Archangel Gabriel by Masolino da Panicale, c. 1430PARADISE ANONYMOUS
To me the Archangel came
not with a lily but a branch of flame.
In bed he covered me with wings
so soft I thought I’d drown.
If I roll over, I said, your wing
could break. He said those wings
were made of wishing on a star,
an astral amalgam.
Amalgam! My knees go weak.
I wade in liquid syllables.
Gabriel rustled in my sleep:
God makes love all the time,
his only interest is sex,
that’s what comes of being immortal.
We have dying so we can transcend
the body’s umber aftermath.
In memory of me, Gabriel said,
wear a silk slip like an embrace.
What matters in the end, he said,
is delinquent underwear —
the only heaven you will have,
unless you make it hell.
Black on black fire like the skin
of the ocean at night, I slip
into more slips than dresses now.
O little town of Bethlehem,
O little House of Bread or Breath,
how soft we let thee go.
~ Oriana
This is the title poem of my first full-length collection of poems from Moonrise Press (available on Amazon).
Cover art: Charles Sherman
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MARK TWAIN: NOT AN AMERICAN BUT THE AMERICAN
~ All American literature comes from one book . . . called Huckleberry Finn,' Hemingway declared. The novel remains both one of the most beloved and most banned books in the US.
He was so famous that fan letters addressed to "Mark Twain, God knows where" and "Mark Twain. Somewhere (Try Satan)" found their way to him; the White House accommodatingly forwarded something addressed to "Mark Twain, c/o President Roosevelt". Like Charles Dickens, Twain achieved immense success with his first book, became his nation's most famous and best-loved author, and has remained a national treasure ever since – America's most archetypal writer, an instantly recognizable, white-haired, white-suited, folksy, cantankerous icon.
Since his death on 21 April 1910, Twain's writings have reportedly inspired more commentary than those of any other American author and have been translated into at least 72 languages. Despite being dead for a century, Twain is not only as celebrated as ever, he is also, apparently, just as productive: the first volume of his unexpurgated three-volume autobiography appeared for the first time in 2010, a hundred years after his death.
Like the premature news of his death, however, reports that his autobiography has been embargoed for a century in honor of the author's wishes are somewhat exaggerated. He did indeed decree that it should be withheld for 100 years after his death, but various heavily edited versions have appeared since then, controlled by Twain's surviving daughter, Clara, his first biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, and subsequent editors, all of whom cut anything they deemed offensive or problematic, standardized Twain's idiosyncratic punctuation, and reordered the narrative to create precisely the conventional cradle-to-grave structure he explicitly rejected.
Twain would have been apoplectic at the presumption: one of the letters he included in his drafts, reprinted in the autobiography's first volume, is a rebuke to an editor who dared to alter the great man's diction in his essay on Joan of Arc. Twain responded with an outraged rant restoring each correction with an explanation of his original choice and demanding: "Have you no sense of shades of meaning, in words?”
If the mot juste was always a priority – "I suppose we all have our foibles. I like the exact word, and clarity of statement, and here and there a touch of good grammar for picturesqueness" – structure was always a problem for Twain. As readers have noted since its publication, the plot of Huckleberry Finn, for example, deteriorates markedly at the end; Ernest Hemingway dismissed the story's resolution as a "cheat". Despite having been thinking about an autobiography since at least 1876, it wasn't until 1906 that the writer almost as famous for his lectures as for his books – he has been called America's first stand-up comic – found a method he liked.
He simply hired a stenographer to follow him around and record his stories, while he talked and talked. He had decided by then not to publish for a century, in order that he might speak freely, without considering reputation or others' feelings. "From the first, second, third and fourth editions all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out," he decreed. "There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now. There is no hurry. Wait and see." The spirit of this wish was followed mostly by accident, because the unfinished and multifarious drafts he left when he died made it extremely difficult for scholars to reconstruct.
Twain's eventual solution to the problem of autobiographical structure was characteristic: he ignored it, deciding instead to "start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale," and move on to the next subject. This is exactly what he does, confident that his "combined Autobiography and Diary" would be "admired a good many centuries" as inventing a form "whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face". The result runs to 500,000 peripatetic words across 2,000 pages, the first 700 of which comprise the first volume.
Twain famously announces at the start of Huckleberry Finn that "persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." A similar – if less threatening – caveat could be offered to readers of the autobiography. Those in search of the story of Twain's life should turn to any of a dozen biographies, by a roll-call of eminent American critics; those in search of explosive secrets should read the more controversial revisionist histories.
Twain was by no means free of Victorian inhibitions, and he was vain; consequently there is much he would never reveal. Instead of cupboards and skeletons, the unexpurgated autobiography offers the "storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one's head"; not the "facts and happenings" of Twain's life, but his voice. Fortunately for us, perhaps more than any other writer Twain was his voice; the result, for all its frustrations, is a revelation.
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, Twain spent his childhood in the backwater of Hannibal, Missouri in the decades before the US civil war. After apprenticing as a printer, he worked briefly as a journalist before training as a steamboat pilot, a career interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1861. He served fleetingly as a Confederate soldier before deserting (“his career as a soldier was brief and inglorious,” said the New York Times obituary; in the autobiography Twain includes a sympathetic account of deserting soldiers being shot, without revealing the reason for his sense of identification).
As would Huck Finn, the young Clemens "lit out for the territory" of the west, where Confederate forces were unlikely to pursue him, and sought his fortune in silver-mining. When that failed he returned to reporting, and adopted his pseudonym, a name derived from the call for safe water from riverboat pilots.
His journalism began to establish his reputation; he started lecturing and published his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches in 1867. Two years later, The Innocents Abroad, the story of Twain's trip with a group of other Americans through Europe and the Holy Land (its subtitle was The New Pilgrims' Progress) was a bestseller, selling 100,000 copies within two years.
He followed it in 1872 with Roughing It, another successful travelogue, and for the next 20 years, Twain produced instant classics, including not only The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but perennial favorites such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Prince and the Pauper, works of social criticism such as The Gilded Age and Following the Equator (an early indictment of imperialist racism that deserves rediscovery), Life on the Mississippi, blending autobiography and social history, and The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, a novel using the device of babies switched at birth to expose the malignant senselessness of American racism.
Across their disparate subjects and audiences, what unites Twain's works is his quintessential Americanness. In Twain's obituary, the San Francisco Examiner wrote that he was "curiously and intimately American . . . He was our very own". Twain went further. Living in Europe in the 1890s, he wrote in his notebook: "Are you an American? No, I am not an American. I am the American." He was arrogant, but he wasn't wrong. It isn't just that Twain's books remain as popular as they are critically esteemed, or that his themes – the individual and society, free-market capitalism and social justice, populism and snobbery, deception and honor, idealism and cynicism, freedom and slavery, wilderness and civilization – represent such characteristically American preoccupations.
Twain was just as American in life, in his self-promotion, commercial ambition, pursuit of celebrity and narcissism. (As a child, Twain's daughter Susy began a biography of her famous father, in which she reports his explanation for never attending church: "He couldn't bear to hear any one talk but himself, but [. . .] could listen to himself talk for hours without getting tired, of course he said this in joke, but I've no dought [sic] it was founded on truth.") Equally American was Twain's mix of idealism and cynicism, sentimentality and skepticism. Hemingway pronounced in the 1930s that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn"; but Twain didn't invent only modern American literature — he invented modern American authorship, as well.
And now it turns out he also felt he'd reinvented modern autobiography – a favorite American genre, given its emphasis on hubristic individualism and self-invention – calling his new method, with characteristic modesty: "One of the most memorable literary inventions of the ages . . . it ranks with the steam engine, the printing press & the electric telegraph. I'm the only person who has ever found the right way to build an autobiography." The comparison is revealing: like the old Scottish "makar" for poet, Twain saw his writing as an object he built; by no coincidence, he was in the forefront of debates about intellectual property.
More than businessman, inventor, showman or even writer, at heart Mark Twain was a speculator. His instinctive grasp of branding and publicity was far ahead of his time, as he flung himself enthusiastically into 19th-century new media. Today he'd be blogging and tweeting his heart out – as long as he could monetize it. He sat for hundreds of daguerrotypes and photographs, displaying what he himself called a “talent for posturing” that suited the burgeoning cult of celebrity.
Even his iconic white suit developed from commercial objectives: he first wore it to appear before Congress, arguing that copyright, which he viewed as a patent, should be extended in perpetuity. When that failed, he incorporated his pen name to establish it as a trademark, prompting the New York Times front-page headline: "Mark Twain Turns Into A Corporation". He designed his own board game, as well as "Mark Twain's Patent Self-Pasting Scrapbook", which sounds like something the Duke and Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn might sell. It is no accident that so many of Twain's characters are hucksters and hustlers, or that deception and opportunism are abiding themes in his writing.
He was susceptible to get-rich-quick schemes: the ventures he invested in and promoted – even as he was writing his greatest books – included vineyards, a steam generator, a steam pulley, a watch company, an insurance company, marine telegraphy, a food supplement called Plasmon, a chalk engraving process called Kaolatype, self-adjusting suspenders and the Paige typesetting machine, which bankrupted him at the height of his fame and forced him back on to the lecture circuit to pay his debts, in part, it's been suggested, to protect the value of his "honorable" brand.
(In fact, James Paige, the absurdly impractical and possibly fraudulent inventor of the machine, inspires the most uncensored moment in the first volume. Previous editions included Twain's bitter remark: "Paige and I always met on effusively affectionate terms, & yet he knows perfectly well that if I had him in a steel trap I would shut out all human succor & watch that trap until he died." It turns out that Twain was more specific: "he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.”)
Twain understood publicity so well that he was merely amused when Huck Finn was banned by libraries across the US; when it was banned in Omaha, Nebraska, for example, he sent a telegram to the local newspaper, observing facetiously: "I am tearfully afraid this noise is doing much harm. It has started a number of hitherto spotless people to reading Huck Finn [. . .] The publishers are glad, but it makes me want to borrow a handkerchief and cry.”
Twain's cult of personality – as lecturer and novelist, commentator and social critic, travel and humor writer, gadfly and avuncular curmudgeon – was carefully judged, his folksy humor natural, but strategically deployed. He wrote out of a tradition of tall tales; this is why he was particularly suited to travel writing, which allowed him to be anecdotal and digressive, without much regard to structure or plot. Huck Finn itself is travel writing, in which the raft-trip down the Mississippi provides the picaresque structure for an episodic tale, an Edenic journey away from civilization, as well as an occasionally frightening glimpse of the (all-too-human) wilderness.
Twain was always a barometric writer, with a knack for registering contemporary social pressures in sharp-eyed aphorisms that weren't merely quotable, but often well ahead of their time. His indictments of imperialism in Following the Equator, for example, read like post-colonialist mottos avant la lettre: "The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice"; "There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages"; "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”
The autobiography adds some new aperçus: "Man is the only [creature] that kills for fun; he is the only one that kills in malice, the only one that kills for revenge [. . .] He is the only creature that has a nasty mind." [Oriana: Now we know that male chimps are capable of great cruelty.] The autobiography is driven more often than not by outrage – personal outrage at times, as at the malfeasance of Paige, or the hapless "Joan of Arc" editor, or the American countess from whom the Clemens family rented the Florence villa, whom Twain roundly abuses.
But most of the outrage here is social and political, including startlingly contemporary denunciations of American military interventions abroad, and condemnations of a society increasingly dominated by corrupt corporations, greedy capitalists, and vested interests. Writing of gilded age monopolists and robber barons, Twain's prescience is remarkable: he denounces Jay Gould, the financier and speculator, for example, as "the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country”.
He is equally critical of American foreign policy, condemning its imperialist ventures in Cuba and the Philippines and calling its soldiers "uniformed assassins". He discusses with some pride his affiliation with the "Mugwumps", a faction of Republicans who voted Democrat in the elections of 1884 in protest against the corruption of the Republican candidate. They were derided as traitors in an age when party loyalty was at a premium, but the Mugwumps were reform-minded independent voters. In this respect, they might be held to anticipate the Tea Party movement, but although Twain would have sympathized with the Tea Partiers' anti-tax, small government agenda, he would have loathed their historical ignorance and their susceptibility to manipulation by the same corrupt corporate interests he was railing against.
Twain's social impulses are not always angry; he was extremely gregarious and, if he was egotistical, he was also keenly interested in others, in ways that may frustrate readers in search of a self-portrait. There are far more sketches of others than of Twain, including many once-famous figures who have since been forgotten (such as the memorably named Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby). The better-remembered appear in tantalizing glimpses: Harriet Beecher Stowe ("her mind had decayed, and she was a pathetic figure"), Lewis Carroll ("he was only interesting to look at, for he was the stillest and shyest full-grown man I have ever met except 'Uncle Remus' [Joel Chandler Harris]") and Helen Keller, with whom Twain became good friends; a letter from Keller ends this first volume.
He does relate some (distant) family history, and tell some vivid stories of growing up in Hannibal. In 1849 Missouri was a frontier, where life was ugly, brutish and often short. Twain remembers witnessing much random violence, including stabbings and shootings, a slave brained with a rock "for some small offense", and two brothers trying repeatedly to kill their uncle with a revolver that wouldn't go off. There is a man shot through his eyeglasses, who shed tears and glass when he cried, and a local surgeon who stored his dead daughter in a cave (the model for "McDougal's cave" in Tom Sawyer) to see if the limestone would "petrify" her body – although this is an anecdote that requires the clarification offered by the "Explanatory Notes" at the volume's end.
The exhaustive notes (250 pages of them) are often considerably more informative, factually speaking, than Twain: he never mentions, for example, that his father-in-law was an abolitionist who served as a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad, helped Frederick Douglass to escape and became his friend. Instead, Twain dwells – characteristically – on his father-in-law's success as a businessman.
All the memories are not brutal: there is an extended, evocative meditation, likely to become famous, describing childhood summers on an antebellum Southern farm, a memory of prelapsarian happiness eating green apples and watermelons; and a poignant tale of Jane Clemens teaching her son to consider a young slave boy's feelings. But most readers will doubtless be in search of the childhood tales of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn – and Twain doesn't altogether disappoint, although he certainly digresses.
He admits that Tom Sawyer was largely a young Sam Clemens, while Huck Finn was based on a real boy: "In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed, but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had . . . He was the only really independent person – boy or man – in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by all of us . . . I heard, four years ago, that he was Justice of the Peace in a remote village in Montana, and was a good citizen and greatly respected." Again the helpful notes clarify: there's no evidence for this rumor; Blankenship was repeatedly arrested in Hannibal for stealing food, and died of cholera in 1889, soon after Huck Finn's publication.
It is largely thanks to Huck Finn's continued popularity, and controversy, that Twain has defied his own supposed definition of a classic as "a book which people praise and don't read". Most American schoolchildren still read Huck Finn, and if they don't, it is because it also remains the most frequently banned book in the US. Although it might seem paradoxical that a book could be both its nation's most frequently banned and its most beloved, this is not as silly as it sounds.
Huck Finn is itself an ambivalent story about two of America's foundational preoccupations, individualism and race. Many readers cannot (or will not) distinguish between a book with racist characters and a racist book; the fact that the novel's sympathies are clearly with Huck and Jim, and against all the slave-owners (who are also all the white adults), is outweighed, for these readers, by its casual use of the word "nigger" – even though that was the only word that illiterate backwoods white boys in the 1840s would have used to describe a slave. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer are rednecks, and Twain's language depends on verisimilitude for its comedy. Twain's appreciative ear for American vernacular is another reason for Huck Finn's abiding popularity; its vulgar, demotic language is why Hemingway celebrated it (and why Louisa May Alcott, for one, was among the first generation of readers to argue for banning it).
But most representatively American of all, perhaps, is the way Huck's struggle between selfish individualism and collective responsibility defines the book's action. Almost uniquely, Twain bridges the perpetual ideological divide that continues to cleave America today, right up to next week's midterm elections: he embraced the "mainstream media" of his day, and promoted democratic egalitarianism and social justice – but he was also a free-market libertarian whose small-town populism was marked by a fundamental suspicion of government. Huck Finn registers America's eternal ambivalence about individualism, simultaneously glorifying and condemning the doctrine that has so shaped the nation's history and continues to define it.
Those who finish Huck Finn still doubting Twain's own racial attitudes should read Following the Equator or Pudd'nhead Wilson, in which Twain excoriates the "one-drop rule" (the American law decreeing that "one drop of negro blood" made a person black): "To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black out-voted the other fifteen parts and made her a 'negro'." When writing in an educated voice, rather than Huck Finn's, Twain puts the then-respectful term "negro" in scare quotes, questioning the category itself.
He also paid for the tuition of a young African American who wanted to attend Yale, saying that "he was doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white man to every black man". The autobiography includes some passing references to slavery and a revealing contemporary episode: Twain goes to a lecture supporting Booker T Washington's Tuskegee Institute and comments the next morning that although he'd met Washington many times before, he'd never realized that he was mixed race and had blue eyes: "How unobservant a dull person can be. Always, before, he was black, to me, and I had never noticed whether he had eyes at all, or not.”
Similarly, if less frequently, Twain has been accused of misogyny, and it is true that his female characters tend toward the cardboard. But just as he learned over time to reject the casually cruel racism of his upbringing, so he was persuaded out of his early objections to women's suffrage by his wife, Olivia. A friend of feminists and suffragists, she persuaded him that women's innate moral superiority justified their presence in the public sphere. Soon Twain was donating money to suffragist movements and writing in his notebook: "No civilization can be perfect until exact equality between man and woman is included.”
Without question the greatest love that Twain reveals in this first volume (excepting perhaps self-love) is for his wife and daughters, especially his eldest daughter Susy, who died in 1896, at 24, of meningitis. Twain outlived his adored wife and three of his four children, which might put his supposed misanthropy and bitterness at the end of his life in perspective.
In perhaps the autobiography's saddest moment, Twain tells himself that Susy's death was for the best, because life is unavoidably tragic: "Susy died at the right time, the fortunate time of life; the happy age – twenty-four years. At twenty-four, such a girl has seen the best of life – life as a happy dream. After that age the risks begin; responsibility comes, and with it the cares, the sorrows, and the inevitable tragedy. For her mother's sake I would have brought her back from the grave if I could, but I would not have done it for my own.”
The autobiography's many tender, grieving passages about Susy anticipate what Twain couldn't see coming: the death of another daughter, Jean, on Christmas Eve 1909. He spent his last months writing his account of Jean's death – "it is a relief to me to write it. It furnishes me an excuse for thinking" – which he declared should be the autobiography's final chapter. He died soon after.
At one point in this first volume, Twain observes that man is loving and lovable to his own, but "otherwise the buzzing, busy, trivial enemy of his race – who tarries his little day, does his little dirt, commends himself to God, and then goes out into the darkness, to return no more, and send no messages back – selfish even in death". But in this autobiography, Twain defies his own description and comes back to us, "speaking from the grave" just as he promised – and with 1,200 pages more to say. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/30/mark-twain-american-sarah-churchwell
Mary:
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BEFORE THE RISE OF MODERN EUROPE: THE ASIAN WORLD ORDER
~ The process that gave rise to Eurocentrism in social sciences and history is somewhat comparable to the follies of youth. Little children have difficulty believing that their parents existed before their birth. Teenagers often think that they are the first ones to have the experiences they are having as they make their way into adulthood. Young people usually think of previous generations as stodgy and old-fashioned, and of themselves as uniquely special and innovative. And they imagine they will be forever so, as if time will stop moving after them.
Part of growing up, however, is gradually breaking out of such narcissistic naiveté. As we get older, we start realizing that others before us had many experiences that resemble ours, even if they enjoyed different fashions and lacked certain technologies. Then the cycle repeats with the next generation. It is perhaps not particularly surprising that our social sciences, which came of age in the 19th and early 20th centuries – ie, ‘the youth’ of European/Western hegemony – also had a similar naiveté about world history. Europe/the West mattered the most at that moment, so it must have always been so. And perhaps it is a sign we are now nearing the twilight years of this hegemony that critiques (and self-critiques) of Eurocentrism have become so commonplace in most social sciences as to be banal.
But while it has been easy to level critiques of Eurocentrism against the social sciences – a low-hanging fruit if there ever was one – it has proven much harder to find solutions to it. There is always the danger that, in attempts to get away from Eurocentrism, we replace one kind of self-regarding history with another. It is also naive to think that only Europeans produce/have produced self-centered and whiggish narratives of history. A Sinocentric or Russocentric world history is no solution – it would just repeat the cycle.
In international relations, too, until recently, students were taught that there was no international order (and thus no international relations) until the 17th century, until Europeans created a regional order via the Westphalian Peace in 1648 and then expanded that around the world. The rest of the world was assumed to be disconnected, stuck in their regional silos, uninterested in the wider world, until European actors connected them first to Europe, and then to each other.
In such textbook accounts, ‘international order’ is usually defined as referring to the system of rules, norms and institutions that govern relations among states and other international actors. The principles and norms that underpin the modern international order are considered to include sovereignty, territorial integrity, human rights, non-interference in internal affairs, peaceful settlement of disputes, multilateralism and the rule of law. Westphalia is considered the origin point because of its supposed introduction of the non-interference principle.
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The ‘Westphalian myth’ in international relations has come under considerable criticism in recent years, but given the way international order is traditionally defined, it is not particularly surprising that experts maintain that there were no comparable international orders before our modern one (though it is also questionable how long such an order has existed even in modernity).
But if we relax the assumption that only orders created by nation-states are worth studying, then there is plenty of international relations material in history outside of Europe and before modernity that we can investigate. This is why I prefer to speak of ‘world orders’ instead of ‘international orders’, defined as the (man-made) rules, understandings and institutions that govern (and pattern) relations between the primary actors of world politics (but those actors can change over time: nation-states, aristocratic houses, city-states, etc). A ‘world order’ also has a universalizing ambition at its core and is expansive in its vision.
When we think of it that way, it is not hard to see that there certainly were world orders before Westphalia and the 17th century: ‘the East’ too has been home to world orders (and world orderers). By looking at Asian world orders that came before European hegemony, we can learn a great deal.
There was a ‘Chinggisid’ world order as created by Genghis (Chinggis) Khan and members of his house (13th-14th centuries), followed by the ‘post-Chinggisid’ world order of the Timurids and the early Ming (14th-15th centuries) and, finally, a globalizing world with its core position occupied by three post-Timurid (and, therefore, Chinggisid) empires (15th-17th centuries): the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals (along with the Habsburgs). These orders were also linked to each other just as our contemporary order is linked to the 19th-century international order – there was a continuity in their shared norms.
In each of these periods, the world was dominated and ordered by great houses who justified their sovereignty along Chinggisid lines.
‘Chinggisid’ sovereignty means the following: in the 13th century, Genghis Khan reintroduced to Eurasia a type of all-powerful sacred kingship we associate more with antiquity but one that had disappeared from much of this space after the advent of monotheistic religions and transcendental belief systems that checked the earthly power of political rulers by pointing to an all-powerful moral code that applied to all humans. As such religions gained more power from late antiquity onward, the power of kingship was greatly diminished throughout Eurasia. Kings could no longer make laws as they had to share their authority with the written religious canon and its interpreters. Genghis Khan and the Mongols broke this pattern of constrained kingship (others had attempted to do so before as well, but never so successfully). The adjective Chinggisid is more apt than Mongol to describe the worlds thus created because these orders were orders of great houses (dynasties) rather than nations.
Genghis Khan claimed law-making power above and beyond that of religious (and other) actors. He made himself the lawgiver but did not claim to be a prophet. Nor did he claim to be merely verbalising divine laws. He made the law and still expected people to obey, even if they already had their own religious rules and laws. Such centralization of supreme authority in one person requires robust legitimation. The claim to have such awesome authority could be justified only by a mandate for universal sovereignty over the world, as corroborated and manifested by world conquest and world empire. And because Genghis Khan succeeded in creating a nearly universal empire, he also diffused this particular understanding of sovereignty across Eurasia.
The story of Genghis Khan as a world-conqueror and lawgiver lived on for centuries (as inflected by the example of Timur/Tamerlane later), legitimizing a certain type of political rule throughout this space and strengthening the hands of rulers desiring to claim centralizing political authority, even in places where religious authority (eg, the Islamic jurists) posed a challenge to absolute kingship. And such rulers always chased world empire and ended up ordering the world (often violently and brutally but also at times productively) in their competition for this mantle. The Asian world orders between the 13th and 17th centuries constitute an important history of powerful and influential world orders outside of European hegemony. And insofar as political centralization is an essential component of modern sovereignty, it may be argued that similar Asian understandings and practices of sovereignty both predate and may have even influenced the European trajectory.
First was the original ‘world order’ created by Genghis Khan (and his house) in the 13th century. If there is indeed an ‘East’ that is distinct from the ‘West’, one of the points of separation can be placed here. After all, Genghis Khan’s empire was primarily an ‘Asian’ one, spanning the distance from the Pacific Ocean in the East to the Mediterranean in the West. Actors of (and within) this order interacted with the Indian subcontinent to their South and the European/Mediterranean regional orders to their West (and influenced developments therein and vice versa) but, for the most part, polities in those regions were not incorporated into this order and retained their own logics of power, legitimation, warfare, etc.
In this ‘Asian’ order, people living in the geographies that we now call ‘Russia’, ‘China’, ‘Iran’ and ‘Central Asia’ – basically, most of continental Asia – shared the same sovereign for the first time and then were ruled/dominated by dynasties (the Golden Horde/Jochid, the Yuan, the Ilkhanate and the Chagatai) that directly inherited Chinggisid norms, ie, ambitions of universal sovereignty and dynastic legitimacy based on world conquest, high degrees of political centralization around the supreme authority of the Great Khan. They were also significantly connected to each other through overland and naval routes that spanned the entire continent, as well as the Indian Ocean.
The existence of such trade routes – the ‘silk roads’ – predated the Chinggisid Empire. After their conquests, however, the Mongols strengthened these connections through the postal (yām) system and homogenized the points of contact throughout by their presence in the major spheres of influence within the continent. Thus, late 13th-century Eurasia was as connected as it had ever been (and even more so than some subsequent periods). Famous explorers of the 14th century – eg, Marco Polo or Ibn Battuta – could thus make their way from Europe or North Africa to China with relative ease, causing hardly any more commotion than some curiosity among hosts (who must have been accustomed to travelers along these routes) and facing not much more than some demand for updated information about cities and rulers encountered along the way.
Yet others traveled in the opposite direction from China to West Asia, and started new lives in Europe or what is now called Iran, under new rulers. A mostly forgotten aspect of this order is the facilitation of epistemic exchange of all sorts, most notably between ‘Iran’ and ‘China’: in the 13th and 14th centuries, bureaucrats, scientists, artists, craftsmen and engineers could be born on one side of Asia and finish their careers on the opposite side, with profound implications for artistic, cultural and scientific standards of both societies. The best (but not only) example of this cultural exchange is the fundamental transformation of Islamic art from the 13th century onward under Chinese influences, producing among other things the blue-and-white ceramics that are now so closely associated with the Middle East. This process is sometimes called the ‘Chinggisid exchange’ by historians of the Mongol Empire, similar to the Columbian exchange in terms of its world-historical impact.
After holding most of Asia under the same sovereign for more than half a century – which would be no small feat even today, let alone in the 13th century – the world empire/khanate ruled by the Great House of Genghis Khan fragmented into four smaller khanates, each based in territories originally given to different branches of his descendants to govern. Once autonomous, rival khanates went through a brief period of intense fighting to reclaim the mantle of universal sovereignty, but none managed to dominate the others. Eventually they settled into a ‘balance-of-power’ type equilibrium in the early 14th century. This period was particularly good for overland trade across Eurasia, extending the period known as Pax Mongolica.
The spread of the Black Death from the East (or Central Asia) to the West in the mid-14th century spelled the end of that status quo, however, as all but one of the khanates fell apart. The Golden Horde continued to rule the north-western steppes of Asia (present-day Russia), but the Chagatai Khanate (Central Asia) and the Ilkhanate (the Middle East) disintegrated, eventually giving way by the end of the 14th century to the Timurid Empire originating from Transoxiana, and the Yuan were overthrown by the Ming dynasty in 1366. Thus ended the first would-be world order organized by Chinggisid sovereignty.
The next world order that succeeded Genghis Khan’s and its successor khanates brought more diversity, and a competition between two great powers. From the last third of the 14th century to the middle of the 15th century, the Great Houses of Timur (Tamerlane) and Zhu Yuanzhang (Hongwu), ie, the Ming dynasty, competed to succeed the Great House of Genghis Khan from the two sides of Asia.
As long as the Ming and the Timurids competed, they ordered the world in post-Chinggisid ways. They were post-Chinggisid because neither the Timurids nor the Ming were directly linked to the house of Genghis Khan but were nevertheless very much influenced by the order of their predecessors. They had different views about the Chinggisids but, just as in our modern world, one cannot escape an institutional legacy only by rejecting its creators.
The post-Chinggisid influence is easy to demonstrate in the case of the Timurids because Timur, as a Turco-Mongol ruler himself, did his best to play up any connections. He married a Chinggisid princess. He ruled through a puppet khan from a Chinggisid lineage, never taking the title for himself (he was called amir himself). Still, in all ways that mattered, he deliberately fashioned himself after the model of Genghis Khan and died on the way to attempting to conquer China, just like Genghis. He centralized authority in the Chinggisid mold, seeking world conquest and recognition. He even found a novel way to reconcile the tension between Chinggisid sovereignty and Islam via the title of sahibkıran (Lord of Conjunction), as astronomy/astrology was a bridge between the Chinggisid and Islamic ways of seeing the world.
By contrast, the Ming, who were Han, ostensibly rejected any Chinggisid influences after they overthrew the Yuan dynasty. Still, the preoccupation of the early Ming emperors Hongwu and Yongle with world recognition also demonstrably derived from Chinggisid ideals and thus can be considered post-Chinggisid. In 1403, the Ming emperor ordered the construction of 137 ocean-going ships; later, he ordered the construction of 1,180 more. He put Zheng He in charge of these expeditions which went as far as the Indian Ocean. Modern-day China’s power-projection ambitions have reintroduced these so-called ‘Ming treasure voyages’ to the popular imagination.
However, what is often missed in contemporary discussion is the larger context and historical antecedents of these voyages.
The maritime envoys were only part of the story – Yongle also sent overland envoys, including to Herat, the Timurid capital. Even experts in the growing field of China’s historical international relations often overlook the degree to which the goal of external recognition drove the early Ming and how that ideal derived from their Yuan (Chinggisid) predecessors and was shared by Central Asian rivals. Much of international relations scholarship, with its bias for a 20th-century world, still imagines inner Asia to be peripheral to world politics in history. But in the 15th century, it was the center of a world ordered by the Timurids on the one side and the Ming on the other.
Timur failed to conquer China and eventually he had to settle into something like mutual recognition with the early Ming dynasty. A continent of lesser houses connected the great houses of Timur and Yuan or Ming. Some had their own Chinggisid-style world-empire aspirations, and others, the Joseon dynasty in Korea, for example, operated at a minimum with an understanding of the same Chinggisid legacy.
Material connections were also part of the legacy of the Chinggisid world order, across Asia. Overland trade brought Ming wares to West Asia (which then sold them to the Middle East and Europe) and silver to the East. Both the Timurid and the Ming also sponsored great works of art and craftsmanship in this period.
Also like the Cold War order, the Timurid-Ming rivalry was not around for very long. In the middle of the 15th century, a bullion famine, a shortage of money, hit Eurasia and precipitated a period of structural crisis by contracting overland trade. The Timurid dynasty of West Asia was particularly hard hit. The Timurids lost control over their territories. In the second half of the 15th century, Chinggisid influences on the Ming also faded, and neo-Confucianism took over.
The neo-Confucian movement empowered bureaucrats and officials and constrained the power and authority of the Ming rulers, checking centralization. The Ming realm turned more inward-looking, or isolationist. The ‘bipolar’ world order of the Timurid and the Ming Great Houses fragmented before it had the opportunity to congeal into something more institutionalized.
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The next fertile ground for world-ordering projects based on Chinggisid sovereignty norms came from the southwestern corner of Asia. In the 15th century, the region had been dominated by the Timurid Empire/khanate, and Chinggisid sovereignty norms had merged with existing Persian notions of kingship, millennial expectations, astrology and other occult sciences, as well as folk practices of Islam within this region. This fusion of Chinggisid, Persian and Islamic political cultures gave rise to at least three great houses with some of the more ambitious universal sovereignty claims in history: the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals.
By the 16th century, these three Great Houses together claimed sovereignty over more than a third of the human population of the world. They also controlled the core of the world economy. Though often called Islamicate empires, the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals shared more than Islam (and at times contravened prior Islamic practice). As with the previous examples discussed, they too subscribed to the same sovereignty model (at least in the 16th century): a type of sacred kingship, a fused form of vertical political centralization achieved by the unification of political and religious authority in the same person, made possible by the Chinggisid-Timurid legacies they inherited.
Following Timur, the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal claim to greatness was based on the claim of the rulers from these houses to be sahibkıran, universal sovereigns marked by signs from the heavens, living in the end of days, delivering on millennial expectations. Astrology and other occult sciences supported the universal sovereignty projects of these would-be world empires. Thus, in the 16th century, it was primarily the post-Chinggisid and post-Timurid ‘millennial sovereigns’ in Southwest Asia who ordered an increasingly globalizing world, not yet the Europeans.
Scholars of international relations tend to see the 16th century as holding the seeds of a world order based on European hegemony. It is undeniable that the 16th century was a period of growth and expansion for Europe (especially for Habsburg Spain), but Europe was growing from a position of greater deprivation than Asia. If we do not read the ending of the story back into the historical narrative, in the 16th century it was still not at all obvious that European actors would come to dominate the world.
Almost all histories of this period within international relations treat the Habsburgs’ eastern relations as relatively insignificant, but that is also a projection of the standards of a later time to the 16th century. Especially in the first two-thirds of the 16th century, the main rival of the Habsburgs were the Ottomans, who were themselves engaged in a simultaneous rivalry with the Safavids, from whose orbit the Mughals were trying to break. Smaller European houses had aspirations, to be sure, but their time in the sun had not really come yet, and they initially had to rely on Eastern alliances as well as trade with Asia to get on an upward trajectory.
The expansion of this Eastern world order was stopped in its tracks not by destiny or European greatness, but rather by the unpredictable developments of the late 16th to mid-17th century, a politically tumultuous period throughout Eurasia. Some historians label this period ‘the 17th-century general crisis’, a period of prolonged rebellions, civil wars and demographic decline throughout the northern hemisphere.
Historians have given different explanations as to what ushered in this upheaval: some suggesting financial causes (eg, the global repercussions of the Spanish ‘price revolution’ – inflation – due to the influx of surplus silver from the New World), whereas others point to demographic contraction.
Others now link the chaos of this period to the Little Ice Age: the peak moment of a cooler period in the Northern Hemisphere that extended from the 13th to the 19th century. Prolonged periods of cooler temperatures and storms may indeed have been responsible for all the other factors we associate with the period: crop failures, disruption of overland trade, demographic collapse in hinterlands, rebellions and civil wars.
Whatever the cause, the continued disorder of the 17th century caused the irreversible fragmentation of the 16th-century world order. This was the turning point for the East because, while aspects of the Chinggisid sovereignty norms survived the 17th century and motivated particular rulers (eg, Nader Shah of Persia), no new ‘world orders’ organized around those norms were successfully created after the 17th century.
A global perception set in the 19th century that Asia had been irreversibly declining for centuries, even though most Asian and Eurasian states had materially recovered from the crises of the 17th century, and had, in some cases, even gone on to territorially expand in the 18th century (eg, Russia, China). These two developments – the loss of ‘world orders’ originating in the East, on the one hand, and the perception of decline despite continued durability of Eastern states, on the other – are linked.
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A similar observation can be made about great power competition in the 19th century or the Cold War. Rivalry is constitutive of order (almost as much as trade and cooperation); order decline almost always originates from elsewhere. A final observation is that world orders were not immediately replaced after fragmentation; there were periods without ‘world order’-ers around (or, even if they were around, their presence was not felt by other actors). The 17th-century crisis period of fragmentation lasted the longest and perhaps for that reason spelled the end of Eastern world orders.
Contrary to the assumptions of the international relations literature about great powers, this history suggests that rivalries by great houses that shared the same understanding of ‘greatness’ in fact strengthened and reinforced the existing world order (even when those rivalries turned violent).
Unfortunately, there are enough reasons to suspect that we may be in for a similar period of turbulence and disorder in the 21st century. All the factors that were at play in the 17th century – climate change, demographic unpredictability, economic volatility, internal chaos – that took the attention of world orderers from maintaining world order are also present today.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-first-world-orders-were-not-european-they-came-from-asia?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e56efdc064-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_01_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-b43a9ed933-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
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PLAUSIBLE REAL REASONS FOR RUSSIA’S WAR ON UKRAINE
Oriana:
For the average person in the West, it’s still difficult to explain why Russia invaded Ukraine. Poles are prone to think that, historically speaking, Russia has always had the nasty habit of invading it neighbors. This of course won’t fly with historians and political scientists. As for Putin’s reasons, such as the alleged need to defend the speakers of Russian in Ukraine — not to mention that Ukraine is a “fake country” in need of “de-Nazification” and “de-Satanization.”
All this would be very funny if not for the amount of human suffering caused by this sudden war of aggression. So — what are the real reasons? This brief article on Quora was the best answer yet.
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Natural resources. The Ukraine has vast reserves of fossil fuels and minerals. Russia doesn’t want them. What it wants is for the Ukraine to NOT have them and sell them into Europe, undercutting Putin’s “private captive market.” Notice how closely any map of these resources matches Putin’s military objectives.
Democracy. The Ukraine was moving with surprising ferocity to move from a corrupt Russian oligarchy to a modern Democratic state. If this were to happen, it would set a clear and shining example to the Russian people that they do not have to live in a kleptocracy.
Russia actually sees both of these as a threat to its own existence. But it has backfired badly. Russia has lost its European market, likely permanently. And Zelenskyy is emerging as a major world democratic leader whereas Putin is emerging as a war criminal and pariah. ~ R. W. Carmichael, Quora
Oriana:
One of the best things done by Prigozhin, the leader of the doomed rebellion against Putin, was the public statement about Russia’s official reasons for invading Ukraine. “They are lying to you. This war has nothing to do with the expansion of NATO. The real reasons are greed and ambition.”
Greed and ambition account for practically all wars of aggression. Prigozhin’s words are true, but not specific enough. The brief Quora article points to wanting to prevent Ukraine from becoming an economic rival, and also, should it succeed at becoming a democratic country, a disturbing example of liberation from a dictatorship and political servility to Russia.
"They are lying to you" — Yes, but doesn't everyone already know that and takes it for granted? Just make sure you have at least five blankets in order to survive the night. And that chair — do you really need that wooden chair? It could be burned to produce some heat.
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TROTSKY’S RISE AND FALL
~ Trotsky was an outsider in the Bolshevik crew. His involvement in the revolutionary movement happened parallel to what Lenin and Stalin did before 1917.
His power move was collecting coffers full of money with lightning speed after Czar Nicholas II abdicated in early 1917 in America and bringing the juice just in time to Petrograd (a.k.a. St. Petersburg), where Lenin with comrades set up shop for proletarian revolution.
Money talks, also in revolutionary matters. This catapulted him right to the center of Lenin’s situation room. In the months and years that followed, he performed like you won’t believe.
Top performer
Trotsky’s star moment was planning and leading the commando operation that overthrew the liberal Provisional Government and installed Soviet rule in 1917. Further, in 1918–1920, his performance as the Soviet defense minister secured the Communists their victory in the Civil War.
The man impressed everyone and himself so much that he deemed his role as Lenin’s crown prince as 100% assured.
The front-runner
Trotsky had the military in his pocket. His role as the acknowledged architect (along with Lenin) of the Revolution went unchallenged. He was a brilliant speaker and debater. He made a serious claim to be a theorist of Marxism.
The last anti-government rally in the USSR before Perestroika in 1927 was organized by Trotsky’s followers—it showed the level of support he once enjoyed at the grassroots level before Stalin stomped out all embers of opposition.
Hubris comes before the fall
Full of this impossible awesomeness, he geared down at the critical moments in the Communist internal power struggle. Hypochondriac as he was, he spent too much time away from his power base. He didn’t put too much effort into courting possible allies. He ignored Stalin’s silent but huge reshuffling of party cadres in order to have his supporters at the right places the day the definitive battle began.
And he underestimated the degree of hate against his Jewish ancestry that permeated younger Party members from the worker and peasant classes.
As a result, Stalin robbed him of his support in the military through the Communist cells in the troops. From there, the only way for Trotsky, as for any fiery radical Socialist who lost the game, was the one to total destruction.
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Below, Trotsky addresses Red Army troopers in Crimea in 1921.
In his own eyes, he soared high over the comrades he worked with. Not many of them could match his brain, his energy, and his gift of words. But to bring him down, Stalin didn’t need too much. He just stayed below Trotsky’s radar. A few more years of consorting with a bunch of other Bolsheviks who hated and feared Trotsky, and he would dislodge the brilliant Jew from his high horse. Forever. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
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RUSSIA’S WINTER WONDERLAND
One of the obvious pros of living in Russia: for those who like extreme tourism, you don’t have to go far — you can experience extreme conditions at your own home. Test your survival skills!
Even the Moscow region, pumped by money extracted from the whole of Russia, became a scene out of climate change horror movie for tens of thousands of locals.
For almost a week, residents of villages and towns near Moscow have been living without heating in temperatures down to -28 degrees C.
People started using electricity for heating their homes and then the electricity grid began to collapse. Videos of burning wires on the street polls are circulating online.
In the Moscow region, a missile attack command center (responsible for warning about nuclear strikes) froze.
The authorities keep assuring people that they will soon solve the problem, but they can’t explain how they will fill the heating pipes that burst underground.
In Solnechnogorsk, half of the city was left without heating, the families of enforcers at Vystrel, Timonovo and the Solnechnogorsk-7 base are freezing.
Solnechnogorsk-7 is a military base that serves the command post. It is there that the crew of the Missile Attack Warning System is on duty around the clock: “All information from the ground and space echelons of early warning systems flows here, and it is there that the decision on a retaliatory nuclear strike is executed.”
Heating interruptions have reached Balashikha. Authorities are complaining about power surges that have led to the shutdown of gas boilers in boiler houses. Residents of Balashikha began to freeze.
Yesterday, the turn to freeze reached the prosperous Rublyovka, where top Russian officials and oligarchs live. Several residential complexes and villages in Romashkovo area were left without electricity and heating for 8 hours. High-ranking and wealthy residents of the Rublevka stormed the phones Moscow region administration.
How did the Russian authorities respond?
Residents of Klimovsk near Moscow, who have been left without heating for 5 days in 20-degree frosts, were told they would not have to pay the bills for heating in January.
After the accident at a boiler house in Podolsk, which left thousands of residents of the Klimovsk microdistrict without heat and hot water, the investigative committee conducted searches and opened a criminal case. The accident occurred on January 4 at the boiler of JSC Klimovsky Specialized Bullet-Making Plant, which provided heating to the whole area. The owners of the company reportedly fled abroad.
That’s the standard KGB approach: any problem in the country is solved by searches, arrests and special operations.
In Tyumen, people organized an Orthodox street procession. I suppose, they asked Jesus to give them heating in their homes.
Following the collapse of the heating system in the Moscow region, in other regions authorities were told to lower the pressure in the pipes for hot water and heating, to prevent breakdowns. Immediately, the heating radiators in apartments turned barely warm. Temperatures in homes dropped.
Garbage collapse hit Moscow’s Khimki. There are no cleaners or garbage removal. People who complain about it online are accused of working for the “Ukrainian PSYOP” and banned from chats.
The collapse of systems in Russia is exacerbated by the severe shortage of employees: the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences estimated the personnel shortage in Russia at 4.8 million people.
According to SuperJob recruitment portal, in 2023, the number of vacancies increased by 57%, and the number of employee resumes dropped by 2%.
54% of enterprises in Russia are experiencing staff shortages.
Putin's authorized representative Boris Titov proposed sending pensioners to work, who, in his opinion, "retired too early.”
Attempts to attract migrants to rectify the personnel shortage “will in no way solve the problem,” this is “just patching up holes,” Titov said.
(I wonder, what happened? Why is there such a crisis, all of a sudden?)
“In order to resolve the issue properly, we need to use other available opportunities — all those reserves that exist within Russia itself. Let’s take, for example, pensioners, according to official statistics, there are more than 40 million of them in Russia,” Titov said.
“At some point, it may be beneficial,” Titov said, to use labor camps, as happened in the USSR during the Stalin’s era. GULAGs will be back!
After Vladimir Putin announced mobilization of 300,000 citizens in September 2022, and then the Ministry of Defense announced that they have recruited another 500,000 people as contract soldiers into the army, the labor market is severely lacking skilled workers, truck drivers, special transport drivers, laborers and engineers.
Another Aeroflot plane broke down in Thailand: 400 people are stuck at the airport. It’s the 8th plane in the last 5 weeks that broke down before the scheduled takeoff.
But there is also good news.
After Russia’s minister of finance proposed to use people’s savings to continue financing the war, the price of Bitcoin jumped by 6.21% (up by $4,000) in one day, and it now exceeds USD $47,000.
Russia may single-handedly finance the revival of crypto.
The demand for foreign citizenship among Russians soared to record heights. The number of queries for “foreign citizenship” in Yandex search engine from Russian IP’s reached 134,832 in November 2023, and didn’t fall below 94,000 requests within the last 3 months.
Looks like even those who stayed in Russia hoping for the best, are starting to realize that this “best” isn’t going to happen. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Philippe S:
That’s kind of what happens when money is spent on missiles lobbed on a neighbor country’s civilians instead of improving infrastructure for the citizens of their own country.
Paul Brawley:
Going out on a procession should help you get warmed up. In ruzzia you can have a winter camping experience without even have to leave your home! All you need is a minus zero rated sleeping bag.
Julian Beirne:
Looks like mighty Russia may be defeated by a domestic system failing, like the heating, or factory manpower. A bit like The War of the Worlds.
Pauli Vaara:
The pictures of ice on the buildings look extreme. It lends a lot of credibility to the bedroom ice scene in the movie, “Doctor Zhivago,” another tragic story from the region.
Fedya L:
Russians tend to be nice, hard-working people after they have left Russia.
Marcus Hartman:
Fix everything with criminal investigations? And who will carry out the maintenance work while the culprit entrepreneurs sit behind bars? Jesus?
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HEATING PROBLEMS IN RUSSIA
Residents are dancing around bonfires, recording messages for Vladimir Putin, begging him to help — because in Russia, there is only one man who can solve problems.
Most Russians live in big apartment buildings, and all apartment buildings have central heating.
This central heating system is connected to a centralized boiler room that’s pumping hot water into hundreds of buildings via underground pipes, to individual heating elements in apartments.
These systems, most built back in the times of the USSR, are now collapsing, leaving tens of thousands of residents with no heating in abnormal frosts up to –35°C.
The residents resort to using electric heaters, the grid can’t cope, the wires start burning, towns lose electricity as well.
“My mother is bedridden, group 1 disabled, I cover her with 5 blankets,” complains a resident of Podolsk, Moscow region.
In 24 years of Putin’s rule, Podolsk residents had to rely on heating from the boiler of the bullet-making factory — a lucrative money-making venture (given the government contracts). But despite the astounding profits, its essential hot water system failed, leaving 20,000 people with no heating.
2 days ago, after much uproar about the disaster, Vladimir Putin announced he’s taking the situation under his personal control — and ordered to nationalize Podolsk’s bullet-making plant.
The Investigative Committee opened a criminal case, detaining the head of the boiler room, the director of the plant and the deputy head of the administration of Podolsk. Someone has to be the scapegoat.
Just think of that: Putin, the ruler of “Great Russia”, who declared war on the entire civilized world, has to deal with the heads of boiler rooms and the heat supply systems of little towns around Moscow. Someone who wants to fight for world domination is now dealing with rotten pipes. How pathetic.
And here, some interesting facts popped up:
Since May 2023, the general director of the bullet-making plant is Igor Kushnikov. Reportedly, it’s the same Igor Kushnikov who was accused of leading a local organized crime group in the late 1990s, responsible for over 40 murders (Kushnikov personally was only accused in 1 murder). He combined leadership in the group with working in the FSB, where he rose to the rank of colonel.
Before him, the plant was managed by Igor Rudyka. He is an FSB officer and in 2017-2019, he was Putin’s personal bodyguard.
The fact that Putin-FSB government is to blame for the collapse of the public utilities sector is not a figure of speech. It’s literally true.
And here’s the most ironical fact: 2 weeks before the boiler room accident, Podolsk received the “Breakthrough of the Year” award in the ‘Effective Resource Management’ category.
"The Breakthrough" was truly epic!
Didn’t spend any money on repairs? Here’s an award for your dedication! The handcuffs to follow.
However, the disaster in Podolsk is just one of dozens. In the Moscow region alone, almost 500 thousand people were left without heating.
Residents of Elektrostal near Moscow have not had heating in their homes since mid-December.
In St. Petersburg region, a captain of the Russian Navy froze to death. 60-year-old Vladislav Shevashkevich died in his own home in a gardening community. Relatives said that he died from hypothermia due to the lack of electricity, without which his home could not be heated.
Cars are swimming in a river of boiling water in Novosibirsk, while residents are freezing in their apartments. Schools canceled classes and hospitals suspended hospitalizations. Tonight, it’s going to be below minus 20°C.
Terrified of Putin, after quick repairs, the new manager of the boiler room in Podolsk turned it at full capacity.
All the remaining rotten pipes immediately burst and the buildings got drenched in boiling-hot water. In several buildings, boiling water was pouring from the ceiling, and the apartments turned into saunas.
The system had to be switched off again. Electrical panels are now covered with ice, basements are flooded.
Water in pipes at a temperature of minus 25 degrees freezes within 3 hours. Because of underground breakages, hot water doesn’t reach buildings even when the system is switched on. Electricity constantly disappears.
Because Putin’s opposition jumped on the topic of disasters with the public heating system, the Russians who publicly complained and posted videos on the Internet are now visited by police, who threatens them with criminal cases. In Russia, speaking up is dangerous — even if you simply don’t want to freeze to death.
The Russian government intended to halve its spending on public utilities: in 2024-26, federal budget spending on housing and communal services was supposed to be cut by 57%.
Now, after the series of disasters that affected towns from Moscow to Vladivostok, where will Putin get the money for repairs? ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Tanner King:
The irony is that villagers with their primitive Russian stove heating systems are best set to keep warm. You just need wood.
Tim Doherty:
Russia becomes, inch by inch and day by day, a memento on why we should really keep a democracy, power rotation and personality cult in check. I feel for the Russians, but as Nemtsov said “Putin can only be overthrown by the Russian people”. We’re a bit closer to that day.
Catalin Ilie:
No we’re not. Russians will never, ever revolt against their leadership. Their capacity to endure is endless. It’s the best people that a cruel, ruthless dictator would want. That’s why that job is the most sought job in Russia. It guarantees a lifetime of doing whatever you want, endless riches, no liability whatsoever.
Neil Quorite:
Putin is not at the end of his road by any means but he senses the end on the horizon. The true result of the election will show Putin the depth of his support. If he had worked on improving the lot of the population as he did at the beginning of his premiership, he would undoubtedly be in a much stronger position instead of mired in an unwinnable war in Ukraine. He wants to be remembered as Vladimir the Great. He'll be lucky if he's even remembered as Vladimir the Greedy.
Vladimir Savkovic:
It’s not “democracy” they have no tradition of. They simply don’t know what it is. No, it’s the tradition of valuing human life and dignity that is entirely absent. Everything else is just a consequence and continuation of that.
Evan Dick:
But they still believe that they are the Master Race and God's own people.
Elena Gold:
Of course they do. And they believe all other nations are envious of Russia.
Wally Bond:
You can’t complain about the maintenance program because there isn’t one.
Mary:
WHY THE SOVIET UNION COLLAPSED (YES, AGAIN: BUT BEST ANSWER YET)
1. Inefficient socialist economy.
2. High level corruption.
3. Expensive arms race with the US.
4. Low oil prices in the 1980s, which was their only export of significant value.
5. Enormously long guarded border stretching all the way from Norway to North Korea, which was very expensive to maintain.
6. Expensive war in Afghanistan.
7. Expensive cleanup of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
8. Resistance to Soviet rule by eastern European countries who ultimately refused to subsidize the USSR economy and eventually broke free of the USSR.
9. Widespread alcoholism.
10. Low standard of living despite having a well educated population and more natural resources than any other country.
11. Resources wasted by spying on and trying to control the population.
12. Resources wasted on propaganda.
So what's happening in Russia at the moment:
1. Inefficient kleptocratic economy. Putin is essentially a mafia boss with nuclear weapons.
2. Severe corruption. About a third of Russia's GDP is stolen by Putin, the oligarchs, and other high and mid level officials.
3. Extortion of small businesses, which form the key to a strong economy.
4. Expensive arms race with the West.
5. Very expensive war in Ukraine.
6. Resistance to Russian rule by republics in the Caucasus such as Chechnya and Dagestan.
7. Sanctions by western countries.
8. Widespread alcoholism although not as prevalent as in the USSR.
9. Low standard of living despite having a well educated population and more natural resources than any other country.
10. Widespread brain drain of the most intelligent and best educated.
11. Low birth rate except in the Caucasus where the birth rate is high.
12. High rate of death and crippling injuries among working age males fighting in Ukraine.
13. High rate of death and crippling injuries from automobile accidents.
14. Resources wasted by spying on and trying to control the population.
15. Resources wasted on propaganda.
So there are some parallels between the USSR and today's Russia. ~ Fred Touche, Quora
Jussi Brown:
Number 5 in the first list is interesting. Maintaining and protecting the border was more to avoid defectors than to protect the USSR from being invaded. Many analysts think that Kremlin wants the 1340 km (830 miles) long Finland-Russia border to be closed so existing or future conscripts don’t leave Russia. My guess is that if someone wants to leave Russia instead of fighting in Putin’s meaningless so-called SMO they will leave.
Peter Rowley:
China is a possibility. Russia stole so much land from the Chinese.
Richard Leong:
Keep an eye on Serbia. It looks a repeat of the Maidan Square protests in 2014, that led to regime change, and the Russian invasion.
Eugene Borisenko:
Stalin’s granddaughter; she lives in Portland, Oregon.
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PUTIN LOSING PUBLIC SUPPORT
The independent Russian news agency Verstka released a survey this morning that reveals Putin is rapidly losing public support for his war in Ukraine.
According to the survey, a majority of Russian citizens now want an end to the conflict “without achieving the goals of the war” and Russian troops brought back to the Motherland. They also said they view the war to be the single largest negative aspect of their lives.
At this point it appears the only viable option for ending the insanity is in possession of the Russian people themselves. ~ Izzy Luggs, Quora
James:
It would help a great deal to get rid of Putin too. That’s the only point I see as what could be called the beginning of the end to the war.
Charlie Johnson:
Yes, because it is down to drafting the rich people inside the big cites and college educated boys. Same thing happened here in the Vietnam war.
*
Between two evils, Russia always chooses both. ~ Susanna Viljanen
*
TRY A TWO-WEEK NEGATIVITY FAST
The human brain is wired to focus on the negative. It’s tied to survival.
“Our seven dominant emotions are anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise,” says Anthony Iannarino, author of The Negativity Fast: Proven Techniques to Increase Positivity, Reduce Fear, and Boost Success. “Five dominant emotions are negative, with happiness the only positive one, unless the surprise happens to be positive.”
Iannarino didn’t realize how negativity impacted his life until a mentor told him, “You know, you’re really angry. All these things that you’re worried about? You can’t do anything about them. The best thing you can do is just let all this go and try to take care of your family.”
Positivity is a choice, and it’s possible to spend more time in a positive state versus a negative one, says Iannarino. While it took six months, he finally took his mentor’s advice, deciding to remove all the negative sources in his life for 30 days.
“I got rid of every single magazine, newspaper, and book,” he recalls. “I started to remove some people in my life that I felt were causing me to be more negative than positive. I started looking around at everything that was negative.”
At the end of 30 days, Iannarino liked the results so much that he did another 30 days and then another. During his third 30-day negativity fast, he only consumed positive information, such as reading content by Stephen Covey, Brian Tracy, and Les Brown. “I was blasting out all the negative that I had put into my mind for many, many years, and it worked really well for me,” he says.
Iannarino also leaned on the work of Albert Ellis, founder of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. Ellis taught the ABC theory, which includes an activating event, your belief about what it means, and the consequences of how you react to it.
“If somebody cuts you off in traffic, for example, you can believe that they have road rage and they’re a terrible person or reckless, or you can believe that they could be rushing home because somebody was sick or they are under some sort of duress,” says Iannarino. “If you can change the belief, then you won’t be triggered anymore. It’s one of the more powerful things that you can do when you’re on a negativity fast.”
Another tool that helped Iannarino purge negativity was to look at his mortality. The average lifespan in the United States is 78.2 years, which boils down to 4,108 weeks. Iannarino uses a countdown app that tells him how many weeks he has left.
“I’m close to about 1,300,” he says. “People often think that’s morbid. Well, I’m here for a short time. You should do everything that you want to do and try to make the best contribution that you can while you’re here.”
Positivity sounds, well, positive, so I decided to tip the daily scale in its favor for a week to see what would happen. I started with the news. I noticed that the morning news shows I watched while enjoying my coffee were focused on fear-mongering. And at night, I usually watch ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir on weekday evenings. While the broadcast always ends with an upbeat story, the reporting in the first 25 minutes is mostly concerning.
I switched out the morning news with a walk and an uplifting podcast, such as Happier with Gretchen Rubin or The Moth Radio Hour. I also learned I could visit World News Tonight’s website and watch their positive news segments without having to sit through the bad first.
When I wanted a news fix, I did a quick scan of the headlines on neutral sources like NPR and Associated Press. Iannarino told me not to worry about missing anything important.
“This is the one concern that people have when I suggest getting rid of the things you watch,” he says. “They wonder, ‘How am I going to know what’s going on?’ I promise, everybody’s going to be talking about it, and they’re going to share it with you. They’ll still try to help you understand that there are bad things happening in the world.”
While I didn’t consider myself a negative person, I also realized I am a regular complainer, especially low-grade things like finding fault or comparing. I’m not alone, says Iannarino.
“Humans complain a lot and often don’t recognize they’re doing it,” he says. “It makes you more anxious and stressed. It can cause you to have other mental problems like depression. The antidote is gratitude.”
Iannarino recommended that I adopt the “three blessings” exercise by Martin Seligman, who is often called the father of positive psychology. Each day, write down three things that went well for you.
“Seligman’s research said it’s more powerful than pharmaceuticals and can keep you from being anxious, stressed, and depressed for as long as six months,” says Iannarino. “When you start looking back at what you wrote, you start to realize a lot of good things happen to you all the time.”
I did my negativity fast before Christmas, and the stress I usually feel about getting everything done didn’t arise this year. The three blessings practice helped me realize I have much to be thankful for, which made me more patient with others. The ABC Theory helped me avoid jumping to conclusions.
By the end of the first week, I felt calmer, so I kept it going for another week. I was surprised at how just two weeks of avoiding negativity changed what I want to consume. For example, a friend recommended watching The Bear. When I tuned into the Hulu series, I found the family arguments and drama overwhelming. The dialogue and violence felt like an assault on me, so I decided to turn it off.
Iannarino has been on a negativity fast for more than two decades. I am keeping it going, too, being more mindful of what I consume. Iannarino told me that a lot of people choose to continue.
“Going on a negativity fast will help you be a lot less angry, stressed, and anxious,” he says. “You’ll feel like you have greater control of what’s going on in your life.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/91004340/i-tried-2-week-negativity-fast-heres-how-it-went
Mary:
I usually find those touting "positivity" very irritating...and even worse— irresponsible. Like the woman who told me "I love my bubble," refusing to entertain the negatives — which are everywhere around us — seemed smugly self indulgent and juvenile. However, the flood of negatives has become overwhelming...threatening to sweep all away into chaos in a cascade of disasters we feel powerless to control.
I may not be outlawing all the negative input, but have felt it necessary to limit the time and attention i can give to it. For instance, one half hour of news only, limited scrolling on Quora and social media. I think of these as reasonable self protective measures, still maintaining responsibility to keep up with the world enough to inform thought and action.
Oriana:
The worst thing about Quora is the level of hostility that is often expressed by those who hold opposing opinions. Worse than Facebook, since much more tolerant of vulgar language and blatant ad-hominem name calling.
No, it’s not possible to live in a bubble — life takes care to introduce plenty of stress and just sheer unpredictability into our lives. But shortening our exposure to the news and cutting out toxic people (e.g. alcoholics) out of our lives can go a long way toward lessening the load of negative emotions. I say this I someone who used to wallow in negative emotions — until I came to my senses, embarrassingly late in life.
And now I’m totally in favor of doing what you’re doing — keeping the exposure short — because life is too short to be mired in huge problems we cannot solve.
Also, I've discovered that it's when I'm relatively calm and happy that I can be of most help to someone in distress.
*
TIME FOR A BIT OF COMIC RELIEF
A person is traveling and calls home to ask how things are at home. The kid says the cat died. Kid is told you don’t break news that directly, you first say cat is on the roof, next day cat it injured, third day cat died, so it isn’t a shock. Next day calls home to see how things are and is told “grandma is on the roof”.
Oriana:
I remember when one of my great-aunts died, and my mother decided to try the “gradual” approach with breaking the news to her mother, my grandmother who lived with us. “We just had a telegram that Aunt Florcia (nickname of Florentyna) is very sick,” my mother said. “She’s dead, isn’t she?” my Grandmother answered. And that was the end of that stratagem.
**
Some Russian jokes feature "Radio Yerevań" (after the capital of Armenia).
Q: Can socialism be built in Monaco?
Radio Yerevań: No. A calamity of such magnitude can't fit into such a tiny country."
*
IS HAVING A FAVORITE CHILD A BAD THING?
Although it may be uncomfortable to admit, many parents play favorites among their children. Is that 'bad' parenting?
Joanna knew she had a favorite child from the moment her second son was born. The Kent, UK-based mum says she loves both of her children, but her youngest child just “gets” her in a way that her first-born doesn’t.
When Joanna’s first baby was delivered, he was rushed away from her due to a health concern, and she couldn’t see him for 24 hours. Missing this valuable bonding period was, she believes, the start of a long-lasting preference for her second son, whom she was able to spend time with immediately after he was born.
“To sum our relationships up: I have to make an appointment to speak to my eldest,” says Joanna, whose full name is being withheld to protect her children. “With my youngest, I could call him at 0230 and he’d drive miles to meet me. My youngest is the nicest guy on the planet. He’s caring, generous, courteous and friendly. He’s the kind of person who would help anyone out.”
Though she battled her feelings for years, Joanna says now she’s in a place of acceptance. “I could write a book on why I love one more than the other,” she says. “It’s been hard, but I haven’t got any guilt.”
Unlike Joanna, most parents’ favoritism is subtle and goes undiscussed. Having a favorite child might be the greatest taboo of parenthood, yet research shows that the majority of parents do indeed have a favorite.
With plenty of evidence to suggest that being the least-favored child can fundamentally shape the personality and lead to intense sibling rivalries, it’s no wonder that parents might worry about letting their preferences slip. Yet research also shows that most kids can’t tell who their parents’ favorite child really is. The real issue, then, is how parents manage their children’s perception of favoritism.
Playing favorites
“Not every parent has a favorite child, but many do,” says Jessica Griffin, an associate professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, US. “Data suggests that mothers, in particular, show favoritism to children who have similar values to them and that engage more with family, over qualities such as being highly ambitious or career driven.”
In one study, up to 74% of mothers and 70% of fathers in the UK have been shown to exhibit preferential treatment towards one child.
Yet for most, the topic remains off-limits. In other research, when parents were surveyed, just 10% admitted to having a favorite child, suggesting that for most mothers and fathers, feelings of favoritism remain a tightly held family secret.
When parents do admit to having a preferred child, research suggests birth order plays an important part in who they favor. According to the same YouGov survey, parents who admitted having a favorite child showed an overwhelming preference towards the baby of the family, with 62% of parents who have two children opting for their youngest. Forty-three percent of parents with three or more children prefer their last-born, with a third selecting a middle child and just 19% leaning towards their eldest.
Dr Vijayeti Sinh is a clinical psychologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. She says that a favoritism towards a youngest child is often to do with the social and emotional skills associated with birth order – as parents gain more practice in child-rearing, they have a better idea of how they want to shape their offspring’s childhood, and what attributes are most important to pass on.
Sometimes, parents play favorites more towards younger children, possibly because they feel more confident as child-raisers after having done it already.
“Parents tend to favor a child that is most like them, reminds them of themselves, or represents what they view as a success of parenting,” she says. “Younger children are most likely to have been raised by a parent who, over time and experience, is more confident and skilled in their child-raising.”
‘Bad’ parenting?
Though parents do often have a favorite, many are racked with guilt, knowing that showing a preference will have a long-lasting impact on their child’s sense of self-worth. The concern is not entirely unfounded.
“Children who grow up in families where they feel that they are treated unfairly may experience a deep sense of unworthiness,” says Sinh. “They might feel that they are unlovable in some way, or do not possess the special traits and characteristics needed to be loved by others. Feeling like the black sheep of the family can lead to fears and insecurities – children might become self-protective and try to be overly nice and agreeable around others.”
But for most parents, their worries are misplaced. Evidence suggests that unless preferential treatment is very extreme, most children are not impacted by being the least favorite child.
“Sometimes parents are blatantly obvious in their demonstration of love and affection,” says Sinh. “But when parents are mindful and thoughtful and do their best to ensure that any feelings of closeness or likeability factor aren’t plain and clear, then children don’t feel unworthy of their parents’ love and support.”
In fact, in most cases children might not even know that their parents prefer their sibling in the first place. In one study, when people who stated that their parents had a favorite child were probed, a staggering four out of five claimed that their sibling was favored over them – a seemingly improbable statistic. Other studies have shown that children incorrectly identify who the favorite child is more than 60% of the time.
Of course, it’s possible that parents are doing a much better job of disguising their preferences than you would expect. Or – as Griffin suggests – we’re simply very bad at guessing who the favorite child really is.
“Although you might think that children instinctively know whether their parent has a favorite child and who that child is, the data is surprising,” she says. “Children might assume that the first-born or the ‘baby’ of the family is the favorite, or the child who is an overachiever in the family and causes less parenting stress. Whereas in actuality, the parent might have different and varied reasons for the favoritism – such as favoring the child who struggles the most, or the child that is most similar to them.”
Griffin argues that it’s perfectly OK – and even expected – for parents to have favorites, and that parents shouldn’t feel guilty if they find themselves feeling closer to one child over another. She says that although children who believe they are the least-favored child tend to have lower self-esteem and higher rates of depression, in the majority of cases, children have no idea which sibling their parent or parents prefer.
Perhaps who the favorite child really is isn’t so important after all.
Griffin has found that the favorite-child conundrum has shown up in both her professional and personal lives: her three children constantly joke about who the ‘favorite’ child must be.
Although she recommends parents or children who find that favoritism is affecting their relationships or mental health should speak to a pediatrician or mental health provider, she believes most imbalances can be addressed with simple tactics that demonstrate care and attention.
Griffin says that although parents might not readily admit to favoritism, they certainly won’t be alone if they find themselves feeling closer to one child over another. Most mothers and fathers have favorites – and that’s OK.
“There are going to be days when we prefer to be around one child over another, for a number of different reasons,” she says. “The important thing to remember is that having a favorite child does not mean that you love your other children less.”
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220119-is-having-a-favourite-child-really-a-bad-thing
Oriana:
And in some families, the "favorite child" is a dog. But if you have two dogs, beware! A dog can become very jealous if s/he notices that more affection is going to the other dog.
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LIBERALISM IN CRISIS
~ Liberalism, it has frequently been said, is in crisis. In his recent book Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, historian Samuel Moyn attempts to explain why. The Cold War, he contends, pushed prominent liberal theorists in a new direction—one that continues to haunt politics today.
As part of our virtual event series co-hosted with The Philosopher, Becca Rothfeld, contributing editor at Boston Review and nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post, recently sat down with Moyn to discuss his argument. (Rothfeld reviewed Moyn’s book for the Post in August.) Their conversation, moderated by Philosopher editor Anthony Morgan, ranges over Moyn’s portraits of Cold War liberals, cooperation and dialogue between liberals and the left, and whether it is possible to construct—or revive—an alternative to what Moyn sees as our Cold War liberal inheritance.
Below is a transcript of their conversation, which has been edited for concision and clarity.
Becca Rothfeld: The first question I wanted to ask is how to improve liberalism. Despite some misreadings of Liberalism Against Itself as illiberal, it’s very much not an anti-liberal book. It’s a book that’s disappointed with the direction that postwar liberalism has taken, but it’s also cautiously optimistic about the liberal tradition’s ability to redeem itself.
Tallying up your objections to Cold War liberalism in the book, I noticed that it was possible to construct a better ideal of postwar liberalism by imagining a sort of mirror image of the failed liberalism you describe. Could you say a little bit about the positive conception of liberalism glinting in the background of the book?
Samuel Moyn: This book is a series of portraits of liberals in the middle of the twentieth century, and I take a pretty deflationary view of the politics that they wrought. I claim that they introduced a rupture in the history of liberalism. I do imply that they’ve left us, at least in part, in our current situation, intellectually and even practically.
I don’t know if I would agree that I’m optimistic about liberalism: I would say that there are resources from the past to draw on before Cold War liberalism that could be used to argue for a new liberalism. But I certainly think that we need to give tough love to liberals, not just for their abuse of their own tradition, but also because they seem recurrently incapable of confronting some nagging criticisms of their platform.
You’re right that I do suggest (albeit indirectly) some laudatory features of liberalism before it became transmogrified through the Cold War liberals. I’ll mention a few. The first half of the book is about what liberalism was before Cold War liberals abandoned its core motivation—human emancipation. I start out with a chapter on the Enlightenment that defines the epoch through its promotion of emancipation from the ruins of authority and tradition.
But a much bigger component of Liberalism Against Itself is the contrast I draw between the self-perfectionism of the Enlightenment and the tolerationism that surged through the careers of more recent liberals like John Rawls. In the beginning, liberals were total perfectionists. They offered a novel, controversial ideal of the highest life, one premised on personal fulfillment through creativity. That’s because the early liberal thinkers were also romantics, were deeply connected to the Romantic movement in literature and philosophy.
Another component of early liberalism that should be resuscitated is an ethos of progress. Liberals before the middle of the twentieth century were connected to a sense that history was a forum to achieve emancipation and to construct interesting lives. Agency doesn’t just materialize—the conditions for it must be built. To the early liberals, those conditions aren’t going to appear overnight.
There were a lot of reasons in the middle of the twentieth century to give up on progress—certainly the notion of inevitable progress. What I worry about is an overcorrection: that Cold War liberals lost any sense of an uplifting, radiant future to offer through policy, both locally and globally. A truly emancipatory vision for liberalism would involve reversing some of the damage of that pessimistic thinking.
BR: Liberalism Against Itself is very concerned with canonization and how rewriting the canon specifically is a big part of the Cold War’s impact. I was wondering how you might rewrite the canon today. What figures from the tradition would you reintroduce?
SM: I would put back those who got expunged by the Cold War. I agree with Harvard thinker Judith Shklar that Cold War liberals expunged the Enlightenment from their canon. They saw it as the source of totalitarianism. We agree that this was a disastrous mistake.
The Romantic movement was also central for all the early liberals—Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill—all of said that that liberalism was about creating the conditions for living interesting lives. I wouldn’t say Hegel was a liberal, but liberals certainly became Hegelians in their intellectual premises.
And toward the end of the 19th century liberals became, if you like, liberal Marxists. They learned from Karl Marx about their own mistakes in adopting laissez-faire economics. That realization is why we got the welfare state. I don’t think John Rawls is doing something that’s thinkable but for the late-nineteenth century new liberalism.
Along with all these other movements that get expunged during the Cold War, we have to go back to the French Revolution, which was the birth of political emancipation in modern times. Liberalism began as a continental phenomenon, not as an Anglophone phenomenon. The American Revolution, for instance, was not on par with the French Revolution.
In the Cold War, the terms were reversed. The American Revolution, in the work of figures like Hannah Arendt, was made the font of a more libertarian freedom. The French Revolution was represented as the source of terrorism and totalitarianism. But the French Revolution deserves to be in the liberal canon, as a fulcrum between the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Hegel’s attempt to blend them.
BR: What about the utopian socialists?
SM: Liberals helped invent socialism. Bernie wasn’t the first liberal socialist. We should hold a place of honor in the tradition of liberalism for socialism.
BR: I think Rawls is a democratic socialist, but that’s a conversation for another time.
*
BR: You claim in your book that Cold War liberals reject the Enlightenment. I felt that was a striking claim because some of liberalism’s loudest opponents—Patrick Deneen, a reactionary communitarian, for example—are fond of accusing liberalism of being steeped in Enlightenment thinking. I was wondering whether there are certain aspects of the Enlightenment that you’re emphasizing, certain aspects of the Enlightenment that the Cold War liberals dispense with. The Enlightenment is a capacious tradition, so there’s space for you to say that there are indeed some aspects they jettison, and some they keep.
SM: In her early work, Shklar worked with a definition of the Enlightenment as the emancipation of human agency from authority and tradition. I’m for that reading. Whether those ideals were actually at the core of Enlightenment thought is secondary because, when we canonize, we also pick and choose and winnow.
Scholars today might say there was no Enlightenment; there were multiple enlightenments. Shklar herself, as she became more of a Cold War liberal figure, associated the Enlightenment not with emancipation but with skepticism. So obviously, in any of these inventions of liberalism, we’re also going to be, in a sense, inventing our own lineage in the past. I’m for thinking about intellectual history as also a political act of finding what we want in the future in our past. Luckily, the Enlightenment provides a resource for that view of modernity as about human emancipation.
There are other views, from both Enlightenment-phobes and Enlightenment enthusiasts. Take Stephen Pinker, a later Harvard professor, who should be treated with caution for the way he associates the Enlightenment with a conflict between reason and religion or scientism versus positivism. That’s not what I want to rescue, although it’s only fair to note that there’s going to be some connection between the emancipation of agency and, say, natural science and what it has done for human beings in the world in the last couple hundred years.
BR: Pinker was someone that I had in mind as a kind of cautionary tale for adopting a triumphalist conception of liberalism. I was wondering how we could be optimistic and emphasize progress without becoming triumphalist in the way that Stephen Pinker is. Pinker is someone who celebrates modernity as a great achievement while underemphasizing the things that were bad about it. How do we avoid that pitfall if we want to bring a focus on progress back into liberalism?
SM: Stephen Pinker is a really interesting person to think with, because he is a progressivist liberal who is downright celebratory about modern times. And we need to look carefully at the basis of his giddiness: it turns out that it’s almost biopolitical. The criterion that he uses to measure progress is not a full-fledged sense of emancipation but questions like, Do you live or die? Do you survive past a certain age? Is there violence? How much is there? What’s the murder rate?
Those questions aren’t trivial by any means, but they’re cramped. When we think about freedom, of whether we’ve created the conditions for distinctive personalities in a relatively conformist age of consumer capitalism, we begin to see that Pinker has left a lot out, and has not seen the way liberals have allied themselves with the forces of the market—which may have had salutary effects but also had a dark side.
I’m suggesting that we need to have a story about freedom, the kind that Hegel had. And we can imagine a future of universal emancipation, but we can’t get ahead of ourselves. The Cold Warriors weren’t only trying to provide cautionary notes against giddy Enlightenment enthusiasts. They rejected the Enlightenment and progress out of fear that the Soviets, their enemies, had taken ownership of them. They went further than course correction to reinvent liberalism as a tragic creed of those who should abandon hope and give up emancipation as an ambitious political project.
BR: Do you think that Cold War liberalism has any redeeming features? It seems like you do think that history is to some extent teleological, and that there’s many respects in which modernity is better, hopefully not just with respect to the death rate and child mortality and the like.
SM: I wanted to be empathetic to it. The second chapter of my book is about one of the most famous Cold War liberals, Isaiah Berlin. The chapter is pretty upbeat because because it shows that against essentially all the other Cold War liberals who denounced romanticism as a font of totalitarianism, he wanted to rescue it, and with it, the moral core of a perfectionist liberalism.
National Socialism and the early years of the Cold War’s nuclearized standoff. These were indeed very scary, and made it very difficult to believe in progress. And yet I wonder if they overcorrected. So my book is polemical: it’s about the Cold War liberals’ unintended consequences of so overcorrecting in their reinvention of liberalism that they might themselves have been appalled.
It’s not a polemic in the sense of indicting them as human beings; it’s about the worth of their thought. And we should have tough love for those in whose tradition we find ourselves in today. We should ask what led to this crisis with people like Patrick Deneen declaring the definitive failure of liberalism and Donald Trump looming once again as the possible president in 2024.
BR: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about Isaiah Berlin because I also read him as a perfectionist. But I also read him as a good model for how liberals could better go about their perfectionism, because he seems to think that a pluralistic form of life is a good form of life. Martha Nussbaum has a paper where she describes Isaiah Berlin and philosopher Joseph Raz as both pluralists and perfectionists in contrast to Rawls, who she sees as an antiperfectionist liberal. I wonder if you think Berlin is a promising model for a perfectionist liberalism going forward.
SM: What strikes me about Berlin is first his contribution to the analytical distinction of forms of liberty. It’s fairly clear that his intent was to write a Cold War tract, distinguishing the West from the Communist rest for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of readers. Berlin provided an optimistic answer as to why the United States was involved in the Cold War. His answer was a libertarian conception of freedom against positive freedom understood through self-realization in a perfectionist mode.
But it’s also true that at the same time, in his loving reconstruction of the significance of Romanticism as leaving us in a situation of inevitable self-making, Berlin struggled with libertarianism. This comes out most clearly in an essay called “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life,” where he portrays Mill as in the situation he himself was most devoted to: a perfectionist sense of what would make liberalism worth having that was also oriented to a fear of the state harming individuals. Therefore, Berlin wasn’t necessarily thinking about the kind of institutional conditions—like state action—that might be required to create a society that could promote broad-based perfectionist self-making.
As the aged Berlin began to speak a lot more about pluralism, which he understood with a tolerationist spirit—there are various groups in society with incompatible goals that don’t easily square with one another. I think the roots of any healthy pluralism, one defined by the pursuit of individual emancipation, were obscured by his later career, though. He loses a theory of pluralism of individual perfection, asking only, How do we promote mutual coexistence between groups with different ideologies and approaches? That kind of theory brings us very close to the later Rawls. Unfortunately, both of these figures—the later Berlin and the later Rawls—lost cognizance of the kind of individual or group identity that would be worth defending philosophically, one rooted in freedom and self-making.
BR: I think that’s right: there’s also lots of different Berlins and so you can sort of find him in a more celebratory mood or like a less celebratory mood. Next, I have a question about Lionel Trilling. Trilling is a postwar literary critic who was pessimistic, and he cautioned his fellow liberals to be more realistic about human nature. He was also into Freud. In the book you criticize Trilling for his pessimistic politics. Is Trilling is genuinely invested in politics per se or should his claims about liberalism be read as an argument about interpersonal ethics, or even aesthetics? Trilling talks a lot about liberal novels, for example. There, he’s not calling for a different political platform but for fewer black-and-white fictions. A lot of the stuff he’s talking about is authors that he likes because they have complex characters, like E.M. Forster. I wondered what you thought about this.
SM: Trilling is such a rich figure, and I detected in him an ambivalence to the construction of a Cold War liberalism. He understood that liberalism, as he theorized it, was about the person and their need for self-regulation. Trilling’s liberalism, to me, comes from the trauma he experienced in the 1930s, which he never overcame. But in his own account his politics come from his discovery of Sigmund Freud, and especially Freud’s account of the death drive. To me there’s no way of distinguishing someone like Trilling who is insisting on a new kind of liberal self, one very controlled and self-regulating, and liberal politics generally. Trilling believed, unlike Berlin, that politics is rooted not just in whether the state is interfering with individual choice, but how the individual is put together.
Trilling overreacted to his own ideological experience his sense that progressive liberals were innocent and naive, unschooled in the reality of death and the death drive and thus likely to play into the hands of liberalism’s enemies. He constantly wavers on the brink of renouncing his self-denying liberalism, especially in his sole novel The Middle of the Journey. To use a Freudian category, Trilling is a melancholic who never moves to mourning, who can never overcome his longing for the kind of Romantic liberalism he’s insisting that everyone now renounce.
BR: Liberalism Against Itself is a history book, but it has many resonances with the contemporary political situation. It seems like every day there’s a eulogy to liberalism or another piece about how liberalism has fallen out of favor. Patrick Deneen’s book is called Why Liberalism Failed, as if liberalism’s failure isn’t even a debatable question. You write that Cold War liberalism styled itself as a series of “defenses in an emergency,” which seems true of liberalism today, particularly in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency. I wondered if you could talk about the book’s resonances with our current situation. Do you think that liberalism is not popular now because it’s not making a good case for itself? How can we save liberalism from Patrick Deneen and his ilk?
SM: I feel like this is not a new situation. It’s true that in the past, liberalism didn’t have as many enemies inside the gates as was revealed on January 6. But my whole life has been under the regime of the reassertion of Cold War liberalism. I think that is especially true after 1989, when liberals didn’t take the opportunity to make their ideology credible enough to be durable. One of the main reasons for this is that Cold War liberalism is, in many ways, a precursor to neoliberalism. And to this date, liberals haven’t repudiated neoliberalism strongly enough. In our time, after the War on Terror, a state of emergency where the United States faced overseas enemies, you find a lot of liberals taking the same attitude about an almost elemental need to preserve freedom against its enemies—whether they are postmodern professors, woke young people, or Donald Trump’s voters.
Through all of that history, Cold War liberalism has done two things. It’s helped us scapegoat a lot of people, and not face the need to reinvent liberalism, to return it to some of its optimism from the past and pivot to a future where it could be appealing, in boring terms, to enough voters to survive some of these decisive elections when we think liberalism itself is on the line. If we just scold people for not understanding how a very minimal liberalism is worth retaining, we’ll have missed the opportunity to offer them something worth embracing.
Liberalism can’t be minimalist anymore. It must take on board its older resources and renovate itself in completely different ways than any early liberals allowed. So it’s not as if going back to the future just means exhuming some earlier version of liberalism: I’m just suggesting that there are resources there if liberals want to be a credible source of appeal in an ideologically contentious world that’s no longer at the end of history.
BR: At the beginning of the Obama presidency, it seemed for a moment like there was an air of optimism, but then it became neoliberal business as usual.
SM: The enthusiasm of that moment, the emotion that many experienced, is worth remembering, because it’s almost impossible to have that kind of stance toward politics now. The investment that a lot of people, especially young people, had in politics got crushed because, when it came to economics and foreign policy, Obama didn’t break with what he’d inherited. The consequences of this have been very grave for liberalism itself.
BR: Even though Biden is leftist in certain ways, he’s not articulating a rousing vision for progressive politics or liberalism.
*
Anthony Morgan: I want to start with some more specific questions about Samuel’s theme of Cold War liberalism. First, could you explain more about what in liberalism was rejected after the Cold War and what its political consequences were?
SM: After the Cold War? I would say not a lot was rejected from the Cold War liberal period. It’s only fair to note there were the 1960s and the New Left who named the Cold War liberals—those are the dissidents to whom we owe the phrase “Cold War liberalism.” But in the 1970s and ’80s, especially in the cold climate of the defeat of George McGovern’s campaign and the victory of Ronald Reagan, a certain wisdom crystallized that we had to adopt to Cold War liberal precepts, to meet the Republicans halfway by adopting neoliberalism in the Democratic Party.
Nothing changed after 1989. Liberals doubled down on their libertarian turn in the later Cold War. I have argued that the same is true for American militarism. After the Vietnam War and the failed McGovern candidacy, liberals learned to be forceful as a condition of winning. But down through Barack Obama, they never took seriously the illiberal consequences of American geopolitical leadership—and after 1989, that became very graphic in ways we’re still processing.
AM: Next is a question from an audience member. What role did Roosevelt and his Four Freedoms play in the development of postwar liberalism?
SM: Roosevelt tried to think of himself as enacting the “new liberalism,” a socially conscious, welfarist liberalism. And of course, he said that “the only thing to fear is fear itself.” Yet later, Cold War liberals reoriented liberalism around the elemental experience of fear: fear, in particular, of the Soviet Union.
It’s important to note that for a while, this established a mismatch where Cold War liberal thinkers were radically transforming liberal theory while in practice, liberals were building redistributive welfare states—the biggest, most interventionist, most egalitarian ones they had ever built. But if you read “Two Concepts of Liberty” by Isaiah Berlin you would have no idea that liberals were doing this in practice. And this mismatch just couldn’t be sustained. And though Rawls would remedy this on the theoretical side, it only created a new situation where liberal theory was completely out of sync with the practical victory of neoliberalism’s hollowing out of the welfare state.
So I want to credit Roosevelt as being sort of the last new liberal who dies before he can save America from the coming of Cold War liberalism. And while he has some heirs through the Great Society, ultimately his practical program has no ideological support, especially at the heights of liberal theory, until John Rawls. But at that point, the practical energy to realize it had evaporated.
BR: There’s now a cottage industry of left-liberal Rawlsians who dominate political philosophy, a huge intellectual tradition justifying FDR-style liberalism, but it’s too little, too late. I love Rawls, but I don’t see much of his intellectual tradition being realized in politics.
AM: Another audience question asks, Are there lessons to be learned from the Cold War liberals for progressives working outside of the liberal tradition, in movements like ecosocialism, the Green New Deal, abolitionist movements, or Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions?
SM: Absolutely. The liberals of the kind I’m calling for would be allies for leftists. We’re familiar, because of the Cold War, with the idea that there is an unbridgeable gap between liberals and the left. But I think that’s anachronistic: in the later nineteenth century, the left proved to be a productive element in the reinvention of liberalism. That’s why I use the phrase “liberal Marxism” to describe the work that was done.
In the United States, the entire progressive campaign against laissez-faire economics can be interpreted along the lines of what Marxists were saying in Europe about purely formal freedom that doesn’t lay the foundations for a society in which the conditions for freedom exist and make freedom credible. So philosophically and strategically, there’s no reason to think that liberals and the left can’t establish a mutually supportive relationship. That doesn’t mean there won’t be bickering and there won’t be lines to be drawn, but those will be less and less important as time goes on—especially to the extent there is a powerful new right and the center begins to fail even more visibly than it has already done. At that point, solidarity across the left spectrum will be essential.
BR: The Cold War liberals are also just worth reading because they’re smart, and they’re good writers. Even when they’re wrong about things, they’re important figures to learn from. In particular, Berlin, in his more celebratory passages about pluralism, articulates what could be developed into a perfectionist liberalism that is more obviously sympathetic to leftism. And Trilling is just a great prose stylist. [Oriana: As Nietzsche said, "To improve your style means to improve your thinking."]
AM: Next are some more general questions. Which are the main kinds of freedom that liberal thinkers focus on and how do they come into conflict? I’m thinking of how liberal ideas of economic freedom undercut other kinds of freedom, for instance.
SM: One of the revolutions in our understanding of liberalism is the refusal to begin the story with John Locke, a thinker who was only understood as a liberal in the twentieth century. Locke focused on a more libertarian sense of pre-political rights, especially on property as the basis for government. The first self-styled liberals only came about in the 1820s, in continental Europe. Most people don’t know that there weren’t large numbers of American self-styled liberals until after World War I, with the founding of The New Republic magazine. The first American liberals, those associated with The New Republic, were not economic liberals. There’s no reason to believe that one should associate free self-creation of the kind that the early perfectionist liberals championed with laissez-faire economics.
It’s true that these liberals often thought of laissez-faire, overly optimistically, as a tool of emancipation, because it did make people transacting in marketplaces equal despite their different faith traditions or even, at times, gender and race. That was enormously liberatory. But Mill is a great example of someone who understood that that the market wasn’t just a tool for emancipation but a recipe for oppression.
We live in an ideological world where Berlin’s portrait of liberty as freedom from state interference could be easily mistaken for neoliberal—and did help bolster the ideological conditions in which it was plausible to have a liberalism that was about economic freedom against state intrusion, interference, taxation. But I still think we can make the relevant distinctions and return to a liberalism that is concerned with economic freedom to the extent it’s useful for abundance and growth and liberation and challenges it when it leads instead to class hierarchy and oppression.
BR: Kant is arguably one of the first liberals, and he has a much more extensive understanding of freedom as self-determination or compliance with laws one set for themself. People like John Stuart Mill and even the later existentialists also understand liberalism as creative self-determination. A lot of left liberals, though, are less interested in freedom than they are in justice, which they understand as a matter of distributive equality. Rawls, for example, cares about civil liberties a great deal. He thinks there should be a Bill of Rights ensuring freedom of speech and the like. But his primary concern is how resources should be distributed so that people get equal portions. He doesn’t necessarily see liberties and distributive justice as opposed, although he does think that liberties are prior to the distribution of resources.
AM: One last question: What would be lost if liberalism was lost?
SM: It really depends. Liberalism stands for some important values, but we could imagine a world in which those values are reclaimed by another tradition with another label. In that case, very little would be lost, especially given all of liberalism’s flaws. But if we take Patrick Deneen’s views seriously, we have to say that everything is at stake in the endurance of liberalism because it stands for what we all care about: the possibility of living beyond authority and tradition and making the meaning of our life ourselves—not according to the dictates of someone else. I think everyone has a stake in self-determination, and liberalism, ultimately, is a great purveyor of that ideal. That’s what makes its dire straits today so sad.
BR: I think that’s right. At its best liberalism establishes the conditions for pluralism and celebrates difference. While we can imagine that being captured under a leftist regime, I think that’s something in liberalism that’s worth preserving.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/what-happened-to-liberalism/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=50ae362f74-ourlatest_1_9_2024&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-50ae362f74-40729829&mc_cid=50ae362f74
I would call myself an "FDR liberal." Social Security was a gigantic achievement, and it paved the way for Medicare. Historians claim that FDR ultimately envisioned medical access for all, but knew he had to work gradually. Lyndon Johnson realized it too.
FDR signing Social Security into law. Behind him stands Frances Perkins, who was essential in the creation of Social Security.
Before I came to the US, certain words were purely positive in my mind, terms of high praise. Those terms included “intellectual” and “liberal.” I grew up in an intellectual milieu, so negativity about being “intellectual” was particularly shocking. When it came to the exercise of the intellect, my only concern was not being intellectual enough.
But I wouldn't put "FDR liberal" (= strong social safety net — add to this human rights with special emphasis on women's rights) in first place in my self-description. Being an intellectual is primary to me. My paraphrase of “You can never be too rich or too thin” was “You can never be too educated or too intellectual.”
As for “liberal,” I didn’t have quite the same clarity and love for it, but I was aware that the word was derived from “liberty” — surely a good thing. On the whole I saw liberal attitudes as naturally going together with being an intellectual, which came to me naturally as soon as I started reading for pleasure. I fell madly in love in learning new things, wanting to study everything, to learn many languages, try doing all kinds of things (including, in my teens, exploring the Amazon jungle and climbing Mt. Everest — talk about discarded ambitions).
As for “conservative,” I had no idea what it was that the conservatives were trying to “conserve.” The most memorable answer I got was “their own privilege.”
"The rich get richer" has also been suggested as the essence of the conservative worldview, with one person telling me, "Americans are too selfish to let everyone have access to medical care." Free college tuition wasn't even mentioned — that, I assumed, would be perceived as truly the end of the world.
Have I become more liberal with age? Probably only more bold in expressing my views. I’m not sure if it’s statistically true that women become more radical as they age, but it seems to me that they become more outspoken. They are no longer concerned with pleasing men. When they become widows, they don’t wish to remarry. Some truly blossom as human beings, finally putting their needs and desire first, not last. For men, acting in their own best interest may seem the only way to live; for women born before feminism, it can be revolutionary.
Finally, soon after my arrival, I was told that “The English language loves the number three” — three of anything, including names and groups of three words. So to characterize myself, I need to add “atheist.” Intellectual, liberal, and atheist — yes, that’s me. And an indelible memory comes back: during a friendly conversation with like-minded people, I casually said, “Of course I don’t believe in god” — and to my shock, got sternly warned never to say it in public. “You’re not in Europe anymore; here people might be offended.”
The blatant irony of this wasn’t lost on me, since freedom of speech is so enshrined in America; various foreign-born writers and activists have sought asylum in America, citing chiefly freedom of speech. But the last thing an immigrant wishes to do is offend the natives; thus, in spite of the sanctified constitutional right, I realized I better stay silent — about both religion and politics.
But I did manage to find a solution. For some mysterious reason, “secular” seems a less controversial word than atheist, and I could live with that more easily than with the cowardly word “agnostic.”
Fortunately, there is no need to reduce oneself to three labels. As I say in one poem, “We are not infinite, but we are / not finished.” The feast of life still has much to offer.
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A NEWLY CLASSIFIED TYPE OF HEART DISEASE IS ON THE RISE: CKM SYNDROME
~ Today, we’re talking about a newly recognized form of heart disease—CKM syndrome, which is when you have overlapping cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and metabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes and obesity.
We’ve got a highly specialized medical system. Sometimes it seems like each doctor has their own organ. If I had a heart problem, I’d go see a cardiologist. And if my kidneys weren’t healthy, I’d check in with a nephrologist. Or if I had diabetes or some other hormone-related problem, I’d see an endocrinologist.
But it turns out that these organs, or health problems, have a lot to do with one another. In particular kidney problems and metabolic problems raise the risk for cardiovascular disease, which means everything from a heart attack to clogged arteries.
So all this medical specialization might keep a doctor from seeing the big-picture risk. And that’s been worrying cardiologists like Sadiya Khan of Northwestern University. People who write diabetes guidelines write about that, people who write kidney guidelines write about that, people who write about heart guidelines write about that. But really, one patient isn't going to go to three different guidelines and clinicians aren't going to go to three different sets of guidelines.
That’s why Khan helped write a new set of guidelines from the American Heart Association, in collaboration with kidney and endocrine specialists. The guidelines, which were just released a few months ago, define a new form of heart disease called cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome: CKM.
The heart association says that one third of U.S. adults have at least 3 risk factors for the syndrome. There are many risk factors, and they include obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar. And from the kidneys, the rate they remove contaminants from the blood.
When these are present, and when more than one is present, they synergistically increase the risk of developing heart disease or dying prematurely from heart disease.
But how do problems in one organ drive problems in another? Oftentimes, people talk about how the kidneys and heart are like an old married couple. We've known for some time that having kidney disease increases your risk of developing heart disease. So there's this connection that exists. And the reverse is also true. Having heart disease makes you more at risk for having kidney disease.
Basically, it starts with obesity. Excess fat cells secrete chemicals that cause inflammation. And that can harm blood vessels and damage both heart and kidney tissue. Inflammation also reduces cells’ sensitivity to insulin, the hormone that moves sugar out of the blood and into those cells. More blood sugar, and less of it in cells, is the hallmark of diabetes, of course.
So in the old married couple analogy, if one spouse gets upset about something, it upsets their partner too. And the whole marriage fails.
Cardiologists have known about this couple for a long time. So why are they just getting around to treating them now?
One of the key drivers was the awareness that there's a growing burden of these risk factors or conditions, and they're often clustering together. So we know that the rate of obesity, diabetes, kidney disease and heart disease have increased in the past several decades. So everyone is more at risk for CKM today.
This recognition has also been complemented by the availability of therapies that aren't just treating someone's diabetes, but they also have cardioprotective benefits, as well as kidney protective benefits. And so the availability of therapies that allow us to more holistically manage our patients was a key piece of this.
Therapies that have really emerged in the last several years include SGLT2 inhibitors and GLP1 receptor agonists, specific classes of medications that have cardiovascular benefits, but also have been demonstrated to have benefit in people with kidney disease and people with diabetes and people with obesity or overweight.
Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, which have been used to treat diabetes and obesity might also protect against heart disease and kidney disease. And SGLT2 [Sodium-glucose cotransporter-2] inhibitors work on the kidneys, helping them filter out extra glucose in the blood, so they were originally developed as diabetes drugs. But then some big clinical trials showed they reduced the rates of heart disease as well.
Even though they were developed as drugs for diabetes, we found that they're not really diabetes drugs. You could call them a heart disease drug or a kidney drug. And I think that's again where this construct is very helpful, because we're not really just treating someone's diabetes. We're trying to treat the patient in front of us.
Because of these advances, the heart association has also rolled out a new risk calculator for doctors to use, one that incorporates kidney disease and diabetes indicators along with heart risks. It’s a complex formula but it ends up giving doctors a good picture of a person’s likelihood of developing CKM, or some more specific form of heart disease, like heart failure.
One important difference is this tool lets doctors start evaluating risk at age 30. The previous assessment tools were only applicable for age 40 and up. If someone is going to get heart disease, the very first signs show up in that 30-to-40 decade. And at that early stage, the symptoms can be rolled back with the right treatments.
Recognizing CKM could mean more people will be diagnosed and treated sooner, and stay healthy for a greater part of their lives.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/a-new-type-of-heart-disease-is-on-the-rise1/
Oriana:
I think it’s ludicrous to call CKM a “new” heart disease. It’s the same heart disease as before — it’s just that physicians are finally aware that the term “heart disease” is too restrictive. Heart disease means that the kidneys are involved as well, and we are probably looking at obesity and diabetes too (if not full-blown diabetes, then at least high fasting blood sugar). No major dysfunction progresses in isolation; it has a multitude of consequences in various other organ systems. So ultimately we have to treat the whole person. Fortunately it doesn’t mean lots of different drugs; Drugs that help the kidneys also help the heart, and so on.
The same applies to to supplements. If they are truly effective (hint: a lot depends on the dose), then they have multiple benefits. Berberine doesn't just lower blood glucose; it gives you an amazing lipid profile. Black seed doesn't just protect against infections; it protects against various types of cancer as well. Lion mane mushroom doesn't just alleviate neuropathy; it protects against dementia as well. And we know that anything that's good for the heart is good for the brain as well — but the obverse has not yet been empirically demonstrated.
Still, I appreciate the frustration of people who read information about diets and supplements who end up exclaiming, "How come everything does everything?" Because the thigh bone is connected to the hipbone, is connected to . . . however this goes. If you lower blood sugar, a multitude of benefits follow, and so on. The interconnectedness of the whole body should never be forgotten.
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HOW TO FALL ASLEEP EVEN THOUGH YOUR MIND IS RACING
Create a relaxing bedtime routine
Anita Yokota, LMFT, a therapist and the author of Home Therapy, tells SELF that sticking to a sleep ritual can help things seem less chaotic when it’s time to wind down. “Create a pattern or process that ‘feels’ like bedtime. This might include washing your face, carrying out your skin care routine, meditating, or reading with a dim light. Each of these steps reminds your brain that you’re preparing for sleep,” says Yokota. “Our brains like consistency.”
The key is doing whatever most helps you relax and feel good. For instance, you could get in a warm bath before hitting the sheets—and add a couple of drops of your favorite essential oil to the water to make it extra soothing and luxurious.
Figure out what you want your nightly sleep schedule to look like in terms of timing; then, as the Sleep Foundation recommends, get rolling with your routine at least a half hour before you actually want to be in dreamland. If planning ahead isn’t always realistic, that’s okay—just squeeze in a few minutes to do something calming and familiar each night. (This doesn’t mean spending an hour scrolling your social media feeds—too much bright light and quick stimulation before bed can keep you awake!) Following a set plan, even loosely, can reliably help you snooze even when life feels haywire.
2. Set your surroundings—and yourself—up for success
Your sleep environment goes hand in hand with your nighttime routine: Where you’re trying to rest can have a lot to do with how easy (or not) it might feel to drift off, especially when you’re stressed out and in extra need of some peace.
First, check out how dark your room is when you’re getting ready for bed: Are street lights coming in through the window? Is your partner streaming movies? “Too much light at the wrong time can tell your body to stay awake,” says Dianne Augelli, MD, a fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Light exposure throws off your circadian rhythm (your sleep-wake cycle) and can slow or halt your body’s production of melatonin, a hormone that promotes sleep. There are easy tweaks you can make to help with this: To keep the room dark, Yokota uses blackout shades to make sure she gets the deep sleep she needs. You can also try wearing an eye mask—it’ll block out any annoying light that manages to peek through the cracks of your blinds.
Make your room as quiet as possible, especially because hyperarousal caused by stress makes you extra-sensitive to outside noise. It’s not always possible to shut out all the sounds around you, but you can listen to white noise to drown out what you can’t control (the sounds of a bustling city, say, or your upstairs neighbor’s late-night pacing) and to help you fall asleep. If you don’t have a machine, check out white noise apps like White Noise Lite or BetterSleep. Pop in some earplugs if any amount of noise feels too disruptive.
And even if you like things toasty in your home, cool things down at night. A room temperature between 60 and 67 degrees Fahrenheit tends to be most people’s sleepy-time sweet spot.
3. Face your worries head-on
“If you’re hyper-focused on an issue that you can’t let go of, write down what’s on your mind and tell yourself it will be there for you tomorrow,” Yokota says. This can majorly help with racing thoughts at night. A 2019 study investigating the effects of writing in a journal before bedtime found that jotting down a to-do list (or a “worry list,” as the researchers referred to it) helped people fall asleep faster. While you might be used to writing about your day, the research suggests that paying specific attention to future events will redirect your brain away from rumination about the past (like that work presentation you can’t stop thinking about because it didn’t quite go as planned)
Rather than writing down, “Pay the bills,” you might try, “Pay $135 electric bill tomorrow by 5 p.m.” Just five minutes of journaling can offer relief to your anxious brain. The study determined that people who wrote lists between 30 and 35 items fell asleep the fastest, so jot down as many future tasks as possible—consider it an all-the-things-that-are-weighing-on-me brain dump. To make this task easier, keep your favorite notebook and pens by your bed.
4. PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR BREATH NOT YOUR STRESS
When life’s occasionally gnarly demands are keeping her clients up at night, Nicole Flynn, ASW, a therapist based in Los Angeles who specializes in mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), recommends breathing exercises to help with relaxation. She particularly likes the 4-7-8 breathing technique because it can reduce your heart rate and blood pressure, both of which can spike when you’re stressed and make it harder to sleep.
To do this breathing pattern, you inhale for four seconds, hold your breath for seven seconds, then exhale for eight. Repeat as many times as you’d like (or until you’re snoring away). Don’t be discouraged if you find this a bit unnatural at first. “It takes time to teach our brains and bodies these new patterns,” says Flynn. Keep trying and you’ll likely get more comfortable as you go. If you’re new to this or just want someone to walk you through it, try SELF’s 10-minute guided sleep meditation to help lull you into slumber.
When life is busy (and beyond stressful), it can be tough to prioritize sleep. Though rest can be hard to come by when you’re anxious as all get-out, even small improvements here will help you feel way better in the long run, since too many late nights can be taxing on your health. It’s all about taking active steps to calm yourself down, rather than just lying in the dark and hoping for the best. You got this! ~
https://www.self.com/story/how-to-fall-asleep-fast?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Oriana: THE SECRET OF SLEEP IS GETTING SUFFICIENT ACTIVITY DURING THE DAY
The best sleep advice I ever read came from an article in The Guardian. It came from a woman who suffered from chronic insomnia and had tried proverbially “everything.” Then she finally met a woman who revealed the secret: Stop thinking about sleep. Concentrate on ACTIVITY.
Ah, did that hit home! I had to admit that on days when I had been busy doing things — both mental and physical — a delightful tiredness would come over me, to the point of having to fight off sleepiness if it was still to early for bedtime. Demanding mental activity was enough when I was younger (writing a new poem worked great). Now I want to make sure I get enough physical activity. A long walk (others would not find it especially long) is the best sleeping pill.
But anything that tires me out, for instance going to the dentist, works well. Leaving the house for any reason helps.
Vacuuming the house helps too. Instead of thinking, Oh, no, what a chore, think, Ah, I'm getting a lot of activity.
As for sleep potions, high-potency CBD oil, a tranquillizing cannabis product, has made a difference. Years ago it used to be valerian extract — oddly enough I don’t miss it anymore, though I may try it again some time. But valerian and CBD came before I read the wonderful article in The Guardian, to the effect that the secret of sleep is sufficient amount of activity during the day. Sufficient activity practically guarantees good sleep. I know I need to do enough to get myself tired out. Chores like cleaning, which used to evoke pure dislike, are now exalted to sleep-inducing activity — and activity means that good sleep will follow.
Having accomplished something thanks to that daytime activity is all the better. Positive emotions benefit our physiological function and make everything easier — including falling asleep. Occasionally, however, a negative, disturbing thought just floats up. Here Buddhist wisdom comes handy: acknowledge the thought. Don’t try to fight it. Witness it and watch it vanish like trillions of other thoughts that have come and gone. And welcome sleep, sweet sleep.
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Ending on beauty:
I lived suspended between the past and present
crucified many times by time and place
and yet happy trusting that my sacrifice
will not go to waste.
~ Zbigniew Herbert
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