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DANTE
del mio bel San Giovanni ~ Inferno XIX:17
Even after his death, he did not return
To his ancient Florence.
To he who leaving never looked back,
I sing this song.
Torches, night, a last embrace,
Beyond the threshold the wild howl of fate.
From hell he sent his curses to her,
In paradise could not forget her —
But he never walked in a hair-shirt
Barefoot, with a lighted candle,
Through that city — beloved,
Perfidious, base, and longed for…
~ Anna Akhmatova
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“In 1301, the White Guelfs sent Dante to Rome on a mission to secure the Pope’s support for their cause. But while he was away from Florence the Black Guelfs seized power. They banished Dante in absentia and confiscated his property; he would burn at the stake should he ever return. He never did, even in 1315, when the city offered to commute his sentence if he repented publicly. Exile was preferable to abasement for a man of his temperament, which was reported to be vain and contentious. After leaving Purgatory’s terrace of pride, he worries that he’ll be remanded there after death.” ~ from The New Yorker, September 2021, Reading Dante’s Purgatory while the World Hangs in Balance
Oriana:
Akhmatova’s great love for St. Petersburg made it vivid for Akhmatova what it must have been like for Dante to be exiled from Florence.
And she knew from experience that “wild howl of fate.”
photo: Sasa Gyoker
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READING DANTE’S PURGATORY
~ Last spring I began reading three new translations of Purgatory, being published to coincide with the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death, at fifty-six, in September of 1321. “Di che potenza vieni?” -- “From what power do you come?” Purgatory, like the other two canticles of what Dante called his “sacred” epic, Inferno and Paradise, takes place during Easter week in 1300. In Canto I, the pilgrim and his cicerone, Virgil, emerge from Hell and arrive at the mountain “of that second kingdom where the human spirit purges itself to become worthy of Heaven.” Dante’s body, still clad in its flesh, inspires marvel among the shades because it casts a shadow. They mob him with questions: From where has he come?
Dante was a good companion for the pandemic, a dark wood from which the escape route remains uncertain. The plagues he describes are still with us: of sectarian violence, and of the greed for power that corrupts a regime. His medieval theology isn’t much consolation to a modern nonbeliever, yet his art and its truths feel more necessary than ever: that greater love for others is an antidote to the world’s barbarities, that evil may be understood as a sin against love, and that a soul can’t hope to dispel its anguish without first plumbing it.
An underworld where spirits migrate after death has always been part of humankind’s imagination. Nearly every culture, including the most ancient, has a name for it: Diyu, Naraka, Sheol, Tartarus, Hades. But there is no Purgatory in the Bible, or in Protestantism, or in Eastern Orthodoxy. In current Catholic dogma, it is a state of being rather than an actual realm between Hell and Heaven: an inner fire in the conscience of sinners that refines their impurities.
The concept of Purgatory was relatively new when Dante was born; it came into currency in the twelfth century, perhaps among French theologians. This invention of a liminal space where sinners who had repented but still had work to do on their souls was a great consolation to the faithful. It was also a boon for the Church. By the late Middle Ages, you could shorten your detention by years, centuries, or even millennia by paying a hefty sum to a “pardoner,” like Chaucer’s pilgrim. A popular ditty captured the cynicism this practice inspired: “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings / The soul from Purgatory springs.”
Before Dante, though, the notion of Purgatory was an empty lot waiting for a visionary developer. His blueprint is an invention of exquisite specificity. A ziggurat-like mountain ringed with seven terraces, one for each of the cardinal sins, rises from the sea in the Southern Hemisphere, opposite the globe from Jerusalem, with the Earthly Paradise at its summit. According to Dante, this mountain was formed by the impact of Satan’s fall to Earth. His descent brought grief to the children of Eve—those “seductions of sin and evil” that every godparent must renounce. But it also created a stairway to Heaven.
Dante’s conception of Purgatory is remarkably like a wilderness boot camp. Its terrain is forbidding—more like an alp than like a Tuscan hillside. Each of the rugged terraces is a setting for group therapy, where supernatural counselors dispense tough love. Their charges are sinners, yet not incorrigibles: they all embraced Jesus as their savior. But, before dying, they harmed others and themselves, so their spirits need reëducation. They will graduate to the Earthly Paradise, and eventually to Heaven, after however much time it takes them to transcend their mortal failings by owning them.
For many students of Dante, Purgatory is the Divine Comedy’s central canticle poetically, philosophically, and psychologically. It is, as one of its best translators, the poet W. S. Merwin, noted, the only one that “happens on the earth, as our lives do. . . . Here the times of day recur with all the sensations and associations that the hours bring with them, the hours of the world we are living as we read.” And here, too, he reflects, there is “hope, as it is experienced nowhere else in the poem, for there is none in Hell, and Paradise is fulfillment itself.”
Dante fought in the cavalry at Campaldino, and war must have given him a foretaste of Hell. But then he went back to civilian life, becoming a nova in Florence’s literary firmament. He made princely friends who admired his poetry. Among them was another of Italy’s greatest poets, Guido Cavalcanti, although Dante wouldn’t spare his father from damnation for heresy.
By 1295, Dante had finished “Vita Nuova,” a stylized autobiography. Its author is a self-absorbed youth with the leisure to moon after an aloof woman.
Several ladies elicit Dante’s gallantry in the “Vita,” but only one, Beatrice, inspires his adoration. Her probable model was Beatrice di Folco Portinari. Her father and husband were rich Florentine bankers; she died in her early twenties. Dante claims that he was first smitten with Beatrice as a nine-year-old; she was a few months younger and dressed fetchingly in crimson. At that moment, he “began to tremble so violently that even the least pulses of my body were strangely affected.” He next catches sight of her at eighteen, now “dressed in pure white,” and when she greets him he feels he is experiencing “the very summit of bliss.” That night, he dreams of her asleep, “naked except for a crimson cloth,” in the arms of a “lordly man.” The man wakes her, holding a blazing heart—Dante’s—and compels her to eat it, which she does “unsurely.”
The “other woman” of the “Vita” was not the girl to whom Dante had been betrothed when he was not quite twelve, and whom he had married as a young man. His lawful wife was Gemma Donati. Her family was nobler and richer than the Alighieris, and they led the Black Guelfs. He mentions several of his wife’s relatives in the Comedy. (One, the virtuous Piccarda, whose odious brother tore her from a convent and forced her to marry, greets him in Paradise; another, Forese, a friend of his youth, is a glutton in Purgatory.) But he never acknowledged Gemma’s existence in any of his works. One would like to think that Dante ghosted her out of discretion—she was beholden to his persecutors. Perhaps, though, the rueful shade of Ulysses hits upon the real reason in Inferno:
Neither tenderness for my son,
Nor duty to my old father,
Nor the debt of love I owed Penelope,
To make her happy, could compete
With my ardor to know the world,
And all things human, base and noble.
If Gemma was Dante’s Penelope, Beatrice was his Athena—the divine protectress of his odyssey. And the final chapter of the “Vita” announces a future joint enterprise. The guilty swain vows to atone for his betrayal by writing of Beatrice “what has never been said of another woman.”
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Dante spent the last nineteen years of his working life as an itinerant diplomat and secretary for the lords of northern Italy. The poem that he called, simply, the “Comedy” (a Venetian edition of 1555 added the adjective “Divine,” and it stuck) is the work of an embittered asylum seeker. Its profoundest lesson may be that love’s wellspring is forgiveness. Yet Dante never forgave Florence. Even in Paradise, he can’t resist a swipe at his fellow-citizens. They are “little brats who swat away their nurse’s breast though they’re dying of hunger.”
As the narrator of the Comedy and its central persona, Dante wrestles with his fellow-feeling for sinners condemned to torments that he has invented. Nowhere is the tension between his orthodoxy and his nascent humanism more acute than in Canto XV of Inferno, when a shade with features scorched by the flames clutches at the poet’s hem. “Brunetto, master, you are here?” Dante cries out, palpably shocked.
Brunetto Latini, a Florentine poet and statesman, had been Dante’s mentor after his parents’ deaths. He has been condemned to the Seventh Circle for practicing the vice of sodomy, about which, apparently, he was unrepentant. But the tenderness both men express, and their mourning for what they have lost in each other—a father and a son—is in its way a heretical rebuke to the implacable order that forbids their reunion in Heaven. “If all that I ask were fulfilled,” Dante says, “you wouldn’t be an outcast from human nature.”
Virgil, who died two decades before Christ’s coming, is also excluded from Heaven, yet he bears that sorrow stoically. He tells Dante that it’s a presumption to question divine justice, even when it seems unfair, and to confuse “piety” with “pity” (the same word in Italian, pietà). Salvation, Dante will discover, requires the surrender of precisely that attribute to which he is most attached as an artist, a lover, and a man: his ego.
As Dante and Virgil make their arduous circuit of Purgatory’s terraces, they ask directions from the shades, who share their stories and explain their penances. Like birds of prey being tamed by a falconer, the envious have their eyes sewn shut. The gluttons are mortified by starvation amid tormenting aromas. The lustful must pass through a wall of flames. The proud stagger beneath a sack of boulders, and the slothful atone with manic activity. But Dante is an embed, rather than a mere tourist. A sword-wielding angel scarifies his brow with seven letters—“P”s, for peccato, or sin. Once he understands a sin humbly and viscerally, he ascends to the next terrace, and a “P” is erased. Fear and exhaustion sometimes tempt him with dejection, but, Virgil tells him,
This mountain’s nature
If Gemma was Dante’s Penelope, Beatrice was his Athena—the divine protectress of his odyssey. And the final chapter of the “Vita” announces a future joint enterprise. The guilty swain vows to atone for his betrayal by writing of Beatrice “what has never been said of another woman.”
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Dante spent the last nineteen years of his working life as an itinerant diplomat and secretary for the lords of northern Italy. The poem that he called, simply, the “Comedy” (a Venetian edition of 1555 added the adjective “Divine,” and it stuck) is the work of an embittered asylum seeker. Its profoundest lesson may be that love’s wellspring is forgiveness. Yet Dante never forgave Florence. Even in Paradise, he can’t resist a swipe at his fellow-citizens. They are “little brats who swat away their nurse’s breast though they’re dying of hunger.”
As the narrator of the Comedy and its central persona, Dante wrestles with his fellow-feeling for sinners condemned to torments that he has invented. Nowhere is the tension between his orthodoxy and his nascent humanism more acute than in Canto XV of Inferno, when a shade with features scorched by the flames clutches at the poet’s hem. “Brunetto, master, you are here?” Dante cries out, palpably shocked.
Brunetto Latini, a Florentine poet and statesman, had been Dante’s mentor after his parents’ deaths. He has been condemned to the Seventh Circle for practicing the vice of sodomy, about which, apparently, he was unrepentant. But the tenderness both men express, and their mourning for what they have lost in each other—a father and a son—is in its way a heretical rebuke to the implacable order that forbids their reunion in Heaven. “If all that I ask were fulfilled,” Dante says, “you wouldn’t be an outcast from human nature.”
Virgil, who died two decades before Christ’s coming, is also excluded from Heaven, yet he bears that sorrow stoically. He tells Dante that it’s a presumption to question divine justice, even when it seems unfair, and to confuse “piety” with “pity” (the same word in Italian, pietà). Salvation, Dante will discover, requires the surrender of precisely that attribute to which he is most attached as an artist, a lover, and a man: his ego.
As Dante and Virgil make their arduous circuit of Purgatory’s terraces, they ask directions from the shades, who share their stories and explain their penances. Like birds of prey being tamed by a falconer, the envious have their eyes sewn shut. The gluttons are mortified by starvation amid tormenting aromas. The lustful must pass through a wall of flames. The proud stagger beneath a sack of boulders, and the slothful atone with manic activity. But Dante is an embed, rather than a mere tourist. A sword-wielding angel scarifies his brow with seven letters—“P”s, for peccato, or sin. Once he understands a sin humbly and viscerally, he ascends to the next terrace, and a “P” is erased. Fear and exhaustion sometimes tempt him with dejection, but, Virgil tells him,
This mountain’s nature
Is to seem steepest from below;
The climb is less painful the higher you go.
Finally, in the Earthly Paradise situated at Purgatory’s summit, Dante reunites with Beatrice. She has descended from her place in Heaven, near the Virgin Mary’s, not to welcome but to confront him:
Finally, in the Earthly Paradise situated at Purgatory’s summit, Dante reunites with Beatrice. She has descended from her place in Heaven, near the Virgin Mary’s, not to welcome but to confront him:
. . . In your desires for me,
Which led you to love the good
Beyond which one can’t aspire,
What ruts or chains in the road
Forced you to ditch any hope
Of advancement?
And what bribes or lures
In others’ eyes enticed you
To dally so idly there?
“Answer me!” she commands, as Dante cowers mutely. He compares himself to a naughty little boy being scolded.
No one has told Beatrice that, according to St. Paul, women are forbidden to teach men. She chastises Dante with a pontifical authority that few members of her sex would have then dared to vaunt. In her perfect beauty and wisdom, she explains, she embodies God’s love, so Dante’s fickleness toward her is ingratitude to the Creator. His repentance ultimately wins her absolution and consummates their love story.
But, for all her endearing feistiness, Beatrice is uniquely implausible among Dante’s major characters. She’s an abstract mouthpiece for her creator’s philosophy who lacks her own vital substance. (The Virgin Mary, by comparison, is a relatable woman who has labored and suffered.) In that respect, the poet’s otherwise incomparable powers of imagination slight Beatrice and us.
Even as a figment, however, Dante’s Beatrice has an enduring prestige as the object of a man’s ardent longing. Did her halo of romance tantalize the poet’s daughter? Dante and Gemma had at least three children. Two of their sons were among the Comedy’s first commentators. The boys’ younger sister, Antonia, became a nun in Ravenna, where Dante died and is buried in a splendid tomb. She is said to have taken the name Suor Beatrice. The poignancy of that detail haunts me. Antonia was a baby when her father was exiled, so she grew up without knowing him—yearning, it would seem, to be worthy of the love that he had vowed so publicly to an ideal woman.
Many readers don’t get farther with Dante than Inferno, for obvious reasons: depravity is a more compelling subject than virtue, as you discover when you reach Paradise. Inferno’s denizens are our familiars—we meet their avatars every day. It’s a place, as Merwin put it, where “the self and its despair [are] forever inseparable,” a predicament we think of as modern, perhaps because it suggests the claustrophobia of narcissism.
Translators have also preferred Inferno: its tableaux of carnage are so thrillingly obscene. In a famous passage, Dante meets Muhammad in the “bedlam” of the Eighth Circle, where the sowers of discord get their comeuppance. (Muhammad’s “sin” was to have lured his followers away from the true church. Dante was a fierce critic of the papacy but a militant defender of Catholic theology.)
I never saw a barrel burst apart,
“Answer me!” she commands, as Dante cowers mutely. He compares himself to a naughty little boy being scolded.
No one has told Beatrice that, according to St. Paul, women are forbidden to teach men. She chastises Dante with a pontifical authority that few members of her sex would have then dared to vaunt. In her perfect beauty and wisdom, she explains, she embodies God’s love, so Dante’s fickleness toward her is ingratitude to the Creator. His repentance ultimately wins her absolution and consummates their love story.
But, for all her endearing feistiness, Beatrice is uniquely implausible among Dante’s major characters. She’s an abstract mouthpiece for her creator’s philosophy who lacks her own vital substance. (The Virgin Mary, by comparison, is a relatable woman who has labored and suffered.) In that respect, the poet’s otherwise incomparable powers of imagination slight Beatrice and us.
Even as a figment, however, Dante’s Beatrice has an enduring prestige as the object of a man’s ardent longing. Did her halo of romance tantalize the poet’s daughter? Dante and Gemma had at least three children. Two of their sons were among the Comedy’s first commentators. The boys’ younger sister, Antonia, became a nun in Ravenna, where Dante died and is buried in a splendid tomb. She is said to have taken the name Suor Beatrice. The poignancy of that detail haunts me. Antonia was a baby when her father was exiled, so she grew up without knowing him—yearning, it would seem, to be worthy of the love that he had vowed so publicly to an ideal woman.
Many readers don’t get farther with Dante than Inferno, for obvious reasons: depravity is a more compelling subject than virtue, as you discover when you reach Paradise. Inferno’s denizens are our familiars—we meet their avatars every day. It’s a place, as Merwin put it, where “the self and its despair [are] forever inseparable,” a predicament we think of as modern, perhaps because it suggests the claustrophobia of narcissism.
Translators have also preferred Inferno: its tableaux of carnage are so thrillingly obscene. In a famous passage, Dante meets Muhammad in the “bedlam” of the Eighth Circle, where the sowers of discord get their comeuppance. (Muhammad’s “sin” was to have lured his followers away from the true church. Dante was a fierce critic of the papacy but a militant defender of Catholic theology.)
I never saw a barrel burst apart,
Having sprung a hoop or slipped a stave,
Like that man split down to where we fart,
His guts between his legs, his body splayed,
His guts between his legs, his body splayed,
Its organs hanging out, among them that foul sac
Which turns to shit all that we eat.
As I beheld this gore he looked at me
As I beheld this gore he looked at me
And even wider tore his breast apart
“See how I spread myself,” said he.
Evil is never banal in Dante’s depiction. Nor are the traitors, counterfeiters, rabble-rousers, thieves, hypocrites, corrupt pols, charlatans, flatterers, pimps, blasphemers, usurers, sodomites, suicides, plunderers, murderers, heretics, spendthrifts, melancholics, gluttons, sex addicts, or, at the threshold of Hell, those apathetic souls whose sin was ingratitude for the life force they were born with. Each one is indelibly individual. Yet, if Dante can show a bodhisattva’s compassion for the sufferings he has devised, he is also susceptible to that most human of guilty pleasures: Schadenfreude. At every opportunity on his journey to beatitude, he settles a score.
The Comedy is a morality tale designed, in part, to scare its readers straight, not to free them from their hangups. But in Purgatory Dante describes a process—slow and arduous, like analysis—of unriddling the mysteries of self-sabotage. As Beatrice puts it to him:
From dread and shame I want you
Evil is never banal in Dante’s depiction. Nor are the traitors, counterfeiters, rabble-rousers, thieves, hypocrites, corrupt pols, charlatans, flatterers, pimps, blasphemers, usurers, sodomites, suicides, plunderers, murderers, heretics, spendthrifts, melancholics, gluttons, sex addicts, or, at the threshold of Hell, those apathetic souls whose sin was ingratitude for the life force they were born with. Each one is indelibly individual. Yet, if Dante can show a bodhisattva’s compassion for the sufferings he has devised, he is also susceptible to that most human of guilty pleasures: Schadenfreude. At every opportunity on his journey to beatitude, he settles a score.
The Comedy is a morality tale designed, in part, to scare its readers straight, not to free them from their hangups. But in Purgatory Dante describes a process—slow and arduous, like analysis—of unriddling the mysteries of self-sabotage. As Beatrice puts it to him:
From dread and shame I want you
To evolve, so you no longer speak
As in a dream.
In his commentary on the poem, Black likens the terraces where the penitents “go round and round” to the “circling thoughts of those who can’t let go of the past.” That describes most of history. There seems to be no escape from our worst natures; it would take a miracle no deity has ever wrought.
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction,” James Baldwin wrote, “and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” But Dante (here in Black’s thoughtful rendering) invites us to believe that we can banish our demons, alone and together, if we resist unconsciousness:
As a man dismayed who turns to face the facts
changes his fear to trust in his own strength
when to his eyes the truth has been uncovered
So I changed; and when my leader saw me freed
from those anxieties, up by the rampart
he moved, and I behind him, toward the height. ~
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/reading-dantes-purgatory-while-the-world-hangs-in-the-balance?
In his commentary on the poem, Black likens the terraces where the penitents “go round and round” to the “circling thoughts of those who can’t let go of the past.” That describes most of history. There seems to be no escape from our worst natures; it would take a miracle no deity has ever wrought.
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction,” James Baldwin wrote, “and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” But Dante (here in Black’s thoughtful rendering) invites us to believe that we can banish our demons, alone and together, if we resist unconsciousness:
As a man dismayed who turns to face the facts
changes his fear to trust in his own strength
when to his eyes the truth has been uncovered
So I changed; and when my leader saw me freed
from those anxieties, up by the rampart
he moved, and I behind him, toward the height. ~
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/reading-dantes-purgatory-while-the-world-hangs-in-the-balance?
Oriana:
“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible God,” said Jorge Luis Borges. But Dante’s sanctified Beatrice is infallible. After submitting to the severe tongue-lashing with which she greeted him, Dante follows her like a puppy. But that’s already in Paradiso, which most find the most boring part of the Commedia. A poem needs conflict, a tension of the opposites; the singing of praises can go on only for so long before losing our interest.
My theological problem with the concept of Purgatory is this: why can’t all the sinners be given a chance to be purified? Why the pointless, sadistic torment in the Inferno? If the answer is that hell is for the unrepentant sinners, why not give them a chance to repent by administering precisely that moral education that governs Purgatory? Why not give them a hope for something better than hell? (So basically my greatest theological problem is hell, rather than purgatory -- though our life on earth could be said to be purgatory enough.)
“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible God,” said Jorge Luis Borges. But Dante’s sanctified Beatrice is infallible. After submitting to the severe tongue-lashing with which she greeted him, Dante follows her like a puppy. But that’s already in Paradiso, which most find the most boring part of the Commedia. A poem needs conflict, a tension of the opposites; the singing of praises can go on only for so long before losing our interest.
My theological problem with the concept of Purgatory is this: why can’t all the sinners be given a chance to be purified? Why the pointless, sadistic torment in the Inferno? If the answer is that hell is for the unrepentant sinners, why not give them a chance to repent by administering precisely that moral education that governs Purgatory? Why not give them a hope for something better than hell? (So basically my greatest theological problem is hell, rather than purgatory -- though our life on earth could be said to be purgatory enough.)
(On a different note: this is a marvelous article. I especially like the statement, "If Gemma was his Penelope, then Beatrice was his Athena, the divine protectress of his odyssey." I have never before thought of Dante in Odyssean terms -- rather as a moralizer with a rather sadistic imagination. But there was indeed that "explorer of worlds" aspect of Dante, even if his great journey took place entirely in his imagination.)
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“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” ~ Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.
Heather Cox Richardson: THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM, THE BLOODIEST BATTLE OF THE CIVIL WAR
~ The armies clashed as the sun rose about 5:30 on the clear fall morning of September 17, 159 years ago (1862). For twelve hours the men slashed at each other. Amid the smoke and fire, soldiers fell. Twelve hours later, more than 2000 U.S. soldiers lay dead and more than 10,000 of their comrades were wounded or missing. Fifteen hundred Confederates had fallen in the battle, and another 9000 or so were wounded or captured. The United States had lost 25% of its fighting force; the Confederates, 31%. The First Texas Infantry lost 82% of its men.
That slaughter was brought home to northern families in a novel way after the battle. Photographer Alexander Gardner, working for the great photographer Matthew Brady, brought his camera to Antietam two days after the guns fell silent. Until Gardner’s field experiment, photography had been limited almost entirely to studios. People sent formal photos home and recorded family images for posterity, as if photographs were portraits.
Taking his camera outside, Gardner recorded seventy images of Antietam for people back home. His stark images showed bridges and famous generals, but they also showed rows of bodies, twisted and bloating in the sun as they awaited burial. By any standards these war photos were horrific, but to a people who had never seen anything like it before, they were earth-shattering.
White southern men had marched off to war in 1861 expecting that they would fight and win a heroic battle or two and that their easy victories over the northerners they dismissed as emasculated shopkeepers would enable them to create a new nation based in white supremacy. In the 1850s, pro-slavery lawmakers had taken over the United States government, but white southerners were a minority and they knew it. When the election of 1860 put into power lawmakers and a president who rejected their worldview, they decided to destroy the nation.
~ The armies clashed as the sun rose about 5:30 on the clear fall morning of September 17, 159 years ago (1862). For twelve hours the men slashed at each other. Amid the smoke and fire, soldiers fell. Twelve hours later, more than 2000 U.S. soldiers lay dead and more than 10,000 of their comrades were wounded or missing. Fifteen hundred Confederates had fallen in the battle, and another 9000 or so were wounded or captured. The United States had lost 25% of its fighting force; the Confederates, 31%. The First Texas Infantry lost 82% of its men.
That slaughter was brought home to northern families in a novel way after the battle. Photographer Alexander Gardner, working for the great photographer Matthew Brady, brought his camera to Antietam two days after the guns fell silent. Until Gardner’s field experiment, photography had been limited almost entirely to studios. People sent formal photos home and recorded family images for posterity, as if photographs were portraits.
Taking his camera outside, Gardner recorded seventy images of Antietam for people back home. His stark images showed bridges and famous generals, but they also showed rows of bodies, twisted and bloating in the sun as they awaited burial. By any standards these war photos were horrific, but to a people who had never seen anything like it before, they were earth-shattering.
White southern men had marched off to war in 1861 expecting that they would fight and win a heroic battle or two and that their easy victories over the northerners they dismissed as emasculated shopkeepers would enable them to create a new nation based in white supremacy. In the 1850s, pro-slavery lawmakers had taken over the United States government, but white southerners were a minority and they knew it. When the election of 1860 put into power lawmakers and a president who rejected their worldview, they decided to destroy the nation.
Eager to gain power in the rebellion, pro-secession politicians raced to extremes, assuring their constituencies that they were defending the true nature of a strong new country and that those defending the old version of the United States would never fight effectively.
On March 21, 1861, the future vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, laid out the world he thought white southerners should fight for. He explained that the Founders were wrong to base the government on the principle that humans were inherently equal, and that northerners were behind the times with their adherence to the outdated idea that “the negro is equal, and…entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man.” Confederate leaders had corrected the Founders’ error. They had rested the Confederacy on the “great truth” that “the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
White southern leaders talked easily about a coming war, assuring prospective soldiers that defeating the United States Army would be a matter of a fight or, perhaps, two. South Carolina Senator James Chesnut Jr. assured his neighbors that there would be so few casualties he would be happy to drink all the blood shed in a fight between the South and the North. And so, poorer white southerners marched to war.
The July 1861 Battle of Bull Run put the conceit of an easy victory to rest. Although the Confederates ultimately routed the U.S. soldiers, the southern men were shocked at what they experienced. “Never have I conceived of such a continuous, rushing hailstorm of shot, shell, and musketry as fell around and among us for hours together,” one wrote home. “We who escaped are constantly wondering how we could possibly have come out of the action alive.”
Northerners, too, had initially thought the war against the blustering southerners would be quick and easy, so quick and easy that some congressmen brought picnics to Bull Run to watch the fighting, only to get caught in the rout as soldiers ditched their rucksacks and guns and ran back toward the capital. Those at home, though, could continue to imagine the war as a heroic contest.
They could elevate the carnage, that is, until Matthew Brady exhibited Gardner’s images of Antietam at his studio in New York City. People who saw the placard announcing “The Dead of Antietam” and climbed the stairs up to Brady’s rooms to see the images found that their ideas about war were changed forever.
“The dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams,” one reporter mused. “We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type.” But Gardner’s photographs erased the distance between the battlefield and the home front. They brought home the fact that every name on a casualty list “represents a bleeding, mangled corpse.” “If [Gardner] has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it,” the shocked reporter commented.
The horrific images of Antietam showed to those on the home front the real cost of war they had entered with bluster and flippant assurances that it would be bloodless and easy. Southern politicians had promised that white rebels fighting to create a nation whose legal system enshrined white supremacy would easily overcome a mongrel army defending the principle of human equality.
The dead at Antietam’s Bloody Lane and Dunker Church proved they were wrong. The Battle of Antietam was enough of a Union victory to allow President Abraham Lincoln to issue the preliminary emancipation proclamation, warning southern states that on January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State,” where people still fought against the United States, “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the…government of the United States…will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons....”
Lincoln’s proclamation meant that anti-slavery England would not formally enter the war on the side of the Confederates, dashing their hopes of foreign intervention, and in November 1863, Lincoln redefined the war as one not simply to restore the Union, but to protect a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
To that principle, northerners and Black southerners rallied, despite the grinding horror of the battlefields, and in 1865, they defeated the Confederates.
But they did not defeat the idea the Confederates fought, killed, and died for: a nation in which the law distinguishes among people according to the color of their skin. Today, once again, politicians are telling their followers that such a hierarchy is the best way forward for America, and today, once again, those same politicians are urging supporters to violence against a government that defends the equality before the law for which the men at Antietam—and at Gettysburg and Cold Harbor, and at four years worth of battlefields across the country—gave their lives. ~
~ The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, is the bloodiest day in American history. More than 22,700 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, missing or captured in the battle, which was fought in the fields and woods outside the small, western Maryland town of Sharpsburg. It is also the first battle where American war dead were photographed. What for some had remained a distant, abstract war, was suddenly—and viscerally—brought to life. The reactions to the photographs reflected the intensity of their content. ~
Oriana:
The dead at Antietam’s Bloody Lane and Dunker Church proved they were wrong. The Battle of Antietam was enough of a Union victory to allow President Abraham Lincoln to issue the preliminary emancipation proclamation, warning southern states that on January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State,” where people still fought against the United States, “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the…government of the United States…will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons....”
Lincoln’s proclamation meant that anti-slavery England would not formally enter the war on the side of the Confederates, dashing their hopes of foreign intervention, and in November 1863, Lincoln redefined the war as one not simply to restore the Union, but to protect a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
To that principle, northerners and Black southerners rallied, despite the grinding horror of the battlefields, and in 1865, they defeated the Confederates.
But they did not defeat the idea the Confederates fought, killed, and died for: a nation in which the law distinguishes among people according to the color of their skin. Today, once again, politicians are telling their followers that such a hierarchy is the best way forward for America, and today, once again, those same politicians are urging supporters to violence against a government that defends the equality before the law for which the men at Antietam—and at Gettysburg and Cold Harbor, and at four years worth of battlefields across the country—gave their lives. ~
~ The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, is the bloodiest day in American history. More than 22,700 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, missing or captured in the battle, which was fought in the fields and woods outside the small, western Maryland town of Sharpsburg. It is also the first battle where American war dead were photographed. What for some had remained a distant, abstract war, was suddenly—and viscerally—brought to life. The reactions to the photographs reflected the intensity of their content. ~
Oriana:
Vietnam was the first televised war in American history, and some claim that was the reason for the fiasco: "The war was lost in the media." And Antietam was the first post-battle landscape to be photographed. And that was a serious blow to the glorification of war.
Interesting that the Confederate soldiers expected the Union soldiers to be "emasculated." Back then, war was glorified as a test of manhood rather than seen more in the category of toxic masculinity.
The way that Confederate soldiers regarded themselves not only as superior due to being white, but also superior to the white men of the North reminds me how the Nazi ideology singled out Germans as being superior to other white people, some of whom were classified as Untermensch (subhuman).
Mary: THE POWER OF IMAGES
The photographs of Antietam brought home the visceral horrors of war in a way that could not be denied or idealized. No one, in fact, can think war a noble or glorious enterprise unless they've never been in one. I think of Tolstoy's Pierre for instance, learning war the hard way, and losing his illusions. Battlefields are messy, ugly and confusing. When there are great numbers of dead and wounded the scene becomes infernal. Sorting the wounded and treating them, cleanup and burial of the dead can be logistic nightmares.
And remember, the number of bodies in the field after this battle was huge, outstripping the capacity of doctors, medics, transporters , burial details. The bodies photographed had already been laying there decaying, for 2 days. The battlefield would have been littered not only with human corpses, but those of horses. And the outnumbered and overburdened doctors had only two major tools to work with, morphine and amputation.
The sight of these things in the photographs could not fail to have strong effects on the civilian population, where both sides began with the idea this wold be a brief conflict with small damages. And though a photograph cannot supply this, imagine the smell. Glamor, nobility, all fail, become absurdities in the light of the untouched material reality, the charnel house horror, of these actual battlegrounds preserved for the first time in image rather than imagination.
Film reportage, as with Vietnam, brings war even more vividly into civilians' awareness. We watched it from the living room or the supper table — we watched executions and naked burning children running for their lives. It becomes harder and harder to countenance the more palpable and immediate it is. There is a visceral revulsion hard to avoid or be argued out of.
On the other hand, the kind of remote warfare now employed with drone strikes makes it all much less compelling, less real. We don't see the bodies as often or at all...maybe just as flag draped coffins. Here the media coverage seems less immediate and compelling.
Oriana:
I’ve heard again and again that the Vietnam war was “lost on TV”; the military decided they can’t afford another such media defeat, and began to restrict what could be filmed or photographed. “National security” is a very broad concept that can be used to deny access to journalists, and especially photo-journalists.
And now, as you note, we have remote warfare by drone — again taking us away from the horror. But we’ve seen the war photographs — the American Civil War, the bloodiest civil war in human history; World War 1, World War 2, Vietnam. We can never unsee those horrific images. There is still a glorification of the military, but not really of war per se. And there have been honest poems, novels, short stories. Only a lunatic fringe still think war is primarily an exciting macho adventure — paunchy middle-aged men who love to dress in camouflage and play war in the woods.
But the public at large is less and less willing— especially when a conflict can’t really be solved militarily. Democracy is not something you can impose by force. And the truth that “war is hell” is out, and can’t be pushed back into oblivion. Mutilated war veterans in wheel chairs mingle among us in parks, in stores, in museums. It’s awful to think that their sacrifice has been in vain.
Alas, it seems we are doomed to wait until toxic religions and ideologies collapse before we can speak of true peace.
John Guzlowski:
Photos of the Dead at Antietam
They are simple as arithmetic. One minus one
is nothing. You see this in their blind, dumb eyes,
the twist of their bodies lying in the mud,
the truth of their silence. There is nothing
to tell one man from another. They are dead.
They have nothing to grieve or remember.
The mouth cracked open tells you nothing
about his first love, or that night in the church
that meant so much, or the happy time he stood
before the Christmas tree knowing how much
his mother would love the light blue pitcher
he gave her, no matter how simple it was.
*************************************************************************************
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WHY HUMANS (AND NEANDERTHALS) HAVE SHED THEIR FUR
~ Evolutionary theorists have put forth numerous hypotheses for why humans became the naked mole rats of the primate world. Did we adapt to semi-aquatic environments? Does bare skin help us sweat to keep cool while hunting during the heat of the day? Did losing our fur allow us to read each other's emotional responses such as fuming or blushing? Scientists aren't exactly sure, but biologists are beginning to understand the physical mechanism that makes humans the naked apes. In particular, a recent study in the journal Cell Reports has begun to depilate the mystery at the molecular and genetic level.
Sarah Millar, co-senior author of the new study and a dermatology professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, explains that scientists are largely at a loss to explain why different hair patterns appear across human bodies. “We have really long hair on our scalps and short hair in other regions, and we’re hairless on our palms and the underside of our wrists and the soles of our feet,” she says. “No one understands really at all how these differences arise.”
In many mammals, an area known as the plantar skin, which is akin to the underside of the wrist in humans, is hairless, along with the footpads. But in a few species, including polar bears and rabbits, the plantar area is covered in fur. A researcher studying the plantar region of rabbits noticed that an inhibitor protein, called Dickkopf 2 or Dkk2, was not present in high levels, giving the team the fist clue that Dkk2 may be fundamental to hair growth. When the team looked at the hairless plantar region of mice, they found that there were high levels of Dkk2, suggesting the protein might keep bits of skin hairless by blocking a signaling pathway called WNT, which is known to control hair growth.
To investigate, the team compared normally developing mice with a group that had a mutation which prevents Dkk2 from being produced. They found that the mutant mice had hair growing on their plantar skin, providing more evidence that the inhibitor plays a role in determining what’s furry and what’s not.
But Millar suspects that the Dkk2 protein is not the end of the story. The hair that developed on the plantar skin of the mice with the mutation was shorter, finer and less evenly spaced than the rest of the animals’ hair. “Dkk2 is enough to prevent hair from growing, but not to get rid of all control mechanisms. There’s a lot more to look at.”
Even without the full picture, the finding could be important in future research into conditions like baldness, since the WNT pathway is likely still present in chrome domes—it’s just being blocked by Dkk2 or similar inhibitors in humans. Millar says understanding the way the inhibitor system works could also help in research of other skin conditions like psoriasis and vitiligo, which causes a blotchy loss of coloration on the skin.
With a greater understanding of how skin is rendered hairless, the big question remaining is why humans became almost entirely hairless apes. Millar says there are some obvious reasons—for instance, having hair on our palms and wrists would make knapping stone tools or operating machinery rather difficult, and so human ancestors who lost this hair may have had an advantage. The reason the rest of our body lost its fur, however, has been up for debate for decades.
~ Evolutionary theorists have put forth numerous hypotheses for why humans became the naked mole rats of the primate world. Did we adapt to semi-aquatic environments? Does bare skin help us sweat to keep cool while hunting during the heat of the day? Did losing our fur allow us to read each other's emotional responses such as fuming or blushing? Scientists aren't exactly sure, but biologists are beginning to understand the physical mechanism that makes humans the naked apes. In particular, a recent study in the journal Cell Reports has begun to depilate the mystery at the molecular and genetic level.
Sarah Millar, co-senior author of the new study and a dermatology professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, explains that scientists are largely at a loss to explain why different hair patterns appear across human bodies. “We have really long hair on our scalps and short hair in other regions, and we’re hairless on our palms and the underside of our wrists and the soles of our feet,” she says. “No one understands really at all how these differences arise.”
In many mammals, an area known as the plantar skin, which is akin to the underside of the wrist in humans, is hairless, along with the footpads. But in a few species, including polar bears and rabbits, the plantar area is covered in fur. A researcher studying the plantar region of rabbits noticed that an inhibitor protein, called Dickkopf 2 or Dkk2, was not present in high levels, giving the team the fist clue that Dkk2 may be fundamental to hair growth. When the team looked at the hairless plantar region of mice, they found that there were high levels of Dkk2, suggesting the protein might keep bits of skin hairless by blocking a signaling pathway called WNT, which is known to control hair growth.
To investigate, the team compared normally developing mice with a group that had a mutation which prevents Dkk2 from being produced. They found that the mutant mice had hair growing on their plantar skin, providing more evidence that the inhibitor plays a role in determining what’s furry and what’s not.
But Millar suspects that the Dkk2 protein is not the end of the story. The hair that developed on the plantar skin of the mice with the mutation was shorter, finer and less evenly spaced than the rest of the animals’ hair. “Dkk2 is enough to prevent hair from growing, but not to get rid of all control mechanisms. There’s a lot more to look at.”
Even without the full picture, the finding could be important in future research into conditions like baldness, since the WNT pathway is likely still present in chrome domes—it’s just being blocked by Dkk2 or similar inhibitors in humans. Millar says understanding the way the inhibitor system works could also help in research of other skin conditions like psoriasis and vitiligo, which causes a blotchy loss of coloration on the skin.
With a greater understanding of how skin is rendered hairless, the big question remaining is why humans became almost entirely hairless apes. Millar says there are some obvious reasons—for instance, having hair on our palms and wrists would make knapping stone tools or operating machinery rather difficult, and so human ancestors who lost this hair may have had an advantage. The reason the rest of our body lost its fur, however, has been up for debate for decades.
One popular idea that has gone in and out of favor since it was proposed is called the aquatic ape theory. The hypothesis suggests that human ancestors lived on the savannahs of Africa, gathering and hunting prey. But during the dry season, they would move to oases and lakesides and wade into shallow waters to collect aquatic tubers, shellfish or other food sources. The hypothesis suggests that, since hair is not a very good insulator in water, our species lost our fur and developed a layer of fat. The hypothesis even suggests that we might have developed bipedalism due to its advantages when wading into shallow water. But this idea, which has been around for decades, hasn’t received much support from the fossil record and isn’t taken seriously by most researchers.
A more widely accepted theory is that, when human ancestors moved from the cool shady forests into the savannah, they developed a new method of thermoregulation. Losing all that fur made it possible for hominins to hunt during the day in the hot grasslands without overheating. An increase in sweat glands, many more than other primates, also kept early humans on the cool side. The development of fire and clothing meant that humans could keep cool during the day and cozy up at night.
But these are not the only possibilities, and perhaps the loss of hair is due to a combination of factors. Evolutionary scientist Mark Pagel at the University of Reading has also proposed that going fur-less reduced the impact of lice and other parasites. Humans kept some patches of hair, like the stuff on our heads which protects from the sun and the stuff on our pubic regions which retains secreted pheromones. But the more hairless we got, Pagel says, the more attractive it became, and a stretch of hairless hide turned into a potent advertisement of a healthy, parasite-free mate.
One of the most intriguing theories is that the loss of hair on the face and some of the hair around the genitals may have helped with emotional communication. Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist and director of human cognition at the research company 2AI, studies vision and color theory, and he says the reason for our hairless bodies may be in our eyes. While many animals have two types of cones, or the receptors in the eye that detect color, humans have three. Other animals that have three cones or more, like birds and reptiles, can see in a wide range of wavelengths in the visible light spectrum. But our third cone is unusual—it gives us a little extra power to detect hues right in the middle of the spectrum, allowing humans to pick out a vast range of shades that seem unnecessary for hunting or tracking.
Changizi proposes that the third cone allows us to communicate nonverbally by observing color changes in the face. “Having those two cones detecting wavelengths side by side is what you want if you want to be sensitive to oxygenation of hemoglobin under the skin to understand health or emotional changes,” he says. For instance, a baby whose skin looks a little green or blue can indicate illness, a pink blush might indicate sexual attraction, and a face flushing with red could indicate anger, even in people with darker skin tones. But the only way to see all of these emotional states is if humans lose their fur, especially on their faces.
In a 2006 paper in Biology Letters, Changizi found that primates with bare faces and sometimes bare rumps also tended to have three cones like humans, while fuzzy-faced monkeys lived their lives with just two cones. According to the paper, hairless faces and color vision seem to run together.
Millar says that it’s unlikely that her work will help us directly figure out whether humans are swimming apes, sweaty monkeys or blushing primates. But combining the new study’s molecular evidence of how hair grows with physical traits observed in humans will get us closer to the truth—or at least closer to a fuller, shinier head of hair.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-did-humans-evolve-lose-fur-180970980/
*
REPRODUCTIVE PROBLEMS IN BOTH MEN AND WOMEN ARE RISING
~ The whole spectrum of reproductive problems in males are increasing by about 1 percent per year in Western countries. This “1 percent effect” includes the rates of declining sperm counts, decreasing testosterone levels and increasing rates of testicular cancer, as well as a rise in the prevalence of erectile dysfunction. On the female side of the equation, miscarriage rates are also increasing by about 1 percent per year in the U.S., and so is the rate of gestational surrogacy. Meanwhile, the total fertility rate worldwide has dropped by nearly 1 percent per year from 1960 to 2018.
When people hear of this, there’s often a natural instinct to shrug it off, believing that 1 percent per year isn’t really a big deal. But it is a huge deal! It adds up to more than 10 percent per decade and more than 50 percent over 50 years. When you consider that sperm counts declined by 50 percent in just 40 years, as Shanna's meta-analysis published in a 2017 issue of the journal Human Reproduction Update showed, it’s difficult to deny or discount how alarming this is.
So, we continue to wonder: Where is the outrage on this issue? The annual 1 percent decline in reproductive health is faster than the rate of global warming (thankfully!)—and yet people are up in arms about global warming (and rightly so) but not about these reproductive health effects. To put the 1 percent effect in perspective, consider this: scientific data show a 1.1 percent per year increase in the number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder between 2000 and 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People have been rightly unnerved about this.
Why aren’t people equally troubled by reproductive damage to males and females? Maybe it’s because many don’t realize that these worrisome changes are happening, or that they’re marching along at the same rate. But everyone should. After all, these reproductive changes can hardly be a coincidence. They’re just too synchronous for that to be possible.
The truth is, these reproductive health effects are interconnected, and they are largely driven by a common cause: the presence of hormone-altering chemicals (a.k.a., endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs) in our world. These hormone-hijacking chemicals, which include phthalates, bisphenol A, and flame retardants, among others, have become ubiquitous in modern life. They’re in water bottles and food packaging, electronic devices, personal-care products, cleaning supplies and many other items we use regularly. And they began being produced in increasing numbers after 1950, when sperm counts and fertility began their decline.
Exposure to these chemicals is especially problematic during pregnancy because what happens during pregnancy doesn’t stay in pregnancy. Rather, an expectant mother’s exposure to toxic chemicals in the air she breathes, the water she drinks, the foods she eats and the products she slathers on her skin can enter her body (and hence the fetus) and influence her baby’s reproductive development. This is particularly true early in pregnancy—in what’s called the reproductive programming window—and it’s especially true for male babies.
For example, if a woman is exposed to chemicals that block the action of androgens during the first trimester of pregnancy, this can affect the reproductive development of the male fetus in numerous ways. It can result in a shortening of the anogenital distance (AGD), the span from the anus to the base of the penis, which is significant because research has shown that a shorter AGD correlates with a smaller penis and, in the adult, a lower sperm count. In addition, prenatal disruption of the male hormonal system can result in reduced testosterone levels and increase the risk that a baby boy will have undescended testicles (cryptorchidism) or a particular type of malformed penis (hypospadias) at birth. And if a boy is born with these genital defects, he will have an increased risk of low sperm count and testicular cancer as an adult.
This cluster of related reproductive problems—for both men and women—is presenting huge challenges to the world’s population. There’s the obvious challenge related to fertility issues and the declining birth rate. But endocrine disruption is also a culprit in rising rates of autoimmune disorders as well as the growing epidemic of obesity and metabolic syndrome (a cluster of conditions that increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes). Some of these reproductive effects are even associated with an increased risk of premature death.
To put it mildly, these issues are more important than the “1 percent” people usually pay attention to, which means: We need to shift our collective focus. It’s time for us to make it a priority to demand that endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the everyday products are replaced with chemicals that don’t affect our hormones and don’t persist in the environment. It’s also time to establish better testing methods and regulatory actions so that only safe chemicals can enter the market and our bodies. In other words, we need to stop using each other and our unborn children as lab rats for EDC exposures. The health and the future of the human race really do depend on it. ~
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reproductive-problems-in-both-men-and-women-are-rising-at-an-alarming-rate/
Oriana:
One's first response to the news of rising reproductive disorders may be, "Who cares? The world is overpopulated as is. In fact it's rather wonderful that infertility is rising." But that's a shallow response. Reproductive problems are in indication of something deeply wrong -- in this case, the presence of hormone mimics in the environment. As with lead in gasoline and the gases damaging to the ozone layer, we should know by now that serious harm can result from putting toxic chemicals into the environment.
Mary:
Of course reproductive problems are increasing...how could we, with our bodies so subtly regulated and developed by hormones, have ever thought it was OK to use hormone mimics in such a careless way?? How could it have taken so long to wake to these dangers?? The effects on sexual features of amphibians was one of the first widely recognized dangers, but that was already late in the game. I'm not sure now any of these harmful effects can be effectively reversed, or completely reversed, without at least leaving some residual harm.
Oriana:
How long did it take us to stop putting lead into gasoline? I'm afraid that the battle against toxic plastics and food additives is going to be much, much harder . . .
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Looking at this mandala, I couldn't help thinking that if god looked like that, rather than the anatomically correct versions by Michelangelo, I might be willing to go along. Christianity has nothing to offer me -- the ideal of kindness can exist without it. But I am drawn to elements of Buddhism and Taoism: serenity and non-striving. If she's trying too hard, a writer needs to be able to catch herself at it and let go, take a walk, clean the house. Good writing will flow effortlessly from the unconscious when the time is ripe.
*
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ATHEISM SPREADING AMONG MUSLIM
~ Ex-Muslims are publicly flaunting their rejection of Islam as never before: a steamy tell-all memoir tops the country’s best-seller lists. One video (with 1.5 million views) shows a copy of the Koran ripped into pieces; another video shows a woman in a bikini cooking and eating bacon; another, blasphemous cartoons of Muhammad.
Beyond such provocations, ex-Muslims work to change the image of Islam. Wafa Sultan went on Al Jazeera television to excoriate Islam in an exalted Arabic and over thirty million viewers watched the video. Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote a powerful autobiography about growing up female in Somalia and went on to author high-profile books criticizing Islam. Ibn Warraq wrote or edited a small library of influential books on his former religion, including Why I am Not a Muslim (1995) and Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out (2003).
Behind these individuals stand Western-based organizations of ex-Muslims that encourage Muslims to renounce their faith, provide support to those who have already taken this step, and lobby against Islam with the knowledge of insiders and the passion of renegades.
Together, these phenomena point to an unprecedented shift: The historically illegal and unspeakable actions among Muslims of open disbelief in God and rejection of Muhammad’s mission has spread to the point that it shakes the Islamic faith.
ATHEISM SPREADING AMONG MUSLIM
~ Ex-Muslims are publicly flaunting their rejection of Islam as never before: a steamy tell-all memoir tops the country’s best-seller lists. One video (with 1.5 million views) shows a copy of the Koran ripped into pieces; another video shows a woman in a bikini cooking and eating bacon; another, blasphemous cartoons of Muhammad.
Beyond such provocations, ex-Muslims work to change the image of Islam. Wafa Sultan went on Al Jazeera television to excoriate Islam in an exalted Arabic and over thirty million viewers watched the video. Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote a powerful autobiography about growing up female in Somalia and went on to author high-profile books criticizing Islam. Ibn Warraq wrote or edited a small library of influential books on his former religion, including Why I am Not a Muslim (1995) and Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out (2003).
Behind these individuals stand Western-based organizations of ex-Muslims that encourage Muslims to renounce their faith, provide support to those who have already taken this step, and lobby against Islam with the knowledge of insiders and the passion of renegades.
Together, these phenomena point to an unprecedented shift: The historically illegal and unspeakable actions among Muslims of open disbelief in God and rejection of Muhammad’s mission has spread to the point that it shakes the Islamic faith.
To non-Muslims, this shift tends to be nearly invisible and therefore is dismissed as marginal. When it comes to Arabs, Ahmed Benchemsi notes, Westerners see religiosity as “an unquestionable given, almost an ethnic mandate embedded in their DNA.” The Islamist surge may have peaked nearly a decade ago but the eminent historian Philip Jenkins confidently states that, “By no rational standard can Saudi Arabia, say, be said to be moving in secular directions.”
To help rectify this misunderstanding, the following analysis documents the phenomenon of Muslims becoming atheists. The word “atheist,” along with the organization Ex-Muslims of North America, in this case, refers to Muslims “who adopt no positive belief of a deity,” including “agnostics, pantheists, freethinkers, and humanists.” Atheist emphatically does not, however, include Muslims who convert to Christianity or to any other religion.
Two main factors make it difficult to estimate the number of ex-Muslim atheists.
First, some of them prefer to stay within the bounds of Islam to retain a voice in the religion’s evolution and especially to participate in the fight against Islamism, something they lose on leaving the faith. There is a phenomenon whereby Muslims “make a tactical decision not to break with religion completely, presenting themselves as secularists, ‘progressive’ Muslims or Muslim ‘reformers.’ They feel more can be achieved by challenging oppressive religious practices than by questioning the existence of God, since they are unlikely to be listened to if they are known to be atheists.
The path of reform, however, is fraught with dangers. The eminent Egyptian authority on Islam, Nasr Abu Zayd, insisted he remained a Muslim while his opponents, perhaps motivated by financial considerations, deemed him an apostate. His foes succeeded in both annulling his marriage and forcing him to flee from Egypt. Worse, the Sudanese government executed the great Islamic thinker Mahmoud Mohammed Taha as an apostate.
Second, overtly declaring oneself an atheist invites punishments that range from ostracizing to beating, to firing, to jailing, to murder. Families see atheists as blots on their honor. Employers see them as untrustworthy. Communities see them as traitors. Governments see them as national security threats. The idea of an individual atheist as a threat seems absurd, but authorities realize that what starts with individual decisions grows into small groups, gathers force, and can culminate in the seizure of power. In the most extreme reaction, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia promulgated anti-terrorist regulations on March 7, 2014, that prohibit “Calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based.” In other words, free thinking equates to terrorism.
Indeed, many Muslim-majority countries formally punish apostasy with execution, including Mauritania, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Afghanistan, Malaysia, and Brunei. Formal executions tend to be rare but the threat hangs over apostates. Sometimes, death does follow: Mubarak Bala, was arrested in Nigeria and disappeared for his blasphemous statements. In a case that attracted global attention, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini called on freelancers to murder Salman Rushdie in 1989 for writing The Satanic Verses, a magical-realist novel containing disrespectful scenes about Muhammad. Vigilante violence also occurs; in Pakistan, preachers called on mobs to burn down the houses of apostates.
This external pressure at least partially succeeds, notes Iman Willoughby, a Saudi refugee living in Canada: “the Middle East would be significantly more secular if it was not for heavy-handed religious government enforcement or the power mosques are given to monitor communities.” Fearful of trouble, more than a few ex-Muslims hide their views and maintain the trappings of believers, making them effectively uncountable.
Nonetheless, Willoughby observes, “Atheism is spreading like wildfire” in the Middle East. Hasan Suroor, author of Who Killed Liberal Islam? notes that there’s a tale “we don’t usually hear about how Islam is facing a wave of desertion by young Muslims suffering from a crisis of faith . . . abandoned by moderate Muslims, mostly young men and women, ill at ease with growing extremism in their communities. . . . Even deeply conservative countries with strict anti-apostasy regimes like Pakistan, Iran and Sudan have been hit by desertions.” That tale, however, is now more public: “I know at least six atheists who confirmed that [they are atheists] to me,” noted Fahad AlFahad, a marketing consultant and human rights activist in Saudi Arabia, in 2014. “Six or seven years ago, I wouldn’t even have heard one person say that. Not even a best friend would confess that to me,” but the mood has changed and now they feel freer to divulge this dangerous secret.
Whitaker concludes that Arab non-believers “are not a new phenomenon but their numbers seem to be growing.” Professor Amna Nusayr of al-Azhar University states that four million Egyptians have left Islam. Todd Nettleton finds that, by some estimates, “70 percent of Iran’s people have rejected Islam.”
Turning to survey research, a WIN/Gallup survey in 2012 found that “convinced atheists” make up 2 percent of the population in Lebanon, Pakistan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan; 4 percent in the West Bank and Gaza; and 5 percent in Saudi Arabia. Revealingly, the same poll found “not religious” persons are more numerous: 8 percent in Pakistan, 16 percent in Uzbekistan, 19 percent in Saudi Arabia, 29 percent in the West Bank and Gaza, 33 percent in Lebanon, and 73 percent in Turkey. Conversely, a GAMAAN poll found that just one-third, or 32.2 percent, of born Shi’ite Muslims in Iran actually identify as such, plus 5 percent as Sunnis and 3.2 percent as Sufis.
The trend is upwards: a Konda survey in Turkey found that atheists tripled from 1 to 3 percent between 2008 and 2018, while non-believers doubled from 1 to 2 percent. Arab Barometer polls show a substantial increase in the number of Arabic-speakers who say they are “not religious,” from 8 percent in 2012-14 to 13 percent in 2018-19, a 61 percent increase in five years. This trend is even stronger among people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, among whom the percentage went from 11 to 18 percent. Looking country by country, the largest increases occurred in Tunisia and Libya, with middle-sized ones in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, and Sudan, and almost no change in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, and Iraq. Yemen stands out as the one country to count fewer non-religious persons. It is particularly striking to note that about as many Tunisian youth (47 percent) as Americans (46 percent) call themselves “not religious.”
Atheism among Muslim-born populations has historically been of minor importance. It appeared especially negligible during the surge of Islamism over the past half-century. As recently as twenty years ago, atheism among Muslims was nearly undetectable. But no longer. Atheism has turned into a significant force with the potential to affect not just the lives of individuals but also societies and even governments.
It enjoys such potency because contemporary Islam, with its repression of heterodox ideas and punishment of anyone who leaves the faith, is singularly vulnerable to challenge. Just as an authoritarian regime is more brittle than a democratic one, Islam, as practiced today, lacks the suppleness to deal with internal critics and rebels. The result is an Islamic future more precarious than its past. ~
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/atheism-among-muslims-%E2%80%9Cspreading-wildfire%E2%80%9D-193924?fbclid=IwAR3sMTsVlEVPdEf_P_sg-yvjWnyK-ss7WyGy_lG0s4FT9PnFihFX8t8NUPY
Oriana:
To me the most encouraging statement in the article is "The Islamist surge may have peaked nearly a decade ago." In the long run, it's impossible to try to remain in the Dark Ages and keep on resisting modernity. Any thinking person may have the experience of waking up and thinking "this is all made-up nonsense." And that thought cannot be unthought. All religions are based on fear and wishful thinking, as smarter humans eventually notice. Above all, as one former minister told me, you have to maintain a high level of threat. But these days, with many other voices out there, it's harder to enforce.
DO FIVE COFFEES A DAY KEEP THE DOCTOR AWAY?
~ According to new research, drinking coffee is associated with lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD), type 2 diabetes and neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s. Drinking coffee, researchers claim, may even lower the risk of suicide.
~ According to new research, drinking coffee is associated with lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD), type 2 diabetes and neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s. Drinking coffee, researchers claim, may even lower the risk of suicide.
The study, published in the science journal Circulation, was led by researchers from Harvard School of Public Health and others. Lead researcher Ming Ding and colleagues analyzed the health data of three large groups consisting of over 208,000 participants, male and female, aged between 25 and 75. The study groups were based on American nurses, dentists, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals, and those who already had cardiovascular disease or cancer were not included.
Their coffee intake was analyzed every four years, by asking the men and women how many cups (caffeinated and decaffeinated) they consume on average a day, ranging from less than one cup to more than five cups.
In the whole population, coffee consumption (between three and five cups per day) was associated with lower risk of cardiovascular deaths and type two diabetes, but was associated with increased risk of lung cancer.
However, looking at those who have never smoked, coffee consumption was no longer associated with an increased risk of lung cancer. Non-smokers who drink more than five cups a day were found to have a reduced risk of CVD and type two diabetes compared to non-coffee drinkers, and a lower risk of neurological disease such as Parkinson’s, and even suicide.
Co-author Frank Hu said: “Regular consumption of coffee was found to be inversely associated with risk of mortality due to CVD. This study indicates that coffee can be incorporated into a healthy lifestyle.”
Strengths of the study include its large sample size, long follow-up (30 years), and efforts to adjust for other issues, such as smoking, which could affect the results. However, with all participants varying greatly in terms of health and lifestyle, other factors might have influenced the results.
The study does not prove that coffee is the reason that coffee-drinkers were less likely to die. Another weakness was that size of coffee portions was only based on each participant’s estimation.
Apart from whether it was decaf, what type of coffee was drunk (eg freshly ground or instant) was not looked at, and nor was the milk or sugar added. Finally, it is important to note that the reduction in risk of death from drinking coffee, at less than 10 per cent relative risk, is small. ~
https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/behind-the-headlines/five-coffees-a-day
Oriana:
Coffee is a great source of antioxidants (caffeine is a stronger antioxidant than Vitamin C) and other beneficial compounds. The findings about the benefits of coffee have been part of the discovery that “forbidden” foods such as eggs and butter are in fact good for you.
As everyone knows, coffee is energizing. Enhanced glucose metabolism resulting in lower blood sugar may be the key to its benefits (think of metformin and berberine).
Aging is, to a great extent, an energy-deficit syndrome. Coffee helps ameliorate that energy deficit.
Coffee also increases dopamine levels, with all its attendant benefits for good mood, obesity prevention, and possibly even cancer prevention. And — listen to this! — regular coffee consumption lowers the risk lowers the risk of Alzheimer’s by 65% and the risk of Parkinson’s by 60% (note: to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, it needs to be caffeinated coffee). It also dramatically decreases the risk of any liver problems, including liver cancer.
Speaking of cancer, coffee also reduces the risk of breast, colon, and rectal cancer— as well as oral and throat cancer. This may be due to its anti-inflammatory effect and its overall health benefits.
Coffee increases peristalsis, serving as a mild laxative.
While caffeine, like other stimulants or exercise, increases blood pressure, that rise its temporary. In fact, regular drinking of moderate amount of coffee is associated with lower risk of stroke.
By improving mood, coffee lowers suicide risk. I dare venture a guess that no one has ever committed suicide after drinking a good cup of coffee.
Of course common sense and listening to your body are needed to for the best results. Nobody suggests consuming a lot of coffee at once sitting.
If it hadn’t been with us for so long, coffee would probably be regarded as a miracle drug.
*
ending on beauty:
He was at Naples writing letters home
And, between letters, reading paragraphs
On the sublime. Vesuvius had groaned
For a month. It was pleasant to be sitting there
While the sultriest fulgurations, flickering,
Cast corners in the glass. He could describe
The terror of the sound because the sound
Was ancient. He tried to remember the phrases: pain
Audible at noon, pain torturing itself,
Pain killing pain on the very point of pain.
The volcano trembled in another ether,
As the body trembles at the end of life.
It was almost time for lunch. Pain is human.
There were roses in the cool café. His book
Made sure of the most correct catastrophe.
Except for us, Vesuvius might consume
In solid fire the utmost earth and know
No pain (ignoring the cocks that crow us up
To die). This is a part of the sublime
From which we shrink. And yet, except for us,
The total past felt nothing when destroyed.
~ Wallace Stevens, Esthétique du Mal, the first section
ending on beauty:
He was at Naples writing letters home
And, between letters, reading paragraphs
On the sublime. Vesuvius had groaned
For a month. It was pleasant to be sitting there
While the sultriest fulgurations, flickering,
Cast corners in the glass. He could describe
The terror of the sound because the sound
Was ancient. He tried to remember the phrases: pain
Audible at noon, pain torturing itself,
Pain killing pain on the very point of pain.
The volcano trembled in another ether,
As the body trembles at the end of life.
It was almost time for lunch. Pain is human.
There were roses in the cool café. His book
Made sure of the most correct catastrophe.
Except for us, Vesuvius might consume
In solid fire the utmost earth and know
No pain (ignoring the cocks that crow us up
To die). This is a part of the sublime
From which we shrink. And yet, except for us,
The total past felt nothing when destroyed.
~ Wallace Stevens, Esthétique du Mal, the first section
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