my students that, if they planned on participating in the upcoming walkout, they’d have to eat the absence. None of them did.
I myself had been frequenting Sproul for another reason, to hawk Peregrine, College Writing’s new undergrad journal. I was out there a couple days after the misdated walkout and, as usual, both sides of the Plaza were filled with rows of tables stretching 200+ yards from the ornate Sather Gate to the southern border of campus on Bancroft Way. It was hot for mid-October, and I had a full two hours between classes. My plan was to spend half that handing out flyers, but I was only 10 minutes in when a pro-Palestinian/Hamas group showed up. It was a fairly large gathering, with a megaphone blaring the now familiar slogans by any means necessary, long live the intifada, and from the river to the sea; slogans that, whether tacitly or no, call for the elimination of Israel as a state and Jews as a people. Their signs and shouted rhetoric disgusted me enough that I packed up and left.
Rhetoric is a Greek word meaning persuasive speech, and is essentially what I teach. So when Berkeley law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon published an op-ed in the “Wall Street Journal” entitled “Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students,” the law students in question cried foul, claiming that their First Amendment rights were being violated. This accusation, however, is erroneous, and I explained why to my students with a demonstration I perform every semester: “Who has a job? I ask the class, and then randomly choose one raised hand.
“What’s your bosses name?” would be my next question.
“Fidel,” the student might answer.
“Ok. So suppose you go to work tomorrow wearing a ‘Fuck Fidel’ t-shirt?”
This always elicits scattered laughter, followed by the student saying, “I’d get fired.”
“Yes. You’d get fired, which is perfectly Constitutional because your speech is only protected against government interference. Fidel has the right to prevent his employees from acting offensively. He cannot, however, force you to take off that t-shirt, and you can stand out in front of your former job every day wearing it because that is your right.”
I perform this little show because I want my students to understand how the First Amendment applies to them. “Free speech is exceedingly permissive,” I continue. “Because of this, it can also have consequences. If you side with terrorists, others are allowed to call you on it. And they sure as shit don’t have to hire you.”
To be clear, I have no love for Netanyahu, his policies, or his retaliatory actions in Gaza, but bombing civilians during a war is hardly a novel tactic, which I’ll return to presently. At that moment, however, I was trying to instill in my students that one can be both pro-Palestinian and anti-Hamas, and that openly supporting the latter is the equivalent of wearing a “Fuck Israel” t-shirt.
Hamas and Palestinian supporters at the Israeli consulate in San Francisco
But I also recognize that they are students, and students can easily get caught up in wrongheaded movements, as “The Messenger” points out: “A letter expressing ‘unwavering support of the resistance in Gaza and the broader occupied Palestinian lands’ was signed by 51 groups representing students at colleges around the country, according to Bears for Palestine, an organization affiliated with students at the University of California, Berkeley.”
This was misguided at the very least, but again, I thought it was just students being students, and that they’d all eventually come to their senses. But they didn’t. And haven’t. And moreover aren’t likely to, especially after faculty (and, yes, even college presidents) jumped on the Hamas war wagon sporting “Fuck Israel” t-shirts of their own.
The University of California’s Ethnic Studies Faculty Council sent a letter to our Board of Regents stating flatly that “the UC and other higher education institutions’ administrative statements in the last week and a half, that irresponsibly wield charges of ‘terrorism’ and ‘unprovoked’ aggression, have contributed to a climate that has made Palestinian students and community members unsafe, even in their own homes.” This as opposed to the relative unsafety of over 1,400 Jewish men, women, and children butchered by Hamas – even in their own homes.
I don’t get how students at UC Berkeley – students who are currently occupying “the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people” – are made to feel unsafe simply by labeling terrorists as, well, terrorists. But what I really don’t get is that students and faculty who regularly cringe at terms like homeless, master class, ex-con, and field of study, suddenly find indiscriminate slaughter, torture, rape, mutilation, and hostage-taking perfectly acceptable. Apparently, not one of these barbarisms are a trifle triggering, at least among members of the Hamas T-Shirt Fan Club.
And it is they who are choosing the nomenclature; their authority decides exactly what is abhorrent violence and what is acceptable violence. Note especially, however, how the word violence – and so too, by that token, acts of violence – have become acceptable to this particular faction. Almost overnight.
What happened to civil disobedience? Direct action? Good trouble? Where are the lessons of Gandhi? The labor and civil rights movements? MLK? Nelson Mandela? John Lennon? Need I remind these students and their overseers that African Americans have clawed their way to a modicum of equal rights without murdering a single baby? Without massacring children in front of parents or parents in front of children? Without raping and torturing and kidnapping a single grandparent?
Given these facts, support for Hamas shows not only a profound lack of knowledge, but so too empathy. In a December column entitled “Cheering Hamas on campus, too uneducated to grasp how grotesque that is,” George Will unabashedly states: “Today, the desire of Hamas to complete the Holocaust is applauded by moral cretins in academic cocoons (some Princetonians chanted ‘Globalize the intifada’), too uneducated to understand the grotesque pedigree of their enthusiasm.”
What I can say is that the academic cocoon at UC Berkeley is tiny. Only 400+ participated in the walkout, out of a student population of approximately 45,000.
Moreover, Hamas started this war, horrifically so, and are now using the Israeli response to garner both sympathy and support. And although I applaud the calls for a ceasefire, they are unrealistic given our history. Contrary to popular belief, there are no rules in war, a hallmark of which is that indiscriminate bombing will take place. Recall Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five, which describes the Allies firebombing of Dresden, Germany. The book, like its predecessor Catch-22, was one of the first to satirize WW II, beginning with its title.
Vonnegut explains that, in gathering material for a first draft, he visited an old war buddy, and the latter’s wife accused them of being babies: “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them.” Vonnegut both agreed and promised to title the book The Children’s Crusade. And he did.
And that’s what the pro-Hamas movement reminds me of: babies wearing “Fuck Israel” t-shirts.
The United States also firebombed Tokyo, killing over 100,000 civilians. This of course was followed by two nuclear bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which combined killed between 110,000 and 210,000, including at least 25 POWs, 12 of them Americans.
So if you start a war with a country that has an air force you can count on getting bombed, and that is precisely what Hamas is counting on, not to mention the scuttling of an historic peace treaty between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and, oh yeah, we get to keep the hostages during ceasefires.
What I find most grotesque, however, is that the civilian slaughter sirens echoing over Gaza are also echoing over a continent where they have been heedlessly echoing for decades: Africa – a large swath of which has been conquered by a multitude of invaders, including Arabs. One tiny sliver of land hugging the Mediterranean has been occupied by Jews who, for the record, have a legitimate claim to it. Meanwhile, completely surrounding them and touching the Atlantic and Indian Oceans as well as the Mediterranean, Arabian, Red, Black, and Caspian Seas are a bevy of subjugated lands, many illicitly occupied by Arab and/or Islamic states, and all dying to exterminate Jews.
The bombing and sexual violence has been especially brutal in the Sudan where, according to the Holocaust Museum, “ethnic Arab militia groups, known as the ‘Janjaweed,’ … attack the ethnic African groups. The government would attack from the air, and then, the Janjaweed forces would enact a scorched earth campaign, burning villages and poisoning wells. Nearly 400,000 people have been killed, women have been systematically raped and millions of people have been displaced as a result of these actions.” Black people, by the way. Black lives.
Then there’s Yemen, where an estimated 85,000 children have starved to death as a direct result of Saudi Arabia’s intervention there, according to “The Washington Post.” Starvation, to be clear, is agonizing. It’s torture, and so a war crime in more ways than one, which is highlighted in another WAPO piece entitled “Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen have been called war crimes. Many relied on U.S. support.” The title kind of says it all, but it also explains how “U.S. support for the Saudi war effort… began during the Obama administration and has continued in fits and starts for seven years.” While in Syria, 12,000 children were killed or injured between 2012 and 2021; “that’s one child every eight hours.” And this is not even mentioning the bombing of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine, or that 15,000 children die every single day on our planet from starvation and preventable diseases, even on Christmas.
Where are the protests? The walkouts? The students and professors marching in lockstep? The freedom fighters on paragliders? The language police lined up to make sure no offensive words are used when describing dead and dying children? Why are none of these arbiters of altruism divesting from purchasing devices and fucking Teslas to show their unwavering support for child slaves mining cobalt in the Congo? Where are the proxy social justice warriors of all the continents and countries of the world where war and injustice and colonialism and slavery and starvation have taken root? Inexplicably, I don’t see or hear any of them.
Must be a frat party tonight. ~ Matthew Parker
https://voxpopulisphere.com/2024/01/23/matthew-j-parker-the-hamas-t-shirt-fan-club/
Hamas flag in the rubble of Gaza
Mary: THE PERSISTENCE OF GENOCIDAL ANTISEMITISM
The discussions on the pro-Hamas/pro-Palestinian demonstrators attempt to illuminate a troubling phenomenon. Key, for me, is that it involves excusing/accepting the horrific acts of the terrorists...why are the dead Palestinian children bemoaned so furiously when the children tortured and murdered on Oct 7 even produced some skepticism — (did they really behead babies? posing that question with an air of disbelief) even when the acts were filmed by the terrorists themselves. As the authors note, children are being starved and slaughtered in conflicts elsewhere, without the same, or any, outcry.
To simply assume that the error in the "Hamas fan club" is lack of knowledge, historical and practical, is, I think, merely handing them an undeserved excuse for what is basically antisemitism. This is true especially when you consider their support for goals that ARE genocidal...to "finish" the Holocaust, to remove the state of Israel and eradicate Jews entirely...that slogan "from the river to the sea" made real.
Also, there is no understanding of war itself. There are no rules in war, despite the assumption that there can be, that there are war crimes. Those who wish for "surgical strikes" seem unaware that those are rarely possible, that airborne weapons cannot make fine distinctions, and avoiding civilian casualties is even more impossible when the enemy is embedded in (or under) the civilian population. Even more impossible when military operations are concentrated deliberately under places like hospitals and schools.
Witness what has recently been revealed: UN relief workers were acting with Hamas in the Oct 7 terrorist attack. This one fact reveals the nature of the situation. Also, I think any peace effort that allows Israel to exist, that allows Jews to exist, will be refused before it even starts. The terrorists, who are unmistakably in control, do not want a "Two State Solution” — putting one into effect would only mean the continuation of terrorist activity.
It is telling to see that the "surgical strike" of Israeli soldiers entering a hospital in disguise to take out certain Hamas leaders, has been met with accusations of "war crime." So what, exactly, can Israel do when fighting this strategically embedded enemy? It seems any action will be condemned. The human empathy for the innocent victims of this war slams up against the adamant refusal of the terrorist ideology to allow for any truly humane solution. The general population, and all its children, are hostage to that terrible intent, useful to Hamas as cover and propaganda, more valuable dead than alive.
Oriana: THE DOUBLE STANDARD
If Israel happened to be just another third-world country, poor and militarily weak, there’d be pro-Israel marches. We’d have “Concerts for Israel” the way we had a Concert for Bangladesh. But Israel, surrounded by impoverished third-world countries, had the nerve to become prosperous, and a regional military power at that. They’ve developed the best desalinating plants, they’ve built modern cities, won Nobel Prizes, turned desert land into fields and orchards. The descendants of victims, they decided not to be victims — “never again.”
Also, the non-Islamic Israelis got classified as white, even though that doesn’t actually apply to a significant percentage of Israel’s population. And being white is perhaps an even worse crime than being successful. Note, however, that it’s only after WW2 that Jews began to be regarded as white. Before then, their alien, Near-Eastern origin was emphasized. But no matter which aspects were singled out as reasons for their persecution, no mater what obstacles put in their way, the Jews managed to thrive and prosper. Give them the worst kind of land, and they’ll turn it into orchards and vineyards. Can such against-all-odds-success be forgiven? No.
Maybe it’s seen as an unspoken rebuke to other ethnic groups, or maybe it’s just that anti-Semitism goes back thousands of years, so it’s seen as normal. But seeing people who claim to be progressive suddenly scapegoat Israel and deny it the empathy they claim to feel for the children in Gaza was an unpleasant surprise (I realize that I will be seen as naive, but I was truly surprised at the reaction to the barbarous atrocities of October 7).
I know a Hispanic proverb that may apply here: “Mala hierba nunca muere” — Weeds never die. Neither does anti-Semitism.
*
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: WHAT WE GET WRONG ABOUT ISRAEL AND GAZA
~ With the bilateral slaughter in the Middle East unleashing poisons that are worsening hatred worldwide, let me outline what I see as three myths inflaming the debate:
The first myth is that in the conflict in the Middle East there is right on one side and wrong on the other (even if people disagree about which is which).
Life isn’t that neat. The tragedy of the Middle East is that this is a clash of right versus right.
That does not excuse Hamas’s massacre and savagery or Israel’s leveling of entire
neighborhoods in Gaza, but underlying the conflict are certain legitimate aspirations that deserve to be fulfilled.
Israelis deserve their country, forged by refugees in the shadow of the Holocaust, and they have built a high-tech economy that largely empowers women and respects gay people, while giving its Palestinian citizens more rights than most Arab nations give their citizens. Israel’s courts, media freedom and civil society are models for the region, and there is something of a double standard: Critics pounce on Israeli abuses while often ignoring prolonged brutality against Muslims from Yemen to Syria, Western Sahara to Xinjiang.
Likewise, Palestinians deserve a country, freedom and dignity — and they shouldn’t be subjected to collective punishment. We’ve reached a searing milestone: In just five weeks of war, half of 1 percent of Gaza’s population has been killed. To put it in perspective, that’s more than the share of the American population that was killed in all of World War II — over the course of four years.
A great majority of those killed have been women and children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Health Ministry, and one gauge of the ferocity and indiscriminate nature of some airstrikes is that more than 100 United Nations staffers have been killed, which the U.N. says is more than in any conflict since its founding. Perhaps that’s because, as an Israeli military spokesman put it early in the conflict, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
“We are normal people, trying to live,” an engineer in Gaza told me by phone. He despises Hamas and would like to see it removed from power, but he says that Hamas fighters are safe in tunnels while he and his children are the ones most at risk: “We’re the civilians paying the price.”
Whichever side you are more inclined toward, remember that the other includes desperate human beings merely hoping that their children can live freely and thrive in their own nation.
The second myth is that Palestinians can be put off indefinitely, strung along by Israel, the United States and other countries. That was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy, his way of avoiding a Palestinian state, and it worked for a time — the way a pressure cooker works, until it explodes.
It’s difficult to know the counterfactual, whether a Palestinian state would have been better for Israeli security. But Palestinian statelessness in retrospect has not made Israel safe, and risks may increase if the Palestinian Authority collapses from corruption, ineffectiveness and lack of legitimacy.
Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said that one of the Hamas attackers on Oct. 7 was carrying instructions for releasing chemical weapons, and that’s a reminder of the risk that terrorism experts have worried about for years of extremist groups turning to biological and chemical agents.
Israel has a right to feel anxious in any case, but I suspect that the best way to ensure its security may be not to defer Palestinian aspirations but to honor them with a two-state solution. This is not just a concession to Arabs but a pragmatic acknowledgment of Israel’s own interests — and the world’s.
The third myth is found on both sides of the conflict and is approximately: It’s too bad we have to engage in this bloodshed, but the people on the other side understand only violence.
I hear that from friends who support the war in Gaza and regard me as well-meaning but misguided, as a naif who fails to comprehend the sad reality that the only way to keep Israel safe is to pulverize Gaza and uproot Hamas at whatever human cost.
Hamas indeed understands only violence, and it has been brutal to Israelis and Palestinians alike — but Hamas and Palestinians are not the same, just as violent settlers in the West Bank do not represent all Israelis. I’m all for surgical strikes against Hamas and I would be delighted if Israel managed to end extremism in Gaza. But so far, I’m afraid that the ferocity and lack of precision in Israel’s attack has fulfilled Hamas’s goal of escalating the Palestinian issue and changing the Middle East dynamic (and Hamas is indifferent to Palestinian casualties).
In that sense, Hamas may be winning.
Five weeks into this war, I don’t see evidence that Israel’s military has degraded Hamas in a significant way, but it has killed vast numbers of civilians, put the Palestinian struggle on top of the global agenda, dissipated the initial torrent of sympathy for Israel, prompted people around the globe to march for Palestine, distracted attention from kidnapped Israelis and ruptured any possibility soon of Israel’s normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia.
My friend Roy Grow, an international relations specialist at Carleton College who died in 2013, used to say that a crucial goal of terror organizations was getting the adversary to overreact. He compared this to jujitsu, with terrorist organizations using their opponents’ weight against them — and that is what Hamas has done.
Each side has dehumanized the other, but people are complex and neither side is monolithic — and remember that wars are not about populations but about people. These are people like Mohammed Alshannat, a doctoral student in Gaza, who has been sending desperate messages to friends who shared them with me; he agreed to allow me to publish them as a glimpse into Gazan life.
“There was heavy bombing in our area,” he wrote in English in one message. “We run for our lives and I lost two of my children in the dark. Me and my wife stayed all night searching for them amidst hundreds of airstrikes. We miraculously survived an airstrike and found them fainted in the morning. Please pray for us. The situation is beyond description.”
“I see death a hundred times a day,” he wrote another time. “We defecate in the open and my children defecate on themselves and there is no water to clean them.”
If he survives the war, what will we Americans say to him and his children? How will we explain that we supplied bombs for this war, that we were complicit in his family’s terror and degradation?
If there is a path forward toward peace — whether in two states or one state — it will begin with all of us moving beyond stereotypes. Israelis are not the same as Netanyahu, and Palestinians are not the same as Hamas.
Seeking humanity in each side means demanding the release of Israeli hostages and calling out the dehumanization that leads people to pull down posters for kidnapped Israelis. It also means renouncing what Netanyahu called “mighty vengeance” that transforms entire neighborhoods of Gaza into rubble, with bodies buried underneath.
I’m exasperated by people whose hearts bleed for only one side, or who say about the toll on the other: “It’s tragic, but ….” No “buts.” Unless you believe in human rights for Jews and for Palestinians, you don’t actually believe in human rights.
If you weep only for Israeli children, or only for Palestinian children, you have a problem that goes beyond your tear ducts. Children on both sides have been slaughtered quite recklessly, and fixing this crisis starts with acknowledging a principle so basic that it shouldn’t need mentioning: All children’s lives have equal value, and good people come in all nationalities. ~
https://voxpopulisphere.com/2023/11/18/nicholas-kristof-what-we-get-wrong-about-israel-and-gaza/
Oriana:
Finally a voice of empathy and compassion for BOTH sides.
The danger, as so often, lies in being inflexible. The poem below by Yehuda Amichai expresses well the barrenness of a frozen, unresolved conflict:
THE PLACE WHERE WE ARE RIGHT
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.
But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.
~ Yehuda Amichai
*
RUSSIA’S LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH JAMES BOND
~ On the morning of 29 May 1962, Commander James Bond crash-landed on to 200 million Soviet breakfast tables. But he wasn’t on a mission deep behind borscht lines. Instead, he was on show trial, ordered by the highest echelons of the Party. The USSR was at war with 007.
That day’s Izvestiya – the Party’s official newspaper – carried an extraordinary three-page denunciation of Dr No, the first Bond film, then filming in Jamaica. It reserved especial spite for Ian Fleming, the author of the Bond novels, thundering: “Who is interested in this rubbish? [His] products enjoy great popularity with American propagandists [but they] are in a bad way if they need to have recourse to the help of an English free-booter – a retired spy who has turned mediocre writer.”
It went on scoff at the film’s plot. Bond, it admitted, was “a great detective, who foils the Russians’ plans”, but his squeeze, “Honey Child” [sic], amused herself with “favorite hobby… collect[ing] seashells in the nude”. While Dr No’s glitzy trappings earned a stern Soviet stare: the picture was full of “hair standing on end, chilled spines, exotic dishes, subtle wines, luxurious beds and beautiful virgins”.
Fleming took the notice in his stride. In fact, he asked his editors at Cape if the dust jacket of his new novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, could carry the damning review in full. It would have one addition – “Ouch! (I.F) [Ian Fleming]”
The end of Bond’s tangle with Russia? Not a bit of it – after all, only in 2022, Ukraine’s spy agency released a list of 620 Russian agents active within European countries on Twitter. One listed their Skype address as “jamesbond007”, and went by the username “DB9”. 007’s relationship with Russia, then, is the spy’s most enduring – and strangest – in the history of his tangled romantic career. And the Izvestiya editorial was just the start.
“The Soviets were very fearful [about Bond],” says James Fleming, Ian Fleming’s nephew, and author of Bond Behind the Iron Curtain. “It was the usual fear that an authoritarian state has of ideas that are outside of its control.”
Like everything Izvestiya published, the editorial was approved by the Politburo. Its subtitle – ‘On the Other Side’ – suggests it was to be the first in a series of critiques damning the cultural output of the fevered Capitalist mindset. But no further broadsides were published; Bond, as usual, stood alone.
Fleming explains: “They must have thought: ‘We can show how awful Capitalists are’. Particularly in the 1960s, the Russians were quite a prudish nation, and here was Bond going off with a different woman every book, and sometimes more than one, and so they had no hesitation labeling [Bond] pornography.”
Not that Fleming set out to offend the Soviets. On the contrary, he learnt Russian as part of his Foreign Office exams, and he spent long periods in the USSR. As a journalist for The Times, he covered the Metro-Vickers show trials in 1933 – where Soviet authorities accused six British suspects of sabotaging their electricity supply – and returned in the late 1940s, after the end of the Second World War.
“His general attitude to Russia was very respectful,” says James Fleming. “He saw them as strong, intelligent, cunning – worthy opponents. He thought it was in the nature of the beast that Russia wouldn’t always be seen as the enemy, but certainly not as a friend. It was unique.”
In the novels, Russia was the great threat lurking over the eastern horizon. SMERSH, Bond’s nemesis in the early books, was a real-life Soviet counterintelligence agency. A conjunction of two Russian words SMERt and SHpionam (Смерть Шпионам) – which means “death to spies” – it worked with blood-thirsty efficiency between 1941 and 1946, rooting out German spies on the eastern front. Officially, it was dissolved in May 1946 when its duties were transferred to the MGB (Russia’s Ministry of State Security); unofficially, as all inhabitants of Bondiana know, it carried on operating long afterwards, its networks burrowing deep into Allied operations across the globe.
Few Russians, though, would have been aware of their fictional representation. While Western music – such as the Beatles’ first single Love Me Do, which was released the same day as Dr No – was available in pirated editions, novels and films were far dicier propositions for smugglers. Towards the end of the Soviet Union, underground “kinos” surreptitiously screened western films, but literature was another matter.
Only one samizdat copy of a Bond novel is known to exist; an error-strewn and laboriously typed-out version of Dr No, annotated with notes which suggest it was used to warn impressionable young apparatchiks of the beguiling danger it contained. As one Soviet critic put it in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper: “James Bond lives in a nightmarish world where laws are written at the point of a gun, where coercion and rape is considered valor, and murder is a funny trick.”
But it wasn’t simply the novels’ themes that had the Soviets running scared. They had some very powerful readers, too. In 1961, John F Kennedy was asked by Life magazine about his favorite books, one of which was From Russia With Love. This commendation persuaded Eon to rush into filming of Dr No. Kennedy asked for a special screening: he was shown a rough cut on November 20, 1963, the day before he left for Dallas. It was the last film he ever saw.
Bond might even have inspired Kennedy during one of the darkest moments of the Cold War. Two weeks after Dr No was released, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba, and commanded Castro to send back what nuclear missiles had already been installed on the island. He refused. The Soviets signaled their intentions to escalate. The world looked on the brink of nuclear war.
Yet charming, dapper and cool under pressure, Kennedy channelled his hero in negotiations with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and the crisis was defused. Dr Jaap Verheul, editor of The Cultural Life of James Bond, explains: “In a way, both James Bond and John F Kennedy embodied a new, glamorous, and cosmopolitan masculinity in the wake of the Second World War – although this was arguably more the case in Sean Connery’s cinematic impersonation of 007 than in Fleming’s literary creation.”
The Soviet Union, though, was now wise to the power of Fleming’s creation. And so, alongside other denunciations of the films and novels, they attempted to launch a spy franchise to rival Bond. It didn’t go to plan.
By the mid 1960s, things were looking up for Bulgarian novelist Andrei Gulyashki. A bookish, unassuming man, he was the editor of the literary journal Plamuk, and his series of novels featuring a studious, pipe-cradling detective, Avakoum Zahov, were selling well. But in 1965, he was tapped on the shoulder by the Bulgarian intelligence service: they wanted to kill Bond, and Gulyashi was the man to do it.
Or rather his detective Zahov was. Gulyashi sketched out a plot whereby Zahov would triumph against the British intelligence agent in a climatic struggle above a crevasse in Antarctica. Much like Conan Doyle’s Reichenbach Falls, the two would tussle above the drop before Bond would overreach a kick and giving “a long drawn-out scream” would plummet into “the snow-obscured bottomless depths”.
To gather inspiration, Gulyashki was packed off to London. Keen to ensure he wasn’t swayed by the decadent enchantments of the West, the KGB provided funding – and a minder. No one, though, told the Bulgarian secret service, who promptly put their own tail on Gulyashki. So ensured a scene from a Tintin comic strip: one agent tailing another agent, tailing a hapless Bulgarian novelist as he tramped around literary London.
There were further complications. While anyone could write a book about “James Bond”, his signature “007” was copyrighted. Ann Fleming, Ian’s widow, who controlled his estate, was immovable on this point: though initially sniffy about her husband’s potboilers, after the success of Dr No, she now saw them as her pension plan. Gulyashki, then, was stumped. Bond’s dramatic death at the hands of a USSR agent would have to occur in a book called Avakoum Zahov versus 07 – the missing “0” allowed Gulyashki to weasel past copyright laws.
Finding a publisher was the next issue. Cassells expressed interest at first, but were warned off by Ann Fleming. In the end, the only Western publisher would dared pick it up was Script, a boutique imprint who otherwise trafficked in adult entertainment; their output, observed one reviewer, consisted largely of “male prostitutes, bored housewives and women in prison”. Copies of Avakoum Zahov versus 07 did not fly off the shelves.
Yet as the Cold War hardened into geopolitical status quo, the Soviet Union began to lose their interest in Bond. For a start, the film adaptations depoliticized Fleming’s novels, as though the producers realized the high stakes with which they were playing. The Soviet SMERSH became SPECTRE, an organization of international criminals; and the villains gradually morphed from Cold War ghouls to lonesome megalomaniacs. This transnational villainy was captured well by the first villian, Dr No, in Connery's titular debut: “East, West, they are just points of the compass, each one as stupid as the other… Now they will both pay.”
Moreover, the Soviets at last had a credible answer to Bond. Teetotal, quiet and diligent, Max Otto von Stierlitz was closer to George Smiley than the gadabouting 007. But the hero of Yulian Semyonov’s Seventeen Moments of Spring novels – a Soviet spy who infiltrates the Nazi secret service – was enormously popular in the USSR. This was especially the case when his exploits were adapted into a 17-part TV series, originally broadcast in the summer of 1973.
In the avowedly secular state, showings became moments of national communion: when Stierlitz was on, electricity demand surged and crime dropped. An estimated 80 million people watched the NKVD-SMERSH agent outfox his German pursuers, and prevent the nefarious Americans cooking up a secret peace deal with the Nazis. By contrast, 10.2 million caught Dr No when it was first broadcast on ITV in 1975.
So popular was Seventeen Moments of Spring that the Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev rescheduled committee meetings to avoid missing its annual airings. And it was credited with a surge of applications to join the KGB – including by Vladimir Putin, who was 21 when it was first broadcast. This enthusiasm wasn’t surprising: the head of the KGB Yuri Andropov had a direct hand in its inception, believing that Russians needed a model Soviet citizen to aspire towards. And in the steely, calculating, but most of all, devotedly patriotic Stierlitz, they had their Bond.
There was one final twist in Bond’s longest affair. In 1996, GoldenEye became the definitive post-glasnost Bond – and marked the most dramatic shift in 007’s attitude to Russia since Dr No. Brash, thunderous and glitzy, its pre-credits sequence features Pierce Brosnan’s Bond (in his first appearance as the character) literally dropping into the Soviet world as he infiltrates a Russian hydroelectric plant.
But as the film begins proper, nearly a decade has passed, and Bond emerges into a technicolor post-USSR world. To illustrate the change, the titles depict scantily-clad iconoclasts smashing statues of Lenin and Marx. Designer Daniel Kleinman said: “Statues really were torn down, and although it wasn’t literally girls in lingerie who caused icons to fall and the Soviet State to break up, in an analogous way perhaps it was, the Soviet people wanted what the west had, goods and glamor.”
Director Martin Campbell went further to appeal to newly-liberated (and wealthy) audiences of the Russian Federation. While set largely in Russia, the Russian state is not the enemy in GoldenEye. Rather the film follows Bond’s efforts to retrieve Soviet satellite technology stolen by a rogue British agent. In accordance with Fleming’s worldview, the Russians are an ambiguous presence: not quite allies, but never outright foes – a duality embodied by the two (Russian) Bond girls in the film. Isabella Scorupco’s Natalya Simonova is his fragrant comrade-in-arms; Famke Jannsen, meanwhile, plays the femme fatale Xenia Onatopp, whose party trick is to squeeze the life out of men while making love.
Despite these concessions, GoldenEye’s production wasn’t painless. The film’s climactic chase sequence, where Brosnan pilots a T54 tank through St Petersburg, ripping j-turns and smashing walls and traffic, was originally due to be filmed on location. But the Russian authorities were understandably reluctant to have a 42-ton armored vehicle tearing through the equivalent of Westminster. So, after months of negotiations, the sequence was eventually filmed on the backlot of Leavesden Studios in England.
There were further troubles, too – members of the art department were threatened with deportation after the wife of Mayor Anatoly Sobchak accused them of vandalizing balustrades on the central Moika canal. The militia were called, and the panicked set-designers had to hastily explain they were in fact working on timber replicas.
Despite these difficulties, GoldenEye was swaggering success on both sides of the newly swished-aside Iron Curtain. Two months after it opened in the US, it premiered in Moscow. The Central House of Cinema was draped in Bond iconography, and the street outside was lined with posters and images of its golden gun barrel. News crews from international and Russian state media filmed the event. Eon’s Russian gamble paid off: GoldenEye became the highest-grossing film in the country in 1996. It was, says Verheul, “the first truly global Bond adventure at the ‘end of civilization’”.
But what of Bond and Russia now? In No Time to Die, Daniel Craig’s Bond dies on the Russian Kurily islands while thwarting a Russian villain, Rami Malek’s Lyutsifer Safin – the only significant Russian character in Craig’s five films. A return to Cold War culture wars? Not quite: despite the Russian specificity of his backstory, Safin is yet another antagonist in a long line of placeless villains.
His confused plan – a whizz-bang fandango of “nano-bots” and biological weaponry – owes little to geo-political reality (or storytelling sense). Of course, Craig’s swansong was completed long before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. (If not before his canary-in-a-coalmine incursions into the Donbas and Crimea). Now, though, with columns of charred T54 tanks clogging the roads towards a European capital, how might the Bond franchise respond?
As it stands, the war is too close, too awful, for Eon to rush anything into production. No Time to Die was a conscious pause; a wiping clean of the slate. But surely the next Bond – whoever he or she may be – cannot avoid being enmeshed in this sudden, bloody end to the end of history? With Bond 26, there is all to play for. “If I were Barbara Broccoli,” James Fleming says. “I would be rubbing my hands together.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/inside-russia-s-love-hate-relationship-with-james-bond?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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RIVER OF POOP IN KAZAN
River of Poop runs through the heart of Kazan, fifth largest city in Russia. Sewerage couldn’t deal with snow this winter, backed up and flooded the streets.
Marat Hasnullin, construction tsar in the occupied territories in southern and eastern Ukraine, hails from Kazan but he’s too busy erecting Potemkin high-rises on the ruins and human bones of destroyed Mariyupol to worry too much about his hometown.
This is what the brand new highway inaugurated by Putin last year that runs from Moscow to Kazan looks like in January. It’s part of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative.
How are Chinese overlords gonna haul plastic goods and electric cars to the EU via Russia’s road corridor when there is a shortage of gas stations and no snow removal services in winter and sewage gushes out of manholes?
This is the main issue with this whole mega project — the Chinese gotta deal with developing countries where maintenance of infrastructure is often subpar.
And what would be the contingency when a local dictator decides to spend all the allocated money on fighting collective west rather than maintaining roads and clearing snow from the highway?
What the Chinese overlords with global ambitions gonna do when truck drivers and warehouse employees can’t access running water in the country with the largest freshwater reserves in the world?
Water supply was turned off in Sevastopol, Crimea. Melted snow caused groundwater to rise and it got contaminated.
There was a shutdown of the water purification system. People were sent home from work to have three days off. Schools and kindergartens were closed. People stood in a long line to get freshwater from a water truck.
Water trucks that are normally seen in hot places like Pakistan and India have become a familiar fixture in the occupied Crimea.
Russia doesn’t have technology to build desalination plant and instead of asking Israel to do it, decided instead to support their enemies, terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah. Alas, Hezbollah won’t build them a desalination plant but they can ship cocaine from Venezuela.
“My daughter is telling me: “Mom, change your apartment. This building is cursed!” This mom hasn’t had any heating in her apartment since last year.
Rather than changing the president, whose re-election in March will surely guarantee drama and thrills compatible only with watching wet paint dry on the wall, she wants her to change the apartment!
Moreover, she thinks there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the local authorities who embezzle municipal funds and don’t bother to repair mains pipes.
She believes it’s a supernatural phenomenon involving demons and possibly ghouls. This place is cursed, but local authorities are doing their best. Fighting demonic forces is no easy enterprise despite twenty new churches built in the area. For example, authorities could have provided temporary accommodations to her mother but of course they won’t.
The general issue is that snow is such a rarity in Russia that it caught officials in the municipal services off guard.
They believed Western scientists and technocrats that due to global warming there won’t be a cold winter ever again.
This was a convenient excuse not to upgrade heating infrastructure, water drainage, etc, and rather spend the funds on purchasing luxury apartments in sunny Dubai to prop up sheikhs’ real estate bubble. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Roni Bechtel:
The majority of Russians have chosen to ignore the obvious reasons for their troubles which is the rampant corruption in their leaders.
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RUSSIA IS NOT THE “THIRD ROME”
If you want to know what is wrong with Russian culture in a nutshell you have to look at how Gorbachev and Stalin are viewed. Gorbachev was not perfect; he was naive, but he tried for something better, and he is vilified. Stalin is the second-greatest mass murderer in history. Included in his butcher bill are millions of Russians, yet he is a hero. Gorbachev was the most decent man to lead Russia since Czar Alexander II. There wasn't much competition.
I think the biggest lie the Russians tell themselves is that they are tough, when really they are a nation of sheep who have repeatedly and willingly been led to slaughter. That is not a superpower I would brag about. They have been brutalized by their own government forever so in turn they see nothing wrong in brutalizing innocence in other countries. They also have a vastly overrated opinion of themselves and think everybody wants what they have. News flash, we don't. I can go out and buy a car both American made and maybe a dozen other countries. Russia can keep the Lada. ~ Tim Brennan. Quora
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“RUSSIA’S POWER IS A SOAP BUBBLE”
According to General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine (GUR), Russia spends more on weapons and ammunition than it produces, thus seeking them from other countries.
North Korea is the largest supplier of weapons to Russia; without its assistance, Russia's situation would be catastrophic, he said in an interview to The Financial Times.
Russia also has issues with the quality of the munitions and weapons it’s getting.
"The entire legend of Russia's power is a soap bubble,” Budanov asserts.
Another problem that Russia faced is manpower. Kremlin is losing as many or more troops than it can recruit, says Budanov.
GUR strikes on the enemy's rear annoy Western partners fearing a nuclear response, but "everything we've done, we will continue to do,” says Budanov.
GUR and SBU (The Security Service of Ukraine) guerrilla operations intensified in recent weeks.
There’s barely a day without some important Russian weapons-producing factory, oil depot or military barracks full of Russian soldiers being hit by drone strikes or put on fire by saboteurs. GUR uses all options to cause damage to military goals on the territory of Russia and in Russia-controlled regions of Ukraine.
Ukrainians managed to hit a gunpowder-making factory in Russia and an oil-distributing plant in the port of St. Petersburg — that’s 800 km into the Russian territory.
“Budanov and Ukrainian GUR are running rings around the Russians. They’re conducting effective net-centric guerrilla warfare with strategic effect,” says General Ben Hodges, former commander of the USA Army in Europe.
Ukraine is rewriting the manual of modern warfare, brilliantly improvising and innovating.
But of course, it comes at cost. Budanov says it’s not going to be an easy year for Ukraine, but he is quietly confident: "I hope our success will surpass theirs.”
Interesting that no one predicts the end of the war in 2024. I always had the feeling that this war will end abruptly. Like the USSR did in December 1991. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Vernon McKenzie:
Unfortunately Russia does not appear quite civilized enough to benefit from something resembling the Marshall Plan, to drag them out of the Dark Ages. The corruption and the mafia protection-racket flavor of its institutions seems too entrenc
hed to succeed. Two decades and $2 trillion couldn’t civilize Afghanistan. I hope Russia could do better, but the odds are not good based on their past history. I suspect China will be the saviors after the collapse, but rather than invade like the Golden Horde, they’ll just buy their way to full control. It’ll be a fire sale.
Orel Valcour:
Moscow is their showpiece. Go look at the neglect in Eastern Russia. Moscow sucks the wealth from the east and leaves them in third world conditions. If you`re homeless in Moscow, you get a ticket to Siberia.
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WHERE TRUMP GETS SUPPORT
~ The evidence cuts strongly against the common view of the movement as driven by “lumpen” Rust Belt rage and economic despair in the country’s shrinking rural hinterland. Rather, the picture that emerges is one of greenfield suburbs that are both fast growing and rapidly diversifying, where inequalities between relatively well-off white households and their non-white neighbors have been shrinking the most. Low voter turnout in these places has, in turn, helped to deliver large margins to Republican candidates. These facts both help us to understand what is animating Trump’s most committed supporters and point the way to defeating Trumpism electorally.
Growing and diversifying exurbs
In addition to being considerably more suburban than Democratic districts, as all Republican districts are, residents of objectors’ districts are nearly twice as likely as residents of other Republican districts to live in exurban “sparse suburban areas.” These are districts like Wisconsin’s 5th in the western suburbs of Milwaukee and North Carolina’s 9th, which runs from the southern suburbs of Charlotte to eastern Fayetteville (but does not include either city itself). The latter’s representative, Dan Bishop, authored that state’s infamous 2016 legislation prohibiting transgender individuals from using the gendered public facilities of their choice and preempting local minimum wage ordinances. He was also a signatory to the brief in support of Texas v. Pennsylvania, President Trump’s final direct appeal to the Supreme Court to forestall the certification of his loss.
These districts are also among the fastest-growing in the country. On average, their population growth outpaced that in districts represented by Democrats and other Republicans over the last twenty years.
And almost all of this growth has been among non-white groups, specifically Latinos and Asian Americans, resulting in a dramatic shift in the demographic composition of these districts.
Since they are, on average, younger, this growth in non-white residents has also meant age and race have become increasingly correlated. Residents under the age of 18 are 3.6 times more likely to be Hispanic and 1.6 times more likely to be Black or Asian American than those over the age of 65. Debates over policies involving a transfer of resources between generational cohorts—Social Security and Medicare, public education, housing—have, therefore, also become even more polarized by race in these parts of the country.
In their work studying the Tea Party protests of the early 2010s, Vanessa Williamson of the Brookings Institution and Theda Skocpol of Harvard identified this nexus of racial and generational resentment as central to the ideology animating its white, middle-class activists. Gabriel Winant, historian at the University of Chicago, has also written about the ways that the concentration of wealth among older Americans has helped enable the authoritarian right to stoke fears about youth-led political movements challenging their direct and indirect claims on younger Americans’ labor and income as employers, landlords, lenders, and pensioners.
WHITE MIDDLE-CLASS STAGNATION
Constituents of Republican objectors do tend to have lower levels of formal educational attainment than constituents in other districts. But this in no way flatters these representatives’ pretensions as spokespeople for the marginalized working class. Partisan polarization by education has risen dramatically over the last forty years, but post-election surveys show that voters with higher incomes and greater wealth are still significantly more likely to support Republican candidates. This correlation may have weakened slightly in the last two presidential elections, but national exit polling from both 2016 and 2020 confirm that even with President Trump at the top of the ballot, the positive relationship between household income and Republican support persisted.
One reason for persistent confusion on this point is the conflation of districts with voters. Republicans do tend to represent congressional districts with lower median incomes, but it does not follow that their base of support is therefore drawn from those places’ working-class residents. In fact, reconciling the fact of these districts’ lower incomes with national survey results suggests the very opposite: the Republican base is composed of the wealthiest voters residing in lower-income districts.
Using educational attainment as a proxy for class obscures the extent to which many white Americans without a four-year college degree receive relatively high incomes and own some wealth, primarily in residential real estate and pensions. According to the Census’s 2019 American Community Survey, more than half of white Americans without a four-year degree have household incomes greater than $65,000 a year—roughly the national median income—and over 70 percent of them are homeowners. White homeowners are also significantly less likely to have a college education in districts represented by Republicans than in those represented by Democrats.
Since 2000, strong demand for housing due to relatively fast population growth has put upward pressure on housing prices in Republican objectors’ districts, shrinking the gap in home values between their districts and other Republican districts. One such case is Texas’s 17th, which snakes through the northern Austin suburbs to include Bryan-College Station and Waco. It saw median home values rise by an inflation-adjusted 3.3 percent a year (from $108,000 to $199,000 in constant 2019 dollars).
In Republican objectors’ districts, home ownership rates over the last twenty years were largely stable for white households, plummeted to less than half among Black households, rose modestly among Hispanic households, and rose considerably among Asian Americans. The latter two groups have been the main beneficiaries of real estate appreciation in these districts and also saw the fastest household income growth over the same period. Low levels of home ownership among Black households is both the near-term legacy of the 2007–09 housing market crash and recession and the longer-term legacy of redlining and Jim Crow segregation. Virtually no progress has been made in the last fifty years in closing the Black-white wealth gap, the expansion of home ownership among Black households in the 1990s and 2000s having been fueled by fraudulent subprime mortgage lending that left them saddled with high debt burdens after housing prices collapsed.
While the home ownership rate among Latinos remains well below that for white households in Republican objectors’ districts, the gap in median home values between white and Latino homeowners in these places has nearly closed in the last twenty years. This indicates strong housing price growth has largely benefited existing Latino homeowners rather than new buyers. Latino homeowners in these districts are also on average more likely to identify as white and to have been born in the United States than Latinos residing in other parts of the country. These facts perhaps go some way in explaining President Trump’s modest inroads among Latino voters in 2020.
The story from the perspective of the bottom of the income distribution is similar. With the exception of indigenous and multi-racial residents, people of color in objectors’ districts have seen significant reductions in poverty since 2000. Asian Americans, for example, are now no more likely to be in poverty than white families. This suggests that income growth among Hispanic and Asian American households over this period also buoyed the very poorest among them. While the Black family poverty rate remains alarmingly high nationwide, only in objectors’ districts did median wages among Black workers grow faster than median wages among white workers. It was also in these districts that the average Black-white poverty gap shrank the most.
White homeowners’ perception of a loss of status relative to upwardly mobile Hispanic and Asian American households is the social context out of which emerged the nativist politics at the center of Trumpism. Middle-class whites in Republican objectors’ districts are nevertheless considerably more likely to own their own home and receive higher incomes than any other racial group except Asian Americans. It is whiteness itself that has lost salience as a signifier of social status and class, and it is to this status anxiety that Trumpism is addressed.
White evangelical Christians have been integral to the Republican coalition since the 1980s and remain President Trump’s most unwavering base of support. In more than half of Republican objectors’ districts, evangelicals account for at least a fifth of constituents, making objectors far more likely to represent evangelicals in Congress than other Republicans or Democrats.
Public opinion surveys reveal just how much white evangelical Protestants stand apart in their politics. The Public Religion Research Institute’s 2020 American Values survey found that they are the only demographic-religious group among whom a majority expresses a preference for living in a country “made up of people who follow the Christian faith.” Just over half believe “society punishes men just for acting like men,” and they are the only group for whom abortion and terrorism rank in their top three most important issues. White evangelicals are also the least likely to agree that President Trump has encouraged white supremacist groups, though a majority of Americans overall do, and the most likely to claim that he “models religious values with his actions and leadership.”
Even those who do not agree with this claim defend their support for Trump on the grounds that he is an “imperfect agent” of God’s will. White evangelicals’ aversion to religious pluralism and providential view of the United States stands in stark contrast to the reality of a secularizing country where regular attendance of religious services is declining and younger Americans are less likely to identify as Christian.
As for local economic activity, workers in Republican objectors’ districts are more likely to be employed in sectors of the economy Trump has routinely identified as most threatened by the political left—heavy manufacturing, and law enforcement. While the average share of workers employed in these industries is small, they loom large in regional economies dependent on them to provide relatively high-wage employment to workers without a four-year degree. In his analysis of the 2020 election, geographer and historian Mike Davis notes how both large concentrations of workers employed in border security and the region’s expanding shale oil industry created new opportunities for Republicans to grow their vote share in south Texas’s Rio Grande valley.
Moreover, though Trump has chosen to prioritize policies like environmental deregulation, the leasing and sale of public lands, and trade restrictions over a real full employment agenda—mainly to the benefit of owners and investors rather than rank-and-file workers—he has been able to burnish his support among workers in these sectors by simultaneously emphasizing the potential threats posed to them by demands to decarbonize the economy, prosecute police violence, and defund local and federal law enforcement agencies.
President Trump’s incitement of his supporters to disrupt the electoral process by force is the culmination of the Republican Party’s decade-long campaign to maintain minority rule by depressing political participation and diluting the vote of their political opponents. Having secured control over governor’s mansions and both houses of state legislatures in twenty-three states, Republicans are once again positioned to ensure district boundaries maximize their representation in Congress for the next decade as well.
Bleak as this prospect is, Democrats’ dual Senate victories in Georgia have vindicated a strategy of organizing and mobilizing a latent majority of voters who will reject Trumpism’s antidemocratic politics, even in a state where voter suppression efforts have been infamous. The fact that Republican objectors command some of the least popular support among their own constituents of any congressional elected officials in the country is both a testament to their effectiveness in entrenching their own power and the foundation on which we must ground our hopes for political change to end minority rule. ~
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/jacob-whiton-where-sedition-rewarded/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=840aa7d210-reading_list_1_21_2024&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-840aa7d210-40729829&mc_cid=840aa7d210
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ALAN WATTS: THE SAGE AND THE MAN
~ On 16 November 1973, Joan Watts received a phone call that began in the worst possible way: ‘Are you sitting down?’ Her father, the English writer and philosopher Alan Watts, had died during the previous night, as a storm lashed his home in Marin County, California. His heart had failed at the age of just 58. Watts’s third wife, Mary Jane Yates King or ‘Jano’, blamed his experiments with breathing techniques intended to achieve samadhi, or absorptive contemplation: he had left his body, she thought, without knowing how to come back. Joan took a different view. Her father had become lost in work and alcohol. He had finally ‘had enough’, she concluded, and had ‘checked out’.
It seems fitting that, even in the manner of his dying, Watts should divide opinion. He frequently did so in life. Born in 1915, in Chislehurst in Kent, Watts moved to the United States with his first wife shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. Living first in New York, he ended up making his home on the West Coast, where he joined the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder as a leading light of the 1960s counterculture.
Countless young Americans heard Watts speak, on campuses and on the radio, extolling the wisdom of the East and informing them in wry, patrician English that the ideals into which their parents and teachers had indoctrinated them were, by comparison, empty. Life did not have to be ‘about’ something or ‘going’ somewhere, any more than the point of playing or listening to a Bach prelude was to get to the end as quickly and efficiently as possible. One’s aim instead should be to tackle the monstrous case of mistaken identity from which so many modern Westerners suffered: each believing themselves to be a small, anxious self when underneath lay a glorious greater Self, entirely at one with the rest of reality.
To his detractors, Watts was an unlettered dilettante – he lacked an undergraduate degree – guilty of peddling a mash-up of Zen, Taoism and Vedānta to the unwary, throwing in psychotherapy, psychedelics and quantum physics for good measure. He lacked moral seriousness, too, preferring forms of religion that emphasized insight over conduct as a path to the divine. The result was a bleak contrast between Watts’s high talk of compassion and love and a series of affairs that, combined with his low view of fatherhood – ‘mow the lawn, play baseball with the children’ – helped to destroy his family.
The man himself gave as good as he got. Watts dismissed his academic critics as hopelessly out of touch with intellectual goings-on beyond the confines of their own institutions and networks. He wrote to the editors of Playboy magazine that:
Under the cover of lusty and curvaceous chicks (of whom I approve), and of silly bunnies (of whom I disapprove), you have turned Playboy into the most important philosophical periodical in this country … by comparison, the Journal of the American Philosophical Society is pedantic, boring and irrelevant.
But if a life philosophy may be judged by its fruits, Watts had become a poor advert for his own ideas by the early 1970s. Desperate and drinking heavily, he was capable of remaining lucid at the lectern but was exposed when he drifted off to sleep during the Q&A (devoted fans sometimes interpreted this as a silence wiser than words). And in the years after his death, several intellectual trends conspired to undermine much of what he had stood for.
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) helped to kickstart decades of academic criticism of the damage wrought when skewed and self-interested Western views of ‘the East’ pass into global circulation. A year later, the equally influential social critic Christopher Lasch argued, in The Culture of Narcissism, that a vogue for ‘psychic self-improvement’ and ‘the wisdom of the East’ was a sign that Americans had given up on serious politics and social change, lapsing instead into self-indulgence.
Flares and campervans were soon being traded in for sensible alternatives, the aging hippie became a stock comic character, and parodies proliferated of Yoda’s gnomic utterances in Star Wars (which owed much to George Lucas’s interest in Asian and world mythologies). Any hint of personal convenience in a philosophy that draws elements from far afield was always going to render it vulnerable, at some point, to charges of ‘cultural appropriation’: a notion that feels prudish and incoherent when applied to the serving of sushi on US college campuses but which has force when profound ideas and practices are taken and twisted without regard for those to whom they are sacred.
Those who treasured – and continue to treasure – Watts have felt equally strongly about the man and his legacies. Here was someone who understood, in a visceral way as a young man, the terror of loneliness and lack of meaning. With warmth, humor and an extraordinary gift for communicating complex ideas, Watts had shown people that the wrongness they sensed in life was not built into the universe. It was the outcome of degraded modern ways of living. The good news, as he preached it in person, in broadcasts and in his bestselling books, was that this fearfully bleak situation could be cured. There is no underestimating his posthumous ability to save or redeem lives, as Tim Lott revealed in his moving Aeon essay about Watts some years ago.
It is tempting to believe that the intellectual and cultural backlash against thinkers of the counterculture era like Watts has now peaked, and is being replaced by what the philosopher and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls the ‘meaning crisis’. From wellness and yoni eggs through to Jordan Peterson and a roster of new and often socially conservative Christian converts, we seem no less interested now than Watts in his day about how we might foster a society more in tune with natural and even cosmic realities. Watts himself remains an inspiration, enjoying a busy online afterlife thanks to the uploading of his talks as podcasts and YouTube videos. His gift for the pithy one-liner turns out to be perfect for the age of X/Twitter and Instagram. And his books, like The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), still enjoy the status of classics.
Given the somewhat unexpected role of Christianity in this new moment, the time has come to include Watts’s much underrated stint as an Episcopal priest in our assessment of him. His view of Christianity’s potential in the modern West, and his cautions about the ways in which it can go wrong, feel as relevant and psychologically astute now as ever. As we negotiate religion in the 21st century, Watts can help us understand some of its great tensions: between pride and grace, insight and morality, spiritual renewal and nostalgia for an idealized Christian society of the past.
Watts’s experience of Christianity as a child was almost wholly negative. During his childhood in Chislehurst, he spent many a lonely night in bed, resisting sleep lest he die and find himself in heaven or hell – as pictured in Victorian and Edwardian hymns and described in lessons at school. Those hymns seem to have upset the young Watts, ill-equipped as he was to treat as anything other than very literal accounts of life after death phrases such as:
How sweet to rest
For ever on my Savior’s breast.
And:
Prostrate before Thy throne to lie,
And gaze and gaze on Thee.
Only after discovering and practicing Zen and yoga, thanks to a handful of friends and the bookshops of Camden Market in London, did Watts begin to taste for himself what he later called the ‘supreme identity’. In our imaginations, he argued, we are here while God or the good life is over there. The journey from here to there, we are told, consists of some combination of earnest striving and good behavior. Drawing on Carl Jung, Zen, Taoism and Vedānta, Watts questioned the reality of this lonely, striving self. Let it go, he suggested, and you may glimpse a truer – supreme – identity that lies beneath it, and which the Upanishads capture in three words of Sanskrit: Tat tvam asi (‘You are that’). This deepest identity, a person’s soul or Self (ātman), is identical with the Absolute.
Watts always insisted that one had to experience this truth directly, rather than merely consider it in the abstract, in order to derive any serious benefit. But when in the late 1930s and early ’40s he did find himself mulling these ideas, he felt something lacking. As he put it to one of his correspondents:
~ Yes, we are united with Reality, and cannot get away from it, but unless that Reality is in some profound sense absolutely good and beautiful, what is the use of bothering to think about it? ~
His love of East Asian art prompted similar questions. He was mesmerized by the ‘turn of a bird’s wing’ and ‘the kiss of the wind on a particular blade of grass’. Talk of artistry or refinement here was beside the point, he thought. The real question was this: how does it come about that human beings possess so nuanced and profound a sense of significance in the natural world?
Watts had tended, up until this point, to picture the Absolute rather hazily as an electric current. This now seemed inadequate to what he felt compelled to imagine and appreciate as a personal dimension to ultimate reality. He was impressed to discover that some of the greatest thinkers in the Christian tradition had always conceived of God in this way: not as a being within the cosmos, but as the source of all, whose nature was ‘personal’ in the sense of being – in Watts’s words – ‘immeasurably alive’.
For anyone who has seen or heard Watts at his best – courtesy, perhaps, of his podcast talks – ‘immeasurably alive’ is quite a good description of the man himself. It is easy to see how a basic understanding of God in these terms might have resonated with him. Watts also had moments when the sheer wonder of life around him made it feel as though it was not merely ‘there’, as brute fact, but was being poured out with extraordinary generosity. It seemed ‘given’, convincing Watts that there must be a giver and filling him with the desire to say ‘thank you’. He found backing for all of this in the writings of the 14th-century German theologian Meister Eckhart and the 6th-century Greek author Pseudo-Dionysius the Areo pagite. It was there, too, in the ‘I-Thou’ thought of the modern Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.
A decade earlier, C S Lewis had completed his journey via Idealism and pantheism to theism. He was far from alone: many in that era, and since, have found the borders between these views – or experiences – of life to be quite porous. In Watts’s case, there may well have been other reasons why he found himself a theist and decided to relocate his family to Evanston in Illinois so that he could train for the Episcopal priesthood at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. It was, in part perhaps, an attempt to make himself at home in the Christian culture that surrounded him. Some have claimed that his ‘vocation’ was even an attempt to avoid the draft, as the war that he had left Britain to avoid threatened to swallow him up.
The Watts family arrived in Evanston in September 1941, and Watts began an almost decade-long struggle with Christian ideas and practices. Realizing that the way people relate to God is shaped profoundly by how they grow up relating to other human beings, Watts found himself questioning his desire to say thank you to some not-less-than-personal dimension of ultimate reality. How straightforward was it, really, to separate out a ‘thank you’ born of wonderment and desire – which might, with luck, lead a person deeper into life’s mysteries – from a ‘thank you’ tinged with feelings of inferiority or a nagging need to please?
Alan Watts, 1964
The answer became clear the moment that Watts stepped into a church. In Indian traditions, Shiva danced and Krishna played the flute. In the Episcopalian Christianity of his acquaintance, ‘thank you’ was offered up amid heavy wooden furniture that was reminiscent of a medieval monarch’s court or a modern courthouse. There was much talk of ‘grace’ in such places: God’s free, redeeming gift to humanity.
But few people brought up in competitive societies like the US found it plausible that something so wonderful was (or indeed ought to be) available free of charge, entirely unconnected to graft or station in life. ‘Corny hymns’ like What a Friend We Have in Jesus suggested to Watts a fake, forced joy, eked out under the gaze of a God who had constantly to be placated through assurances of his gloriousness and implored ‘not to spank [us]’.
Watts’s experience of US Christianity was no doubt rather narrow, but it was far from niche. And what he saw chimed with his broader sense that much of modern Western culture was underpinned by a sense of needing to earn God, salvation or the good life. One detected this, thought Watts, beyond purely Christian language, in the equation of meaning with purpose. The idea that meaning might actually be more closely related to play, and that God might not just be a maker of plans but also – in some meaningfully allegorical sense – a reveler, would strike a great many Americans as blasphemous.
Watts set out to tackle these problems in books like Behold the Spirit (1947) and in his handling of Church services after his ordination and appointment, in 1944, as Episcopal chaplain at Northwestern University. Some of these services were as High Church as he could make them, convinced as he was that the power of the liturgy lay in giving people a sense of the ‘sacred dance’ of the cosmos, eternally moved – as Dante Alighieri pictured it – by love. Other services were casual and intimate, blending conversation, piano improv, jokes, Gregorian chant, smoking and drinking.
Both sorts of service honored a God who is ‘immeasurably alive’, but over time the second, more bohemian sort began to feel truer for Watts. Desire was a strong feature of his character – as a young man, he had been pleased to find that although ‘the Buddha had taken a dim view of wenching and boozing … he never called it sin’. Still a young-ish man while he was working as chaplain on a college campus, he appears not to have been able to resist the potential for one-to-one counseling sessions with students to become intimate. In the end, an affair with a graduate student in mathematics, Dorothy DeWitt, helped to finish off both his marriage and his clerical career. Watts decided to jump before he was pushed.
He had, in any case, struggled to develop a clear idea of how God could be both the Absolute – the ‘ground of being’ as Eckhart put it – and capable of entering into a relationship with human beings. To put it the other way around, how could human beings have their deepest identity in God and be separate enough from God that the idea of a ‘relationship’ could be intelligible?
Here was a difficulty that had bedeviled Western interest in Asian and especially Indian thought for centuries. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had fallen out of love with Indian Idealism when he began to suspect that it was little but a ‘painted Atheism’. For him, the value of nature and solitude lay – in part, at least – in their potential to lead people beyond themselves to the divine source of all. The Idealism of Indian philosophers like Shankara (c8th century) came perilously close, in Coleridge’s understanding at least, to picturing nature as a giant conjuring trick or a veil with nothing behind it. As Coleridge put it in one of his poems:
… If the breath
Be Life itself, and not its task and tent,
If even a soul like Milton’s can know death;
Oh Man! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant …
Watts tried to suggest that a truly all-inclusive God would not be bound by Western logic, with its insistence on mutually exclusive propositions. In Asia, argued Watts, one found not just ‘either-or’ forms of logic but ‘both-and’ forms, too. This was not to say that every Christian must become an accomplished logician. It was a matter, thought Watts, of clergy being trained to do more than ‘go out and bang Bibles in the back woods among lumberjacks and hillbillies’. Like the best of their counterparts in Asia, they ought to be able not just to teach people but to help them unlearn some of the habits of thought and feeling that were holding them back.
In the end, Watts’s personal life helped to render such questions moot. He packed his bags and started life again on the West Coast. For his critics, Watts’s moral failings undermined his idea of a ‘supreme identity’. He had claimed that a person would naturally live a moral life when they had tasted the fruits of that true identity, since so much immorality is the result of insecurity; an ultimately pointless compulsion to look after the interests of a small, mortal self.
He had meanwhile objected to traditional moral codes that appeared to expect things to run the other way: do a, b, and c, and there’s a prize for you at the end. Look, his detractors could now say, where a philosophical prospectus that starts from vision rather than morality may take you.
Watts never returned to a serious consideration of Christianity, placing his faith in Zen, Taoism, Hinduism, psychotherapy and good, eye-opening conversation.
And yet his period of struggle with Christianity went on to inform the work of countless Christian thinkers after his time, including the Franciscan priest and writer Richard Rohr. It has much to say, too, to our own ‘meaning crisis’. If we imagine the religious instinct as incorporating elements of need, desire and sense of obligation, Watts shows us how necessary – and yet how difficult – it is to hold these three things in balance or tension.
Allow obligation entirely to take the reins, and we risk what Frank Lake, a pioneer of clinical theology, described as a ‘hardening of the oughteries’. For Watts, this revealed itself in people striving to be dutiful or to appear cheerful, or else sitting glumly in the pews when they might be dancing in the aisles. There is a caution, here, for strands of the renewed interest in Christianity that seem focused on battling non-Christian or ‘woke’ forms of thought and ways of living. ‘Cultural Christianity’ of this kind risks locating its beginnings and ends in mere conformity, with little of the joy or vision that one might expect if Christianity is in any meaningful sense ‘true’.
If, on the other hand, need rules us, then we may stay or become Christians out of what Watts described as a collective nostalgia, or a clinging to the past. Again, it is hard not to see something of this in the contemporary mourning of Christianity’s decline by those who regard it primarily as a source of cultural identity – whether of the old church-bells-and-community-feeling sort or a newer and more combative kind, intended for call-up in the culture wars.
What of desire? The pastor and writer Tim Keller, recently deceased, used to say that if religious people don’t desire God, then the chances are that their faith is more about getting something from God – a distinction, he cautioned, which can be hard to discern. Desire may all too easily stop short of its ultimate object, causing people like Watts the sorts of problems to which his critics enjoyed calling attention. A better lesson from Watts’s life might be his honesty about the power of desire in general, and the need to include it – even integrate it – in any search for meaning.
This is where, in retrospect, the inquisitorial style of the New Atheism fell short. By reducing religion to propositions, and testing the faithful on their scriptural knowledge – how can you be a Christian if Richard Dawkins quotes the Bible better than you do? – it made people doubt that emotions, intuitions and desires have any legitimate role in the religious life. Even now, our contemporary conversations about culture and religion often seem ruled by ‘oughts’ – intellectual, moral and political.
From Watts, we learn that desire may be the royal road to truly experiencing reality as gift, of the most recklessly generous kind. For all their differences in temperament, C S Lewis, too, found that desire was the key that unlocked life’s mysteries. His autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), is the record of a journey from writing off desire as a feature of biology and psychology to discovering that it is etched into human nature as an invitation from God.
Never having had a mentor on this point, Watts seems to have struggled with the art of discernment. And as the disappointed editor of his autobiography, In My Own Way (1972), could have told you, he didn’t enjoy digging very deep into his own emotions and motivations. The ‘supreme identity’ was handy in this respect, since the small, everyday self could be dismissed as unworthy of much attention.
But when has recognizing, exploring and ordering our desires ever been easy? In his writings, and in the contours of his eventful life, Watts has bequeathed us a passionate and persuasive advocate for the exploratory potential of desire. Either everything is religious, or nothing is: this was his message, and it may be the only basis on which people will consider religion worth bothering with beyond the 2020s. For those who try to live this way, holding that balance of need, desire and a sense of ‘ought’ – responsibility to others and to the divine – it may be no bad thing to have the spirit of Alan Watts hovering somewhere overhead.
Oriana:
It’s easy to dismiss Watts as someone who failed to be “saved” by his own philosophy: he was known as a womanizer and an alcoholic, and a heavy smoker as well; he died at 58. But was his Gospel to the Western seeker really rendered worthless by the personal flaws of the teacher? To me, it was his style that was made reading his works worthwhile — and style, as Nietzsche reminds us, is not separate from thinking. Watts never tired of praising Eros rather than Logos — again, like Nietzsche, but in a very different personal manner, trying to correct the West’s torturous relationship with both.
Watts would never say that God was dead, but would certainly agree that Western religion was dead — at least the kind preached in churches. He wanted not the Judeo-Christian god of punishment, but a god of joy. He was a Dionysian, but with enough disciplined Logos to be able to lecture and write books. His message is two-fold: first, you are not an isolated individual, doomed to loneliness — we are all incredibly connected not only with other humans, but also with all of nature; secondly, trust your feelings. And that meant not only following your bliss, but also fully experiencing grief or whatever life might throw at us. Accept yourself as yet another incarnation of the unfinished divine seeking to expand its consciousness through your experiences; don’t live in denial of joy and emotional and sexual repression. Enjoy life.
And, barring extremes, don't offhand reject anyone. A large part of Alan's charisma, it seems to me, was his ability to come across as welcoming to anyone who'd listen. And if you listen, you become charmed; you chuckle softly to yourself, a little happier for the experience of having listened to someone so accepting.
And it's not "Sinners Welcome." Seeing yourself as a sinner and endlessly calling yourself a sinner is not the proper approach to the divine. It's rather through identifying with the divine and rejoicing in it that we drop our self-obsession and are naturally inclined to be kind to others, who divinity we recognize and revere.
Nothing new here, just the use of a different vocabulary, different examples. Mystical Christians who emphasize joy and Buddhists of various schools can walk and talk together, or sit together in silence, simply enjoying the moment.
*
THE UNKNOWN VERSUS THE MYSTERIOUS
~ Freud was interested in what a particular dream, slip of the tongue, or object meant to an individual. For example, a young man once told Freud about a recurring dream, one involving a river and certain strange events. Freud reasoned that the symbols in the dream reflected that the young man was anxious of a particular possibility—becoming an unexpectant father. The young man did not see this link between the symbols in the dream and his own fears. Jung was interested in what symbols mean, not just to the individual, but to all humanity. According to Jung, these meanings could be inborn and stored in what he called “the collective unconscious.”
Thus, Freud and Jung attempted to illuminate what symbols mean to an individual (because of his or her life history) or to everyone (because of inborn knowledge or shared experiences). To them, the mysteries of the mind concerned the deep, true meaning of mental events. Thinking of water actually means X, which is really not about water, and dreaming of falling really means Y, which is not really about falling. To them, one does X (e.g., a slip of the tongue) because of Y, which is not obviously related to the malapropism. One dreams of falling, because one is worried that one’s soccer team will be dropped to second division, for example.
Regarding the brain, Freud and Jung were interested primarily in “semantic” (meaning) processes, which are largely carried out by the medial temporal lobes. It is important to circumscribe the kinds of processes in which they were interested. As in the anecdote above, semantics are often associated with one’s desires and motivations.
Of course, the popular press became interested in these insights, and of course, people at cocktail parties wanted to discuss the deep meaning of their own dreams and random thoughts. All symbols and thoughts held by one now became much more special. Regardless of the validity of the conclusions by Freud and Jung (many of which were controversial), it is important to note that these mysteries concern semantics—that is, the meaning of things. And the meaning of things naturally varies to some extent across individuals. The sight of a piano means one thing to a frustrated musician; it means something else to a young child; and it means yet a different thing to a piano tuner. And the sight of certain colors might sadden someone who is a fan of a soccer team that wears those colors and that just lost a very close match.
Freud, through various kinds of analyses, was trying to ascertain the deep meaning of dream images, actions, and out-of-the-blue thoughts for an individual. To find out the true meaning, one must know much about the individual, about his or her history. The conclusions about the meaning of a symbol might be correct or wrong, but in either case, the question was about the true, deep meaning of the symbol (e.g., the meaning of “the sun”).
When an undergraduate student participates in one of my experiments, I do not know all the associations that he or she has toward, say, the image of a sun or a dog. For the latter, the image could be a generic line drawing of the dog. This would be the stimulus, and the activations in the temporal lobes in response to the stimulus would be the “semantic activation.” The participant might be a dog lover or could be a dog trainer or could be fearful of dogs, because of some past event that may or not be remembered (e.g., a dog barked at the participant when he or she was very little). Thus, to me, the experimenter, the meaning of “dog” to a particular participant is an unknown, at least to a consequential extent. To me, this is an unknown. However, that a stimulus will activate mental associations and meanings is, at least conceptually, not a real mystery today in cognitive science.
It is true that much is unknown about the semantic process, certainly, but it is not a mystery in the sense that it is what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn would call an “anomaly” in the current scientific approach. There are plenty of neural network models, and other kinds of models, that explain how neurons in the temporal lobe reflecting “semantic representations”—the meaning of objects or words—can be activated by external stimuli and possess meanings that are peculiar to an individual. Freud and Jung were trying to crack the ‘mystery’ of what a particular thing meant to an individual (or humanity, in the case of Jung). This was their mystery about the mind. But this is not a deep mystery regarding how the mind works. What is a deep mystery, and continues to be an “anomaly” in the current approach of the cognitive sciences is how neurons are capable of generating conscious states, the subjective experiences that you and I have every day, every waking moment—and in dreams.
The neurons, each of which is unconscious, form networks that, somehow, create conscious experiences, be they of after-images, the smell of coffee, or ringing in the ears. The cardinal mystery regarding how the mind works is consciousness. It is important to note that Freud and Jung were trying to crack a different kind of “deep” puzzle. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/consciousness-and-the-brain/202401/the-unknown-vs-the-mysterious
Oriana:
Of special significance here is the phenomenon of EMERGENCE. "Emergence describes the distinct patterns and behaviors that can arise out of complex systems." When only details are observed, the picture appears to be chaotic. Cells appear to generate random electric pulses, but when combined together with other seemingly chaotic cells, we get phenomena such as heart beat or neural activity. Or, to change imagery to more "macro," when birds start congregating in large and seemingly formless groups, we can expect the emergence of an orderly migration.
Now, it doesn't get us very far to say that the theories of chaos and emergence account for much of our physiological function. We can't even define consciousness to everyone's satisfaction, much less relate its quality to its physiological/bio-electric origins. But hopefully we are at least asking empirically verifiable questions.
*
“FREUD’S LAST SESSION”: THEORY AND SUFFERING
~ “Freud’s Last Session,” directed by Matthew Brown and starring Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud and Matthew Goode as C.S. Lewis, is a period piece set in 1939 London, just as Britain is threatened by Nazi Germany. Based on a two-person stage play by Mark St. Germain, which won the 2011 Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Play, it imagines a possible encounter between Freud and Lewis as humans and thinkers.
The film sees them debating between reason and the existence of God, with the very real backdrop of war, suffering, and disconnections around them. It might be of keenest interest to those interested in psychoanalysis, Christian theology, or the lives of these two men. I liked the cinematography, which reminded me of moody Old Masters oil paintings, and I enjoyed the acting. The film humanizes Freud and Lewis, but also had me rolling my eyes and wincing at analytic concepts and techniques which are revered as gospel to this day.
If you’re interested in Freud on film, you might want to also check out “A Dangerous Method” (my review in references), which portrays Freud and Jung. If you’re interested in the evolution of therapy, I highly recommend “Yalom’s Cure: A Guide to Happiness” available on Kanopy. I found Yalom’s approach most like my own, and in the film, Yalom says his years of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic training were “a waste of time.” Take that, Siggy!
Freud in this film, like the Freud in “A Dangerous Method” seems quite conscious of being and needing to be a “great man,” and perhaps favoring authority over humility, assertion over reception, certainty of theory over uncertainties in relatedness. He’s rubbed elbows with Einstein, essentially founded an entire profession, and set in motion what has been called a “Copernican revolution” in psychology.
Analysis names important concepts, like the unconscious, transference (which I prefer to think of as a transmission), and boundaries, and is one route to naming, understanding, and validating difficult emotional states. Freud and Freudian analysis have stalwarts, defenders, and detractors to this day. Janet Malcolm in her classic book Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession described intramural disputes in psychoanalysis in which those who differed with classic Freudian psychoanalytic theory were accused of having Oedipal complexes about Freud, and long-running debates in analytic schools between relatedness and compassion versus distance and austerity.
I am actually really glad I didn’t study analytic theory in depth before I started working with patients and entering my own therapy. I learned to think and feel for myself, rather than adhere to a “school.” People are different from theory, and I really find Freud’s “model” of human psychology and the classic psychoanalytic techniques he promoted often quite problematic and unhelpful. And yet, many trainees are turning to psychoanalytic education to do depth work, and look to analysis as the holy grail of the inner life.
There have been important revisions in terms of cultural and “relational” analysis, and I’ve appreciated learning from analysts working with narcissism, borderline personality disorders, racism, colonialism, and even love. I’ve met many fine, warm, collegial analysts, and I’m sure most are doing their best to help their patients. But my conclusion so far is that analysis, at best, is far better at deconstruction than reconstruction and repair.
Analysis has made fine contributions to the understanding the origins of psychological suffering in early childhood experiences — but there’s a whole lot more to it than that, and not all analysts are prepared to go there. Some analysts operate from a critical and not compassionate perspective. Some analysts are quite narcissistic themselves and, not infrequently, they inhabit institutions where they promote being “right” rather than related. Some are more comfortable in their heads rather than their hearts.
Many analysts seem to favor an evocative and cerebral absence and abstinence, allowing patients to flounder, but perhaps also to explore their needs, belongings, fantasies, and wishes. Some, like Orna Guralnik in Showtime’s “Couples Therapy” are adept at unearthing childhood trauma and, from a power position, creating the conditions for catharsis. (See my review of her show in references.) The 2023 Holmes Commission report (in references) revealed that analysts and analytic institutions have great difficulty dealing with racialized experiences, racism, and racial enactments. Freudian analysis and psychiatry famously failed to understand and pathologized homosexuality until the 1970s.
I favor relational cultural theory, whose central insight is that “suffering is a crisis in connection, and the opposite of suffering is belonging.” I’ve written that even affects (emotional experiences) need belonging – meaning validation, understanding, and comforting, even as the patient becomes more aware of their own inner life. Patients often come to us with inherent self-worth and relatedness eroded, and need support and growth in these areas.
Yet analysis can become pathologizing, instead of humanizing. Indeed, in the film Freud delivers cutting “analyses” off-the-cuff which seemed horribly cruel and unnecessary. After making a grand interpretation, he was fond of lighting a cigar in celebration. One of own mentors, Seymour Boorstein, was classically trained as an analyst, but he always told me "don't add insight to injury; instead of an insight, give them a crust of bread." He would also raise the ire of colleagues by asking in case conferences, "do you like the patient?" He told me that he only later became brave enough to ask "do you love the patient? If you don't love your patient, then the therapy won't work." His words were a reminder for me to work harder at loving and caring for my patients.
Relational cultural theory, and compassion more broadly, recognize shared humanity, even in distressing states or variations in character and personality. But we know best what we treat. In fact, “we are who we treat!” And different people might benefit from different approaches. And most good depth therapists can modify their approach based on their patients’ needs. Most important is learning from our patients — retaining a “beginner’s mind” to see the world through their eyes and relating to them thoughtfully, compassionately, and knowledgeably; not as “problems to be solved,” or as completely separate individuals constructed only of their personal life history (a stereotypical analytic view), but people to be cherished in some way, who exist in a broader cultural and historical context, and who need us to be there for them. As humans, we make each other special with our time and attention.
Therapy and analysis deal with human suffering — and there’s a lot of it. “Freud’s Last Session” gets most real and poignant where we see Freud dealing with his own pain and in need of aid from his daughter, doctors, pain medications, and even Lewis. He is perhaps most helpful to Lewis when Lewis experiences a flashback of being in the trenches in WWI. He is really there for him. Anna Freud (Liv Lisa Fries) is pathologized for her love of her father, and her love of another woman. Freud seems to blame himself for her lesbian identity. Their fraught relationship of intimacy, power imbalance, confused relatedness, unmet needs, and disconnection speaks volumes about "what analysis hath wrought" so to speak.
All these people lean on each other in a time when conflict and war threaten them all. And perhaps Lewis’s God is a manifestation of his needs for order, values, meaning, and to be cared for, as Freud would have it – or an experience of awe and mysterious connections that gave him faith and hope in trying personal and cultural times. In any case, Lewis lives between concrete and emotional reality, and his theory of God, and Freud lives between his theory of psychic suffering and actual relationships with other human beings. In both men we see imperfect attempts to make sense of the world and the hope that, in making sense of it, we might somehow either tame suffering or inspire others to look more closely at it.
Psychotherapy has advanced far beyond the reckonings of Freud. Neurobiology, social psychology, cultural psychology, as well as the science of mind offer great possibilities for the relief of suffering. But technology, human isolation, and profoundly interdependent global stimuli and crises make for a dangerous stew of possibilities. You don’t need to be an analyst to recognize we need to affirm and cultivate our better angels of reason, compassion, and shared humanity to transform our predicament to possibility, our suffering into belonging, our paths apart into reunion. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-pacific-heart/202401/freuds-last-session-theory-suffering-and-humanity
Oriana:
I was unable to see the movie, but managed to find the screenplay. I realize that it’s not the same as watching a master actor like Hopkins, but at least I read the dialogue, which helps grasp the arguments for and against the existence of a deity. A secondary matter is Freud’s dependence on the care provided by his youngest daughter, Anne, which disrupts her work. Of course Freud regards himself as Anne's priority.
Anne is also uncomfortable trying to conceal from her father her lesbian relationship with Dorothy Burlingham, an heiress to the Tiffany fortune. Freud believed that male homosexuality was “harmless,” but female homosexuality threatened the social order: lesbians rejected any need for men. And women, Freud proclaimed, depend on men to guide them in matters of morality. (Only men acquire morality thanks to the fear of castration, Freud claimed — yes, he really staked everything on sex.)
Some years ago I went through a period of reading some of Freud’s books (he was a good writer, lucid and elegant) and well as books and articles about Freud. The latter always mentioned Anna’s devotion to her father and Freud’s worry that Anna was going to pay a steep personal price for that devotion. Yet none of those books or articles mentioned Anna’s homoeroticism. They skirted it by saying that Anna never married or had children — so yes, indeed she paid a price. But did she, if she was happily partnered with another woman, and enjoyed working with children? For whatever reason, that used to be a secret not all that long ago. Are happy lesbians still seen as such a threat to the established social order?
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“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” ~ attributed to Winston Churchill.
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FAMILY ESTRAGEMENT: WHY ADULTS ARE CUTTING OFF THEIR PARENTS
~ Polarized politics and a growing awareness of how difficult relationships can impact our mental health are fueling family estrangement, say psychologists.
It was a heated Skype conversation about race relations that led Scott to cut off all contact with his parents in 2019. His mother was angry he’d supported a civil rights activist on social media, he says; she said “a lot of really awful racist things”, while his seven-year-old son was in earshot.
“There was very much a parental feeling like ‘you can’t say that in front of my child, that's not the way we're going to raise our kids’,” explains the father-of-two, who lives in Northern Europe. Scott says the final straw came when his father tried to defend his mother’s viewpoint in an email, which included a link to a white supremacist video. He was baffled his parents could not comprehend the reality of people being victimized because of their background, especially given his own family history. “‘This is insane – you're Jewish’, I said. ‘Many people in our family were killed in Auschwitz’.”
It wasn’t the first time Scott had experienced a clash in values with his parents. But it was the last time he chose to see or speak to them.
Despite a lack of hard data, there is a growing perception among therapists, psychologists and sociologists that this kind of intentional parent-child ‘break-up’ is on the rise in western countries.
Formally known as ‘estrangement’, experts’ definitions of the concept differ slightly, but the term is broadly used for situations in which someone cuts off all communication with one or more relatives, a situation that continues for the long-term, even if those they’ve sought to split from try to re-establish a connection.
“The declaration of ‘I am done’ with a family member is a powerful and distinct phenomenon,” explains Karl Andrew Pillemer, professor of human development at Cornell University. “It is different from family feuds, from high-conflict situations and from relationships that are emotionally distant but still include contact.”
After realizing there were few major studies of family estrangement, he carried out a nationwide survey for his 2020 book Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. The survey showed more than one in four Americans reported being estranged from another relative. Similar research for British estrangement charity Stand Alone suggests the phenomenon affects one in five families in the UK, while academic researchers and therapists in Australia and Canada also say they’re witnessing a “silent epidemic” of family break-ups.
On social media, there’s been a boom in online support groups for adult children who’ve chosen to be estranged, including one Scott is involved in, which has thousands of members. “Our numbers in the group have been rising steadily,” he says. “I think it’s becoming more and more common.”
The fact that estrangement between parents and their adult children seems to be on the rise – or at least is increasingly discussed – seems to be down to a complex web of cultural and psychological factors. And the trend raises plenty of questions about its impact on both individuals and society.
Past experiences and present values
Although research is limited, most break-ups between a parent and a grown-up child tend to be initiated by the child, says Joshua Coleman, psychologist and author of The Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict. One of the most common reasons for this is past or present abuse by the parent, whether emotional, verbal, physical or sexual. Divorce is another frequent influence, with consequences ranging from the adult child “taking sides”, to new people coming into the family such as stepsiblings or stepparents, which can fuel divisions over both “financial and emotional resources”.
Clashes in values – as experienced by Scott and his parents – are also increasingly thought to play a role. A study published in October by Coleman and the University of Wisconsin, US, showed value-based disagreements were mentioned by more than one in three mothers of estranged children. Pillemer’s recent research has also highlighted value differences as a “major factor” in estrangements, with conflicts resulting from “issues such as same sex-preference, religious differences or adopting alternative lifestyles”.
Both experts believe at least part of the context for this is increased political and cultural polarization in recent years. In the US, an Ipsos poll reported a rise in family rifts after the 2016 election, while research by academics at Stanford University in 2012 suggested a larger proportion of parents could be unhappy if their children married someone who supported a rival political party, which was far less true a decade earlier. A recent UK study found that one in 10 people had fallen out with a relative over Brexit. “These studies highlight the way that identity has become a far greater determinant of whom we choose to keep close or to let go,” says Coleman.
Scott says he’s never discussed his voting preferences with his parents. But his decision to cut them off was partly influenced by his and his wife’s heightened awareness of social issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement and MeToo. He says other adult children in his online support group have fallen out due to value-based disagreements connected to the pandemic, from older parents refusing to get vaccinated to rows over conspiracy theories about the source of the virus.
The mental health factor
Experts believe our growing awareness of mental health, and how toxic or abusive family relationships can affect our wellbeing, is also impacting on estrangement.
“While there’s nothing especially modern about family conflict or a desire to feel insulated from it, conceptualizing the estrangement of a family member as an expression of personal growth, as it is commonly done today, is almost certainly new,” says Coleman. “Deciding which people to keep in or out of one’s life has become an important strategy.”
Sam, who’s in her twenties and lives in the UK, says she grew up in a volatile household where both parents were heavy drinkers. She largely stopped speaking to her parents straight after leaving home for university, and says she cut ties for good after witnessing her father verbally abusing her six-year-old cousin at a funeral. Having therapy helped her recognize her own experiences as “more than just bad parenting” and process their psychological impact. “I came to understand that ‘abuse’ and ‘neglect’ were words that described my childhood. Just because I wasn't hit didn't mean I wasn't harmed.”
She agrees with Coleman it’s “becoming more socially acceptable” to cut ties with family members. “Mental health is more talked about now so it’s easier to say, ‘These people are bad for my mental health’. I think, as well, people are getting more confident at drawing their own boundaries and saying ‘no’ to people.”
The rise of individualism
Coleman argues our increased focus on personal well-being has happened in parallel with other wider trends, such as a shift towards a more “individualistic culture”. Many of us are much less reliant on relatives than previous generations.
“Not needing a family member for support or because you plan to inherit the family farm means that who we choose to spend time with is based more on our identities and aspirations for growth than survival or necessity,” he explains. “Today, nothing ties an adult child to a parent beyond that adult child’s desire to have that relationship.”
Increased opportunities to live and work in different cities or even countries from our adult families can also help facilitate a parental break-up, simply by adding physical distance.
“It’s been much easier for me to move around than it would have been probably 20 years ago,” agrees Faizah, who is British with a South Asian background, and has avoided living in the same area as her family since 2014.
She says she cut ties with her parents because of “controlling” behaviors like preventing her from going to job interviews, wanting an influence on her friendships and putting pressure on her to get married straight after her studies. “They didn’t respect my boundaries,” she says. “I just want to have ownership over my own life and make my own choices.”
The impact of estrangement
There are strong positives for many estranged adult children who’ve detached themselves from what they believe are damaging parental relationships. “The research shows that the majority of adult children say it was for the best,” says Coleman.
But while improved mental health and perceived increased freedom are common outcomes of estrangement, Pillemer argues the decision can also create feelings of instability, humiliation and stress.
“The intentional, active severing of personal ties differs from other kinds of loss,” he explains. “In addition, people lose the practical benefits of being part of a family: material support, for example, and the sense of belonging to a stable group of people who know one another well.”
Feelings of loneliness and stigma seem to have been exacerbated for many estranged people during the pandemic. While the ‘Zoom boom’ enabled some families to feel closer and stay in touch more regularly, recent UK research suggests that adults with severed ties felt even more aware of missing out on family life during lockdown. Other studies point to Christmas and religious festivals being especially challenging periods for estranged relatives.
“I have my own family and my partner and my close friends, but nothing replaces those traditions you have with your parents,” agrees Faizah. Now in her thirties, she still finds the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr particularly tricky, even though she’s distanced herself from her parents’ religion. “It’s so tough. It’s so lonely... and I do miss my mum’s cooking.”
Choosing not to stay in touch with parents can have a knock-on effect on future family bonds and traditions, too. “For me, the biggest regret is my kids growing up without grandparents,” says Scott . “It’s preferable to [my parents] saying – gosh, I don’t know what – to them [but] I feel like my kids are missing out.”
Of course, all of this also has an impact on the parents who have, often unwillingly, been cut out of their children’s – and potentially grandchildren’s – lives. “Most parents are made miserable by it,” says Coleman. As well as losing their own footing in the traditional family unit, they typically “describe profound feelings of loss, shame and regret”.
Scott says his mother recently tried calling him. But he texted her saying he’d only consider re-establishing contact with his children if she recognized her comments had been “horribly racist” and apologized. So far, he says she hasn’t done that. “Even if all those things happened, I would always limit what I tell them about my life and certainly supervise any visits with the kids. Unfortunately, I don’t see any of that happening.”
Attempting to bridge rifts?
With political divisions center-stage in many nations, as well as increasing individualism in cultures around the world, many experts believe the parent-child ‘break-up’ trend will stick around.
“My prediction is that it's either going to get worse or stay the same,” says Coleman. “Family relationships are going to be based much more on pursuing happiness and personal growth, and less on emphasizing duty, obligation or responsibility.”
Pillemer argues that we shouldn’t rule out attempting to bridge rifts, however, particularly those stemming from opposing politics or values (as opposed to abusive or damaging behaviors).
“If the prior relationship was relatively close (or at least not conflictual), I think there is evidence that many family members can restore the relationship. It does involve, however, agreeing on a ‘demilitarized zone’ in which politics cannot be discussed,” he says.
For his book, he interviewed over 100 estranged people who had successfully reconciled, and found the process was actually framed by many as “an engine for personal growth”. “It is of course not for everyone, but for a number of people, bridging a rift, even if the relationship was imperfect, was a source of self-esteem and personal pride.”
He argues that both more detailed longitudinal studies and clinical attention are needed to get the topic of estrangement further “out of the shadows and into the clear light of open discussion”. “We need researchers to find better solutions — both for people who want to reconcile, and for help in coping with people in permanent estrangements.”
Scott welcomes the growing interest in adult break-ups. “I think it will help lots of people,” he says. “There is still a big stigma around estrangement. We see these questions in the group a lot: ‘What do you tell people?’ or ‘How do you bring it up when dating?".
But he’s unlikely to reconcile with his own parents, unless they recognize they’ve been racist. “The whole ‘blood is thicker than water’ — I mean, that's great if you have a cool family, but if you're saddled with toxic people, it's just not doable.”
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20211201-family-estrangement-why-adults-are-cutting-off-their-parents
Oriana:
Estrangement seems eminently solvable — you may simply agree not to discuss certain subjects. Religion and politics are the two most common areas of family disagreement, and both are relatively easy to leave out from discussion.
In the past, family had a bigger weapon against dissenters and anyone who might be called a "black sheep" — disowning. If you were disowned, it wasn't just that wouldn't get your share of the inheritance. It was as if you were dead, but worse: your name was never mentioned, memories were revised to exclude you. You became a non-person — and back then, the family was the most powerful social institution that existed.
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AFTER MY MOTHER DIED, I FOUND COMFORT IN A MEDIEVAL TALE FROM ANDALUSIA
~ My mom died of cancer in November 2020 and, as clichéd as it may sound, not a day goes by that I do not think of her and miss her. Her death sparked in me a need to discuss death and grief. It is in talking about it, contemplating it, facing it, and inviting others to join me in these discussions, that I have been able to construct ways forward.
While the specifics of my loss are mine, I know I am not alone in knowing grief. Perhaps many of you reading this also know its heaviness. As a medievalist and literary scholar, it is unsurprising that I find comfort in stories and the written word. One text that particularly resonates with my reaction to grief is the Andalusi polymath Ibn Tufayl’s 12th-century philosophical tale, Hayy Ibn Yaqzān (‘Alive Son of Awake’).
Among other details, it is an autodidactic story where the protagonist contemplates his place within the universe. This self-guided journey is prompted by the death of the only mother he’s ever known, a gazelle who raised him from infancy. It is this life-changing loss that prompts Hayy to explore the divide between the body and the soul – or the material and the nonmaterial. He meditates on how the soul must be part of a larger creational energy uniting everything in nature, ultimately discovering ‘God’ without any revelatory text.
In Hayy I saw aspects of myself: someone whose mother-loss prompted them to question existence and seek a way to support the weight. This story doesn’t ‘solve’ grief, nor should we want anything to do so, but it does prompt questions and reflections that can help us lean into the discomfort. What can we do when we are forced to face death? Do we continue ignoring it or do we weave it into our understanding, possibly creating a more nuanced appreciation for both the fleetingness of life and its interconnected nature? I find that it is this very activity that can arm us with the tools needed to continue living in a world that no longer physically holds our loved ones as we once knew them.
Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzān circulated widely in North Africa and Iberia in its original Arabic until the 14th century when it was translated into Hebrew. By the 17th century, it was translated into Latin and English, and it has many modern editions today. Regardless of the language, the core message is that of how, through introspection, without the intervention of social norms or religion, one can reach a mystical understanding of the cosmos.
As a work, it is widely philosophical but especially powerful considering the protagonist’s connection with grief and love. Indeed, Hayy’s desire to understand his role in the cosmos is triggered by the death of his gazelle-mother. She raised him, and years later, upon seeing her lifeless body, he tries to fix her. He searches her body for a blockage yet sees no physical damage. He concludes that something is missing and that she ‘who had nursed him and showed him so much kindness could only be that being which had departed’ and that her body was ‘simply a tool of this being’. Her form changed.
Her death opened his mind to conceiving existence beyond the material world and drove him to see the cyclical nature of energy in the ever-transforming world. In apprehending these patterns, Hayy came to the realization that ‘all physical things, despite the involvement of diversity in some respects, are one in reality’. If everything is one, then nothing is lost, it is simply changed. When applied to the death, this meant that those that died ‘have taken off one form and put on another’. This means that his mother, and by extension anyone, never truly dies in the sense of ceasing to exist, but rather takes on a new form, free from the constraints of any one material entity.
For me, this type of conclusion was so very comforting. My loss stems from the shed material appearance of the energy that fueled my mom. I will always long for the form she once held, that way of being, but seeing the nonmaterial as part of the larger cosmic energy calms much of my anxiety. It’s not that she, as she was, is now floating about, but rather that the energy that made her remains, even with the loss of her material form.
While written in an Islamic context, a lot of what Hayy realizes through observation and contemplation mirrors many mystical, neo-Platonic, Sufi and hermetic ways of thinking. These different approaches share a common theme of unity. Indeed, Hayy is able to reach some of the same conclusions without any official doctrine. It is this universality that most captured my attention. One of his conclusions is that everything is cosmically connected through energy, and that this unity is powered by love – something reinforced in the introductory pages of the story. Indeed, many magical treatises of the time echo the power of love.
This cyclical thesis can form part of more institutionalized modes of knowledge but is also inherently accessible to us without direct instruction through observation, as Hayy demonstrates. Within this line of thinking, the good news is that love, as something nonmaterial, remains. Moreover, the energy that fueled loved ones lingers as a part of the cosmos, just manifested differently. Everything is knit together. While the materiality of existence creates difference and individuality, there is a comfort in seeing the interconnection of all things.
We don’t have to become wild mystics like Hayy and seclude ourselves to benefit from recognizing the added layer of unity within difference. In many modern societies, death, grief and loss are rarely discussed openly. In such situations, a disposition to consider the ways nothing is really destroyed, but is rather transformed yet also interconnected, can be very rare to encounter – in fact, something many never encounter – but it can also bring immense metaphysical comfort.
Practically, what this framework does for me regarding my mom’s death is that it allows me to move forward with her in shifting how I understood what ‘her’ was. Now I am deviating slightly with a more secular approach to Hayy’s discoveries and Ibn Tufayl’s commentary on the ways of knowing ‘God’ or the universe, but I think that it is such contemplations and other pantheistic/panentheistic non-dual mentalities that are essential for embracing grief in a world that too often stifles such discussions as taboo. Just as in the case with Hayy, deep loss can trigger existential questions that have the potential to progressively drive forward conversations of death and grief, despite their relegation to the margins.
As long as I identify with my individual material self, I will always long for mi mami’s physical presence as I knew it. The cyclical nature of life and death, of the transformation of nonmaterial energies that give life to the material, helps me to see beyond my self, a picture of the cosmos really, that helps me slowly let go of the fear of death. It’s still very much an endeavor in progress. Even a fleeting awareness of the temporality of it all helps me continue to see her in beautiful scenes of nature like sunrises, the Sun’s rays reflecting fall leaves as birds fly by, or the various stages of the Moon in the night sky. There is energy all around us and energy within us. Whether or not we’ve met grief yet, beginning to have these conversations can help us map a path we will all inevitably walk. ~
https://psyche.co/ideas/after-mom-died-i-found-great-comfort-in-a-medieval-andalusian-tale?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=b1ab7f2d30-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_01_26&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-a9a3bdf830-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
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THE “LIVING SKIN” OF TINY PLANTS PROTECTS THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA
Rammed earth portions of the Great Wall of China — built by compressing natural materials with soils — have been regarded as a weak point in its structure. But these swaths of the iconic landmark developed a natural line of defense against the looming risk of deterioration, a new study has found.
These soil surfaces on the Great Wall are covered by a “living skin” of tiny, rootless plants and microorganisms known as biocrusts that are a source of the heritage site’s staying power, according to soil ecologist Matthew Bowker, a coauthor of the study published December 8 in the journal Science Advances.
“(Biocrusts) are common throughout the world on soils of dry regions, but we don’t typically look for them on human-built structures,” said Bowker, an associate professor at Northern Arizona University, in an email.
Past studies have found lichen and moss biocrusts to be a destructive threat to modern heritage stone structures due to the microbial communities’ long-term impacts on aesthetic value, production of acid and other metabolites, and alteration of microenvironments, which may cause erosion and rock weathering. Those findings have led to the removal of plants growing on the top of parts of the Great Wall. But the effects of biocrusts look different for earthen landmarks, and communities of cyanobacteria and moss actually increase the Great Wall’s stability and improve its resistance to erosion, according to the new paper.
Examining samples taken from over 300 miles (483 kilometers) across eight rammed earth sections of the site built during the Ming Dynasty between 1368 and 1644, the study authors found that more than two-thirds of the area is covered in biocrusts. When the researchers compared the stability and strength of samples layered in biocrust with samples sans “Earth’s living skin,” they discovered that samples with biocrusts were as much as three times stronger than those without.
“They thought this kind of vegetation was destroying the Great Wall. Our results show the contrary,” said study coauthor Bo Xiao, a professor of soil science at China Agricultural University. “Biocrusts are very widespread on the Great Wall and their existence is very beneficial to the protection of it.”
LIKE A BLANKET
Made up of components such as cyanobacteria, algae, moss, fungi and lichen, biocrusts dwell on the topsoil of drylands. Covering an estimated 12% of the planet’s surface, the communities of tiny plants and microorganisms can take decades, or longer, to develop. Forming miniature ecosystems, biocrusts stabilize soil, increase water retention, and regulate nitrogen and carbon fixation.
They are able to do so partly thanks to a dense biomass, which acts as an “anti-infiltration layer” for soil pores under the right conditions, as well as a natural absorption of nutrients that promote salt damage. The secretions and structural layers of biocrusts also intertwine to form a “sticky network” of aggregating soil particles that promote strength and stability against corrosive forces threatening the Great Wall, according to the new study.
Climatic conditions, the type of structure and type of biocrust all play a role in a biocrust’s protective function, with its reduction of erodibility “much greater” than its risk of weathering, the researchers found.
Compared with bare rammed earth, the cyanobacteria, moss and lichen biocrust-covered sections of the Great Wall exhibited reduced porosity, water-holding capacity, erodibility and salinity by up to 48%, while increasing compressive strength, penetration resistance, shear strength and aggregate stability by up to 321%. Of the bunch, the moss biocrusts were found to be the most stable.
“(Biocrusts) cover the Great Wall like a blanket that separates the Great Wall from air, from water, from wind,” Xiao said.
Working to keep water out and prevent salt buildup, the biocrusts resist chemical weathering, he noted, producing substances that act as a “glue” for soil particles to bind together against dispersion, making soil properties stronger.
Most of the communities that make up a biocrust start from a single organism that grows and makes the environments it grows within suitable for others. Although they are still vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, these constantly evolving organisms are expected to deploy internal mechanisms to adapt to future extremes, said Emmanuel Salifu, an assistant professor at Arizona State University who studies nature-based solutions for sustainable engineering.
That inherent adaptability makes biocrusts great contenders for nature-based interventions to address structural conservation in our warming world, said Salifu, who was not involved with the new study.
“Even if we have warmer temperatures, they are already suited to performing in those conditions,” he said. “We hypothesize that they will be better able to survive if we engineer their growth at scale.”
Wind erosion, rainfall scouring, salinization and freeze-thaw cycles have led to cracking and disintegration across the thousands of miles of structures that link together the Great Wall, which is at risk of severe deterioration and vulnerable to collapse. Rising temperatures and increasing rainfall could also result in a reduction of the wall’s biocrust cover.
Still, the wider construction industry remains divided over the historic conservation potential of biocrusts, according to Salifu.
“The conventional idea is that biological growth is not great for structures. It affects the aesthetics, it leads to degradation, affects the overall structural integrity,” he said. However, there is a lack of concrete research that supports those conclusions, Salifu added, noting that “the jury is still out on that.”
Salifu sees the new study as evidence of the potential advantages to engineering biocrusts for the conservation of earthen heritage sites — though that is still an emerging field. The research establishes that the natural communities of plants and microorganisms “have the capacity to improve the structural integrity, longevity and durability of earthen structures like the Great Wall of China,” Salifu said.
The paper “goes a long way in further pushing the hand on the clock in bringing the industry closer to where we might be able to start thinking about (engineering biocrusts),” he noted.
The study’s authors also say their work makes a case for exploring the possibility of cultivating biocrusts for preservation of other rammed earth heritage sites worldwide.
Beyond its status as a tourist destination that draws millions of visitors each year, the Great Wall has great cultural relevance, which is why the biocrusts preserving it are so significant, Xiao said.
“The Great Wall is the cultural center of Chinese civilization,” he told CNN. “We should do our best to protect it for our next generations. For our children, for our grandchildren.”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/04/world/great-wall-biocrusts-strength-living-skin-scn
Note: The total length of all sections of the Great Wall of China ever built adds up to about 21,196 kilometers (13,171 miles),
including overlapping sections that were rebuilt. The wall constructed
during the Ming dynasty, the most well-preserved section, is about 8,850
kilometers (5,499 miles) long.
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BREASTMILK CONTAINS A MOLECULE THAT HELPS TO ENHANCE BRAIN CONNECTIVITY
A new study published in July 2023 found that a sugar molecule that is a component of breastmilk called myo-inositol is important in enhancing brain connectivity. The researchers studied breastmilk samples from mothers in very different locations (Cincinnati, Mexico City, and Shanghai) to make sure that they were identifying a substance that was universal to breastmilk (that is, not dependent on diet, race, or location).
Myo-inositol is present in the highest concentrations in early breastfeeding (during the first months of life) and gradually decreases over the first year (however, it is still found in breast milk at 12 months). See the graph below for the concentrations of myo-inositol over the first year of life. The researchers found that putting this molecule with neurons (translation: brain cells) increased connectivity among these cells.
Although we don’t necessarily know that this molecule makes brains more efficient or more intelligent in any way—only that it increases connectivity, this study suggests three important lessons about breastmilk:
1) Breastmilk is likely more than just sustenance and calories for an infant but may provide micronutrients that are involved in brain development,
2) breastmilk may have the same benefits regardless of diet—the researchers found that the concentration of myo-inositol was the same regardless of a mother’s location or diet,
3) breastmilk adapts to the baby’s needs over the course of development—this molecule is produced in the highest concentration when the baby needs it the most (when brain cells are forming connections in the first few months of life)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-translator/202401/3-key-findings-about-breastfeeding
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WHY COLDS AND FLU ARE MORE FREQUENT IN WINTER
There’s a chill is in the air, and you all know what that means — it’s time for cold and flu season, when it seems everyone you know is suddenly sneezing, sniffling or worse. It’s almost as if those pesky cold and flu germs whirl in with the first blast of winter weather.
Yet germs are present year-round — just think back to your last summer cold. So why do people get more colds, flu and now Covid-19 when it’s chilly outside?
In what they called a “breakthrough,” scientists uncovered the biological reason we get more respiratory illnesses in winter — the cold air itself damages the immune response occurring in the nose.
“This is the first time that we have a biologic, molecular explanation regarding one factor of our innate immune response that appears to be limited by colder temperatures,” said rhinologist Dr. Zara Patel, a professor of otolaryngology and head and neck surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine in California. She was not involved in the new study.
In fact, reducing the temperature inside the nose by as little as 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) kills nearly 50% of the billions of helpful bacteria-fighting cells and viruses in the nostrils, according to the 2022 study published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
“Cold air is associated with increased viral infection because you’ve essentially lost half of your immunity just by that small drop in temperature,” said study author Dr. Benjamin Bleier, director of otolaryngology translational research at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
“It’s important to remember that these are in vitro studies, meaning that although it is using human tissue in the lab to study this immune response, it is not a study being carried out inside someone’s actual nose,” Patel said in an email. “Often the findings of in vitro studies are confirmed in vivo, but not always.”
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A respiratory virus or bacteria invades the nose, the main point of entry into the body. Immediately, the front of the nose detects the germ, well before the back of the nose is aware of the intruder, the team discovered.
At that point, cells lining the nose immediately begin creating billions of simple copies of themselves called extracellular vesicles, or EV’s.
“EV’s can’t divide like cells can, but they are like little mini versions of cells specifically designed to go and kill these viruses,” Bleier said. “EV’s act as decoys, so now when you inhale a virus, the virus sticks to these decoys instead of sticking to the cells.”
Those “Mini Me’s” are then expelled by the cells into nasal mucus (yes, snot), where they stop invading germs before they can get to their destinations and multiply.
“This is one of, if not the only part of the immune system that leaves your body to go fight the bacteria and viruses before they actually get into your body,” Bleier said.
Once created and dispersed out into nasal secretions, the billions of EV’s then start to swarm the marauding germs, Bleier said.
“It’s like if you kick a hornet’s nest, what happens? You might see a few hornets flying around, but when you kick it, all of them all fly out of the nest to attack before that animal can get into the nest itself,” he said. “That’s the way the body mops up these inhaled viruses so they can never get into the cell in the first place.”
When under attack, the nose increases production of extracellular vesicles by 160%, the study found. There were additional differences: EV’s had many more receptors on their surface than original cells, thus boosting the virus-stopping ability of the billions of extracellular vesicles in the nose.
“Just imagine receptors as little arms that are sticking out, trying to grab on to the viral particles as you breathe them in,” Bleier said. “And we found each vesicle has up to 20 times more receptors on the surface, making them super sticky.”
Cells in the body also contain a viral killer called micro RNA, which attack invading germs. Yet EVs in the nose contained 13 times micro RNA sequences than normal cells, the study found.
So the nose comes to battle armed with some extra superpowers. But what happens to those advantages when cold weather hits?
To find out, Bleier and his team exposed four study participants to 15 minutes of 40-degree-Fahrenheit (4.4-degree-Celsius) temperatures, and then measured conditions inside their nasal cavities.
“What we found is that when you’re exposed to cold air, the temperature in your nose can drop by as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit. And that’s enough to essentially knock out all three of those immune advantages that the nose has,” Bleier said.
In fact, that little bit of coldness in the tip of the nose was enough to take nearly 42% of the extracellular vesicles out of the fight, Bleier said.
“Similarly, you have almost half the amount of those killer micro RNA’s inside each vesicle, and you can have up to a 70% drop in the number of receptors on each vesicle, making them much less sticky,” he said.
What does that do to your ability to fight off colds, flu and Covid-19? It cuts your immune system’s ability to fight off respiratory infections by half, Bleier said.
MASKS HELP — ‘LIKE WEARING A SWEATER ON YOUR NOSE’
As it turns out, the pandemic gave us exactly what we need to help fight off chilly air and keep our immunity high, Bleier said.
“Not only do masks protect you from the direct inhalation of viruses, but it’s also like wearing a sweater on your nose,” he said.
Patel agreed: “The warmer you can keep the intranasal environment, the better this innate immune defense mechanism will be able to work. Maybe yet another reason to wear masks!”
In the future, Bleier expects to see the development of topical nasal medications that build upon this scientific revelation. These new pharmaceuticals will “essentially fool the nose into thinking it has just seen a virus,” he said.
“By having that exposure, you’ll have all these extra hornets flying around in your mucous protecting you,” he added.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/06/health/why-winter-colds-flu-wellness/index.html
It's no longer just because of Covid. And not only because the mask if a physical barrier. The main advantage of wearing a mask in winter could be its ability to keep the nose warm, thus making it more difficult for the virus to get past our first line of defense.
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ending on beauty:
Snow falls
the way we walk.
Slowly.
Without a word.
~ John Guzlowski
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