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LATE RIPENESS
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.
One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.
And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.
I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King.
For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.
We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.
Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago—
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef—they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.
I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.
~ Czeslaw Milosz, translated by the author and Robert Hass
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Oriana:
This is an astonishing poem, created at the end of the author's life. It celebrates the clarity of the poet's mission: to celebrate the beauty of life and to uplift our hearts: at nineteen or ninety, there is always a task still awaiting us. One of Milosz's tasks was to remind his readers that they are of infinite worth simply because they are human — or, in religious terms, "we are all children of the King." It reminds me of the statement in Desiderata that touches me deeply: "You are a child of the universe; you have a right to be here."
But, returning to Milosz's poem, the special clarity that the poem celebrates — "the clarity of early morning" — is the clarity about our life's work.
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.
One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.
And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.
I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King.
. . . and so on — please read the opening poem again. A poem keeps on giving — on each re-reading we gain something new from it. You can’t step into the same poem twice.
Mary:
The first stanza of the Milosz poem states a remarkable truth...that it is not early, but late in life, that that door can open to “the clarity of early morning.” Perhaps it is only then possible to see how all are "children of the king" through all of time and history, laboring in the vineyard that is the human world, part of the greater universe, so beloved in every atom, every stone and leaf, every act and word, that world we must create and recreate in the endless enterprise of becoming.
There is great compassion in these lines, both for all one's own “former lives” and their sorrows, and for all men and women, without division, who are one, though they may have forgotten that, and used only a fraction of their potential. There is the sense that the clarity of this late vision allows both forgiveness and hope — that the fulfillment we wait for will be achieved, even if we stumble, forget ourselves, use only "a hundredth part" of our gifts. There is a wonderful sense here of wisdom and generosity, compassion for all that is human, and refusal of any temptation to despair.
Oriana:
One of the things I like about Christianity (I think of myself as a "cultural Christian") is the statement by Paul: "Before God there is neither male nor female, Jew or Greek, slave or free" (Galatians 3:28). This must have been an incredibly radical statement two thousand years ago, when society was very hierarchical and it made a huge difference whether you were male or female, slave or free, or whether you were a Roman citizen or not. Milosz aligns himself with Paul: "We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King." This elevates the status of ALL human beings, in stark contrast to statements I remember from my Catholic childhood to the effect that we are all wretched sinners. That too was "equalizing," but it required degrading everyone.
I don't see myself as a fan of Paul's Christianity, generally speaking, but I stand in stunned admiration of his upgrading, rather than degrading, everyone. "You are a child of the Universe" works for me even better, not requiring belief in the fictitious King of Kings.
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MILOSZ: THE POET AS SURVIVOR
Czesław Miłosz was a survivor par excellence. His relative, the French-Lithuanian poet and diplomat Oskar Miłosz, had predicted as much in 1935. On the steps of the Opéra métro station in Paris, the two had a final parting. The young Czesław was unsettled by the older man’s prophecy of a catastrophic war in 1939 that would last for five years. Who would be alive at the end of it? His mentor’s last words to him were: “You will survive”.
It was a blessing and a curse. Miłosz would receive international recognition and a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980 – but at a heavy cost. It may be a cliché that the great poet gives everything to his art, but in Miłosz’s case the platitude appears to have been agonizingly true.
Miłosz: A biography by Andrzej Franaszek, abbreviated and translated from the 960-page Polish edition published in 2011 (TLS, November 25, 2011), describes Miłosz’s unsparing choices. Literary ambition drove him to abandon the woman he called his “true and tragic love” in his native Lithuania in the 1930s (she may have been pregnant as well). After the Warsaw Uprising, he told friends that he would not take up arms, because he must survive the war. His death would be meaningless: he must write, not fight.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/czeslaw-milosz/
Oriana:
The rest is behind a paywall, but just his cousin’s prophecy — “You will survive” — makes
these paragraphs worth reading.
To my knowledge, Milosz’s “true and tragic love,” the unnamed woman in Vilnius, did give birth to a daughter. Given the chaos and displacement caused by the war and the Soviet takeover of Vilnius, Milosz never succeeded in tracing this woman and child — it’s possible that both got deported either to Kazakhstan or Siberia. Russia needed slave labor. It’s also possible that neither survived. We can only speculate that Milosz kept imagining (and longing for) this never-seen lost daughter, swept away by the dark winds of history.
Robert Hass translated a lot of Milosz’s poems. Here is a fragment of his musings:
~ Robert Hass
This seems to be an excerpt of a poem — alas, I don’t have either the title or the rest of it. But the opening captivates me:
Perhaps to write means to wage “campaign against nothingness.” Milosz witnessed a lot of destruction in his lifetime (mainly during the war, but not only), and his most ardent wish seems to have been for the restoration of everything. In one poem he even writes of a divine computer somewhere in space where earthly DNA and other records are stored for eventual bodily resurrection — not only of people, but of animals, no matter how humble — ants, flies. And of plants too — after all, he wanted his Lithuanian meadows back, his special lake, his river.
Yes, he wanted the resurrection of the rivers too, in Lithuania, Poland, France — his broadly understood "native realm." And I'm reminded that we tend to constantly confuse things and processes, nouns and verbs (so to speak). A river means flowing, like writing. And those rivers continued to flow in Milosz, who astounded his readers with his prolific creativity.
But the charming lines about the poet's "campaign against nothingness" aren’t meant to probe into the nature of reality but to say something about Milosz's faith in his vocation. He was right: our poems can be better than the flawed self who created them, even if the ambition behind them was doomed and deluded.
Of course this is true not just of poems but of anything we create: the work is more important, especially if it’s the kind that outlasts the creator. I think of the furor in the media about Wagner’s Ring cycle being produced in Los Angeles several years ago. I went to see Das Rheingold — it was magnificent. I can understand why Wagner isn’t performed in Israel — but what a feast is being missed . . .
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I was struck by this statement by Milosz:
“Our fate does not depend on what was once called humaniora [arts and humanities], but on religion and science. Fortunately, both the America of the Bible and the America of technology remind me of this fact, despite my professional aberrations as a humanist. The tomorrow we would like for planet Earth – justice, peace, the elimination of hunger and poverty – is not very likely unless a fundamental conversion occurs.
Many pronouncements by high-ranking Catholic figures sound as if they came from the socialists of a hundred years ago, those noble-minded dreamers who were, back then, treated by the Church with disapproval, to say the least.” ~ Visions from San Francisco Bay, 221-22.
In an essay on Herbert Marcuse, the author of Eros and Civilization, Milosz says, “Marcuse satisfies some of my early acquired habits; he is from the tradition in which I was raised. That tradition provided me with the conviction that the key to the human condition lay in the marriage of Logos and Eros” (Visions, p. 190).
I hasten to explain that by Eros Milosz does not mean anything degraded to the level of Penthouse magazine. Nor is Eros a little Cupid shooting arrows. Eros is more the realm of relatedness and the sense of the sacred. Logos [“Reason”; a debate about the various meanings of this term would derail this post] without Eros is any “soulless” system, e.g. unregulated capitalism (this may come as a surprise in an enemy of Communism, but Milosz clearly stated that he does not like capitalism, and obviously he’d never state that making profit is a supreme value).
For Milosz the creative realm is primarily Eros (this makes me wonder if he realized that some of his poems were too heavy on Logos).
Freud equated Eros with the life instinct, as opposed to Thanatos, the death drive, or the “death wish” that we all carry (I remember Jorie Graham speaking about “the drive for closure” – not just poetic closure, but a wish for a life – or even the world – to end, to be over, so we can “see what it was all about”). However, we must remember that Freud favored the repression of Eros in the service of civilization.
The definition of Eros and Logos has been evolving over the centuries, but I think you have some intuitive idea of what Milosz is trying to get at. Interestingly, the most recent definition I’ve read equates Eros with seeing others as family.
I have a blog post on Milosz’s two souls, related to these ideas: http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/05/miloszs-two-souls.html
By the way, Herbert Marcuse taught at UCSD, which did its best to get rid of him. In response to his forced retirement, the UCSD Student Union actually hired Marcuse to continue his lectures.
Milosz’s quarrel with Marcuse had to do with the latter’s Utopian tendency, in which Milosz saw the danger of totalitarianism. It seems that whenever people set out to build heaven on earth, they end up creating hell.
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“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished’* ~ Czeslaw Milosz.
*And, I might add, if the family isn't finished, then the writer is.” ~ Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure
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“You are living as if destined to live forever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don't notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like a mortal in all that you fear, and like an immortal in all that you desire.” ~ Seneca
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IAN FLEMING IN MOSCOW TO COVER A SHOW TRIAL
“Russia is ruled by an army of executioners with the Lubyanka as the headquarters of death.”
In the late 1960s, the screenwriter Jack Whittingham, who had collaborated on the writing of Thunderball, started to write a screenplay based on the life of Ian Fleming. Whittingham’s daughter Sylvan says: “He had Fleming as a Reuters correspondent traveling on that train across Russia. Fleming was sitting in a compartment, and this alter ego like a ghost came out of him, and this whole adventure took place. That was how Dad played it—that Fleming had this other life that was Bond.”
The project was aborted, yet it reveals something of Whittingham’s perception of Bond that he saw his origins in Ian’s first important foreign assignment. During his fortnight in Moscow, Ian confronted a system that crystalized in his twenty-four-year-old mind the kind of enemy Bond would take on in the 1950s and 60s.
Ian had been forewarned from reading Leo Perutz that “Russia is ruled by an army of executioners” with the Lubyanka as “the headquarters of death.” He understood the truth behind these remarks as he sat for six days in the packed Moscow courtroom and observed from a few feet away “the implacable working of the soulless machinery of Soviet Justice.”
In July 1956, after delivering From Russia, with Love, Ian told his editor how it was based on what he had witnessed personally, “a picture of rather drab grimness, which is what Russia is like,” and a portrait of state intimidation on a scale that he could never have imagined in London's Carmelite Street.
During his time in Moscow, Ian formed a hostile picture of the Soviet state that, twenty years later in the context of the Cold War, the rest of the world was ready to gobble up. A system built on fear, routine arrests, the terrorizing of innocent men and women in a show trial dominated by a pitiless Stalinist prosecutor, who, in his appetite to break and dehumanize the accused, compared them to “stinking carrion” and “mad dogs.”
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At 9:45 am on April 8 1933, Ian’s ornate Victorian-style carriage pulled into Belorussky station. On the platform on this cool morning in late spring was Robin Kinkead. The twenty-seven-year-old Stanford graduate had booked them both into the National and he brought Ian up to speed on their drive to the hotel.
The streets they raced through were in grey contrast to Kinkead’s rented Lincoln. The unpainted and weather-stained houses reminded Ian of the Gorbals neighborhood in Glasgow. He agreed with one of the British journalists whom he met for lunch at the National, Arthur Cummings, that Moscow was “as depressing as a pauper’s funeral,” with long queues outside the bakeries “as if the unemployed of half a dozen industrial towns in the north of England had been dumped here and ordered to keep moving.”
The faces of the people had the pinched, dead look that came from the malnutrition that had already claimed an estimated five million lives and was provoking tales of cannibalism out in the grain belts. There was nothing in the shops, only busts of Stalin and what Kinkead told Ian were perpetual signs: No Lamps, No Bulbs, No Shoes, No Dresses, No Cigarettes, No Vodka.
The National was situated near the Trades Union Hall, which the Soviet government had chosen as the venue for the trial. Several seasoned hands were among those journalists downing sixteen-rouble Martinis at the hotel’s American bar. In addition to Cummings, political editor of the News Chronicle, there was Walter Duranty, the one-legged Pulitzer winner from the New York Times who had denied the famine; A. T. Cholerton of the Daily Telegraph; Linton Wells of the International News Service; and Kinkead’s secretary-interpreter, Zachariah Mikhailov, “a dapper little man of fifty odd” with a cane and a grey hat, who had a temporary job with Reuters’ rival agency, Central News of London.
Ian was the baby of the pack, the least experienced, yet here he was covering a trial that Cummings told him might prove to be “the most spectacular event of its kind in recent years—if not since the trial of Dreyfus.”
The [London] Times did not have a man in Moscow, nor the Manchester Guardian (Malcolm Muggeridge had left a few days before, “in a frenzy of frustration”). This meant that a large part of the world was relying on its Russian news from one young man of twenty-four.
The pressure on Ian to come first with the story was exhilarating. He was back on the athletics track. Twelve years later, when Ian became responsible for news from Russia for the Sunday Times, he privileged “the man from headquarters” over the local bureau chief. “The clear eye and perspective of the special correspondent from London can translate the foreign scene in sharper, simpler colors than the man-on-the-spot who by long residence and experience has become part of that scene.”
The “so-called trial,” as The Times, relying on Ian’s cables, put it, opened at noon on Wednesday April 12 in a building with Greek-style columns that had once been a gentleman’s club like White’s. Ian had done a recce on Rickatson-Hatt’s advice. He set the scene in a paragraph cabled the night before that The Times reprinted. “As the famous clock in the Kremlin Tower strikes twelve, the six Metropolitan-Vickers English employees will enter a room which has been daubed with blue in the Trades Union Hall and thronged with silent multitudes in order to hear an impassive Russian voice read for 4 or 5 hours the massive indictment which may mean death or exile.”
Militia patrolled the streets outside to prevent crowds. Two soldiers with bayonets inspected Ian’s press pass. A short flight of red-carpeted steps led him into a high-ceilinged chamber “hung with crystal chandeliers, expensive damask and all the trappings of Czarist days.” The massive electric chandeliers lit up the platform with the prosecutor’s small scarlet-draped table and the boxed-in, low wooden dock with chairs for the seventeen prisoners. The place had a queer, fusty, charnel smell, thought Arthur Cummings, squeezed in beside Ian on the press bench. Next to Ian sat his translator. Ian was fortunate to rely on Aleksei Brobinsky, son of a former count, with a big nose and curly hair, who had learned his English from an Irish governess. Cummings, by contrast, had “a most perfidious police-woman as interpreter who whispered in his ear what she thought best.”
Bullard wrote in his diary: “England is humming with sympathy for the imprisoned engineers.” In London, two hours behind Moscow, the morning had begun with the BBC offering prayers for the six British prisoners. Ian watched five of them enter in single file—the technicians who had been released on bail. Minutes later, the sixth and last, a club-footed engineer called William MacDonald, limped to his seat in the front row. His fingers twitched over the dark goatee beard he had grown in the Lubyanka, where he had been in solitary confinement for four weeks. MacDonald’s deposition formed the bulk of the Soviet Government’s case against the British company.
MacDonald was joined in the dock by eleven of the Russians accused, including Anna Kutuzova, Thornton’s secretary and his whispered mistress.
Peter Fleming, passing through Moscow two years earlier, had reported to his brother on the “startling and universal ugliness of the women.” Yet the abiding memory of Hilary Bray, who had grown up in Russia, “was of girls with bright smiling eyes looking at him out of enormous furs.” According to Alaric Jacob, Ian picked up a Jewish woman from Odessa, “and then discovered that she was supposed to be keeping tabs on him.” Rickatson-Hatt formed the idea that “he got preferential treatment by flirting with the secretary of the chief interpreter.” If so, the evidence has not survived. The only Russian woman Ian wrote about was Anna Kutuzova. She sat directly opposite him for six days, attractive, lively, strong-minded. In her impossible predicament can be glimpsed the first outline of Tatiana in From Russia, with Love.
She took her place between MacDonald and Thornton and gazed around at the columned walls, the elaborate cornices, with what Cummings described as a look of birdlike intelligence. “She wore a dainty black costume with a broad and spotless white collar, and elegant shoes and stockings and her glossy hair was beautifully waved.” Kutuzova was the prosecution’s star witness.
Andrei Vyshinsky, the thickset state prosecutor, emerged briskly through a low curtained doorway. Pince-nez, blond mustache, tight-lipped, fifty years old, wearing a blue suit and tie. In 1908, he shared a cell with Stalin, and in 1917 he ordered the arrest of Lenin. His catchphrase: “Give me the man and I will find the crime.” After the Second World War, Vyshinsky would gain fame as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials and then as Russia’s Foreign Minister. In April 1933, his name was synonymous with Stalin’s show trials.
A clerk in a droning voice read out into a microphone the seventy-seven pages of charges.
Ian reported two bombshells on the opening day. The first occurred at 3 p.m. when MacDonald was asked if he pleaded guilty. A sensation was caused by his haggard reply. “Yes, I do.”
The audience gasped. “To all the charges?”
These included disabling motors by chucking bolts and stones into them, and paying Russian employees to gather military information for British Intelligence.
MacDonald muttered, “Yes.” Vyshinsky rubbed his hands.
The court was adjourned. Ian dashed out to write his report in the press room on the floor below. It needed to be submitted to one of the three Soviet censors in a room upstairs and signed and red-stamped before Ian could take it to the central telegraph office two blocks away. He picked up on the general feeling that MacDonald’s confession had been “extracted by OGPU methods’, and was ‘not entirely unexpected: he had been in prison longer than the others.”
Even so, Bullard wrote in his diary, “MacD’s ‘confession’ was a terrible blow, not merely to the British government but to all of us who believe that British engineers of that type would not commit sabotage . . . it was saddening to think that any pressure could make a man perjure himself so grossly.” The case was “pure fake.”
*
“I wish to repudiate this document entirely.”
The second bombshell occurred in the evening session when Leslie Thornton retracted his confession. In a clear voice, he added, “I always built and never destroyed.” When the judge asked him why then he had signed the deposition, he fumbled angrily with his copy of the indictment: “Because I was nervous. I lost my courage.”
“When did your courage return?”
Thornton replied firmly. On 4 April at 6 pm, the hour he was released from prison. Duranty was a veteran reporter of these trials. “This created the greatest sensation the writer has ever seen in a Soviet courtroom.”
The second day exceeded the first for unexpected drama. The court opened at 10 am when Ian witnessed a further “astonishing development.” Having pleaded guilty the afternoon before, William MacDonald rose stiffly to his feet and said in a loud voice that he was changing his plea. “I am not really guilty of these crimes. I declare this emphatically.”
Ian wrote: “Standing upright despite a lame left leg, MacDonald denounced in cold and calculated tones the statements contained both in the indictment and the written statement.” His depositions against himself, against Thornton, “were a tissue of lies, signed ‘under the pressure of circumstances’ on the premises of the OGPU.” This “sudden turning of the tables” produced “the profoundest sensation . . . in the midst of which the microphones ‘broke down.’”
The court was adjourned and MacDonald was escorted away by uniformed OGPU guards. When he reappeared for the evening session, pinched and hollow-eyed, Ian was shocked by his “remarkably changed demeanor.” Instead of defiantly maintaining his innocence, MacDonald spoke in a low, almost inaudible voice and admitted to further charges, answering “yes” to every question put to him about wrecking activities.
What could have happened to him in the interval? Ian listened to the press room speculation. Torture was one theory, hypnotism another—the OGPU had possibly resorted to drugs prepared by Tibetans from herbs and administered in the prisoners’ food to place them in the psychic power of their jailers.
The view of the British embassy in Moscow, wrote Bullard, “was that MacDonald made his ‘confession’ to save the families of various Russian friends.” Ian reported that Anna Kutuzova had been broken like this, “by the usual threats in regard to her relatives.” But the censors would never have let him cable the actual details: how she had been kidnapped for twenty-four hours and come home battered; how the OGPU had sat her down back-to-back with Thornton; how the chief interrogator had then said to Thornton, “If you deny what she asserts we will believe you, but citizeness Kutuzova will be shot for perjury.” Thornton had crumpled.
After that, the trial followed a predictable course. Thornton’s statement that there was not a word of truth in his deposition was supported by his boss, Allan Monkhouse, who was then forced to listen to Anna Kutuzova repeating to Thornton, her lover, after an initial hesitation,
“mechanically, in an unnatural voice, as if by heart,” how she remembered Thornton explaining to her that “if a piece of metal were thrown into a turbine, a turbine would fly into bits through the ceiling.” In her weary sing-song tone, she made the claim, which sounded improbable even to the many Russians in the hall, that her lover had plotted in her presence. She said the Moscow embassy had provided 50,000 rubles to hire wreckers.
One after another, the Russian prisoners in the dock stood up to testify in the same nervous manner: yes, they had received bribes to throw iron into the machinery, also a fur coat, and in two instances, a bottle of eau de cologne and a pair of trousers.
To all this, the state prosecutor listened with grim detachment, playing noughts and crosses with a stubby pencil, and sipping from glasses of hot tea. Vyshinsky’s winding-up took place over two days, lasted six and a half hours, and resembled, in its exorbitant length, bombastic tone and trumpeting of his world-beating system, not merely the tirades of Sam Slater, Uncle Phil and Eve putting young master Ian in his place, but the speech of virtually every James Bond villain.
Ian wrote in You Only Live Twice: “It was pleasant, reassuring to the executioner, to deliver his apologia—purge the sin he was about to commit.” ~
https://lithub.com/when-a-24-year-old-ian-fleming-went-to-moscow-to-cover-a-show-trial/
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IS ISRAEL PERPETUATING THE CYCLE OF RADICALIZATION?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had one stated goal since Israel began its military campaign in Gaza six months ago: a complete "victory" over, and eradication of, Hamas. As recently as February, Netanyahu framed victory as the key to peace and security in Israel.
But some experts — like Ambassador Dennis Ross, a former U.S. Middle East envoy — have warned that fully eradicating Hamas, or any terror group, is difficult.
33,00 Palestinians have been killed so far, with 13,000 of them children, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Some geopolitics researchers, like H.A. Hellyer with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, believe that if that number continues to grow, so does the possibility that groups like Hamas could be further radicalized.
2. How ideologies find ways to live on.
Ross cites the U.S. military's response to ISIS in the 2010s as an example of how difficult it is to win victory over an idea. He told NPR that the U.S. was able to defeat the group militarily, but that you can't get rid of a belief.
"We still have 3,000 forces in Iraq for one reason; to prevent ISIS from coming back. We have 900 in Syria to prevent ISIS from coming back. And the truth is, there are pockets of ISIS today, because ISIS as an idea has not been eradicated," he said.
3. The impact of Israel's campaign on its security.
Hellyer doesn't believe Israel's military campaign is close to achieving its goal.
"I don't think it's possible to destroy Hamas. I think at best, you can radically degrade its military capacity. And I'm not sure that that's really what they've managed to do over the past six months," he told NPR.
Hellyer adds the current situation between Israel and Hamas could just fuel the radicalization.
"With the civilian death toll being at where it is, I reckon Hamas will actually have a lot of people that will be willing to be recruited in order to defend themselves against further Israeli attacks," he said.
"None of this is aiming us towards de-escalating what's going on. On the contrary, it's escalation upon escalation."
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/12/1198911236/israel-hamas-gaza-middle-east-netanyahu
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IS THE HATRED OF GAY MEN BASICALLY A HATRED OF FEMININITY?
~ Conservatives do not hate homosexuality. They hate femininity. They hate women. ~
So let’s talk about camp.
Traditionally, male fashions were over the top in style, colorful, and flamboyant.
We’re talking about men wearing wigs, make-up, laces, and high-heels.
Men wearing tights and skirts covered with beautiful embroidery in vibrant colors.
Throughout history, vibrant color, expensive fabric, excessive jewelry, and flamboyant style have always been favorites of rich men to show off their wealth and good taste.
It wasn’t until the mid-19th century, during the Victorian Era, that men started to favor a more somber, almost uniform-like style. This style was then reinforced by two world wars when uniforms became the ultimate statement of masculinity. Female fashion, however, went on a different path. Since men weren’t allowed to showcase their wealth with their own clothing, they dressed up their trophy wives. Women’s clothing remained colorful and vibrant. Women have more room for self-expression because, well, we’re required to be beautiful to attract mates.
So you are socialized to associate men with somber color and conformity in style, while women with vibrant color and freedom of self-expression in fashion. And because you never learned any history, you thought things had always been like this.
When you see men wearing “camp and flamboyant” clothing, you automatically consider them “emasculated.” And that’s what you find unbearable. Not their sexual orientation but their being “feminine.” After all, there were plenty of masculine gay people; you don’t even register them as “gay.”
Why? Because it is never about sexual orientation. It’s always about misogyny. You don’t hate gay men. You hate emasculated men. You hate men who seemingly voluntarily associate/identify themselves with the “lesser sex.”
Here’s the interesting thing. Many straight, conservative men also dress in campy and flamboyant fashion.
How about these proud boys in their yellow kilts?
What about this conservative who fancies him a Roman legionnaire?
Which part of Trump’s brand of golden sneakers isn’t campy and flamboyant?
So, you accept certain types of “flamboyant” as masculine, specifically Vikings, Romans, Scots, and, of course, whatever Trump is selling. If people’s dress falls within these categories, you are fine with it because you already associate these styles with masculinity (and whiteness).
It’s the type of colorful, camp, and flamboyant style you associate with women that you can’t stand.
So it’s not even “camp or flamboyant.” You just hate women. ~ Feifei Young, Quora
Nana Togonmessie:
I have long asserted that homophobia was just misogyny directed towards men; the fear of being treated and regarded by men the same way they treat and regard women. That is telling.
Victoria Baker:
Which is why their panic about trans is only about trans women (m2f).
Ned Adams:
Interestingly enough, the company that made those yellow kilts, Verillas, is extremely LGBT friendly. Its owner was horrified that the Proud Boys used them as a uniform.
He discontinued the color and donated the profits to the NAACP.
Matthew Harris:
I don’t think one can overstate the effect of the world wars on male thinking about fashion (and many other things). I was born in the 50s, grew up in the 60–70s, so in the wake of WWII. When I think of dress requirements in pubic school, it seems almost otherworldly to me when compared to young people today. And the differences strongly track military dress customs from that era. Tuck that shirt in, buddy-boo, or off to the principals office for you! Belt required, and shoes at least clean and shined, somewhat. Stand up perfectly straight or you will wish you had! Wearing a T-shirt to school was just not something anyone did. Walk single file to the cafeteria, and I mean F7ck!ng single file. Speak only when an adult has spoken to you. Sure, there were poster pictures of James Dean on his motorcycle in a T-shirt, but he was definitely the bad boy for it. Something mysterious and naughty…..and kind of alluring.
Joanna Sleight:
The big shift in male fashion actually came about because of the French Revolution — the British aristocracy were so terrified of the same thing happening to them as happened across the channel that they dissociated themselves from the French aristos they had up til then modeled themselves on, ditched the flamboyant clothing and pretended instead that they were very sober, ascetic, sensible, practical and not at all overly wealthy by wearing black, navy or grey suits in town and brown or green in the country — this is still the acceptable business/upper class dress in the U.K. and has been adopted all over the world…
Susanna Leima:
Yep and do not forget about rappers with all their bling and long flashy coats on. Don’t know their political ideology (if any) but they sure are THE biggest macho egos of all yet dress up feminine and flamboyant!
Simon Jemčenko:
It seems to me that austere clothing styles were influenced by the Christian church, which demanded conformity and simplicity from their ordinary members. Of course top levels of society were initially an exception from this trend, but with the birth of modern democratic government and ideas of equality during the 18th century Enlightenment era men from the upper classes also adopted simpler clothes. Mass conscription and birth of the nation state after the French revolution accelerated this process.
Mary:
This may help to explain the particular animosity to the flamboyant, camp, gay persona.
Camp is not a reflection of “femininity,” but an exaggeration, almost a parody, of the social form of the feminine. This “feminine” is a construct of socially assigned traits, not of biological ones. No women I have ever seen matches the gestures, physical and verbal, of the Camp, flamboyant gay man...Camp echoes the “feminine” as the opposite of socially defined masculinity. Voice, dress, physical movement and gestures, interest and attitude all exaggerate and elaborate stereotypical “femininity.”
One of the stereotypes is also that women have great friendships with gay men. This does occur, maybe not because the gay man is so "feminine" but because for a gay man the woman is not prey.
Rory Fellowes:
It was Queen Victoria, when she went into mourning at the death of Prince Albert, who caused the whole country to join her in wearing black. We didn’t fully recover from this morose style until the 1960s.
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THE SOCIOPATH WHO LEARNED TO BE LOVING
~ Patric Gagne has spent most of her life fighting terrible urges. She is also a loving sister, daughter, mother and wife. She talks about her remarkable journey
There is a slight flash in her eyes as Patric Gagne describes what she calls the “tug” – the moment she imagines something she really shouldn’t do and thinks: “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
She laughs. What would once have been a compulsion can now be overpowered by logic and consequences. “You want to take that car for a joyride? Yes, but if I did that, I’m probably going to have to answer for it. And do I want to? Not really.”
This isn’t to say that Gagne wouldn’t jump at an opportunity, if she could argue she wasn’t at fault. It happened recently, she says. Waiting for her car, parked by a valet, she was given the keys to someone else’s and drove off in it. “They handed me the keys! And then I was like” – she puts on a mock-surprised voice – “‘Oh, this is not my car.’” Her husband, when he heard, “didn’t love it”, she says. She smiles as if to say: but what did he expect?
2020, Gagne featured in the New York Times’s Modern Love series with the headline: “He married a sociopath. Me.” This led to her memoir, Sociopath, in which she writes about her lack of empathy and other emotions, and the destructive compulsions that once threatened to overwhelm her.
The term sociopath is widely understood in popular culture – the chilly and ruthless politician or CEO or, at its most extreme, the serial killer – but it isn’t an official diagnosis. In the UK, it’s an outdated term, now under the umbrella of antisocial personality disorder, which also includes psychopathic traits. Gagne has never been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. In the US, she was labeled a sociopath by a psychologist who got her to take the psychopathy checklist assessment, often used with offenders.
Sociopaths, if we persist with the term, have a bad reputation – not undeserved, she acknowledges – but she wanted to offer up the inner life of someone struggling, who didn’t want to hurt people or do destructive things, and who did want to have fulfilling relationships. “I was driven by the need to help others like me understand who they are, why they are.”
We speak over video call, Gagne at home on the east coast. She is compelling, like a movie character – a sociopath who’s beautiful, warm and funny, articulate and charming. She’s a self-confessed liar, but her book details a woman struggling against her urges, and her deceit is largely about masking to fit in – not deployed, as far as I can tell, for power and control. (Mind you, might a sociopath make me want to believe that?)
Can she recognize other sociopaths? “Not really,” she says. “People want to believe that sociopaths are all evil and it makes them easy to spot, therefore they’re safe. People don’t want to admit they might be working with a sociopath, sleeping next to a sociopath, they might have birthed a sociopath. But my goal is to take the stigma away from so that we can have a more complete conversation about it.”
In her university library, Gagne struggled to find much about sociopathy. Older books made more sense to her. Reading a book written by a psychiatrist in the 1940s, the personality characteristics listed – including lack of remorse or shame, unreliability and untruthfulness – made sense to her. “I remember reading these studies, some of which were decades old, and thinking, ‘Why aren’t people talking about this?’”
Other mental disorders get a lot of research and therefore treatment, but not, she realized, antisocial personality disorder. Even though early intervention could prevent destructive behavior, and could revolutionize the criminal justice system, she says: “I think because these words have become synonymous with evil, people’s compassion for them automatically drops. There’s no incentive to help.”
Where, she says with a smile, is empathy for the sociopath? “When you are a sociopathic kid, nobody’s empathizing. Sociopaths are villainized for failing to demonstrate the exact same emotion they have never received themselves.” That feeling of hopelessness, she thinks, can be “a driving force in the escalation of destructive behavior”. But the sociopaths we hear about “are the extreme examples, and by only focusing on the extreme, we continue to exacerbate the problem. The majority of people who fall on the sociopathic spectrum fall on the moderate side, for whom treatment is possible, and that’s what I want them to know.”
For Gagne, it felt reassuring to put a name to her experience – however much disagreement there is about it – and to see that it could be improved. Her treatment included cognitive behavioral therapy. “For me, there is nothing inherently immoral about having limited access to emotion – it’s not what we feel, it’s what we do. If destructive behavior is at play, the behavior needs to be addressed, first and foremost.” Left untreated, it doesn’t mean people become career criminals, she says, “but they’re certainly going to employ unhealthy coping mechanisms”.
Gagne did not become a career criminal – she worked in the music industry, then was a therapist before she became a writer and advocate – but she had her moments. She was a compulsive thief and joyrider. As a child, she stabbed another girl in the head with a pencil. This wasn’t, she insists, “rooted in a drive to inflict pain. I just remember feeling this pressure building, and this girl just happened to be standing next to me when the dam burst. Certainly she was grating on me in that moment but I wasn’t trying to hurt her specifically.” The act, she says, “resulted in a pressure release that I’d never experienced. Certainly, I can look back and can think logically that I wish she hadn’t had to suffer in order for me to get that release.”
Gagne grew up in California, where her father was an executive in the music industry; then, after her parents split up, on the east coast. She remembers realizing she was different from other people, “really early – just a subtle awareness that I wasn’t experiencing things the way my classmates were, their emotional reactions were very different than mine. And certainly my family’s.”
She observed and imitated her younger sister’s behavior, and that of other children at school, especially in relation to emotions. “It was almost like learning a language,” says Gagne. “I would try to figure out the socially appropriate way to respond.”
It wasn’t deliberately manipulative, she says. “I understand that someone who is frequently dishonest, you’re automatically going to equate that with evil, or someone who’s out to get you, but that really was not the case. I didn’t have the social tools everyone else seemed to have, so I mimicked theirs – an antisocial child trying to survive in a pro-social world.” Did she have many friends? “Not really, but I was OK with it.”
She loved her family – “The sociopathic personality isn’t incapable of making those connections” – especially her younger sister. “We were just buddies from the start. I also didn’t have that jealousy that comes with a lot of sibling relationships.” Gagne was thrilled that her younger sister took attention away from her. “I think without that rivalry element, we were able to exist cooperatively.”
At 14, at a holiday camp, she met another teenager, David. They had a brief relationship before getting together years later; they’re now married and have two children. Before him, did she think she would be able to feel love for a partner? “My concern was: is this going to be a real relationship or am I going to have to fake it 90% of the time? Is there anyone out there with whom I will be able to be completely myself?”
Did she worry about becoming a mother? “I remember holding out hope that when my first child was born, I would have that instant connection I had read about in books and seen in movies. When that didn’t happen, I felt very disappointed: ‘Is this going to be a situation where I can’t connect?’ But ultimately, I love my kids. I didn’t experience that instant connection, but I learned other women who do not have a sociopathic personality also experience that.” She knew, she says, from the experience with her family and husband that she was capable of love. “So I never worried that I wouldn’t love my children.”
Gagne finds it hard to describe how her urges felt (she doesn’t have them to the same degree now). When she was younger, she struggled with her feeling of apathy, a grayish world, and, she writes: “doing something I knew was morally unacceptable was a way to force a pop of color”. It was also that feeling of release. Was there a pattern to the compulsions? “It didn’t become concrete for me until later, but if I tried to ignore [the urge or pressure], I had less control over the behavior.”
Gagne realized, she says, that regular, smaller acts of deviance would prevent a larger blow-out. She came up with a list of “rules”, of which the first was “no hurting anybody”. “I think it was important for me to set those boundaries, because they weren’t inherent,” she says. “I knew what was right and wrong, but I was missing those complex emotional systems that tend to keep people in check. I had to write it down and talk myself through it. What is bad in the big sense?
That was easy: “violence.” Instead, she would stalk strangers on the street (if they were unaware, she reasoned, it wouldn’t hurt them), truant from school and let herself into the houses her mother, an estate agent, had access to. Later, she taught herself to pick locks.
But there were slips. Once she picked up a cat in the street and squeezed it harder and harder, feeling, she writes, “euphoric” before she let it go. It frightened her – she didn’t want to hurt animals. There are other things she left out of the book; I’d love to know what they are, given that she does include disturbing things such as breaking into the property of a woman who is trying to extort money from her and attending strangers’ funerals, drawn in by the mourners’ heightened emotions.
“My husband and I made a deal that I wouldn’t show the pages to anyone else before he looked at them,” she says. “There were occasions where I would write something and he would come in with a horrified expression, like: you can’t show this, burn your computer. My editor jokes that he wants to get his hands on what he calls ‘David’s vault’. Even now I will say something or admit to something that someone who is neurotypical is going to find horrifying, but it just doesn’t register that way to me.”
At university in Los Angeles, Gagne continued her acts of deviance but she was struggling to understand her urges. At one point she jumped from her window – not a serious attempt at suicide, she now thinks, more a hope that it would somehow incapacitate her. “Maybe if I was somehow compromised physically, I would no longer be at the mercy of my compulsions. I don’t feel that way any longer, because I am very much in control of my behavior. I have a greater understanding of my personality type.”
After university, Gagne worked in the music industry. Does she think that world attracts sociopaths? “If it’s not a job prerequisite, it’s certainly recommended. I think it helps to have moral flexibility in certain fields, and the music industry is definitely one of them. But that’s why I made the decision not to pursue that career. It is sort of unchecked, and it was better to spend my time in a more structured environment that had clearer boundaries.”
So Gagne studied for a PhD, and became a therapist. She thinks her detachment was helpful. “If you are constantly projecting your own emotions into the session, they’re not going to be able to process what they’re feeling.” There are other benefits to Gagne’s sociopathic traits. “When I look at other women who are struggling with self-worth, shame, are struggling to make other people feel more comfortable by making themselves less comfortable, that seems awful, and it’s easy to say I’m better off that I don’t have to deal with that. But, conversely, women who have deep emotional ranges are able to connect much better than I can, to have those relationships that I don’t have.”
She does have good friendships, she says. “I am really fortunate to have friends who are both emotionally generous and nonjudgmental.” Can she be a good friend, empathic when she needs to be? She thinks so. “If I have a friend who is experiencing something I can’t directly relate to, I say: help me understand this. Other times, I just listen.” Has she offended her friends by saying or doing the wrong thing? “Of course,” she says with a laugh. “There are times where certain moments need sensitivity that I don’t always grasp, but they will let me know that reaction was not great and I can go, OK, I see that.”
As she wrote her book, Gagne started to understand herself more – and to feel empathy growing. “In writing about my experience as a child, I was able to empathize with other children who might be in the same position, and it was powerful – sort of, ‘Oh, this is what it feels like.’” It felt hopeful, she says. It was like being on the right path.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/apr/08/patric-gagne-sociopath-fighting-urges?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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THE SECRET OF OUR EXISTENCE — AND SURVIVAL — MAY DEPEND ON GRAVITATIONAL WAVES
Astounding research suggests our biological makeup is star-spun.
gravitational waves from a black holeGravitational waves are made by colliding neutron stars, and could explain essential . . . nutrients.
Our bodies rely on some "heavy elements" that may be, at least partly, from neutron stars.
It’s difficult to confirm that a particular supply of iodine or bromine is definitely from neutron stars.
All life on Earth evolved within its specific atmosphere, which is very different from those on even our nearest planetary neighbors. In new research that is not yet peer reviewed, "Do We Owe Our Existence to Gravitational Waves?," three physicists find that the origin of life on Earth could rely directly on a chain of events that leads back to gravitational waves. These giant ripples through space time can turn neutron star collisions into far-flung chemical package deliveries, which the researchers say could have brought iodine and bromine to Earth. These elements are essential nutrients in humans today, including during fetal development, and the researchers say this could be the best explanation for how they got here.
In the prepress paper, famous physicist John Ellis of Kings College London and CERN is joined by Brian Fields of the University of Illinois and Rebecca Surman of Notre Dame. They explain that the human body requires over twenty elements, from carbon and hydrogen all the way down to iodine. Most of these elements are lighter, with lower atomic numbers, and were dispersed throughout our portion of the universe by supernovae. Hydrogen dates back nearly to the Big Bang, and other elements formed as particles were flung around the newborn universe and stuck in different nuclei.
But some of the essential elements are heavier and quite a bit newer, and they can’t be explained by those same supernovae. Something else must have occurred to deposit them on Earth, and in sufficient quantities that they enabled the evolution of humans in the first place. We all carry these elements, and our biology uses them for building tissue, tapping energy, establishing our metabolism, and much more. There’s no "human life" as we know it without these heavy elements — so where did they come from?
We can explain iodine and bromine with something called r-process, or rapid neutron-capture process. Like a character in a video game, an atom’s nucleus can move from neutron to neutron and accumulate them all, staving off radioactive decay and building atomic mass. Heavier elements can be traced back to the r-process or a different s-process, and between the two, the r-process is harder to quantify and understand because of its volatility.
Even within the r-process, it can also take place in different kinds of environments, not just in collisions between neutron stars. This research is an attempt to start to quantify one of these sources with more certainty, if that’s possible. A kilonova is a merging of two neutron stars, or a neutron star and a black hole, that throws out an extraordinary amount of light and radioactivity. Kilonovae also generate gravitational waves, something observed and confirmed within the last ten years.
It’s easy to see how bromine could have surfed the wave all the way to primordial Earth, and that iodine might as well. But how can scientists test this theory? This paper, the researchers explain, is just an exploration of the "chain of custody" of these two r-process elements all the way from one possible origin to Earth. Future researchers might focus on exploring other sites that generate the r-process, for example, or verify the "circumstantial evidence" that iodine comes from kilonovae at all.
Iodine found in humans is the isotope iodine 127, which the researchers say may come from kilonovae as radioactive iodine 129. In future studies, they suggest, physicists could study how much iodine 129 is found in lunar rock in relation to other predicted results of kilonovae. "[I]t would provide circumstantial evidence that the r-process in kilonovae does indeed produce iodine, suggesting a positive answer to the question in the title of this paper," they conclude. Thank goodness — we’re ’dine to know. ~
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a60411673/gravitational-waves/?source=nl&utm_source=nl_pop&utm_medium=email&date=041024&utm_campaign=nl34986911&GID=df404ca4c6a7ea7fd7c7fddd0178d54e5e4b11c249c39eb055ba3cb06818db2d&utm_term=TEST-%20NEW%20TEST%20-%20Sending%20List%20-%20AM%20180D%20Clicks%2C%20NON%20AM%2090D%20Opens%2C%20Both%20Subbed%20Last%2030D
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DIFFERENT COUNTRIES, DIFFERENT PARENTING
Kids in Japan run errands and walk to school by themselves
You’ve likely heard of the television program “Old Enough” (“Hajimete no Otsukai,” or “My First Errand,” in Japanese.) While the show has been a sensation in Japan for decades, only this year did it amass a U.S. following after its Netflix premiere. It’s a reality program that follows young children — ages 2-5 — as they undertake tasks such as going to the store.
As in all reality television, there is a great amount of orchestration behind the scenes to keep the children both safe and in sight of the cameras. But the show highlights a real cultural difference between Japan and the U.S. In Japan, it’s not unusual to see children — perhaps not quite as young as those featured on the show, but still elementary-school-aged — taking public transportation or walking to school on their own or with other young children, demonstrating a degree of independence virtually unheard of for American children of the same age.
Perhaps this has something to do with Japan’s low crime rate: The incidence of gun homicide there is 350 times less than in the U.S.
In safe, enclosed spaces like schools, Japanese children are likewise given significant responsibilities. As young as age 6, children are tasked with cleaning their schools — even bathrooms! — and serving lunch to their classmates.
Maybe it’s time for us to ask our kids to step it up a little in the chore department.
Scandinavian babies take their naps al fresco
A recent TikTok video about the practice went viral, teaching a new generation of astonished Americans, and others, about the Danish custom of leaving babies outdoors in their strollers to sleep. There is a cultural belief about the fresh air helping the babies sleep better and being healthy for them — which, given what we’ve learned these past couple of years about virus transmission in enclosed spaces, makes a lot of sense!
In individual homes and day-cares, you will see babies snoozing outside tucked inside their strollers, as well as out front of shops, restaurants or bars, where their parents might be inside enjoying a drink and keeping an eye on their little one from a table near the window.
While the practice is new to Americans, it’s been going on in countries like Denmark and Finland for generations. But this is definitely not something you’ll want to try at home. When Danish mother Annette Sorensen left her baby outside a New York City restaurant back in 1997 while she and her partner went inside to have a drink, Sorensen was subsequently arrested, strip-searched and temporarily lost custody of her daughter.
There have been more recent cases of American parents being reported to the authorities for such offenses as briefly leaving a child in the car while shopping or sending them to the local playground by themselves.
If it’s truly not safe to leave a baby outdoors in a stroller for a nap in the U.S., maybe instead of vilifying parents we could focus on how to make public spaces less dangerous.
Some Chinese babies don’t wear diapers
Traditional Chinese infant potty training, known as “elimination communication” by Westerners who have adopted the practice, involves babies spending their days diaper-free.
Sometimes starting as early as the first weeks of life, babies are held bare-bottomed over the toilet — or a trash can or bush, if they happen to be outdoors — and caregivers cue them to urinate with a gentle shushing sound that sounds vaguely like running water. Parents say they learn to read baby’s signals that they are ready to “eliminate,” such as squirming or gazing off into the distance.
Adherents of the practice say that they are able to dramatically reduce the number of diapers they use in a win for both their budgets and the environment. Some do find it helpful to remove any carpeting in their homes, however.
Italian preschoolers may do woodwork with hammers and saws.
One sight that’s common in a Reggio school — and likely not many other places — is very young children wielding little hammers to pound nails and saws to cut wood in order to build their own original creations.
“Reggio Emilia encourage a wide range of media through which children can express themselves,” Peter Moorhouse, an expert in early childhood education and woodworking, told HuffPost.
Parents, says Moorhouse, “are surprised by just how confident and competent their children are working with tools.”
Enticed by the tactical satisfaction of the wood and tools, children practice creativity and develop problem-solving skills as they work, making this one of the most engaging and memorable parts of their first years at school.
Swimsuit tops are optional for kids of all genders in Europe.
The sight of a little girl running around on the beach or at the pool in only her bathing suit bottom is no big deal to the locals in places like Spain and Germany.
While we’re used to seeing boys playing in and around the water in only their swim trunks, the idea that little girls don’t need any additional coverage is completely foreign to Americans.
But why do we insist on bikini tops, or one-pieces that complicate trips to the bathroom, for our girls? Because it’s what we expect of grown women?
To state the obvious, little girls don’t have breasts yet. What does it say about us that we insist on pretending that they do?
Of course, Europeans tend to be much less hung up about nudity in general. It’s also not uncommon to see adult women sunbathing topless on beaches, and specific beaches are clothing-optional for all.
French children eat like grown-ups.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a kids’ menu in a restaurant in France. Similarly, you won’t find a separate table for kids, with separate dinnerware and food options, at any special events.
While lots of American kids are frequent smackers, French children tend to meet most of their nutritional needs through three daily meals and one snack. They sit at the table with their families to eat dinner, often set up with a tablecloth and the kind of “nice” dishes that many Americans tend to keep away from their kids.
Even school lunch tends to involve four courses served restaurant-style at a table, and a minimum of 30 minutes to dine in order to ensure that they eat well.
Karen Le Billon, a Canadian who moved with her family to France and wrote a book about her experience, told the BBC that training kids to savor their food this way also limits the phenomenon of picky eaters: “The French believe that taste is a skill that can be acquired . . . They believe that children can learn to eat, and like, all kinds of food.”
Rather than telling a child that a type of food is nutritious or that they have to eat it, says Le Billon, a French parent is more likely to encourage a child to try it because it tastes good.
Italian kids tend to go to bed really late.
It’s not unusual to see a family pushing a stroller around the piazza at 8, 9 or even 10 o’clock at night. Italians dine late, and, like their French counterparts, often dine together as a whole family, even when it means some of the younger members end up conked out in their parents’ laps before the evening is over.
American parents spend so much time fretting about their children’s sleep habits that it’s spawned a whole industry of sleep consultants who promise to help train babies and young kids in order to give parents their nights back.
Of course, kids do need a solid amount of sleep for their health and growth. While there is at least one study showing that Italian kids get less sleep overall than kids in other countries up until age 6, researchers also found that the “sleep hygiene” (routines and an environment conducive to uninterrupted sleep) of Italian teens was significantly better than that of American adolescents.
It’s common for Indian children to be cared for by a number of generations within a family.
The individualist, every-nuclear-family-to-itself approach to parenting that is so common in America is far from the norm in many other places where there is a more collectivist philosophy to caregiving.
Instead of being tended to all day by a nursing mother, the Indian babies Seymour observed would be passed from one relative to another — including younger family members — so that the mom could attend to her other obligations.
“Children grow up in extended households,” Seymour told HuffPost. She described “relatives coming and going,” and “plenty of people to take care of them.”
Knowing that this model existed in other parts of the world gave Seymour the confidence to return to work when she had her own children in the U.S.
Whether you’re leaving a baby with grandmothers and cousins or day care providers and babysitters, there’s no reason to think that not staying home with them constantly does any harm to a child’s attachment or development.
In other words, working moms should drop any guilt they’ve been carrying and embrace multiple caregiving as normal and healthy.
Fathers from the Aka tribe do nearly half of the caregiving.
Across the world, the sight of women tending to the needs of young children is ubiquitous. But there is precedent for men taking on a significant portion of the child care duties. In the nomadic Aka tribe of central Africa, anthropologists have observed that fathers spend 47% of their time within arms’ reach of their infants.
Roles are interchangeable and flexible. Aka women also hunt while the men do the cooking, and vice versa.
Although the tribe’s top leadership roles go to men, it is also not unusual to catch sight of an Aka baby suckling for comfort (not milk, obviously) at its father’s nipple.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/9-parenting-practices-from-around-the-world-that-may-totally-surprise-you-ano_l_660f2deee4b083254eab842f?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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MIND-BLOWING FACTS ABOUT RUSSIA
Mind-blowing facts about Russia that you rarely hear:
35 million of Russians don't have indoor toilets plumbed into sewerage system.
47 million of Russians do not have hot water.
29 million of Russians have no running water at homes at all.
The total population of Russia is 140 million (some experts believe it’s a lot less than that).
So, 20% of the total Russian population don’t have running water at their homes, while millions of Russians (including residents of some apartment buildings) use outhouses.
There are unlivable residential buildings that are owned by the Russian government, where people live in inhumane conditions for years.
These buildings are called “dilapidated housing”, the residents are supposed to be given new homes by the state — but instead, they are being fed promises.
Where do the people with no running water at homes get it? From the street water tap, and then take it home to use for all the needs — cooking, washing.
Not having running water in homes is a norm in Russian villages.
Residents of privately owned houses are not eligible to get new homes from the state. Only the residents of dilapidated apartment buildings.
The ones capable of getting out, get out. Others keep living there and waiting, hoping to get a new home from the state one day.
The state keeps feeding residents of dilapidated housing promises, hoping they would soon die.
It’s from places like these that Putin recruits soldiers into the Russian army. $6,000 one-off payout that they are getting on sign up is the type of money they earn in 2–3 years. They never had in their hands so much money at once.
It is the “deep Russia” that you never see in the stories on Russian TV. But it exists.
~ Elena Gold, Quora
Henrikka Heskinnen:
“The total population of Russia is 140 million (some experts believe it’s a lot less than that).”
Yes. One of those experts is Ekaterina Schulmann (although it has to be noted that she’s a political scientist, not a social scientist or a statistician).
She has been very frank about this. She has said that the recent censuses have failed and that the real size of the Russian population is closer to 110–130 million.
How is it possible?
The statistics show significant rural depopulation anyway, but there might be a financial incentive for the regional governors to try to hide the extent of it.
There might be unreported emigration as well, especially since 2022. Oh, and COVID-19 deaths and casualties of war.
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RUSSIA’S POPULATION IS DECLINING (Elena Gold)
In the first 7 months of 2023 (January-July), 726,641 babies were born in the Russian Federation and 1,023,947 people died.
That’s 297,306 negative growth.
In just 7 months, Russia lost nearly 300,000 people. It will be about half a million in the whole year, if not more.
In June 2023, fewer children were born in Russia than in any other June since 1991 — the year when the USSR collapsed and shop shelves were empty.
Putin doesn’t want Russians to remember the queues to buy bread and empty stores of the late USSR. In 1985-1990, Putin worked in East Germany through the KGB foreign intelligence service. East Germany didn’t have such acute food shortage problems.
In July 2023, Russia broke another anti-record: the lowest number of children born since 1945 — the year when all men were at the last year of the war with Hitler.
According to the forecast of independent demographer Alexei Raksha, in 2024 the number of births in Russia will be at the level of 1943.
Women in Russia don’t want to bear children because of lack of money, a recent poll revealed.
(And, I suppose, lack of security because of war — but women don’t want to mention the war to pollsters.)
The only way how Russia used to manage this demographic crisis was by bringing migrants from ex-USSR republics: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, etc.
But now Russia is sending migrants who got Russian passports to the war in Ukraine. Ruble is plummeting and unqualified jobs where migrants work are now paying about the same as in their home countries. Before, migrants could earn double the amount compared to wages in their home countries.
This means both Russia’s ability to fill job vacancies and maintain the size of population will suffer.
Putin’s war is destroying Russia, in all societal dimensions. But most of all, it’s destroying it morally, requiring from people to approve destruction and mass murders. It changes the group psychology of the Russian society. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Audie Chason:
Russia has a high divorce rate, 74%. My Russian wife tells me one reason for the low birth rate is child support is only capriciously enforced and alimony is rarely awarded. So, a Russian woman has one child, divorces without support, and is reluctant to bear a second child. My wife divorced her philandering, alcoholic husband 3 months after her twins were born. She never received a kopek in child support from him, and after her kids were 8, neither she nor they ever saw him again.
RUSSIA’S POPULATION HAS BEEN DECLINING FOR THE LAST THREE DECADES
This decline had a short lull a few years ago, thanks to work immigration and a slight pick-up in fertility rates (mainly in the Islamic areas). We also got an addition of over 2 million by annexing Crimea in 2014. However, now things are back where they were: during the first 10 months of 2019, we lost another quarter of a million.
Is it likely that we can reverse the trend any time soon?
Russia is an urbanized society. Less than 30% live in the countryside, which is where people make babies more rapidly than they die themselves. The countryside is steadily depopulating, and there’s no chance that our urbanites are ready to take over and start procreating like peasants.
The process of shedding our Imperial-era dependencies is probably not over. Chechnya—the Islamic territory of our terribly failed colonization— may get restive again after Putin. If that happens, Dagestan next door may follow suit. If these jump ship, Turkic territories along the Volga River with their own history of statehood may opt out, too. These are the areas of the highest fertility in Russian Federation.
The economy is anemic, showing at best around 1–2% annual growth over the last decade. This is even when the rise of oil price is taken into account, and after our government statisticians have taken all measures not to aggrieve President Putin unnecessarily. A stagnating economy can absorb only so many work immigrants, so we shouldn’t expect too much demographic contribution from them as long as this lasts.
The model of extractive economy which President Putin and our state-oligarchical elites favor is a capital-intensive business that doesn’t require a large workforce. Some even say that at the Western level of productivity and infrastructure, Russia’s current GDP can be assured with only 15% of our population. In other words, it makes economic sense for the Kremlin to shrink, not grow, the population.
The decolonization of many faraway provinces, especially east of the Urals, makes it harder to absorb large additional numbers of work immigrants. For now their main destinations are Moscow and other big centers of economic activity. Large numbers of immigrants, especially Asian-looking young men from Islamic areas in Central Asia, may provoke a rise of radical nationalists—the main threat to President Putin’s stability.
Emigration from Russia to the West has again become fashionable, especially among young adults. Some 53% of Russian respondents aged 18 to 24 now would like to emigrate, which marks a 16% increase in five months and is the highest share of respondents since 2009. We have already shed some 4 million emigrants during Putin’s rule, and more are likely to go at the first opportunity.
Some technological game-changer could of course make it possible to dramatically prolong human life. Also, some Black Swans abroad could generate a huge influx of immigration to Russia. But under normal conditions projections say we may shrink down to 130 million by 2040, and less than 100 million by the end of the century, even if work immigration continues at today’s rate.
There’s some consolation in the fact that some nations much smaller than us punch far above their demographic weight, economically and politically. If Israel can kick the way they do with 9 million people, why can’t we? With their GDP per head and our current headcount of almost 150 million we would be at about 6.3 trillion in nominal GDP, well ahead of Japan and Germany ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Timothy Vorobiev:
Health care is mediocre at best. Diseases and conditions that are treatable in the west, including some cancers at early stage, are a death sentence in Russia. Also, Russians tend not to visit doctors except for emergencies.
High rate of crime does not help either. A lot of young people are brought up in the criminal subculture, where violence is a universal solution.
Dmitry Vakhtin:
Fertility rate is strongly correlated with women’s education. The more educated women are, the fewer children they tend to have. This rule applies (to my knowledge) to any country, not just Russia. In the USSR (and then in Russia) women’s education has been roughly on par with that of men for at least 80 years.
Other factors, such as economic instability and low life expectancy are, of course, also part of the story, but the general trend comes from reasonably good education among women.
Maxim:
Alcoholism is a factor.
Then, there is the fact that Russian apartments are small and we don’t have enough suburban and rural housing. It’s a well documented fact that less urbanized places have higher birthrates as people have more space and freedom to have kids and these places are also more often religious than not.
Religion is the third reason. Despite what you think most Russians aren’t super religious, this might have an impact on the births as well. I don’t want Russia to be hyper religious because that comes with drawbacks but the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church might not not be so bad for the demographics of our country.
Fourth, the social support for women. We have support for women who want to have kids but I think our birthrates indicate we need to dedicate more resources to help women who want kids to have kids.
We need better conditions in the country to raise birthrates.
Roxolan Tonix:
Russia is in decline because it is failing to adapt in a changing world on several levels. Moscow has been “swimming against this tide” since the Bolshevik Revolution, but I will focus on the post-Soviet space for the sake of simplicity.
Governance — The unfortunate timing of democratization and the simultaneous economic reset in the 1990’s left many Russians associating democracy with chaos and poverty. Today’s regime quite successfully uses this to dupe people into believing that stability (Putin) is far better than the scary unknowns of democracy. In this case however, stability is actually stagnation because Putin is only interested in keeping the house order exactly the way it is.
Economy — Putin is the head gangster in quite the literal sense of the word. His gang consists of “siloviki” — government officials in various positions of power who are able to shake down businesses in exchange for not finding various code violations, or even criminal offenses. They are tied directly into the justice system and this group is particularly loyal to Putin for their livelihoods.
You can imagine how this stunts economic growth and simply drives smart, honest people out of the country. This might be the biggest damage Moscow inflicts on Russia because brains are far more valuable than oil.
Outdated ideals — Today’s modern societies have embraced liberty, individualism and civil rights. Meanwhile, Moscow tries to claw out some kind of national concept from a narrow menu of past successes. Recently the focus has been on the victory of WWII and Orthodox church values. The most bizarre manifestation of this became a combination of both: Angels and artillery: a cathedral to Russia's new national identity. Pictures alone are worth the read.
In reality however, nobody gives a sh1t about WWII in practical terms anymore. There are no borders in Europe, the French and the Germans have been building Airbus together since 1970. The world has moved on.
External politics — this one is especially difficult. On one hand Russia is trying to maintain its shrinking sphere of influence in the near abroad, but due to the lack of economic prosperity or attractive ideology, it’s in a no-win position against the EU. Whenever a democratic choice is allowed to manifest, Russia’s neighbors increasingly choose Europe. This leaves Moscow with very limited options.
“To Berlin” in a BMW is particularly ironic.
Leonid Rahman:
I see one of the biggest Russian problems is its dependence on natural resources and therefore lack of economic diversification which eventually leads to its anti democratic policies. With the world’s rapid move toward new sources of energy, Russia inevitably will left far behind developed nations.
Steven Haddock:
During the Soviet period, the non-Russian parts of the USSR had very high birth rates, which drove up the population of the USSR as a whole even as the population of Russia stayed more or less stable. As a result, the average age of Russians increased, and there are fewer and fewer Russians of child-bearing age.
Emigration and immigration are also big factors. After the fall of the USSR, many Russians left Russia. Here in Canada, I know several Russian expats, many of whom are in their sixties. A lot of Russians with connections to Judaism left for Israel.
However, there are very few reasons for anyone to move to Russia, and Russia is notoriously difficult on foreigners (Russians treat both immigrants and tourists with tremendous indifference at best). Compare this with Canada, which goes out it's way to be nice to both immigrants and tourists — it's native-born birth rate is similar to Russia's, but thanks to immigration and immigrant birth, the population of Canada is growing quickly.
Tomaž Vargazon:
Wrong question. The correct question is why do birth rates always fall with industrialization. Here is the fertility rate for France from 1800 to 2020.
For whatever reason, industrialization reduces the human innate desire to produce more offspring. If left unchecked, without government spending to stimulate more babies, it falls all the way down to 1.2–1.5 children per woman. With stimulus the best results put that up to about 1.8, but hardly any more. There are also utter failures (Bejing is said to be at about 0.7, but accurate information is difficult to come by).
We see this literaly across the entire world, from Russia to China to Korea to Japan to Europe to Americas to Africa and more. Wherever abject poverty drops due to industrialization, birth rates drop too.
Humans bodies and subconcious minds use hunger and deprivation as a trigger to desire children. If you live in harsh conditions you will desire more children, so that at least some will survive. This is why poor places, wrecked with decades of conflict, tend to have high birth rates. However since long periods of plenty didn’t really come up until very recently, human desire for procreation is poorly regulated at the low end. We simply aren’t wired up to have lots of good things available to us for a long time, because it never came up in our evolutionary history.
A negative feedback loop between wealth and procreation is also stable. If we were wired to have as many children as possible during times of plenty, we would have exhausted resources on an exponential scale due to simple overpopulation. This is a good thing overall; we just need to figure out a way to force ourselves into 2.1 children per woman on average before we die out for not having children.
No Soviet lies were too outratgeous: this poster claims that Russian children are well cared for, while in the capitalist countries children live in poverty.[the words on the poster are automatically translated to English]
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RUSSIA’S POPULATION DECLINE PLAYS INTO PUTIN’S HANDS
Russia has had a few successes with reversing demographic decline lately. But not nearly enough.
Good news
Infant mortality rate (IMR) is on a steady decline and may soon be halved compared to the start of Putin’s presidency.
Life expectancy has been on the rise during the last 15 years. There’s a good chance we reach a solid European level in about 2–3 decades, if no calamity happens again. More about the factors that were dragging us down earlier.
The prosperity of early Putinism attracted to us a lot of foreign guest workers, mainly from Central Asia, but also from Ukraine and Belorussia. Most of them will most likely stay here for good. According to the police, this has boosted up our population stats by at least 6%, may be as much as 9%.
We annexed Crimea, and this added to our population stats another 2.3 million.
The fertility boom back in the Khrushchev era gave us a slight spike of births recently, when kids of the baby boomers were having their own kids.
Among the Muslim ethnicites in Northern Caucasus it’s now customary to have several kids.
Despite a recent decline in overall fertility, they are still safely above the needed reproduction level of 2.1 per woman.
It now carries prestige among the elite to have kids, unlike what was considered cool in my time in the USSR. The billionaire Roman Abramovich has 7 children. Putin’s spin master during his early presidency Gleb Pavlovsky has 6; one of the early Soviet millionaires German Sterligov, 5. The trendsetter of Russian loyalist design Artemy Lebedev claims to have 10.
Bad news
In 2017, Russia returned to the trend of long-term demographic contraction. Now, there’s no prospect of returning to growth other than through massive immigration—which is resented by the public and is not required for the adopted economic model of Russia as a global extractive mine. If the trend holds, we’ll be about 20–25 million fewer by the end of the century.
Fertility rate among ethnic Russians is very low, at about 1.2 per woman.
In the Crimean addition, pensioners are over-represented. The peninsula has long been a sunset destination among our men in uniforms, a kind of “Soviet (now Russia’s) Miami”. In our tradition, the secret police, military officers, and others who the State trusts with bearing arms, are entitled to much earlier pensions, some as early as 40-something.
Educated young Russians—the same ones who now think it’s cool to have many babies—are increasingly inclined to emigrate to the West. Among upwardly mobile talents, Russia is considered a good place to earn money and make a career. But Europe and the Anglosphere are viewed as a much better place to have kids and give them an education. It’s a mark of class and sophistication among female socialites in Moscow to give birth in the US.
Of the work migration, half the net is estimated to have targeted Moscow and the urbanization inside Moscow oblast. This means that Russia’s provinces undergo increasing depopulation.
The areas of North Caucasus with natural population growth are very poorly colonized Muslim territories. They feel little affinity with the Westernized—Christian or secular—culture of Russia. The ethnic statelet of Chechenia has de-facto introduced Shariah law. These areas are an unrelenting economic burden on Russia’s economy, a source of ethnic tensions and ethnic insurgency. There’s an overwhelming chance that sometime in post-Putin Russia, our new nationalist rulers will unburden our nation of them, which will strike a couple million off our population stats.
Shrinking workforce
In the past, a shortage of workforce was one of the main factors in the bankruptcy of the USSR. The economic model of “real socialism” requires an unlimited access to unskilled labor from the countryside.
But the Putinist model of liberal market economy is not like that at all. It’s based on extracting and selling natural resources. This is capital-intensive, and doesn't require much workforce. The enormous inflow of guest workers from Central Asia to Russia during Putin’s era was filling positions in secondary sectors: building & construction and service & maintenance.
“Natural” development
Putin’s era has seen a massive de-industrialization of Russia. It was not so much a determined choice, but an adaptive measure to our demographic decline and the realities of the globalized world. Given the constraints, it was extremely successful. Despite the economic stagnation of the last decade, Russians have never lived such prosperous lives in our entire history.
Huge numbers of Russians were transferred from industry to positions on the government payroll. This includes the police, military, national guard, tax police, state attorney offices, government offices regulating, supervising and enforcing things around the country—along with the government-funded education, health care and pension system. All these people are now dependent on the stability and growth of their employer, the State. This gives to Russia the political stability and to Putin the support that are envied by the rest of the world.
Security vents
As we know from history, demographic growth is a driver of revolutions. Revolution is an anathema to President Putin and the oligarchic clans around him. Here, their preferences coincide with the seniors. Grey electorate assured of their pensions are the cornerstone of Putin’s support.
On the other side, young educated people and a large, politically self-assured middle class are a challenge to the Putinist principle of non-rotation of power. The unrest in Moscow in 2011–2013 demonstrated that the middle class is not Putin’s friend. In addition, the Arab Spring, and the level of support given to the leading “non-systemic” Russian politician Alexey Navalny by teenagers in Moscow also proved to Putin that young people are a source of threat to him.
Therefore, the whole system of Putinist rule encourages emigration of young upwardly mobile educated people and immigration of low-qualified, poorly organized, politically docile guest workers. For this, no changes in demographic policy are required.
Security dimension
As long as grand projects of imperial expansion or Communist revolutions are taken off the agenda, Russia doesn't need a big standing army or a vast mobilization pool. Massed armies in the era of precision weapons are just big convenient targets. [This article must have been written before the invasion of Ukraine.] For deterrence, our nuclear weapons work just fine.
As to the military operations wherever they are needed for Russia’s global game, small, mobile, well-trained and well-equipped troops—especially those in neutral uniforms—are much more useful. For these, Russia doesn't need many men. (And they don’t even need to be Russian, as Eastern Ukraine and Syria have shown).
In light of the above, the current demographic development in Russia:
… is beneficial for political stability and the longevity of Putin’s rule;
… fully complies with the current economic model;
… attracts a mass of politically harmless immigrants and gets rid of troublesome younger groups in the educated middle class;
… doesn’t create any overwhelming threats or problems for the country in the short or middle term.
In other words, no important changes are taking place, indicating either “recovery” or “death”. No difficult or important decision are required of the Kremlin, as the development nicely plays into their hands.
Deep down inside, we must live with this paradox: the fewer of us are around, the happier we are.
IN SUMMARY:
A DEMOGRAPHIC TRAGEDY is unfolding in Russia. Over the past three years the country has lost around 2m more people than it would ordinarily have done, as a result of war, disease and exodus. The life expectancy of Russian males aged 15 fell by almost five years, to the same level as in Haiti. The number of Russians born in April 2022 was no higher than it had been in the months of Hitler’s occupation. And because so many men of fighting age are dead or in exile, women now outnumber men by at least 10 million.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/03/04/russias-population-nightmare-is-going-to-get-even-worse
Oriana:
With a higher birth rate among Muslims, Russia will slowly but steadily becomes less “ethnic Russian.” Some predict that eventually it will become an Islamic republic — but not within our lifetimes.
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Irma Dookler:
Immigration into Russia is low—immigrants are primarily a trickle of ethnic Russians moving out of former republics (but now independent countries) of the Soviet Union. Brain drain and emigration from Russia to Western Europe and other parts of the world is high as native Russians seek to better their economic situation. Net migration (the difference between the number of persons entering and leaving a country during the year per 1,000 persons) in Russia is 1.7 migrants per 1,000 population; compared to 3.8 for the United States.
Russia's population peaked in the early 1990s (at the time of the end of the Soviet Union) with about 148 million people in the country. Today, Russia's population is approximately 144 million. In 2010, the United States Census Bureau estimated that Russia's population will decline from the 2010 estimate of 143 million to a mere 111 million by 2050, a loss of more than 30 million people and a decrease of more than 20%.
The primary causes of Russia's population decrease and loss of about 700,000 to 800,000 citizens each year are related to a high death rate, low birth rate, high rate of abortions, and a low level of immigration.
Russia has a very high death rate of 13.4 deaths per 1000 people per year. While decreased from a high of 15 in 2010, this is still far higher than the world's average death rate of just under 9.
The death rate in the U.S. is 8.2 per 1000 and for the United Kingdom it's 9.4 per 1000. Alcohol-related deaths in Russia are very high and alcohol-related emergencies represent the bulk of emergency room visits in the country.
With this high death rate, Russian life expectancy is low—the World Health Organization
estimates the life expectancy of Russian men at 66 years while women's life expectancy is considerably better at 77 years. This difference is primarily a result of high rates of alcoholism among males.
Russia's total fertility rate is low at 1.6 births per woman [probably closer to 1.1 for ethnic Russian women]; the number represents the number of children each Russian woman has during her lifetime. For comparison, the entire world's fertility rate is 2.4; the U.S.'s rate is 1.8. A replacement total fertility rate to maintain a stable population is 2.1 births per woman. Obviously, with such a low total fertility rate Russian women are contributing to a declining population.
The birth rate in the country is also quite low; the crude birth rate is 10.7 births per 1,000 people. The world average is 18.2 per 1000 and in the U.S. the rate is 12.4 per 1,000. Infant mortality in Russia is 6.7 deaths per 1,000 live births; in the U.S., the rate is 5.7 per 1,000 and worldwide, the rate is 32 deaths per 1,000 live births.
LIFE EXPECTANCY GAP BETWEEN WOMEN AND MEN
In 2021, the life expectancy has significantly decreased in all gender groups compared to the previous time point. Comparing the two different gender groups for the year 2021, the 'life expectancy of women at birth' leads the ranking with 74.77 years. By contrast, 'life expectancy of men at birth' is ranked last, with 64.21 years. Their difference, compared to life expectancy of women at birth, lies at 10.56 years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/971100/life-expectancy-at-birth-in-russia-by-gender/
Number of Russians living abroad in Europe - 5,99 million.
Mortality in Russia. Over the past 20 years, more than 8 million Russians have become extinct in Russia. By this indicator, you are ahead of Brazil and Turkey by 50%, and Europe - several times.
Every year Russia loses in terms of population an entire region equal to Pskov, or a large city such as Krasnodar.
The number of suicides, poisonings, homicides and accidents in Russia is comparable to the death rate in Angola and Burundi.
In terms of male life expectancy, Russia occupies about 160th place in the world, behind Bangladesh.
Russia ranks 1st in the world in terms of absolute population decline.
Misha Firer: RAPID INCREASE IN POPULATION IN THE RUSSIAN ISLAMIC REPUBLICS
Makhachkala, capital of Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim region in the south. Since 1995, it has doubled in size despite massive migration to Moscow in search of work. By 2050, Makhachkala is projected to have a million residents, while Yaroslavl — half of that.
Makhachkala, Dagestan
This difference between fertility rate in Muslim majority and ethnic Russian majority regions hides the true decline of Russian non-Muslim population. Fertility rate for ethnic Russians is much closer to 1 than 2.
Russians have 1.5 children per woman fertility rate across the country. However, only ethnic Russian majority regions have seen declines in population.
Muslim-majority regions, like Chechnya and Ingushetia, have seen a rapid increase in population, and fertility rates are 2–3 times higher there than on average across the country.
On the bright side, the aging population will signal the end of incessant saber-rattling and the empire that is expensive to run with little to no benefits.
Dima Vorobiev:
If this trend with fertility rates continues, in 2080 ethnic Russians will be a minority in Russia just as they have become in Kazakhstan after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
This would have far-reaching consequences as Russian culture, language and mindset might not survive past 21st century.
Under normal conditions projections say we may shrink down to 130 million by 2040, and less than 100 million by the end of the century, even if work immigration continues at today’s rate.
There’s some consolation in the fact that some nations much smaller than us punch far above their demographic weight, economically and politically. If Israel can kick ass the way they do with 9 million people, why can’t we?
John McAndrew:
I think it’s a global social phenomenon: women have access to contraceptives and the option of bringing up children as single parents with the support of the state. Hence they can be far choosier when it comes to selecting gene donors for their kids leading to the population being far healthier on average compared to the past. I’ve noticed this with the UK White working class who are far healthier and “beautiful” looking compared to say fifty years ago.
Oriana:
This is probably due mainly to better nutrition and progress in medicine, rather than to women choosing to have children with men who have great genes. It’s possible to imagine a selectively bred human population, and science fiction is full of such scenarios, but in practice half the pregnancies are still unplanned — or at least that’s the best estimate.
Luke Hatherton:
At present, 25 countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, are experiencing population decline. But shrinking populations can actually benefit countries economically and environmentally as the national GDP is shared by fewer and fewer people, demand for labor goes up, pollution decreases, wilderness recovers etc.
Dima Vorobiev:
Russian fertility rate has high correlation with negative economic growth. The fastest rise in living standards during Putin’s early presidency didn’t see too much fertility improvement.
The uptick a few years ago is more of a far echo of the post-WW2 rebound. The more numerous generation born in the 1980s started getting their own babies.
John Murphy:
Russia will lose the Far East to China in the next 20 years.
Chris Yau:
A shrinking bear has nothing to fear from a hollow dragon.
Kristi Nochka:
For a modern person, more and more often a child begins to be perceived as a burden and a hindrance to his own life. With this point of view, it is impossible to raise the birth rate.
Ivan Novoselov:
If you asked people 20 years ago why don’t they have children, the usual answer was “We can’t afford it”. Now it’s more like “We want to live for ourselves”. Too much entertainment, too much focus on careers, too much focus on things that matter much less than actual small living beings around you. People are becoming less caring and less loving. Still, here in Moscow the trend is very positive.
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WHY REAGANOMICS DIDN’T WORK
Partly because of what’s called the “propensity to save”.
If you give low income people more money they spend it on things they really need. Food, clothing, a car that runs, furniture. Many of these things are made in America. Low income people have almost no “propensity to save”.
When you give low-income people more money almost all of it immediately gets circulated back in the economy.
If you give high income people more money they bank it, invest it (which sounds good but actually helps no one and no company) or spend it on luxury items. Luxury items are expensive Japanese electronics, expensive European cars, expensive European fashion, expensive European jewelry etc. High income people have a high “propensity to save” and like expensive foreign stuff.
When you give high-income people more money almost all of it goes to the stock market or Japan, or Europe and almost none of it gets circulated back in the economy.
Money does not “trickle down”. It pools in the pockets of the wealthy or drains to Europe. That’s why it didn’t work, and never could.
Steve Hirsch:
The Republican Party believes the poor are too rich and the rich are too poor and they have been successfully working at solving that problem for decades.
Pamela Brown:
Reagan’s tax cuts were supposed to pay for themselves. They did not. They did lead to a higher concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer people though.
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THE UNFINISHED PROJECT OF ENLIGHTENMENT: REGRESSION REMAINS THE CONSTANT SHADOW OF PROGRESS
Frontispiece to the 1772 edition of the Encyclopédie by Diderot and d’Alembert. At the center, crowned Reason attempts to remove the veil from Truth.
“No one in the world feels the weakness of general characterizing more than I.” So lamented Johann Gottfried von Herder, towering figure of the German Enlightenment, in his 1774 treatise This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity. “One draws together peoples and periods of time that follow one another in an eternal succession like waves of the sea,” Herder wrote. “Whom has one painted? Whom has the depicting word captured?” For Herder, the Enlightenment dream of grasping human history as a seamless whole came up against the irreducible particularity of individuals and cultures.
The German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, among the most influential thinkers of our time, grapples with much the same problem in his new work, the title of which reverses the order of Herder’s terms: This Too a History of Philosophy. Published in German last September, Habermas’s History spans over 3,000 years and 1,700 pages.
It marks the apogee of a singular career. Like his eighteenth-century precursor, Habermas seeks a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the sweep of human history. “Philosophical problems,” he writes, are distinctive from merely “scientific” ones in their “synthetic force.” For Habermas, the fragmentation of modern life has hardly exhausted philosophy’s capacity for bold questions and architectonic structure.
History, in Habermas’s telling, is the story of humanity’s learning, a record of problems solved and challenges overcome. “New knowledge about the objective world” alongside “social crises,” he explains, create “cognitive dissonances.” These dissonances propel societies to adopt novel modes of understanding and interaction.
Tracing a continuous learning process across three millennia of Western philosophy, This Too a History of Philosophy is a masterpiece of erudition and synthesis. Habermas’s command of the philosophical canon astounds, and even experts will find fresh insight in his searching portraits. At the same time, his narrative of humanity’s rational development invites us to pose Herder’s challenge anew: Whom has Habermas’s History captured? Most urgent is the question—raised, but not resolved—of how the learning process traversed by the West interacts with wider histories of the modern world.
Born in 1929 into Western Germany’s Protestant middle class, Habermas is contemporary Europe’s most prominent philosopher and public intellectual. Over a prodigious career stretching nearly seven decades, he has set out a system linking epistemology, linguistics, sociology, politics, religion, and law. His philosophical texts have appeared in over forty languages.
But more than that, Habermas has distinguished himself as a staunch advocate of the intellectual’s public role. His exchanges with interlocutors from John Rawls to Michel Foucault have generated debate across the humanities, and his political interventions have shaped controversies on themes from historical memory to European unification to genetic engineering.
An overarching project connects Habermas’s philosophical writing with his public advocacy and helps to account for his global reach: the elaboration of what he terms a theory of “communicative rationality.” When we address ourselves to another human being through language, Habermas argues, we assume the possibility of mutual intelligibility and rational persuasion. In an “ideal speech situation,” where no coercion is present save the “unforced force of the better argument,” dialogue would foster consensus based on rational agreement. Habermas recognizes that most communication is far from this ideal. Yet he insists that the ideal remains the prerequisite even for ordinary speech, and contains the seedbed of radical democracy.
Democracy, for Habermas, is a system where uncoerced communication triumphs over naked power, where rational argument among equal citizens forms the basis of political legitimacy.
Habermas’s project emerged from the traumas of postwar Germany. Fifteen-years-old at the time of the Nazi collapse, Habermas had narrowly escaped military conscription and listened, horrified, to radio broadcasts of the Nuremberg trials.
Determined to uncover where German history had gone so wrong, and whether German culture possessed resources for the country’s reconstruction, the Gymnasium student abandoned a planned career in medicine to pursue philosophy.
In what has become a set piece of his biography, it was the 1953 republication of a Nazi-era tract by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, extolling the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism, that led the young Habermas to reject the reigning existentialism and cultural despair. He would instead find his academic home at the University of Frankfurt, among the returned German-Jewish exiles Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Their reconstituted Institute for Social Research served as a haven for critical debate amidst postwar West Germany’s hidebound academic culture.
Yet even as he quickly gained recognition as the leader of the Frankfurt School’s second generation, Habermas diverged from his predecessors. Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) tracked the decay of Western rationalism into a self-destructive “instrumental reason,” Habermas sought out a mode of rationality that escaped a narrow means-ends logic. This he would locate in intersubjective communication. Habermas’s habilitation thesis and the book that made his name, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), foreshadowed the centrality of communication for his life’s work.
Embedding philosophical argument in historical sociology, Habermas traced the rise of a bourgeois “public sphere” in the coffee houses and print culture of eighteenth-century Europe. The new domain of reasoned deliberation, between the official institutions of politics and the private sphere of the family, challenged ruling authorities and fomented the spread of republican ideas. Although Structural Transformation concluded by charting the decline of the public sphere in modern mass media—a pervasive concern in today’s talk of disinformation and fake news—the work announced its author’s lifelong identification with the “unfinished project” of Enlightenment.
If Structural Transformation made Habermas a rising star, it was his 1981 magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, that established him as a premier philosopher of the twentieth century. Theory bore the fruits of two decades of intellectual exploration, including a stint as director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, Bavaria, and an ambitious program of reading across classical sociology, systems theory, ordinary language philosophy, and American pragmatism. The book marshaled all of these influences to uncover the rational foundations of communication as a path toward reenergizing democracy.
The modern “system” of economy and bureaucracy, Habermas concluded, must be subjected to rigorous oversight by the “lifeworld,” the spaces of society and culture where free communication can flourish. While accepting the structures of the capitalist welfare state, Habermas warned against the “colonization” of the lifeworld by private interests. He would return to this theme over subsequent political writings.
This Too a History of Philosophy marks the culmination of a third stage of Habermas’s career, one in which questions of faith and religion have assumed increasing prominence. Habermas’s earlier work hinged on a theory of secularization. Whatever one’s private convictions, the public sphere depended on the exchange of “validity claims” accessible to all citizens; appeals to faith had to be checked at the door.
Yet in an address one month after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Habermas characterized contemporary Western democracies as “postsecular” societies. The public sphere, he now argued, should accommodate religious diversity and permit the participation of religious citizens.
Habermas went further in a 2005 essay that followed a public discussion with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). Not only should religious and secular citizens have equal access to the public sphere, but the latter “can be reasonably expected not to exclude the possibility that [religious] contributions may have cognitive substance.”
For some of Habermas’s secular-minded interlocutors, these apparent concessions to religion betrayed the rational promise of critical social theory. Yet as with so much in Habermas, what seems an about-face reflects a deepening of earlier concerns. My own research on Protestant intellectual networks in early postwar Germany uncovered evidence of Habermas’s participation in “Christian-Marxist” working groups during the early 1960s.
And since the 1980s, Habermas has engaged in philosophical exchanges with prominent Christian theologians, most notably his Catholic contemporary Johann Baptist Metz. Habermas’s recent writings build upon his longstanding view that religious citizens can contribute moral insight to the public sphere—and that they did so in a democratizing Germany. As Europe absorbs new waves of Muslim immigrants, Habermas has sought to combat xenophobic discourses of cultural difference, while fostering democratic deliberation across religious divides.
But more provocative convictions drive Habermas’s writings on religion as well.
Notwithstanding his advocacy for a religiously plural public sphere, Habermas has remained emphatic about the foundational role of Western Christianity. Already in The Theory of Communicative Action, he drew on the classical sociologist Max Weber to trace the rise of modern purposive rationality out of the Protestant idea of vocation. More recently, Habermas has distanced himself from claims of Weberian disenchantment to suggest that the process of secularization remains incomplete.
“Universalistic egalitarianism,” he stated in a 2002 interview, “is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love . . . Up to this very day there is no alternative to it.” Drawing a dubious contrast between the two monotheistic religions, Habermas articulated what would become the core of his intellectual program. The West’s Judeo-Christian heritage was not a passing phase in the emergence of modern thought and politics, but contributed—and perhaps still contributes—its essential core.
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This Too a History of Philosophy is the realization of Habermas’s claim on a grand scale. At its most basic, the work provides a historical survey linking Habermas’s longstanding theory of communication with his more recent argument for the preeminence of Judeo-Christianity. The central thesis is expansive but straightforward. Communicative rationality as well as constitutional democracy emerged out of a three-thousand-year dialogue between the two poles of Western thought: faith and knowledge.
Through a protracted history of intellectual debate and social transformation, the moral universalism at the core of Christianity—having evolved out of its Jewish precursor—was subsumed into modern, postmetaphysical thinking. Habermas’s account of secularization departs from what the philosopher Charles Taylor has termed the “subtraction story,” by which irrational beliefs are stripped away with the forward march of science. Instead, Habermas reconstructs the interactions of Christian faith and worldly knowledge as a process not of conflict, but of mutual learning and translation.
Humanity’s social and cultural learning could thereby outpace its biological evolution.
Habermas proceeds to narrate the early development of human societies along a hierarchy of communicative forms. Ritual served as the primordial medium of “symbolic” communication, bridging the individual and the collective. Habermas locates a shift to myth in the “Near Eastern high cultures” of the third millennium B.C.E., characterized by written language, scientific advancement, and political hierarchy.
But the crucial transformation came in the “Axial Age” of Moses, Buddha, Confucius, and Plato—a term Habermas borrows from the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Whereas myth collapsed god and man into one another, the Axial worldviews accomplished the seminal distinction between sacred and profane, eternal and temporal. In Judaism’s omniscient God, Buddhism’s doctrine of reincarnation, and Plato’s Forms, Habermas locates the foundations for the transcendental perspective of both objective science and universal morality.
Jaspers developed the concept of the Axial Age, Habermas notes, “to overcome the Eurocentric narrowing of view to the Western path of cultural development.” But Habermas’s own study takes a sharp turn toward the West. It is the particular history of Western Christianity, he argues, that leads from the nascent universalism of the Axial Age to modern postmetaphysical reason and constitutional democracy. Eastern religions became amalgamated to state power or declined in competition with new sciences.
Judaism remained too bound to its sacral language and text to interact productively with its surroundings. But the unique circumstances of early Christianity’s confrontation with Greek philosophy and Roman state power catalyzed a process of mutual learning. The cross-pollination of faith and knowledge found an early apex in Augustine’s fourth-century synthesis of Christianity and Platonism. And at the same time that Augustine introduced philosophy to the Church, Western Christianity’s Roman-inspired legal system brought the Church into the realm of power politics.
Traversing the church-state conflicts of medieval Europe, Habermas arrives at thirteenth-century Italy as a new turning point: a site at which the earliest forms of proto-capitalism inaugurated the functional differentiation of modern society. Thomas Aquinas, the central thinker of the period, departed from Augustine’s Christian-Platonist synthesis to establish theology and philosophy as separate disciplines. Reason and faith now offered firmly independent paths toward salvation.
Though Aquinas remained a monarchist, his formulation of “natural law,” implanted by God in human reason, opened the door to nascent democratic theories.
With unprecedented criticisms of the pope, Aquinas’s late medieval successors theorized law as a limit on both church and state power. They prefigured an age when law would become an object of contestation among citizens.
Yet ironically, perhaps reflective of Weber’s ongoing influence, it is the political reactionary Martin Luther who is accorded pride of place in Habermas’s narrative of secularization. Luther’s attack on ecclesiastical authority, Habermas argues, not only exacerbated the cleft of church and state, but located faith in the intersubjective exchange between the human being and God.
Protestant hermeneutics, in which every believer became an interpreter of Scripture, foreshadowed a communicative rationality in which authority is accorded to the “most convincing argument.”
At the same time, Luther’s attempt to secure faith from the incursions of worldly authority set up its own undoing. The Reformation, in addition to the scientific and political revolutions of the seventeenth century, tore apart the Augustinian and Thomist syntheses of ontology (what is there?) with practical philosophy (what should I do?).
The secularization of state power, epitomized in the English constitutional revolution, eroded the Christian foundations of political order; the determinism of Newtonian laws threatened to undermine human free will, the kernel of Christian morality. The question of legitimacy emerged as the Achilles heel of modern thought.
David Hume and Immanuel Kant are the eighteenth-century thinkers who, for Habermas, articulated the paradigm-shifting responses to this problem. Seventeenth-century philosophers could reconcile faith and knowledge only at the expense of “inconsistent foundations”: consider Thomas Hobbes’s argument for religiously based monarchy despite his avowed atheism and John Locke’s return to divinely ordained natural law.
Only in Hume and Kant was the breakthrough to postmetaphysical thinking achieved. Hume disaggregated human subjectivity into a succession of sense-impressions, dissolving Christian metaphysics. But Kant emerges as the hero of Habermas’s narrative, the figure who reconstructed the rational core of Christianity in the wake of Hume’s withering critique. Kant’s categorical imperative, which called on individuals to posit their actions as the basis for a universal law, established a universal morality on purely rational grounds.
Only Hegel’s left wing successors of the 1830s developed a social theory of language to mediate between subject and object. The “Young Hegelian” Ludwig Feuerbach located the potential for human freedom not in a transcendent God but in everyday social relations, constituted through language.
Habermas titles his last chapter “The Contemporaneity of the Young Hegelians,” underscoring an enduring shift in the locus of reason from subjective consciousness to intersubjective communication. He dismisses Karl Marx’s critique of ideology, which situated the theorist “over the heads of the participants themselves.”
Instead, Habermas regards Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism, as the true successor to the Young Hegelians. Peirce developed Feuerbach’s philosophy of language into a full-fledged theory of knowledge. For Peirce, scientific knowledge obtained solely in intersubjective understandings. Language was the essential medium coordinating between the external world and the research of the scientific community.
Habermas, finally, draws a line to his own writings. Whereas Peirce uncovered linguistic learning processes in science and technology, Habermas’s own work since the 1980s has shown how communication fosters progress in moral and political life as well. Habermas elects not to engage the late twentieth-century debates that surrounded his corpus. That, he writes, “would have required at least one more book.”
But this decision only contributes to the air of inevitability surrounding This Too a History of Philosophy. Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality emerges as the outcome of, and explanation for, the trajectory he has traced since the Axial Age. The learning process, it would seem, culminates in its own self-awareness—realized in Habermas’s oeuvre.
This brief summary can hardly do justice to the staggering array of texts and debates that Habermas explores. The architecture of the work is ingenious, if its teleology does not fully convince. Most pressing, however, Habermas intends his History not only as a historical exercise, but as a record of the ideas that have furnished the political foundations of the modern West. The work invites readers to consider the resonances—and contradictions—between philosophy and politics.
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Habermas draws to a close with a reference to Theodor Adorno’s late essay, “Reason and Revelation.” Reflecting upon on the modern revival of irrational faiths, Adorno concluded that a return to religion could not be sustained. “Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed,” Adorno pronounced. “Every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating into the realm of the secular, the profane.”
Adorno wrote these words in homage to his friend and interlocutor Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide in 1940 fleeing Nazi persecution at the French-Spanish border. Its inclusion is a fitting tribute to Adorno, Habermas’s teacher and the thinker who articulated the crisis of modern civilization to which Habermas’s career has responded. And Habermas answers Adorno in a manner fitting of Benjamin, whose late writings perceived the glimmer of messianic hope peering through histories of suffering:
~ So long as religious experience can still support, on the basis of ritual praxis, the presence of a strong transcendence . . . the question remains open for secular reason whether there are uncompensated semantic contents that still await a translation ‘into the profane.’ ~
Religion, Habermas suggests, might retain a sacral core that resists secularization.
“Regression,” he notes, remains the constant shadow of “‘progress’”:
What we experienced in the twentieth century as a true break in civilization is anything other than a ‘relapse into barbarism,’ but the absolutely new, and from now on always present possibility of the moral collapse of an entire nation.
Challenges to democracy and struggles for justice in our own moment may belie the conviction that public reason is the sole heritage of the West, or the apex of its historical progress. But thinking with and against Habermas offers powerful tools for reconsidering the place of communicative action in social theory’s project of emancipation. Returning to history as a critical lens on the discourse of philosophy, rather than the canvas of its rational development, offers one path forward. ~
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/brandon-bloch-learning-history/
Jürgen Habermas
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WHY SPACESHIPS DON’T GET HIT BY ASTEROIDS
You probably think the asteroid belt looks like this:
What it actually looks like is this:
The average distance between asteroids in the belt is 600,000 miles — two and a half times the distance from Earth to the Moon, and a distance it would take Voyager, for example, 15, 16 hours to cover.
There is a lot of passing distance.
You'd really have to deliberately work at it to hit one...or even just get close enough it looks like anything other than a dot.
~ David Johnson, Quora
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AN ICE BODY THE SIZE OF FRANCE IS MYSTERIOUSLY SHIFTING EVERY DAY
Ross Ice Shelf with Mount Erebus in the background. Mount Erebus is the second-highest volcano in Antarctica, the highest active volcano in Antarctica, and the southernmost active volcano on Earth.
The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest chunk of ice on Antarctica, at roughly the size of France.
Scientists have known that ice streams have a tendency to lurch at least once a day with the tides, but a new study could show that this mysterious “stickiness” moves the entire Ross Ice Shelf by an astonishing 6 centimeters once or twice a day.
It’s important to understand these movements, as ice streams can cause icequakes and fractures throughout the frozen continent.
The geologic motions of the Earth happen at soul-crushingly slow speeds. The tectonic plates, for example, only shift on average some 0.6 inches every year, Mount Everest will put on a measly 4mm of height in 2024, and the Grand Canyon formed one-quarter of one-thousandths of a foot a year over the course of some 20 million years. So, yeah, the Earth can be pretty slow going.
But a new study from scientists at the Washington University in St. Louis shows that, every once in a while, our planet is capable of putting a little pep in its step.
Although Antarctica appears as an ice-encased footnote at the bottom of most maps, the landmass is actually very large—1.5 times the size of the U.S. The largest slab of ice on that frozen continent is the Ross Ice Shelf, clocking in at around 188,000 square miles and several hundred meters thick. And surging with the Ross Ice Shelf is the 60-mile-wide Whillans Ice Stream, named after the American glaciologist Ian Whillans and his groundbreaking research into these moving belts of ice.
One of the interesting properties of the Whillans Ice Stream is that it undergoes a tidal-induced stick-slip cycle, in which this stream suddenly slides forward at high tide and midway into falling tide. Scientists at Washington University recently discovered that the power behind this particular stick-slip motion—similar to the motion occurring before and during an earthquake—actually moves the entire Ross Ice Shelf (which is largely the size of France) some 6 centimeters once or twice a day. Although that may not seem like much when marking it off with a ruler, it’s an incredible amount compared to movement over Earth’s usual geologic timescales. The results of the study were published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“One would not detect the movement just by feeling it. The movement occurs over a time period of several minutes, so it is not perceptible without instrumentation. That’s why the movement has not been detected until now” Washington University’s Doug Wiens, an environmental and planetary sciences professor and lead author, said in a press statement. “These sudden movements could potentially play a role in triggering icequakes and fractures in the ice shelf.”
This stick-slip motion is caused by part of the ice stream remain stationary while the rest of the ice moves forward. Eventually—once or twice per day — the large section lurches forward to make up for lost time. This jerking movement of the Whillans Ice Sheet is well-known, but scientists didn’t realize that this particular ice stream was moving the entire Ross Ice Shelf in the process.
Ice streams are incredibly important, as they act like arteries for the Antarctic Ice Shelf by discharging 90 percent of its ice and sediment out into the oceans. While the researchers haven’t connected the effects of human-induced climate change to this lurching ice stream behavior, one theory (according to the scientists) is that loss of water in the Whillans Ice Stream is making it more “sticky.” And while icequakes and fractures are just a part of life on the Ross Ice Shelf, this massive chunk of ice did completely disintegrate some 120,000 years ago during Earth’s last interglacial period.
For now, the Ross Ice Shelf shows no signs of cracking up—but one or two daily lurches is to be expected.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a60364046/ross-ice-shelf-lurch/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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CHRISTIANITY IS NOT ABOUT BEING GOOD
Oriana: Many people think of compassion and forgiveness as being the defining core of Christianity. But a few years ago I read an article “Christianity Isn’t about Being Good.” Warning: you may not like what the minister was trying to say. In summary: Christianity isn’t about being good. One can be good without being a Christian; even an atheist can be a good person (this is an immense insight on the part of an ordained minister!)
If Christianity is not about being good, then could it be about . . . being bad? Precisely. Christianity is about sin and salvation. Also, when you do good, you bestow your kindness upon others. You may even put their comfort and happiness ahead of yours, and rejoice in the compliments you get as a “good Christian.” But this shows a misunderstanding. Your first duty is not to your fellow men, but to god.
Was Abraham’s first duty to his son Isaac? No, his first duty was to god.
This happens to be the most perfect summary of my religious instruction: it was about sin.
“Christianity is not primarily about ethics, about “being a nice person” or, to use Flannery O’Connor’s wry formula, “having a heart of gold.” The moment Christians grant that Christianity’s ultimate purpose is to make us ethically better people, they cannot convincingly defend against the insinuation that, if some other system makes human beings just as good or better, Christianity has lost its raison d’être.
Much of the confusion on this score can be traced to the influence of Immanuel Kant, especially his seminal text Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. Like so many of his Enlightenment era confreres, Kant was impatient with the claims of the revealed religions. He saw them as unverifiable and finally irrational assertions that could be defended, not through reason, but only through violence. Do you see how much of the “New Atheism” of the post-September 11th era is conditioned by a similar suspicion? Accordingly, he argued that, at its best, religion is not about dogma or doctrine or liturgy but about ethics.
In the measure that the Scriptures, prayer, and belief make one morally good, they are admissible, but in the measure that they lead to moral corruption, they should be dispensed with. As religious people mature, Kant felt, they would naturally let those relatively extrinsic practices and convictions fall to the side and would embrace the ethical core of their belief systems. Kant’s army of disciples today include such figures as John Shelby Spong, John Dominic Crossan, James Carroll, Bart Ehrman, and the late Marcus Borg, all of whom think that Christianity ought to be de-supernaturalized and re-presented as essentially a program of inclusion and social justice.
The problem with this Kantianism both old and new is that it runs dramatically counter to the witness of the first Christians, who were concerned, above all, not with an ethical program but with the explosive emergence of a new world. The letters of St. Paul, which are the earliest Christian texts we have, are particularly instructive on this score. One can find “ethics” in the writings of Paul, but one would be hard pressed indeed to say that the principal theme of Romans, Galatians, Philippians, or first and second Corinthians is the laying out of a moral vision. The central motif of all of those letters is in fact Jesus Christ risen from the dead.
The inaugural speech of Jesus, as reported in the Gospel of Mark, commences with the announcement of the kingdom of God and then the exhortation to “repent and believe the good news.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thefont/2015/01/why-having-a-heart-of-gold-is-not-what-christianity-is-about/#ixzz3Ug6fsQa5
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CAPITALISM AND CHRISTIANITY: THE ETERNAL RETURN OF THE CHRISTIAN NATION
John Adams once wrote, “It was never pretended that any persons employed in [drafting the founding documents] had interviews with the gods or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven.” Ours was a government “founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretense of miracle or mystery.”
That Adams had to disavow divine inspiration always surprised me before I taught in Utah in the 1980s. Evangelical Christians and Mormons are often at odds, but at some point they united in the belief that the Founders had acted as scribes for divine revelation. Some of my students thought angels bearing the word of God had been at the Constitutional Convention. I began inserting into my lectures reasons why this probably was not true. Why the disputes over what passages meant? Why the amendments? Had God—or the angels—forgotten stuff?
Two recent books—Steven Green’s Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding and Kevin M. Kruse’s One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, which documents a mid-twentieth-century scheme to roll back the welfare state—go far in answering that question and explaining not only my students, but the backdrop to my public school experience in the 1950s which I never fully understood before.
Green offers the conventional interpretation of why the Founders, even the devout among them, created a barrier between church and state: there were too many competing religions. Initially this multiplicity encompassed quarrelling Protestant sects, but things have grown even more contentious since then. First with Catholics and Jews, eventually Muslims, Buddhists, and others, and now large numbers of people who are just uninterested in anything theological.
Green dates the idea of a Christian nation to the Second Great Awakening, which occurred at a time—the antebellum era—when Americans were striving to create a cohesive national identity. Religious competition remained intense, but more and more of the competing denominations were evangelicals who conflated their nationalism and religion in ways that made divine intervention and providential thinking suitable for politics. It was this second American generation, rather than the Founders, who created the myth that has been with us in various forms ever since.
The original myth is not the same as the one currently in fashion. Both see God’s guiding hand behind the nation’s history and regard Christianity as the basis of republican principles. The old myth, however, was optimistic and tried to be inclusive, which was possible in what was still an overwhelmingly Protestant country. It was oriented toward the future and intent on explaining a providential American destiny. The new myth, by contrast, is sectarian and divisive in a country full of Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, etc., not to mention agnostics, atheists, and the sometimes-inchoate mass who define themselves as spiritual. Rather than look to tomorrow, today’s myth appeals to those who think they have lost an ideal past.
Kruse contends that our modern version of Christian America has some of its roots in a plan hatched by conservative corporate leaders to overthrow the New Deal. The plan escaped their control. They didn’t accomplish their goals, but they helped to trigger what might be called the Third Great Awakening.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, worried about a decade of political losses and their own deep unpopularity, a group of conservative industrialists—as conservative rich are wont to do—began to grow anxious about American values. They came up with the idea of freedom under God, which was a kind of Christian libertarianism that emphasized a religious understanding of the Fourth of July and America’s founding. Realizing their own limits as spokespeople for freedom under God, they recruited—largely but not entirely—Protestant clergy, the most notable being Abraham Vereide and eventually Billy Graham. The goal was to argue for individualism and individual salvation and against claims of a larger public good. They wanted to restore self-reliance and oppose unions and welfare. Just as the first advocates of Christian America had sought to intertwine republicanism and Christianity, the advocates of this new version sought to intertwine capitalism and Christianity.
President Eisenhower sincerely believed that the United States was a Christian nation. He was named after Dwight Moody, the Chicago fundamentalist minister, and his brother said they were raised fundamentalist Christians. Eisenhower believed that a democracy could not exist without a religious base, and he saw part of his job as president as leading a spiritual renewal. Eisenhower was the Yogi Berra of American presidents; he was shrewd, but sometimes the way things came out gave listeners pause: “our form of government,” he said, “has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” He meant it. In a diverse nation, religion would serve to unite only if it reached the lowest common denominator.
Thus, state endorsements of the deity, until then uncommon in American history, began to emerge. The 1950s gave us “In God We Trust” on our coins, “one nation under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, the National Day of Prayer, and congressional prayer breakfasts. Many of the Ten Commandments statues dotting government spaces date from the era; some originated as part of the publicity campaign for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956).
In 1962 the Supreme Court in Engel v. Vitale ruled that the New York law requiring public school teachers open each day with a prayer violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
The political firestorm that resulted is in some ways still burning. There were attempts to get a school-prayer amendment to the Constitution, which led to congressional hearings. Adeptly managed by Representative Emanuel Celler, head of the House Judiciary Committee, the hearings revealed that no official school prayer could satisfy all parties—because the United States still was not a Christian nation.
This seemed to me the truth on the ground. By then my family had moved to California, and I was a teenager in an Orange County Catholic school. I cannot recall Catholics talking much about the United States as a Christian nation. As Kruse points out, the efforts of the Gideon Society to get bibles—King James Bibles—into the hands of citizens and bible reading and prayer into the schools had raised the question of which bibles and whose prayers. These were the Kennedy years, and the president’s Catholicism clearly did not qualify him as a Christian for many Americans.
My Catholic classmates agreed; they joked they weren’t Christian but Catholic, by which they meant they weren’t Protestant, which is what they took “Christian” to mean. The Judeo-Christian tradition was taking shape, but it didn’t yet have much of a grip on La Habra, California or Wantagh, New York. In those worlds, there were Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, and they were not united. That there were religions beyond this I knew only from the weekly collections the nuns made on behalf of “pagan babies.”
The defeat of the prayer amendment meant another evolution in the Christian nation and in its political utility. Eisenhower had intended generic religiosity to be inclusive, but it instead served as a weapon in the culture wars. Ronald Reagan, conservative Republicans, and the right in general used it brilliantly.
Viewed over the longue durée of three centuries, the idea of a Christian nation traces our changing religiosity, but more interestingly our sense of ourselves. Like originalist constitutional interpretation, the appeal of the Christian nation lies in its assertion that nothing has changed; we are who we were in the beginning and will presumably be until the end of time. Except of course we are not. We are certainly not a Christian nation. Over three centuries we have had three chances to enshrine that belief in the Constitution, and each time we refused.
http://bostonreview.net/us/richard-white-christian-nation?utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=22800152&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9aEflzGdSemq2q8dfK1TZ84PL74FNuPV4nUGZQ-AU3e3RXR5hA950Gr4a1WvJY3KCrggAxXjase_yEau_UXXdDrl1mEA&_hsmi=22800152
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CHRISTIANITY HAS IT WRONG – YOU ARE NOT BROKEN
Christianity has it wrong.
We are not broken.
We are not fallen.
We are not flawed.
We are simply fragile.
We are beautifully distractible.
We are self-invested because of love, and that love gives us a slight bias toward justice.
We are so deeply invested in life that we can, at times, deny the larger good for the experience of the moment.
We are not broken.
We are human.
We are flesh and blood, and we are experiential.
Sometimes that makes us better. Sometimes that makes us worse. It never makes us less.
Or sinful.
Or unredeemable.
It means we are real.
It means that life has a relentless hold on us.
The struggles, the stumbles, the seemingly endless short-fallings simply point to our humanity, not to our unworthiness.
They mean life is difficult — but they also mean life is vibrant, pulsing with potential, ripe with possibility, constantly presenting lessons from which to grow.
YOU —
You are not broken.
You are a unique expression of God’s love here on Earth.
You are bursting with potential that has not yet been expressed.
You are God’s beloved.
You are NOT broken.
You are in process.
You?
You are Love hoping to not only be expressed but to be recognized. ~ Mark Sandlin
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/thegodarticle/2015/01/christianity-has-it-wrong-you-are-not-broken/#ixzz3QAROvsz8
RESISTANT STARCH: THE BODY’S “NATURAL OZEMPIC”
Ozempic promotes weight loss by mimicking glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), which is a hormone naturally produced in the intestines in response to food intake.
Ozempic acts like GLP-1 in the body, binding to and activating GLP-1 receptors which helps regulate appetite and digestion.
When you take Ozempic, it tells your brain you're full, so you eat less. It also slows down how fast your stomach empties, which means you feel full for longer after eating.
Resistant starch does the same, and so much more.
Butyrate, GLP-1, and Resistant Starch
The types of fiber that increase GLP-1 the most are fermentable, or prebiotic fibers, specifically resistant starch.
These fibers reach the colon mostly intact, where they are fermented by beneficial gut microbes, leading to an increase in production of GLP-1, the hormone that Ozempic mimics.
In fact, resistant starch is far superior because it stimulates GLP-1 continually, whereas Ozempic is a GLP-1 activator for a short-term boost.
A recent study showed that resistant starch supplementation for 8 weeks can lose an average of 6.2lbs (2.81kg) and improve insulin resistance.
This outperformed Ozempic, which took 13 weeks to get similar results.
As opposed to Ozempic, which also causes muscle loss, resistant starch (via butyrate) increases muscle growth.
Resistant starch increases butyrate the most among all dietary fibers, which is extremely important not just for fat reduction, but cognitive and gut function as well.
The amount of butyrate that resistant starch creates far outweighs how much butyrate supplements you can take before feeling nauseous.
Cognitive Function and Butyrate
Butyrate promotes the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein that supports the growth and maintenance of neurons.
By enhancing neuronal growth and plasticity, butyrate improves your learning and memory.
Additionally, butyrate has anti-inflammatory properties that can protect against neurodegenerative diseases and cognitive decline.
~ Joe at Self-Decode
Food Sources of resistant starch:
Plantains and greenish bananas (as bananas ripens the resistant starch changes to a regular starch)
Beans, peas, and lentils (white beans and lentils are the highest in resistant starch)
Whole grains including oats and barley.
Cooked and cooled rice, cooked and cooled potatoes
Regular consumption of white beans induces weight loss: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7063375/
Oriana:
White beans are a natural Ozempic? The price difference is staggering.
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WHY NEANDERTHALS WENT EXTINCT
Anthropologists once saw Neanderthals as dull-witted brutes. But recent archaeological finds show they rivaled us in intelligence.
Why did humans take over the world while our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, became extinct? It’s possible we were just smarter, but there’s surprisingly little evidence that’s true.
Neanderthals had big brains, language, and sophisticated tools. They made art and jewelry. They were smart, suggesting a curious possibility. Maybe the crucial differences weren’t at the individual level but in our societies.
Two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, Europe and western Asia were Neanderthal lands. Homo sapiens inhabited southern Africa. Estimates vary, but perhaps 100,000 years ago, modern humans migrated out of Africa.
Forty thousand years ago Neanderthals disappeared from Asia and Europe, replaced by humans. Their slow, inevitable replacement suggests humans had some advantage, but not what it was.
Neanderthals mastered fire before we did. They were deadly hunters, taking big game like mammoths and woolly rhinos and small animals like rabbits and birds.
They gathered plants, seeds, and shellfish. Hunting and foraging all those species demanded a deep understanding of nature.
Neanderthals also had a sense of beauty, making beads and cave paintings. They were spiritual people, burying their dead with flowers.
Stone circles found inside caves may be Neanderthal shrines. Like modern hunter-gatherers, Neanderthal lives were probably steeped in superstition and magic; their skies full of gods, the caves inhabited by ancestor-spirits.
Then there’s the fact Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had children together. We weren’t that different. But we met Neanderthals many times, over many millennia, always with the same result. They disappeared. We remained.
THE HUNTER-GATHERER SOCIETY
It may be that the key differences were less at the individual level than at the societal level. It’s impossible to understand humans in isolation, any more than you can understand a honeybee without considering its colony. We prize our individuality, but our survival is tied to larger social groups, as a bee’s fate depends on the colony’s survival.
Modern hunter-gatherers provide our best guess at how early humans and Neanderthals lived. People like Namibia’s Khoisan and Tanzania’s Hadzabe gather families into wandering bands of ten to 60 people. The bands combine into a loosely organized tribe of a thousand people or more.
These tribes lack hierachical structures, but they’re linked by shared language and religion, marriages, kinships and friendships. Neanderthal societies may have been similar but with one crucial difference: smaller social groups.
TIGHT-KNIT TRIBES
What points to this is evidence that Neanderthals had lower genetic diversity.
In small populations, genes are easily lost. If one person in ten carries a gene for curly hair, then in a ten-person band, one death could remove the gene from the population. In a band of fifty, five people would carry the gene – multiple backup copies. So over time, small groups tend to lose genetic variation, ending up with fewer genes.
In 2022, DNA was recovered from the bones and teeth of 11 Neanderthals found in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. Several individuals were related, including a father and a daughter – they were from a single band. And they showed low genetic diversity.
Because we inherit two sets of chromosomes — one from our mother and one from our father — we carry two copies of each gene. Often, we have two different versions of a gene. You might get a gene for blue eyes from your mother and one for brown eyes from your father.
However, the Altai Neanderthals often had one version of each gene. As the study reports, that low diversity suggests they lived in small bands — probably averaging just 20 people.
It’s possible Neanderthal anatomy favored small groups. Being robust and muscular, Neanderthals were heavier than us. So each Neanderthal needed more food, meaning the land could support fewer Neanderthals than Homo sapiens.
And Neanderthals may have mainly eaten meat. Meat-eaters would get fewer calories from the land than people who ate meat and plants, again leading to smaller populations.
GROUP SIZE MATTERS
If humans lived in bigger groups than Neanderthals, it could have given us advantages.
Neanderthals, strong and skilled with spears were likely good fighters. Lightly built humans probably countered by using bows to attack at range.
But even if Neanderthals and humans were equally dangerous in battle, if humans also had a numeric advantage, they could bring more fighters and absorb more losses.
Big societies have other, subtler advantages. Larger bands have more brains. More brains to solve problems, remember lore about animals and plants, and techniques for crafting tools and sewing clothing. Just as big groups have higher genetic diversity, they’ll have higher diversity of ideas.
And more people means more connections. Network connections increase exponentially with network size, following Metcalfe’s Law. A 20-person band has 190 possible connections between members, while 60 people have 1770 possible connections.
Information flows through these connections: News about people and movements of animals; toolmaking techniques; and words, songs and myths. Plus the group’s behavior becomes increasingly complex.
Consider ants. Individually, ants aren’t smart. But interactions between millions of ants lets colonies make elaborate nests, forage for food and kill animals many times an ant’s size. Likewise, human groups do things no one person can — design buildings and cars, write elaborate computer programs, fight wars, run companies and countries.
Humans aren’t unique in having big brains (whales and elephants have these) or in having huge social groups (zebras and wildebeest form huge herds). But we’re unique in combining them.
To paraphrase poet John Dunne, no man — and no Neanderthal — is an island. We’re all part of something larger. Throughout history, humans formed larger and larger social groups: bands, tribes, cities, nation-states, and international alliances.
It may be then that an ability to build large social structures gave Homo sapiens the edge against nature and other hominin species.
https://www.inverse.com/science/why-did-neanderthals-go-extinct-theory?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
*
ending on beauty:
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?
~ Galway Kinnell, Another Night in the Ruins
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