ANGEL WITH THE SUNDIAL (II)
In the storm that rages round the strong cathedral
like a denier thinking on and on,
your tender smile suddenly engages
our hearts and lifts them up to you.
Smiling angel, sympathetic stone,
your mouth distilled from a hundred mouths:
do you not mark how from your always-full
sundial our hours slide off one by one —
that so impartial sundial, upon which
the day’s whole sum is balanced equally
as though all our hours were rich and ripe?
What do you know, stone-born, of our plight?
And does your face become more blissful still
as you hold the sundial out into the night?
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, tr, J. B. Leishman
(slightly modified by Oriana)
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Oriana:
I fell in love with this poem at first reading, when I first discovered Rilke in my late twenties — so many years ago that it seems like another lifetime. Unpredictable, the words that may connect one stage of our life with another; timeless ripples in time.
There are so many great lines here, and the poem works so well in English (including the rhymes, often a translator’s downfall — but here we see Leishman at his best) that I am surprised that this exquisite piece from The Book of Images is little known. You’d think that many Rilke lovers could recite the second stanza by heart:
Smiling angel, sympathetic stone,
your mouth distilled from a hundred mouths:
do you not mark how from your always-full
sundial our hours slide off one by one —
The poem flows by itself, each word inevitable, even in translation. But this sublime angel remains largely undiscovered, obscured by its larger, lethal kin perched in the Duino Elegies.
(Rilke thought that those giant angels were Islamic.)
Let’s “take it from the top,” as a quirky (but aren’t they all?) professor of mine used to say. The first stanza is interesting in itself. What is this “storm that rages round the cathedral”? I no longer remember my source for this information, but one explanation may be biographical. When Rilke and Rodin visited Chartres together, Rilke, for whom it was his first visit, was surprised by the wind around the cathedral — “the wind in which we stood like the damned.” Rodin replied that there is always a wind around the great cathedrals. (Oriana: and around skyscrapers; massive buildings change the air flow)
Before we go into the metaphorical meaning of the “storm around the strong cathedral,” let me dispose of a more literal interpretation. The stone walls of medieval cathedrals (which used to double as fortresses in wartime) are massive not only in height, but in thickness. That’s why it’s always cold inside, even on a hot summer day. The turbulence noted by Rilke may have been due to the complicated air currents as the wind pushes against and flows around the giant walls (and oh, how the wind whistles if you open a side door! as if a blizzard were going on . . . )
Also, Rilke might have known the legend of the wind around the Strasbourg cathedral: the wind there waits for the devil (trapped inside god’s fortress) to ride it again. Hence the “denier” might refer to the “spirit that always denies [or “always says No”), a line from Goethe’s Faust.
But let’s assume that the denier refers to an atheist who feels enraged against religion, but rather than express his hatred in a purely emotional outpouring, tries for rational arguments. Though Rilke was influenced by Lou Andreas-Salomé’s belief that all religions were human invention, like Lou he shared a longing for a “real god,” one who does not divide humanity into the saved and the damned.
This “real god” understands our wounds (rather than condemn our “sins”) and accepts everyone. Nothing could separate us from that loving essence of the universe (now if we could only find even the slightest evidence that the “real god” exists . . . )
Rilke felt that it was possible to experience this kind of divine presence, with no need for either rationalized doctrine or blind belief in what we suspect (or even know) isn’t there. Though outwardly hostile toward Catholicism (he forbade the presence of a priest at his funeral), he was drawn to the poetics of Catholicism, the tenderness embodied in Mary and, now and then, other figures — in this case an angel. In spite of the literal as well as emotional and intellectual storm around the cathedral, the angel greets us as a beautiful, loving, and all-accepting being:
your tender smile suddenly engages
our hearts and lifts them up to you
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I especially love the lines that open the second stanza:
O smiling angel, sympathetic stone,
your mouth distilled from a hundred mouths:
The sculptor made the angel in man’s image. It’s a collective image: “your mouth distilled from a hundred mouths.” An angel is a human self-portrait. But it’s a wishful self-portrait, with wings. That’s how beautiful and serene we’d look if we’d known nothing but affection instead of being screamed at and punished. This is how we’d smile if we knew nothing about abandonment or betrayal. This is how smooth and soft our faces would be if we never experienced stress and suffering (mentally handicapped people sometimes have that soft and smooth look long past childhood — they generally encounter nothing but kindness, since no one judges them; they are granted innocence, so their faces stay unmarked by stress).
The angel, a stone man-bird, cannot know that all our hours are not “rich and ripe.” It can know nothing of the human life, and yet
your tender smile suddenly engages
our hearts and lifts them up to you
That happens thanks to the power of art and the power of a smile, whether on someone’s face or in a painting or on a statue. A smile expresses affection and trust. When we see a smile, we tend to relax and smile back, which automatically makes us feel better.
And then the final irony:
What do you know, stone-born, of our plight?
And does your face become more blissful still
as you hold the sundial out into the night?
The angel is blissful because he is blind and innocent — innocent in the sense of “ignorant.” He doesn’t even know night from day. Alas, we can’t recommend ignorance as a prescription for happiness, though “ignorance is bliss” holds in enough cases to remind me of Esther Perel’s admonition: “Not all truth needs to be told.”
What we can recommend, looking at the angel — and also at the joyfulness of most dogs, for that matter — is that children can be raised without constant judgment and condemnation. I HAVE seen much progress in this area, and a decline in toxic, punitive religion that encourages child abuse. Minimal punishment combined with a lot of affection seems to produce happy, friendly children to whom self-control comes more easily because they aren’t filled with hate and anger. I’ve said this a gazillion times, but I never tire of saying it.
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WHY “WRITING” REQUIRES ONE T BUT “WRITTEN” REQUIRES TWO
This comes from a medieval spelling reformer, Orm, aka Ormin, an Augustinian canon and grammarian. His name means “Dragon” in the more northern dialect of East Midlands Middle English (very cool!). Orm came up with a method in which you can indicate whether a vowel is long or short by doubling the consonant after it.
(He had a bunch of other spelling laws too regarding doubled vowels, but this is the one applicable to your question. His work that introduces various spelling rules of this sort is called the Ormulum. The Ormulum is mostly fragmentary homiletic work, but it does include asides in which Orm complains about lack of consistency in spelling.)
So, suppose you came across two imaginary English words:
*Xate (with one t)
*Xatt (with two ts)
If I ask you to read both words aloud, you will probably pronounce #1 as “xayte” and make it rhyme with words like “late.” You will probably pronounce #2 as “xaht” or “xat” and either make it rhyme with “bought” or “bat.”
The reason you do that is the same reason you distinguish between hoped and hopped or rated and ratted. You have absorbed the spelling rule that two repeated consonants after a vowel usually indicate the previous vowel is short. If it’s not a doubled consonant (and especially if there’s a silent e on the end), you have absorbed the rule that the previous vowel is long.
English had to create kludgy variations like that because we inherited a very limited number of vowel symbols from the Roman alphabet, but we actually have a lot more vowel sounds in English than the number of letters we inherited.
In the case of write, the word write has an i pronounced as a long vowel. In the case of written, the word written has an i pronounced as a short vowel. It’s exactly the same as the difference between bite and bitten, where the first vowel is pronounced two different ways. ~ Kip Wheeler, Quora
ARE WE FOCUSING ON THE WRONG THINGS ABOUT AI?
Conversations about the future of AI are too apocalyptic. Or rather, they focus on the wrong kind of apocalypse.
There is considerable concern of the future of AI, especially as a number of prominent computer scientists have raised, the risks of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—an AI smarter than a human being. They worry that an AGI will lead to mass unemployment or that AI will grow beyond human control—or worse (the movies Terminator and 2001 come to mind).
Discussing these concerns seems important, as does thinking about the much more mundane and immediate threats of misinformation, deep fakes, and proliferation enabled by AI. But this focus on apocalyptic events also robs most of us of our agency. AI becomes a thing we either build or don’t build, and no one outside of a few dozen Silicon Valley executives and top government officials really has any say over.
But the reality is we are already living in the early days of the AI Age, and, at every level of an organization, we need to make some very important decisions about what that actually means. Waiting to make these choices means they will be made for us. It opens us up to many little apocalypses, as jobs and workplaces are disrupted one-by-one in ways that change lives and livelihoods.
We know this is a real threat, because, regardless of any pauses in AI creation, and without any further AI development beyond what is available today, AI is going to impact how we work and learn. We know this for three reasons: First, AI really does seem to supercharge productivity in ways we have never really seen before. An early controlled study in September 2023 showed large-scale improvements at work tasks, as a result of using AI, with time savings of more than 30% and a higher quality output for those using AI. Add to that the near-immaculate test scores achieved by GPT-4, and it is obvious why AI use is already becoming common among students and workers, even if they are keeping it secret.
We also know that AI is going to change how we work and learn because it is affecting a set of workers who never really faced an automation shock before. Multiple studies show the jobs most exposed to AI (and therefore the people whose jobs will make the hardest pivot as a result of AI) are educated and highly paid workers, and the ones with the most creativity in their jobs. The pressure for organizations to take a stand on a technology that affects these workers will be immense, especially as AI-driven productivity gains become widespread. These tools are on their way to becoming deeply integrated into our work environments. Microsoft, for instance, has released Co-Pilot GPT-4 tools for its ubiquitous Office applications, even as Google does the same for its office tools.
As a result, a natural instinct among many managers might be to say “fire people, save money.” But it doesn’t need to be that way—and it shouldn’t be. There are many reasons why companies should not turn efficiency gains into headcount or cost reduction. Companies that figure out how to use their newly productive workforce have the opportunity to dominate those who try to keep their post-AI output the same as their pre-AI output, just with fewer people. Companies that commit to maintaining their workforce will likely have employees as partners, who are happy to teach others about the uses of AI at work, rather than scared workers who hide AI for fear of being replaced. Psychological safety is critical to innovative team success, especially when confronted with rapid change. How companies use this extra efficiency is a choice, and a very consequential one.
There are hints buried in the early studies of AI about a way forward. Workers, while worried about AI, tend to like using it because it removes the most tedious and annoying parts of their job, leaving them with the most interesting tasks. So, even as AI removes some previously valuable tasks from a job, the work that is left can be more meaningful and more high value. But this is not inevitable, so managers and leaders must decide whether and how to commit themselves to reorganizing work around AI in ways that help, rather than hurt, their human workers. They need to ask “what is my vision about how AI makes work better, rather than worse?”
Rather than just being worried about one giant AI apocalypse, we need to worry about the many small catastrophes that AI can bring. Unimaginative or stressed leaders may decide to use these new tools for surveillance and for layoffs. Educators may decide to use AI in ways that leave some students behind. And those are just the obvious problems.
But AI does not need to be catastrophic. Correctly used, AI can create local victories, where previously tedious or useless work becomes productive and empowering. Where students who were left behind can find new paths forward. And where productivity gains lead to growth and innovation.
The thing about a widely applicable technology is that decisions about how it is used are not limited to a small group of people. Many people in organizations will play a role in shaping what AI means for their team, their customers, their students, their environment. But to make those choices matter, serious discussions need to start in many places—and soon. We can’t wait for decisions to be made for us, and the world is advancing too fast to remain passive.
https://time.com/6961559/ethan-mollick-ai-apocalypse-essay/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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WHY BULLYING IN SCHOOLS IS SO COMMON
Schools are children’s prisons. They are basically similar totalitarian institutions like prisons, military, mental institutions or concentration camps. The same basic rules apply there and the human relations in all of them are the same. The same patterns of human relations which are evident in prisons, also exist in schools.
The main reason is heterogeneous materiél. The more heterogenous a body of people is, the more there are also internal conflicts. When an immense number of children with vastly different IQ, coming from different social backgrounds, different attitudes on society and education etc are put together, internal conflicts and competition of dominance and subjugation will emerge. Bullying is basically resolving the pecking order and who gets to beat up whom. This is very much evident also in prisons.
Bullying is rarer in schools where the pupils are more homogeneous by their IQ, social class or attitude on education; it diminishes radically once the mandatory basic education is over, and the Great Centrifuge of Life begins to spin. The pupil materiél in senior secondary schools is vastly more selected and sieved than in the comprehensive schools, and there is no similar competition over dominance or pecking order as in the comprehensive schools. There are also far less conflicts — unless someone is a total jerk, psycho or narcissist.
Low IQ and bullying go hand in hand. This is perhaps best illustrated in the Russian military, where dedovshchina (military brutalization and bullying) is an unresolvable problem (as if someone really wanted to do anything about it). Russia has conscription, but the military is so unpopular that any boys who are able to, dodge the draft. The result is that the military only gets the dumbest, the least talented and the least connected of the cohort — and they are no better than an Orc horde. The pathetic performance of the Russian military in the Ukrainian war is a demonstration of this sad culture.
The same applies to schools. Bullying is most common where the average IQ of the pupils is lowest. And God help if there are kids whose IQ is 30+ points higher — or lower — than the average of the class! Exclusion, ostracism and bullying is certain to emerge.
Jerk jocks are so commonplace it is a trope. Whenever a bully is an athlete, he is without an exception either a hockey jock, footballer, basketballer or similar team sports athlete. The reason is that stupidity condenses in a team. Team sports encourage tribalism, antisocial behavior towards outsiders, dilution of responsibility and mobbing. Ice hockey is the worst: ice hockey has a Pharisean attitude on violence in the rink — officially it is not tolerated, unofficially it is encouraged. The only individual sports jerk jocks are either boxers (simply because the average IQ of boxers is very low) or ski jumpers (because it takes a certain type of personality to jump off the slope and risk one’s life). This kind of behavior is seriously discouraged in true martial arts.
There is also a trope Adults Are Useless — and it has strong connotations in the real life. “Boys will be boys” is a very common excuse, as is “let the kids resolve their own pecking order”. So I cannot suggest anyone experiencing bullying to try seeking adults’ help — it often only exacerbates the situation. ~ Susanna Viljanen, Quora
Mike Bell:
The only thing that seems to fix it is to engage in some retaliatory violence once in a while.
I had to do it in school. Amazingly, the extremely credible threat of a beating unless it stopped “right now”, even from a weak guy like me, was enough to make it stop the one time it happened in high school. In elementary school, it had happened more… and a teacher quietly took me aside and told me that the only solution was to hit them—and he was right. It stopped at that point.
My rather gentle father had a similar experience in school: some idiot kept on bullying him repeatedly… until eventually he lost his cool and cracked the dude’s head into a brick wall. It ended then.
Anyone who has had such experiences, which is to say, the vast majority of people, and still believes in non-violence in any circumstances, is totally deluded, if you ask me. Because never being willing to engage in violence means being a perpetual victim. On the other hand, it’s surprising how a little infrequent violence is enough to keep it well under control.
Frederico Leal:
I feel introversion is far more problematic than IQ. The “bullied nerd” stereotype has some validity, but my impression is that is because a good number of high IQ boys are also introverts. I remember kids who were high IQ and extroverts were not bullied so much, and low IQ introverts got it the worst of all.
Niall Macdonagh:
Now make the school a boarding school where you do not even get to home at the end of the day. This is a clip from the autobiography of a classmate, Nick Hewer.
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WHAT’S AHEAD FOR RUSSIAN ECONOMY?
Novosibirsk is the hometown of Maxim Geikin, who can now only look at the filthy streets from a billboard. Geikin is one of hundreds of thousands of Russian men sent by Putin to die in Ukraine. All Russia is covered with these posters. And posters to sign up for the army contract.
~ The Russian economy is falling further and further through the cracks, while Putin is spending USD $300 million per day on the war in Ukraine.
new orthodox church near St. Petersburg
The scenery above is indicative of what is going on in Russia: a brand-new church in a “sleeping quarters” suburb of St. Petersburg (called in Russia “the cultural capital”), with typical lack of parking and flooding muddy roads.
That’s the type of environment that an average Russian city dweller experiences every day.
In the near future, Russians will be deprived of foreign goods: Russian leader Vladimir Putin demanded to reduce the share of imported goods in the economy to the levels of the Soviet Union.
Putin wants the share of imported goods and materials to drop to 17% of GDP by 2030. That’s how much the USSR was importing in 1990 — there had never been such a low level of imports in the history of the Russian Federation, since its inception 33 years ago, in 1991.
I still remember the times of the USSR when buying imported goods was a lucky break: clothes and shoes made by Soviet factories were not only ugly but also hugely uncomfortable to wear.
Soviet-era clothing store
Typical assortment of the Soviet clothing store: tweed coats — in spring, summer and winter. I have no idea why this was deemed to be a necessary item to produce and flood all clothing stores.
It’s only that dull and baggy merchandise that was available in Soviet stores: imported goods were sold only at the end of the month, “to make plan” — I’ll explain what it is.
Each store had a “plan” how much money they had to make per month.
If the sales of ugly, dull Soviet clothing didn’t achieve the required amount, the store would be allocated ”deficit” to achieve the planned amount: some imported clothing or shoes of good quality, to be sold on the last day, to just cover the difference to “make the plan” — so that the director and employees weren’t reprimanded by the communist party committee (and could get their bonuses).
Queue to buy imported shoes in the USSR.
On the last day of the month, the queue of grannies and non-working youth waiting for the sale would form in the morning. No one knew what would be sold, but they knew that something would be “thrown in”.
The sale would usually begin after the lunch break and end when the “deficit” goods were sold out (sometimes even after the working hours).
The rule was: one item per person. You’d be lucky to buy something in your size; most people would buy anything imported that was for sale, and then re-sell to friends or family.
It wasn’t allowed to re-sell goods for profit, but people were doing it, adding 50–200% on top. (That’s why they stood in the queue for hours, waiting for goods.)
Since I was about 13, I was standing in these “last day of the month” queues. I was saving the money that my parents were giving me for lunches, and used the funds to buy “deficit” goods — and then re-sell them in the markets, which were held on Sundays in a small town outside the city (had to take a train to get there).
The income was tremendous, and by the age of 14 I could make more money in a month than my mother was earning; she was the chief of a chemical laboratory at an industrial plant with 5,000 employees. My parents didn’t know what I was doing. (I skipped school to stand in queues.) I used some of the profits to buy fashionable clothes for myself, which I was hiding at home and lied to my parents that I was borrowing the clothes from friends.
What I was doing was highly illegal and risky: selling goods for more than their official state-regulated price was called “speculation” and it was punishable by a prison term.
“Large scale” of the crime of speculation was 2,500 rubles (at the time, the minimum wage in the USSR was 70 rubles per month).
”Regular income stream” would be if the police could establish that you have sold items for profit on a regular basis, or if you were caught for the second time, while trying to sell something for more than the state-assigned price.
Luckily, the crime of “speculation” was removed from the list of punishable violations in 1990. If I kept doing what I was doing, I could end up in jail.
I knew people who served time in prison for “speculation” in goods.
I also met people who were imprisoned for organizing an “illegal business” (sewing fashionable clothing for sale) — this wasn’t allowed; only the state had the right to own a profit-making enterprise; individuals were only allowed to work for hire.
That type of structure is what Putin dreams to restore: the situation where only the state is making money, and any citizen only has the right to work for a state enterprise for a low, survival-only salary, not owning anything except their clothes and bed sheets.
The USSR was a state of quasi-slavery: factory workers were attached to homes by “a registered place of residence”, while peasants didn’t have passports and weren’t allowed to leave villages until 1970s. The state owned all the land and all the buildings; people were allocated small flats to live in, but they didn’t own them.
After decades of mass killings, deportations to Siberia and GULAG labor camps, by 1970s, Soviet quasi-slaves were conditioned to do as they were told and don’t complain.
No dreams of a different life.
No dreams of being free.
Only dreams of an upgrade on the apartment or buying a car (to purchase a car would take years of saving money — with the average wage being 110 rubles per month, a car cost 7,000 rubles).
Slaves never make good workers. Despondent quasi-slaves won’t be doing their best, they won’t dare to venture beyond their prescribed work obligations. No private enterprise; no initiative; no creativity.
Soviet Union lunch hour in a factory canteen
It’s pretty clear that the Russian economy is going downhill, but if Putin has his way (and he had already moved under state control over 180 large companies, and plans to move more), the ability of the industries to remain competitive will be impaired at the very base level.
Will Russia be a top-5 economy in 3 years?
Only in Putin’s dreams. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Sean Martin:
Considering Russia has used 44% of their liquid assets for the war in Ukraine, another two years of war and the government will be nearly broke.
David Peters:
Thanks Elena for your memories. I lived in Communist China for a while and underneath the surface it was just like this, a drain of humanity and creativity.
Putin is a champion of special interests, his own.
The war makes no sense to a rational person, only one steeped in dogma but there are plenty in Russia willing to believe the dogma. That Ukrainian government is drug addled Nazis, that NATO attacked or were about to attack Russia, that they were protecting Russians living in Ukraine.
Fascists and propagandists are winning in Russia.
Bruce Reitz Irwin
A huge step backwards into anarchy and slavery once again!
And no one cares.
So sad . . .
Star:
It's scary how familiar it sounds. The deficit goods everyone tried to procure, the illegal business — we even created a word for it, bișniță, meaning speculative illegal business. Often if you wanted a book you couldn't just buy it, you had to buy also the unsellable stuff like Ceaușescu's speeches; a package deal. Don't Russians remember their (and our) recent history?
Mark Kempson:
Sad isn’t it? For a nation so rich in natural resources, it need not be this way. They ought to have living standards like their Nordic neighbors.
Barcha S:
It’s just incredible how delusional Putin is, thinking that going back to these times would be an improvement.
For a long time, I thought that Putin perhaps had some masterplan that was behind all his seemingly irrational behavior. But this plan to go back to the Soviet times with little imports, makes me realize he’s just completely lost it.
He’s just batshit crazy.
Paul Vincent:
The Russian government should be waging war on outhouses, not on Ukraine.
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A CRACK IN PUTIN’S ARMOR
~ On Friday, March 22, gunmen toting assault rifles stormed Crocus City Hall, west of Moscow in the Krasnogorsk district, shot the guards and, as graphic videos show, opened fire on the concert audience without restraint. More than 6,000 tickets had been sold for the performance by the famed Russian rock band Piknik. At least 137 people were killed and many more wounded, some critically; the final death tally could be higher. That even more people were not shot may owe to the perpetrators’ plan to decamp before Russian security forces arrived on the scene. In a move that seemed calculated to maximize the terror, generate publicity, and broadcast the Russian government’s ineptitude, the assailants set parts of the building ablaze. According to some reports, 90 minutes elapsed before Russian special forces arrived. Putin waited until Saturday afternoon before addressing the Russian people in a televised address. By then, an offshoot of the Islamic State, Islamic State–Khorasan (IS-K), had already claimed responsibility.
The attack reverberated through Russian society, but also rattled the government, which was caught unaware and unprepared. For Putin, the attack came at a particularly bad time. He had been basking in his recent electoral victory—no surprise, since any candidate with even a slight chance to garner votes of a meaningful magnitude had been declared ineligible to run—and talking up the Russian army’s capture of the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka and its grinding westward advance. Putin has always presented himself as a leader to whom Russians can confidently entrust their safety.
Yet even before the attack by IS-K, that image had been tarnished by Ukrainian drone attacks on more than a dozen of Russia’s 44 oil refineries and incursions into provinces adjacent to the Russia–Ukraine border by anti-Putin insurgents, both of which brought the war into Russian daily life. Furthermore, on March 16, while the Russian presidential election was still underway, Ukrainian missile attacks forced the governor of Belgorod province to order the closing of schools and shopping centers for two days.
But those embarrassments and failures were nothing compared to the Crocus City Hall massacre, the most spectacular attack on Russian territory in nearly twenty years. (The two worst attacks in Russia before this one occurred at a school in Beslan, North Ossetia in 2004 and at Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater in 2002. More than 330 people died in the Beslan attack and at least 130 in Moscow; both were perpetrated by Chechen militants.)
The concert hall attack doesn’t threaten Putin’s hold on power, but it certainly challenges the competent, tough-guy image that has been his stock-in-trade for nearly a quarter of a century. To distract from the state’s security lapse, the Kremlin’s most strident spokespeople lost little time trotting out a time-worn strategy: blaming Ukraine. Margarita Simonyan, director-general of RT, Russia’s state-run television channel, scoffed at the theory that the attack was the handiwork of IS and called it a Ukrainian operation, adding for good measure that Western intelligence agencies had played a “direct” role in it.
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, reacting to American officials’ statement that Ukraine had played no part in the plot, retorted that such exculpations of Ukraine amounted to evidence of Kyiv’s culpability given that the investigation into the incident had yet to be completed. “The terrorist activities of the Kyiv organized crime group by American liberal democrats,” she declared, had been “going on for many years.”
Well-known media personalities who routinely reinforce the government’s political pronouncements also chimed in to point fingers at Ukraine. One of them, Sergei Markov, said that “the Pentagon” knew about the attack in advance and bore responsibility for the operation, which was organized by “Ukrainian military intelligence.” In the televised statement following the attack, Putin didn’t blame Ukraine’s leaders directly (nor mention IS-K), but he did say that four terrorists had been caught while trying to flee across the Russia-Ukraine border, where “a window was opened for them.” Since then, he has acknowledged the role of “radical Islamists” in the attack but continued to speculate about their true motives. The attack’s perpetrators had a “customer,” he alleged—and who else but the country Russia is at war with?
The Russian government’s key theme has been that the attack underscores the necessity of waging war with Ukraine relentlessly—a rallying cry which, at the very least, amounts to an indirect if transparent effort to implicate its government in the terrorist plot. Ukraine, for its part, was quick to declare the allegations absurd, a desperate attempt to deflect attention from the Russian state’s failures. President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, noted that Putin had remained silent for many hours following the shooting.
The extent of the security lapse was made worse by the fact that Russia might have known an attack was coming. On March 7, the American embassy in Moscow issued a terrorism alert warning of possible attacks, including on concerts. But on March 19, three days before the mass shooting at the concert hall, Putin dismissed that warning as “outright blackmail” and a scheme “to intimidate and destabilize our society.” The Russian media has not mentioned this warning.
If the allegations against Ukraine are baseless and we can take IS-K’s claim of responsibility seriously, there are several plausible motives for its attack. To make sense of them, we first need to understand the recent history of the Islamic State.
The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, which I’ll refer to here as IS, emerged in 2013. A year later, the group announced the creation of a “caliphate,” which covered parts of western Iraq and eastern Syria—a testing ground for a state based on its conception of true Islamic political and social principles. The caliphate came to an end by 2019 as a result of a military campaign by the United States and its local allies, most importantly Syrian Kurdish fighters opposed to the Russian-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad. That same year, IS’s “emir,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (his nom de guerre), died during an October 2019 American military raid in northwest Syria, reportedly after activating a suicide vest.
The caliphate’s collapse scuttled IS’s most spectacular achievement, but the proto-state’s progressive loss of territory did not stop the movement and its transnational affiliates from conducting terrorist operations, some of which were daring and dramatic. The April 2019 Easter attack in Sri Lanka killed 359 people. In August 2021, as American troops departed Afghanistan, IS conducted a suicide bombing at Kabul airport that claimed at least 170 lives, including those of 13 American military personnel. In the ensuing years, it struck additional targets in Afghanistan as well as in Pakistan and Iran. No attack, though, equaled its slaying of 1,500 or more Iraqi Shia cadets outside the Tikrit Air Academy in 2014.
The IS affiliate that carried out the Moscow attack, IS-K, arose following a 2015 split within the Taliban caused by the belief of some members of its Pakistan wing, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), that the Taliban’s leaders were not following the principles of Islam, including the sharia code, faithfully. That conviction led them to pledge fealty to IS, and they were joined eventually by like-minded Islamist groups from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan. IS-K’s recruitment and operations have encompassed Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Central Asia (parts of which constitute the historic region referred to as “Khorasan”), as well as Russia’s predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region, which includes, among other territories, Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia. The largest proportion of the thousands of men from various parts of Russia who went to Iraq and Syria to fight alongside the IS hailed from the North Caucasus.
The March 22 attack is not the first conducted by IS and IS-K that has involved the killing of Russians. The others include the October 2015 bomb explosion aboard a Russian airplane flying over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, which killed all 234 occupants; the 2017 bomb explosion on the St. Petersburg metro that killed 14 people; the bombing that same year in a St. Petersburg supermarket that also left 14 dead; the September 2022 suicide bombing at the Russian embassy in Kabul; and a string of attacks in the North Caucasus as well as other parts of Russia between 2015 and 2018.
There are many long-simmering tensions underlying these IS and IS-K attacks. First among them is Russia’s 2015 aerial bombing campaign in Syria. Undertaken to prevent the fall of Bashar al-Assad, an Alawite whom IS regards as a heretic, the campaign killed fighters from many opposition groups, many of whom were IS members. Since then, the movement has proven that it has a long memory—and that it does not lack for vengefulness.
Second is the feud between IS-K and the Taliban, which remains fierce. IS-K has condemned Russia’s dealings with its foe, which it has attacked for “befriending Russians, the murderers of Chechen Muslims” and the killers of Muslims in Syria. The Russian government still classifies the Taliban as a terrorist group but has nonetheless been seeking closer ties, diplomatic and even economic, with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, especially following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the consequent near-rupture of its relations with the West. IS-K has conducted many terrorist attacks inside Afghanistan, including one in Kandahar the day before it attacked the concert venue in Moscow.
Then there’s Russia’s alignment with Iran, which has become more pronounced as Moscow has turned to Tehran to supply some of the drones, artillery shells, and surface-to-surface missiles it uses in Ukraine. IS, a doctrinaire Sunni movement, has conducted terrorist attacks inside Shia Iran, which it regards as an apostate state, and it stands to reason that the group does not look kindly on Moscow’s bond with Tehran.
Reaching further back, there are Russia’s two brutal wars against Islamist separatists in Chechnya—1994-1996 and 1999-2000—which laid waste to the capital, Grozny, and claimed tens of thousands of lives (according to some estimates as many as 160,000 Chechen combatants and civilians). These wars seem too far removed from the present to have been a prime motive for the attack on Crocus City Hall. But as with the Soviet army’s war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, they comport with IS’s persistent depiction of Russia as a country that stands guilty of slaughtering Muslims.
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The March 22 attack is unlikely to have much effect on Russia’s politics or its war in Ukraine. Putin’s reputation may have been sullied, but most Russians are consumed by grief and shock. Not only does the state control the media, which gives it an enormous capacity to frame the narrative on the attack and to shield the country’s leadership from blame, it also has formidable means of repression and has demonstrated a willingness to use them against dissenters. Many Russians will accept their government’s account of what happened and who’s to blame. Those who won’t will be deterred by the high price paid by people who publicly criticize the authorities, to say nothing of calling for street protests. Those dissidents who might have had the stature to use this security failure to mobilize demonstrations against the government are dead, imprisoned, or in exile.
Meanwhile, the state has moved rapidly to regain public confidence, touting the arrest of four perpetrators and detainment of eleven others. For good measure the security services—perhaps to show that they were now on the case, perhaps assuming that Russians yearned for revenge—released gruesome photos of the suspects after they had been beaten up and tortured.
As for the war in Ukraine, now entering its third year, Putin will continue to do whatever he can, short of using nuclear weapons, to win it. The attack on the concert hall won’t necessarily change his strategy: the combination of continuing to blame Ukraine while targeting its cities and power grid with drones and rockets will still play well with the Russian public, as it has since the invasion started more than two years ago.
Putin will only face a more serious problem if this attack is followed by others: say, continual Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure and defense-related industries plus more cross-border attacks from armed insurgents. If the Russian state fails again to discharge the elemental duty of a government—protecting its citizens—the public’s trust in a leader whose appeal derives in no small measure from projecting strength and competence could quickly erode. If, in addition, the war drags on, Putin’s tactic of deflecting blame onto others for security lapses may eventually wear thin. But for the moment, there’s no evidence that he faces dissent within his inner circle or bottom-up disaffection sufficient to produce rebellions.
Substantial gains on the battlefield might help Putin overcome whatever doubts might have arisen about his leadership. In the meantime, though, he’s managed to control the narrative surrounding the attack by pushing the message that it is an occasion for Russians to demonstrate their resilience, compassion, and patriotism. Left unsaid, but well understood by Russians, is that other reactions, especially those that point fingers at the state, will signal a lack of these qualities. Few Russians want to be seen in that light: some because they support Putin, others because they are unwilling to face the consequences of opposing him, still others because they largely ignore politics and immerse themselves in the routines of day-to-day life.
Putin’s political position could change for the worse; however, if the war against Ukraine continues with no apparent end in sight, the already substantial number of dead and wounded, estimated to be about 70,000 and 280,000 respectively, continues to rise, and the state resorts to mass mobilization. The political ground could then shift and catch Putin off guard.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-crack-in-putins-armor/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=79505edde1-ourlatest_4_3_24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-79505edde1-40729829&mc_cid=79505edde1
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ANOTHER TAKE ON THE FUTURE OF RUSSIAN ECONOMY: Misha Firer
My friend Nick has sent me photos of the state of the road near his place in Povarovo, a locality just twenty miles from Moscow. He wanted to show Americansky readers who think that Russia’s economy is booming.
He believes there are no road construction funds anymore because war expenditures have drained the budget. He also wondered why Americansky don’t put tires into potholes? Maybe you can answer him better than I did.
If authorities don’t have money to fix potholes in a Moscow suburb, just think what it’s like in the rest of the country.
EDIT: Povarovo administration repaired the potholes two days after the publication of this post.
This predicament is certainly nothing new. Russia has inherited Byzantium’s centralized government, and has remained far less developed than the West for centuries, to this day.
The authoritarianism that liberal democracies have decried is necessary for military command to fight invaders that have historically come from every direction except the Arctic Ocean.
Russian leadership has tried to push borders as far as possible from the capital because they have been paranoid that if they don’t, they would be attacked and conquered, which has become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
For example, a botched invasion of Finland in 1939 to push borders from St. Petersburg, demonstrated unpreparedness of the Red Army and convinced Hitler that the Soviet Union would be a piece of cake.
However, Western leaders keep forgetting to take into account that Russia is structured for military victory at any cost.
The state treats citizens as cannon fodder and command economy permits the national leader to spend every ruble in the coffers to manufacture arms and generals are lauded for high casualty rate in the units under their command to deliver results on the battlefield.
This single-minded pursuit of military objectives time and again bankrupts the state like it happened because of Cold War.
Nowadays, Russia’s elites are once again Westernized and speak Western languages, and pursue Western lifestyle of comfort and luxury, while peasants punch anyone in the face for daring to speak a language of the foes.
A good example is Pyotr Tolstoy, a descendant of the aristocratic novel writer Leo Tolstoy. He’s a politician and deputy chairman of the legislature branch.
He used to work for French daily Le Monde as a Russian correspondent and recently gave an interview to a French blogger speaking in French.
A puzzling idea that circulated in the Western press about how 23 High Mobility Artillery Systems delivered to Ukraine would cause Russia to break up into twenty seven independent nations has caused Kremlin to double down in paranoia and shift economy to the war footing.
Tolstoy in the interview paid back promising that Russia is going to fight in Ukraine until they succeed in breaking up the European Union.
While Pyotr Tolstoy enjoys a bottle of French champagne, he in all seriousness believes that “Vladimir Putin’s Russian model” is morally superior to “the decadent West” and therefore they are gonna win.
Russians have always confused Western decadence with their backwardness and provincial character. But whatever the cultural disagreements, as usual, it’s the peasants who fight Westernized elites’ war, which they are doing now in Ukraine.
Will there be a point when Russian soldiers wake up and realize that they get maimed and die for the French speaking politicians and English speaking oligarchs whose families live in Miami and Paris?
Alas, in Russia, if you are against the state it means you are a traitor pulling for foreign invasion. However, Ukraine didn’t attack Russia, it’s paranoid Russia that invaded Ukraine.
Ordinary people are getting poorer and poorer and the Westernized pompous elites who prey on the concept of family values, country and patriotism are getting richer.
Public safety is degrading with almost daily arsons, terrorism, and shelling of the border regions. Remember that the FSB, political police, wrestled power from the oligarchs on the promise of improving state security.
In 2022, the FSB arrested theater directors Berkovich and Petriychuk and a criminal case was opened against them for justifying terrorism over their play about women who met representatives of the terrorist organization Islamic State (ISIS) on the Internet and decided to go to Syria with them. Both young artists are still in the detention center awaiting trial.
In the meantime, real representatives of the real terrorist organization who staged a real terrorist attack in the concert hall are most likely still at large unless you believe that the four scrawny Tadzhiks from a restaurant kitchen are professionally trained fighters capable of shooting dozens of people in cold blood. Oh my, that restaurant doesn’t look safe to me anymore!
Rampant inflation is wiping out standards of living. The only opportunities to prosper are military service in war zone, producing arms — occupations full of perils of being two-smokered out and HIMARSed, and vast majority of people are falling further and further behind struggling just to make the ends meet.
Another military disaster. Another revolution. ~ M. Firer, Quora
Robert Ottawa:
“Ordinary people are getting poorer and poorer. Westernized pompous elites who prey on the concept of family values, country and patriotism are getting richer.”
That's maybe a reason why Putin doesn't want to end the war in Ukraine. At the end of the war, thousand of battle hardened soldiers will be coming home to watch their families live on pittance while witnessing the opulence of the elite. The resentments will be tremendous.
If the march on Moscow by the Wagner group last year was an indication, it should be clear to Kremlin by now that an army of angry and disillusioned military-trained men is a clear danger to the regime.
Mike Horton:
Russia will collapse on the economic front before it collapses militarily in Ukraine.
Sure Putin has huge support, but the more oppressive the tyrant the faster the support will flip. Once it starts and it may well be this year, it will be measured in days if he is lucky.
Nancy Knight:
I was very interested to read your remarks about the guys arrested for the attack. I watched video of the shooters, and they looked pretty beefy to me, not very skinny like those arrested. The big loser here is Poo-in-a-tin. He’s got egg all over his face from ignoring America’s warning. We have a policy of sharing intelligence like this with other countries, even our adversaries, but of course someone who is a psychopath like Pooty-poot would never believe that.
Patrick Cox:
Interesting point, it was the failed militarism that gave Lenin the opening in 1917. Could Ukraine provide another such opening for some new ‘strong man’?
Robert Beyer:
At least the Russian situation does not seem as bad as what I encountered when I worked for USAID in Tbilisi in the early 2000s, where impoverished people stole the manhole covers to sell for scrap, leaving the hole exposed, which in my neighborhood someone tried to remedy by sticking a log down the hole to give drivers a warning, which was not very effective at night because of blackouts. The regular potholes were so bad that every month or so I had to take my car to a garage to have the wheels re-rounded.
As for Russia's having inherited Byzantium’s practice of centralized control of all government levels, USAID in both Ukraine and Georgia had special programs to develop local government autonomy and responsibility for services, going so far as to pay for garbage trucks for local municipalities to be able to provide sanitation services. The programs were quite popular in both countries with both the local governments and the populace, and resulted in increased citizen involvement in local issues and local elections.
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UKRAINIAN FORCES KEEP DESTROYING RUSSIAN TANKS
A new important achievement unlocked! 7,000+ Russian tanks have been destroyed since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
In 2024 alone, Ukrainian warriors destroyed more than 1,000 tanks. Every day, Ukraine makes the Russian invader weaker, but Ukraine still needs more weapons to defeat the aggressor.
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RUSSIANS EXIST IN THEIR OWN PARALLEL REALITY, WHERE RUSSIA IS THE BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.
The Russian world and the Western world are 2 different realities — the war in Ukraine is no longer just the war for the territory. It is the war of the worlds.
With Russia’s speedy regress towards sadistic dictatorship, these 2 worlds simply cannot co-exist anymore. Only 1 world can survive.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin is hellbent on making his reality the only reality.
For Russia to be the best country in the world, all other countries must either live worse — or they should cease to exist.
That’s why Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022 — he couldn’t allow that another country next door, where people can also speak and understand Russian, will be living better than Russia.
Putin spelled out his desire to destroy the Western world many times — and his propagandists go further, constantly threatening to drop nukes on Europe, Britain and the USA.
By April 2024, the majority of Russians are consumed by their hatred of the West — the amount of hateful anti-West propaganda from the shows of Solovyov and Skabeeva is so overpowering that people become hysterical in their drive to destroy Europe and America, even if this means they will also die. 
Text in the photo translated to English
This may seem like insanity — well, it is insanity.
A very dangerous insanity that has already cost hundreds of thousands of Russian lives — and most certainly, will cost Russia many more.
It might cost tens of thousands of lives to remove the criminal Putin’s regime — or it could be tens of millions of lives who will suffer the consequences of the distorted reality, where Russia is the best country in the world.
~ Elena Gold, Quora
Deeptanshu Singh:
Its just as well that they don't have kids, this will probably be the last generation of Russians to trouble the world before their own demographics screw them over.
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MISHA’S TAKE ON “WHY RUSSIA IS THE BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD”
The Head of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill (the bearded man in a floppy ear hat) awarded the Order of Dmitry Donskoy 1st degree to the head of the FSO federal guard service Dmitry Kochnev (the man that holds the umbrella) for protecting him.
There is so much to unpack in this brief summary!
To start with, why does the head of the church need physical protection when he’s the representative of God on earth? Kirill doesn’t put his faith in God to protect him?
Secondly, FSO is a federal security agency tasked with presidential protection. According to its constitution, the Russian Federation is a secular state. The church is separate from the state. Why does the head of the church have the state agency’s protection?
Thirdly, why on earth does the head of the church hand out medals instead of blessings? To add insult to injury, for achievements completely unrelated to spiritual merits but for professional secular duties.
And fourthly, only commander-in-chief and senior military personnel of the Russian Armed Forces are authorized to award military medals — and the Order of Dmitry Donskoy is a military medal awarded “to generals, war veterans, and other persons who showed courage in defending the Fatherland.”
So then who has authorized the head of the Russian Orthodox Church to award a military medal to the head of the federal guard service?
The answer is simple: Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev has a rank of a senior military officer.
He served to protect the Fatherland as a KGB officer in the past and continues to do so in his role of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s highly likely that he even has a rank of a general, but this information remains secret.
The medal was launched by his predecessor, Patriarch Patriarch Alexy II Ridiger of Moscow. Ridiger was a KGB officer stationed in Estonia, a Baltic republic, and as his name suggests was a Protestant who became a fake Orthodox Christian to serve the Fatherland in the capacity of a fake priest.
Shoigu and Mordichev: Another award ceremony, more interesting facts.
Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu presented the hero star to the the commander of the Central Group of Forces, General Andrei Mordvichev, who’s responsible for 17,000 KIAs and 30,000 WIAs according to Z milbloggers in order to capture Avdeevka, a suburb of the city of Donetsk, in Eastern Ukraine.
“This is the highest rank in our country and, of course, you deserve it,” Shoigu said.
Let’s unpack it. Why would a man responsible for killing and wounding enough of his own soldiers to populate a medium-sized town be a hero who deserves the highest merit?
No new towns have sprung up in the Russian Federation since its creation in 1991, but whole towns have been getting depopulated. Why award a man who’s helping to send the county into a downward spiral?
Russia cannot create new technologies and build a civilization on its own. Therefore, to preserve the state in all its glorious backwardness, soldiers must be vanquished on the battlefield in great numbers.
These are the sacrifices to the pagan gods to keep progress and cultural evolution at bay and far away from the borders protected by the FSB officers.
General Mordvichev has sacrificed a truly great number of Russians and so the gods must be celebrating, thumbs-upping and high-fiving him down from the Valhalla. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
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ANTI-MISSILE DEFENSE ACCORDING TO TRUMP
Trump has described
using an “iron dome” missile defense system as “ding, ding, ding, ding,
ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out.
Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/06/donald-trump-speech-analysis
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THE SELF-CLEANING HOUSE
After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time
~ Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek
The Right to Be Lazy and Other Writings ~ Paul Lafargue, translated by Alex Andriesse
~In 1980 Frances Gabe applied for a patent for a self-cleaning house. The design was based on her own home, which she had worked on for more than a decade. Each room had a sprinkler system installed; at the push of a button, Gabe could send sudsy water pouring over her specially treated furniture. Clean water would then wash the soap away, before draining from the gently sloped floors. Blasts of warm air would dry the room in less than an hour, and the used water flowed into the kennel, to give the Great Dane a bath.
The problem with most houses, Gabe thought, was that they were designed by men, who would never be tasked with cleaning them. The self-cleaning house, she hoped, would free women from the “nerve-twangling bore” of housework. Such hopes are widely shared: a 2019 survey found that self-cleaning homes were the most eagerly anticipated of all speculative technologies.
Cleaning, like cooking, childbearing, and breastfeeding, is a paradigm case of reproductive labor. Reproductive labor is a special form of work. It doesn’t itself produce commodities (coffee pots, silicon chips); rather, it’s the form of work that creates and maintains labor power itself, and hence makes the production of commodities possible in the first place.
Reproductive labor is low-prestige and (typically) either poorly paid or entirely unwaged. It’s also obstinately feminized: both within the social imaginary and in actual fact, most reproductive labor is done by women. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that political discussions of work often treat reproductive labor as an afterthought.
One place this elision shows up is in the “post-work” tradition. For the post-work tradition—whose influence on the Anglo-American left has been growing for the last decade—the aim of radical politics should not (just) be for higher wages, more secure employment, or more generous parental leave. Rather, radical politics should aim for a world in which work’s social role is utterly transformed and highly attenuated—a world in which work can no longer serve as either a disciplining institution or the fulcrum for our social identities.
Two new publications bookend the tradition. Paul Lafargue’s 1880 essay, “The Right to Be Lazy”—a touchstone for post-work theorists—was recently reprinted in a new translation by Alex Andriesse. (A Cuban-born revolutionary socialist, Lafargue married one of Karl Marx’s daughters, Laura, in 1868.) Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek offer a more contemporary contribution. In After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, they blend post-work conviction with feminist scruples. A post-work politics must, they argue, have something to say about reproductive labor. The post-work tradition grapples with the grandest themes in politics—the interplay between freedom and necessity. But within its lofty imaginaries, there must also be space for a dishcloth, and a changing table.
Automation has always been central to the post-work imaginary. In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891), Oscar Wilde envisages a world in which “the machine” is made to “work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing.” But Wilde gives little thought to the soul of woman under socialism. While the machine frees men from “that sordid necessity of living for others,” it does not lend a hand with the laundry, or feeding the baby. Even in the age of the machine, it seems, women are mopping up after others.
Maybe Wilde thought breastfeeding would be harder to automate than coalmining. But even if we could automate reproductive labor, it’s not clear that we should. It’s one thing to imagine robots taking over the factory, the warehouse, and the office. But, as Hester and Srnicek point out, it’s quite another to envisage them in charge of the hospital, the nursing home, or the kindergarten. A world where no one spends tedious hours on the assembly line is a world worth aspiring to. But a world where no one nurses their children or cooks food for their friends? That sounds like a nightmare.
Reproductive labor, then, resists automation. Can we still aspire to a world without work? One might argue that reproductive labor is not really work (because it is unwaged, or because it happens inside the home, or because it is bound up with love) and therefore lies beyond the scope of a post-work politics. Hester and Srnicek are (rightly) unconvinced. Reproductive labor is work—and work that we can’t offload to a machine. But, they argue, when properly understood, the post-work project can absorb the stubborn realities of reproductive labor; indeed, they write, it “has significant contributions to make to our understanding of how we might better organize the labor of reproduction.”
Critiques of capitalism tend to come in one of three flavors. Distributive critiques locate the badness of capitalism in its tendency toward an unjust distribution of goods. Others identify the wrong of exploitation as capitalism’s core moral flaw. Hester and Srnicek work within a third critical paradigm, whose key moral grammar is that of alienation. Under this rubric, the true badness of work under capitalism—traditional wage labor and unpaid reproductive labor alike—lies in its distortion of our practical natures.
When we fashion the world in accordance with our freely chosen ends, we realize ourselves within it. We exercise a key human capacity: the capacity to make ourselves objective. But under capitalism, we are not free to choose and pursue our own ends; we are forced into projects that we value only instrumentally. We mop floors, deliver packages, or babysit not because we think these activities have value in and of themselves, but because we need the money. We act on the world, yes, but we cannot properly express ourselves within it.
Hester and Srnicek don’t actually talk in terms of alienation; their critical registers are those of “temporal sovereignty” and “free time.” But these are novel placeholders, used to freshly mint an argument for which alienation has been the customary coin. “The struggle against work,” they say, “is the fight for free time.” And free time matters because, they argue, it is only when we have free time that we can engage in activities that are chosen for their own sake: activities in which we can “recognize ourselves in what we do.”
Hester and Srnicek, then, are not advocating indolence. For them, the problem with work is not that it is effortful. Humans are agents. We make and we do. Work, though, catches our making and doing in a trap: it is caged agency. Hester and Srnicek want us to open the cage.
Hester and Srnicek’s friendliness to effort marks one point of difference between their approach and Lafargue’s. For Lafargue, freedom is more closely tied to idleness. Hot stoves don’t feature in his post-work world. His vision of the good life centers on lazing about, smoking cigarettes, and feasting.
The differences don’t stop there. Hester and Srnicek offer a moral critique of capitalism, one that appeals to values. Despite Lafargue’s title, with its talk of a “right,” his main focus is political economy. He is best read as offering a “crisis theory” of capitalism: a form of critique that appeals not to moral damage but rather to capitalism’s structural instability. Capitalism, says the crisis theorist, is a flawed economic system not because it is (say) cruel, but because it is a self-undermining system. It destroys its own capacity to function.
The roots of crisis, for Lafargue, lie in the inevitable mismatch between the productive capacities of a capitalist society and that society’s capacity to consume what is produced. Capitalism, he thinks, requires that workers play two roles: they need to make things, but they also need to buy them. Eventually, these two roles will come into conflict. Suppose that a commodity is overproduced, so that its supply outstrips demand. Its price will fall. To compensate, factory owners will cut costs or slow production. And that means they will pay their workers less or lay them off. Consumer demand will then further contract, incentivizing further wage cuts, which will further suppress demand. Worker and capitalist will both be trapped in an ever-tightening fist of economic dysfunction.
Lafargue’s innovation was not to link overproduction with crisis—hardly an original suggestion—but rather lay in his proposed solution. Where twentieth-century Keynesian reformists proposed to coordinate production and consumption by stimulating demand, Lafargue pushes in the opposite direction. We should coordinate by suppressing production; workers should simply work less. Thus, Lafargue posits not so much a right to be lazy as a duty. Those who shirk it are to blame for overproduction. “The proletarians,” he writes, “have given themselves over body and soul to the vices of work [and so] they precipitate the whole of society into those industrial crises of overproduction that convulse the social organism.” (This haughty tone is of a piece with the rest of the essay, which is consistently disdainful.)
This argument makes for an unusual brand of crisis theory. Most crisis theorists trace overproduction to structural features of the capitalist economy. This underpins their contention that overproduction is not just bad luck but a sine qua non of capitalism. “It is in the nature of capital,” Marx wrote in Theories of Surplus Value (1863), to “drive production to the limit set by the productive forces . . . without any consideration for the actual limits of the market.” Insofar as overproduction is sufficient for crisis, then, it will also be “in the nature of capital” to undermine its own productive capacity. For Lafargue, by contrast, overproduction is not a structural necessity but a function of working-class myopia.
Lafargue doesn’t worry that suppressing production will lead to scarcity. If the proletariat do manage to withhold their labor, he thinks, then laziness will become not a duty but a default. If workers work less, industrial equipment will be developed more quickly to compensate; and this trend will eventually result in a post-scarcity, post-work idyll.
And Lafargue is at best impressionistic as to what life in such a world might be like. The niceties of (say) institutional design are quite beyond his ken. This marks a third point of contrast between Lafargue’s essay and After Work. Lafargue is primarily focused on the pathologies of industrial capitalism and on how they might be overcome. After Work, by contrast, is more interested in providing a blueprint than a roadmap—less concerned with how we might arrive in a post-work world, that is, than with how to organize things once we get there.
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After Work begins with a puzzle. Post-work theorists propose “free time for all!” But what if the parents’ free time can only be purchased at the cost of their baby going hungry or unwashed? How can free time for all be secured alongside care for all?
In their attempt to realize both, Hester and Srnicek make three key moves. First, they argue that a lot of reproductive labor is unnecessary. They give the example of ironing. If style norms became more crumple-tolerant, ironing one’s shirts could become an optional eccentricity rather than a burdensome chore. And if caring for someone doesn’t mean doing their ironing, care and free time become more compatible as goals.
Of course, some reproductive labor is nonnegotiable; Hester and Srnicek know this. So they make a second move. Reproductive labor’s resistance to automation, they contend, has been overstated by the squeamish (and the privileged). Waged care workers often “point to elements of their jobs that could usefully be automated,” giving them more time to focus on the bits of their job that require a genuine human connection. Hester and Srnicek cite surveys showing that pensioners are significantly more open to the use of robots in elder care than other groups are. This is perhaps not surprising when we remember—Hester and Srnicek are careful to remind us—that we should not sentimentalize caring relationships. Many older adults are abused by their caregivers.
Hester and Srnicek are not crude techno-optimists. They realize that tech can be labor-extractive as well as labor-saving. Despite the “industrial revolution in the home” in the first half of the twentieth century, full-time housewives spent more hours per week on housework in 1960s (fifty-five) than they did in 1924 (fifty-two). Social expectations tend to ratchet up alongside technological proficiency. If it now takes half the time it used to take to hoover—well, you’ll just be expected to hoover twice as much. Hester and Srnicek give a deadpan account of a 1940s advertisement for a washing machine: “once the clothes are in the washing machine,” says the delighted customer, “I’m free [sic] . . . to do other housework.” Automated reproductive labor, then, doesn’t guarantee more free time; we must also lower our collective standards. (That’s good news for slobs like me: crumpled clothes, hairy legs, and messy houses can be figured as a kind of a kind of lo-fi political resistance.)
Nonetheless, Hester and Srnicek do still have a somewhat coarse view of the relationship between technology and freedom. For Hester and Srnicek, technology expands the realm of freedom. It does this by adding new options. Without a dishwasher, I have no choice but to do the dishes. But once I have a dishwasher—here they quote Martin Hägglund—“doing dishes by hand is not a necessity but a choice.”
The example is not as compelling as it might seem. I once could have traveled by horse and carriage from Oxford to London, but thanks to the internal combustion engine, the public infrastructure required for such a trip to be feasible no longer exists. The United States’ car-focused public infrastructure prevents its citizens from doing simple things, like walking to work. When it comes to social arrangements, technology both adds options and takes them away. It destroys some forms of compulsion while creating its own mandates. It need not roll back the sphere of necessity.
Hester and Srnicek might more be sanguine than most about automating some reproductive labor. But they are not sanguine about automating all of it. This technological remainder motivates a third move: efficiency. The basic social infrastructure of the Global North funnels reproductive labor into the sealed-off space of the household, which is tied to biogenetic kinship and “nuclear” living arrangements. This enclosure prevents specialization and (temporal) economies of scale: when everyone has their own kitchen, everyone has their own kitchen to clean.
But such an arrangement is not inevitable; the atomic household needn’t function as the default locus for care work. We might instead rely, as the United Kingdom did during World War II, on public canteens—decorated with art from Buckingham Palace—that cooked nutritious meals prepared at scale. (These “British Restaurants,” Hester and Srnicek point out, were initially called “communal feeding centres,” but the name was vetoed by Winston Churchill for “sounding too communist.”)
It’s helpful to situate this suggestion in terms of three social dynamics posited by Nancy Fraser. First, there is the struggle for social protection: demands for material security. Second, there is marketization: the tendency for more aspects of social life to be commodified. Third, there is the struggle for emancipation: demands that social hierarchies like those of race and gender be dismantled. Fraser notes that each of these forces is politically ambivalent. The family and the welfare state are iron fists as well as velvet gloves: they can offer protection, but they also discipline those who break its rules. Marketization breeds vulnerability, but it can also offer a route to freedom. You might, like me, prefer for your material security to depend on your earning power than on your ability to keep your husband happy. And emancipation struggles may weaken social bonds—and thus a basis of social protection—in the course of dismantling hierarchy.
In terms of this typology, After Work attempts to show that demands for social protection—specifically in the form of care—can be met without compromising on emancipation. Existing models of care provision tend heavily towards privatization: your care is either a business (traded on the open market), or nobody’s business but yours (a family affair). After Work suggests a third option: care should be communal. Households should be more porous—for example, they should share communal goods and spaces—and they should no longer be the centers of gravity around which informal relations of care revolve. As a result, the burden of care is lifted from the household, but not offloaded onto the market. What’s not to like?
Yet real life is messier than this solution allows. Communal spaces can be lovely; they can also be deeply unpleasant. I don’t like cleaning my kitchen, but I also like not having to share it. When I read After Work, I was visiting my brother in Edinburgh, and we sat talking about it on the bus. He was enthusiastic about the idea that more of our lives should take place in shared spaces. Then a baby started to scream, and we couldn’t talk for the rest of the journey. “I guess this is why people like cars,” my brother said, darkly.
It could well be that other people’s screaming children are a price worth paying for a functional care infrastructure. But there’s no getting around the fact that there are costs to making our lives more communal. No transition to a post-work world is (democratically) possible unless people can be persuaded that the form of life on offer in the communal feeding center is a form of life that they would want.
Such persuasion might well be possible, but it’s not a task that Hester and Srnicek really attempt. They do acknowledge that “not everybody would feel comfortable living in fully collectivized living spaces for any great length of time, and many will want more than a single bedroom to retreat to.” And collective living, they are clear, “cannot be imposed from the top down.” Hester and Srnicek argue that, if we want free time, we will need to live more communally. But what they take as an argument for more collective living, someone else might read as an argument against shrinking reproductive labor to a minimum. After Work maps the territory for political battle but doesn’t begin to fight it.
The book’s vision doesn’t end here. Hester and Srnicek realize that while we might be able to shrink the amount of reproductive labor that needs to get done, we can’t shrink it to zero. So alongside their main approach—lessening the burden—they offer two other strategies.
The first is to incorporate care work into their picture of flourishing: what it means to live a good life. In a truly just society, this strategy says, caring labor will no longer be alienating, because we will value service to others—either for its own sake, or as part of an authentically valued project. In the lesbian separatist communities of second wave feminism—the landdyke commune, the Oregon-based “WomanShare”—participants dug ditches, converted livestock outbuildings into homes, and went in for low-tech farming. Under different conditions, such work could easily be alienating. But when folded into a larger political project to which the women freely subscribed, even their drudgery became meaningful—an expression of agency, rather than a straitening of it.
Wilde thought a post-work utopia would mean a world in which we are relieved of the “sordid” requirement to care for others and would be free to “realize” our own personalities. But Wilde got things back to front, say Hester and Srnicek. Caring for others is not a squalid compromise with scarcity; rather, we can realize our personalities by caring for others.
The analytic Marxist G. A. Cohen illustrated the logic of such arguments by analogy. Say we want a world where there’s a plentiful supply of blood for transfusions, but also where no one is coerced into giving blood. It might seem that there is a tension between these two goals. But there isn’t, Cohen says: if we create a culture in which people want to give blood, then we can have both blood and freedom. Similarly, After Work suggests, a just society will shape the souls of its citizens, so that they want to serve. One might wonder whether soul-making is really an alternative to coercion, rather than a particularly subtle form of it. But in Hester and Srnicek’s hands, at least, it is not sinister social programing so much as the insight that necessary labor could be structured on “more agential terms,” thus making it a more attractive pastime.
Besides, Hester and Srnicek are clear-eyed about the limits of any such transformation. They don’t think that cleaning the toilet can be turned into a treat; they allow that some necessary labor will remain burdensome even in a post-work utopia. Its existence is compatible with freedom, they say, so long as we ought to divide that labor “equitably.” Their picture, then, is one on which some reproductive labor may cease to be alienating because our attitudes toward it will be transformed. But there will still be some care work that no one chooses for its own sake. This brings us to their last strategy: the remaining work, they say, should be distributed equitably, divided “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”
That’s a nice enough slogan, but in After Work it never becomes a serious proposal. Suppose you work faster than I do. Do you have to work the same number of hours that I work, and therefore perform more tasks? Or do you have to complete the same number of tasks as I do, in which case I will have to work more hours?
Beyond this lack of detail, there is a more serious problem. Even in a perfectly just society, there will be people who just don’t want to do any care work at all: they will prefer to freeride rather than do their fair share, whatever that turns out to be. Once we attend to would-be freeriders, it is not clear that a post-work society could really be a society of freedom, at least as Hester and Srnicek themselves understand it. As they put it, freedom entails that “the means of one’s existence will never be at stake in any of one’s relationships.” But a society that relies on everyone doing their fair share of care work presumably couldn’t get by without the resources to penalize those who opt out. And if a society has the means to impose such penalties, it will be a society in which the means of one’s existence can be a stake in one’s relationships. If we really want an equitable division of care work, some people will need to be coerced into doing it.
Hester and Srnicek might concede that perfect freedom is not compatible with care for all, but at least we would be much freer in a post-work society than we are now. (Perhaps more political theorists should be Winnicottians—concerned with developing the “good-enough” society.) So long as we have sufficient time to choose and pursue our own projects, it should not matter too much that there will still be allotments of necessity: parcels of time that are not truly our own. And, perhaps, these refractory parcels could even be packaged as a feature, rather than a bug.
For Hester and Srnicek, freedom and necessity are like land and sea—one a hospitable dwelling-place, the other a hostile territory. They think that with some ingenuity we can wall ourselves off from the water. For my part, I see human life as lived in a sort of tidal zone—an in-between place, with its own alluvial treasures. Necessity can serve as a spur to moral learning, wresting us from or filling out a cramped set of values. We often discover the projects that give shape and meaning to our lives only because we stumble into them, forced into roundabout routes by a fractal floodplain. We want to author our own lives, yes. But the value of some activities is opaque until we try them: it can’t be grasped in advance.
The actor Sally Phillips, who has a son with Down’s syndrome, puts the point perfectly. “I have such a rich life,” she says. “They say the special needs club is one that nobody wants to join, but once you do, you realize you’re in it with the best people in the world.” If an expansion of the realm of freedom is an expansion of the realm of choice, then perfect freedom might, in effect, exile us from certain forms of goodness. A life composed only of self-realization will tend to create a self of the sort that doesn’t deserve to be realized. Unwanted work can serve as a teacher, shushing the would-be brat that lurks in every human heart. Communal life presupposes a deep structure of Bildung, through which we become fitted as companions for others.
When we reflect on the two-facedness of necessity—on the ways it serves us, as well as on the ways it does us damage—we come up against the limits of After Work’s politics. Hester and Srnicek’s preferred rubrics—free time, self-realization—can’t distinguish between just and unjust forms of compulsion.
When a sulky teenager is made to set the table by her parents, her labor is alienated; she would rather be doing something else. Her activity is unchosen and imposed; she refuses to avow the purposes it serves. But to know whether the teenager is wronged, it is not enough to know how she feels about setting the table. Rather, we need to ask questions like: Does the teenager’s work benefit a community that is oriented toward her flourishing? Does the community weigh her claims and interests equally to those of its other members? Does she have a meaningful say over its policies, priorities, and direction? Or does it serve a community who dominates her, who sweeps her along while blocking their ears to her claims and interests?
The answers make a difference to the character of the compulsion (as more sophisticated theorists of alienation acknowledge). Someone whose work serves a democratic community—a community for which they serve as a trustee, rather than merely as a mute resource—is not wronged, regardless of whether her work is dull or stimulating, cherished or resented.
Conversely, feeling happy about one’s work is no antidote to victimization. Someone who cares for her baby because she loves him can still be an exploited worker. Her love, although it benefits the baby, also benefits Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, by creating a future worker and consumer, from whom they can harvest data, and profit. (This is the trick of capitalism: it takes our freedom and turns it against our deepest interests.)
Because Hester and Srnicek take choice as the measure of emancipation, they end up saying relatively little about the broader social relations in which labor should be embedded. Yet social relations are the real springs and cogs of justice. What really matters, when it comes to work, is not whether we can realize ourselves through it or whether we identify with its purposes. It’s the social relations that wrench us into motion. Without a way to talk about these forces, we will go on misdiagnosing the real pathologies of our contemporary work regime. ~
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/can-we-imagine-a-world-without-work/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSHT-HKkk8Q
Mary:
The "reproductive labor" that is housework...the dusting, mopping, cleaning, cooking, washing,.. is not only a thankless bore, it has a kind of grinding futility. Nothing is ever "done." Everything has to be repeated again and again, with the same always temporary results. You go through the same tasks same motions, over and over, unchanging and unending. It's as punishing as Sisyphus and his eternal rock, never getting anywhere, never able to stop.
I think of my mom chained to the stove and the washing machine...three meals a day, cook and serve and clean up and put away the dishes then repeat in a few hours. Washing clothes in her tubs and wringer washer for 10 people...she didn't have an automatic until we were all mostly grown and gone, largely because dad believed only the old wringer truly got the clothes clean. (He had his own thoughts on housework, involving not only plenty of rags to use, those rags must be washed, and FOLDED neatly, ready to be used again.)Mom washed clothes daily. And ironed them...no permanent press or polyester in those days.
We learned by helping, or rather, the girls learned, the boys were exempt. But the onus of the work fell to my mother. Watching it all I was determined to never end up in her place, with all that unproductive reproductive labor and so very little time for all the good things in life — like books and art and music, science and study and the simple pleasures of relaxation. Of course that didn't work out as I hoped. A married, even childless woman, still becomes the main house keeper, cook, etc. Men never learned any of that, and it wasn't, as with my brothers, expected of them. To re-train a grown man to share these jobs is a major enterprise, a challenge fraught with tension, and something requiring energy you might not have, especially if you also work outside the house.
We have reached an equilibrium in responsibility for this reproductive labor through sharing it...but were only able to do that after both of us were retired . The self cleaning house doesn't sound very cosy, and I value my privacy more than would be possible in communal living — so — right now we muddle through and try to share the grind as much as we can.
It is interesting to note that as more labor saving technology becomes available, the standards of cleaning simply rise so at least as much time must be devoted to it, or even more than for earlier generations. As noted, you must hoover twice as much and end up working longer than grandma did rather than less. I won't even speak of the whole Martha Stewart business of elaborating housework into some kind of overpowering ritual of perfection. Martha LOVES ironing...so, obviously, she's simply mad.
Boredom is something no one wants to live with...though I confess I have never felt bored, even when doing the humdrum tasks so hard to avoid. My mind was always busy .
Oriana:
I too went through the shock of how much time housework takes and how exhausting it can be. And I'm still elated whenever I find a way to make some unpleasant chore easier. Part of it is that, like you, I value my privacy more than "making everything shine." When guests are due to come, one easy trick is to take a large garbage bag and toss all manner of clutter into it, and then put it out of sight. And, surprise! cleaning the toilet every day is easier and faster than the big and nasty chore of doing it less frequently.
And some chores simply have to go. I don't expect to use an iron ever again in my life. Nor do I expect to do any baking — just too messy. I specialize in one-pan dishes — two pans for special occasions.
So yes, I've discovered a few tricks, but . . . taking care of a household, shopping for groceries, cooking, laundry — all this takes time and energy, and yet I too can't imagine hiring someone to do it. As for "communal living," the very thought makes me suicidal (no, not just a figure of speech). I love living alone, but there is certainly a price. But that's life. It's still fabulous having a washer and drier, and an electric cook top that's smooth and very easy to wipe clean with a moist paper towel. No rags in my house. I regard paper towels, Kleenex, and paper plates to be the greatest inventions, up there with the wheel.
But ultimately, certain chores just have to be done, and there is little point lamenting this.
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“If you have illegal aliens invading your home, we will deport you” ~ D. Trump, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/06/donald-trump-speech-analysis
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ANOTHER LOOK AT WILLIAM JAMES
James, the ‘father of American psychology’, was born in 1842, more than a decade before Freud, and three decades before Jung. James’s unique approach to complex, strange experiences emerged while studying in Europe, where he learned to combine German laboratory techniques with the philosophy of British empiricism. He was trained as a physician, wrote the foundational textbook of psychology, and helped to establish the philosophical school of pragmatism. He also came from one of the most influential literary families in the country – his brother was the novelist Henry James and his sister the influential feminist diarist Alice James. When he died of heart failure, in 1910, the philosopher Bertrand Russell considered James to be the most famous academic in the world. But today, his name is less well recognized than Freud’s or Jung’s.
James, however, had a view that was more nuanced and multifaceted than either of those other thinkers. In his most well-known book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), based on his Gifford Lectures, James includes accounts of dozens of experiences. He describes them in many ways throughout the book, using phrases such as ‘forms of consciousness’, ‘religious experience’ or ‘mystical experiences’.
He took an agnostic view on their providence, setting philosophical and theological questions aside to instead focus on what people report about these experiences and whether they impact their lives, for good or for ill. James discusses spontaneous experiences, those triggered by contemplative practices, as well as those triggered by psychoactive substances such as nitrous oxide.
He includes experiences that were accompanied by joy, but also despair. He includes experiences that resulted in lasting positive transformations while also discussing the reality that such experiences can result in or be associated with psychopathology and suffering. This acknowledgment contrasts with Freud’s reflexive pathologizing and Jung’s sometimes overeager enthusiasm. Additionally, in contrast with Freud’s certainty that these experiences are mere delusions and Jung’s certainty that they are revelations, James admits that the scientific study of these experiences cannot tell us whether they reveal a supernatural reality or not: ‘In all sad sincerity, I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless.’ And lastly, James offers no prescription to seek or avoid such experiences –- a descriptive approach I find refreshing.
But what’s the point, you might wonder, of just describing these strange personal experiences? The value of James’s approach comes when we realize how rarely people discuss these experiences after they have had them. Even today, there remains a taboo around seriously discussing spiritual experiences. James may have played a crucial role in beginning to normalize these intense and often deeply meaningful moments of inner mental life. I know he did for me. The value of his position is also simply to allow a more even-handed approach to a highly complex set of personal experiences.
It is unfortunate that James is now the least well known of these three psychologists. Today, as psychedelic experiences enter mainstream discussions – experiences that are sometimes very similar to those described by James – his approach to psychology is needed more than ever. Can we learn to value a descriptive approach, driven by curiosity, without a corresponding call to action or a knee-jerk impulse to make a judgment about the use-value of something? This doesn’t mean we should ignore useful applications: James wanted to put good ideas to work, even if that included using potentially beneficial psychoactive substances, but not at the expense of understanding or without acknowledging risks. Each new experience, each new piece of research, does not need to immediately become a new way of optimizing ourselves in the form of a quick fix.
So, what might Freud, Jung and James say about this new era of psychedelic experiences? During Freud’s lifetime, he had nothing to say about psychedelics – he was likely so chastened by his embarrassing exuberance for ‘medicinal’ cocaine early in his career that he steered clear of revolutionary claims about psychopharmacology. Jung, on the other hand, joined a long line of often religious reactionaries who saw no value in experiences triggered by psychoactive substances. And James? He was instead fascinated by the seeming similarity between experiences triggered by psychoactive substances and those arising from other triggers (or even occurring spontaneously) and he encouraged further research on all of these, regardless of the cause.
In 1902, James ended the last of his Gifford lectures at Edinburgh with a call for more descriptive scientific research on these and other experiences. Today, at a time when psychedelic experiences are being rabidly promoted as powerful panacea (or denounced as extremely dangerous), we could do with a dose of James’s open-mindedness and his impulse to carefully gather evidence. A new wave of psychedelic research offers new opportunities to follow the problem that James described a century ago: ‘How to regard them is the question, for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness.’ Rather than Freudian cynicism or Jungian enthusiasm, perhaps what we require today is Jamesian curiosity.
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WHY WESTERNERS DON’T CONVERT TO ISLAM
Your religion is overwhelmingly determined by where you were born. Why would Westerners be different than people everywhere else in the world?
In the 21st century, the Islamic civilization is in a very poor condition. The dominant global culture is the West: it is the West that holds a vastly superior share of global military and economic power. The USA can project force anywhere around the world, using its blue-water navy, its fleet of 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, its network of military bases around the world, and its nuclear weapons. People are excited to watch American movies and TV shows, wear American clothes, follow American fashions, and listen to American pop music. Developing countries aspire to have the same wealth and standard of living as the West. No one looks up to the Islamic world as an inspiration for anything.
The weight of history is behind all of this. The Islamic world lost the global contest for cultural dominance, whereas the West won decisively, in the period 1750 to the present. By 1918, Europe and its offshoots in the Americas had conquered the entire world. We are still living today in the world heavily shaped by this reality.
The West may not directly control colonies anymore as they did in the past, but do not let this fool you. The world banking and financial system is controled by the USA
and by Western companies. If any Arab country, or any country anywhere else, steps out of line, they’re immediately invaded, bombed or placed under crippling sanctions (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Somalia, the list goes on and on…). The West decides who can rule in Muslim countries; the winners are typically Western puppets like Sisi in Egypt or the House of Saud in Arabia, while the losers typically end up executed, as Saddam Hussein or Colonel Gaddafi.
American aircraft carrier
The US has 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers. It also has a vast fleet of ships, an immense arsenal of ballistic missiles, nuclear warheads, the most powerful air force in the world, and a military capable of deployment anywhere in the world, armed with the most sophisticated weapons and technologies ever developed. How many nuclear powered aircraft carriers does the Muslim world have?
These are some of the more obvious reasons why people aren’t joining Islam. But there are other reasons, too.
Divisions between Muslims
What even is Islam? There are such divisions in the Muslim world between different sects, factions, groups, governments, denominations, interpretations, that the internet is full of endless arguments over what is, and what is not, Islam. This does not help Muslims.
Something that is often missed in Islamophobic discussions about Islam and Muslims: there is no single ‘Islam’, instead there are so many different versions.
The modern world doesn’t favor religion
The problem for many people in today’s modern, technological society is that many people find it increasingly hard to believe in the literal truth of man-made religions. Religion in developed countries is on the decline. In an increasingly urbanized, fast-paced lifestyle, there is less and less room for religion in daily life. People are watching videos on Instagram and TikTok instead of attending prayers.
Modern medicine has increased life expectancy and reduced mortality from diseases. Most people in the world now have enough food to eat.
For many people, life is about going to work to pay the bills. When you’re stuck in traffic on the motorway, or sitting in a modern office block using IT, or on the subway train, or ordering something online, we are so far removed from the world of our ancestors that the connection with religion seems remote and strange. The rise of universal education and the internet also undermines the ability of many people to accept religion at face value. In the past, religion was often unquestioned. That is increasingly no longer the case today.
My point isn’t to criticize Islam and Muslims, rather it’s to point out that there are powerful reasons in the world today why people aren’t joining Islam. If anything, my take is offered with sympathy. Those who know me, know that I’ve heavily criticized the disastrous Western ‘interventions’ in the Muslim world over the past 100 years.
If anyone hopes to see a better future for the world’s Islamic cultures, we must first ask why society in so many of these countries is currently in such a damaged state, and how that can best be fixed. Personally, I believe pragmatism is the only way forward; it has been proved time and again that ideology is a road to nowhere.
Some people look to China as an example for how a world civilization can pick itself up after a long period of decline, defeat and humiliation, and turn things around. Through economic development comes global status, military power, and the ability to shape destiny. I have reservations about China’s politics, but I do also see that China’s rise offers lessons that may be relevant.
China has advanced a long way in recent decades. The country’s rise is proof that sound economics is the root of strength.
I don’t see global Islamic civilization becoming the dominant world culture anytime soon. But I do believe that there is a path forward towards greater economic development. And through this, increased relevance and standing in the world. In my opinion, countries and societies in the Muslim ummah should focus on this for the foreseeable future. Because it offers the best chance of preserving their heritage, and ultimately continuing to survive and possibly even thrive in the world of the future. ~ Bryden Walsh, Quora
Peter Williams:
Just a minor addition. People are, I think, generally more educated in the West. The decline in religion is, as suggested, so often a consequence of education. In the West, Christianity is not part of the law in quite the same way as in the Muslim world I would suggest. [Christian teachings may vary significantly from the laws of land in the West]
However religion so often has been used as a controlling aspect of life as part of society. Go back 100+ years ago in the UK and the Church was a massive building in the center of the community often built with funding from the local mill owner (or similar) and if you were not in church on Sunday then you’d be out of work on Monday. Hence the churches were well attended.
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WHY SOME PEOPLE DO CONVERT TO ISLAM
There are a few reasons.
They want a religion which appears to give strong direction. Islam certainly has an uncompromising image in an age when Christian churches appear to be watering down their convictions.
They associate belief with foreign and alien customs, giving them the allure of the unknown.
Friends help them convert, especially in schools located within multicultural areas.
Prisoners convert out of fear from Islamic prison gangs. This is increasingly a problem in UK prisons.
They enter into an Islamic marriage. I’ve known a few people like this.
The spiritual deadness of atheism leads them towards experimenting with Islam or other non-Christian religions.
They get so knee deep into the Palestine movement that they convert for anti-colonial or anti-Western reasons.
They follow Andrew Tate and presume Islam is a macho religion.
I have read the Qur’an. Its central doctrine is Tawhid which means the ‘oneness of Allah.’ This is an active denial and misrepresentation of the Trinity. It is also a flat out denial of the Old Testament and New Testament.
The Qur’an also states that Jesus was not crucified, but believes that God put an innocent man who looked like Jesus on the cross instead, tricking everyone present including his own mother.
[Nevertheless] Christianity is gaining converts across the Islamic world. ~ Jack, Quora
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WHAT IT’S LIKE TO QUIT ISLAM
On Quora and other social media platforms, you can read the words of ex-Muslims. Typical comments:
“I lost my faith years ago. I realized I could never tell my family. They’d throw me out or make my life miserable. So I keep going through the motions even though my whole life is a lie.”
“I’m a university student. I told my best friend that I think I’m an atheist. I begged him not to tell anyone. The next thing I knew, he had told everyone at school and now I’m being harassed every day. So I told everyone I was just joking. But some of them don’t believe me. I’m scared and don’t know how to get out of this.”
Muslim society is insane. My son (American, has a Muslim dad) told me that at barbecues and get-togethers, every single Muslim relative has approached him and demanded, “You believe in Islam, right? You agree it is the right religion? You know Mohammed was the best man ever?”
Every Muslim is taught to police the relatives for signs of disloyalty to the Great Hive Mind.. Disloyalty causes outrage and is punished. ~ Angeli Adeen, Quora
Jane Urresti:
When I lived in Saudi Arabia, I had to travel all over the country frequently for work. I traveled with a male Jordanian Muslim colleague. Upon returning from a trip once, I was surprised when 5 of his closest friends, who were all supposedly very moderate Muslims, asked me if I saw him do his prayers while we were on our trips together.
I was taken aback by the question. They went on to tell me that they suspected that he might not, and they wanted to find out. Knowing the punishment for apostasy in Saudi Arabia, I was very wary about answering. The truth was, I hadn’t seen him pray at all while we were away together. But as a western atheist, I didn’t really care what he did. He loved to ask me questions about Christianity, and even about atheism, so I think he was curious about something other than Islam.
To protect him, I lied to his friends and assured them that I always saw him do all his prayers while we were traveling. They seemed satisfied with that, but it struck me as strange as to why would they even care?
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ADAM AND EVE JOKE
An American, an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Russian are viewing a painting of Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden.
The American said, “Look at their determination, all alone yet preparing to go out and build a new world with their own two hands. They’re American for sure.”
The Englishman shook his head. “No, look at their poise, their confidence, their stiff upper lip. Definitely British.”
The Frenchman sniffed. “They are beautiful, they are in love, they are naked. They are certainly French.”
“Nyet!” the Russian growled. “They are naked, have no shelter and only apples to eat, yet they are told they live in Paradise. They are Russian!” ~ Donald Cheek, Quora
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WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE AN ATHEIST CHAPLAIN
Sean Illing: You did your residency as a chaplain at Bellevue Hospital in New York City during the pandemic. What was that like?
Devin Moss: It was intense and full of people in acute moments of crisis, at that hospital in particular. But I cannot imagine a better place to learn what it means to be spiritual. Because I came into this incredibly insecure about spirituality in general and what kind of spiritual care I can provide to people when I’m a non-theist. How can I do this without God? It was scary as hell and it was profound as hell at the same time.
Sean Illing: Were you a different person coming out of that?
Devin Moss: Absolutely. And even on a daily basis, my shift hours were from 2 to 8 or 9, and around 1 I’d be like, Ugh, I can’t believe I got to go back and do this today, but when I’d leave at night, I’d be like, Wow, I could never have imagined that would happen today, I learned so much! I felt like a different person leaving at night than when I got there in the morning and that was a repetitive cycle over and over again.
Sean Illing: We’re talking because I happened upon this article about your experience on death row. I guess I’m curious how you found yourself there in the first place. How does a humanist chaplain from Brooklyn end up on death row in Oklahoma?
Devin Moss: Soon after I finished my residency at Bellevue, the American Humanist Association sent me an email saying that there are some attorneys that represent this man on death row named Phillip Hancock in Oklahoma, and he’s looking for a non-theist chaplain and they wanted to know if I was interested. I said I was absolutely interested. And on reflection, to be candid, I felt called to do that from a spiritual care perspective, but I also was very much intrigued by the story.
So I wrote Phil a letter, introduced myself, left my phone number in it and said, If you find that I am the right person to represent you or be by your side in such a important time, I would love to do so, and then we talked and hit it off and started a journey of almost a year.
Sean Illing: Did you have strong feelings about the death penalty before you went to Oklahoma? Did the experience change your views one way or the other?
Devin Moss: I did not have strong opinions. I’d describe my views going in this way: If there was a chance for anybody innocent to be executed, then I’m not for it.
And yet, knowing that there are monsters among us, I still had this hypothetical scenario in my head, and it’s the one that everybody who’s pro-capital punishment will use: If it was your daughter (and it’s always the daughter, no one says if it were your son), and she was murdered and raped, that should be the litmus test of how we think of capital punishment. That’s the argument that the state legislators in Oklahoma use and I don’t know where I got it, but that was also in my head prior to working with Phil. And in the case of such a heinous violent crime, then yeah, I would be okay with capital punishment. That’s how I came into it.
Those are real feelings. If a parent had to go through that horrible, horrible scenario, they have every right to feel that. And I’m not advocating that anybody can’t feel those very strong and real emotions but what I didn’t realize until I was actually in the soup is that there are a lot of externalities. The ripples of who it affects, they’re significant.
The legislators make the laws, the judicial branch of the state does the sentencing, but guess who does the executions? None of them are doing the executions, none of the family of the victims are doing the executions, it is everyday people. It’s people like me, it is the corrections officers in the small towns where this is more than likely the only employment opportunity they have and we are the ones that are doing this.
I spoke with a man named Adam Luck, who was the former chair of the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board before the execution, and he said, Everybody that has a hand in doing the execution itself, part of them dies in some way. Although that sounds like a dramatic statement, it’s absolutely 100 percent true. The warden isn’t for it, the corrections officers aren’t for it, and so with all of the externalities and all the pain, it creates a karmic ripple that is multigenerational.
Sean Illing: The last words Phillip heard were yours — what did you say?
Devin Moss: The whole thing was surreal. The whole day was surreal. Even that morning, the morning of the execution, the governor still hadn’t made a decision whether to grant clemency. The execution was scheduled for 10 am, so it was postponed an hour and a half and Phil is strapped to the gurney for an extra hour-plus, which is horrible to think about. And the night before, they messed up his last meal, I can’t even express to this day how angry that makes me and I can imagine what it does to the spirit of someone that just cannot get any demonstration of humanity on any level.
Normally, the spiritual care adviser generally gets 30 to 45 minutes with the person that’s going to be executed, but because the governor had delayed, the press corps had already made it through security, and I was just trying to maintain my poise and not get frazzled. And we went through this maze where the head chaplain then left me in this sally port and the corrections officers escorted me up to the front door of the execution chamber.
It was there that the masked corrections officer who would be in the room with us greeted me because the corrections officers that are in the room need to be anonymous. And then I could see in his face that he was nervous and that he was scared and that he was also affected by this moment. It was in that moment that I realized that part of my role is just to bring as much calmness and peace into that space as I possibly could.
Earlier that morning, I had written an invocation, a prayer of sorts, that I knew needed to be said and I did it immediately because I wanted to claim that space for Phil so that we could make it sacred and not let any time go by without making sure that he felt that this was his time.
Sean Illing: Do you remember the prayer that you wrote?
Devin Moss: When I originally wrote it, I wrote something about “I call into the space the spirit of the divine” and then I crossed that out and instead I just wrote “I call into the space the spirit of our humanity” because it was very clear to me that this was a human problem and not a theological issue. And I had the answer to the Philippians riddle, Show me something real, tell me something true. I seeded that within the prayer, I wanted him to know that he was loved and that I was a conduit to that love and that he was not alone. And then I also invoked the spirit of grace, of strength, of surrender, and, interestingly, I ended it with an amen just because it felt right.
I also understood too that there were other people in that room, besides Phil and me, that I think needed to hear these words and so I claimed that space for him. And then I followed it up with telling him how our relationship affected me and what it meant to me and that he is a loved human. He died well, with grace. I made sure that he knew that he was loved and he was not alone. And so, in this weird moment of an execution, which is weird to say, there was peace.
Sean Illing: Part of what interests me about your story is this question about whether we need religion, or something like religion. The fact that you felt called to do this work speaks to this. Do you feel like there’s a God-shaped hole in the modern world that needs to be filled by something even if that’s something isn’t supernaturalism or religion in a conventional sense?
Devin Moss: I do believe that. I do believe that there is a God-shaped hole in all of us and I do not feel that it needs to be filled with dogma. The question that I get asked a lot in this regard is, “How do you prepare someone who’s dying, who doesn’t believe that there’s something next?” The answer is in the reframing of the question.
If there is something next and if that’s what you believe, fine. And if we’re wrong, then great. But what’s more important is everything that you’re doing before that moment — that’s the most important, not after. What happens after is after, but it’s the transition that’s important and how you get there and all these micro-steps tracking back throughout your life.
So do we need spirituality as individuals? Yes, I think so. And I would also say, as a culture, whether it’s a collective consciousness or a resonance that connects us to each other and connects us out to something bigger, there’s something real there and we need to make sure those points are connected.
Sean Illing: I’ve really come to be annoyed with a certain kind of atheist that can only approach religion as a set of epistemological claims, as though scanning the Bible for bogus claims about biology or history will amount to some death blow for religion. And I understand where that comes from. This has always been tricky for me because I do think religion has done immense damage in the world. I think it has caused a lot of needless suffering in the world. I think it still causes a lot of needless suffering in the world.
There are people in this country who want to create a theocracy here, who want to chain women to their reproductive cycles because of their religious beliefs, and those people are enemies of liberal democracy in my opinion. It’s important to say all of that. But it’s also important to recognize that religion, at its best, is a near-universal expression of this human need for connection and ritual and meaning and it’s a mistake to not grapple seriously with the implications of that, especially if you’re a nonbeliever.
Devin Moss: I see spirituality and theology as two completely different animals. I see religion as an expression of the spiritualities. Because the way it works now is that spirituality is an expression of religion, but I say flip it. I’m a huge proponent of rites of passage rituals, I’m a huge proponent of even making rituals throughout your day and you can develop them for yourself, you can be as syncretic as you need to be just to make sure that it is bringing intention throughout your day.
The expression of spirituality can be your lived religion and we can see what that looks like. Even if it’s Sunday mornings, we’re going to sweep up the sidewalks in Brooklyn and have coffee and cake, that’s an important spiritual expression and can be considered religion without the pomp and the history and all of those things.
Sean Illing: A humanist chaplain may not be able to offer the solace that comes with belief in the afterlife, but what kind of solace can you offer someone as they approach the end?
Devin Moss: Death is hard for everybody and it’s hard because we avoid it personally and we most definitely avoid it as a culture. How a culture dies is a direct reflection of how they live and we do not die well in modern America. I would probably take out the border between faith and non-faith when it comes to how to die well and I would just say that dying well requires work that is to be done while you’re still very much alive, whether you have faith in a supernatural power or not.
https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area/24111417/atheist-humanist-chaplain-clergy-death-row-inmate-execution-compassion
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WHY HUMAN CHILDHOOD IS SO LONG
The average human spends at least one quarter of their life growing up. In the careful calculus of the animal kingdom, this is patently ridiculous. Even most whales, the longest of the long-lived mammals, spend a mere 10 per cent or so of their time growing into leviathans. In no other primate has the mathematics gone this wrong but, then again, no other primate has been as successful as we are in dominating the planet. Could the secret to our species’ success be our slowness in growing up? And if so, what possible evolutionary benefit could there be to delaying adulthood – and what does it mean for where our species is going?
The search for the secret to our success is at the heart of anthropology – the study of humans and their place in the world. This most narcissistic of disciplines piggybacked on the fascination for cataloguing and collecting the entirety of the world that rose up during the colonial expansions of 18th-century Europe and the growing popularity of ‘natural laws’ that explained the workings of the world in terms of immutable truths, discoverable to any man (and it was open largely only to men) with the wit and patience to observe them in nature.
Early anthropology collected cultures and set them end on end in a line of progress that stretched from fossils to frock coats, determining that the most critical parts of Man – the secrets to his success – were his big brain and his ability to walk upright. Everything we are as a species was taken to be a result of our canny forebears playing a zero-sum game against extinction, with some monkey-men outbreeding some other monkey-men. In this grand tradition, we have Man the Hunter, Man the Firestarter, Man the Tool Maker, and the other evolutionary archetypes that tell us the reason we are the way we are is because of a series of technological advances.
Mother and Child (1883) by Christian Krohg.
However, about 50 years ago, anthropologists made a shocking discovery: women. Not so much that females existed (though that might have taken some of the old guard by surprise), but rather that they could do quite interesting research, and that the topic of their research was not, inevitably, the evolution of Man. It was the evolution of humans, women and children included. New research reframed old questions and asked entirely new ones – ones that did not assume what was good for the gander was good for the goose, and that there might be more drivers to our evolutionary history than the simplistic models that had come before.
Among these new ideas was one that had been consistently overlooked: the entire business of reproducing our species is absolutely off-the-charts weird. From our mating systems to maternal mortality to menopause, everything we do with our lives is a slap in the face to the received wisdom of the animal kingdom. After all, the pinchpoint of evolution in any species comes at reproduction. Making more of your species is how you stay in the game and, judging by the numbers, we are far and away the most successful primate ever to have walked the earth.
Pioneering researchers such as Sarah Hrdy, Kristen Hawkes, and many others of this new generation finally thought to ask, is it about the way we make more humans that has made us the species that we are?
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The physical lack of difference between sexes sets up a social system that is, in animal terms, weird: pair bonding. Virtually no other animals reproduce in pair bonds – only about 5 per cent, if you discount birds, who do go for pairing in a big way. But an outsize proportion of primates opt for this monogamous arrangement, about 15 per cent of species, including, of course, our own. There are a variety of evolutionary theories for why pair bonding should appeal so much to primates, including maintaining access to females that roam, supporting offspring, or increasing certainty about paternity. One prominent theory is that pair-bonded males have less motivation for infanticide, though as the anthropologist Holly Dunsworth pointed out in her Aeon essay ‘Sex Makes Babies’ (2017), this does suggest a type of understanding in primates that we don’t always even ascribe to other humans.
Other theories point to female roaming requiring a pairing system so mating opportunities aren’t lost whenever she moves on. Pair bonding has emerged perhaps as many as four separate times in the primate family, suggesting that the motivation for the invention of the mate may not be the same in all monkeys. What does seem clear is that humans have opted for a mating system that doesn’t go in as much for competition as it does for care. The evolution of ‘dads’ – our casual word for the pair of helping hands that, in humans, fits a very broad range of people – may in fact be the only solution to the crisis that is the most important feature of human babies: they are off-the-scale demanding.
Our babies require an intense amount of investment, and as a species we have gone to staggering lengths to give it to them. As placental mammals, we solved the limitations placed on babies who are gestated in eggs with a fixed amount of resources by capturing the code of an RNA virus in our DNA to create the placenta: a temporary organ that allows our embryos and foetuses to draw sustenance directly from our bodies.
As humans, however, we have gone a step further and altered the signaling mechanisms that maintain the delicate balance between our voracious young and the mothers they feed off. Our species’ pregnancies – and only our species’ pregnancies – have become life-threatening ordeals specifically to deal with the outrageous demands of our babies. Gestational diabetes and preeclampsia are conditions virtually unknown in the animal kingdom, but common killers of pregnant humans thanks to this subtle alteration.
Babies grow to an enormous size and plumpness, and they’re so demanding that the resources in one body aren’t enough to sustain them. They emerge into the world with large brains and a hefty 15 per cent lard, but still unripe and unready.
The question of why we have such large but useless babies – unable to cling like other primate babies can, eyes and ears open but with heads too heavy for their necks – is one that evolutionary theory has long treated as a classic moving sofa problem. As posed by the author Douglas Adams, or the popular TV series Friends, the moving sofa problem asks the question: how do you get something big and awkward through a small and awkward space? Our babies have very large heads, and our mothers quite narrow pelvises, and what seems a trivial question about furniture logistics is in fact a huge impediment to the successful reproduction of our species: this makes human birth dangerous, and mothers die giving birth at a far higher rate than any other species.
Classically, this was viewed as an acceptable trade-off between competing evolutionary demands. This is what the anthropologist Sherwood Washburn in 1960 called the ‘obstetrical dilemma’: the dangerous trip down the birth canal is necessitated by our upright posture and the tight fit required by our big brains. This widely accepted theory provided functional explanations as to why male and female hips were different sizes and why our births are so risky. Until recently, it was thought that humans had in fact developed a mitigation of this size mismatch in a unique twist performed by the baby as it travels through the birth canal, forcing the baby to emerge with head to the side rather than facing towards the mother’s front.
There is one problem with this particular explanation: we are not the only species to sneak in a twist at the end of our grand pelvic-canal dive – in fact, we’re not even the only primates. Research by Satoshi Harota and colleagues has shown even chimpanzees, who have ‘easy’ births, do the twist.
Even the pelvis size and shape differences we identified as critical in human evolution turn out to be less-than-unique. Many animals have differences between male and female pelvises that surpass those of humans, without having difficult births. Shape difference might be something that is far more ancient in the mammal line. For human hips, variation tracks many factors, such as geography, rather than just male/female divides. But human babies really do have a terrible time coming into the world, above and beyond other species, due to that tight fit. So what gives?
The answer may be in that glorious pinchable baby fat. Having precision-engineered our offspring to siphon resources from their mothers in order to build calorifically expensive structures like our big brains and our chubby cheeks, we have, perhaps, become victims of our own success. Our babies can build themselves up to an impressive size in the womb, one that comes near to being unsurvivable. But the truly fantastic thing is that, having poured so much into our pregnancies, after we hit the limit of what our babies can catabolize from their mothers’ bodies, they are forced to emerge into the world still fantastically needy. For any mammal, survival after birth calls for the magic of milk, and our babies are no different, but here we find another very unusual feature of humans: our long childhood starts with cutting off infancy early.
Even accounting for differences in size, human babies are infants on the breast for a far shorter time than our closest relatives. Breastfeeding can go on for four to five years in chimpanzees and gorillas, and eight years or more in orangutans. Meanwhile, babies in most known human societies are fully weaned by the age of four, with a lot of agricultural societies past and present opting to stop around age two, and of many modern states with capital economies struggling to get breastfeeding to happen at all, let along go on for the WHO-recommended two years or more.
After the first few months, we start complementary feeding, supplementing our babies with solid foods, including the rather unappealing pre-chewed food that seems to nonetheless support not just human but all great-ape infants as they grow. Our fat, big-brained offspring require a huge investment to support the amount of brain growth required in our babies’ first year, but they don’t – and can’t – get what they need to build the adult 1,200 g brain from milk alone. This is where those pair bonds come in handy. Suddenly there are two food-foragers (or chewers) to hand, which is convenient because we kick off our babies from the breast quick – but, once they’ve moved from infancy into childhood, there is yet another surprise: we let them stay there longer than any other species on the planet.
Childhood in humans is extended, by any measure you care to use. We can look at the 25-odd years it takes to get to physical maturity (in fact, the tiny end plate of your clavicle where it meets the sternum doesn’t fully finish forming until your early 30s) and compare it with our nearest relatives, to see that we have slowed down by a decade or more the time it takes to build something great-ape sized. To find a mammal with a similarly slow growth trajectory we have to look to the sea, at something like a bowhead whale. A bowhead whale, however, which will top out at about 18 meters and around 90 tons, is on a trajectory of growth well beyond a piddling human. We can look at our markers of social maturity and find they are even more varied. Our individual cultures tell us very specifically when adulthood is – ages of legal responsibility, for instance, or the timing of major rituals – and these might hover near our physical maturity or they might depart from it entirely. Perhaps the most clear-cut definition describes childhood in terms of investment: it is the period when you are a net resource sink, when other people are still investing heavily in you.
One of the most fascinating things in the study of humans is our ability to extend our lens back, beyond the borders of our species, and look at the adaptive choices our ancestors have made to bring us to this state. We look at the shape of fossil hips and knees and toes to learn how we came to walk upright; we measure skulls and jaws from millions of years ago to see how we fed our growing brains. Palaeoanthropology allows us to reconstruct the steps that brought us here, and it is where we can find microscopic tell-tale signs of the journey that carried us into our extended childhood.
There are a handful of juvenile fossils in the hominin record, a very small proportion of the already vanishingly small number of remains from the species living over the past 3 to 4 million years that form the family tree that led to humans. Two of these, the Taung child and the Nariokotome boy, provide some of the best evidence for how our species evolved.
The Taung child is an australopithecine dating back about 2.5 million years, and the Nariokotome boy belongs to Homo erectus, about 1.5 million years in our past. Looking at the teeth and skeletons of these fossils, we see that the teeth are still forming in the jaws, and the bony skeleton has not yet taken its final form. If our ancestors grew like modern humans – that is, slowly – then the absolute chronological age they would have been at that stage of development would be about six and 12 years old, respectively, though it would be younger if they grew more rapidly, like apes.
Luckily for science, there is a timer built into our bodies: a 24-hour rhythm recognizable in the minute tracks left by the cells that form dental enamel that can be seen, perfectly fossilized, in our teeth, and a longer near-weekly rhythm that can be seen on the outside of teeth. When we count the growth tracks of enamel in the Taung child’s teeth, we can see they were closer to three than to six, and the Nariokotome boy only about eight. Our long childhood is a uniquely evolved human trait.
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There is one more adaptation at play in the support of our needy offspring that should be accounted for: the utter unlikeliness that is a grandmother. Specifically, it is the almost unheard-of biological process of menopause, and the creation of a stage of life for half of our species where reproduction just stops.
This is outrageous in evolutionary terms and it occurs only in humans (and a handful of whales). If the goal is to keep the species going, then calling time on reproduction sounds catastrophically counterintuitive, and, yet, here we are, awash in post-reproductive females. Why? Because, despite the denigration many older women face, women do not ‘outlive’ their sole evolutionary function of birthing babies. If that was the only purpose of females, there wouldn’t be grandmas. But here they are, and ethnographic and sociological studies show us very clearly that grandparents are evolutionarily important: they are additional adults capable of investing in our needy kids. If you remove the need to invest in their own direct offspring, you create a fund of resources – whether it is foraged food, wisdom or just a pair of hands – that can be poured into their children’s children.
All the unique qualities of human childhood are marked by this kind of intense investment. But that raises the big question. If ‘winning’ evolution looks like successful reproduction, then why would we keep our offspring in an expensive holding pattern for longer than necessary?
It is only when we start to consider what this extension is for that we get close to understanding the evolutionary pressures that brought us to this state. And we actually have quite a good idea of what childhood is for, because we can see the use that other animals put it to. Primates have long childhoods because you need a long time to learn how to be a better monkey. The same principle applies to social species like crows, who need to learn a complicated series of social rules and hierarchies. We, like monkeys and crows, spend childhood learning. Growing up human is such an immensely complicated prospect it requires not only the intense physical investment in our big brains and high-fat bodies but an extended period of care and investment while our slow-growing offspring learn everything we need them to learn to become successful adults. The cost of this investment, 20 to 30 years’ worth, is staggering in evolutionary terms.
A long childhood is our greatest evolutionary adaptation. It means that we have created needy offspring, and this has surprising knock-on effects in every single aspect of our lives, from our pair bonds to our dads to our boring genitals to our dangerous pregnancies and births and our fat-cheeked babies and even that unlikely creature, the grandmother.
The amount of time and energy required to grow a human child, and to let it learn the things it needs to learn, is so great that we have stopped the clock: we have given ourselves longer to do it, and critically, made sure there are more and more investors ready to contribute to each of our fantastically expensive children.
What’s more, as humans, our cultures not only scaffold our evolution, but act as bore-drills to open up new paths for biology to follow, and we find ourselves in a position where the long childhood our ancestors took millions of years to develop is being stretched yet further. In many societies, the markers of adulthood are increasingly stretched out – for the most privileged among us, formal education and financial dependence are making 40 the new 20.
Meanwhile, we are taking time away from the most desperate among us, placing that same education out of reach for those foolish enough to be born poor or the wrong color or gender or in the wrong part of the world. A human child is a rather miraculous thing, representing a huge amount of targeted investment, from mating to matriculation. But given the gulfs in opportunity we are opening up between those that have and those that do not, it would benefit us all to consider more closely the childhoods we are investing in, and who we are allowing to stay forever young. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/why-have-humans-evolved-to-have-a-long-journey-to-adulthood?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=21dafe3849-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_03_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-b43a9ed933-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
Mary:
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STARING AT THE SCREEN ELONGATES THE LENS: THE INCREASE IN MYOPIA
Myopia affects half of young adults in the US, twice as many as 50 years ago and over 40% of the population.
How close is the smartphone or laptop you’re reading this on from your eyes? Probably just a few inches. How long have you spent looking at a screen today? If you’re close to the average it’s likely to be over nine hours.
Research from ophthalmologists shows that our constant screen time is radically changing our eyes. Just like the rest of our bodies, the human eye is supposed to stop growing after our teens. Now it keeps growing.
When our eyes spend more time focusing on near objects, like phones, screens or even paperbacks, it makes our eyeballs elongate, which prevents the eye from bending light the way it should. This elongation increases nearsightedness, called myopia, which causes distant objects to appear blurred. Myopia affects half of young adults in the US, twice as many as 50 years ago and over 40% of the population.
For adults this might cause eye strains or speed up existing vision issues. But for kids, whose eyes are still developing, the situation is so dire that the American Academy of Optometry and American Academy of Ophthalmology both consider myopia an epidemic.
Working for prolonged periods, whether texting, reading or jotting emails is what optometrists call “near work”. The trouble with holding a screen close to your face isn’t about light shining into your eyes — it’s about the strain of the eye. For one, your eyes blink far less when they’re focused so closely. As you’re holding your phone in your hand, performing near work, your muscles stretch and your lenses shift since our eyes over-accommodate to constant close-distance tasks. That’s why they’re growing.
When you put on a pair of glasses, your eye muscles relax because they’re no longer straining. Ditto if you put down your phone – sans glasses – blink a couple times and stare off into the distance for 20 seconds.
Does this affect you? Probably. How much extra time on screen have you had in the past 18 months? How much work have you been doing from home? Pre-pandemic, our phones were already constant companions. When many of us began working from home and e-learning last year, researchers predicted this dramatic online increase would cause never-before-seen eye dysfunction. They were right.
In the spring of 2020, Chinese researchers tested over 120,000 Covid-quarantined students aged six to eight and found myopia and other vision issues linked to home confinement increased up to three times compared with the previous five years – that’s with as little as 2.5 more hours of e-learning (not counting video games, social media, etc). Results for US students could be much higher since many American kids spend most of their days online. “Virtual learning has definitely increased myopia,” says Dr Luxme Hariharan, of the Nicklaus children’s hospital in Miami, Florida, who points anecdotally to a huge shift in cases in the last year. “Prolonged near work [like looking at screens up close] makes our eyes overcompensate.”
“We can clinically measure the millimeter lengthening of the eyeball,” explains Dr Eric Chow, a Miami, Florida optometrist. “Studies have shown that the longer the axial length, the higher the risk of eye diseases like glaucoma, retinal detachment and cataracts.”
Straining vision introduces a host of eye-related health problems. And it’s more than just kids needing prescriptions. “People say ‘oh, it’s just glasses,’” says Dr Aaron Miller, a pediatric ophthalmologist at Houston Eye Associates. “The nearsighted have much higher chances of retina tears and glaucoma, bigger issues secondary to nearsightedness. It’s the long game we worry about.”
He adds: “The shape of the eye is round like a basketball,” he explains. “When an eye becomes nearsighted, myopic, the eye is longer, like a grape or olive. The retina – the coating – can get stretched and thinned. As we age, sometimes there can be breaks in the retina. Like cracks in wallpaper. When that occurs, these cracks cause fluid to enter in behind the wallpaper, that’s what we call retinal detachment which causes a lot of people to go blind.”
This isn’t just a western problem. There is a genetic component here, but it’s clear that behavior accelerates the change. Poor eyes can lead to decreased work efficiency and huge loss of productivity – think money–for multinationals. That’s why nations like China are so worried about this that they have already changed their education system, limiting how long students study – even extra tutoring – to curb the near-work that heightens myopia. The US should do the same, says Miller.
Labeling myopia a second public health crisis is no hyperbole. 10-year-old Aleena Joyce’s screen time tripled in the last 18 months, with many school days – and two-thirds of Aleena’s waking hours – held almost entirely on her iPad. The Illinois fourth-grader had already been diagnosed with myopia – nearsightedness – in kindergarten, and her eyes had worsened each year.
“Sometimes we would have to go in prior to her annual eye exam because she noticed more difficulty with reading the board at school,” says Yusra Cheema, Aleena’s mother.
Aleena was one of a handful of students who said that their vision had markedly worsened in connection with increased screen time. The parents of Alan Kim, the child actor and nine-year-old Minari star, said their son’s prescription doubled in the last year in part due to the near work of on-set studies held on his iPad.
Each child now uses new FDA-approved contact lenses that effectively reshape the eye to slow down myopia. But most parents and their kids have no idea this issue even exists.
These problems affect adults too. Constant connection can heighten high or degenerative myopia, severe nearsightedness that progressively worsens and can lead to cataracts, glaucoma and retinal detachment – since the eyeball stretches and the retina thins – but thankfully, it’s rare. Risk grows with age, and can speed up gradual loss of the eye’s ability to focus, called presbyopia.
Detection can help. Home approaches like GoCheckKids, an FDA-registered vision screening app allows any parent to take a photo of their child’s eyes to analyze how light refracts and measure their risks for near or farsightedness and other eye problems.
Specialized contact lenses are another major tool, says Dr Michele Andrews, a vice-president of CooperVision, the company behind the FDA-approved MiSight contacts. “It’s a contact geared for children aged eight to 12 whose eyes are growing,” she explains, “Which slow down the progression of myopia and change the shape of the eyeball.”
In late 2021 at the American Academy of Optometry meeting in Boston, an annual eye research conference, Andrews presented the results of a seven-year study that showed abnormal axial length growth slowed by an average of 50% among eight-to-17-year-olds who wore her company’s corrective contacts. Perhaps most striking is for those who suffered from myopia, wore the lenses, then stopped wearing them, “we learned there is no rebound effect,” she says. “Myopia did not come back” after kids stopped wearing her company’s contacts. That’s because these lenses “change the way the light bends inside the eye and pulls the image in front of the retina”, she says, which slows axial growth because the clear image is now in front of the retina. If there’s no reason to grow then the problem resolves itself early.
As myopia is typically most pronounced – and dangerous – as the eyes grow, this solution is geared for kids. But adults have hope too. “Spend more time outdoors,” recommends Chow, at least two hours daily. “Studies have shown that increased sunlight decreases myopia progression.”
Most important is taking breaks which help eyes rest, blink and lubricate. Then there’s the 20-20-20 model. “Every 20 minutes, look at a distance 20 feet away, for 20 seconds,” Hariharan advises. “Being on the computer for hours on end isn’t good for your health. Don’t break to play video games or pick up another screen. Go outside!” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-staring-at-screens-is-making-your-eyeballs-elongate-and-how-to-stop-it?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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CAN PROBIOTICS HELP NEGATE THE TOXICITY OF PLASTIC IN OUR DIGESTIVE TRACT?
Research suggests bacteria in fermented foods may ameliorate some inflammation that microplastics promote in our system
The topic of microplastics and our bodies is disconcerting. It seems like there’s little we can do about the tiny particles that have found their way into our blood, brains, lungs and beyond.
Encouragingly, a body of research now suggests we have at least one cheap, accessible line of defense against the damage associated with plastics in our digestive systems: probiotics.
There is already evidence that these bacteria, found in fermented foods such as yogurt, sauerkraut and kimchi, support our immune systems and offer benefits that can alleviate gastrointestinal issues, inflammation and allergies. Now, it seems they could help us fight some effects of these pervasive petrochemical particles.
Multiple studies have demonstrated that nanoplastics can enter our blood and organs and cross the mucosal barrier into our gastrointestinal tracts.
While more research is needed to determine the relationship between plastic and gastrointestinal disorders, preliminary findings suggest ingesting plastic isn’t doing us any favors.
A Tufts University study published this June found that high concentrations of polystyrene particles “significantly triggered the secretion” of inflammatory proteins called cytokines in in-vitro gut models. Cytokines are linked to inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, which have been rising globally from 3.7m cases in 1990 to more than 6.8m in 2017.
A causal link is not yet clear, because factors such as a diet high in ultra-processed foods, smoking and exposure to air pollution are also linked to IBD. But researchers increasingly believe microplastics, which are filled with various harmful chemicals including additives like bisphenol A (BPA), flame retardants and phthalates, also play a role.
For a January 2023 study published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, French researchers added microplastics to a modeled gut biome and observed that beneficial bacteria declined, while two strains of bacteria associated with disease increased. A 2021 Chinese study determined that people with inflammatory bowel disease have 50% more microplastics in their feces than those with healthy digestive tracts.
“When gut microbes feed on or adhere to microplastics in the stomach, it can alter their chemical composition, affecting bacterial diversity and causing other “negative effects, including changes in gut metabolic profiles and inflammation”, wrote the authors of a 2022 Spanish study. In more extreme cases, they said it could contribute to a condition called “dysbiosis”, in which bad bacteria outnumbers the good in our stomachs. Dysbiosis can increase the likelihood of developing other serious conditions, including diabetes, Crohn’s disease and colorectal cancer.
How probiotics and microplastics interact
Unfortunately, probiotics can’t magically pluck plastic particles out of our bodies. However, some research suggests that the good microbes could help ameliorate some of the toxicity and inflammation plastics promote in our gastrointestinal systems.
This summer, a team of Iranian researchers published a review study exploring how probiotics could protect against the adverse effects of plastics on gut flora. Probiotic micro-organisms may interact with polystyrene particles “to modify their toxic effects on different tissues”, they wrote.
They cite studies that show probiotics binding to, absorbing and neutralizing toxic heavy metals like cadmium and mercury in animals, as well as two separate studies from 2021 that determined probiotic strains including lactobacillus plantarum, found in fermented dairy and pickles, bound to and degraded BPA and phthalates, both harmful chemicals commonly found in plastic.
“The use of probiotic supplementation for improving the microbiome could be an effective intervention to counter different toxins,” including those that leach from plastic, the Iranian research team wrote.
For a separate 2023 study, Chinese researchers first observed that mice exposed to microplastics and their endocrine-disrupting chemicals experienced testicular inflammation, decreased sperm health and a depletion of healthy gut bacteria. They then found that supplementing the mice with probiotics increased sperm vitality, providing a solid foundation for further research into “male reproductive damage caused by environmental pollutants”.
Can probiotics affect microplastics before ingestion?
Not only could certain probiotics help our gut – they could help reduce the chemical additives that leach out of food and beverage packaging before they even make it into our bodies.
There is promising research on the interaction between probiotics and BPA in food containers. BPA, as well as other harmful bisphenols sometimes used in its place, is commonly found in cans and hard polycarbonate plastic bottles used to hold food and drink. These additives are known to leach from containers and into the consumer products we ingest.
A Chinese study from 2019 found that when a preparation of the probiotic lactobacillus reuteri was added to juice and teas packaged in BPA-containing cans, the probiotic reduced the concentration of the chemical in the beverages by at least 90% in one day.
In 2020, Iranian researchers reached a similarly encouraging conclusion by making yogurt out of various probiotic strains of bacteria and milk intentionally contaminated with 100 parts-per-million BPA; after 28 days of storage, yogurt made with lactobacillus plantarum and lactobacillus acidophilus had detoxified the BPA by 95% and 90% respectively.
The science behind what plastic does to our bodies and what benefits probiotics may offer is still preliminary. Yet researchers are finding support for the theory that common strains of probiotics, particularly lactic acid bacteria like those found in yogurt, sourdough bread and pickles, could help counteract the effects of the chemicals that microplastics ferry into our bodies when ingested.
It’s wise to talk to your doctor before taking probiotic supplements, which aren’t always consistent in quality or effect; in the US, they’re not evenly regulated. However, probiotics from fermented foods are widely considered safe and generally beneficial for human health, so you can feel good about eating more of them. They’re affordable and delicious to boot. Just be sure to stick with recommended serving sizes, as large quantities of probiotics can lead to minor digestive upsets like gas and bloating. Pass the yogurt!
https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2023/nov/27/probiotics-plastics-fermented-food-bacteria-stomach-benefit
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BENEFITS OF CREATINE
Helps muscles create more energy
Creatine supplements increase your muscles’ phosphocreatine stores.
Phosphocreatine aids the formation of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the key molecule your cells use for energy and all basic life functions.
During exercise, ATP is broken down to produce energy.
The rate of ATP resynthesis limits your ability to continually perform at maximum intensity, as you use ATP faster than you reproduce it.
Creatine supplements increase your phosphocreatine stores, allowing you to produce more ATP energy to fuel your muscles during high-intensity exercise. This is the primary mechanism behind creatine’s performance-enhancing effects.
Supports many other functions in muscles
Creatine is a popular and effective supplement for adding muscle mass
It can alter numerous cellular pathways that lead to new muscle growth. For example, it boosts the formation of proteins that can increase the size of muscle fibers.
It can also raise levels of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), a hormone that promotes increases in muscle mass.
What’s more, creatine supplements can increase the water content of your muscles. This is known as cell volumization and can quickly increase muscle size.
Additionally, some research indicates that creatine decreases levels of myostatin, a molecule responsible for stunting muscle growth. Reducing myostatin can help you build muscle faster.
Improves high intensity exercise performance.
Creatine’s direct role in ATP production means it can drastically improve high-intensity exercise performance.
Creatine improves numerous factors, including:
strength
ballistic power
sprint ability
muscle endurance
resistance to fatigue
muscle mass
recovery
brain performance
Unlike supplements that have been shown to primarily impact advanced athletes, creatine has been shown to provide benefits regardless of a person’s fitness level
One review found that it improves high-intensity exercise performance by up to 15%.
Speeds muscle growth
According to a position statement from The International Society of Sports Nutrition, creatine is the world’s most effective supplement for adding muscle mass. Taking it for as few as 5–7 days has been shown to significantly increase lean body weight and muscle size.
This initial rise is caused by increases in the water content of your muscles.
Over the long term, it also aids in muscle fiber growth by signaling key biological pathways and boosting gym performance.
In one study of a 6-week training regimen followed by a 3-week detraining period, participants who used creatine added 4.4 pounds (2 kg) more muscle mass, on average, than the control group, who showed no gains at all.
Similarly, a comprehensive rev
iew demonstrated a clear increase in muscle mass among those taking creatine, compared with those performing the same training regimen without creatine.
Of the many popular sports supplements on the market, creatine consistently ranks among the best athletic performance supplements available. Its advantages include being relatively inexpensive and having been verified safe when compared with many other sports supplements.
May help with Parkinson’s Disease
Parkinson’s disease is characterized by reduced levels of dopamine, a key neurotransmitter in your brain.
The large reduction in dopamine levels causes brain cell death and several serious symptoms, including tremors, loss of muscle function, and speech impairments.
Creatine has been linked to beneficial effects in mice with Parkinson’s, preventing 90% of the typical drop in dopamine levels. However, there is no evidence that it has the same effect in humans.
In an attempt to treat the loss of muscle function and strength, those with Parkinson’s often weight-train.
In one study in individuals with this disease, combining creatine with weight training improved strength and daily function to a greater extent than training alone.
However, a recent analysis of five controlled studies in people with Parkinson’s noted that taking 4–10 grams of creatine per day didn’t significantly improve their ability to perform daily activities .
May fight other neurological diseases
A key factor in several neurological diseases is a reduction of phosphocreatine in your brain .
Since creatine can increase these levels, it may help reduce or slow disease progression.
In mice with Huntington’s disease, creatine restored the brain’s phosphocreatine stores to 72% of pre-disease levels, compared with only 26% for control mice.
This restoration of phosphocreatine helped maintain daily function and reduced cell death by around 25%.
Research in animals suggests that taking creatine supplements may treat other diseases too, including:
Alzheimer’s disease
ischemic stroke
epilepsy
brain or spinal cord injuries
Creatine has also shown benefits against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease that affects the motor neurons that are essential for movement. It improved motor function, reduced muscle loss, and extended survival rate by 17%.
Although more studies are needed in humans, some researchers believe that creatine supplements can serve as a defense against neurological diseases when used alongside conventional medicines.
May lower blood sugar levels and fight diabetes
Research suggests that creatine supplements may lower blood sugar levels by increasing the function of glucose transporter type 4 (GLUT-4), a molecule that brings blood sugar into your muscles.
A 12-week study examined how creatine affects blood sugar levels after a high carb meal. People who combined creatine and exercise exhibited better blood sugar control than those who only exercised.
Short-term blood sugar response to a meal is an important marker of diabetes risk. The faster your body clears sugar from the blood, the better.
While these benefits are promising, more human research is needed on creatine’s long-term effects on blood sugar control and diabetes.
Can improve brain function
Creatine plays an important role in brain health and function.
Research demonstrates that your brain requires a significant amount of ATP when performing difficult tasks.
Supplements can increase phosphocreatine stores in your brain to help it produce more ATP.
Creatine may also aid brain function by increasing dopamine levels and mitochondrial function.
Since meat is the best dietary source of creatine, vegetarians often have low levels. One study on creatine supplements in vegetarians found a 20–50% improvement in some memory and intelligence test scores.
For older individuals, supplementing with creatine for 2 weeks significantly improved memory and recall ability.
In older adults, creatine may boost brain function, protect against neurological diseases, and reduce age-related loss of muscle and strength.
Despite such positive findings, more research is needed in young, healthy individuals who eat meat or fish regularly.
May reduce fatigue and tiredness
In a 6-month study in people with traumatic brain injury, those who supplemented with creatine experienced a 50% reduction in dizziness, compared with those who did not supplement.
Furthermore, only 10% of patients in the supplement group experienced fatigue, compared with 80% in the control group.
Another study determined that creatine led to reduced fatigue and increased energy levels during sleep deprivation.
Creatine also reduced fatigue in athletes taking a cycling test and has been used to decrease fatigue when exercising in high heat.
10. Safe and easy to use
Along with creatine’s diverse benefits, it’s one of the cheapest and safest supplements available. You can find a wide selection online.
It has been researched for more than 200 years, and numerous studies support its safety for long-term use. Clinical trials lasting up to 5 years report no adverse effects in healthy individuals.
What’s more, supplementing is very easy — simply take 3–5 grams of creatine monohydrate powder per day.
At the end of the day, creatine is an effective supplement with powerful benefits for both athletic performance and health.
It may boost brain function, fight certain neurological diseases, improve exercise performance, and accelerate muscle growth.
Try adding this natural substance to your supplement regimen to see whether it works for you.
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Additionally, creatine supplementation plus resistance training results in a greater increase in bone mineral density than resistance training alone.
Higher brain creatine is associated with improved neuropsychological performance, and recently, creatine supplementation has been shown to increase brain creatine and phosphocreatine. Subsequent studies have demonstrated that cognitive processing, that is either experimentally (following sleep deprivation) or naturally (due to aging) impaired, can be improved with creatine supplementation.
Creatine is an inexpensive and safe dietary supplement that has both peripheral and central effects. The benefits afforded to older adults through creatine ingestion are substantial, can improve quality of life, and ultimately may reduce the disease burden associated with sarcopenia and cognitive dysfunction.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21394604/
Ending on beauty:
I ASK THAT I DO NOT DIE
—but if I do
I want an open coffin
I am an American poet and therefore open
for business
Owls peck the windows of the 21st century
as if looking for
the board members
of Exxon Mobil
who who who who who
Listen
my beloved nothings
your seriousness
will kill you!
But before you die
my doctors
have prescribed happiness
God is a warm brick
or a claw
or the silence that survives
empires
An old woman
in the rain with a pot of mushroom soup
is one of God’s
disguises. Her dog
lifts its leg
another one of God’s shenanigans
and pushes its nose
into morning’s ribcage
I point my hand
God this and God that and
when God has nothing
I still have my hairy hand for a pillow
Put me in an open box
so when God reaches inside my holes
I can still see
how a taxi makes a city more a city
slippers on my feet, and only half
covered by a sheet,
in a yellow taxi
so as not to seem laid out in state
but in transit
~ Ilya Kaminsky
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