Evgeny Sedukhin. Symphony of the 6th Blast Furnace. 1979*
The fifth spring of war is beginning.
A young girl is weeping for her lover.
Snow is melting in the Warsaw streets.
I thought my youth would last forever,
That I would always be the same.
And what remains? Fear in the early hours.
I peer at myself as at a plaque on blank, gray stone,
Looking for something I have known.
A carousel drones in the little square.
Somebody is shooting at somebody out there.
A light squall blows from the torpid tree.
But what is all that to me?
I am like a child unable to tell a yellow dandelion
From a star. This isn’t the wisdom
That I bargained for. What are centuries,
What is history? I hack out each day
And it’s a century to me.
O Lord, throw me a tiny plume of your pity.
~ Milosz, Songs of Adrian Zielinski, 1945
Warsaw 1945*
SEAMUS HEANEY’S TRIBUTE TO MILOSZ
~ "The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth": so Milosz had written, and for his many friends he himself was one of those wise men. His sayings were quoted, even when they were wisecracks rather than wisdom. A few days before he died I'd had a letter from Robert Pinsky, telling of a visit last month to the hospital where Czeslaw was a patient. "How are you?" Pinsky asked. "Conscious," was the reply. "My head is full of absurd bric-a-brac." It was the first time I'd ever detected a daunted note in any of his utterances. A couple of years earlier, for example, a similar inquiry from Pinsky's fellow translator, Robert Hass, had elicited the reply, "I survive by incantation" — which was more like him.
His life and works were founded upon faith in "A word wakened by lips that perish". This first artistic principle was clearly related to the last gospel of the Mass, the In principio of St John: "In the beginning was the Word". Inexorably then, through his pursuit of poetic vocation, his study of what such pursuit entailed and the unremitting, abounding yield of his habit of composition, he developed a fierce conviction about the holy force of his art, how poetry was called upon to combat death and nothingness, to be "A tireless messenger who runs and runs / Through interstellar fields, through revolving galaxies, / And calls out, protests, screams" ("Meaning"). With Milosz gone, the world has lost a credible witness to this immemorial belief in the saving power of poetry.
His credibility was and remains the thing. There was nothing disingenuous about his professions of faith in poetry, which he once called philosophy's "ally in the service of the good", news that "was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo". Such trust in the delicious joy-bringing potential of art and intellect was protected by strong bulwarks built from the knowledge and experience that he had gained at first hand and at great cost.
It was not enough that the poet should be like Venus in WH Auden's poem "The Shield of Achilles", looking over the shoulder of his artefact at a far-off panorama that included everything from kitchen comedy to genocide. The poet had to be down there with the ordinary crowd, at eye level with the refugee family on the floor of the railway station, sharing the smell of the stale crusts the mother is doling out to her youngsters even as the boots of the military patrol bear down on them, the city is bombarded, and maps and memories go up in flames. Awareness of the triteness and tribulations of other people's lives was needed to humanize the song. It wasn't enough to be in the salons of the avant-garde.
Certain things, as he says in "1945", could not be learned "from Apollinaire, / Or Cubist manifestoes, or the festivals of Paris streets". Milosz would have deeply understood and utterly agreed with John Keats's contention that the use of a world of pain and troubles was to school the intelligence and make it a soul. The discharged soldier of "1945" has received just such a schooling:
"On the steppe, as he was binding his bleeding feet with a rag
He grasped the futile pride of those lofty generations.
As far as he could see, a flat, unredeemed earth.
And what, in these drastic conditions, has the poet to offer?
Only what has accrued to him through custom and ceremony, through civilization:
I blinked, ridiculous and rebellious,
Along with my Jesus Mary against irrefutable power,
A descendant of ardent prayers, of gilded sculptures and miracles.”
Tender towards innocence, tough-minded when faced with brutality and injustice, Milosz could be at one moment susceptible, at another remorseless. Now he is evoking the dewy eroticism of some adolescent girl haunting the grounds of a Lithuanian manor house, now he is anatomizing the traits of character and misdirected creative gifts that led some contemporary into the Marxist web. From start to finish, merciless analytic power coexisted with helpless sensuous relish. He recollects the fresh bread smells on the streets of Paris when he was a student at the same moment as he summons up the faces of fellow students from Indochina, young revolutionaries preparing to seize power and "kill in the name of the universal beautiful ideas".
No doubt the intensity of his early religious training contributed to his capacity to let perpetual light shine upon the quotidian, yet this religious poet was inhabited by another who was, in a very precise sense, a secular Milosz, one afflicted by the atrociousness of the saeculum he was fated to live through.
The word "century" usually preceded by the definite article or the possessive pronoun, first person singular, repeats and echoes all through his writing. It was as if he couldn't go anywhere without encountering, as he does in his poem, "A Treaty on Poetry", "The Spirit of History... out walking", wearing "About his neck a chain of severed heads". And it was his face-to-face encounters and contentions with this "inferior god" that darkened his understanding and endowed everything he wrote with grievous force.
Once, after a poetry reading in Harvard where he had seemed, as I later wrote, to combine the roles of Orpheus and Tiresias, he said to me: "I feel just like a little boy, playing on the bank of a river." And the poems convinced you that here too he was telling the truth. In fact, Milosz gave the lie to TS Eliot's line that human kind cannot bear very much reality. The young poet who started out with his peers in the cafés and controversies of 1930s Warsaw was present when those same young poets were dying in gunfire during the Warsaw Rising, their memorials little more than graffiti in the rubble of the devastated city. The old man, the sage of Grizzly Peak Road in Berkeley, veteran of the cold war, hero of Solidarity, friend of the pope, was at once the child "who receives First Communion in Wilno and afterwards drinks cocoa served by zealous Catholic ladies" and the poet who constantly heard "the immense call of the Particular, despite the earthly law that sentences memory to extinction" ("Capri").
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And yet Milosz was always impatient with "the insufficiency of lyric", as the poet Donald Davie expressed it, and indeed the insufficiency of all art, deeply conscious of the unattainability of the reality that surrounds us. His yearning for a more encompassing form of expression than is humanly available was a theme to which he returned again and again. "Arranging colors on a canvas is a paltry thing compared with what calls out to be explored."
Yet he also exulted in the certainty that he was called as a poet "to glorify things just because they are", and maintained that "the ideal life for a poet is to contemplate the word is ". In pursuit of this ideal, he brought poetry beyond the chalk circle of significant form and opened it to big vistas and small domesticities: his poems sometimes have the head-on exclamatory innocence of child art ("O happiness! To see an iris"), sometimes the panoramic sweep of synoptic historical meditation, as in "Oeconomia Divina": "I did not expect to live in such an unusual moment... / Roads on concrete pillars, cities of glass and cast iron, / airfields larger than tribal dominions / suddenly ran short of their essence and disintegrated... / Out of trees, field stones, even lemons on the table, / materiality escaped".
Yet by diagnosing the onset of this lightness of being Milosz effectively halted it for his readers, and much of his staying power as a poet will continue to reside in his exemplary obstinacy, his refusal to underprize the thickness of the actual and the sovereign value that can inhere in what we choose to remember. "What is pronounced strengthens itself. / What is not pronounced tends to nonexistence" ("Reading the Japanese Poet Issa").
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Out of reluctant matter
What can be gathered? Nothing, beauty at best.
And so, cherry blossoms must suffice for us
And chrysanthemums and the full moon. (“Out There”)
Ultimately, Milosz declared, “one can believe in God out of gratitude for all the gifts”.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/sep/11/featuresreviews.guardianreview25
Oriana:
Milosz can't be subsumed under a single label. He was a poet of history and a poet of religious ideas (he struggled to believe; he knew that at best he was a heretic, perhaps a Gnostic; the problem of evil was always with him). At the same time, he was a poet of nature and the body, of cherry trees and a woman's earrings and perfume. There is Milosz the sensualist and Milosz the ascetic, the intellectual, disgusted with the world. Milosz the humanitarian and Milosz the aloof judge of the cruelty he saw in both in humans and in nature, where everything devours everything else. Now we see Milosz the lamenting prophet, the "Guardian Mole" counting all that perishes; now Milosz the mystic who foresaw the resurrection of everything, even the tiniest insects.
If I were forced to choose a single label, I'd choose to call him the great poet of loss. He experienced many losses, many exiles, starting with the loss of his Lithuanian garden of Eden. But rather than submit to despair, he kept on struggling with the meaning of loss and impermanence. He circled around the religious solution — all will be restored — yet also knew that no modern man can accept the idea that real life starts only at the moment of death.
He knew that a creator of a world so full of suffering could not be called good. He found some semblance of consolation in the notion that Christ suffers with us, so even in the worst hour we are not alone. At the same time he brilliantly understood that it's technology and not science that is the primary reason we no longer turn to religion; thanks to technology we are not as helpless. He was pragmatic enough to see that. I'm tempted to say that on Monday he was a mystic, and on Tuesday a secular pragmatist. He was caught between two eras, the past that revered the landed gentry and all it stood for, and the present that rejected all of it as mostly hollow lies. He came to reject Marxism, but felt a revulsion toward capitalism -- perhaps because he was too Christian in the deep sense, too well-trained in the recitation of the Seven Deadly Sins.
At Berkeley his most popular class was on Dostoyevsky. He certainly understood the great Russian author's obsession with the problem of evil. But perhaps during those intervals of grace he called "eternal moments" he too felt (I don't want to say "thought," implying the rational plane) that "beauty will save the world."
Of course no such formula would satisfy him. His mind was too large for that — too aware of the complex interweave of good and evil to follow any single creed or ideology. With Whitman he could say, "I am large, I contain multitudes."
Milosz was as perceptive about language as about the complexity of history and humanity. Of course, he was a poet, living the truth of language's power to create and define. To know that "What is pronounced strengthens itself/ what is not pronounced tends to nonexistence," is to acknowledge how our naming of things, the way we talk about them, actually defines both ourselves and our societies. What distinguishes us from other animals, the evolutionary step most crucial to becoming human, was not bipedalism or bigger brains, but the development of language. In the beginning was the word — for every one of us home will always be those first words, the mother tongue.
Oriana:
Milosz is downright inexhaustible. Talk about a poet of ideas! He succeeds where Wallace Stevens often fails due to his overdependence on wordplay and imagination to dress up emotional emptiness. But Milosz grew up close to nature, and thus could draw on the imagery of the natural world as easily as Chinese poets.
A second huge difference is that he experienced the giant dramas of history. That gave him a rare depth, especially when we include his essays too. When I discovered Milosz, I spent a year or so reading more and more of him — here was someone who had transformed a lot of experience into language.
And yes, he understood the power of language to shape human psyche — first through his exposure to the religious propaganda of the Catholic church, and then the attempts at mind control through the special language of various ideologies, especially Marxism. His saving feature, and his special value as a public intellectual, is his grasp of complexity, his awareness that no religion or ideology can encompass reality without distortion, which often leads to evil. What remains is our heaven here on earth: the lakes, the woods, the Lithuanian meadows; and family love and the basic decency among humans.
“If, despite everything, I would not wish to live in the nineteenth century, because then I would not have the consciousness which I still find difficult to name, but which embraces humanity as a whole, as a unit, as predestination, then let’s put an end to this pessimistic chatter about regression or the circle of eternal return.” ~ Czeslaw Milosz
Oriana:
One of my favorite quotations by Milosz. He was a citizen of the world: "Here and everywhere is my homeland."
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“Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” ~ Terry Pratchett
Of course by the time you return you are not the same person, and the place is not quite the same either. Yet something of what you remembered is still there, sacred fragments of that first world coming into focus: these are the real trees, the real clouds of heaven; here is the one and only river. And the sound of your native language is the most beautiful music in the world.
That’s why Milosz ultimately settled in Krakow and not in Vilnius, which he loved in his youth. Vilnius was well preserved — the beautiful churches, the university — all the holy places of memory. But the language was now Lithuanian, and Milosz wanted to spend his last years hearing the sound of the Polish language. Like many exiles, he knew that home is the place where you go to die. Ultimately the language proved to be that primal, primary home.
The town where I was born: the Vistula River and the old granaries
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“Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing... Thus no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the previous generation.” ~ Kierkegaard, born 5 May 1813
Oriana:
But we do learn something about love from being nurtured by our parents. but I agree that when it comes to falling in love and falling out of love, we discover that drama by ourselves. There is no telling a young person in love for the first time that the passion will end.
But in a more important sense, we do learn something immense from our parents in particular, but in general from the older generation: the attitude toward others, the basic decency of caring about others. With luck, we learn that most people are decent and can be trusted. Much of what follows in this blog explores this idea.
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LORD OF THE FLIES? WHAT REALLY HAPPENED WHEN SIX BOYS WERE SHIPWRECKED
~ I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.
I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island? I wrote an article on the subject, in which I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently. Readers responded sceptically. All my examples concerned kids at home, at school, or at summer camp. Thus began my quest for a real-life Lord of the Flies. After trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: “One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip ... Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”
The article did not provide any sources. But sometimes all it takes is a stroke of luck. Sifting through a newspaper archive one day, I typed a year incorrectly and there it was. The reference to 1977 turned out to have been a typo. In the 6 October 1966 edition of Australian newspaper The Age, a headline jumped out at me: “Sunday showing for Tongan castaways”. The story concerned six boys who had been found three weeks earlier on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of ‘Ata for more than a year. According to the article, the captain had even got a television station to film a re-enactment of the boys’ adventure.
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My wife Maartje and I rented a car in Brisbane and some three hours later arrived at our destination, a spot in the middle of nowhere that stumped Google Maps. Yet there he was, sitting out in front of a low-slung house off the dirt road: the man who rescued six lost boys 50 years ago, Captain Peter Warner.
Peter went to work for his father’s company, yet the sea still beckoned, and whenever he could he went to Tasmania, where he kept his own fishing fleet. It was this that brought him to Tonga in the winter of 1966. On the way home he took a little detour and that’s when he saw it: a minuscule island in the azure sea, ‘Ata. The island had been inhabited once, until one dark day in 1863, when a slave ship appeared on the horizon and sailed off with the natives. Since then, ‘Ata had been deserted – cursed and forgotten.
But Peter noticed something odd. Peering through his binoculars, he saw burned patches on the green cliffs. “In the tropics it’s unusual for fires to start spontaneously,” he told us, a half century later. Then he saw a boy. Naked. Hair down to his shoulders. This wild creature leaped from the cliffside and plunged into the water. Suddenly more boys followed, screaming at the top of their lungs. It didn’t take long for the first boy to reach the boat. “My name is Stephen,” he cried in perfect English. “There are six of us and we reckon we’ve been here 15 months.”
In the months that followed I tried to reconstruct as precisely as possible what had happened on ‘Ata. Peter’s memory turned out to be excellent. Even at the age of 90, everything he recounted was consistent with my foremost other source, Mano, 15 years old at the time and now pushing 70, who lived just a few hours’ drive from him. The real Lord of the Flies, Mano told us, began in June 1965. The protagonists were six boys – Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand.
There was only one obstacle. None of them owned a boat, so they decided to “borrow” one from Mr Taniela Uhila, a fisherman they all disliked. The boys took little time to prepare for the voyage. Two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner were all the supplies they packed. It didn’t occur to any of them to bring a map, let alone a compass.
No one noticed the small craft leaving the harbour that evening. Skies were fair; only a mild breeze ruffled the calm sea. But that night the boys made a grave error. They fell asleep. A few hours later they awoke to water crashing down over their heads. It was dark. They hoisted the sail, which the wind promptly tore to shreds. Next to break was the rudder. “We drifted for eight days,” Mano told me. “Without food. Without water.” The boys tried catching fish. They managed to collect some rainwater in hollowed-out coconut shells and shared it equally between them, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening.
Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.
The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.
Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”
They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).
They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local physician later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen’s perfectly healed leg. But this wasn’t the end of the boys’ little adventure, because, when they arrived back in Nuku‘alofa police boarded Peter’s boat, arrested the boys and threw them in jail. Mr Taniela Uhila, whose sailing boat the boys had “borrowed” 15 months earlier, was still furious, and he’d decided to press charges.
Fortunately for the boys, Peter came up with a plan. It occurred to him that the story of their shipwreck was perfect Hollywood material. And being his father’s corporate accountant, Peter managed the company’s film rights and knew people in TV. So from Tonga, he called up the manager of Channel 7 in Sydney. “You can have the Australian rights,” he told them. “Give me the world rights.” Next, Peter paid Mr Uhila £150 for his old boat, and got the boys released on condition that they would cooperate with the movie. A few days later, a team from Channel 7 arrived.
The mood when the boys returned to their families in Tonga was jubilant. Almost the entire island of Haʻafeva – population 900 – had turned out to welcome them home. Peter was proclaimed a national hero. Soon he received a message from King Taufa‘ahau Tupou IV himself, inviting the captain for an audience. “Thank you for rescuing six of my subjects,” His Royal Highness said. “Now, is there anything I can do for you?” The captain didn’t have to think long. “Yes! I would like to trap lobster in these waters and start a business here.” The king consented. Peter returned to Sydney, resigned from his father’s company and commissioned a new ship. Then he had the six boys brought over and granted them the thing that had started it all: an opportunity to see the world beyond Tonga. He hired them as the crew of his new fishing boat.
While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read. Media historians even credit him as being the unwitting originator of one of the most popular entertainment genres on television today: reality TV. “I read and reread Lord of the Flies ,” divulged the creator of hit series Survivor in an interview.
It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other. After my wife took Peter’s picture, he turned to a cabinet and rummaged around for a bit, then drew out a heavy stack of papers that he laid in my hands. His memoirs, he explained, written for his children and grandchildren. I looked down at the first page. “Life has taught me a great deal,” it began, “including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.” ~ Rutger Bregman, from his new book Humankind
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months?utm_source=pocket-newtab
PRINCE PETER KROPOTKIN, THE ANARCHIST WHO BELIEVED THAT PEOPLE ARE GOOD
~ The message that only together can individuals thrive – isn’t a new one. It can be found in the remarkable story of a Russian prince-turned-anarchist who had an important message. Trust, trust, trust each other.
A PRINCE IS BORN
On a cold winter’s day in the Old Equerries’ quarter of Moscow, a prince is born. He’s the youngest scion of an ancient and wealthy line. The family owns more than 2,000 serfs and their house teems with maidservants. From birth, this prince is destined for a life of privilege.
When he is eight years old, a ball in honor of Tsar Nicholas I is organized in the sprawling House of the Nobles. The boy walks in a great parade of more than 50 children, dressed as a Persian prince. And that’s when it happens. No sooner have Moscow’s nobility taken their places in the great hall, than a small commotion ripples through the room. To his surprise, the tiny prince is plucked from the procession and lifted onto the imperial platform.
“That is the sort of boy you must bring me!” the tsar cries to his blushing daughter-in-law beside him. Whether because of the earnestness with which the little boy held up his flag or the corkscrew of curls beneath his fur cap, Nicholas I is enchanted. Then and there, the young prince is promoted to the corps of pages, a rare honor in those days. “My father was delighted,” he recalled years later, “and already dreamed of a brilliant court career for his son.”
By 3 September 1851, there was no doubt about it: Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was destined for a brilliant future.
Kropotkin, 1861
AN INCREDIBLE LIFE
Another 70 years passed before Kropotkin entered the gates of the House of the Nobles again – by then renamed the House of the Unions. Where as a little boy he’d been lifted onto the platform, now he was lying flat in a casket. An astounding 20,000 people flocked to his funeral. “Our Peter,” the people called him. In Great Britain, Oscar Wilde mourned “one of the most perfect lives I have come across in my experience”.
During his lifetime the prince became an international celebrity. He may have started out as the apple of the tsar’s eye, but he ended up fleeing halfway across the world to escape Russia’s secret police. Why? Because the prince had a radical and subversive idea; an idea that struck fear into the hearts of the ruling elites from Russia to Switzerland and from France to the US.
Peter Kropotkin believed that most people are pretty decent.
Kropotkin was far ahead of his time. He rejected both authoritarian communism and the iron cage of capitalism. He believed in the power of the individual, but equally that we can’t survive without each other.
In these times of growing inequality, a warming planet, and a virus run amok, the moment has come to radically rethink how we live. Reason enough to take a trip back to Russia around the middle of the 19th century. “Kropotkin is no messiah,” remarks a British historian, “but his writings force us to imagine a politics that might just help save the world.”
PANIC IN PRISON
Hands trembling, he rereads the note. It’s been smuggled in under the lid from a pocket watch, written in a code known only to Peter and his confidants. In a few terse lines, it sets out a plan. Be ready in two hours, he reads. There’s hardly time to think.
Later that afternoon, Peter Kropotkin is brought into the courtyard of the military hospital where he’s detained. His heart is racing. The guard escorting him has no idea what’s about to happen; he’s just following the doctor’s orders, letting the apparently ill patient stumble back and forth every day for a bit.
Some 15 minutes tick by. Suddenly, a violinist begins to play in the street beyond the prison. A rousing mazurka fills the courtyard, and Peter knows his moment has arrived.
Now! In two fluid motions he casts off his flannel dressing gown and sets off at a sprint. “He’s making a run for it! Stop him! Catch him!” Some peasants unloading wood at the open gate rush to intercept him. The guard, closely followed by three soldiers, is hot on his heels.
But the prince is too fast. “Jump in, quick, quick!” cries a coachman waiting outside. The racehorse – brought for just this purpose – leaps into a gallop. Behind them, shouts can be heard: “Hold them! Get them!”
Even more dangerous is the soldier stationed at the sentry post ahead. One of Peter’s friends manages to distract the man with a tale about a parasite. (“Did you ever see what a formidable tail it has?” – “What, man, a tail?” – “Yes, it has; under the microscope it’s as big a...” – “Don’t tell me any of your tales!”).
Careening down the street at a full gallop, the carriage makes its getaway. The prison officers call for a manhunt, but there’s not a carriage available for miles around – they’ve all been hired by the prince’s accomplices. “Everywhere we saw friends,” Peter later wrote, “who winked to us or gave us a Godspeed as we passed at the full trot of our beautiful horse.”
HIS MOST URGENT INSIGHT
The memory of this escape became the basis for Kropotkin’s greatest insight, 12 years later. And I don’t mean his geological work, which was groundbreaking, or his anarchist pamphlets.
I’m talking about his contribution to the theory of evolution, and its consequent view of human nature. Still dismissed and defamed a hundred years ago, now this story is more urgent than ever.
In 1888, Peter was living at the outskirts of London where he’d finally found peace. One day, he came across an essay by the celebrated scientist Thomas Henry Huxley. Its title: The Struggle for Existence: A Program.
It turned out that Huxley was a cynic. He believed humans are beasts: that the strong survive and the weak perish. He described an eternal struggle “of man against man and of nation against nation”. The only remedy for this evolutionary maelstrom, he wrote, was to turn our backs on our nature and embrace civilizing society.
This assertion echoed countless thinkers before him, from the Greek historian Thucydides to the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for whom civilization is just a thin veneer on our bestial nature. Which put Huxley – also known as “Darwin’s bulldog” – perfectly in tune with the spirit of his age.
Because this was where it all started: with Charles Robert Darwin. In 1859, after years of persistent doubts, the British theologian-turned-biologist was ready to announce his theory to the world. A revolutionary theory, developed over the course of a long Pacific voyage to the Galapagos Islands.
To a friend, he wrote that publishing On the Origin of Species felt “like confessing a murder”. Then something unexpected happened. Britain’s wealthy elites went wild for Darwin. Here at long last seemed to be a scientific justification for the yawning inequality in British society. It explained why, in Huxley’s words, the “privileged races” won out in “the struggle for existence”.
“Social Darwinists” began to argue that evolutionary theory should inform politics, too. Like the billionaire Andrew Carnegie, who swore his wealth was a product of natural law: “We accept and welcome (...) great inequality,” he pronounced. The philosopher Herbert Spencer sold hundreds of thousands of books in which he characterized life as an eternal battle. Regarding people living in poverty, he wrote:“The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better.”
Economic and biological theories began to converge. Where biologists said existence revolved around survival and reproduction, economists believed that we exist to consume and produce. And the engine driving it all, they agreed, was competition.
THE MAKING OF AN ANARCHIST
When Kropotkin reached the end of Huxley’s article, he thought back to his own escape. He recalled the woman who smuggled the note hidden in the watch to his prison cell, the violinist who played the mazurka, the friends who’d hired every carriage in town. And that’s when it struck him – the insight that biologists are still building on today. Human beings, Kropotkin realized, are hardwired to help one another out.
And so the prince began work on what would become his most important book, Mutual Aid (1902). His writing drew on the stack of notes he’d taken during a long trip taken 30 years before: a 50,000 mile expedition across Amur, the frigid far eastern reaches of Siberia.
It was in this region, where temperatures could drop to -40C (-40.0F), that Kropotkin conceived his first ideas about cooperation and friendship. No matter where he looked, he was unable to find the “ bitter struggle for the means of existence” that was “considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as … the main factor of evolution”.
In Siberia, animals had to work together to survive. Kropotkin studied birds, fish, and insects. Wherever he looked he saw struggle. Not against one another, but against the Siberian cold, drought, storms, and snow.
The prince believed this natural tendency to cooperate applied to humans, too. He saw how remote villages managed to govern themselves without the tsar ever lifting a finger on their behalf. This must be the society of the future, he thought: a federation of communes in which everyone voluntarily worked together. “In Siberia I lost all faith in state discipline,” he later wrote. “I was prepared to become an anarchist.”
ONE LEG SOCIAL, ONE LEG SELFISH
When you read about Kropotkin’s ideas and the prevailing discourse he opposed, you can’t help feeling time and again that this is about us. Social Darwinism may stem from the 19th century, but its view of human nature is evident all around us. You can see it on trading floors in London and New York, in the supply chains and distribution warehouses of Apple and Amazon, in the heads of untold managers and policymakers.
“The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed (...) is good,” declares Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street. “Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” Greed and fear, supposedly, are what drives us. Humankind has risen to great heights by fighting each other and crushing its weak. Because humans are animals, motivated solely by food, sex, and money. Only the powerful hand of the state can restrain us with an arsenal of rules, protocols, and violence.
Even today, reams of legislation are written from an assumption that most people are rotten. This assumption is constantly treated as biological fact, when nothing could be further from the truth. “Too many economists and politicians model society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere projection,” observes biologist Frans de Waal. “What we need is a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature.”
This discussion isn’t purely academic. Our view of human nature has huge implications for how we design our democracies, schools and workplaces. The debate between Huxley and Kropotkin hinged on the biggest questions we can ask. What is it to be human? How should we organize ourselves? And, can we trust one another?
Kropotkin knew that nature has its share of selfishness, struggle, and violence. But he also understood that the Social Darwinists were blind to something even bigger: mutual aid. Since his book, a tremendous body of scientific literature has emerged on altruism and kindness in humans and animals alike. “We walk on two legs, a social and a selfish one,” writes de Waal, who in a scientific sense is Kropotkin’s great-grand-successor.
This will never change.
But which foot we put forward makes all the difference. In recent decades we’ve been limping along, relying more and more on our selfish leg – and not without consequences. Anyone who expects the worst from someone else calls forth the worst in themselves.
Theories about human nature – unlike theories about molecules or black holes – can come true simply because we believe in them. This phenomenon was noted in the early 1990s by Robert Frank, an economics professor who saw his students grow increasingly selfish the longer they studied economics. In time, they seemed to become the picture of humanity they were taught.
What would happen if we turned this around? What if schools, businesses, and governments assumed that most people are doing their best? What if we rallied round our tendency to trust and cooperate – a tendency with every bit as much of an evolutionary basis, over hundreds of millions of years?
Maybe we wouldn’t have to drill our kids to compete with each other any longer. Maybe fewer employees would buckle under depression. Maybe we wouldn’t need so many managers and controllers. Maybe we could switch to other and more direct forms of democracy. Maybe the financial sector would revert to serving society instead of itself.
The tragedy of Kropotkin is that he was right too early. The great ideological battle of the 20th century was a contest between capitalism and communism; but the anarchist prince was convinced they were just two sides of the same human coin, of our shared humanity.
After the revolution of 1917, Kropotkin returned to his native Russia. He wound up disappointed. The new dictator, Vladimir Lenin, appeared to defy his ideas. In 1920 Kropotkin sent him a furious letter, warning that the word “socialism” would one day be considered a curse. State socialism, he predicted, would lead to “a new tyranny even more terrible than the old one”.
THE LAST IDEOLOGY
The life story of Peter Kropotkin may sound more like the stuff of Hollywood (why isn’t there a blockbuster about him yet?), but I think the prince’s ideas are more urgent now than ever. Because if there’s one thing we need in these times, it’s a hopeful view of humankind.
I [the author, Roger Bregman] was one year old when the Berlin Wall came down. The great battle between capitalism and communism was already over. When I was in elementary school, the age of the ideologies was declared finished, settled. Around the time my generation reached adulthood, in 2008, the final ideology came crashing down: the ideology of an omniscient market.
The market has not proved any less bureaucratic and oppressive than the state. Or, more accurately, the “invisible hand” of the market too often conceals the iron fist of the state. Politicians on both sides of the aisle tend to assume a negative view of human nature: the right suspects most people are self-centered and lazy; the left often doesn’t trust people to make their own decisions.
Don’t get me wrong: there’s a good deal in Kropotkin’s work that is dated and maybe even naive. I’m not advocating a society without government, as he did. I don’t believe revolutions can abruptly change the world, and most of all I don’t believe in the violence that some anarchists – including Kropotkin, in his youth – deem necessary to achieve it.
Even so, I think it’s time to dust off those old tomes and pamphlets. For a long time, it looked as if history had proved the dissident prince wrong. Kropotkin lived out his final days in a tiny village north of Moscow, sick from hunger and filled with anxiety for the future. He spent a couple of hours each day at work on his last book, about the good in human nature and the natural world.
But make no mistake: the story that started with Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin is far from finished. On the contrary, I believe there’s a good chance that it’s only just begun. ~ Roger Bregman, tr by Elizabeth Manton
https://thecorrespondent.com/443/brace-yourself-for-the-most-dangerous-idea-yet-most-people-are-pretty-decent/13570408368-5d02e964?pk_campaign=daily&fbclid=IwAR16OoJQwlKKhCG1vE3JXJXn9OxWhakDJ0hjkwI7jOs0ZCvw4HdjjNnyAt4
Kropotkin, 1886*
BREGMAN’S NEW BOOK ARGUES THAT PEOPLE ARE BASICALLY COOPERATIVE
~ “Humankind” declares that political debate for centuries has turned on a critical argument about human nature. In one corner stands Thomas Hobbes, insisting that, left to their own devices, people will turn on each other in a “war of all against all”: they need the institutions of civilization to restrain their otherwise base instincts. In the other corner stands Jean-Jacques Rousseau, countering “that man is naturally good, and that it is from these institutions alone that men become wicked”.
Bregman charts how Hobbes won the argument. Society and its key institutions – schools, companies, prisons – have been designed based on a set of bleak assumptions about human nature. But, Bregman says, the scientific evidence suggests those assumptions are badly flawed, that as a species we’ve been getting ourselves wrong for far too long.
This is where he has most fun, methodically dismantling some of the best-known nuggets of sociological and psychological conventional wisdom. Bregman considers the famous Milgram experiments – which purported to reveal that regular US citizens were willing to administer fatal electric shocks to strangers, so long as they were ordered to do so by a figure of authority – exposing that study’s deep methodological flaws. Did the people of Easter Island really turn on each other in a brutal war that descended into cannibalism? The evidence suggests otherwise.
Stone by stone, Bregman breaks up the foundations that underpin much of our understanding of ourselves as callous, uncaring creatures hiding beneath a veneer of civilization. That understanding has acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy, he says: if people expect the worst of each other, they’ll get it. He can cite the experiments that show even lab rats behave worse when their handlers assume they’ll behave badly. Our true nature is to be kind, caring and cooperative, he argues. We used to be like that – and we can be again.
It’s surely not a coincidence that Bregman’s father is a Protestant minister. (His mother is a special needs teacher.) Humankind is the story of a fall from grace. Back when we were hunter-gatherers, we roamed peacefully in the Garden of Eden; then we enclosed a square of land, called it our own, invented property and settled down to defend it, wars began and our innocence was lost. Somehow, we have to find our way back to the Garden. Admittedly, that’s my summary of the book, but there’s even a section called The Other Cheek. Bregman may say he’s an atheist, but this is an intensely Christian work, isn’t it?
He laughs and admits: “In many ways, it is. I couldn’t help myself, writing the epilogue, thinking about what the rules for life could be if you held this [benign] view of human nature. I found myself quoting the Sermon on the Mount over and over again.” He remembers being a student and losing interest in the traditional questions of dogma – does God exist, did Jesus die for our sins – and being more interested in the effect religious belief has on believers. “Back then there were all these books being published by famous atheist writers like [Richard] Dawkins and [Sam] Harris, with subtitles like ‘How Religion Poisons Everything’. And I was like, you guys have got to meet my parents. This is clearly wrong.” As for his father, the priest: “People often say that I followed in his footsteps, that I’m just a secular version.”
The argument he makes is compelling, not least his suggestion that gloomy assessments of humankind such as William Golding’s or Milgram’s flourished in the postwar era, as the world tried to make sense of the Holocaust. One section of the book is titled “After Auschwitz”. Which brings us to the biggest roadblock in the way of his argument. How to square the notion that humans are fundamentally good with a long and continuing history of humanmade horror, exemplified by the Nazi slaughter of 6 million Jews, including more than a million children? Bregman does an admirable job debunking those post-Holocaust experiments and theories, but the Holocaust itself still stands there, implacable and unmoving.
He has thought about it hard, noting that people are only really capable of doing dreadful things once they are physically distant from each other (and the book has fascinating stats on soldiers’ recurrent refusal to shoot at the enemy, a pattern going back centuries). But what about the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads that murdered an estimated 1.3 million Jews up close? Those men had established “psychological distance” from their victims, Bregman says, after exposure to years of Nazi propaganda. That might account for the German gunmen, but what about their collaborators in Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Ukraine, people who’d had far less such exposure?
Bregman cites evidence that the motivation of perpetrators was often rooted in qualities we’d ordinarily admire: loyalty to their fellow soldiers, for example. He notes how the friendliness that sets humans apart – he calls our species “Homo Puppy” – has a dark side, because empathy with “us” can turn to murderous hostility to “not us”. “Our secret superpower” is our friendliness and ability to cooperate, he says, and yet “we’re also the cruellest of species”. But surely, that latter statement fatally undermines his thesis?
“I would emphasize that I’m not actually saying that people are good. The title of the book in Dutch is De Meeste Mensen Deugen, which is ‘Most People Are Deugen’, with deugen a word that you cannot translate. It’s sort of like ‘pretty decent deep down’ or ‘good after all’.” Later he refers to human destructiveness in these terms: “We’re not born to do this, but we’re capable of it.”
So does his confidence extend to this current moment? Is a reshaping of society towards cooperation and equality, at work, at school, in prison and in politics on its way? He says he doesn’t know, though he was struck by a recent and much-discussed Financial Times editorial calling for redistribution, UBI and wealth taxes. He’s been heartened by the “explosion of cooperation and altruism and people organizing stuff from the bottom up” in response to the pandemic. But he says the crucial thing is that the left is ready when the immediate crisis passes, that its ideas are the ones “lying around” waiting to be picked up. Among those close to the top of the pile will, surely, be his. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/rutger-bregman-our-secret-superpower-is-our-ability-to-cooperate
Oriana:
I wished the title got translated into English as “Most People Are Pretty Decent.” That makes room for bad apples, whose existence can’t be denied or completely explained. Fortunately, psychopaths are a small (though highly destructive) minority. And there is something to the idea that “history is made by bad people,” as I.B. Singer put it.
But psychopaths who become dictators isn’t the whole story. It’s rather the disquieting exception. Humans are the most social of social animals — “Homo Puppy,” to use Bregman’s term. The dark side of that exceptional empathy is that it is reserved for “our” group. If our group feels threatened by another group, hostility is easily aroused.
And I love the title: Our secret superpower is our ability to cooperate. Imagine if this became a universally known saying. A good idea can lead to good behavior. As for bad ideas, I think Sam Harris said it best:
Mary: BEWARE OF THE LANGUAGE OF AGGRESSION
How we name things shapes both understanding and assumption, determining behavior, social organization and history. Hobbes, Darwin, Social Darwinism, Capitalism, Marxism...in all of these the most basic term is competition. All is framed within a constant struggle, from the way nature is seen and described to the entire sweep of human life, survival is a process of competing for the means to existence, whether that is land, space, water, food, money, time, or even love, acceptance and pleasure. Every individual always out for themselves, in opposition to his competitors. This gives us everything from sibling rivalry to global warfare. Everything can be talked about in terms of war, from the interior lives of individuals to social processes..we have seen the war on poverty, the war on drugs, and now the war on the current pandemic .
This kind of characterization is based on an idea of scarcity...there must always be a winner and a loser, there's only so much “stuff” — space, food, money, gloves, masks, ventilators, medicine — and we have to struggle fiercely to get what we need. The ideas of abundance and cooperation are foreign, and the evidence for them tends to fade or be ignored in the full spate of social discourse. Nature is red in tooth and claw, culture always just a step away from devolving into barbarism, as in Golding's choirboys turned savages.
What isn't often considered is that these are not only self-defining justifications for systems of social inequality (that can become monstrosities resulting in catastrophe..the Holocaust, genocides) — they are circular, self-creating systems, treadmills, traps for perpetrating what they supposedly simply describe. If language is full of war and aggression, conflict and competition, behavior and reality will inevitably follow suit. As poets always know, words are never neutral.
The views of Rousseau and Kropotkin, of that sermon on the mount and the true story of the six boys marooned on the island, interpret nature and humanity in a very different way. While we may struggle for the means of existence, one of our principal tools, and most essential characteristics, is cooperation. We are not solitary, but social animals. Even infants have been shown to tend toward cooperation and fairness, things as much a part of us as selfishness, and just as necessary to survival. Maybe even more necessary.
These ideas, and the language that frames them, has for quite a while been relegated to the background, even characterized as too naive for sophisticated minds. It seems we would be wise now more than ever, to give them an airing, a platform, and some honest consideration. The potential for positive change is huge, and urgent.
Oriana:
The view of human nature as basically evil is the foundation of conservatism, while the faith in progress toward ever-greater cooperation — the much-reviled “faith in humanity” — underlies progressivism. And yet deep down, does anyone really doubt that if marooned on an island, a group of people would cooperate for the sake of survival? One person can’t budge a heavy log, but two or more people can roll it; soon we have shelter, fire, cooking, and so on. We have civilization.
Darwin knew that humans are basically cooperative; his thought got distorted by some of his vociferous followers. Herbert Spencer, not Darwin, coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”; it wasn’t long before some concluded that those “unfit” should be exterminated. Alas, language has the power to inspire both altruistic and murderous behavior.
Since it’s biology that got perverted to create murderous ideologies, we can (and perhaps must) take a look at how we are indeed biologically programmed. And it turns out that we are “wired” to help others — our brain rewards us with a feeling of happiness when we act with kindness. The sense of fairness is also innate, even in preverbal toddlers. We see the same in other social species. But only humans have a language that can juggle abstractions — and that can be our undoing. It is indeed unnerving to note how the language of war permeates the public discourse.
Religion too can be perverted for "ungodly" purposes. By now many have pointed out that the the East doesn't have the doctrine of the Original Sin, with the consequent belief that human nature is "fallen" and evil from birth. Baptism is supposed to wash off the "stain of Original Sin," but unless you die in infancy, somehow the stain is permanent, and we are all wretched sinners who deserve eternal damnation. But the true "good news" is not that Jesus died for our sins, but that, being social animals, we are wired to feel good when we help others.
If I repeat myself, it's because I know that this message is still very feeble next to religious propaganda of sin and the need of punishment. Actually, we thrive on affection and reward. This is still a secret. Pass it on.
Rutger Bregman*
ARE WEALTH AND POVERTY “DESERVED”?
~ With ideals of meritocracy reinforced in American culture, it is tempting to assume that those who are wealthy have worked hard and fairly earned their affluence. But that wouldn’t tell the whole story. One study from 2017 found that 60 percent of wealth is inherited rather than worked for.
Evidence suggests that simply having wealth, whether earned or by luck, increases one’s justification for it. Also known as the Just-World Fallacy, those who are on top of the social ladder, that is, those with money, power, and influence, believe the world is just. Those in the middle think the world is somewhat just, and those at the bottom believe the world is unjust.
Researcher Paul Piff cleverly demonstrated this by giving some participants a clear advantage in a game of Monopoly such as giving them extra money. When he asked participants why they (inevitably) won, they described how they had made smart decisions, and downplayed their privileged position.
Those who believe the world is just, that is, believe you get what you work for, are more likely to justify inequality and victim-blame. If those who are wealthy are automatically seen as good, it is assumed that the poor must have done something to deserve their misfortune. This was addressed by political author Sarah Kendzior, who said: "When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatize those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.”
Blaming the poor for their circumstances disregards the potential physical, psychological, and neurological effects of poverty. Poverty has the largest association with people’s later well-being if they were in poverty between 0 and 2 years of age, a time before children can even make decisions for themselves. Brain scans from children in low- and high-income families show striking differences in areas involved in memory, language processing, decision-making, and self-control.
Understanding that wealth is no indication of one’s capacity for compassion or moral character can have important implications for public policy. For example, some participants of a Swedish survey were informed that half of all wealth is inherited, those with the highest incomes inherit the most, and that most Swedish billionaires inherited their fortunes. Those given this information were more likely to support an estate tax compared with those who were not. When wealth is no longer equated with worthiness, research indicating the greater political influence the wealthy have compared to ordinary citizens becomes even more disturbing.
While the American Dream feels out of reach for many, it doesn’t have to. Rather than blaming the poor for their circumstances, we can use data-driven policies to address the needs of the nation. I echo the words of Elizabeth Gilbert, a philanthropist and member of The Compassion Collective, who wrote, “Those of us who are warm and dry and safe and well-fed must show up for those who are cold and wet and endangered and hungry. That’s a rule of life.” ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pulling-through/202003/the-lazy-poor-or-the-entitled-rich
*
TRAITS THAT PREDICT A SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIP
~ What are the most important things to prioritize if you want to have a happy and successful relationship? Decades of research into relationship satisfaction and longevity points to several key qualities you may be able to spot early on:
1. Kindness, loyalty, and understanding (not looks, status, and excitement).
When people are asked to list the most important qualities in a potential partner, kindness, physical attractiveness, an exciting personality, and income/earning potential tend to top the list. But once you're actually involved in a relationship, some of these traits become more important than others. Research I described in detail in an earlier post found that those whose partners meet their ideals in terms of warmth and loyalty are more satisfied with their relationships. Having a partner who meets one's ideals in terms of physical attractiveness, excitement, status, and wealth, on the other hand, is much less correlated with overall satisfaction. This research also found that having a partner who fell short on attractiveness, status, and excitement did not affect satisfaction if that partner was also highly warm, kind, and loyal. In other words, those more "superficial' traits were not important at all for those whose partners were kind, understanding, and loyal.
2. Similarity.
You should seek someone who is similar to you. A large body of research shows that we are attracted to people who are similar to us, especially those who share our attitudes and values. And, in fact, similar couples are happier. Research has shown that couples who share tastes, interests, and expectations tend to encounter fewer conflicts. When you like the same kinds of food, movies, or hobbies, and have the same attitudes toward work-leisure balance, child-rearing, and social obligations, there is just less to fight about. There is also evidence that spouses who start out more similar in terms of educational attainment, age, and desired number of children are less likely to get divorced.
3. Conscientiousness.
Conscientiousness is about being reliable, practical, rule-following, and organized. This may not sound like the sexiest set of traits, but it’s a good package for a long-term mate. People who are conscientious tend to bring that trait into their relationships and are more dependable and trustworthy.6 People who are less conscientious are more difficult to deal with in a relationship – They cancel plans, fail to fulfill their obligations around the house, act carelessly, and fall through on their promises. That unpopular kid in high school who always got his or her homework done and followed all the rules could make a more trustworthy and dependable spouse in the future.
4. Emotional stability.
The personality trait that affects our relationships most is emotional stability.7 Those who lack it tend to be moody, touchy, anxious, and quicker to anger — all traits that make someone more difficult to live with. Those high in neuroticism (the opposite of emotional stability) are much more likely to have negative and argumentative interactions with others, including their partners.8,9 They also tend to be more jealous and less forgiving.10,11 Not surprisingly, then, individuals high in neuroticism are more likely to end up divorced.12 In the early stages of dating, watch out for someone who seems excessively touchy or anxious: It could be a sign that a relationship with that person will be rocky.
5. The belief that relationships take work.
When you’re just starting a relationship, it’s hard to anticipate how things will change after months or years together, and how a partner will deal with the inevitable bumps in the road. But you can get a sense of how hard they will work to maintain a happy relationship and resolve conflicts. How? You need to understand their general philosophy about relationships.
Researchers have identified two primary sets of beliefs about relationships — growth beliefs and destiny beliefs. Those with destiny beliefs think that relationships are either "meant to be" or not. They believe that once two soul mates unite, everything will be perfect — when a relationship is meant to be, everything will just work out. But if there are problems, that’s just a sign that you’re with the wrong person.
In contrast, those with growth beliefs think that relationships take hard work and that a strong relationship is something that you develop over time. They believe that all relationships inevitably encounter problems and that having a stronger relationship means working hard to cope with difficulties that arise.
These different attitudes toward relationships have major implications for how people cope with relationship difficulties. When people with destiny beliefs hit a bump, they assume it’s a sign that their relationship is doomed. So they tend to avoid conflicts and become angry if they must acknowledge their partner’s faults — because that would mean the relationship is not meant to be. And when the going gets tough, they give up, rather than working to repair the damage. In contrast, those with growth beliefs are more open to discussing problems, and respond positively to challenges in the relationship by working to resolve them. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/close-encounters/201702/5-essential-qualities-romantic-partner?utm_source=FacebookPost&utm_medium=FBPost&utm_campaign=FBPost&fbclid=IwAR1yw2E68gD2x-4HKhctobjC-lax0otXVeg6msyrh8oTxowVAxsZVcvL2PE
Oriana:
I hate to think how much I had to suffer before I realized that kindness was more important than intellectual brilliance. Brilliance still attracts me — but at this point I know that getting involved with a brilliant narcissist is a death wish. I treasure my own quiet life too much to risk losing it, even temporarily.
Likewise, I’ve learned a lot about conflict resolution — and the primary importance of respect, empathy, and compassion. I also like to say that love is a set of caring behaviors more so than a feeling. The love that is centered on mutual nurturing is also a pact of non-abandonment: for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.
Those words of the traditional wedding vows emerged from collective wisdom. We honor marriage because the spouses are supposed to be there for each other, to help each other in the hour of need — even if it takes some self-sacrifice. Ultimately it's about basic decency: we don't abandon our life partner.
Dysfunctional marriages are conducted as warfare; happy marriages are based on cooperation. As one therapist remarked, his great struggle is to convince warring couples that they are both on the same side.
Lovers; John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1880*
THE SECRET LIVES OF FUNGI
“R. Gordon Wasson learned of a so-called “divine mushroom” consumed in remote corners of the world. In 1955, he finally found one of these communities, a small town in the mountains of southern Mexico. At the house of a local shaman, Wasson drank chocolate, then spent thirty minutes chewing “acrid” mushrooms. “I could not have been happier: this was the culmination of years of pursuit,” Wasson wrote. For the next few hours, he experienced visions—resplendent motifs and patterns, mythical beasts and grand vistas, streams of brilliant color, constantly morphing and oozing, whether his eyes were open or closed—and he felt connected to everything he saw. “It was as though the walls of our house had dissolved,” he wrote, and his spirit were soaring through the mountains.
For many, the pleasure of psilocybin is in giving oneself up to the weft of a connected world, and making peace with one’s smallness.
The fact that Wasson was an otherwise straitlaced, politically conservative bank executive at J. P. Morgan lent this adventure a serious and respectable air. He began to wonder if he had unlocked a mystery uniting all of humanity: “Was it not probable that, long ago, long before the beginnings of written history, our ancestors had worshiped a divine mushroom?”
Wasson’s discovery turned, briefly, into a movement. Timothy Leary read about the Wassons and went to experience the mushroom himself, starting the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Spurred on by evangelists like Leary, young Americans turned to drugs (LSD, too, is derived from a fungus), along with alternative approaches to agriculture, diet, and sustainable living. Within a few years, the backlash against psychedelic drugs was in full swing, macrobiotic eating was relegated to the fringes, and it seemed that America had returned to its generally mycophobic ways.
But our attitudes toward the fungal kingdom may be evolving, with respect both to pharmacology and to food. Psilocybin has already been decriminalized in Santa Cruz, Oakland, and Denver. Meanwhile, the American diet includes more mushrooms than it used to—about four pounds per person a year, a gradual increase from just one in the sixties. The hefty portobello burger is ubiquitous, and, even before the current pandemic, there was a growing interest in the everyday role that fungi play in our lives on a microbial level: “home fermentation” (whether for sourdough, kombucha, kimchee, or harder stuff) has become a mainstream hobby.
Fungus, as Merlin Sheldrake writes in “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures” (Random House), is everywhere, yet easy to miss. Mushrooms are the most glamorous but possibly least interesting members of this kingdom. Most fungi take the form of tiny cylindrical threads, from which hyphal tips branch in all directions, creating a meandering, gossamer-like network known as mycelium.
Fungus has been breaking down organic matter for millions of years, transforming it into soil. A handful of healthy soil might contain miles of mycelia, invisible to the human eye. It’s estimated that there are a million and a half species of fungus, though nearly ninety per cent of them remain undocumented. Before any plants were taller than three feet, and before any animal with a backbone had made it out of the water, the earth was dotted with two-story-tall, silo-like fungi called prototaxites. The largest living organism on earth today is a fungus in Oregon just beneath the ground, covering about 3.7 square miles and estimated to weigh as much as thirty-five thousand tons.
If fungus can inspire awe, it can also be a nuisance or worse, from athlete’s foot to the stem rust that afflicts wheat and is considered a major threat to global food security. Last year, the C.D.C. identified the Candida auris as an emerging public-health concern; it’s a sometimes fatal, drug-resistant pathogen that has emerged in hospitals and nursing homes around the world. The more we learn about fungi, Sheldrake observes, the less the natural world makes sense without them.
Sheldrake was drawn to fungi because they are humble yet astonishingly versatile organisms, “eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of the earth’s atmosphere.” Plants make their own food, converting the world around them into nutrients. Animals must find their food. But fungi essentially acquire theirs by secreting digestive enzymes into their environment, and absorbing whatever is nearby: a rotten apple, an old tree trunk, an animal carcass. If you’ve ever looked closely at a moldy piece of bread—mold, like yeast, being a type of fungus—what appears to be a layer of fuzz is actually millions of minuscule hyphal tips, busily breaking down matter into nutrients.
The fungus kingdom spreads by way of spores. This is where mushrooms, the part of fungus that makes it above ground, show their prowess. The shaggy inkcap mushroom—soft and tender when cooked—can break through asphalt and concrete pavement. Each year, fungi produce more than fifty megatons of spores. Some mushrooms are capable of onetime exertions in which spores are catapulted through the air at speeds of fifty-five miles an hour. But the contribution that fungi make to the larger ecology is fundamental: by turning biomass into soil, they recycle dead organic matter back into organic life.
Penicillin had famously been isolated by accident, in 1928, when Alexander Fleming noticed that his petri-dish colony of staphylococcus had been ravaged by an incidental growth of mold. Perhaps our old-growth forests, filled with mycelia that had adapted in order to ward off invasive bacteria, held the key to preventing future pandemics. Their preservation, Stamets believed, was a matter of national security.
Stamets is an advocate of what he calls mycoremediation—the use of fungi to remove toxic substances from the environment. Fungi have helped clean up diesel-contaminated soil; they’ve broken down pesticide residues, crude oil, and plastics. Disposable diapers can linger in a landfill for hundreds of years, but in 2014 scientists reported that they had grown oyster mushrooms on a substance made from used diapers, reducing their weight and volume by eighty per cent. (And the mushrooms were safe to eat.)
Mycelium is even capable of filtering E. coli or heavy metals from polluted water. Sheldrake describes a company in Finland that has adopted these mycofiltration techniques to reclaim gold from electronic waste. The firm Ecovative Designs has developed mycelium-based packaging that resembles Styrofoam but biodegrades within thirty days. It also helped devise a mycelium-based alternative to leather, which was used in a prototype of a Stella McCartney handbag.
For Wasson, fungus was related to the transcendent, the realm of worship, of reverence; for Stamets, fungus was an instrument for environmental resilience and restoration. But can fungus, finally, provide a political vision? What might we learn, Sheldrake asks, from the “mutualism” and coöperation of a seemingly brainless organism?
Sheldrake notes that the hyphal tips of mycelium seem to communicate with one another, making decisions without a real center. He describes an experiment conducted a couple of years ago by a British computer scientist, Andrew Adamatzky, who detected waves of electrical activity in oyster mushrooms, which spiked sharply when the mushrooms were exposed to a flame. Adamatzky posited that the mushroom might be a kind of “living circuit board.” The point isn’t that mushrooms would replace silicon chips. But if fungi already function as sensors, processing and transmitting information through their networks, then what could they potentially tell (or warn) us about the state of our ecosystem, were we able to interpret their signals?
Sheldrake also tells us about Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist who was taken with Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” and its insights on inequality. She wondered how mycorrhizal networks, the symbiotic intertwining of plant systems and mycelium, deal with their own, natural encounters with inequity. Kiers exposed a single fungus to an unequally distributed supply of phosphorus. Somehow the fungus “coordinated its trading behavior across the network,” Sheldrake writes, essentially shuttling phosphorus to parts of the mycelial network for trade with the plant system according to a “buy low, sell high” logic.
The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has explored the story of global capitalism through mushrooms. In 2015, she published “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins,” which followed the trade in the prized matsutake mushroom from a community of Southeast Asian refugees who are among the top foragers in the Pacific Northwest to the auction markets of Japan, where matsutake fetch a thousand dollars a kilogram, and on to chefs and discriminating diners in the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.
Maybe the vision that unites our mycophiles, from Wasson to Stamets and Sheldrake, isn’t so freakish, after all. The divine secret is the magic of the mundane, and one needn’t fly too high to witness it. The composer John Cage was an avid forager who supplemented his income by selling prized mushrooms to upscale restaurants. He once persuaded administrators at the New School to allow him to teach a course on mycology alongside his music classes. “Often I go in the woods thinking after all these years I ought finally to be bored with fungi,” Cage confided in his diaries. But his sense of revelatory delight never faltered. “Supreme good fortune,” he wrote, as he held a fine specimen in his hand. “We’re both alive!”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-secret-lives-of-fungi?
COTTON MATHER, AN EARLY ADVOCATE OF VACCINATION
~ Cotton Mather was no friend of reason. An excitable minister and hyper-prolific author in colonial Massachusetts, he became a driving force behind the Salem witch trials, which cost 14 innocent women and six equally innocent men their lives.
Mather is no longer as well known for his contributions to science and public health. Clergymen were often the public intellectuals of their day, and many dabbled in philosophy, medicine, and other fields. When a deadly smallpox epidemic swept through New England in 1721, infecting half of Boston, Mather took to scientific inquiry when he could’ve been expected to join the fatalist stance of the uselessly devout. You know the drill: God is angry at us; human intervention is pointless/blasphemous; we must surrender to Him and pray that He’ll eliminate the scourge.
Manseau reminds us that unlike the Jesus is my vaccine crowd, even Mather, the pious puritan who fancied himself divinely inspired, ultimately chose sense over sanctitude. Mather began advocating a new technique called inoculation — and was attacked for it by printer James Franklin (Benjamin‘s brother) and others.
Writes Manseau: [Mather] began to wonder: If it was in humanity’s power to counteract illness through the God-given gift of the intellect, wouldn’t it be wrong to fail to do so? … He … read as many European medical texts as he could lay his hands on. Emboldened by these interests, Mather proposed a radical new treatment — inoculation. … But doing so meant breaking ranks with both his country’s religious elite and what then passed for common sense: If plagues were sent by God, to work against them was blasphemy.
The controversy that followed was both the first conflict between science and religion in America and the first media-addled public health disaster.
Mather … had first learned of inoculation’s efficacy from Boston’s enslaved population, who had received the treatment before being kidnapped, sold and brought to America. … [Slaves’] accounts proved that in non-Christian lands he had thought inferior to his own, the supposedly cutting-edge practice was commonplace.
When the origin of Mather’s opinions became known, suspicion of the practice became more fervent than ever. Like current anti-shutdown efforts, opposition to inoculation was shadowed by violence. A lit grenade thrown through the minister’s window came with a note: “Mather, you dog! I’ll inoculate you with this!” Apparently the fuse fell out when it hit the floor. …
“Is it not taking God’s work out of His hands?” opponents demanded of inoculation. “Is it any better than dictating [to God] what measure of His judgement we intend to have?”
Manseau perhaps captures the fear that grips today’s Christian “reopen lobby” by observing eighteenth-century New Englanders’ mental struggle at the time.
If inoculation worked, … then God was not in control; and if God was not in control, many feared they would not have their greatest source of solace just when they needed it most.
Regardless: inoculation did work.
While Mather was experimenting with the procedure, prominent Puritan pastors Benjamin Colman and William Cooper expressed public and theological support for them. The practice of smallpox inoculation was eventually accepted by the general population due to first-hand experiences and personal relationships. Although many were initially wary of the concept, it was because people were able to witness the procedure’s consistently positive results, within their own community of ordinary citizens, that it became widely utilized and supported.
P.S.: It beggars belief that three hundred years later, we’re still battling the same narrow, frightened minds. Why can’t conservative Christians accept masks, social distancing, and other public-health recommendations by experts as tools given to us by God, if that makes them feel better? ~
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/05/09/when-witch-hunter-cotton-mather-faced-an-epidemic-he-chose-science-over-faith/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=FBCP-PATH&fbclid=IwAR1MDe3AKqP70TpdW3GN6YW3cqNl7NBPLYeKoY9eHin1fLai1UthyzPU3Dc
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OUTDOORS IS SAFEST; WORST: ENCLOSED PLACES WHERE PEOPLE BREATHE THE SAME AIR OVER AN EXTENDED PERIOD OF TIME
“The virus often spreads inside confined spaces, like restaurants, churches, workplaces and schools. Even when people remain more than six feet apart, they can become infected breathing the same said for an extended period of time. Those scenarios are more worrisome than a quick trip to the grocery store or almost any outdoor activity.
Ignoring the terrible outbreaks in nursing homes, we find that the biggest outbreaks are in prisons, religious ceremonies, and workplaces, such a meat packing facilities and call centers. Any environment that is enclosed, with poor air circulation and high density of people, spells trouble.
Some of the biggest super-spreading events are:
Meat packing: In meat processing plants, densely packed workers must communicate to one another amidst the deafening drum of industrial machinery and a cold-room virus-preserving environment. There are now outbreaks in 115 facilities across 23 states, 5000+ workers infected, with 20 dead.
Weddings, funerals, birthdays: 10% of early spreading events
Business networking: Face-to-face business networking like the Biogen Conference in Boston in March.
We know most people get infected in their own home. A household member contracts the virus in the community and brings it into the house where sustained contact between household members leads to infection.
But where are people contracting the infection in the community? I regularly hear people worrying about grocery stores, bike rides, inconsiderate runners who are not wearing masks.... are these places of concern? Well, not really.
Bathrooms have a lot of high touch surfaces, door handles, faucets, stall doors. So fomite transfer risk in this environment can be high. We still do not know whether a person releases infectious material in feces or just fragmented virus, but we do know that toilet flushing does aerosolize many droplets. Treat public bathrooms with extra caution (surface and air), until we know more about the risk.”
https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20200511&instance_id=18384&nl=the-morning®i_id=62348556&segment_id=27239&te=1&user_id=e18ae510841c77329a0e2626cc03d351
“One study of 1,245 coronavirus cases across China found that only two came from outdoors transmission." (New York Times, May 14, 20020)
Oriana:
In summary, outdoors seems safest. Most risky: enclosed spaces with lots of people and no good airflow. Think of a crowded, noisy restaurant: the louder people talk, the more droplets (potentially containing the virus) are released into the air. Think of a church choir practice: people standing close together, singing — singing releases a lot of droplets.
Nursing homes, prisons and jails are obviously the epicenters of contagion. Add meat-packing plants to this sad list.
But huge supermarkets, with social distancing and a large volume of circulating air, are not dangerous. A jogger, even though he’s panting, presents very little risk as he passes you by. During such brief outdoors encounter, you’re not likely to be exposed to a large dose of virus long enough. Prolonged unprotected talking face to face, however, is another story.
THE VIROLOGIST WHO DISCOVERED THE EBOLA VIRUS GETS COVID-19
~ Virologist Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, fell ill with COVID-19 in mid-March. He spent a week in a hospital and has been recovering at his home in London since. Climbing a flight of stairs still leaves him breathless.
Piot, who grew up in Belgium, was one of the discoverers of the Ebola virus in 1976 and spent his career fighting infectious diseases. He headed the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS between 1995 and 2008 and is currently a coronavirus adviser to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. But his personal confrontation with the new coronavirus was a life-changing experience, Piot says.
This interview took place on 2 May. Piot’s answers have been edited and translated from Dutch:
“On 19 March, I suddenly had a high fever and a stabbing headache. My skull and hair felt very painful, which was bizarre. I didn’t have a cough at the time, but still, my first reflex was: I have it. I kept working—I’m a workaholic—but from home. We put a lot of effort into teleworking at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine last year, so that we didn’t have to travel as much. That investment, made in the context of the fight against global warming, is now very useful, of course.
I tested positive for COVID-19, as I suspected. I put myself in isolation in the guest room at home. But the fever didn’t go away. I had never been seriously ill and have not taken a day of sick leave the past 10 years. I live a pretty healthy life and walk regularly. The only risk factor for corona is my age—I’m 71. I’m an optimist, so I thought it would pass. But on 1 April, a doctor friend advised me to get a thorough examination because the fever and especially the exhaustion were getting worse and worse.
It turned out I had severe oxygen deficiency, although I still wasn’t short of breath. Lung images showed I had severe pneumonia, typical of COVID-19, as well as bacterial pneumonia. I constantly felt exhausted, while normally I’m always buzzing with energy. It wasn’t just fatigue, but complete exhaustion; I’ll never forget that feeling. I had to be hospitalized, although I tested negative for the virus in the meantime.
This is also typical for COVID-19: The virus disappears, but its consequences linger for weeks.
I was concerned I would be put on a ventilator immediately because I had seen publications showing it increases your chance of dying. I was pretty scared, but fortunately, they just gave me an oxygen mask first and that turned out to work. So, I ended up in an isolation room in the antechamber of the intensive care department. You’re tired, so you’re resigned to your fate. You completely surrender to the nursing staff. You live in a routine from syringe to infusion and you hope you make it. I am usually quite proactive in the way I operate, but here I was 100% patient.
I shared a room with a homeless person, a Colombian cleaner, and a man from Bangladesh—all three diabetics, incidentally, which is consistent with the known picture of the disease. The days and nights were lonely because no one had the energy to talk. I could only whisper for weeks; even now, my voice loses power in the evening. But I always had that question going around in my head: How will I be when I get out of this?
After fighting viruses all over the world for more than 40 years, I have become an expert in infections. I’m glad I had corona and not Ebola, although I read a scientific study yesterday that concluded you have a 30% chance of dying if you end up in a British hospital with COVID-19. That’s about the same overall mortality rate as for Ebola in 2014 in West Africa. That makes you lose your scientific level-headedness at times, and you surrender to emotional reflections. They got me, I sometimes thought. I have devoted my life to fighting viruses and finally, they get their revenge. For a week I balanced between heaven and Earth, on the edge of what could have been the end.
I was released from the hospital after a long week. I traveled home by public transport. I wanted to see the city, with its empty streets, its closed pubs, and its surprisingly fresh air. There was nobody on the street—a strange experience. I couldn’t walk properly because my muscles were weakened from lying down and from the lack of movement, which is not a good thing when you’re treating a lung condition. At home, I cried for a long time. I also slept badly for a while. The risk that something could still go seriously wrong keeps going through your head. You’re locked up again, but you’ve got to put things like that into perspective. I now admire Nelson Mandela even more than I used to. He was locked in prison for 27 years but came out as a great reconciler.
I have always had great respect for viruses, and that has not diminished. I have devoted much of my life to the fight against the AIDS virus. It’s such a clever thing; it evades everything we do to block it. Now that I have felt the compelling presence of a virus in my body myself, I look at viruses differently. I realize this one will change my life, despite the confrontational experiences I’ve had with viruses before. I feel more vulnerable.
One week after I was discharged, I became increasingly short of breath. I had to go to the hospital again, but fortunately, I could be treated on an outpatient basis. I turned out to have an organizing pneumonia-induced lung disease, caused by a so-called cytokine storm. It’s a result of your immune defense going into overdrive. Many people do not die from the tissue damage caused by the virus, but from the exaggerated response of their immune system, which doesn’t know what to do with the virus. I’m still under treatment for that, with high doses of corticosteroids that slow down the immune system.
If I had had that storm along with the symptoms of the viral outbreak in my body, I wouldn’t have survived. I had atrial fibrillation, with my heart rate going up to 170 beats per minute; that also needs to be controlled with therapy, particularly to prevent blood clotting events, including stroke. This is an underestimated ability of the virus: It can probably affect all the organs in our body.
Many people think COVID-19 kills 1% of patients, and the rest get away with some flulike symptoms. But the story gets more complicated. Many people will be left with chronic kidney and heart problems. Even their neural system is disrupted. There will be hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, possibly more, who will need treatments such as renal dialysis for the rest of their lives. The more we learn about the coronavirus, the more questions arise. We are learning while we are sailing. That’s why I get so annoyed by the many commentators on the sidelines who, without much insight, criticize the scientists and policymakers trying hard to get the epidemic under control. That’s very unfair.
Today, after 7 weeks, I feel more or less in shape for the first time. I ate white asparagus, which I order from a Turkish greengrocer around the corner from my home; I’m from Keerbergen, Belgium, an asparagus-growing community. My lung images finally look better again. I opened up a good bottle of wine to celebrate, the first in a long time. I want to get back to work, although my activity will be limited for a while. The first thing I picked up again is my work as a COVID-19 R&D special adviser to von der Leyen.
The Commission is strongly committed to supporting the development of a vaccine. Let’s be clear: Without a coronavirus vaccine, we will never be able to live normally again. The only real exit strategy from this crisis is a vaccine that can be rolled out worldwide. That means producing billions of doses of it, which, in itself, is a huge challenge in terms of manufacturing logistics. And despite the efforts, it is still not even certain that developing a COVID-19 vaccine is possible.
Today there’s also the paradox that some people who owe their lives to vaccines no longer want their children to be vaccinated. That could become a problem if we want to roll out a vaccine against the coronavirus, because if too many people refuse to join, we will never get the pandemic under control.
I hope this crisis will ease political tensions in a number of areas. It may be an illusion, but we have seen in the past that polio vaccination campaigns have led to truces. Likewise, I hope that the World Health Organization [WHO], which is doing a great job in the fight against COVID-19, can be reformed to make it less bureaucratic and less dependent on advisory committees in which individual countries primarily defend their own interests. WHO too often becomes a political playground.
Anyway, I remain a born optimist. And now that I have faced death, my tolerance levels for nonsense and bullshit have gone down even more than before. So, I continue calmly and enthusiastically, although more selectively than before my illness.” ~
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/finally-virus-got-me-scientist-who-fought-ebola-and-hiv-reflects-facing-death-covid-19?fbclid=IwAR2lHh4eGvb-YVLJs3uaNHg9oVcdwBIJuj7MxSvCtFH4H9nEeXoVxMEUb0A#
Oriana:
Piot’s story confirms the main message from other survivors of covid-19 whose symptoms weren’t mild — it takes a long time to recover, and the effects of the illness are likely to persist for months. There may also be chronic heart and kidney damage.
But it's also good to remember that most of those who become infected have only mild symptoms, or even none. One reason may be that we've acquired partial immunity thanks to our exposure to other coronaviruses, those that cause the common cold.
ending on beauty:
Oh, body, be held now by whom you love.
Whole years will be spent, underneath these impossible stars,
when dirt’s the only animal who will sleep with you
& touch you with
its mouth.
~ Aracelis Girmay
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